Barbell Shrugged - The Strongest Bodybuilder in the World w/ Stan Efferding - 281

Episode Date: October 11, 2017

Want to gain more muscle?  Bodybuilders can show you the path.  Want to gain strength?  Powerlifters will show you the way.  Want both?  Talk to Stan Efferding.   IFBB Pro bodybuilder Stan Efferding holds the all-time raw world powerlifting records in the 275-pound-class and is often referred to as the "world's strongest bodybuilder".   Best lifts include: 606 raw bench, 865 squat w/ wraps and an 837 deadlift.  Truly impressive!!! It's no accident that Stan is jacked, lean and incredibly strong.  He's dialed in his training and nutrition with decades of consistent focus, intense study and a lot of trial and error.   In this episode Stan talks about: How training for hypertrophy is massively helpful for getting stronger How training heavy (1RMs) doesn’t always mean you’ll get grow larger muscles How he programs when focusing on staying healthy (lookin good and feelin good) How he utilizes movement to speed recovery Why he uses conditioning tools like 20 rep squats and 500 lb weighted carries Why he eats the same few simple foods almost every day to build maximum muscle How to make consistent progress without “overloading your system” If you want be lean, muscular and very, very strong then sit back and learn from the master, "The Rhino", the strongest bodybuilding in the world; Stan Efferding.   Train smart, Mike and Doug   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Barbell Shrugged helps people get better. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini.   Find Barbell Shrugged here: Website: http://www.BarbellShrugged.com Facebook: http://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast Twitter: http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged Instagram: http://instagram.com/barbellshruggedpodcast

Everybody has a different need, and people who are dieting might be different. People are trying to gain muscle. Power lifting, body building, strong man, football players, people who have to put on extra muscle. Even weightlifters are trying to go up a class. Or crossfitters who may be under-mast and want more strength, etc. And intend to gain more weight. So it's focused kind of more so on that group.

And here's the thing, I'm not against the diversity. I think diversity is important. But when it takes away from your ability to give the body what it needs to grow, just in sheer calories and the kinds of calories that your body will assimilate and utilize very easily and quickly, if anything becomes a distraction or competes for that, then I want it to be of a smaller amount. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Gletzer here with Doug Larson and our guest co-host, AJ Roberts.

We're here in Las Vegas hanging out. And we are at Iron Addicts and hanging out with stan rhino efforting strongest bodybuilder on the planet that's uh that's a big fucking deal i think yeah i think i think most people think bodybuilding like oh it's all about aesthetics these guys really aren't that strong yeah yeah it's uh it's a neat little title it's kind of like being the world's strongest ping pong players, whatever you can couple together. I was going to put together some more titles for myself and challenge Eric Delibridge to a ping pong match

and see if I could find a happy medium to still carry some titles around. I remember, was it at the Olympia or the Arnold, when they had the contest and you weren't in it, and you walked out and you said, I'll put my hummer up, I'll put everything up. I'm going to prove. And that was, I remember, I came, was it the Olympia? It was at the Olympia, yeah.

I drove my Hummer in and parked it next to the stage. That was a fun time. That was good. That's WWE shit right there. You took that title. Yeah. It's earned. Yeah.

So for someone who's listening right now, they can't see you on video. You're obviously a very strong-looking person, but if they're just listening on audio, they don't get the context so how how strong are you what are your best lifts uh well i power lifted competitively and as well as uh as winning a pro card in fbb pro bodybuilding and so in power lifting i got a 606 raw bench uh 854 squat with no knee wraps uh 865 with wraps bested in the meet 837 deadlift so i had a 2303 total that was the best i did been about four years though i turned 50 this year so i've been out from under the heavy stuff for a little while and some crazy things have happened in the industry as

you know it's gotten so popular now that uh so many people are starting to participate we're starting to see those outliers those freaks of nature those young the larry wheels of the world and the jesse norris's the kids who you, they're 12 years old and they pull the 100 pounds. They just came out of nowhere all of a sudden. So I look at it now and I'm just in awe of what's going on. It's an exciting time for powerlifting, which typically had been kind of a closet sport, particularly with the geared stuff, which nobody understood. They couldn't really relate to it.

And now that it's raw and the CrossFitters have started to participate, so many people are involved in the sport. It's exciting to see, you know, all the meets are maxed out. There's Internet posts every single day with just incredible lifts and stuff. So I'm excited for it. All the sports in general, the figure, the physique, the bodybuilding, the bikini, the CrossFit. You go to these expos now, the FIBO and the Arnold and the Olympia and the seven Arnolds, you know, Africa and Brazil and Dubai and China,

and they're all just packed, just absolutely overwhelmingly packed with people and all interested in a different, you know, aspect of the business. And I think it's good for health in general. So many people are participating now in competitive athletics, and they have that goal, that carrot in front of them. And I just see, you know, I think it's a good thing for the awareness for nutrition and health, particularly in light of the obesity crisis that's been so bad over the last 40 years. It seems like maybe we'll be able to turn the corner on that.

I'm hopeful. We'll see. Yeah. I feel like over time, each of the individual niches within the strength world, bodybuilding, powerlifting, CrossFit, strongman, et cetera, they're all gaining more and more and more respect for each other. Exactly. You know, Mark Bell was huge in bridging that gap between powerlifting and CrossFit. And now, you know, all these people are competing together in the same forum, such as the Arnold, like you said, with all those sports competing together and watching each other compete and just seeing the, you know, just the awesomeness, for lack of a better word, of these different athletes. Yeah. And they all have their own niche,

and it's something that you can't do, you know, everything, and you have to admire and respect the accomplishments of each of those individual pursuits. Yeah, I feel like there's less now of people saying, like, no, no, no, like our way is the best way. Like you're doing something that's different but you're doing it wrong if you're doing if you're doing our way you would you would do better and and now they're more likely to to actually look and see what other people are doing and think like oh like wow like i'm a strongman

competitor but what can i learn from a crossfit and what can i learn from from an olympic weight lifter or a bodybuilder what have you exactly there's lots of crossover lots of education from watching these different people and in terms of nutrition and performance and cardiovascular fitness and how the carryover is for strength when you start specializing all those things come into play now and you use like you said those little bits and pieces from all the greatest athletes that you're seeing competing now i think it's helped raise everybody's game in their own specific sport to cross fit to cross train you know and like we've heard for years now and it seems to be more and more we understand that that those athletes who have

participated in more than one sport are better than the ones who have participated in one sport growing up and those who have participated in two or more are better than you know less and three or more those are the best athletes in college tend to have played the most sports, maybe three or more, rather than specializing the whole time. And they get that crossover effect of all those different skill sets. Yeah, I don't know what the statistic was, but just with the NFL draft recently, they said that the top 40 people all were triple sport athletes.

Exactly. Oh, wow. Precisely. So they were saying how that, you know, specialization doesn't need to happen until later on. But I think what you guys are saying about the learning from each other is a big thing that's changed. And we just saw with the training you were just doing, you've got bands incorporated, you've got strongman incorporated, and your goals now are obviously different, but you can see where you've pulled things from different areas.

And I think that that's what's changed the industry as a whole. People have come together because it's like, all yes at the end of the day the way you compete whether it's bodybuilding powerlifting strongman is different but training methods and principles like each domain has figured out what's best for that so if we're trying to build these hybrids or you know you're trying to do multiple things why not learn from each other and that's something that wasn't there before i remember when crossfit first started coming in powerlifters we they rejected it you know it's just a stupid thing people were doing on the internet and uh strongman or even worse well a decade ago we were at power lifting meets and everybody was just trying to be as big as possible and over the last decade we'd

watch everyone basically slimmed down yeah health became a big issue you don't really see donnie thompson was probably the last real super heavyweight. That kind of disappeared. Now even the 308 weight classes disappear. And then 275 is like a big class now. That's where most people end up. What did you compete at? 275. Yeah, so it's kind of...

Stan's humble, but he was kind of paved the way here for these guys and broke... His record was 30, 40 years since John Cole said it. Yeah, over 40 years when his record was it was 30 40 years since john cole said it over 40 years when john cole had said it so 40 year record standing and um you know to break that at what 47 45 45 i mean i just remember what was happening and it was you know we stan came in from bodybuilding and from the powerlifting perspective he was lifting raw so it was like what is he doing you know why would he do that and and then then he set the records, and we didn't expect the sport to change the way it did.

And here we are just a few short years later, and now that's what everyone is focused on is pushing up these numbers. And it's incredible seeing what they're doing after a 40-year gap of people thinking human potential raw, no equipment, was peaked. And we weren't going to see anything greater. And now it's at a whole new level. things that were happening seven years ago that seemed groundbreaking are being broken on a regular basis i think one of the oldest records for almost every weight class is less than a year old right now i mean eddie cone's one just got broke right his deadlift record is

903. you look across the weight classes and there's nothing that's more than a year or two old they've all been getting broken and one thing that I learned, or that people, I think, started to recognize from my example, possibly, and my example was just the one that was most public because I was in IFBB Pro Bodybuilding. I had that big forum in the magazines, Flex and MD and the layouts. And so I just had the opportunity to reach more eyeballs. And then the Internet was really trying to broaden at that time. The Instagram and the YouTube and Facebook stuff was really starting to blow up there.

And I think everybody was starting to see each other and then, of course, chasing those goals. But one of the things that maybe we weren't as familiar with but had been around for years because I didn't pioneer any of these training concepts is someone like Eddie Cohn who only competed twice a year in powerlifting and then deloaded and spent his off season doing hypertrophy training and not only did it help provide him a lot of balance build him a lot of muscle which he could then strengthen for powerlifting but also the carryover effect and the shoring up the weaknesses. So he had a good cardiovascular system for when he started powerlifting

and reducing the volume and the frequency and started lifting heavier, he could recover faster because he was healthy from that. And I think Dmitry Klokov talked about that too, is Bob's had him do a lot of cardio in the offseason. Well, he would lose a significant amount of strength, sure. But there was a carryover effect from that, you know, elevated cardiovascular health so that when he did start training for the Olympics and decreasing the volume and increasing the weights progressively for competition, he was recovering faster.

And that's really, really important is the health of your body, both in terms of nutrient partitioning so that the food you eat gets utilized for muscle and glycogen and also for recovering from those workouts so then you can increase your frequency and still be increasing strength over time so two big components i think that more people recognize now in terms of quote unquote cross training for for power lifting or for strength sports yeah so that's a really good example of how bodybuilding style training can help power lifters since you have done both of those sports you bodybuilding and power lifting how do you on the other side of things think the powerlifting had influence and helped out with the bodybuilding side yeah i said it was always said it was terrible i've

always struggled with my legs i mean i was 135 pounds in college my legs were about 12 inches so i always struggled with my legs and uh i kept powerlifting you know all those years i kept doing heavy singles even after flex and i trained together in 2008. And I had built the largest legs that I had ever built from doing a lot of high rep, high volume, high frequency, shorter rest period, more range of motion kind of movements that Flex had me do. That's Flex Wheeler? Flex Wheeler, yeah. And, you know, I was able to win my pro card off of that training,

and I had built, I think, the best bodybuilding physique I'd ever built under his tutelage. I turned right around and started powerlifting again. I went back to Mark's, and here's a perfect example. When I competed, when Flex trained me, I competed in nationals. I was 250 pounds on stage, and my legs were 30 inches, the biggest they'd ever been in my life. I actually had some volume to them. They were more balanced than they had been historically. I went down, I trained with Mark, and in seven weeks,

I went from 250 pounds to 285 pounds. I put on 35 pounds, and I lost an inch and a half on my legs because I was squatting 800 pounds every week for a single or a double, and my legs got smaller. They had no hypertrophy training. Now, certainly the bodybuilding training helped me in terms of my hamstrings, my glutes, my hips, everything was strong. And the cardiovascular fitness from doing all those 20s and the high volume.

So I was recovering, you know, in a good way. But specifically with respect to the hypertrophy, my legs had leaned out a bit and become more efficient for that one rep movement. So gained 35 pounds, lost an inch and a half of my legs. Interesting. Yeah, you really got to focus on what the goal is and stay stay on that yeah i think a lot of people see what you're doing now and this happens with a lot of athletes see what you're doing now it's like okay i'm gonna do a mix of bodybuilding powerlifting all this stuff what got you to this point like

what what does your training history look like well first and foremost when i was in powerlifting when i was just finishing up you know i was right on the verge of a number of injuries i'd battled through a number where i had done rehabilitation for my hips and my knees, when I was just finishing up, you know, I was right on the verge of a number of injuries. I'd battled through a number where I had done rehabilitation for my hips and my knees, and I was just kind of a walking mess in terms of being sore, labrum in my shoulder, in my hip, et cetera. And I just had to kind of, you know,

I had to redefine what my goals were. And my goal was is to be fit, you know, and to be fit at 50. And, you know, longer than that, I got a little five-year-old and a 3-year-old at home, and I wanted to be able to play tennis and run around. And at that point, I could hardly walk without soreness, you know, with my knees and hips, et cetera. So first thing I did is I dropped 35 pounds, almost 40 pounds. And that consisted of just going out and taking a walk, you know, a little 10-minute walk three times a day

and limiting my calories a little bit. And within 40 days, I'd lost 30, 35 pounds and immediately started to feel better and have more mobility, etc. And then I kept trying to lift heavy for a little while. And of course, that didn't bode well with the lighter body weight. And I just had, you know, kind of ongoing soreness. And so I just had to step back and say, you know, what's my goal? And so I had to kind of start all over. I had to get a greater range of motion into my movement so that I was utilizing my joints through their full range of motion so that they weren't, you know, in powerlifting, you tend to close in around those movements. You tend to squat kind of 90 degrees or as little as you can to reach depth. And so your hips and your knees,

they kind of operate just in that limited range of motion. I had to start over with like 135 pounds just so I could sit ass to grass and get a full range of motion in my knees. I actually had to start by just holding a plate out in front of me and sitting into that position. My knees were sore. So first thing was to get healthy.

So I lost the weight, and then I started working through a greater range of motion, and then slowly, very gradually starting to build up the volume and the frequency so that I could come in and train. Secondly was return on investment. I didn't want to spend 10 hours a week in the gym anymore. And, you know, I got kids. I got things to do, businesses to run.

So I decided what would be my greatest return on investment? How could I put as little time possible into training, get the greatest benefit, and, you know, stay healthy? And that was these big ROI movements, these big return on investment? How could I put as little time possible into training, get the greatest benefit and, you know, stay healthy? And that was these big ROI movements, these big return on investment movements that, which include both a cardiovascular benefit and a hypertrophy benefit. Because I wanted to look good and I wanted to feel good and I wanted to stay lean without having to go in and do a bunch of, you know, 40 minutes on a treadmill. I've just never been a big steady state cardio guy. So what you saw today was, of with the banded leg presses, with the two-minute rest periods and the high volume.

I never have to do cardio with that kind of workout. You did like five sets of 25. When you say high volume, 25 rep range. And it's a whole gamut of things. You know, I'll go in, and Sundays and Thursdays are typically my really hard leg days. And today's Tuesday, so I just come in and I do kind of what I call a rehab workout. You know, some people used to call it speed day, which I was never a big believer in. I thought it was more just movement, blood, recuperation.

I've said in my rants that, you know, when it comes to recovering from workouts, the best thing you can do is movement and movement through a full range of motion. It gets some blood in there without a lot of eccentric loading so you don't keep breaking down the tissue. So today was kind of an example of that. A lot of folks, they want to do some ART or they want to do some foam rolling or they want to, you know, get some chiro work or they want to, you know, take a pill or whatever else. And I've always said that all those remedies are superficial and temporary

and things that people do to you or for you are never as effective as things you do for yourself and so i implemented these um these types of recovery methods where i'll either come in and get on a recumbent bike and i'll do a little uh hit training session 30 seconds with some resistance 30 second rest now i'm getting a little uh lung capacity going i'm breathing heavy my legs are getting a blood pump in them they're moving through a full range of motion i'm recovering from my workouts faster i'm not having as much late onset muscle soreness. By moving my joints and getting some blood in there, they're getting healthier through their full range of motion. Today's a similar example of that. I keep the band on there and now my knees

feel better throughout that range of motion. I get a little deeper, put some blood in there, get a good, you know, keep a clock on it and do multiple sets with a short rest period. So I'm getting, you know, plenty of my oxygen debt and VO2 max built up. And, you know, you burn more fat, more calories that way. You stay healthier. And it's what I call hit under load, which is kind of where all this is headed. But to get the biggest ROI, I think that I need to be under load. And so I do things like, you know, 20-rep squats, weighted carries,

uprights to and overhead press for reps. That kind of thing will pull a lot of oxygen out of you. I try and do the kinds of exercises that put weight on my body, which I stay away from machines as much as I can because I'm not under load. And I want my body to feel that. It keeps my thickness. I think that it stimulates metabolically a lot of the hormones that uh that help develop uh and maintain muscle while also getting your metabolism to shoot through the roof you get all that um you know that epoch that excess post-exercise oxygen

consumption so for many hours or even a day or two after training you're still kind of at an elevated thermogenesis you know you're you're burning fat you go to bed at night and you're still warm you can create all that environment for yourself by utilizing these kinds of high roi movements the ones that have a huge impact on your system so you walk out of here kind of euphoric kind of really you know like i did something as opposed to sitting on a machine so you worked your big muscles you did you did a leg press that was banded yeah i reps yeah did some uh cable rows and then turn around and did some carries outside yeah carries that's something i've been doing in my training more because it is something you can load you don't have to move through your joints

through it's like almost like a static hold for a lot of your body, and your legs are just moving a little bit, but it's very, very taxing. Yeah, and I always say that, you know, one of the biggest problems they have with astronauts when they shoot them up in space is that there's no gravity, so they start losing muscle tissue at a very rapid pace, and that can compromise their health, and so they set them up there with these bands, and they have to do exercises, and that's one of the big things they do in terms of maintaining their health in there is try and keep load on their muscles so they don't atrophy. And they do atrophy.

They come home and it's significantly lighter body weight and muscle mass than when they leave. And they monitor that very closely. So I flipped the script on that. You know, I said, well, it's double gravity. What's triple gravity? Let's do the best we can to put our body under load for an extended period of time multiple sets with with a decent amount of uh you know distance to to get that cardiovascular system going if i can get my heart rate up to 160 plus beats a minute and keep it there for 30 40 minutes with a you know a blend of these

banded leg presses and weighted carries etc that's a perfect place to be imagine the return i get on that i only need to train three days a week four days a week max and i only do that about every other day you know particularly in terms of cardiovascular fitness you don't want to be doing that every day you don't be blasting yourself even when i'm training ufc fighters you're doing carries every other day no i'm that type of of gotcha of loaded hit so one day i'll come in and i'll do, say, squats and 20 rep squats. And then the next day I might take off. The day after that I'll come in and I might do the banded leg presses with the weighted carries and then take a day off.

I might come in the next day and do, you know, more banded leg presses with a different design. One day I might come in and do seven sets of 25 on a 90 second clock. The next time I might come in and do five sets with one minute time under tension. Because a set of 25 might only take 20 seconds. But a minute time under tension, regardless of what pace you go, is a completely different impact on the legs in terms of the blood and lactic acid buildup and the oxygen debt that you endure as a result of it. So I can change the stimulus so many different ways. That's one thing.

Creating a progression that's always based on increasing load is kind of a dead end you know but changing the progressive component of training and being able to increase the number of sets the number of reps the rest period you know the frequency the volume all those things you know you can manipulate to continually come in here and be progressing without overloading the system because at my age one of the biggest things i have to watch out for is fatigue, particularly on the lower back. So if I'm deadlifting once or I'm high bar squatting once or, you know, I've got to be careful how much fatigue am I building up in my lower back because that will take a big hit on my central nervous system.

Next thing you know, I've got to recover longer. I lose frequency and volume. And for me now, it's really about the law of repeated bouts. I can't go to the gym and try and get everything out of one workout. And I can't stay in there very long. You've got diminishing returns, you know. So really 40 minutes is about all I want to be there. And I want to be able to do that again in 48 to 72 hours.

Then I have to be cautious of how much fatigue I build up, how much really heavy weight I load on my spine because that's going to slow down my recovery. I'm going to wake up the next morning feeling like I was in a car accident, this way I felt for years, you know, when I was powerlifting. So now I can come in and feel great, and every 48 to 72 hours, I can do these kind of pumping volume workouts and still be under load. Weighted carry is special in that regard, because you don't get a lot of spinal,

central nervous system overload. I use it with NBA basketball players and people who have back issues. For that very reason. It's good for stabilizing the core and helping to heal, you know, because a lot of people have lower back problems. And that's one of the best ways to recuperate from lower back problems is core stabilization. I don't mean to drag on, but these things just keep blending into each other in terms of the benefits of them. And I want to make sure that people from, you know, with all different goals and all different issues, let's say,

can still benefit from what I think are the best training modes without getting too distracted so they can train more often. And so it's fun and it feels good. How far are you away from your competition, not powerlifting, but when you were bodybuilding, how far are you away from that weight? Probably 10 pounds. Yeah, I was going to say you look almost stage ready still and you're still a huge guy yeah i think a lot of people will be surprised to know the way you train now versus how you used to train

and that you're not you know once you've made you're essentially maintaining and i would i would guess in some areas getting better and it's probably a little surprising in a sense that you know you are where you are but now you've switched to this new training method incorporated these things for health but somehow the body still responds and still grows and i think it's it's great to see because it a lot of people get pigeonhole right when they say oh i'm going to do this i'm going to do that and to be able to open yourself up to different training mythologies and then make improvements and you know be close to where you were i know mentally it's probably refreshing to be like oh i don't have to go bang super heavy weights or you know you know push up squats to 600 for 20 reps it's like i can still maintain

and if not improve on where we were so yeah well in terms of hypertrophy in particular i mean it's it's it's really hard to gain it's a lot easier to maintain and when i was if i wanted to be 10 pounds heavier in this same condition it'd be a hell of a road i'd have to i'd but it's a lot easier to maintain. And when I was, if I wanted to be 10 pounds heavier in this same condition, it'd be a hell of a road. I'd have to, I'd have to make a lot of sacrifices. I'd have to train twice a day. I'd have to eat more calories. It would be a big commitment to, to get that and keep it and hold onto it. I've always said that every single, you know, the further you go with your goal, whether it's gaining muscle or even when it's like lowering your body fat percentage, the closer and closer you get to where you want to be or you keep redefining your goal from 25 body fat to 20 to 15 to 12 to under 10 each of those is exponentially more difficult

in terms of the commitment the time and nutrition and the sleep and all that that you have to put into it the hours per day so i'm kind of happy being able to stay here and only have to train probably three days a week really intensely like I do. But I do still maintain a really aggressive, I don't want to say healthy diet necessarily because I still eat quite a bit of food. If I had just cut back my calories a little bit, I could easily lose 10 pounds. It's really hard to maintain a decent amount of muscle mass in, you know, under 10% without pushing a lot of food through you. Yeah, that certainly seems to be the thing that is the most difficult part of the physique world. It's easy to get bigger in some respects. It's easy to get smaller in some respects, but it's very hard to be big and lean both at the same time, especially as you

are out of your 20s into your 30s. Now you're in your 40s. Damn, we're close to being in your 50s. You're 49 years old right now. Correct? Exactly. So what have you learned about how to be as big as possible while still being very lean, especially in your 40s? Well, one thing in particular is that I got to make sure I do exercises that yield a big return. I talked about those ROI movements. And so it's twofold. One, I don't want to be in here a long time. I don't want to get an enormous benefit out of it. But two, I also want to use the kinds of exercises that stimulate growth.

And so I'm cautious about steady state cardio, et cetera, because I don't want to be whittling away at muscle tissue. And I also try and get under load. So I do put a bar on my back, you know, every week. And I do higher and get under load. So I do put a bar on my back, you know, every week. And I do higher repetitions for sure. And I do these, you know, these banded leg presses. I think that's a good load. Obviously, the weighted carries every single week.

You know, I shoot these videos and people think that that's, you know, that's something unique. I just a couple days ago did legs with Big Gabe Moan up at G-Standard Gym. And, you know, Gabe was all worried we were going to do some, you know, crazy big workout or even the one I did with Mike O'Hearn a couple years ago. It was, oh, the big challenge. And I said when we were done, I do this two or three times a week. It was a normal workout, you know, and it was this epic thing with, you know, hundreds of thousands of views of people like, oh, this guy did this great.

That's every week. It just is what it is. It's what you have to do, I think, to maintain that muscle tissue in that kind of condition. And these HIIT under load training sessions do both for me. I don't have to do cardio, and I don't have to be restrictive on calories. As a matter of fact, just the opposite. The demand of these workouts requires me to fuel them with a lot of food. On that note, a lot of people will see people retire from bodybuilding and they'll lose a ton of weight.

And they'll be like, oh, he's off the sauce and look what happens. He just stopped force feeding himself, really, because that's the big difference. And the reason it's important for me to make that distinction is because a lot of people ask, how do I get to your level? You know, and I know in the back of their mind, they're thinking is how much sauce do i have to take you know how much testosterone in five grams a week or whatever the conversation always comes to that you know is more better we know people have tried five grams a week right it didn't turn out it's not it always ends up there and i you know look i don't need to argue about it i've been in this business for 30 years and i've seen everything and everybody.

I've worked with all the best gurus in the business. I've trained athletes that have been on the Olympia stage in both bodybuilding and physique. I know what people are using and what they've done, and some people are more genetically gifted than others. But really, at the end of the day, the greatest athletes, all things being equal, a level playing field, everybody using something, all things being equal, the ones that excel are the ones that are the best at recovery, the ones with the most voracious appetites.

Look at Kai Green. Yeah. Look at his appetite. Oh, yeah. Look at Ronnie Coleman. His appetite is insane. The amount of food that guy can put away. And as soon as he stops eating like that, he's going to lose a ton of weight.

There's no question. You know, Dorian, same way. And, you know, I know folks who are honing in about the next cycle or, you know, this, that, or the other or the macros or all this other stuff. Look, you need to train very, very hard. And you need to put down a lot of fuel. And let me give you a little example here because this is something that's very recent. Hofthor Bjornsson, 420 pounds, competes in the world's strongest man, takes second to Brian Shaw. Contacts me shortly after that. He says, look, can we talk about nutrition?

I said, sure. So the first thing we do is we get a blood test. We find out what his insulin sensitivity is like, because I want to see how he's using food. He's eating a lot of food, but he's having a hard time gaining more muscle and more strength, because he's got poor insulin sensitivity, and he's partitioning his nutrients particularly into fat as opposed to muscle glycogen, right? Proteins into muscle and carbs into muscle glycogen. That's a problem, so we need to fix that first.

And there were three or four primary components, I think, that contributed to fixing that problem on the front end, the big things, the most important thing, is to get your body in a position to where it can utilize calories more efficiently and more effectively for your purpose. This is true of a pro strongman as much as it is for a bikini competitor. So the first thing we had to do was drop a little bit of weight. Got him down to 395.

Got him a CPAP because, as you know, you start losing sleep. Insulin resistance starts to become a problem. Blood pressure. All those other problems. So got him a CPAP. Got him a blood test. Find out his vitamin d is low well that's inversely correlated to insulin sensitivity so his hemoglobin a1c was was

elevated and partially because of the the problem with a deficient vitamin d so we remedied those problems now i didn't say anything about training i didn't say anything about macros i didn't say anything about uh you know gear or cycles or anything. Because those things all take a backseat, if not a distant, you know, backseat, to what, you know, the essential problem is, is preparing your body to be able to handle and utilize food and gear and training better. And so we started with what I think was most important, what I call the 99% rule. All the other stuff to me is 1%, all the creatine and the aminos

and all that other crap that people, the whey protein, all that stuff that people spend all their time focusing on. I focus on the 99%, get him healthy. So went down to 395, got his blood sugars improved, insulin sensitivity, vitamin D. And then what we did is in order to build him back up efficiently, what we wanted to do is make sure that he wasn't again shutting down his insulin sensitivity. So we went from eating horizontally, I call it, to eating vertically, right? A lot of bro science here.

I'm just going to put a name on it just to help people kind of envision the thing. But really what we know is that when people have food allergies or they have digestion problems, we know that they're probably eating something that doesn't agree with them. There's gut biomes all messed up, whatever it is, whether it be yeast or whether it be digestive issues, irritable bowel syndrome, whatever, Crohn's disease, all those things are generally affected by something that you eat that is causing, wreaking havoc on your body. Whether it be a food allergy such as uh you know a lactose intolerance or a whey intolerance um you know casein allergy any of those things peanuts what does it matter

what it is but eggs even are kind of high in terms of allergies so you try and minimize those problems by eliminating those foods right first and foremost get yourself healthy and then maybe you can reintroduce those in a smaller amount later. Do you suggest an elimination diet? I start there. You've got to start there and try and figure out what's causing the problem. Because if you can feed yourself stuff, it's like all this juicing stuff. I'm going to clean my body out, and really what you end up doing is you eliminate the source of the problem. The juice cleanse doesn't do anything for you.

Really, it doesn't. If anything, it causes more problems than it solves. A lot of people talk about going on a juice fast. All I'm going to do is juice. I'm thinking might as well just fast. Right, right, right. Or if you want to do juice because it feels good to put something green in your body. I don't know.

Two things happen. One, you eliminate the problems, eating the crap that's causing the problem. And two, you generally reduce calories, so you lose some weight. Yeah. The juice has nothing to do with it. You could reduce calories and eliminate the problems and not drink juice and you'd be just fine. If anything, it's going to give you diarrhea

and then of course you'll think you're cleaning yourself out. That's what people are thinking. So nonetheless, to get back to Hofdor, what we did is first... Every time I have diarrhea, I'm like, oh, this is such a good thing. All the toxins are in my toilet. That new whey protein or whatever you're taking is like, oh, this is working.

So we started reintroducing foods that I thought were very efficient, very easy to metabolize, highly bioavailable. And you could eat a lot of them and your body wouldn't reject them. And, of course, for me, that is first and foremost going to be steak, lean red meats. And then secondly, in terms of carbohydrates, it's white rice. It's the least offensive to the body. Like brown rice has phytic acid. You know, obviously going to be plenty of problems if you try to eat tons of bread or pasta or oatmeal.

All those things kind of have a cumulative effect in terms of your stomach fighting quantity. Now, I believe in a diverse gut biome, but. So why is it the lean red meat versus, say, chicken or fish? Well, I think it has, again, bioavailability. Your body is going to easily utilize all that, but it's got so many more micros in it. It's got your B vitamins and your iron and your creatine. It's so easy for your body to digest and utilize.

It's just in terms of, like I say, these higher ROI movements in the gym. I'm going to eat the foods that give me the biggest bang for the buck too. You know, the ones that have acquired a broader range of nutrients in a highly assimilable format so that you can eat those and benefit from them. And then I introduced that, say, like Flex did with me back in 2008. You know, just six ounces of steak a meal plus a cup of rice, and then every three hours repeats, blah, blah, blah. And then over time, we built up that volume.

So we trained our metabolism. I did a rant on this, training your metabolism, so that just the same way you train a bench press where, you know, every week you might add five pounds or you might add one rep, and, you know, progressively over time you become stronger and stronger. Same thing with the gut. I want to train the gut to be able to metabolize and utilize that food. If I turned right around and tried to eat Ronnie Coleman's diet tomorrow,

I would just crash my system. Same way if you were a 300-pound bencher and tried to put 400 on the bar, ask for a liftoff, it's just going to crush you. Interesting. So I had to get the stomach prepared for eating more of that kind of food, which was pretty easy to do since I wasn't distracting it with this horizontal diet. I hopped for breakfast with five different protein sources from, you know, bacon and cheese and eggs and milk and, you know, fast food for lunch and the Subway footlong or whatever. And then, you know, and then Domino's

pizza for dinner, you know, calories, a calorie kind of thing. But think of how you're confusing your stomach in that environment. And where do you ever have an opportunity to improve and increase those volumes over time? And does your body just keep fighting you? And eventually, you know, again, your nutrient partitioning becomes such that you're turning everything into fat storage and you're not being able to utilize more and more of the kinds of foods that your body easily can assimilate. So maybe five meals, six ounces of steak a day a cup of rice um and then you're full initially and maybe within a week 10 days you're like damn i'm hungry again you eat an hour later like oh god i'm hungry add a sixth meal and then five ten days later i'm hungry again you're digesting the food a little faster utilizing all of it okay let's go from six to eight ounces

of steak well i'm full again well days later, you're hungry again. And your body just starts to learn to utilize that food faster and more efficiently. And, of course, I have never heard this strategy before. Well, I'm like. I didn't invent it. I'll tell you that. This, to me, has happened back in the early 90s as far back as I recall. I don't know how I haven't heard this before.

I don't know. Yeah. I thought I'd heard everything. Okay. Well, let'd heard everything. Okay. Well, let me keep going and say it. What about you, Doug? It's not something that people talk about in the CrossFit space that much. Like CrossFit, weightlifting, powerlifting, I feel like in the bodybuilding space,

like having a linear progression for food is more common. Right. Right. Well, and here's the thing, and I'll finish with the point that you just made. First of all, in the 90s, the best bodybuilders did this. They trained twice a day. They ate eight times a day. They slept eight hours a night and took two naps a day.

They lived, breathed, ate, and thought bodybuilding. That was it. That's all they did. 24-hour job. Exactly. And Flex introduced me to that concept back in 2008. And he told me six, seven months before I ever went down there and trained with him, I have to get your metabolism prepared to eat the amount of food that you're going to need to handle the volume of training it gets back to what you just

said it's like you're treating your food the same as training yes i've always i've always thought about training and then just adjusting your food for whatever training you're doing but i never approached it from that direction yeah and it goes both ways also a lot of people say you have to especially with respect to like ufc fighters you mentioned ufc fighters earlier like you don't want to get in shape for the fight. You want to get in shape to train for the fight. And you're kind of saying that about food right now. Exactly.

Exactly. And if you want to train more, you need to eat more to recover from that training. And if you eat more to recover from that training, then you might be able to train a little more, particularly if your body's prepared to digest that food, to do the nutrient partitioning, to quickly convert the carbohydrates into muscle glycogen, to quickly digest the protein, or to be efficient enough to digest that food fast enough so now you can eat more. So instead of getting bogged down with 4,000 calories, all of a sudden you can eat 5,000 calories and your body's able to utilize all that. First thing people say is,

well, you run to the bathroom all the time. And I'm like, no, my body's using every bit of that. I went to the bathroom less. And if you wanted to start adding in things like bread or pasta or massive amounts of fiber from vegetables, then yeah, you're going to go to the bathroom all the time because your body's not going to utilize that stuff. So I kept those things at a minimum, particularly with respect to vegetables. I had to be careful to eat low gas vegetables that didn't cause a lot of bloating. Things like spinach and peppers that were low in oligosaccharides. So I didn't have those indigestible fibers creating methane in the stomach. And so I could stay, my stomach could stay flat and I wasn't bloated. Plus

a lot of those heavy fiber vegetables will impede protein absorption and they'll bind to valuable minerals and electrolytes. And so, and those things are hugely important to me. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, zinc, those things are hugely important to me sodium potassium magnesium zinc those things are enormously important i think you guys just talked to uh examine.com yeah just just this last week or a couple weeks ago i can't remember when it was but you know he was quick to say as as we know in or i've been talking about for a long time now since i came out with a sodium rant that much more important than multivitamins or even creatine is sodium and right behind that the rest of those minerals magnesium zinc you have deficiencies in those you got a problem you got

performance problems you know as right now you got problems so every time i work with someone i'll increase their uh not just uh you know give them a supplement possibly of those but get a blood test find out if they're deficient and feed them the foods that will maximize or increase those things. Zinc, magnesium, sodium, potassium, you know, those kinds of things that I think have a huge benefit for the system. So we could train more, we can eat more. I do this vertical dieting program where I add more of the kinds of foods that I think improve performance. So eventually he's at eight meals a day, 12 ounces of steak every meal, two cups of rice, 1,000 grams of carbs a day, four pounds of steak a day. When we flew down to the – now remember, he was at 220 at the World's Strongest Man.

He came down to 395 to get healthy, to get his system ready and prepared. When he got to the Arnold, he was 450. What? 450. What? 450. He's like 6'8", though, right? 6'9". But he was the biggest he's ever been and stronger than he's ever been. He set records for himself on the deadlift. He set the world record on the weight over bar. He was healthy.

He was strong. I packed 40 pounds of steak into a cooler, took it on the airplane with me, got out to the Arnold a week early. It was barbecuing steak every single day and taking it over to his room so he could eat four pounds of steak a day the whole week going into the meet. Loaded with sodium. He was monstrous and strong. And he had a huge performance.

He took second to Brian Shaw, but that was his best performance at the Arnold ever. He'd never placed better in fifth or sixth. And he was healthy and strong. So he utilized that method. Of course, Flex Wheeler taught it to me. Flex learned it in the early 90s from everybody that was training at Venice. So I didn't invent this. I just kind of titled it in order so people kind of see what I'm talking about,

vertical as opposed to horizontal. Whatever bro science may be involved, maybe somebody with some extra time and, you know, like Greg Knuckles and the rest of those guys can do some research and or put together some studies and and make something out of it who knows but uh it's been hugely effective for my performance and that of the athletes that i've worked with that concept in general so a couple times a couple times now you have mentioned nutrient partitioning which we've certainly mentioned on the show but for people that don't know what that is and how that works how does that work well you know when eat calories, how those calories get utilized kind of depends on

whether or not your body is prepared to use them. If you're insulin resistant, you're not going to, you're going to store those carbohydrates as muscle glycogen. They're going to sit in your system for a while and the insulin is going to get raised up and it's going to stay elevated for an extended period of time. And your body's quickly going to start trying to shuttle those into body fat storage and so and the same thing is true of amino acids because insulin is a courier for all nutrients and it's going to try and digest that food and get it in storage as quickly as it can to get those insulin levels down and so i look at at nutrient partitioning really is is am i using the calories i'm eating for the purpose i want they're intended or I want them to be intended to,

which is to me muscle glycogen, sodium, water in the muscles prepared for performance and recovery. You know, we talk about glycogen in terms of just energy for training, but it's so much more than that. Muscle glycogen and the water it holds and the sodium it holds is all hugely beneficial for recovery from training. I only look at training as a stimulus. That's just a breaking down muscle tissue. That means very little to me. I can do that easily, and that's fun. But I look at recovery and preparation for the next workout as really the hard part.

That's the one that takes more discipline, more time. You train three or four times a week. You eat six times a day. So you have so much more opportunity in terms of eating and sleeping and using the right nutrients and keeping your body healthy to utilize those nutrients for repair and then preparation for the next workout. I'm going to squat on Sunday. On Friday, I'm wholly and solely focused on when I show up to that squat workout, am I going to be rested? Am I going to be hydrated? Am I going to be well fed, you know, protein, carbs, et cetera. And so I know when I get there on Sunday, that I'm prepared for a big workout. And then I'm, you know, I'm confident that I'm going to

have a great workout. Yeah. Let's take a break real quick. I want to get back. I want to get into more of the recovery methods that you're into. Sure. All right. And we're back with Stan. Yeah. So, you know, my entire life, I've always wanted to create a lot of diversity in my diet, different types of proteins, different types of vegetables, trying to get as many different types of micronutrients and macronutrients in my body. Yeah. So this whole scenario is new to me. And because I've never done that, now I'm tempted.

I feel like that was the recommendation my whole life was get a lot of variety. That way you don't miss any particular nutrient. There's a few factors in play. First and foremost, we have to be careful painting with a broad brush. We're talking about a specific type of athlete. Everybody has a different need. People who are dieting

might be different. People who are trying to gain muscle. Power lifting, body building, strong man, football players, people who have to put on extra muscle. Even weightlifters who are trying to go up a class or crossfitters who may be under-mast and want more strength, et cetera, and intend to gain more weight. So it's focused kind of more so on that group. And here's the thing.

I'm not against the diversity. I think diversity is important. But when it takes away from your ability to give the body what it needs to grow in my, just in sheer calories and the kinds of calories that your body will assimilate and utilize very easily and quickly, if anything becomes a distraction or competes for that, then I want it to be of a smaller amount. It's not like I'm anti-vegetable. I want vegetables in there. I want a diverse gut biome. I want fruits in there. But instead of eating a whole apple, I'll eat two spears. Instead of eating a ton of broccoli and asparagus, again, I'll eat the low-raffinose

vegetables such as spinach and peppers. I'll try and, you know, it's okay to eat a half a cup of oatmeal, but if you tried to eat 800 grams of carbs a day in oatmeal, your stomach would reject. It just wouldn't, you know, it has a cumulative effect that way. Things like bread and pasta, you'd just be bloated all the time. My wife would get along with you. Yeah. She's most, she never finishes her vegetables and is like, just crushes meat and wants more meat. Right. Yeah. Right. Well, I, and I look at vegetables as, as part of being healthy, as part of having the, the, the nutrient, you know, more of the micro that are necessary. If you're deficient in vitamin D, take vitamin D. If you're deficient in iron, you know, then maybe you want to take iron or eat more red meat to get that iron. Obviously, you want to try and get what

you can out of whole foods first, including vegetables. So I try and include vegetables to do that, but I have to be cautious how much of them I use because, again, we talked about how it can impede your ability for protein absorption and it can compete with or bind to important minerals additionally with vegetables is it a problem with people that are trying to put on a certain amount of muscle mass they need a certain amount of calories and then vegetables are just taking up space and they just don't have enough calories to really help they're in the way almost and let's just look at the opposite thing if you're trying to lose weight one of the first things you do is try and eat high satiety or satiety. How do you say that word? Satiating or satiety? Yeah. I know how to read it. You eat foods that keep you full longer, right? So you can eat less really

because ultimately that's the goal, whether it be you stuff yourself full of low calorie foods or you eat on a restricted eating window like the intermittent fasting or the eat from 10 to 6. All of those things really are focused around reducing calories. And when you reduce calories, you get hungry. And so how do you manage that? Well, you eat more high-fiber foods, eat more protein because then you stay full longer. Well, I don't want to be full when I'm trying to gain weight. I need more calories.

So I have to do the opposite of that. I have to eat calories that I can consume, digest quickly and efficiently and utilize those calories and then be hungry again in an hour or two. I mentioned many ways that you can improve utilizing those calories and then becoming hungrier faster. One of the ones I forgot to mention was I take three or four 10-minute walks daily immediately following when I eat. And I suggested this to Hofthor and I suggest this to a lot of people who have problems with insulin sensitivity because a study out of Australia showed that taking three or four 10-minute walks a day was almost 40% more effective than taking one 40-minute walk a day in terms of cardio. And we're seeing a lot of that literature come out now,

where you sit at a desk all day and then go to the gym for 40 minutes. You don't undo the damage. You need to move frequently. I tell Hofthor when he travels, you need to get up every hour and walk around the airplane. I always do. I stand back by the bathroom. I'm doing the running man. I'm back there walking like this, you know, in place.

And I look ridiculous. But, you know, I do that every hour so that when I get where I'm going, you know, I haven't hurt my body because I talk about how important movement is. I move a lot. It makes me less tired. It makes me more efficient at utilizing calories. I take those four 10-minute walks a day immediately following each meal except for post-workout. I move a lot. And I move my whole body.

And I try and get my legs to move through a full range of motion and I think that is one of the keys to recovering faster utilizing more calories etc but not to get too far away from the vertical diet that's why I don't eat a ton of vegetables or a ton of fruits because I want those to be a garnish almost per se And I want to be able to free myself up for tons of the kinds of calories that I need to build muscle. How long would I have to do this to see a result? A month? I want to do an experiment. So I'm wondering how long I need to do this to see a result. Well, first and foremost, you've got to maintain a calorie surplus, right?

If you want to grow. You just have to. If you want to build muscle and gain weight, you have to be at a calorie surplus. And conversely, if you want to lose weight, you need to be at a calorie deficit. Well, I hardly eat anything these days, so it wouldn't be that hard to have more calories than I normally eat. Yep. And now we're back to what we talked about earlier is that maintaining a calorie surplus is one of the hardest parts about growing. It's tough to eat enough calories every day.

And then if you want to grow, the best thing to do is increase the volume and frequency of training, hypertrophy training. And when you do that, it's the law of repeated bouts. You know, like I said, I try and train, and then 48 hours or 72 hours later, I try and be able to train again, the same body part. And the more frequency and volume you put into the gym, presuming you're recovering, then you can stimulate more muscle growth, presuming you're maintaining a calorie surplus and eating enough, you know, calories and protein to do that. So it goes together. I can't really talk about one

separate from the other, the sleeping, the eating, and the training. It all goes together. It is a big system. And so if you employ the vertical diet and then gradually increase calories as you've trained your metabolism, as you're utilizing them, again, you can't eat Ronnie Coleman's diet tomorrow. He'll knock you out. I don't think I could eat half of it. No. But you can get a calorie surplus. And here's the thing. If you do 1,500-calorie-a-day surplus, a lot of that's going to be wasted.

Your body can only grow so fast. It can only respond so fast. So you have to look at things in terms of the long term. And this is true with training. You know, they say stimulate, don't annihilate. You can't go in the gym and do a seven-hour workout and think you're going to grow this massive amount. It's just these little, you know, law of repeated bouts. It's just these little stimulus with the follow-up.

The same thing is true in terms of protein. You can't be taking these massive amounts of protein and expect to grow any more than just maintaining a surplus, just having what you need when you need it. What if I just drank seven whey shakes a day? You know, that would work if you were at a surplus. It's not my favorite plan, but I'm just saying. And the reason it's important for me to say that is because the same thing is true on the other end. People talk about the best diet to lose weight.

Well, the best diet to lose weight is the calorie deficit. And that's true. I mean, I talked about it in my rant, but the guy who did the McDonald's study and he only ate 1850 calories a day and he walked 40 minutes a day, lost 30 pounds in 30 days and he improved all of his health markers, his blood pressure, his, his, uh, blood sugars, his cholesterol, you know, by all intensive purposes, drastically improved his health, eating at McDonald's every day. And then a professor did the same thing at 7-eleven so people want to come in and they want to get all you know same thing he lost 40 pounds in 40 days and improved and he was eating packaged foods and

twinkies and ding-dongs and breakfast cereal and stuff like that and uh well i think it's important you mentioned this earlier with movements it's the same thing with the whole concept of the calorie deficit it doesn't matter if you're if you're eating grass-fed you know organic food if you're not in a calorie deficit so it's not that that isn't better once you get there and it's not that you make improvements like you mentioned not a big wave fan i'm guessing most you're a real foods guy real foods guy but but if you needed to take shakes it's like you put shakes in and then like those are the things you change when you're at your level yeah and you go okay okay, what can I do to go even further? You say, okay, now we've got the deficit there, but the quality of food, where it's coming from, all of these things play in.

But you mentioned earlier, these are micro things, not macro things. You've got to look for what's the big thing first. What's the big thing first? In the business, we call them action items. You need to tackle those first. Don't be running around doing all the little stuff. And people freak out when I talk about this, the McDonald's diet or the 7-Eleven diet. But look, because, like you said.

These are just examples. You're not recommending them. No, no, no, no. I'm trying to prove a point. Because, yeah, what's most important, and what's most important is maintaining a calorie deficit and being consistent. And the reason most people fail in terms of the diet isn't the diet. It's because they go off of it, and they don't have a long-term outlook. There's a lot of diets out there that help put you in a calorie deficit. Yeah.

And there's a lot of different ways to skin that cat. So finding the one that works for you. Exactly. Staying there. You know, what diet works and that's the one that you'll stay on is really the one that works. Yeah. Same with the exercise. What's the best exercise?

The one you'll do. Stan, you mentioned earlier about walking more frequently, and obviously you mentioned eating more frequently. And there are some people out there, and I'm not smart enough to know this stuff, who say it doesn't matter if you do it like the workout, 40 minutes versus split. What's the – you mentioned some research behind it. What is that? Why is that more efficient?

It does matter. Is it just the that more efficient? It does matter. Is it just the abilities of body? It does matter. There's a law of diminishing returns. The longer the workout, the less you get out of it. The same is true in studying. We know that about your mental capacity to retain information, learn from it. Your body will start to fight you.

That's what it does. It will fight you with your diet. It will fight you with your training. It wants homeostasis. It will fight you with your weight gain or weight loss. And you have to continually push that envelope. So, you know, it's always better to stimulate twice a day. You have more energy.

You have more glycogen. You have more, you know, your protein, everything for the repeated bout as opposed to just trying to do an hour and a half workout at once. Yeah, so you're not moving so far away from homeostasis. You're a little bit back, a little bit back versus all the way. Yeah, yeah. And I was talking about how you make gains in these tiny little increments. Your body is not going to make huge gains or huge progress. We saw this with whey isolates versus casein. It was like, oh, whey isolates. You know, it's in your system faster and you have higher peaks. Your body doesn't respond that way. It doesn't respond to quickness and peaks. It needs what

it needs when it needs it. And it can only use so much of it. And so what we discovered when all the research came in is that casein was a better form to maintain and grow muscle over the long term than whey. Even though you could see more of the, you know, there was the whey would get in you quicker and would have higher peaks. And you notice that casein, ultimately, people are like, oh, this stuff actually is pretty good. You know, they were trying to trying to poopoo it for a while and say oh it coagulates in the stomach and it doesn't digest very fast well that's kind of what you want you want to have what you need when you need it so your body doesn't respond to peaks if you take 10 grams of test on Monday

don't expect to grow you know from by Tuesday to be 10 pounds heavier it doesn't work that way your body doesn't respond that way. Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say I've seen similar things with regard to nutrition. When they do studies with isocaloric diets between two groups, one group does two meals a day, one group does six meals a day on the same number of calories in each case. The people that do six meals a day gain more muscle and lose more fat

than the people that did two meals a day on the exact same number of calories. So frequency does matter. Calories do matter also to your point, but they're not the only thing that matters. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we, you know, we had a brief discussion over the break about, um, about studies. And, uh, my very first rant was why you'll never be right about anything in the health and fitness industry, because there's the, there's a study out there for everybody and people talk about bro science and I'm like look it's all you know just science and at the end of the day you got to try and apply it and see whether or not you have the genetic predisposition whether or not you uh respond uh effectively to that protocol um you know you don't know that until you've tried it and so like you said you know

what do you need to do and what's effective for you we'll start with the calorie surplus uh we'll try and and we kind of ended off talking about the fact that 500 calories is plenty of calorie surplus because you're not going to grow any faster if you do 1500 calories quite the contrary you might create a bad environment for nutrient partitioning as a result of that right and you you you may impede your long-term progress and so uh the reason i'd like to track things and do meal tracking for people who are losing weight or gaining weight is because how do you know where to go from where you're at? What are you eating now? What can we implement? And how can we grow that over time or minimize that over time so you can continue to make progress? So I like the high-volume training, and I like the vertical diet in terms of being able to add more calories that your body can utilize more of

because eventually you're going to get somewhere where you're going to need to train more and eat more, and are you preparing yourself for that place? Yeah. Are you recovering fast enough from your workouts because your body's adapted to that kind of frequency and volume? And is your body metabolizing calories effectively and efficiently enough it's hard work what i'm describing to you is is you know i've not once said that there's some secret or gimmick here this is the same conversation i had with flex wheeler in 2008 when i thought he was going to open up the the curtains to the wizard of oz and i was going to

see how this whole thing worked but that's not what happened i He gave me nothing I didn't already know. He just reiterated the fact that this is a lot of discipline, commitment, consistency, time management, meal prep, making the choice to get to bed by 10 o'clock as opposed to playing on your phone for an hour and a half and having the meals ready when you need them and then pushing the metabolism, pushing the food just as hard as you push yourself in the gym. It's equally as hard and even more difficult in terms of the frequency and consistency that you need to do. I feel like people hear, you know, six meals a day,

eight meals a day, and they think like, okay, with how I eat meals right now, that sounds impossible. Like I wake up, I make my breakfast, I go out to eat for lunch. Like if I'm going to eat eight meals a day and I have to go to a restaurant eight times, I've got to drive there, I've got to sit down, I've got to order, it's going to take up my whole fucking day. There's no magic between six or eight. But I couldn't eat enough total calories to fuel my workouts in five meals. The meals would be too big.

I just couldn't stomach them. So I had to find a way to eat a little bit of a smaller meal. Uh, cause sometimes you can overload yourself with one big meal and it takes longer to digest. Uh, and frequency became more important than volume. Exactly. And I would have to wake up a little early. Sometimes I would have my meal ready by my bed instead of an end table, I have a and so if I woke up at say 5 a.m to pee beautiful then I would I would pull that meal and I would eat it and I'd go back to sleep and when I got up at 8 I'd eat my second meal now I'm already two meals in for the day by 7 38 o'clock in the morning oh yeah we're cheating so yeah so yeah the purpose of me

saying that that it would be impossible to do it their same way is that they have to change how they do their their meal prep how they got to they got to do kind of what you're saying like like the meals are ready in advance and they either haul their own food around with them or how does meal prep work is huge meal prep's huge it's huge for weight loss it's huge for performance in terms of weight gain or muscle or just maintenance of performance when you're training meal prep's the number one thing um when i went i told you that I went a week early to help Hofthor with his meals. When I went to Samoa recently, I knew I was going to be there for 10 days. I packed 40 pounds of steak and 20 pounds of chicken. I put them in coolers and I

froze them and put them in coolers and I took them uncooked down to Samoa and made sure that there was a barbecue grill there. And so I was cooking steak and chicken all week long while I was down there because they didn't have the prime meats that, you know, I like to eat the Costco prime cuts because they taste good reheated. You get a grocery store meat or a Walmart meat or something and reheat it the next day, dog food. Tastes horrendous. And your food has to taste good if you're going to eat that much of it that often. So I took all my meals down there and had a busy schedule. We did seminars at five high schools, a college, a K through 12, two radio shows, two TV shows while we were down there. Every day was a blitz in preparing for this meet and doing the powerlifting meet and the bodybuilding show. And I walked around every day with my roller carry-on bag for the airplane

full of Tupperware to eat meals constantly throughout the day. So meal prep's enormous. I've talked about it before in college. I would take my meals to classes. It's just huge. If you aren't prepping meals, chances are pretty good you're going to. Where did that discipline come from? Obviously, it's been there.

You mentioned college right then. So you've had discipline instilled from a young age. Like, you know, where did that come from? A lot of people, like Doug said, are listening. They're like, oh, my gosh my gosh gotta do all this stuff and you know for a lot of high level athletes it's you know this is just what you do and it's kind of you know you see food as fuel and so you're looking at okay what foods can I get in to do this and and all of that comes down to discipline and meal prep discipline where does that come from for you because obviously you know it's a huge part of

yeah I knew that's what had to be done to to to grow i knew i had to get enough food in and like say when you're in college and you go without a meal and you're trying to build muscle i wouldn't eat or drink anything that didn't build muscle so i didn't drink and call i never had beer or anything like that in college because if i was going to eat something or if i said i wouldn't eat a dessert if because i would you know i would get another steak or something you know i was something that would build muscle. And it had to be often, so I would pack things with me. And one of the reasons, this kind of brings me into another really important thing about this gaining and losing weight, et cetera, and hit the topic of set points. So I was 135 pounds as a freshman in college, and I started lifting weights and working out two hours a day.

And I was eating, like, chicken and tuna and rice cakes. And I wasn't gaining much weight at all, very little. It took me two hours a day. And I was eating like chicken and tuna and rice cakes. And I wasn't gaining much weight at all, very little. Took me two years of training. I was at 158, competed in my first bodybuilding show. And what I realized after a while is that I had to train a little less and eat a whole lot more. And then I started implementing that and started growing.

But I had these plateaus. And men's physique competitors address this, talk to me about this all the time, about how they'll go from, say, 175 and then the off-season they might get up to 190, but then they have to get ready for another photo shoot. You know, these guys are trying to do some sort of photo shoot every weekend, or they just have to keep a six-pack, right? And so they lose the weight, and they just go back and forth between, say, 175 and 187,

and 175, 187, they just go back and forth between, say, 175 and 187, and 175, 187. They just go back and forth. They never get anywhere. It takes us back to the eating, like I said, which is hugely important for people like Kai Green and Ronnie Coleman, et cetera. But it also gets us to this concept of set points. When you go from 175 to 187, or when I went from, say, 170 to 190, I didn't own that. And Flex was big about talking to me about that. He said, you know, you don't own that. You have to stay there now.

It's a fight. You're scratching and clawing and trying to eat more and more every day, and your body wants to go back to 170. It wants to go back. And you don't gain any more weight, and you're at this plateau. And that plateau can last for weeks or months or a year. You don't know until your body finally accepts that that's its new weight. It happens with weight loss as well when people regain their weight.

You have to fight and scratch and claw to stay there. Your metabolism, as we all know, slows down, and so now you're burning fewer calories as a result of the weight loss. That's one of the big problems with losing weight and keeping it off. If you go back to what you were eating, you're going to explode. Same with bodybuilding. If you don't continue to eat and train and, uh, and get your body to adapt and stay at that weight. So you do that. And six months later, maybe you're one 90 and you're, you're holding it and it's pretty good and you can miss a meal and you don't go back down to one 85, you know, overnight. Uh, well now, if you want to go to 200,

you need to increase your meals or your frequency, sleep or something something has to improve and then when you get to 200 or 205 you don't own that and now you have to continue to eat more food and train and i call it becoming a victim of your own circumstance because you're in this prison where you have to continue to do what your body requires if you want to you know demands of you to hold that new 205. And you have to do it very consistently and disciplined in order to do that. And if you want to go any higher, you're going to have to own that first. And that can take many, many months to get your body to reset its set point. Or you're just going to drop right down. You'll lose that 10 pounds quick if you go on this little mini diet or have a photo shoot next week. You'll never own or earn that. And then what happens over time, now you're at this 200,

your body composition will start to change there. They get worried that, oh, I've only got a four pack now or my body fat percentage is higher. Well, of course it is. But the longer you stay there and then you own it, your body will start to change. Utilizing the kind of workouts that we do, the kind of meals that I talked about, your body composition will start to change. Utilizing the kind of workouts that we do, the kind of meals that I talked about, your body composition will start to change. And eventually you'll be just as hard and just a good condition at 200 as you were at 170. It's going to take a while, but that's what will happen. And if you don't hold that 200 for an extended period of time

and keep banging away at the training and continue to eat those meals, then your body composition will never change. You'll never be lean there. So that kind of goes into set points on how you can, and it can take years. I bet you it works exactly the same, the opposite way. Exactly the same, the opposite way. And some of the research isn't very generous on that. They say that these people, the biggest loser, can have suppressed metabolisms for years and maybe never, ever recoup a reasonable metabolism

and have to continue to fight. The people who are successful on The Biggest Loser say the same thing. I have to watch my diet and exercise every single day. The ones that have kept the weight off. You mentioned earlier, as you get closer, it gets harder. It's kind of like to go from suck to good is really not that hard in terms of effort. No, the newbie gains, yeah. But then to go from good to great, but go from great to excellent,

and I think people don't realize that that gap is smaller, but it's so much harder. Yeah. And so there's not the reward. I love the sedentary 30% body fat people. They're great because any diet, they'll lose 20 pounds in a month. Those guys are great. And they're like, yay! Keeping it off now.

How good a trainer are you? Did you do your part? Did you find them a diet that they enjoy that they can consistently stay on? Did you get them a training program that they enjoy that they'll consistently do? If you didn't do either of those things, then they're just going to go right back. But most people, they get paid up front. They get the 20-pound result. The person kind of fades off after that. going to go right back. But most people, they get paid up front, they get the 20 pound result. The person, you know, kind of fades off after that,

gain the weight back, but you know, no bother you're onto the next client. And that's why there's, you know, much greater than 90, 95% recidivism in terms of weight loss. They gain it back because the consistency issue, not because the initial program wasn't successful. It's always a long-term thing. Yeah. Is there any other recovery things that you like? I mean, we talked about nutrition and you mentioned eight hours of sleep. Is there anything else that you're real big on in regard to recovery? Those are the biggest, you know, the consistency in the meals, the movement is huge. And if you're just talking about recovering from workouts that's one thing but if if you're trying to to manage uh say you know difficulties in in like shoulders or knees or stuff like that movement again is number one and you can go do your art all you want and

you can you know take your anti-inflammatories all you want and you'll just be managing the problem long term and never winning the battle you got to eliminate the source you know so many folks they want to find out what they can do after the fact and then they'll go you know maybe see some a little improvement and get right back under the same problem if it's hurting you you need to eliminate the source and then try and get healthy through you know i have a video that i did with mark philippe here in town called stand effortorting Mobility, where we went through all of those things that I hated doing.

You know, the plie squats and the kettlebell squats and the stuff like that. And the, you know, the moving the hips through the range of motion. Use it or lose it. If your shoulders are impinged or you're not able to move them as high or through the full range of motion that you used to maybe you need a little art to to get them to into a full range of motion that's i've said that's just the doorway that's all that is when you go into a chiropractor and he and he does some art so that now you have a full range of motion that's not not therapy. All that is, is he's opened the door to say, okay, now you need to do, now you need to move that through a full range of motion and get the blood in there and stimulate the muscles in that area that's been restricted,

which has started to close in. And there's been muscle atrophy and maybe scar tissue. And if you don't, you know, get that freed up and then start moving that body. But to repeat again, because it's important, those things that are done to you or for you are never anywhere nearly as effective as the things you do for yourself. So you have to move. And you can do that, you know, whether it be for your hips or your shoulders. I will say with respect to lower backs, which most people talk about, please don't stretch the hell out of your lower back. Please don't do a whole bunch of sit-ups or hyperextensions for your lower back.

Please don't get chiropractic treatment for your lower back because as soon as you start bending and twisting and overstretching that area, you're never going to get healthy. Your abs and back, your your core are stabilizers they're not flexors and if you have lower back issues your number one goal is to re-establish the muscle strength and rigidity in that region so that you can prevent uh you know the pain uh and the the you know the the joint uh the muscles in the area from continuing to atrophy, et cetera, which is why I love the weighted carry concept.

Even if you just pick up a pair of dumbbells and walk back and forth, or even one dumbbell and walk back and forth for the obliques, et cetera, that's the number one thing that people ask me about is back injuries. And the first thing, they're like, oh, I could take some yoga. Horrendous idea. How many longtime yoga yoga instructors you know the fused discs now it's a terrible idea to over stretch particularly your lower back terrible idea so as long as i'm touching on those topics i'll throw that out there it seems that we could

apply the the concept of having a set point to mobility just like we just applied it to body weight yeah yeah and mobility is just movement. It's not static stretching. Static stretching might help a little bit and put a little bit of blood in there. But, you know, the research on that is horrible. You know, you look at what people are finding out about static stretching and its adverse effects. Now, in the absence of any other type of movement, maybe stretching is the best you can do. But if you are doing mobility, which mobility isn't necessarily't necessarily stretching mobility just moving your body through the range of motion plus weight training just coming in the gym uh and gradually like you notice when i warmed up i

warmed up on the leg press and initially there was a short range of motion and over you know the period of a number of sets i got a greater and greater range of motion your body starts to be able to uh you know kind of self-st itself, but you're moving through that range of motion. So, yeah, you know, I don't know where to end up with folks or if we've covered enough of those topics, but I think that's, those are all really important things in terms of, uh, it's always said that I do more outside the gym than inside the gym. And I think what you're getting from all of this is that the training is the fun part. It's the easy part and that the rest of this stuff sounds kind of like a pain in the ass but it's so effective yeah so incredibly effective i've

learned a lot today yeah thank you great for sharing great uh if people want to find out more about you where do they go uh boy everything's stan efforting uh instagram at stan efforting uh youtube uh please listen to the rhinos rant so they talk about a lot of this stuff getting blood tests of uh you know all those things, the vitamin D, the sodium the stuff, obesity things, just lots of great stuff Rhinos Rants on YouTube is Stan Efferding stanefferding.com

and that's pretty much it Stan Efferding excellent, thank you