Barbell Shrugged - Why Sleep Is the Secret to Increase Testosterone with Sam Miller, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash Barbell Shrugged #620

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

After a life changing traumatic brain injury Sam has spent the last 14 years separating the truth from the garbage, and sharing his quest for health, fitness and nutrition knowledge with the world. Sam built his reputation as an online coach, educator, and mentor dedicated to providing simple, yet strategic ways to amplify your results either as a coach or in your own transformation.    Sam has been featured as a 2x Fortune 500 Speaker at companies like Linkedin. He has also been a masterclass instructor for top certifications like Nutritional Coaching Institute and in 2019 alone, Sam guided and mentored 100+ coaches.   In addition to his practical coaching and mentorship experience he has been featured as a contributor, content creator, or guest for brands like Barbell Shrugged, T-Nation, Elite FTS, Next Level Human, and the Primal Health Coach Institute!   In short, Sam Miller is extremely passionate about his craft!   In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   What is the SHREDS model Why is sleep so closely linked to testosterone How important is sleep to hormone balance How does hunger and stress tell the story of hormone balance Why is testosterone so important for fat loss and muscle gain   Connect with our guests:   Follow Sam Miller on Instagram   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Mentorship Application: https://bit.ly/DDMentorshipApp   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Training Programs to Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/34zcGVw   Nutrition Programs to Lose Fat and Build Muscle: https://bit.ly/3eiW8FF   Nutrition and Training Bundles to Save 67%: https://bit.ly/2yaxQxa   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Sam Miller from Sam Miller Sciences back on the show. He is bringing the Shreds formula and talking all about how sleep is the number one key for you to increase testosterone. Turns out each hour of sleep past six hours has been scientifically proven to increase your testosterone by 15%. So you do the math. The difference between six and nine hours of sleep, that's right, 45%,

which is insanely cool knowing that one simple solution is out there, and it starts with sleep. We dig into all the science behind sleep, testosterone, and I think you're going to really enjoy this show. It's always a pleasure having Sam back, and I look forward to having him again. I want to thank our sponsors before we get into the show. Shrugged Family, Organifi.com forward slash shrugged, your spot to get all the green, red, and gold micronutrients that you need in your life for the stronger, healthier,

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M-A-S-S-Z-Y-M-E-S.com forward slash shrugged. That's masszymes.com forward slash shrugged and use the code shrugged to save 10%. Again, masszymes.com forward slash shrugged. Use the code shrugged to save 10%. Ageless male protein. I know you've been to Walmart. I know you've been into the performance nutrition section and I know you have seen three boxes on the shelf, the zone, the pump and the shred and wondered who is that insanely good looking man on the side of the pump, and the shred, and wondered, who is that insanely good-looking man on the side of the box? It's yours truly, Anders Varner. On the box in 2,200 Walmart stores, we have partnered with Ageless Male Protein, and this partnership is very, very cool. Not only are

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Doug Larson, Coach Travis Bass. Today on the show. Our good friend Sam Miller, he's back. It's been like a year and a half. Dude, the last time we had you on, it's so funny. You got thrust right into pandemic dad life, which is tough because we had to do a show at like 5 a.m. I remember texting you like, we're gonna do a show at 5 a.m. because it's 630. We all become dads and we're no longer cool fitness people. And you were like, 5.30? 5 a.m.? What?

What? What happens at that time? I have no kids. I sleep until whatever I'd like. I can work as late as I'd like. I can do this whole business thing. It seems so easy. Nope.

We're going 5 a.m. On today's show, we're going to talk about some biofeedback we're going to talk about the shreds model that you uh have created which is now hold on you you made shreds official with the government recently didn't you yeah we did file for the uh i guess trademark and like u.s patent office for shreds tm so i gotta put the little tm i love that shred you own the word shreds how rad is that that's like the mic drop moment of life right i think hopefully by the time this goes wasn't like a big fitness thing like 10 years ago like involved in it with a z with a z yeah yeah so so they have shreds with a Z. Obviously, my shred stands for sleep, hunger, recovery,

energy, digestion, and stress. So it is a built-in acronym. So we have little periods, obviously, in between the words to kind of signify the acronym. And then I guess at some point, it shifts from filing your trademark to basically the registered trademark. So right now, in using the TM, that's sort of our, you know, kind of legally official thing. And then at some point, I guess it shifts to the R and this is why attorneys are paid probably a lot of money. And I just kind of have to do some paperwork and sign off on things and give them proof of concepts basically, as well as all the podcast episodes and background and the different sort of teachings around biofeedback that I've done

over the years to, I guess, sort of qualify and then quantify everything that kind of goes into it. But for me, it was just really a way to synthesize that because I think a lot of times people don't have a quick checklist to refer to. And I've seen a lot of different coaches and even naturopathic physicians over the years and different people who are in sort of the health space try to check up on these topics. But, you know, it's hard for people to sort of triage themselves and have a quick system to refer to. And I find that it's not easy for clients to remember and it takes more than five to ten minutes. They're not going to do it.

So there's a level of you need to get as much information as you can out of every check-in you have, whether it's in-person or online. And as I made the shift from in-person coaching to online coaching and then mentoring coaches online, I noticed one of the most difficult things was making sure they had all the information they needed in the check-in. So that's really where the concept of Shreds was born because, you know, rattling off things, well, like how hungry are you? What's your appetite like? Did you recover okay from that workout? You know, people aren't going to remember every single thing every time. Uh, so I was really just trying to streamline that as much as possible, take the guesswork out of it. And then hopefully we make better coaching decisions as a result. Um, or if you're in your own transformation, you kind of check on these, you audit them yourself and it helps with things like auto-regulation. If you are more intermediate

to advanced trainee, um, you know, if, if you're in tune with that, you kind of know when to pump the brakes a little bit, when to push a little bit harder. Um, and, and I think that's a valuable tool that more people need to be aware of. That's why I'm super excited to hear about this. Kind of right up my alley. So I had, I had the big breakthrough moment this morning. Um, I, um, typically the alarm goes off at 6 AM 6am. And then I go walk like two, three miles and I get my head right. And I listened to smart people talk on on audiobook and all that stuff. This morning. It's like, I'm kind of done with this. I'm gonna get this walking thing done maybe one mile in the morning, but start sleeping. I need to I need to get back

to the eight hours of sleep when possible, instead of setting the alarm and prioritizing all this movement in the morning, like slow the movement down, back that down a little bit, but really increase total time with my eyes closed. Can we dig into why sleep is so important for like just hormone regulation and actually just getting really healthy? Cause I'm like, I like to think I'm seven hours plus a night, but guess what? My Fitbit tells me I'm about six hours and 28 minutes on average over the last year. That's not that good. Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, there's a couple things that happen both on, you know, just from a sheer, you know, cognitive perspective, you know,

you're going to feel your best, you're gonna have less brain fog when you do sleep. But in terms of when we see decreased sleep quality, as well as sleep quantity, you do see changes in things like insulin sensitivity. So that's going to be how receptive your body is to calories in general, but especially carbohydrate. Usually we'll see decreased glucose tolerance. Sometimes you actually get increased immune activation, increased blood pressure, and kind of that change in relationship between your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. So I know Travis kind of geeks out on things like HRV. This is where that's going to come into play. So as your sleep is compromised, you are going to see a little bit more sympathetic activation as opposed to parasympathetic. So that's kind of the idea of your fight or flight

versus rest or digest. We have this balance in our nervous system. We need to maintain that tone over time. So if we constantly are pushing the envelope, we're very type A, burn the candle at both ends type people, we're not focusing on recoverability. We are going to run into a little bit of an issue there. What we also see with decreased sleep is increased ghrelin, decreased leptin. Ghrelin is basically a hunger hormone. So if you ever try to adhere to a diet for a long period of time, one of the metabolic adaptations that comes with chronic dieting is we do get that increase in hunger hormones. So if you're lacking sleep, you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot already because you're just furthering an existing sort of, you know, kind of hormonal pushback that our body already has to try to maintain our current levels of body

fat. So one of the reasons the first S of shreds is sleep is because it really is paramount for recovery. But also, you know, if we think from the aesthetics, you know, component of things, we really, really need sleep for fat loss and making sure that we are, you know, moving in the right direction. Cause most of the people who listen to this show probably either have performance goals or they have fat loss goals. Maybe, you know, we, we also have some longevity goals in there too. We want to live long, healthy lives, but really two prongs of that, that we really want to pay attention to our fat loss performance. It's very hard to achieve fat loss or performance with inadequate sleep. So that's kind of why it's the first S. I do agree with kind of your approach. A lot of people think that waking up at 4am and doing this

three hour morning routine is like the most optimal thing in the world to like hack your life and supercharge things. You'd be surprised getting a few hours of extra sleep, waking up, you know, kind of maintaining that circadian rhythm, how that's going to influence your productivity at work, but also, you know, your output with other things later in the day. So like your training may improve Anders to where, yeah, maybe you're not getting that walk in, but we're seeing compensations in other areas or maybe because you're not waking up so early, you actually have the energy and the zeal to like go play with your daughter and do more outdoor activities later in the day because you're not doing that really, really early walk. Now I'm a huge fan of morning movement. I love going for walks in the morning. I always take my dog out, but I think there's a balance between doing this kind of

overzealous morning routine and short changing sleep versus, okay, I'm going to have kind of this modest morning routine. I'm going to get some movement in, maybe walk for 15 minutes and sort of, there's also some visual benefits to that in terms of getting outside and having your eyes exposed to sunlight. But we can push the envelope a little bit too far with that. And what we see is when people do push the envelope too far and they shortchange their sleep for whatever reason, whether it's to work more or whether it's for parenting or whether it's to kind of have this trendy morning routine, we tend to see sometimes decreased physical activity later in the day. We also see that oftentimes we will kind of overeat because of that change we see in terms

of hunger hormones. So then our energy intake will actually exceed our energy expenditure. And that's where people run into issues where then they're accumulating body fat and they're not sure why. Um, and so really when you repeat this cycle over time, especially when we look at the landscape of, especially the United States, but the Western world in general right now, this is why we see both with sleep plus the standard American diet, we run into issues with obesity, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and really like things like excess inflammation and sleep is super important for modulating that as well. So that's kind of like how all of this connects and why that's kind of the first pillar when we're looking at biofeedback. Yeah, look at- So we run a program called Diesel Without Mentors.

He's like, you stole my spotlight. We were in real life. There's no way this would happen. So we run a program called the Diesel Without Mentors mentorship. Most of the people in that program are focused on fat loss. They're all dads, of course. And so, you know, they have, especially if they have little kids, you know, free time and whatnot is kind of at a premium. It's hard to get enough sleep when you're a new parent, especially you can ask Anders. He has a very young baby at the moment.

What does the research show for, and if you have any numbers on this, I would love to hear like actual data. What does the research show is the difference between people that sleep, you know, eight hours versus people that sleep like six hours as far as fat loss goes and, or from, for people that sleep eight hours versus six hours for how, how much they increase their, their intake on, on the days following the days where they didn't sleep as much. Do you have any, anything in that world that you could cite? Uh, so I do have like, if you guys want like actual pub med studies, as far as like the actual number of, so in terms of

people's rate of loss, obviously we're not all the same body weight. We're also eating a different number of calories, but in terms of some things we can quantify, we do have research that shows that the calorie deficit is maintained basically despite increased hunger and cravings, a greater proportion of weight loss will come from muscle as opposed to fat. When we do have, um, less sleep, um, we do also have a study on instance resistance as well. I can try to like pull that up for you real quick while we're chatting. Um, but the, a couple, um, more recent like randomized control trials on this, Um, you know, they'll, they'll look at basically a group of like either healthy weight or overweight, non-smoking adults, and then they'll kind of find a mean age and then they'll look at kind of a period of calorie restriction, right?

So it could be like 14 days. Um, and so for example, one of these studies, they looked at eight and a half hours of sleep versus five and a half hours of sleep. And so basically, they use fancy words in research like sleep curtailment, which basically means, hey, you got less sleep. I don't know why they just don't speak in English, but that's kind of what they do. But it decreased the proportion of weight loss as fat by 55%. So we were basically looking at... Now, this was over a two-week period so obviously in a perfect world We get to look at humans for a very long period of time we get to observe it And this was at a clinical research center in a sleep laboratory. So that is very tightly controlled But the weight loss that we saw here as fat varied by about 55 depending on that

You know eight and a half versus five and a half hours of sleep So over the span of two weeks, that's 1.4 kilos versus 0.6 kilos. Uh, so you're looking at a couple of pounds there. Um, and the increase of the loss of fat-free body mass by 60%. So, uh, what they also noticed is this is where they were kind of looking at the markers of, um, our neuroendocrine adaptations to calorie restriction. So that's basically the communication between our brain and our hormones or our metabolism essentially. And what tended to happen was they had that increased hunger, um, and then shift in, um, they're basically burning or oxidizing less fat. So that this is one really cool study from, uh, the research that I kind of pulled when I was putting together one of my workshops for coaches. Um, we do have some stuff

on inflammatory status and insulin resistance as well, but in terms of actual weight loss, I think kind of pulled when I was putting together one of my workshops for coaches. We do have some stuff on inflammatory status and insulin resistance as well. But in terms of actual weight loss, I think you were asking about like, okay, six hours versus eight hours. What does that really look like? You know, it can amount to, you know, if you're looking at trying to lose like half a pound a week or a pound a week, you know, the difference in sleep, it'll add up at the end of a month or two months or three months if you're not being careful with it. Now, I do think there's some merit in understanding there are seasons of your life where if you have a newborn, we need to sort of periodize your nutrition and training to work with your life, right? Like I'm not going to put someone on a seven-day training split or

a four-day, you know, double, you know, you're going in in the morning, you're going in the evening. I'm just not going to do that with someone who's a new dad. I'm not going to do that with someone who's a new mom either. I'm going to take account their variables and what they've got going on in their life. And we might be on a three-day-a-week training split or two days and trying to sleep more and then just walking a lot outside or put the baby in a stroller or carry the baby and go for a walk, do what you need to do. And your activity looks different in those stages of infancy, basically. Right. And then as the kids grow up, you're going to play with the kids more, take the kids to the gym with you or build in healthy habits that, you know, kind of build on that foundation. But I don't think, you know, two

weeks into parenthood is when you're going to be pushing your training volume and training frequency as much as possible. It just doesn't make sense. And so I think you'd have better results with finding a nutrition plan you can stick to and focusing on your sleep and stress management and training when you can, even if that's 30 minutes to an hour, a couple of times a week, that, that should maintain the muscle mass that you have. And then we can go into a heavier push towards building more muscle or losing more fat, you know, after, you know, let's say Anders gets out of this phase of dad life that he's in right now. So I think that's a huge part of this is I talk about like seasons of nutrition or seasons of training. And it's really to kind of simplify for the lay person, if they don't understand periodization, just understand you're going to plan around your life and you've got to understand when to push and when to pull back and when to

maybe take a maintenance phase as needed. And not every season of your life is where you're setting PRs. It's not every season where you're reaching a new low level of body fat. And I think people forget that sometimes and they're hard on themselves as a result. But, you know, most of the people you're seeing on, you know, magazines or, you know, if they're working with Travis and setting all-time PRs, this is probably a stage of their life where, you know, their main job is like they're working with Travis and they're setting PR. Like that is literally what they are supposed to be doing.

It is not, you know, that they've got other stuff going on. So I think we need to be cognizant of that. I know you guys do a good job of that in terms of how you sort of set up the expectations with your folks who are like in the Diesel Dad program and just for folks in the podcast in general. But I think it's just really important to outline that for people so that they don't, I guess, be so hard on themselves in the sense that I'm training seven days a week right now. You know, that's, I, I think there's a time and a place for everything. We just need to be mindful about as coaches that we're setting realistic expectations and holding people accountable to, um, something that's going to

work with their life. Right. Cause that's really at the end of the day, that's one of the most important aspects of any transformation is you've got to be consistent with it. Sure. You know, I'm always curious, you know, we've got, we all are friends with Corey Gregory. You probably know him and like he sleeps maybe five hours at night. However, the quality of which, you know, he,

he just squatted 600. Yeah. And it is ripped. And he, you know, he looks so much younger than most people are. He's 47 years old. And like, but like when he looked,

you know, when you look at the quality, of course it's, you know, whoop, you know, when they say rim and they say deep, it's's it's really arguable if it's really true numbers but it appears his quality of sleep is much higher than most people's so how important is it quality

versus quantity so both are both are definitely important now the closest thing we would have to this is now most people are not going into sleep labs and getting like a sleep study or having a polysomnograph attached to them. So your next best thing is going to be probably like an aura ring or something like that. We do know that in terms of sleep tracking, most, so I was going to kind of pull some stuff up for you guys real quick. But essentially when we're looking at tracking sleep, my understanding is we have a decent ability to track things like sleep latency. And if you're moving a lot in terms of sleep and maybe the total hours you're spending in bed, but not all wearable technology has caught up yet to where we're doing a really

great job of monitoring things like deep sleep, REM, HRV. I think right now, probably the best, you know, as far as the folks that I follow who specialize in that a little bit more, they seem to sort of think, you know, right now, Aura is a little bit ahead of the game in terms of what they got going on, especially with where the placement is of the device. So that's probably your best bet. I have no affiliation with them or, you know, I'm not compensated to say this, but I've tested a lot of different things over the years. Aura and Whoop right now seem to be doing the best job with their technology and updating it as quickly as they can. Some of the other wearables, they're going to be great for your non-exercise activity tracking.

They can track things like sleep latency, which is basically the time it takes to fall asleep. They might look at your sleep efficiency, which is basically your quality of sleep relative to the time spent in bed. And then some of them like aura, for example, can look at your deep and REM. Now, I think both of those are definitely very important. I've sort of played around with this myself. And I do notice that the quality of sleep and the amount of deep sleep you're getting, and even the amount of REM sleep you're getting can make a really big difference in terms of, and that's where paying attention to your overall sleep cycles and the time that you're going to bed and the time you're, excuse me, waking up each day is very, very important.

But as far as like concrete data on deep and REM sleep, we would just need more readily accessible tracking devices that people could use in order to get more out of that. Now, if Corey responds really well and can get on five and a half hours of sleep, if he can still get over two hours of deep sleep and a little bit of REM, he's probably doing all right. I would gather that what I've seen personally is when I have a shorter total duration of sleep, most athletes, especially if you've been training for a long time and you have pretty good overall habits in your life outside of the shortened sleep can still get a pretty decent amount of deep sleep. Um, but it might be REM. That's really

what he's kind of short changing. Cause it just, it just sort of depends on the individual. So I noticed when I track, um, my REM tends to fall a little bit later in stages of my sleep cycles. And then also I tend to get the bulk of it kind of right before I wake up in the morning, whereas some folks experience that a little bit differently. So I noticed that even if I wake up pretty early, I can still get a lot of deep sleep. Part of that, you can also sort of supplement and do different things to try to enhance that. But overall, I would say one of the biggest things is just going to sleep at the right time. If you're asleep before midnight, you know, staying with kind of the same circadian rhythm

or diurnal rhythm each day, waking up around the same time, getting early morning sunlight, all of those things can really help to promote your sleep hygiene overall and the quality of the sleep you're getting. But there are folks like Corey and there's some people who from a hereditary perspective and just throughout their life have either sort of adapted to work with that or also just respond really well. Now, that doesn't mean that Corey wouldn't get even better results on eight hours of sleep. It just might mean that he does better than the average person on five and a half, but there's probably some sort of intervention he

could do where i'd be curious if corey kind of split tested it we might find that he actually gets better results with i would like to say you can't get that guy to sleep till four o'clock no way he wouldn't know what to do he would have to go to bed at like seven um all, for him to get eight hours, seven. And there's definitely some stuff where they, they look at things like, um, chronotypes and people sort of circadian biology. Um, that's not, I do have someone on my team who's pretty well-versed in that stuff. Um, from a circadian biology perspective, I would say for the average person, just to not complicate it, I wouldn't look at operating on five hours of sleep as a badge of honor of like, well, Corey doesn't, he's a really cool dude and gets a lot done and squats 600 pounds, but that's, that's the exception. That's not the norm. And if we were all to try to operate based on the

exception, just because, just because Ronnie Coleman can do what he does and looks the way he did and you know you'll probably end up in the same place yeah crippled i want to dig into like the the seasons uh idea that you had earlier because like the reason uh kind of going back to the beginning of like what i was talking about kind of like my the morning routine thing so much of that was because i had a newborn and they'd wake up and mom had been awake all night long. I'd be like, I got to get this thing out of the house. Yeah. Like it's, it's my turn. She handled the night it's morning time. I get a giddy up and go.

And next thing you know, I'm wearing a weight vest, walking around my neighborhood trying to do, uh, get my steps in bright and early with morning sunshine. Um, but now that the baby sleeps a little bit later, you know, 14 weeks into it, uh, that was like the immediate first things like now everybody wakes up at six 30 or seven versus four 30 or five. And, but how do you, how do you like break those seasons up or kind of be able even to like auto regulate, Oh, my body's saying like, I'm allowed to eat a little bit more, or now it's time for, to lean out. Like, how do you, how do you break the year up to

naturally allow some sort of, um, like biofeedback rhythm to happen? Yeah. So I don't really look at it too much from like a rhythm perspective, but I would view it this way, right? Biofeedback is kind of like your permission slip for a lot of the phases you want to pursue. So if you're looking to go pretty hard in the paint with the diet phase, probably need your sleep and stress management on point. You're drinking your water, you're getting some meal quality meals in that are micronutrient dense. You're eating enough protein to recover from your training sessions. We've got to kind of hit the big rocks first. So I look at, you know, the seasons that we go through as basically if we can hit some key, basically checklist markers,

right? So now depending on your ability level, there's probably more or less on your checklist, right? If you're a total beginner, what this might look like is you're hitting your protein, you were, you know, kind of adhering to a schedule that works for you. You're probably drinking enough water and maybe you're getting some micronutrients in via, you know, you're eating some vegetables and have a pretty well-rounded plate. That's like the beginner level, right? Intermediate, we might stack some things on top of that. For someone who's advanced, their level of, you know, the recovery modalities they might

need to pursue to train with Travis on a regular basis is going to be very, very different than the beginner, right? So I'm going to look at the seasons of what we go through. I basically talk about kind of like building phases, more of a burn phase, not just for fat loss, but also think of if someone was peaking for an event and they're working with Travis, or maybe they're a CrossFitter and they've got regionals or the CrossFit games, they're burning through a significant amount of physiological bandwidth, basically their ability to recover. There's only so much that our musculoskeletal system and nervous system can handle over a year, right? So we're not going to be peaking all the time. We've got to find the right time. And that's why,

you know, even when they, you know, you look at, they moved the Olympics, right? That was pretty significant in terms of people's training cycles. That messed a lot of people up. Yeah, it messed a lot of people up. And there were a lot of, you know, we also even, you know, when we looked at the 2020 NFL season, there were a lot of injuries and things that happened that were kind of freak things, how practices and everything were changed over time. So when I look at seasons, I would look at number one, kind of one of the reasons we kind of started this podcast was around biofeedback and sleep, hunger, recovery, energy, digestion, stress. I would just have a simple checklist around, you know, sleep, managing hunger, you know, looking at your recoverability, looking at your energy levels. You know,

if your digestion is trash, it's probably not time for a fat loss phase or pushing a bunch of food either in terms of a muscle building phase. You got to get the digestion ironed out first in terms of actually absorbing the food that you're eating. And then the stress component is obviously higher stress times of your life can make it a little bit harder to either build muscle, lose body fat. So we want to pay attention to what's going on in your life as a human being. So I'm going to look at those things. I'm also going to look at, like I said, some of those markers that are more quantifiable. Like if Anders, if you're supposed to be eating 180 grams of protein every day, and I'm a coach and I'm working with you, I need to check that box probably before we're going to get into any other fancy stuff, right? Because what's that going to do? It's going to help with muscle building and

recovery. It's also one of the most satiating nutrients that we have at our disposal to deploy during a fat loss phase. So I need that to be in check before I'm pursuing any of these other seasons. Now, I also include the other B besides like building burning would be a break. So this could be a diet break. This could be a deload. There's some form of release of tension that we're basically pulling stress off the body in some form or fashion. So there's not, I tried to basically take something that was somewhat more scientific and in the research and in the literature and what people use and, you know, whether they're strength and conditioning coaches or whether they're fat loss, whatever they classify

themselves as. And I was like, how do we make this a very kind of lay person, easy to understand thing a little bit more colloquial. Cause if you say periodization to a new client, they're going to look at you like you have four eyeballs and two heads. They don't know what it means, but if I say, yeah. So if you just say, Hey, we're planning this to work with your life, right? We got to kind of like, instead of, think of it this way. So swimming against the current, we're going to go with the current when we can. Now, there are some times where you got to buckle down and be resilient and like, understand that life is inherently has challenges in it.

It is stressful. We need to have a little bit of kind of a growth mindset there and understand that sometimes the obstacle is the way we got to go. And that's adaptation too though, you know, like you can't be easy all the time. Yeah, it can't be easy all the time. Right, right, right. So to get adaptation. So also even we look at some of the best things in life, like even exercise, right, is it's hormetic stress, right? So what Travis is talking about is we can intentionally apply stress. Now, in order to ensure that we get the adaptation that we want, yeah, we have to do it strategically. So I always tell coaches that they are really, we're really managing, we're really adaptation managers as

coaches, right? That's the most simple way to look at it. What are the two variables we manage most? Stress and energy. Why do we use biofeedback and why do we use seasons? Why do we use periodization? We're managing the adaptation to stress. We're also managing things like energy availability or relative energy deficiency. So if I'm moving into a calorie deficit, I'm intentionally pulling calories out, which is a form of energy. And that is a little bit of a stressor on the body. However, if I positively adapt to that and I lose body fat, I may actually get healthier in that process. So we're intentionally applying some stress. If I'm going to go train with Travis and he's going to kick my ass for a couple of weeks or a couple months or a year or whatever I'm doing, you know, for working with him to set some PRS, like if I'm on Travis's former squat everyday program,

that is a bit of a stressor, but ideally I'm there's, there's, there's going to be some adaptation there that comes with that. The key is we have to have the recoverability to match the imposed stressor. So that would be your sleep, your protein intake, you know, you're actually doing something for yourself for your stress management. It's not that the stress goes away. Maybe for Doug, it's, you know, time in nature or he likes music or something. Maybe we've got someone else who really likes art or creative therapy. Maybe someone else who loves their pets and they're going to, you know, spend more time with animals. There are a lot of proven things we can do for stress management. It doesn't mean we stop training hard. It just means we have to include

some things that put us into more of a parasympathetic state on occasion. For some people, they like journaling and meditation and very woosah activities that a lot of people, maybe that doesn't resonate with them. The key is, is there's not one, there's not only one way to achieve that balance and achieve, you know, what, what Travis is talking about is that push. And then also that release of stress and that release of tension. We can push our training. We just got to have some other things in place to ensure that we are recovering and that we are recovering and that we're not constantly in this sort of sympathetic fight or flight state all the time,

which training can do that. Dieting can do that. High stress lifestyle can do that. So we just need to, you know, I kind of look at it this way, right? It's like drains and charges. So hormetic stressors, even though they're a good thing, if we have too many of them, they can be a little bit of a drain. Things like sleep is kind of universally a charge. So I talk with clients about, Hey, you can charge your smartphone. You can charge your body. These are things we know we can do. So if we look at it as a piece of paper, you divide it down in the middle, you fold it in half. What are you doing? That's actually restorative. That's going to promote your training, going to promote fat loss, doing the things that you need to do to move forward. And then also on the other side of it, you know,

what are some things that are, you know, maybe it's picking the kids up at school and the meeting you had and the tps reports that are due by friday like there are sort of inherent those wonderful things yeah i know that reference doug makes me send their tps reports all times messed up yo yes i don't even know what that is outside of the office it's a movie my question is about the ranges. Like I fall into this fun ex-athlete thing where I'm on or I'm off. And off means I'm trying to get as strong as possible. So I'm going to eat as much as I possibly can. And then on means everything is so 100% dialed in. There's zero room for flexibility. Like I get all the stress if I'm out of my element, like, and then those ranges are relatively large because when you're trying to get large, you're allowed to eat as much as

you want. You're allowed to, you know, play that game. And then when it's time to get lean, well, now we don't eat that much. And now we get irritated when there's bad food around you and you're out of your comfort zone. If you were to just have like a long-term plan and to understand kind of the fluctuations and seasons, what is that – even if it's like a percentage. But what – how do you know, hey, we've gone a little too far or, man, it's really time to back this thing down because you're just, you're not functioning well, this lean and being this strict on life. Yeah. So I think part of to kind of distill that down a little bit, right. When we look at diet phases and stuff, a couple of things matter when I'm looking at someone's health history or what I tell coaches to look at is kind of the depth, duration and frequency of those diets. So Anders, if you were constantly, I know recently you were kind of trying to get a

little bit leaner. You got some photo shoot stuff coming up. You got other things going on. You know, if you had done that. That sounds so weird, by the way, still. If you had done that for a very. Anytime I have a photo shoot, I'm like, really? Or is there just a guy with a camera?

There's just a guy with a camera. I feel like a bodybuilder. Like bodybuilders do that. Yeah, go ahead. Not some random dad that's just trying to make it work. The diesel dad brand. I would just say, you know, there's not one right answer here, but Anders, what works in your life, you know, if you notice that you tend to hedge towards one of those two extremes, there might be a pattern that exists in the middle where sometimes we are kind of hanging out. I think if I were looking at, okay, when is too much? Usually I'm going to know that based on how steep was the calorie deficit, how long were you in that deficit

and how frequently, like, are you a habitual dieter that always restricts? Now Anders probably is not, but we probably do have people who listen to this where they're always looking for the next thing. They're always on the next diet. They're always trying. They're never really in a maintenance phase or not. We're going through a phase of building muscle. They're always trying to, they're going to try whole 30 this month and then they're going to try keto and then they're going to try low, you know, something else that's low. Not to call them out, but that's like normal human being. Like that's when I, when I talk to parents that live in my neighborhood, they're like, Oh, I'm trying this new thing. And like two months later, like, Oh, I'm trying this new thing. You go, why don't you just have like a maintenance period? Right. And so our job as coaches is really

to, I think, instill sort of those like key nutritional keystones or like pillars of what people need. And for most people that strength training, you know, we need adequate protein intake. We need some non-exercise activity activity like walking and basic primal movements. We need to get outside. We need to get some sunlight. Um, and we need to manage our stress, which is also going to help facilitate sleep. So if we look at it as, as kind of those things that should be going on, whether Anders is trying to build muscle and gain a bunch of size or whether he's trying to lose fat, we need those key cornerstone pieces, the big rocks anyways. Kind of look at it as like if we had a bucket, we're going to drop some big rocks in it. That's going to get us the majority of the weight there.

And then we're going to fill some pebbles and some sand and maybe some water around to fill the rest of the bucket up all the way to the top. I think a lot of people who are jumping from those different programs, they're focused on the sand and the gravel and the water. They're not focused on the big things that we need to be executing on a regular basis. And I think what you guys talk about a lot on this show, and if you were to take all the interviews and do like an epic mashup of all the similarities between the folks that come on for interviews and some of the things that you guys preach, you know, with your, your program at Diesel Dads is, you know, there are sort of these key foundational pieces that

most people agree on would be necessary. And, you know, Anders, maybe for you, it's like either way, you're probably eating a good amount of protein. Either way, you're probably getting your strength training in. And then what changes around the edges is maybe you're doing a little bit of extra conditioning somewhere. Maybe you're dialing back, you know, your carbohydrate or fat intake to create a level of portion control that allows you to be in a calorie back, you know, your carbohydrate or fat intake to create a level of portion control that allows you to be in a calorie deficit. You know, that that's probably, you know, in what I've observed in being friends with you over a period of time is, is you kind of have those phases and you figured out what works for you. I think the neighbors you mentioned and

the regular people in real life is they're still kind of looking for this secret sauce. Um, I actually made this joke the other day, I was on a mentorship call and I was like, it's kind of like that scene in Space Jam where Bugs Bunny has got the water bottle that says special stuff on it and everybody wants Michael's special stuff and they're like passing around. They just frantically want it. And we kind of gravitate towards diets like that or training styles that we think there's this sort of special stuff when really it's like it's the water bottle, you know, and there's a bit of a placebo effect that goes into that for a lot of people. So I think we really, as coaches, unless someone sort of drilled down those cornerstone pieces, which I know you try to do with a lot of the folks in the Diesel Dad program is we, we got that. It's kind of our responsibility to make

that clear and teach that first. And then we can get more advanced with things later on. And that's, and really for someone who's just starting out, they may not be moving through a great degree of change in, you know, periodization or seasons or whatever you want to call it. They probably need to master the basics first. I think folks moving beyond that, then they can really start to get, you know, it's kind of like earning your advanced protocols. Yeah. I would say, right. Well, there's like a behavioral piece of like, when I'm gaining, I'm going somewhere. When I'm losing, I'm going somewhere. When I'm maintaining, I'm going nowhere. I think that's like your athlete mentality. Like you're used to competing for something, right? Like I

think CrossFit and having a CrossFit gym. It's very much like a mindset thing. Like, maintenance feels like a defensive way of approaching anything. Like, I'm just going to stay right here. When you're opening the floodgates and it's time to go do squat every day, like, we're trying to get huge. There's only one way to get huge. You've got to go lift all the weights. You've got to go eat all the food.

And you've got to, like, go do it. In a way, losing it's almost easier you just stop eating as much but that that maintenance thing is is a is a is mentally that mindset of maintaining a healthy body weight i think that just sits really hard with you i i'm one of them like it it still sits as like a challenging way because you just feel like you're playing defense. You're like, I'm just going to stay under 2,600 calories today. Well, that sucks. I don't even have a target. It's just like eat enough protein and try not to go over this number. And even if you do, as long as it's not too egregious, who cares? Yeah. So I would definitely still try to have

targets and goals. And I would also set goals on other things, whether it's your gym performance or whether we're gamifying some aspect of something, right? I, I, I'm not, I'm not someone who's for having these like amorphous phases where there's no goal. Um, but for a lot of people, they need that phase of maybe a protein goal or maybe setting a new PR lift or progressively overloading something. I think just because you're at maintenance calories doesn't mean you're not progressing in other areas. And a lot of people underestimate how much progress you can make at maintenance calories with a lot of different things. So I would look at it as we have phases of our training and we have phases of our nutrition. Now, ideally those match up to support

the recovery from training that we need to get the adaptations that Travis is talking about. But very rarely do we not have a goal or something we're pursuing. It's just, for example, if we took that CrossFitter who's prepping for the games or they're in regionals, they need more food. So we're pushing that and there's a very high level of activity that's during that. Now, maybe in an off season, maybe we do pull food a little bit, but maybe they're in more of a hypertrophy phase or they're doing work that is accessory work to their main lifts and what they're doing competing and addressing some weak points. And they're still making progress with that, but that's very different than their other season of what they were doing. For you, Anders,

it might be similar. Maybe in one block, you're doing more hypertrophy-based work versus in another block, maybe you're focused on something else. Or maybe, you know, you and Travis come up with sort of this mastermind of an approach that you'd like to take. Zero programs that Travis thinks is low volume, that is not too much for me. You don't know. I mean, I'm just... It's still my program. my program is very low volume

the thing is even i didn't mean to cut you off there it's just funny you're gonna get he wrote the one-ton challenge program i did it for like a month i was like wrong person i got an infant at home no chance it's not even couldn't do it there wasn't a it was a month of 10 by 3 front squats with tempo work, and I was like, if I don't get home in the next hour, I'm going to be divorced. I should have wrote maybe like a low volume version maybe. You know, I've got a question though. Like when you say biofeedback, like how do you measure it?

Like what are the ways you guys measure the biofeedback? It's something I've been, you know, I've loved since 2004. I started talking about it. And to this very day, I'm still working on that. So I'm curious, you know, in what ways do you measure? Sure. And I think it's very, it's a mix of subjective and objective data, right? So there's some qualitative component of how do you, if we were just two people hanging out, or if I was meeting Anders at the gym,

I'd probably be like, Hey man, how are you doing today? Right. If he tells me he slept like crap or, you know, Hey, I ate some garbage yesterday. I don't feel my best. That's a very, very, very basic level that is biofeedback in some way. And then we can scale that all the way up to athletes tracking HRV. We can scale it to looking at your heart rate and basal body temperature. What I like about biofeedback is very scalable based on your ability level. So for someone, what are the variables? Right. So I'm going to run through sleep, hunger, recovery, energy, digestion, and stress. I usually have a quantitative variable for each of them, which could be anything from your hours of sleep, or if you have a sleep

tracking device and you think it has good data, we can use that. I'm going to look at hours of sleep. Also this, the subjective, do you feel well rested? I think is a great question there too. On hunger, usually we're looking at appetite and satiety. So how well are you managing your hunger? Are your food choices on a meal by meal basis managing your appetite or are they trigger foods for you where you're eating something that contains calories, but then within 30 minutes or an hour or two hours, you're hungry and you're likely to overeat at your next meal. So we're going to look at that in terms of hunger and satiety. Usually that's very closely tied with protein, fiber, and water. So if we can hit our protein and we're consuming the appropriate

amounts of fiber and water relative to our size and total calories and things like that, we're usually going to be okay. So hunger, and some of these you can use, it's a Likert scale or Likert scale. The pronunciation is always people kind of go back and forth on, but in research, they use things like one to five ratings or one to 10 ratings. I think that's okay unless you have, you know, and what this might look like if you're an online coach is a dropdown where people can check a box or they can put a number in there. And then what I'll usually follow up with in addition to that one to five or one to 10 is if you rated any one of these particularly low today or this week, why is that? And can you explain? So if I have a client who travels for business and has jet lag or anything like that,

if he rates his sleep low and normally he's a stellar, you know, he recovers great. He's, he's very on his routine, very by the book, him having that extra box to clarify for me, he can say, Hey, I had a trip to the West Coast. I just came back. I'm still kind of stuck on Pacific time. I was going to sleep a little bit later than normal and waking up at a different time. I'm a little still messed up from that. Now I know that there's a circadian stress or disruption in his routine that's affecting the biofeedback. So when possible, you know, if clients have, you know, an Oura ring or whoop or whatever, cool, we're going to have HRV, we're going to have sleep or whatever. But a lot of people don't and that's okay. So how do we make it accessible and affordable for everyone? We simply ask them how they're doing and then we

try to track that or quantify that. Either one, I like to do a numerical rating and then I like just to ask someone from a subjective perspective using qualitative information, which is just they can write it out, they can tell me how they feel. They can do whatever they need to do. And if someone says, Hey man, like I've been super constipated lately. Clearly I know their digestion is off. Right. So I'm going to give them a built ability to elaborate on what they're feeling. If someone, you know, went out to eat and they've had an upset stomach, um, and it's resembling like irritable bowel syndrome for a period of time that we got to address that too. So as a coach, you need to know what's setting things off and why things are happening. So I like to do two prongs for each part of shreds. You're usually going to have a quantitative aspect and a qualitative aspect

for your advanced athletes. Quantitative measures could be, like I said, basal body temperature, it could be resting heart rate, it could be HRV. Those are great quantitative markers. If we do not have that technology at our disposal, we need to kind of break it down and make it more simple for what our clients have. And usually that's going to be them saying, Hey coach. Yeah. Like your scale or Hey coach, I went to sleep at 10 and I woke up at six 30. That's what my sleep looked like. I was tossing and turning a little bit, but that's how long I was in bed. And that's, that's enough information where if you track it over time, you're going to notice patterns because then

all of a sudden, if you know, Debbie is going to bed at 1145 and waking up at 545, well, okay, that sleep is not the same as the person who is consistently going to bed at 10 and waking up at six something. Right. So we're going to notice changes in their circadian rhythm. Really what I'm looking for in those numerical values is a level of consistency or if there's an aberration or deviation from their normal, right? Because part of our job as coaches is we have to figure out every client has sort of their own fingerprint when it comes to their bio-individuality and what works for them. Like we were just talking about Corey, right? And Corey's getting five and a half hours of sleep and he's doing whatever Corey is doing. Right. But for someone else that might not work. And so our job would kill Travis and probably kill Anders, Doug. It would kill me too. Yeah. So for us, it's kind of like we're

using this check-in to sort of etch out this individual sort of fingerprint for clients, right? Or it's like their individual sort of identity by which we can structure their training, you know, create some level of customization to their nutrition training. Now there's always going to be the foundations that we all need, which is going to be, you know, protein strength training movement of some kind, you know, there's, there's all those big rocks apply to all of us, but then we're going to scale the volume of that or the total amount or quantity based on the individual. So Travis needs different than Anders and Doug's needs different than me. And then that's okay. But that's why we use those questions to fine tune that over time. And so it really, you can, you can scale this as much as you want. You can modify it based on what works for your client base. If you work with strength

athletes or strongman competitors or power lifters, it's going to look different than if you work with bodybuilders. If you work with dads who can only train competitors or powerlifters, it's going to look different than if you work with bodybuilders. If you work with dads who can only train two or three times a week, it's going to look very different. So what I would do if I was Doug or Anders, and I'm working with a lot of working professional men who have kids, I'm going to make this like five minutes. So I know that they're going to do it and they can do it on their smartphone. They can do it while they're waiting to pick their kids up at school or they're waiting in the pickup line or whatever. And they're just parked in the parking lot. I'm going to say, Hey, you can do this in five minutes. I know you can. And I expect it every week by Tuesday at noon, right? That's going to be different than, you know, if Travis has someone who has a bit

more free time and has the ability to dive in at a greater level, or they're trying to compete at a very high level. I need more information to tailor and customize for them sam i like you know because i have to go see you and i want to tell you some good news is like so we use the same thing we use like um a scale and like people have a subjective questionnaire that they answer every day all my athletes seven days a week they answer it only takes two minutes though so that's key. It needs to be short. But we also compare it to jump mat. So we do a depth jump every single day, two depth jumps. And then we compare it to 80% velocity on all their big movements. And we have found a direct correlation.

It's crazy. So what I'm trying to say is, like, if people don't have the money to get velocity or jump mats to get you know readiness you a simple free questionnaire is pretty darn good because it is almost dead on especially the athletes who have been training for a while or you know or even you know people who have even older dads like me i'm an old dad but yeah i know my body really well because i've been training my whole life but it is dead on as far as like readiness. And so we just, you know, when I see like a one, I'm going to ask them what happened, but we're going to back it down that day.

So it is like been a total change in all my athletes. I just want to tell anyone listening, you don't need to spend a ton of money on a bunch of cool gadgets. You could, cause I love velocity, but, um, code mash fine. But, but you don't, you don't have to. Yeah. Yeah. You could because I love velocity, but code mash fine. But you don't have to. Yeah, you have other things. Have you done anything like grip related or anything like that over the years?

Yeah, grip is good. It's just not as good as a depth jump. Here's why. Because the depth jump is going to show the neuromuscular system versus simply muscular. And so you're going to get that, you know, because you're going to look at the muscle spindles, Golgi tendon, organ, you get a bigger picture. I wonder if you could like hack that depth jump into something that, you know,

if Anders or Doug are programming for an individual who's not at a facility quite like yours, I wonder if we could reverse engineer a mechanism for looking at velocity and performance that would be you know require less technology but still be very indicative of um i don't know you know yeah just like a standing vertical as soon as you get out i wouldn't do standing here's what i would do i would do right before they train i would do a depth jump, but just have them do a jump jump and touch the wall and like put chalk on their finger and market and see like, you know, if you're,

if you're way under it, okay. You would want to peel them back. If they're way above it, you might consider going a little bit harder, but that is the exact way we've been training now. Ryan, you know,

he's killing it, you know, over a year now. And so we have obviously seen results that's destroying everybody so have you ever done like a reactive into if if they don't have a vertical um you know anything they can tap or touch could they do like that reactive jump into a broad jump and then measure distance you could yeah oh yeah i think i would do this i would do like a triple broad jump

you know because then you're going to get that reaction i was either thinking like triple broad jump or if you did like a um like if you jumped off the box and went into a broad jump from uh basically like a box jump deficit and then land on the ground to a broad jump from that that would be a good test i think i think that would be a fantastic idea but you know copyright pending travis mash and sam miller 2021 my whole thesis is on this by the way so like i'm in about seven more weeks i'm gonna be able to give you all the data that you've ever could ever dream up on this very topic. I love that.

That's cool, Travis. I'll send it to you for sure, Sam. Yeah, I geek out on that type of stuff. So we'll have to talk about it for sure and use some of those takeaways. But I like the idea of having a training component with it. I think what's been interesting is I have to remember, you know, I speak to a lot of coaches who have different modalities and maybe different types of athletes than Travis does. So, you know, for

very rarely are we going to see like a bodybuilder sufficiently doing a broad jump, right? So it's like, how do we, I'm always trying to kind of think of easy ways that we can take tools that Travis has discovered working like in his lab essentially. And then how do we apply that to a broader population of people where, you know, they can do it. And that's why, you know, when you were talking about that reactive jump, I was like, Hey hey maybe we could do this with like a broad jump because anyone can just go outside jump off a box and then see how far they can jump you know what i would do if i were you is do a t-score then so if i had a population filled with like um you know bodybuilders you just compare them to each other and like so then you don't need to know you don't

have to compare them to ryan my guy because because no chance they're going to be him. But if they compare to each other, you can start to see, okay contact time and they have a, but they have a weak distance, then they're super, that means they're muscular weak and they're probably at risk of a muscular tear. So that is like, that's data that I'm going to, I'm going to clarify to you in the next seven weeks. But it's, it's really cool, you know, risk assessment. If you're coaching diesel dads, the last thing they can afford to do is get hurt. It would be a great way to quantify the odds of them getting a tendon and or muscle

relative. There you go. I want to change directions real quick and dig into testosterone. We've been talking more and more about testosterone over the last couple of months, me and Andrew and Travis as well. From the perspective of lifestyle habits like sleep, like training, strength training versus cardio, et cetera, et cetera, what are the short-term and long-term changes to testosterone as you adjust the various variables in your life and also how does body fat

percentage play into it? Yeah, sure. So we'll start again with kind of those keystone elements and that I think probably biggest for testosterone is going to be sleep, stress management, strength training, and like you said, controlling your body fat levels. Sunlight's going to be important too, like getting outside and having sort of just operating the way that we would as we have evolved over time as humans, uh, speaking quickly to the body fat component, what happens. So when we have extra adipose tissue or body fat on our frame, a lot of people forget that that tissue behaves differently, um, at a cellular level than muscle tissue does. So when you have excess fat or adipose tissue, it's sort of inherently inflammatory. It has different sort of signaling messengers that come out of that tissue that influence other areas of our health. What also happens when we have higher

levels of body fat as men is that fat tissue is actually very dense in an enzyme called aromatase that converts our testosterone to estrogen. Now, estrogen is not necessarily bad for you. A lot of people think of it as like the female hormone, when in reality, both men and women have testosterone and estrogen. What changes is kind of the ratios. Women have progesterone in their luteal phase, so that's kind of the balance ebb and flow of reproductive hormones. But for men, if you are overweight or obese, what tends to happen is we will see that increased conversion of testosterone and estradiol. And if they don't already have high T levels, it's basically, we're going to have less free testosterone and we have higher levels of estrogen. And so for them, that can be problematic in terms of overall, you know, just how you feel, your quality of life, your libido, also play into things like

your ability to build muscle and things like that. So we do need that balance of testosterone and estrogen, but we do see with increased body fat, we tend to see a change in that. Also, there's a relationship between insulin and sex hormone binding globulin, which is a binding protein that will basically bind to your testosterone. And so when you do kind of what insulin can do, if you're on a very high carbohydrate diet, very high calorie diet, you've been pushing the standard American diet for too long. What you'll sometimes see is those folks do have lower levels of SHBG, which can have consequences as well. But I would say the biggest thing is really that conversion of testosterone to estrogen, because we want a

little bit of that. But if you're over converting, that's not necessarily a great thing either. So we need to understand that testosterone is important. Estrogen is also important. So if, for example, if you had no estrogen or you were not, you blocked aromatase, which we can talk about in a little bit. But if you do that from a neurological and cardiovascular perspective, that's not good. Estrogen is very cardioprotective. It's also very good from a neurological perspective. Good for ligaments.

There's a lot of things that's good for you. I heard Andrew Huberman say one time that with respect to estrogen, it kind of gets a bad rap and people are trying to minimize it in the performance and bodybuilding space. He was saying most problems that you get with, especially if you're quote unquote doing steroids, are problems with prolactin more so than problems with estrogen. Yeah. Prolactin can be an issue. Um, prolactin is actually, uh, interesting. So prolactin is the hormone that women have when breastfeeding. It also happens for men during the refractory period after sex. Um, so prolactin is sort of in a way, almost like population control in a sense, um, which is super fascinating if you get into actually Robert Sapolsky, who Huberman actually recently interviewed, does a lot of

stuff on that. But it is an issue with prolactin, but it's also an issue with bodybuilding and polypharmacy is that people do not stack their performance enhancing drugs in an intelligent fashion that minimizes certain side effects and risk profiles. And so the way that people should build things versus how they build things is largely antiquated based on a lot of stuff that's been passed around forums over the years. And whatever bro bodybuilder at the time kind of sat on top of that throne and then would shoot anyone down who had any sort of opposing viewpoints. But if you understand kind of basics in terms of physiology and endocrinology, you can go down that avenue if you are an athlete and if you do need to rely on those compounds for your success.

But at the same time, we need to understand what happens when you push certain things. So Huberman doesn't really dive into this, but if you were going the performance enhancing drugs or steroid route, you have to look into both aromatizing and non-aromatizing compounds, understand what that means, and also understand that controlling your body fat and controlling levels of inflammation can also influence what's happening with the hormones that you're adding externally or exogenously, um, to your body. So, uh, but to kind of circle back to Doug's kind of key question here, I would say the biggest things, especially for natural athletes, it's going to be, um, I would say stress management, sleep while sleep is paramount. Number one, stress management, and don't forget your micronutrients.

So a lot of guys are slacking on zinc, selenium, um, you know, your, your basic vitamins and minerals and doing that, just shoring up your gaps there and eating, you know, a micronutrient dense food plan can really, really help. Um, so that, that's some low hanging fruit and then strength training obviously does have benefits. Plus we know that muscle tissue behaves a bit differently than fat tissue does. Um, so the more that we can recomposition, now you don't want to be too lean if you're like 4% body fat and you're a natural athlete, that's not great for your hormones. But, uh, you know, if we're looking at overall, I'd say great for your hormones. But, you know, if we're looking at

overall, I'd say sleep, stress management, micronutrient density, and, you know, strength training would be a great start, get some time outside. And then like you said, those issues you experience with higher levels of body fat largely come from that conversion of testosterone and estrogen. And also just, I think there's just a general, you know, you're going to feel lethargic, you know, if you're overweight and obese, and you're not going to feel great, you can get a little down on yourself, not to mention there are sort of these cognitive and neurological consequences when we are overweight or obese. We can also see basically instead of creating serotonin and certain sort of neurotransmitters that are very good for our overall brain health, we start to

see going down different pathways. So we can end up with things like quinolinic acid, which is neurotoxic. If you have too much inflammation going on in the body, it's not necessarily a good thing. Most of the people who are overweight or obese, they're following the standard American diet. They're also consuming too many calories. Consuming too many calories can contribute to that excess adipose tissue or body fat. And then that, it goes hand in hand with higher levels of inflammation and comorbidities and cardiovascular disease and things like that. So it's really all connected. But the hormonal aspect and neurotransmitter aspect is largely what causes people to feel pretty shitty. And then they don't do the things that they know they should do because they feel

like garbage. And we need to change the lifestyle habits and the food quality in order to get them moving in the right direction where they don't feel like trash anymore. It also seems like there's a kind of a chicken or the egg thing going on with having low testosterone and having too much body fat or low testosterone can cause you to have too much body fat and too much body fat can cause you to have low testosterone. How do you break out of that cycle if that's you? Yeah, it's tough. I mean, so usually we got to find like the root cause of why would the testosterone have been low in the first place. And that's where seeing someone's diet history and training history and getting to know the

person as a human being can be super helpful. And there's also things like head injuries and testicular trauma that can play into testosterone levels as well. So if you believe that there's a medical reason behind the low T, it might be wise to talk to a physician and get some additional advice or input there, potentially consider hormone replacement therapy. If you do not have any sort of trauma or medical history or significant medical event that would have triggered that, a lot of times the lifestyle and food, you know, components as well as the training components do influence, you know, those testosterone levels, which then obviously will determine whether you are gaining or losing body fat. So for a lot of guys, you know, those testosterone levels, which then obviously will determine whether you are gaining or losing body fat. So for a lot of guys, it's, it's the lifestyle and key habits

first that are going to help them improve their levels. And that's one of the reasons why sometimes, you know, and I've seen this and I know you guys had Allie Gilbert on the show recently, and she sees this a lot with guys too, is when you do get the hormone levels in the right range, and this is why people do respond to hormone replacement fairly well, is they'll start doing the things that they know they should have been doing and they have more energy to do so because they get their testosterone in the right place. Now, there's something to be said where if you're willing to make the change and you're willing to stick it out and embark on some new habits, you'll probably start to see some changes pretty quickly. And

that can happen with the first bit of fat loss can change with, you know, changes in food quality, getting to the gym. I think there's just a bit of inertia that we have to overcome and start to build some momentum in the right direction. So that can be hard, but that's where having a coach comes in. And I think having the right program and having faith in that program. So Doug, it very much is the chicken and the egg. I think it's, it's very hard to pinpoint unless you know your client very, very well and where their low T symptoms, like what it originated from. Um, and that could be anything from eating in a calorie deficit too long. It could be from lack of sleep. It could be high stress lifestyle,

micronutrient deficiencies. It could be head trauma. Like if you have a, um, a TBI that can influence your testosterone level. So it's really getting to know your clients and also, or yourself, if you're in this situation and, and get some lab work done and get to the bottom of, of, of what your levels are, number one, and then be honest with yourself about your habits. If you're being notoriously, you know, if you're being fairly lazy and not making good food decisions and you're not training, your levels will reflect that. If you are, you know, living the appropriate lifestyle and you're doing the things you know you should be doing and you're still having some issues, that's where I would take a second look at things and kind of go back. But we have to get the low-hanging fruit

first, especially for testosterone. And that's really, you know, where that sleep and stress and training and having some strategy behind your nutrition really are key components for that, you know, for that hormone. Yeah, I'd love to take it. Oh, go ahead, Doug. Sorry. I was going to say on the TBI category, is there any testing that's really reliable to say if low testosterone is coming specifically from TBI versus all the other reasons it could be low? Usually if you have that in your health history, what you would probably do is your PCP or primary care doctor would refer you to an endocrinologist and then they would refer you to get an MRI.

You'd get an MRI on your pituitary and just your brain in general. Sometimes you'll see what's called like heterogeneous enlargement of the pituitary. It's fancy medical lingo instead of just saying, hey, it looks like something's going on with your pituitary gland, which influences the signaling of LH and FSH to the testicle. So you may have perfectly healthy balls for lack of scientific terminology. You may have perfectly healthy nuts, but you may struggle to have healthy T levels. And that could be because your brain is so important for the production of hormones. So what they're going to look at is usually you're going to go into a doctor or an endocrinologist, and they're just going to make sure you're all your other things that they can assess aside from your brain or, you know, you're in good health overall. Um, you

know, they may do a testicular exam or they may check on some things. They may also look at your levels of LH and FSH, not just your levels of testosterone and free testosterone. They're going to look at those hormonal precursors because those are kind of the shot that fires from the brain that signals testicular production of testosterone. So they're going to look at that. And then usually what happens is if they do suspect a head injury, you probably should have had an MRI or some sort of imaging on the brain in that case. So for athletes, if they are in that situation and they have a history of concussions, I would highly encourage either seek out a concussion specialist, seek out

an endocrinologist who's familiar with that, get some labs done. And then if need be, if you can, if you can afford it, or if it's covered by your insurance, go get an MRI done and kind of check that out and see what's going on. Particularly what they're probably going to look at is your pituitary and just see what's going on there. And then you'll be able to get more data. Obviously, guys on the podcast, I can't really speak to your individual situations. And obviously, you know, me, Travis, Anders, and Doug, obviously, we don't know anything about your medical situation. Can't give you advice on that. So you got to check, got to check with your physician when it comes to stuff like that. But that would be like my, if you had to go down that rabbit hole, that would be my best

kind of commentary on that. TBI can go one of both ways. It could like do quite the opposite. I've, you know, there's been the first, my first job out of college was working with traumatic brain injuries. It was awesome, by the way. But sometimes it will ramp their testosterone super high. And so you'll have like, it's crazy.

I can't really say what i witnessed but like um they just get wild in a funny you know it's kind of funny these dudes are like you know they can't control themselves because their testosterone is so high and there was one young this young uh guy poor guy was tbi and he would just like have these outbursts you know he was a super sweet kid but every once in a while he would just like have these outbursts you know he was a super sweet kid but every once in a while he would just like punch you right in the face because he'd get this burst of testosterone and you know it never hurt me but i would laugh every time he would one time he jacked me really hard i thought i was gonna get knocked out he hit me so hard but i would always just laugh

anyway i just wanted to thought that was a comic relief yeah it's not always just laugh about Chris. Anyway, I just want to thought that was a comic relief. It's not always just testosterone too. I mean, sometimes there's issues with females and fertility or maybe it's thyroid or maybe, you know, I mean, just like we can have someone who is hypothyroid and has low thyroid hormone, you could have hyperthyroidism, which is Graves disease. So, you know, there's kind of the yin to the yang, right? It's not, we can't assume, but I would say right now in our country and especially who Doug and Andrews work with, um, you know, outside of Travis's case, you know, we do see a lot of men suffering from low testosterone for sure. And so getting the lifestyle behaviors on point and then, you know, nutrition on point can

be really key for those folks and stress too. Cause even at a very, uh, uh, very, like if you wanted to get nitty gritty into the science, there are a lot of mechanisms by which stress lowers your testosterone. So we do need to have some balance for those dads out there. And it doesn't need to be that you meditate every day, right? It could, it could simply be, you know, you throw on some music that you like, or you get out in nature, or you have a dog or pet or you know time with loved ones playing outside you know really you know like i highly recommend strangling somebody three days a week

minimum oh yeah i saw that video of your son doing the sumo wrestling like we're going to jiu-jitsu tonight i'm gonna beg him to do that like i want to see bear sumo wrestle somebody it's kind of it's a joke that's not a joke. Like, when I go to – I could go to jiu-jitsu, like, with all kinds of stuff on my mind and be, like, frustrated or angry or whatever it is, and then, like, when I leave jiu-jitsu, like, I totally just – I forgot about everything. Yeah, I feel like –

It's like a total break from real life. I feel like anything that just is present or forces you to be present like that, like it just, you realize, oh, I was either pissed off about the past or worried about the future. Right now, I'm just chilling. Yeah, anxiety, you're too far in the future if you're worried about the past.

Really, when we look at stress, a lot of what it is is excess rumination or just thinking about stuff a lot. And so if you can do anything, whether it's an activity, and this is why a lot of people talk about, they're like, oh, the gym is my therapy. The gym's not really your therapy, but if it takes you out of like overly ruminating on things and moves you out of a place of where you're thinking about your issues and you focus on the present moment. And that's the same idea behind meditation. It's just not

everybody enjoys that, right? So if you feel very present and you love your dog, that's awesome. If you enjoy going outside and riding a bike and you're very present, that's cool. If you want to go to mixed martial arts or go to jujitsu or anything like that, and that is good for your mental health, then I would encourage you to do that. I think the biggest thing is we have to look at if we're, like Anderson, if you're worried about the past, you're worried about the future, all of the studies, whether it's creative therapy, whether it's time outside, whether it's animal interventions, everything they look at is like that degree of rumination and anxiety that people are experiencing and that perceived stress questionnaire. And if we can shift out of that state and be more present with each other or with whatever

activity it is we're doing, we're probably going to be in a better spot when it comes to our stress. So that would be the biggest key theme between all of those avenues. And the biggest thing is find what works for you. Like Doug likes to go strangle people, you know, but you know, maybe for, for Anders. He's good at it too. Running outside with the big wheels and playing with the kids in the neighborhood. Yeah. Being an athletic director for your neighborhood. There you go. There you go. Director of outdoor activities, Anders. That's my role. I didn't know. I had no idea until recently that I was AD of this neighborhood.

I made it. Dude, where can people find you? I love having you on the show. I'll come back for part three. Third time's the charm, right? We'll do it. Especially now that things are opening up a little bit and I live so close to Anders. I feel like we just got to hang out more in person um we actually live a distance that is harder than

any other distance i feel like i feel like it's easier for me to see travis two hours away because i'm like fully committed to that day you being like 40 minutes away it's like it's such an in between you really in between a whole day of hanging out or like are we getting lunch together you never know are we getting coffee or am i just stalking you is this weird you're like i'm close enough to you where i might actually pass you in my day-to-day life all right you're less deliberate about making plans so that can say where do you live so i'm just yeah i'm right near Raleigh, North Carolina. You guys don't hang out like on the daily?

That's what we're saying. It's like 40 minutes away. It's like we're on opposite points of the highway that takes you all around the city. Yeah, that's rough. I mean, there is a lot of traffic. Well, depending on the time, there is a decent amount of traffic. Andrews has got the dad life going on. So also, you know, he is in high demand

with that garage supervision of the neighborhood. Lots of responsibility. I need to all come to the country and come to my neck of the woods and let's get in the hot tub, smoke a cigar. Smoke a cigar. That was the most PC thing of what you're really smoking.

Because if Doug is in Tennessee and you're in western North Carolina, that's right in the middle, right? Yeah. That's where we end up every time. Tennessee, we got North Carolina. We end up at Mash's house. I would love to sit and talk to you about biofeedback like all night. That's my – I love it.

If we could throw your weightlifting event again soon, we would have all the people. We need to have like a hub in North Carolina where all the people hang out. Let's do it. All you got to do is throw up like 10 platforms in your front yard. Try not to get kicked out of the neighborhood and let's go. All right. I think I actually saw a video of you lifting in your yard during 2020s

event. I did. Just like a random squat rack. Okay. Saw some videos of that. We're having Sam. Let me ask you this. This is putting you on the spot.

The second weekend in December, I'm doing like a, like a clinic where i went but i wanted to be like rock stars so like i'm you're familiar with keith barry's like he's the tendon dude uh i want to invite him spot university you know uh aaron um obviously my boys and then would you be open that day like i mean i'm gonna pay people like yeah yeah well let's just talk dates and i mean you're in north carolina so say no say no just say say sorry travis i'm busy this is where cool people say like i'll have my people talk to you

december should be good um yeah let's connect obviously off the podcast. So people don't know all our business, but, um, yeah, for sure. I, I love, you know, I, the, one of the biggest things that's been unfortunate with like the 2020, 2021 climate is like, I love seminars. I love workshop. I love hanging out with people in person and also just like the energy of networking and like people with like-minded, um, uh, kind of pursuits that they have, I think it's super important to get people together. So, um, I think that's part of what makes humans human. So anytime we can do that and also pass on some knowledge, I think is always a really, really good time. So, um, I appreciate the invite and also appreciate you guys having me

on to, uh, you know, chat a little bit. I'll email you. I'll email you and ask you formally. When, uh, when's your next bootcamp or when's, when's the next launch of, I know you're coming out of launch period right now.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we'll probably open up another one. I mean the best place, honestly. So I've got a podcast,

similar science. My website is similar science.com. Um, I'm also similar science on Instagram and, we'll likely do another bootcamp soon. Usually what we do is we leave up like a little like sign up thing in between where you can join a wait list. That was called the biofeedback bootcamp. That's biofeedbackbootcamp.com. I'll give Anders some links for the show notes. But the biggest thing is if you're following me on those platforms, and usually we'll link those things off at

samillarscience.com. That way you can know what's going on. Um, but the biofeedback bootcamp is a workshop that I basically break down biofeedback for coaches, how to use it, um, some of the science behind it and some of the things we talked about with Travis and Doug and Anders today. Um, so I can make sure you guys have first access to that when we opened it up again. Um, you know, but otherwise I'm usually most active on the podcast, um, Instagram, and then we try to keep kind of my site as that main hub, um, where I can connect with you guys. So that would be, would love to see your Facebook group. Are we allowed to talk

about that? Cause I enjoy seeing all the questions and the stuff you post in there. Yeah, for sure. I think Anders, you're already in that. Yeah, I'm in it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so my group, if you are a coach and you listen to Barbara Shrug, do you want to hang out with Anders? Who's in there? And I'm in there. I just actually posted a video recently from another, another podcast interview. Uh, it's called the nutrition coaching collaborative on Facebook. Um, and we just have a couple of questions to confirm. You're not like some random bot on Facebook. Uh, make sure you're a real person and you coach people and then we'll get you added to the group. I post lots of free content in there as well. And, you know, as we recently

experienced with like the shrug guys dealing with some social media stuff going on, it is good to connect on multiple platforms because you never know what's going to happen. So I would encourage if you enjoy my content, you know, subscribe to some stuff, follow along and you may see a random Anders cameo in there at some point, and maybe even hanging out with Travis too. Doug, we'll just have to get you to North Carolina so you can join in on this. You just need to move here.

That's where all the cool kids are. If we were going to turn North Carolina into like the hub, like Tampa had like a huge five years, I feel like, but I don't hear about Tampa as much anymore. Who cares about Tampa? Next one's North Carolina. I love it.

I can't collect, baby. Hey guys, I got to go. Yeah. Tell the people.? Next one's North Carolina. Hey, guys, I got to go. Tell the people. I saw. You can go to Twitter at Mashley and Instagram

Mashley Performance. I'm going to go hang out with legendary coach Bill Gillespie all day and I can't wait. I love it, dude. Doug Larson. I got my Instagram back 90 minutes ago, so you can see me on Instagram. Still working on Shrugged. We'll get that back too. Yeah. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner.

I still have my account. We are Barbell Shrugged. And hopefully by the time this show airs, we will be fully operational at Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to your local Walmart. That is where we are going to be on the shelves in 2200 stores coming in November. Walk over to the performance nutrition section in the pharmacy. Look for my face,

three products on the shelves, working with our good friends over at new vitality and make sure you get over to diesel dad, mentorship.com for busy dads. I want to lose 20 to 40 pounds by opt by supporting natural testosterone production without drugs, doctors and destructive diets. Friends. We'll see you guys next week.