Mark Bell's Power Project - Carb Cycling to Speed up Fat Loss - Justin Harris || MBPP Ep. 893

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Justin Harris, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how Justin coaches his athletes lean out with carb cycling, educates us on PEDs and how to get jacked. Follow Justin on IG: https://www.instagram.com/troponin_nutrition/ 1st Detachment Supplements: https://1stdetachment.com/ 1st Detachment on IG: https://www.instagram.com/p/Co-DDiHNFAm/ Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

There is apparently more than 40,000 of you that are listening to each episode of this podcast, but we only have, I think, 1,200 reviews on Spotify and iTunes. So if this podcast has brought benefit to your life, please go on Spotify and iTunes and give us a five-star review. It'll really help the podcast grow, and we'll continue to bring you this awesome free content on a daily basis. Enjoy the episode. We should probably just start right there. Yeah. Artificial sweethearts. Enjoy the episode. We should probably just start right there. Yeah. So a lot of people don't know this, but artificial sweeteners, apparently, I think they could be utilized to our advantage. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, people are always worried about artificial

sweeteners like aspartame, you know, where you're going to get cancer, but aspartame is just two amino acids. And one of the amino acids is phenylalanine, which converts to L-tyrosine. And L-tyrosine is the precursor for the dopaminergic pathway, which ends with norepinephrine and epinephrine. So, I mean, it's obviously too small of an amount to have any effect. But if anything, aspartame is a fat burner or an Adderall-type medication.

Oh, so if we add more aspartame, we might get the results we're looking for. Yes. Yeah. Technically, yeah, if you could. I mean, I think it's pretty self-regulating how much L-tyrosine can actually convert to norepinephrine in the end. But yeah. I mean, people supplement with L-tyrosine.

Yeah. A lot of times it's in supplements, right? Yeah. Yeah. How'd you get into all this stuff? Like you're, you know, you, uh, you work with elite or you were working with elite many, many years ago. That's how I became more aware of you. How'd you get into like lifting in general? You know, what's funny, actually, I really liked to draw when I was a kid and I think it must've been the 89 Arnold

cause it was on like NBC. There's a, there's a bodybuilding show on NBC. I think it was on like NBC. There's a bodybuilding show on NBC. I think it was the very first Arnold classic. And I remember just being like, whoa, what is, you know, because I was a kid of the 80s, you know, Rocky, Rambo, Foster Stallone. I mean, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, like I watched, you know, I still, when I get, if I get a new stereo system for like home theater, the first thing I do is go to the Predator scene where they're tearing up the, you know,

the jungle. So, you know, being a kid from the eighties, seeing, seeing that like real bodybuilding on stage, I was mesmerized by it. So I remember going to bed and trying to like draw.

Look that up, Andrew, Jesse, the body Ventura mowing down the jungle. And so, you know, I just, from that point on,

I was really intrigued by it and I was more intrigued by it and like wanted to work out And so, you know, I just, from that point on, I was really intrigued by it. And I was more intrigued by it and, like, wanted to work out. But, you know, I was, like, seven or nine or whatever, you know. So I'm not going to. But then what really did it for me was when I was, like, 14, I decided I really wanted to join a gym and try to work out. And I think it was the real world. You remember?

Was that one guy, Eric or something? You know, like he's probably like, he probably looks like a coat rack now, but as a 14 year old kid, he had abs and I was like, you know, that dude's awesome. And so anyway, so I go to the gym and obviously I'm weak as hell, but I go back, you know, the next time

and I'm stronger. And that was like mind blowing for me. Watch this. Here's this epic clip. He just sees like a skunk oh no god what is that uh freaking thing oh did he already he might already mowed down my bad that's all right i think it's jesse the body i think it's coming up because i think he picks the gun up here oh yeah yeah he got you're right you're right good call he picks the gun up here. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're right. You're right. Good call. He picks it up. Oh, here we go. What a great movie Predators. Oh, yeah.

Never seen it. What? Oh, dude. I heard that the original Predator was like Jean-Claude Van Damme and then it didn't work out. It was like really shitty or something. Yeah, I think I heard that too. Is that real?

Yeah, I think so. He was partying the whole time. Oh, here we go. I'm going to have me some fun. I'm going to have me some fun. I remember he's like, because he's losing his mind, this guy. There's Arnold with the flex.

And that's the... Blowing off some steam. That shot right there with Arnold, that's the image for Contra. Do you remember that? Oh, yes. Yeah, they stole it. The 99 lives.

What's Contra? Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, A, B, select, start. It's a video game. Oh. Yeah, you got it. You got the algorithm. You got the generational differences.

And the code for Mike Tyson is 0073735963. Hell yeah. That's just to get right to Tyson. Yeah, if you want to just skip right to it. God, that was great. Punch out. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah.

Like a third grader, if you actually made it to Tyson, that code was like. Were you able to beat him? I don't think I ever beat him. Fuck, no one did. That shit was way too long. No, there was always a kid in school. Mike Mayer beat him. I heard about it.

You had to slip the punch at just the right time, because then Little Mac, he would move faster. If you did it just at the right time, he would move exponentially a little faster than normal. So you had to time it, but otherwise Tyson would knock you out. It's impossible. Remember Little Mac? Of course. Oh, yeah. He was a hell of a fighter.

I don't think he's Little Mac anymore. I think you fight Mr. Dream, and it's like— Oh, it's all different. Yeah. But anyway, so I went to the gym, and I got stronger the next time. And that was mind-blowing for me because I wanted to be something special, but I was short, pudgy, not muscular, just not like a loser. Worse, no one even knew I existed, I don't think.

I wasn't good at sports or anything. You weren't good enough to be a loser. Yeah, exactly. You weren't good enough to be on the back end. You weren't good enough to be on the front end. I was right in the middle of the bell curve. So you didn't play football, anything? Oh, I did.

I played sports. I just wasn't. I didn't start on it. I played Division III. I was actually a two-time All-American division three football player, but I didn't start a single year in football until my senior year in high school because I was, but anyways, you know, I learned, like I got stronger and I learned about progress and it was just like, it was like a whole new world for me because I was, I realized like, well, if I don't like how something is, if you work hard, you can change that. I realized like, well, if I don't like how something is, if you work hard, you can change that. I mean, you know, like most people probably know that or get taught that. I'm sure I did too, but I didn't really understand it.

You don't know it until you actually feel it, I don't think. Yeah, yeah. And so that was, it was like just a total different life change. And so then I was obsessed with the gym and getting stronger. You know, and then I ended up being good at sports. I was, you know, captain of the football and the baseball team, my senior year in high school, where, like I said, my, even on, even like the sophomore year, when all the good sophomores move up to varsity, I still didn't even start as a sophomore on the JV, you know? So it really, you know, just changed my life. And so that's how I kind of got into it. And then I went to college and I got a degree in exercise science as my undergrad. Later on, I went back and I got

a master's in physics, but that was like years later. But that's kind of how it all happened. And it's just all because you're obsessed with lifting. That's kind of why you went to school. Yeah, yeah. I mean, really. You wanted to keep learning more about lifting. Well, that's why.

Nutrition. That's why I picked my degree, exercise science. You meet with an advisor. I don't know what I wanted to do. And he's like, well, what do you like? I'm like, I like working out, sports, and science. And he said, exercise science. I mean, there's, I probably, I don't know that I would do it again. It's a, it was a tough field to really progress in if you

make that your career. But I mean, obviously there's knowledge benefits, you know, cause I have now these other careers based on it basically. So how about the physics side of things? Why'd you do that? Oh man. So I had, I owned Trop owned Troponin Nutrition, and I had another nutritionist at the time who was doing really well. We kind of made him operations manager. And I was like – I had a lot of – I had kind of easy income coming in from other business stuff. And it was like an early midlife crisis. I never was good at math. And it was like an early midlife crisis.

I never was good at math. And I read a book called Probability 1, which was like basically used – I can't remember what the equation is, but it predicts the likelihood of life somewhere else in our galaxy, which is a cool book. And I liked it. So I read like The Universe by Brian Greene. I read a book by Lisa Randall, who's a physicist. And I realized this is really cool. I just don't understand when it gets to the science stuff because I didn't know any math. And so I started self-teaching math. And so I self-taught myself Calc 1. And then I thought,

well, I need to, I should go to school for this. Self-taught yourself Calc 1. So like you were also working and doing other stuff and then you were just teaching yourself calc because you wanted to. Yeah, but like teaching yourself. That's cool. That's so cool. Like doing his curls. He got his book open. Well, it sounds harder than it is. But calc one, like the way I learned it, is different than understanding the theory.

Taking the derivative of a function is just – it's easier than adding. It's very simple. And so then I went to school the next semester i took calc 2 and calc 3 together with uh uh relative uh i think relativistic physics uh which is like an undergrad like a uh advanced physics god i can't remember the name of it now but anyways and then i decided i wanted to do that so i went back to school uh i couldn't decide if i wanted to do math. So I went back to school. I couldn't decide if I wanted to do math or physics. So I kind of almost double majored in math and physics in undergrad. And then I applied to grad school and got in at Western Michigan for the PhD program

in atomic physics, experimental atomic physics. And then I got several years into that and realized two things. One, it wasn't my passion. And two, there are really, really smart people out there. And I was never going to make like an important contribution to physics. Yeah. But the problem was I didn't get an undergrad in physics. So I've been going to school this whole time. This is now three years in. And if I left, I'd have nothing to show for it because I applied to grad school before getting my degree.

And they accepted me because I had a previous degree. And so that was like – I was like – that was a really rough time in my life because I'm like I'm three years into this, all this money. I can't bail. To get a PhD for what I want – the PhD in physics is different than in other fields. You get paid to do research, but they take forever. Like the average PhD time at Western Michigan is like seven years. That's after undergrad. So I just got into grad school.

Anyways, I was doing my research, and my research was in electron capture. So you take an ionized particle. It's really – my mouth's dry. I'm kind of nervous, but it's really not that bad. You take like argon or something and you ionize it, meaning you strip some electrons up. So it's got a few negative charges and then you put it through a particle accelerator at a neutral target, like an atomic molecular target, and they collide. They don't really collide because nothing ever touches.

This is how they make whey protein, by the way. And they collide. They don't really collide because nothing ever touches. This is how they make whey protein, by the way. But they collide. And some of those electrons jump to your particle that's moving. And then that excites that particle. The electrons move up to a higher energy range.

And there's a difference in energy called the Q value. And that's what we were doing, just kind of trying to get better Q values for some of these energy states. Wow, dude. But anyway, I'm doing that. And my professor kind of passed me on the back, and he's like, you know, you're doing really good. He said, you'd have enough for a master's thesis. He was saying that to encourage me, like, how far, and then that, like, clicked in my brain. I was like, master's thesis?

I could be done? And so that week, I went to the registrar, and I applied for my master's, and then wrote the thesis, and it was done. Wow. I got a question for you. my master's and then wrote the thesis and was done. I got a question for you. If we were to go to Mars right now, how old would we be by the time we got there?

Well, you'd be the same age. You'd be four years older. People on Earth would be much, much older. I would be the same age. Because you're not moving. And this is that. You can explain this. Here's the way you explain it.

So how long does it take to get there? About four years. It takes about – OK. So I'd be the same – You wouldn't travel fast enough for us to really age differently, but we would be older for your reference range. And I can do it in a way I think that will explain it. So if you're riding in a car and you throw a tennis ball up in the air, you catch it, right? So from what you're seeing is the tennis ball moving like this, that much space, right? Someone else sees the tennis ball moving that much, right?

So that moves farther through space, which works for objects. Light works differently because light only have one speed. Light travels at the speed of light. So if the light, so you could do the same thing. Instead of a tennis ball, imagine you were reflecting a light particle, a photon off a mirror. And so from us driving, we see the photon go like that. It travels this much distance. From an observer watching us travel, they see the photon go like this because we're moving through space.

And so it traveled all that distance. Well, all that distance happened in the same amount of time as that short distance happened. And so the only way that can happen, because it has to travel the same speed, so it can't have traveled a different speed to get there, so the only way that can happen is one person's frame of reference for time is different than the others. And so for us, we're traveling, time is what time is. But people seeing us, they're aging much more than us. I probably didn't explain that that well.

It's not that bad. But I know even if I just am going to walk over to Andrew, it takes me X amount of time to get there. So I'm older by the time I get over there, right? Yeah, but if we went to Mars, it would take about four years, and we'd be about the same age. What about how much would we weigh? On Mars? Mars is 60% the mass of Earth, so like 60% of what you weigh here. I got another mathematical equation.

This guy keeps gaining weight. Weighs 260 pounds. He's trying to lose weight. I'm not trying to lose weight. I've just been eating more than you. Psalm 260. He travels not trying to lose weight. I've just been eating more than you. Psalm 260. The feed travels really fast from your perspective. I see.

Oh, man. That's amazing that you learned all that. It probably has helped you even without you maybe recognizing it all the time. Maybe it's helped you in business. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, physics. You're creating formulas and all kinds of stuff. Well, because there's just some things in physics.

One, it teaches you to think logically. Things happen, and in certain ways, they can only happen. And you can kind of work through things from first principles, meaning start from zero. What minimal object do I know? And how far can I get moving along from that? And it really teaches you to look through problems that way. And it really works for nutrition because thermodynamics is all nutrition.

You know, like calories in versus calories out, people want to argue against that. But you can't. I mean, it's like arguing that how far you can drive has no relation to how much gas is in your tank. You can argue, though, that the calories themselves might be somewhat inaccurate. Oh, yeah. And there's more involved because like digesting a protein is different than digesting a fat. If I'm eating a protein, the protein has to be broken down to die in tripeptide bonds before it can cross the small intestine. So you have this big protein structure, which is all this big clump of amino acids.

I have to break them apart into two and three amino acid forms. That takes energy. I mean, you can't break anything. If I were to break this pen, it doesn't happen without using energy. So that energy is kind of removed from those calories because, you know, if you eat 100 calories and six calories, it takes six calories of energy to do that. You ate 100 calories, but you really only absorbed 94 calories. And then even after that, because nearly almost none of the protein we eat actually gets used as a protein.

Do you think protein should have four calories per unit? Or do you think that's like maybe a little off? It doesn't. They all have four point something or three point something. It might not matter too much. Yeah, I don't think you could even be accurate enough. Even if you said it was two calories, it might not make a difference in people's – Yeah.

But, I mean, like why people – there's lots of reasons people think calorie or calorie doesn't – calories in versus calories out isn't real. It has to be. You can't – well, just from a thermodynamic standpoint, there's something called the law of conservation of energy. And whether you want to believe it or not you cannot violate that i mean energy is constant so if you eat this amount of energy if either i burn that amount of energy if i don't burn that amount of energy any energy i have not burned remains stored in the system which you know but but there's tricky things because we store energy three different ways we store it as carbs which would be like glycogen liver and muscle glycogen and we store it three different ways. We store it as carbs, which would be like glycogen, liver and muscle glycogen.

And we store it as muscle or protein, which would be like muscle. And we store it as fat with, we can almost store an unlimited amount. And so, you know, we just, there's a lot of things,

you know, we use the scale to kind of gauge our progress and fat loss where, which is really stupid because 70% of our body is water, you know? And so I just, I just said this in a different podcast, but it'd be like, if the only way we could tell whether our car was out of gas was we had to weigh it. It's like how many people are in the car?

How much is in the trunk? Do I got gym bags in the car? Yes, the car weighs less when it's empty, when it's out of gas, but most of the car is not the gas weight. It's the same with us. To lose two pounds of fat in a week, I have to be in a thousand calorie daily deficit for seven consecutive days. It's a big deficit. You know, most women only have, you know, like 16, 1800 calories per day metabolism. So you're talking for them to lose two pounds of fat, they have to basically eat nothing, you know, 600 calories. Hey guys, I want to tell you about Merrick Health, the premium

telehealth clinic owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. Now, when some people think about Merrick Health, they think it's just another one of those testosterone companies or another one of those blood work companies. But Merrick Health is really cool because, yeah, you can get your blood work done. You can get hormone optimization, but you can also get nootropics. You can also get Viagra. You can get literally whatever you need from that clinic, and they make it very, very easy for you. That's why we love Merrick. So, Andrew, how can people learn about it? Yes, Merrick Health is not just a one-trick pony.

But if you did want to get your labs done, we highly recommend the Power Project panel. That's 28 different labs. That's also going to come with a client care coordinator that's going to give you a lab analysis. And they're going to work with you and help you optimize your body. Again, that's at MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. At checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save $101 off that entire panel. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. But it's not easy to figure certain things out, right?

Like food labels can be a little different, right? They have like, I think, like a 15%. I don't know what the laws are. Well, they can't be. I mean, like when you see like, you know, my chicken, 2.5 grams of fat per three ounces. It's an animal, you know? Right. If like we ate human, it would be like 85-15 ground human, you know?

That doesn't mean every human on earth has 15% body fat. Yeah. You know, I might be around 15%. You're lower than 15%. You're lower than 15%. Joe is way, way above 15%. Way, way above 15%. You're lower than 15%. You're lower than 15%. Joe is way, way above 15%. Way, way above 15%. Joe doesn't have

a microphone. This is unfair. So that's what you're doing. What they did at one point, some farm that produced the chicken, they probably took this chunk of chicken, put it in like a bomb climatry, measured the calorie content of that particular group of

chickens at that time, 25 years ago in the nineties or whatever, when they forced the food label and then, then they list it to the decimal. And each, each, uh, company utilizes that. Yeah. Right. Like, so it's not like every company, like, like I sell supplements as well. And with my supplements, um, I didn't I didn't actually test my stuff for how many calories it has. And it's an estimate based off of what we know about like whey protein

and all the supplement companies. Yeah. Yeah. And there's only so accurate you can be. And all food is that way. It's all based off of it. Yeah. Well, look at like, you go get 96 four ground beef. Do you think that's made in a pharmacy? You know, they're not like guys who have hazmat suits, you know, like it's some, you know, it's a butcher. He's like, yeah, these are the leader cuts. Try to trim the fat who have hazmat suits. It's a butcher. These are the leader cuts. Try to trim the fat and put it in here. It's about 96.4, but to try to calculate

things to the decimal place of a gram for macronutrients. It could be 80-20 for all we know. I'm sure on a Friday afternoon when Bubba's trying to get off his shift, he don't care. Just put everything in there. Yeah, so there can be discrepancies in that. And then calories out can be hard to figure out.

But even with all that, it's still a manageable and a good idea to kind of track calories, in your opinion? I don't know. What do you think? Well, I really don't. In my diets, we go by macronutrients, which is basically the same thing. don't. In my diets, we go by macronutrients, which is basically the same thing. And the reason I do it is to kind of lose that variation. And so I have a list of like a food list. You're not worried about the precise accuracy of the actual overall calories because it can fluctuate.

Yeah. And it's going to fluctuate more within the natural variance of the food sources than you can even calculate. If you eat chicken for six meals, what the true calorie count of those six meals or true fat count, protein count is basically a bell curve, where the center of that bell curve is probably about what the food label says. But if you have a day where you ate six super lean muscular chickens, you had a higher protein and lower fat than you were calculating. You know, and conversely, if you ate a bunch of fatty chicken one day, you're going to be off on the other end.

And so like what I do is I just have people, like say I gave you a meal of 50 grams of protein as your macro for that, and you would pick from a food list protein sources. And there would be like 96 foreground beef, chicken breast, chicken tenderloin, turkey, things like that, eggs with egg whites, like a six to one ratio of eggs, whites to yolk. And then those aren't all exactly the same macros. But if you get 50 grams from those, the fat variance, we don't count the fat as close as there's more variance between each individual source than between each other source. Meaning, like if you ate a particularly lean 96.4, even though the food label says it has higher fat than chicken, that one could be lower fat than the chicken you ate the next meal. So I only count the direct macros in each source.

So if you pick like a protein source in a meal, like chicken, you would only count the protein from that. Rice, maybe for your carb source, you would only count the protein from that rice. Maybe for your carb source, you'd only count the carbohydrates from that. If we added a fat source like avocado, you'd only count the fat from that. You're really manipulating energy a lot. And that's one of the things that the way I first became aware of you was you did have the miraculous feat of getting,

getting Dave Tate in really good shape many years ago, but carb cycling, you know, and but like I've heard people many years ago. But carb cycling. But I've heard people talk a little bit about carb cycling kind of before I saw some of your stuff. But I didn't see somebody talk about it in such detail. And then I also never heard of anybody talking about it at the way that you were talking about it with the amount of carbohydrates for some of these guys. And I think for Dave Tate, it might have been maybe like 1,600 grams of carbs in a given day. That sounds absolutely crazy. How does some of that work?

Well, I'll use you as an example. The average adult male can store about 800 grams of glycogen. So you're a more muscular adult male, so you could probably easily store 1,000 grams of glycogen. So let's say we, just from a calorie standpoint, just to make easy numbers, let's say if we gave you 250 grams of protein, 500 grams of carbs, and no added fat for the day for five or six meals, that would be basically your BMR. You'd burn through that, you know, hypercaloric diet. You want to burn more or store more.

So we know you can eat that without gaining fat. Now let's put you on a diet. And so we're doing low-carb days, medium-carb days, and you're depleting. You're losing fat because you're in a calorie deficit, but you're also losing glycogen because your body's trying to pull from as many energy sources as it can. Start getting depleted in glycogen, and let's say we go a whole week, and now you're 500 grams depleted in glycogen. Half your glycogen is depleted, which probably makes sense.

You know, if you've ever been really depleted, you know the difference between being glycogen loaded and depleted. So you're half glycogen depleted. That's 500 grams. Now, we know you can eat 250 grams of protein and 500 grams of carbs without storing anything. Now let's add 500 more grams of carbs to replace that glycogen. Now you're eating 1,000 grams of carbs that day, and you are storing, you're storing 500 grams of those carbs, which is a lot, but

because we're in a glycogen depleted state, you're going to store them preferentially as glycogen rather than fat. So what we get all the benefits of that, your, you know, thyroid upregulation, appetite suppression, the glycogen storage make one making you look bigger, you know, but feel bigger and being stronger in the gym. Your NEAT's going to be higher the rest of the week, and you're going to have energy to power through the workouts where they're low-carb. So for me, it's – because you can't cheat thermodynamics, but this is a way to – well, you can't beat thermodynamics. This is a way to kind of cheat the system a little bit. So as far as carb cycling is concerned, because what you mentioned is interesting and a lot of people are probably like, oh, I can eat 800, 900 grams of carbs in a day.

But what type of athlete should be implementing this and how can they figure out, okay, like you mentioned, the amount of carbohydrates that they can then store? Well, I mean you can't know – you can guess kind of like what we just did and get pretty close to start. But it is interesting because it really varies by sport and athlete. So if I was a bodybuilder, how I utilize the high carb day would be different than if I was a powerlifter. And I'll explain. So if I'm a bodybuilder, all I care about is building muscle. I like being strong, but that's not why. My performance in the gym is not what matters. It's the results of that performance in the gym. So I would have my high-carb day maybe on a day, on a body part I'm trying to bring up. Say my back's weak.

So I have my high-carb day on the day I train back. And that sounds great. You think like, oh yeah, all those carbs. But your training's probably going to suffer because insulin's a mild central nervous system depressant. It's a lot of food, yeah. Yeah, you know, you'll be bloated. It increases glomerular filtration rates. You're peeing more often. It increases

sodium retention. So you know, like you feel sluggish. You feel bloated. you're peeing more often increases sodium retention so you you know like you feel sluggish you feel bloated you're peeing all the time you're you just you know but the way insulin works i hope i don't get sidetracked here so you can always pick every cell in your body has a receptor an insulin receptor and i picture just like that because it's easy you know like then you picture insulin coming in and it binds to that receptor. What that does is it shifts some proteins around and it shuttles nutrients into the cell. So you get increased amino acid uptake, increased glycogen storage, all things that are anabolic basically. So on that high-carb day, your results of the back training,

even though your back training might have been worse, is that all the nutrients necessary for hypertrophy are there in spades. Now conversely, if you're a power lifter, you don't care how big your muscles are, really. I mean, it's nice to have muscle, but you need to move weight. So we're performance-based. So we don't want to do it on that day. Like, if you have a heavy squat day, making that your high day, we don't want to be sluggish. We don't want to be bloated.

We would have the high day the day before that. So you're bloated and sluggish the day before. Then you go into your heavy workout where you need to perform and you have all that glycogen available. And so then people would say, well, but I want, you know, that doesn't make sense. I want to have a good workout as a bodybuilder. Why wouldn't I have it the day before then? And I always use an analogy that I think is a little, it's kind of a reverse analogy,

but I think it's easier to explain it. If I were to do cardio to burn fat, like say I went running and I'm doing it because I want to get leaner, I'm not going to be drinking Gatorade during the run. I'm not going to be eating gel packs because I want to burn fat during the run. But if I was running a marathon to win the Boston Marathon, I would want all those things. So one of them is eating for performance.

The other one is eating for the results of the exercise. And so you can do that for all sports like like for mma we would do high days differently because you don't want to be bloated you still want the high day before if you need exactly i was going to ask you it's like yeah how do some of these other athletes that are on the hook for more movement because like when you go in the gym lower back doesn't yeah it doesn't matter quite as much when you're when you're lifting weights if you're a little bloated and things like that but if you're rolling around doing jiu-jitsu or doing mma or even a runner i think there's a really good case for that actually if you remember it's like old now but when brock fought uh car what's the guy oh yeah carwin shane yeah and shane if you looked at that, I remember we watched that,

and he came out and he had edema in his lower legs. And they talked about how they were loading him and giving him IV bags, and he was too full. And so he came out great in the first round, but he was adrenaline dump. It was completely done in the second. And, you know, like remember those lower back pumps? Oh, yeah. Imagine going into the second round and having your whole body with that feeling. Against Brock Lesnar.

Yeah. And so like for an MMA, the high day would be slightly different. We still want to be glycogen loaded, but we don't want to be fluid loaded. So we'd go lower in carbohydrate. We'd still load higher, but we'd want to be like shove 1,000 grams in because we don't want you all stiff and tight. shove a thousand grams in because we we don't want you all stiff and tight and yeah and maybe would it maybe even potentially do it like the day before if you had oh yeah if you had like an off day and you're a jiu-jitsu guy maybe you would do it on the off day because it doesn't matter if you're a sluggish and then the next day you still have that carb reserve that work yeah because

you're doing it for the performance so it'd be basically the same way with the power lifters you do it the day before for performance andrew's writing the shit down andrew's like all right 1200 carbs tonight for jiu-jitsu tomorrow guys sounds good to me yeah you kind of before you mentioned that you don't really have unless you like you have people use other things other than weight to track their progress because you mentioned it's kind of stupid to track weight so do you have i track weight and i track weight i track weight but people just get too worked up about it you know it's like's like, you know, what does this weigh, two pounds? You know, to lose two pounds of fat is a lot of work. To gain two pounds of fat means I drank this before I stepped on the scale.

Yeah, the body weight changes drastically every day. Yeah, and so if you talk someone on a fat loss diet, fat loss is going to be linear. You know, if you're tracking down correctly with the right, you know, calorie deficit, your total fat weight is going to be like that. But your fat weight is going to be like that. But your scale weight is going to be like that. Over time, within an error bar, it's going to be trending down. But to lose two pounds of fat a week is really hard work. So that's eight pounds in a month.

I can hold eight pounds after a sushi dinner. So one meal can change the scale in the opposite direction more than an entire month of hard dieting. One poop can change things drastically too. So you do like – but the thing is like you will have them – I'm assuming that you have them take averages of that weight if they use weight and then you track other things. So I'm curious. What other things do you track? Photos. Photos. Yeah.

And when you're having them track weight, what do you have them pay attention to so they don't get too focused on this is the scale? Try not to weigh too much. Weigh the same day. You know, like if you weighed on a medium day on a Wednesday after this workout, try to just – and we'll track it over time. It's a nice secondary metric because sometimes, like you'll see in photos, if someone's sick, they'll look watery but flat. It's a different look than when you're watery because you're bloated. And so you can see, well, the pictures show me this. You're really watery, but you kind of look flat.

Oh, you actually lost weight and you're watery. I bet you're going to get sick. If you're really watery, like, oh, man, he doesn't look good. Oh, he's up six pounds. He can't be up six pounds because we're in a calorie deficit. He's not up six pounds of fat. He's up six pounds of water. That makes sense why the pictures look that way.

You've noticed people getting sick? Yeah, yeah. Like kind of before? Yeah. Like when they send you a picture, you can tell. Yeah, and they're check-ins. Yeah, it's really, once you see it, it's really, it's like an inflamed look. So you know what bloated looks like, you know?

Imagine bloated but flat because you know what flat looks like too. You look like terrible. You know, you got no veins. You got no – your muscles aren't pumping. So imagine that look with like a watery look and it'll like surprise – Do you tell them that you think they're going to get sick? That probably makes it happen. You're going to get sick, bro.

You'll probably wake up the next day. No, but I mean you'll see it a lot because you see that and their weight is down, even though they're watery. And you say, have you been sick? And they'll be like, yeah, you know, I think I'm coming down with something. And then they'll say their next check and be like, yeah, you were right. Like two days later, I was sicker than hell. I wonder if that has to do with like their sleep is maybe getting augmented and a couple, maybe their stress is a little higher than normal. I mean, everything's so tied together.

Yeah. But there's other things you can do, like as far as tracking progress, still using pictures. It's like something I don't know if everyone knows. But if you take a picture of like 1996 Ronnie Coleman and 1998 Ronnie Coleman and have them both blown up really huge. Now, you know 98 Coleman is better and bigger. Look at his lats, his right lat in both photos. You're not going to be able to tell the difference when you're looking right at him.

But now take Ronnie Coleman and zoom out into two thumbnail pictures of him side by side where you can see his whole silhouette. And you clearly see 1998 Ronnie's better. And so when you're doing client check-ins, what I do is I keep their thumbnails first so it's zoomed way out. And I can see their silhouette. And you can really see how their shape has changed. You can see whether they're filling out. You can see if they look leaner. And then you zoom in and then you look at like the fat stuff.

Like you can see their lower back and actually see how much fat is. But to see like true progress, the thumbnails really – that's a little trick for anyone out there if they want to use it. How about light? Because like one thing is you notice like certain people, they'll take a picture in their bathroom and then they'll take a picture with like daylight. So do you have people try to take pictures in the same spot with light? Solid background, bright light, washed out, flash on the camera if you have it, as terrible as you can look.

Because that's what's going to be on – most of my clients are competitors. That's what you're going to be on stage. And then even if that isn't how you're going to be on stage, that doesn't hide anything. I'll tell people, do your pictures for me and then do your pictures for Instagram. So they're two separate, you know, use your good picture, your good lighting. So you look good. But for me, you don't want to look good because you know, there's no lighting that Ronnie Coleman or Phil Heath would look bad. So when you're really in shape, the lighting doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. What do you think of some of the like kind of old school trends that we had uh in this

country where we were telling people to not eat a lot of fat do you think things like that are actually like a halfway decent message because it sounds to me sometimes like bodybuilding in a lot of ways is like a lower fat diet but they're also eating like just way healthier in general well there's that's a loaded like health is a loaded word because but you know look how you look you when you say health you have to define what you mean do you mean healthy like i want to live a long time because that's a very different diet because people want to be a lot less fat i guess yeah well so the uh i think we got everything wrong with the diet. I mean I think it's like a – it's really like bad, how bad the experts have been. And I don't think it's always intentionally.

Like you saw the new thing I think where they said like – what they say like fruity pebbles are better than a steak or something. Yeah, Lucky Charms, yeah. Because of marshmallows. It was misleading because for many people, eating Lucky Charms is going to result in lower calories than, I don't know, a ribeye or something. Right. But I still don't agree with that. But I don't think – it's not like as egregious as that is. But we just – we've done things really dumb. I mean if you go back to first principles, I always like to do that.

What can we eat and not die? Meat, because we have two essential nutrients. We have essential amino acids and essential fatty acids. That's it. If we don't get those in the diet, we die. And that's why you'll notice that in cultures, like beans and rice is a combination. Beans are not a complete protein, and rice are not a complete protein. When you combine them together, they are a complete protein.

Did ancient civilizations know that? No, but the ones that only ate rice died and the ones that only ate red beans died and the ones that ate them combined lived. So like corn-based societies like Native Americans, if they didn't pair it with like beans, they would not have survived as a species. And I'm sure there were some that didn't thrive well enough to survive. And so if you look at – so that's all we need. So it's like, okay, let's look at a species. And I'm sure there were some that didn't thrive well enough to survive. And so if you look at – so that's all we need. So it's like, okay, let's look at a human.

Our eyes, we have predatory eyes, eyes in front of our head. We have canine teeth. We have high pepsid content. We can't digest cellulose. So we can only eat a very, very small fraction of the vegetable world or the plant world. We clearly were hunters, and we know how we hunted. We were persistence hunters because, interestingly, a couple things that the humans do better than any other animal besides think

is dissipate heat. For one, bipedal motion is really energy efficient. Running on all fours is not energy efficient. So as soon as we go bipedal, we're already more efficient than other animals. And we sweat. Like my dog, he pants. He releases moisture. He evaporates moisture just from his tongue.

We do it everywhere. So we radiate heat really well. Our body surface area to body volume is very favorable. You look at a bison because volume is length times length times length, length cubed. And surface area is length times width times length, you know, length cubed. And surface area is, you know, length times width or length squared. And so, like you take a bison, he's producing heat like length cubed over that big round body, but he doesn't have very much surface area to radiate heat. So they're great for like winter, but they're not good for heat.

We radiate – our body volume to surface area is really favorable for radiating heat. We don't have a huge body volume, so we don't produce a ton of heat. And we radiate it out really well, and we sweat. And we have very efficient walking. So the way we hunted was persistence hunting, where we would literally just chase an animal until they died of exhaustion and then eat it. And what did we eat? Organ meat, because that's what had essential amino acids and essential fatty acids and all the vitamins that were keeping the animal alive. amino acids and essential fatty acids and all the vitamins that were keeping the animal alive.

So clearly, I think it's very difficult to make an argument that that's not what we were meant to eat. However, whatever meant means, but the way humans survived for a very long time was through that. It seems like we tend to like just really screw things up a lot, you know? So years ago, they said like low fat and then they made a lot of like low fat snacks then you had like kind of uh there's a lot of other movements that happen to gluten-free and then we make like gluten-free brownies and gluten-free cookies um you get into keto and then again people make cookies like at every turn with every diet people kind of uh adulterate the food and turn it into something that still puts you back in the same place, which is just having a hard time regulating how much food you eat. Yeah. Well, I've been wanting to write a book for 20 years called The Pick It, Kill It, Grow It Diet

because that's all a diet should be. If you can't pick it from a tree, grow it in a garden, or hunt it for meat, you shouldn't be eating it. And if you do those things, you don't have to worry about being fat. You don't, especially if you hunt for your own meat. But you're not going to go on My 600-lb Life and find someone who just can't stop eating apples. It's not. You're not going to find someone who can't stop eating flank steak

because you can get fat eating flank steak, but you're not going to kill yourself eating flank steak. You might be turning the apples into apple pie, though. You never know. So if you just do that, that's really all – like the FDA, the food label, all that stuff, if they would have just emphasized that. Just eat real food. Eat stuff from your garden. Eat nuts.

Eat meat. And we wouldn't have any of the problems that we have. But I think it's really like a travesty it's a travesty because i think it was done by well it seems like because if you think like well americans are too fat or people are getting too fat well it seems like we should reduce the fat intake you know because that's like but that's like just first level thinking you know there's no science behind that there's no it's just like well that seems like it but in in the way things really work what seems like it should be it nothing things are always more nuanced than that and this obviously is because obviously because we have

essential fatty acids that will die if we don't get you know and so clearly that wasn't the good approach you know a lot of the science uh is backed by a lot of money because a lot of the research and little hearts that you see on the research and the little hearts that you see on the oatmeal and the little hearts you see on the Cheerios and all that stuff. Yeah. And that's, I mean, you can't remove that, but I think, I mean, I, it is that way, but it's, it's like, that shouldn't be an excuse. You know, it's like, that's terrible that we just like, well, you know, there's money involved. So of course they're going to tell us to eat the way that's going to kill us.

You know, it's like, can we be better than that? Well, I think it's a halfway decent excuse because they try to tell you that it's healthy. So it's fake health. So it's a, it's the reverse of like, it's different than saying, it's different than just saying like, hey, these aren't bad for you. They're actually telling, which that would hey, these aren't bad for you. They're actually telling, which that wouldn't be that bad, but they're telling you like, this is a really good option for you.

And it's probably not a good option for most people because again, they're going to have a hard time regulating how much of it they eat. Yeah, well, it's like you gave like the, what do you say, like you do Cheerios or what do you do, oats? Yeah, Cheerios with a little heart. Why?

Because it's got soluble fiber. Soluble fiber is good for the heart you know it is good at lowering cholesterol but why do you have high cholesterol why don't we look at that you know it's like you know yes like when you if you cut yourself a band-aid covers the cut that doesn't mean you should like that doesn't mean band-aids are good that means that once you've done something bad band-aids kind of help you get past it you know well then it like that whole thing is like we don't have to worry so much about soluble fiber if we didn't have high cholesterol you know why do we have high cholesterol because we eat terribly and then you know there's more to that because there's arguments with cholesterol and how

important that even is also so how do you like moderate your diet as far as processed foods are concerned because like do you um do you just regulate how much of it do you eat do you totally take it out of your personal diet how do you do that personal diet well yeah am i on camera so i can't lie my personal diet obviously does not take it into consideration no i'm just so busy right now i'm really like i went through you know 20 year phase where i was completely obsessed with nutrition and i still eat good good, but I'll talk like I'm talking to one of my clients. I give a food list, and we really try to avoid processed food. The only time they really have the option of doing it would be on their high-carb days. I'm not going to try to eat... A thousand grams of carbs from rice or oatmeal, your stomach will rip open.

So I let people have up to 50% of the carbs in every meal come from sugary sources, which sugary sources I define as just really any carb source that's very low in fat. Like juice? Yeah, but bagels even also, things that aren't on the normal list of really healthy foods. But the very interesting thing, and I've been tracking this for several years, and I don't know what I'm going to use with it because I don't know that I'll necessarily change my approach. But I've noticed a very clear dichotomy uh the the clients who for their sugary sources use fruit and 100 fruit juices and things like that report how they feel on high days completely different than the people who eat like fruity pebbles and skittles which are

technically you know i mean which is it doesn't it's tough to like work through because sucrose is sucrose. Fructose is fructose. Why would it matter whether it came from a pineapple or it came from pineapple-flavored Skittles? But it's something to do with the processing that really seems to change inflammation. I hate to use that word because that's like a loaded word, but it seems like the processed food lead to some type of inflammation. So the fructose group always report back feeling better. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It was just like the fruit, which technically would be mostly fructose, but yeah, the fruit and fruit juice people. Yeah, absolutely. And even the ones who try it themselves. And then I hate that because, you know, once they try going back and forth, they're always going to placebo effect. What about some of the cofactors that are in fruit?

I don't know so much about like a pineapple, but I know that like an apple has fiber in it and potassium. And these are things that could help slow down the digestion. I think that potassium maybe impacts kind of how your body handles the glucose and things of that nature. Yeah, we have an article up and I have a website, teamtroponin.com, and we have a potassium article. I know Stan Efferding is really big on potassium. I'm really not. Partly I think when I was an exercise physiologist,

I saw two patients go into VTEC and almost ungraded V-fib because of really high potassium and exercise. Because if you're hyperkalemic and you exercise, you're much more prone to heart arrhythmias. Were they taking like a potassium supplement or something? I mean, I'm pretty sure both of them were kidney patients where, you know, they weren't excreting potassium. So, but it is, you can still, you know, like if you load too much, there's a reason when

you go to like vitamin shop or something, most of the potassium capsules are 99 milligrams when a large potato is 700 milligrams because they want to make it really hard to take too much because you can. And I'm not against potassium. I just think most people, especially if you're eating my kind of diet, you're probably including a lot of potatoes, which is your potassium is going to tend to be higher in the diet than most people. But yeah, but like the skin, the fiber, that's going to slow down digestion. And then even more, like, again, you know, like, you can eat a lot of apples before the calorie count gets very high. You know, it's like a bag of Skittles is one of those hand-sized bags. So it's 50 grams of carbs.

Eat 50 grams of carbs from an apple, your stomach's going to rip open, you know. So there's additional benefits just aside from that. How does somebody get jacked? Somebody that's listening right now that's a young young guy that just like wants to, let's say they're 160 pounds, you know, and they want to be 200. How do they work their way towards getting jacked? It's super simple. It's simple, not easy. It's hard, but it's a two-step process. It's how to get big. Step one, teach the body to eat more and more good, clean, whole food sources without getting fat. So you can't just throw food at the problem.

You're always trying to add food, but you're basically eating meat and rice and trying to eat more of it as often as you can without getting fat. And then step two, go to the gym and get really, really strong in a bodybuilding rep range. I mean that cuts out all the middlemen because what's the end result of that? If we take that a few steps down the road, if you're eating 6,000 calories a day of chicken and rice and strong as fuck, you're going to be huge. You can want to be skinny and weak, but that's not going to happen. And so really that's it. Now, how do you do that? That's the hard part. How do you increase your metabolism? Because you can't just go in and just start pounding food. You'll get fat and everyone's tried that. And you also have to accept growth rates.

And I'll get – every time I bring this up, the comment section, all I'm saying is that – I'm saying basically that 453 grams is a pound. That's basically what this whole thing will be. So if you see how slow muscle growth actually is and how precious it is and how rare it is, you know, if I were to convert one gram of protein per hour, that's it. So 24 grams per day. You know, think of all the protein you eat. If only 24 grams of that gets used to build muscle, that's 200 pounds of muscle every 10 years.

So no one's growing that fast. You have 20 pounds a year. You might get one year or two years out of that. And that's it. So think every meal you eat. You know, you eat six times a day. That means only four grams of each meal at maximal growth rates is converting muscle. So that's the other thing you have to accept is that getting huge isn't – you have to

love the process of getting huge because it's going to happen slow, even when it happens fast because who's probably the fastest ever? Like a Nick Walker or something? And people always show his first show from 2012. Yes, and he's blown up since 2012. But that was 11 years ago. So he's gained 120 pounds, but it's been 11 years. So he gained 11 pounds a year. So he was only converting 10 or 12 grams of protein per day to new muscle.

And that's about as fast as anyone's grown. So that's the other problem is you have people, they're 160 pounds, they want to be 200 pounds tomorrow. It's not going to happen. It might take two years. You can be 200 pounds if you're fat, but 200 pounds muscular is only so fast you can push the process.

But the process is find ways to eat more meat and rice without getting fat and then train really hard. That's it. So when it comes to like younger guys, are you – do you think some people would benefit from going on a – I guess a less conservative bulk? Not being extremely irresponsible but like there's a group that's like, okay, favors bulking. And then there's the group that's like, okay, no. Let's try to gain weight without gaining too much fat. What would you favor for a younger?

I can make an argument both ways because I went the balker out because I just wanted to be big and fat and strong. And it ended up working because now I'm big and fat and strong. But no, I really, if you look at, if you go back first principles again and what makes someone anabolic, you know, they need a higher male hormones, testosterone, they need lower female hormones, estrogen. And they need good insulin sensitivity.

They need good digestion to work good. Because a lot of our calories, the calorie difference in metabolism is in the digestion. And the bacteria in their gut can break down some of the calories. And so I read one study, and I haven't been able to find more to correlate this because I think most of them say they're above 90, but I read one study where they estimated that only 67% of the calories eaten were not broken down by gut bacteria. So you can imagine like if someone's doing 62%, the other's doing 70%, that's a big calorie swing.

But the male body is most anabolic in like the 8% to 12% body fat range. And I hate to say 8% to 12% because these are from studies back when they only really did skin calipers, which is probably down 3% to 5% from what they really were. But you can't – without dissecting someone, you can't know anyways. So just with the idea that like at 12%, you have a faint outline of abs, like you look good at the beach. Because you get above 12%, your testosterone production levels, your testosterone production decreases, your aromatization estrogen increases, and your insulin sensitivity decreases. And I've used this example before, but you can, everyone, when you guys, when you're early 20s, had like a fat friend, you know, who didn't have a full beard. And like no chest hair.

Maybe had like a neck beard, you know, kind of man boobs, not very much chest hair. And that's why through puberty where the testosterone production was the highest, testosterone production was blunted because they were fat and they were aromatizing more of the test they did produce into estrogen. And so if you have high estrogen, low testosterone, and insulin sensitivity issues, you're not going to build muscle. So really you want to stay below that 12% ideally.

You know, creeping up a little bit above it in the off season is fine, but you really, when you do creep above it, at some point you want to diet down past down to that bottom end percent. So you can have a length of time in that eight to 12% fat where you're optimally anabolic. You just broke so many hearts. Broke so many hearts. You think somebody new that's starting to train that doesn't have a background in lifting,

do you think they should really kind of focus on? Because a lot of people, they want to lift and they want to get lean. So you think they should be a little bit more muscle focused? That's tough because it seems like no one can pick the right range. Guys either want to have abs all the time or they want to be primal balkers, and neither one is right. You mean through the gaining process? Because if you look at it like what's probably ideal would be at one point in the year

you diet down really hard to 8% or maybe even lower. If you're on TRT or something, possibly even 6%. But diet down hard. During that process, what happens when you diet is you're improving your hunger hormones, so your appetite's increasing. You're improving your nutrient digestion. And if you don't believe that, drink a Gatorade during your workout in the middle of the off-season, and it's going to sit right here in your gut because it's a low-molecular weight carbohydrate. You won't be able to break it down, which is partly why this was designed.

But do the same thing two weeks out of a bodybuilding contest. You're not going to get bloated. Your gastric emptying rate is so high. Everything's moving through perfectly. And so you get that with the diet for one. And then you come out of the diet with – you've been glycogen depleted for so long. You're going to have glycogen supersaturation for a period of time. Your appetite is going to be sky high. Your testosterone production is going to be lower your insulin sensitivity is going to be higher and then extend that basically for

nine months or so you know and then by then at the end of the off season you're like a little above 12 body fat your growth your animal anabolic nature whatever is reduced then you diet down again and just kind of repeat that. I think that's the fastest way to like true muscle gain progress. What are some good natty ways for somebody to get the hormones in their favor so they can get in better shape? Let's say it's someone like between 35 and 45 and they just kind of, they want to get off their ass and start to train and stuff, but maybe their hormones and different things are not in a good position because they haven't really done much about it in a long time. Even though these aren't really how my diets – I tend to have kind of lower-fat diets, but I would say you'd probably get on a higher-fat diet.

And like when I say higher-fat, I'm saying higher-fat compared to a typical healthy diet. They're probably already eating too much fat, just the wrong kinds of fat. But like testosterone is synthesized from cholesterol. Cholesterol converts to androstenedione and that then gets converted to testosterone. So the fats are where our hormones come from. And so – and you can use fats – like you can really manipulate things with fats because omega-3 fatty acids are really anti-inflammatory. And so you can kind of improve your way through a sickness. So if what I have,

like with clients, if they're going to, if they're sick and they're not going to be training, I've had them run our low carb days, but we add extra fat to those from like omega-3 fatty acids and they self-report feeling better and recovering quicker from, you can imagine, because we're supplying all the stuff that reduces inflammation, you know, and inflammation is largely why you feel like crap when you're sick. And then, but also for the same thing, more like the omega-6 fatty acids and arachidonic acid is really hypertrophic. But the fats would help get their testosterone levels or any of the sex hormone up better. Have you worked with many natural competitors getting super lean?

Now, have you noticed – because this is one thing that I experienced and I've seen other natural competitors experience this, but people seem to think that when this happens, it means that they are on some type of PED. But when you get super lean and you're not using any type of exogenous hormones, your libido goes into the tank. Like I didn't have a sex drive for months. If I did a testosterone test, it would have been shit. But a lot of natural competitors had to deal with that.

And coming out of a prep, it's like their shit's still tanked for a while. So is there any way for those competitors to mitigate that? Or is that just something that if you're getting super lean and you're on that side, it's just kind of what you have to deal with? I mean, it'll come back pretty quickly once you get about 8% body fat. But in those cases, I do tend to do higher fat diets for the same reason we talked about before. Yeah. Yeah. But that's funny.

It's like natural competitors because it's a really different look because their skin tends to be much thinner. They haven't used GH. They don't have that thicker skin. They don't hold as much water. And then they don't have as much muscle, which actually makes something – you still don't have as much muscle to lose. And so people think like they're afraid to die because they think they're going to lose all their muscle. There was a study done on like special operations. That's all you can do these like terrible studies on is people in the military.

Extreme conditions. Yeah, and they tested for – they did muscle biopsies testing for muscle loss and extreme deprivation diet. So these are people like going through buds or whatever and basically eating nothing and not sleeping and burning 10,000 calories a day. And they didn't find really any appreciable muscle loss. That's loss of contractile tissue until 5% body fat. Now, that's misleading. And this is kind of like with the scale thing. What is the scale really measuring? Because that's muscle. That's myosin and actin. Like only about 30% of our muscle is muscle. If I take my bicep out of my arm and cut it in half and look through it cross-sectionally, you see all these blood vessels, capillaries, veins, arteries, glycogen, water.

And like probably about 70% of it is the non-muscular stuff, the sarcoplasmic stuff. And so you do lose that. So you look – an analogy for that would be taking like a pound of steak and saying that's muscle. And then if you dehydrate down to the beef jerky, that tiny little bit there, that's real. That's actual muscle. The rest is all the other stuff. So you'll lose all that. You'll look smaller.

You'll look flatter. But that's not real. You can fill those back up or just bring some food back in the diet. And they don't – so they don't really lose muscle. They just look – you just look really flat. And this is actually something I'm curious because you've worked with so many competitors. But have you noticed that when guys get very lean and they at least do that a few times or maybe once that their body composition permanently changes when they gain body fat back? Yeah, it's so weird.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And stubborn areas like stop being stubborn areas. I don't have a reason for it other than, yeah, I absolutely see it. And you see it a lot with like glutes. And Steve Kuklo is a good example because he came up for, you know, and his knock all through the amateur ranks was that he couldn't get his glutes in. And then one year he like over-dieted, but he got his glutes striated.

And from then on, striated glutes were the first thing he had in a diet. You know, it's like it came right in. I have no idea why that works. I think it's probably because – I don't even want to say. It could be like some blood – because, you know, you can't – you systemically burn fat. You can't spot reduce. But the fat's got to get in the bloodstream. So if you have an area that's not getting very oxygenated blood, you know, it could be something like that.

Then once they've lost that fat there, somehow that changes the way the blood, you know, the blood vessel system, you know, goes through the area. I'm just, I didn't want to say that because I'm just kind of thinking on the spot, but then you get better vascularization of the area, which would be in future times would be more likely when fat is oxidized from the area, it's going to reach the bloodstream and yada, yada. Power Project family,

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works or your way of thinking works but i've seen other coaches do things like this or like i'll switch to like red potatoes like from regular potatoes or switch, you know, cut out your dairy or cut out like they pinpoint like these things. Does that matter at all? No, no. And they're doing one of two things. Either they don't understand, they don't know what they're doing. I mean. They're bullshitting you pretty much.

Well, what's the difference? And what are you going to say? Like white potatoes have like 3% more potassium than red potatoes. And so switching to red potatoes and lowering your potassium intake by 3% is going to – you know, no, it's not a – what it is is it's either that or – and I've done this because peak wheat competitors are so out of their mind crazy. If I can – they want to – they think it's this magical, special few days. And so sometimes what I'll do is change everything without changing anything.

So I'll say, you know, on Wednesday we're switching to spring water. I needed to get this brand of spring water. We're using sea salt. It has to be from a brand. They're like, fuck, yeah, I'm going to be shredded. Yeah, and so I haven't changed anything. They're just less stressed. Yeah, yeah.

So it's one or the other, but a lot of times it's just not knowing. So you don't think that like, yeah, when a coach is like, I want you to switch to this food or whatever, that it's typically just like them. It's kind of sometimes bullshit. Sometimes, yeah. I mean there could be a reason. But like if I was switching you from potatoes to rice because you were eating the skins on the potato and you're getting bloated, there's a reason behind that. If I was switching you from potatoes to rice because maybe we knew you were hyperkal, and I wanted a lower potassium intake or something like that.

But without, yeah, switching to types of potatoes, and I've seen some crazy stuff from people that I know really, they did it for option one, which is they thought it did something. They just don't know. They just know that three years ago when I coached Bob, I had Bob do this, and he looked awesome. I wish we could pull up some photos right now, because there are so many people that

they'll look at pictures of competitors and be like, oh, she was just flat on this day or he was flat. It's like, no, he was just fat. People will use these phrases like, oh, I just wasn't full enough or I needed to do this more. And it's like, no. And they're almost always wrong too. You're just always fat.

It is. It drives me crazy. it's so hard as a coach because uh you know what i kind of have a reputation for getting adding size to people that's what almost all my guys are super heavies or get to super heavies and so with that it's enjoyable because i get the people who want to add size which that's the most fun but it's also sucks because that means everyone that works with me thinks they're going to go up a weight class you know whether they deserve to or not. The best coaches are the ones that get a reputation for bringing people in shredded because then it's self-prophesizing because then the only people that work with them are the ones who are willing to die to get shredded.

But, like, it's harder now because they don't have the battle for the Olympia. Like, in the old days, Mitsuru Okabe put that out every year. And you could, like, Ronnie Coleman, the unbelievable, you could see Ronnie Coleman walking around five and a half weeks out. He was stage ready. You know, he was shredded six weeks out of the show, you know, like, so you can see how much different he looked from six weeks to the show day, which is almost nothing. So, but these people all think they're going to, they need to look different. You know, if you're not ready a week out, you're just not ready. You can make yourself look a little better, but you're either zero fat or you're not zero fat. What if somebody just has like a real short period of time to like i don't know maybe do

something for a photo shoot or something like that are there certain foods that should kick out like is there any sort of response to like milk or anything like that you notice that makes people like not look i mean outside of allergies like i think probably the thick skin thing was the fact that people were lactose intolerant you know same thing, like I had celiac. I know you mentioned gluten earlier. My punishment for making fun of food allergies for 20 years was getting one myself. But so like – or people have candida or SIBO, meaning like if they ate carbohydrates. You said you had?

I have. Oh, you still have it. Yeah. And that's something that developed later for you or you've always had it? I don't know. No, I definitely didn't always have it. Not that I know. I think I would argue bodybuilding possibly related to it because for 10 or 12 years,

I didn't eat bread except for like after a contest. And every time I did, I'd get sick. I didn't really notice it until I kind of was leaving the sport and was eating more like a normal human. And I was sick all the time, sick all the time. I couldn't figure out why. I ran a fever, like a low-grade fever forever, always achy. And I think I have some autoimmune thing going on.

My daughter is a type 1 diabetic. My grandmother had celiac. My mom has diverticulitis, sarcoidosis, which is autoimmune. So I have like a family history of autoimmune things. But I think like not eating bread for a decade and then eating it, I think my body – I mean I don't really know. I just know that I can't eat – I mean I can but I'll get sick. There's not really foods that make people just puffy.

They're just puffy. They're just – they need to lose body fat. Yeah, almost always. I mean people are sensitive to things. Like if you have SIBO, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, you can get bloated from carbohydrates. You have candida, the same thing. But people are not carb sensitive in general. We follow – like our bodies are really tightly regulated.

I can't handle carbs. People say it all the time. I look at carbs, I gain weight. Yeah, they do probably because if they haven't eaten any carbs and they're all glycogen depleted and they eat some, yes, they store glycogen. They're going to gain some weight, yeah. Yeah. But no, outside of like they don't violate thermodynamics.

But it's like people talk about like alkaline water, which I'm not really too against because it doesn't do any harm, I don't think. But if our pH in our blood changes by even 0.1, we die. You spend like a whole semester on the acid buffer system. And if you do anything in biology or physiology or anything, you know, we die. That's like you can't, your blood pH cannot change. And so things like that or what was another one I was thinking of? Like the sodium content of your blood.

Your blood is 0.9% sodium. That's it. And so if like I eat extra salt and it goes to like 0.10%, I have to dilute the blood back down, which means I have to pull water from somewhere. Conversely, if I deplete sodium, this is actually a lot of what spilling over is. Spilling over a lot of times isn't that they ate too many carbs. It's that they didn't supplement the things needed to take those carbs to the muscle. And so to store glycogen, you need obviously glucose, carbohydrates, but you need water and sodium. And so you get people

carving up and then cutting sodium. And so it doesn't even matter if they're supplying the water, they don't have the sodium. So they think they're spilling, but they're not. What happens is their blood sodium level decreases. So if it goes from 0.9% to 0.8%, it's too diluted. What does it have to do? Pull water out of the blood under the skin to get it back to 0.9%. Boom. Now you're – now you spilled over. What really happened was your blood sugar spiked.

You were trying to store glycogen. You didn't have enough sodium. Your body had to bring the sodium content in the blood back up to 0.9%. The only way it could do it is flush water under the skin. Yes, it was somewhat correlated to the fact that you had too many carbs, but it was really the fact that you didn't have enough sodium. What's a simple tip for people to just lose body fat? I know you did mention earlier that you think that people that are training

and training pretty hard should maybe only go for those lower body fat percentages one time per year, and I think that that's pretty cool. But what are some just like someone just wants to make some small changes and they just want to lose a little bit of body fat? I mean, number one is learn to enjoy the process of losing your weight or you're never going to keep it off anyways. And that's because you have this goal. But once you hit that goal, you don't get to stop.

And also, once you hit that goal, if it's a goal that's like something you're going to actually maintain, you've already made new goals by then. And so you have to find something you can stick to. And that's just the biggest problem because we don't gain weight overnight. You know, people talk about like the holidays and gain weight over the holidays. The average American gains one pound, that's it, over the holidays. But they never lose that pound, you know. The average American typically gains about a pound over the summer months too. And then maybe like one other time they go on a binge or something.

So you say the average American maybe gains three pounds a year. They just never lose it. So if you live 30 years, that's 90 pounds. Boom, you're fat. And so it's really understanding that. So you just have to reverse that. So we can try to lose those 90 pounds in three weeks, which isn't going to happen. And it's certainly not going to be something that you can stick to,

or you can try to make better food choices and try to move more. And that's really as simple as it is for most people, because most people, all their weight gain is in the meals they eat out of the home, almost always. When you eat in the home, most people eat within 100 calories per day of their BMR all the time. Because even eating 100 calories more is 10 pounds of fat a year. So obviously we do. When do we not?

Almost always when we're eating out. Well, what do we do when we go out? We're like, that looks good, that looks good, that looks good. Appetizers. Yeah. Dessert. If people simply went from picking

of these four foods, which one tastes the best to which one of these four foods that I want is healthiest. If that's all you did. So you're already picking foods you want to eat. Just pick the healthier version of that. And you're probably going to cut several hundred calories out every single time.

And now you do that over 20 years. Now you don't gain 50 pounds. I was curious about this, kind of going back to the carb cycling thing you mentioned. What would be the difference between someone who, let's say that they had five days at 500 and then they had a thousand versus the person who just kept their carbohydrates consistent, had the same calories? Would it mainly just be the performance difference post high-carb day or are there other benefits? There are other benefits and it won't be noticeable in the short term. And for most people like Joe Smith probably wouldn't notice the difference.

An elite athlete would. But over time, you're going to get – if you're in a hypercaloric state, you slowly get a reduced thyroid output. Your thyroid production decreases. Your glycogen stores will get low. So you'll – even though at the same total weekly calorie expenditure, you feel more tired long-term because we're not replenishing glycogen. And because fat is a better energy source, fat creates more ATP than glucose, but it's harder to get that energy.

You don't feel as energized. It's not as easy energy. So what ends up happening is your daily outside of exercise energy production will slowly decrease. And it might not even be noticeable, but your step count will start decreasing. You'll sit more. You'll lay more when you used to sit. And so over time, I really believe it does add up.

And I think I've got 20 years of data to suggest that the little things that come with the carb cycling, because it lets us cheat the system just slightly because they're always pulling from fat and glycogen. And that glycogen is not really getting filled up very much, but they're always kind of doing that. What we're doing is really artificially pushing the fat part of the week because we take carbs very low. We're in a glycogen loaded state, so we're training very hard. We're burning more calories when we work out

because we're able to exercise harder. And then, so we get preferentially more fat loss than glycogen, but we're still depleting glycogen. And then we restore that glycogen, which is like a switch in the opposite direction higher calorie so whatever whatever that calorie excess is above zero if we're still in the same weekly total deficit then that means i was in a greater deficit on the other days obviously

so i burn more fat on those and so i think you know like my mom over 12 weeks would probably never notice a difference a elite athlete over 12 years will notice a difference. Gotcha. That might be a nice thing that they don't notice a difference because you might be potentially or you are potentially probably pulling calories from some people. And if they don't notice it, that could be a good thing. And then for the athletes, if they're noticing that they just have more energy or feel better. I mean, I think most people, even regardless of whether they're an athlete or not, they have days during the week that are like just more stressful or have more demand than others.

And for someone that is like a lifter, maybe they're like, OK, well, let's have the high carb day be on your weakest body part. Your legs suck. Let's ramp the carbs up on that day or the night before, however sometimes it works. And then same thing with somebody that just has your typical nine to five. suck, let's ramp the carbs up on that day or the night before, however sometimes it works. And then same thing with somebody that just has your typical nine to five. Maybe they know on the weekends that they're going for a run or going cycling or something like that and you can ramp the carbs up there, right? Yeah, and that's the other thing I like with carbs. It allows you to be more precise.

We're still bound by thermodynamics. We're bound by these are how many calories you burn, these are how many calories we can eat. But I can be more precise because on our off days from training, I don't need the extra carbs. We're not training, we're not burning glycogen. So I can focus more of my calories on protein and fats, which are great. You know, those are probably the most important, you know, like as far as true survival as a human, but we can add more protein, we can add more fat, slow the digestion of the protein. So if there is a stimulus for muscle protein synthesis, it's more likely to occur because

we have more of the available nutrients for it. And then, but then also on the days I train, because I ate lower carbs on those off days, I can take carbs a little higher to fuel the training. You know, so you just get like a little more, you're still stuck by, if I burn 3,000 calories, I can only eat 3,000 calories or I'll gain weight. But how those calories situate throughout the week, you get a lot more maneuverability with it. What are these supplements that you got here? This is First Attachment Nutrition.

This is – I'm very excited about it. We are a new company, but we have 14 products with six core products that we really, really love. And my favorite is Field Rations, which is an inter-workout nutrition product. We don't really talk about inter-workout nutrition, but I think it's a very important piece of the puzzle, I guess, which is why that's our flagship product. And what it contains is something called a highly-branded psychodextrin, which is a high molecular weight carbohydrate.

And what that means is like the osmolarity of blood is like 300 nanograms per milliliter something like that whatever the units are but uh if you drink like a juice and we talk about this with gatorade especially in the off season if you could drink a juice that's got like a molecular weight really low and a higher osmolarity there's there's no if you remember osmosis you know there's no pull so what ends up happening is water kind of floods into the stomach where the glucose sits, and that's how you get bloated. With a higher molecular weight, it kind of acts like a bowling ball. It's got a low osmolarity. So it doesn't spend much time in the stomach, and it goes right to the small intestine.

And then it's a high molecular weight, meaning it's a big molecule. So it's got all this glucose. And we talked about surface area earlier. The highly branched psychedelics have a really high surface area per volume so all this glucose because you can all you can do is you can't you don't digest carbohydrates only sugars go across the small intestines you have to pluck those sugars off okay so you take a maltodextrin and it's like this a straight line of glucose you can pluck one off each line at a time until it keeps getting smaller but you have a big cluster dextrin you can pluck one off all the time.

And so you get two benefits. It's a huge molecule. It takes a long time to pluck all of them off. And then it's got all that surface area, so it starts putting glucose into the bloodstream really early. But there's a problem with that because you get too high of a molecular weight, you can actually get something called dumping syndrome, which is what it sounds like. It pulls too much water in the small intestine. And so we've tempered it a little bit. That's what happens sometimes on a carnivore diet, dumping syndrome, which is what it sounds like. It pulls too much water in the small intestine. And so we've tempered it a little bit.

That's what happens sometimes on a carnivore diet, dumping syndrome. Yeah, that's an interesting thing too because we realized like a lot of what we thought we knew about fiber is only really what we knew when our carbohydrate intake was really high. It's really probably not needed. You know, in like a carnivore diet, you see you don't need fiber. Right. But we temper that with a little bit of glucose so that the molecular weight goes down just a little bit.

The other interesting thing is highly branched psychodextrins are like a conic structure. And you know Febreze? Yeah. And I talked about this before in a different podcast, but Febreze and forget it. The reason you can do that is because that conic structure is hydrophilic on one side, hydrophobic on the other. So you spray it on the stink or whatever. The stink gets trapped in, and it stays that way until you reintroduce water. When you wipe it at some later date, and it reverses it,

and that stink goes into your washcloth. But because of that, that works for anything. You know, picture this like traffic cone. Amino acids could potentially get stuck in there. And amino acids don't have a high molecular weight, so it's difficult to get them into the small intestine unless they're bound to something with a high molecular weight. So utilize Febreze while you're working out. Or take field rations and spray it on your hunting clothes.

But yeah, so we actually have a research article comparing that to Gatorade and why we think that's actually a better sports supplement for in-game sports than Gatorade. Gatorade ain't half bad, huh? No, half drinks Gatorade is good. For real, the original – because Gatorade is from the Florida Gators in the 1960s, and the original formula was quite a bit different. And obviously they didn't use high fructose corn syrup. But what they were trying to do for their athletes, trying to figure out a thing to keep them energized and keep them hydrated and keep them from cramping.

So what happens is if insulin starts spiking, it's a sense of nervous system depressant. So if you're taking too many sugars during exercise that your insulin is increasing, you're not going to perform as well. So they realized they had to keep their carbohydrate intake really low on the Gatorade. But when they went to mass market, you can't sell that because it doesn't taste good. Now they have like the G2 formula. They use like artificial sweeteners to get the taste of it. But the G2 formula is closer to what the original Gatorade was. The original Gatorade was what, fructose and glucose of some sort?

Yeah, I think they used glucose, dextrose I think. And I've read this study story like a hundred times cause I know I get asked everyone to, but I always forget. And I think it had more sodium than it has also now because it doesn't taste good. Right. I don't see a caloric amount on it.

Is it because of the, you don't have to. Yeah. Cause of back to the FDA and what calories are, you know, single, single free form amino acids. You don't have to count as calories,

even though they have, they technically are more calories because you don't have to break apart those bonds to start the digestion process so what would be like a clork mount per scoop per scoop is 11 grams of carbohydrates and 25 grams of protein which would be a little under 150 calories okay what do you think uh what the fuck do you think happened to me uh when i was on my run the other day? Because no one really – I don't think anyone actually really knows. You took ketones, right? Yes. I took ketones.

I had some kratom. I had some modafinil. I had a lot of things going on that day. So there's a number of things that – modafinil is great, right? There's a number of things that can affect – I also had a runner's high. I was like in the middle of a run already. Well, you can get acute like hyperglycemic episodes if you're really dehydrated, if you're low in blood sodium, which is possible if you're sweating a lot. Are you doing carnivore right now?

No, no, no. I mean I've fueled up. Obviously you weren't. Never mind. I knew you were. Yeah, I need some carbs. You thought you know, like I... Obviously you weren't, never mind. I knew you were because you were... Yeah, I needed some carbs. You thought you were a hypo, yeah.

Yeah, so, because I'll see a high blood sugar in contest athletes, like contest bodybuilders all the time, like in the 300 range, from being sodium depleted and dehydrated. It's possible it was that, but I think it was a combination of probably not enough sodium in the blood,

taking the ketones, adding more carbohydrates, and then being a little dehydrated. And it was just enough that you were already not storing glycogen. Well, one, you had the ketones, which were kind of like an extra energy source. Your body was kind of battling different pathways because it normally wouldn't have the ketones if blood sugar was elevated. Normally, you would have the ketones if blood sugar was blunted. So you have that kind of working against each other.

Then maybe you were a little depleted in sodium, a little dehydrated, and then you added carbs on top of that. So you didn't have the water or the sodium to take the glucose to the muscle to store glycogen. And so then we added more carbohydrates to it and you had the alternative energy source. It was just enough, like perfect storm scenario.

Yeah, that's what it kind of seemed like. It seemed like just some weird circumstance where everything kind of came together or maybe the wrong time. Your A1C and everything is normal usually or your blood sugar? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything's good. Yeah, I would bet it was just, I mean, because that, like, logically, we know

that your blood sugar is elevated, so we know we weren't taking it to glycogen. And what takes it to glycogen is water and sodium. So most likely those two were deficient. But probably not super deficient or you wouldn't have felt good. So it had to be something else going on. The ketones as an additional energy source

seems to make sense. Right. Since we're on this topic, how often do you have athletes do blood work? Because like I've seen some younger athletes mention that, oh, my coach never really has me do blood work. I try to do it twice a year. And you can go to Merrick Health

backslash troponin nutrition or troponin or go to my website, Troponin Nutrition, and go to blood work. And you can see the exact Merrick blood labs that I recommend. But I recommend twice a year. And when I recommend doing it, most of my athletes are on PEDs and then use TRT a portion of the year. So what I have them do is their whole off season we push. And then we take like a four-week break before they would start a contest prep. Or actually, it's about eight weeks before contest prep. But at week four of that break, when they're on TRT, we'll get blood work.

And if it looks good, then we know that they're going to be okay to start the contest prep. If it's not, then we continue on, focus on health, and test it again in four weeks. And then we do the contest. And then after the contest, I keep them kind of on like a mild amount of everything for four to six weeks to get like take advantage of the post-contest rebound growth rates. And then then we go back to TRT and four weeks after that, they test. So that would be the second time in the year. How do athletes know?

Because like there are guys that are listening that work with a coach, right, who maybe does check their blood work. But there are guys that are listening that use PEDs and they're not working with anybody. So how do they know if they're fucking themselves up in a way if they're not? Like, do they just have to get blood work? But even then, even then you can get, it's hard if you're just seeing a GP, because if you carry a lot of muscle, your creatinine is always going to be elevated. You know, it should still be at least close to normal range, but it's, if you're 280 pounds, it's going to be very difficult to have it in normal range because creatinine levels are related to muscle mass.

And then worse, the EGFR, the glomerular filtration rate they give you, is an estimated one. And it estimates using that creatinine value and the average muscle mass of a male or female. So you get doubly off. So you can get really bad kidney readings without having bad kidney function, which really sucks because the thing most people on PEDs really need to worry about is kidneys. Your liver can regenerate. You can get cholesterol stuff back together. But your kidneys go bad and your heart goes bad. That's it.

Not much you can do. And so people see that and like if a doctor knows that, they'll say your kidneys aren't really bad and you can kind of let that snowball but there's other things also like if a lot of uh if you're on an ace inhibitor for blood pressure that can often artificially increase creatinine levels and so you like you really have to know what you're looking at because like a hard training bodybuilder say say, say this actually has happened to me. Say me when I was actually training hard. I go and I get blood work and my creatinine is like 1.4. So my EGFR is like 57 or something.

And my creatine kinase is sky high. And my AST and ALT are a little elevated. Well, the creatine kinase and AST and ALT from training recently, and they're within the range you'd expect because i had maybe a really hard leg workout yesterday and then my my actual like gfr because this happened to me years ago and i kind of panicked because i was like that's the first because i never even seen a gfr it was just always over 60 and it just said you know over 60 and uh and it said 57 or something so i panicked i went i asked to see a nephrologist and he was like no no, no, this is why, why, why.

And he did a 24-hour clearance test. And my true GFR was actually 135, he said, which is like better than it was supposed to be for my age. So I would recommend anyone listening, if you get a bad kidney blood work and you really want to know like what your actual filtration rate is, get a 24-hour clearance test. And you did mention that you have your athletes part of the year, they're using their PEDs for whatever, and then I guess it's their off-season that they're using TRT. Is there ever a reason for an athlete to, let's say that they are bodybuilding or this is just someone on TRT,

is there ever a reason to take a break from utilizing TRT? Or is that, do we know enough yet? I don't know that. I mean, we probably do know enough. I would say I don't know enough, but I don't think really. I mean, well, there's negative side effects to low testosterone. I mean, that's the problem we have is that we decide something's bad, like steroids are bad.

And so then that removes all true medical applications of them, which is dumb. A friend of mine recently is like, why don't you think about coming off that stuff? I'm like, why in the fuck would I do that? I feel great. My blood work's great. I look 10 years younger than I am. I have energy. I'm strong.

So yeah, the dangers of low testosterone are you can't just push them aside. So no, I wouldn't have someone come off. Now, I wouldn't say never, because if you get someone with uncontrolled blood pressure, their kidney function is all messed up, and they've got these serious things where we know adding an androgen to the mix like testosterone is going to increase blood pressure, increase fluid volume, which is going to put strain on the kidneys, then I'd say, yeah, I mean, this version of not optimally healthy is better than the version of really unoptimally healthy you are right now.

Yeah. You've probably come off before, right? For months at a time and things like that, right? Yeah, for like almost six years when I was in grad school and I'll never do it again. I didn't even realize how miserable, miserable. Because, I mean, I'm a bigger guy. Puberty hit me like a freight train. Like I was talking about earlier, like when I started working out, that was also I'm a bigger guy. Puberty hit me like a freight train. I was talking about earlier when I started working out.

That was also when puberty hit me. Part of the reason I started working out is because every male in my family across the board was really big, overweight. But everyone's like 6'300", you know? And, yeah, really, I got a bad – actually, in like third grade, we were learning about normals or averages or something. And I remember I got a bad grade on a test or something because I said the average man was 6'2", 50. So this wasn't happening. My cousins are all huge.

My dad, my uncles are all huge. And so I started working out, and then puberty hit me at the same time, and I gained like 100 pounds in a year. But where was I even going? I don't remember. We know some of the standard performance-enhancing drugs, and we know that when somebody gets with some of these TRT companies that testosterone is mainly prescribed and things like that. What are some other things that might be of benefit that are maybe just not on people's radar?

Well, yeah, like for joint health and stuff like BPC-157, TB-500, you're seeing that a lot. Those are peptides, right? Yeah, peptides. Yeah, peptide hormones. And then like some are glutide. It's really interesting right now. I'm curious what will come out of that because it's so new and it just blasted on the scene.

So hopefully we don't find out like it's a carcinogen or something because it's like blew up on the scene. But people are losing a lot of weight with that product. Yeah, dramatically reduced appetite. And it seems like even above the reduced appetite, like your cravings seem to be reduced. So even though your appetite is lower, in addition, the food you eat, you don't seem to mind eating healthy as much. The downside is some people report that the appetite suppression is like 100% due to nausea. Yeah.

But I haven't used it. But it seems to be really, really helpful. And I mean, like aspartame, we were talking about earlier, like Americans really need to pick their poison, you know, because you have people worried about artificial sweeteners, but one out of every two of us are going to die of obesity related illness, you know, and almost all of them are going to die because of, are going to have correlated diabetes, you know. All of them are going to die because of – are going to have correlated diabetes.

So I think we really need to like decide what we're going to do with things. What if somebody doesn't want to take like testosterone type things but maybe they want to kind of work their way around the peripheral a little bit, kick the tires a little bit and maybe not end up in the performance enhancement realm, like where it would be maybe against competition or just against like they don't want to take like steroids necessarily. Are there some good options for people to take that could maybe potentially in a more natural way ramp up their testosterone or their growth hormone or anything like that? Yeah, I mean, well, like there's peptides for growth hormone that are decently effective, Growth hormone or anything like that? Yeah, I mean, well, like there's peptides for growth hormone that are decently effective, like was it Thomas Harten, the growth hormone-releasing peptides, 2, 6. I can't remember all of them now. It's supposed to help body fat.

Yeah, and there's CJC. Yeah, and there's like the fragment one that's supposed to be mostly the fat-burning portion of it. Yeah, I mean, you know, modern medicine is amazing. You know, you don't – I mean, it seems crazy that someone would just want to take the hormone most, like, that we've evolved. It's already studied a lot. Yeah, and every single one of us has, you know. But you can do, like, a tricosterone, which is, like, has some interesting data showing that it improves natural testosterone. Almost anyone who's going to have low testosterone should be on DHEA here.

Even if they're supplemented with TRT, probably a lot of them should be supplemented with DHEA also. What does that do? It's the part of that precursor for like cholesterol. I can't, is it cholesterol to DHEA to androcyne dione to testosterone, or is it cholesterol to androcyne dione to DHEA? It's DHEA before androcyne dione, I think. But yeah, it's part of that whole process. It's like, it's the precursor is how we naturally synthesize testosterone so you know if you have testosterone

it's almost guaranteed you're gonna be low and also the things that make you produce testosterone and then also we try to do low cholesterol diets which is just not helping the problem but cholesterol is kind of the backbone of testosterone yeah yeah cholesterol is so important I don't want I mean I'm not a physician and this so I this is not my expertise, but I think cholesterol really probably should have a good look again by the medical community. If you look at rates of Alzheimer's, part of it was people weren't living as long, but that's really not true. Life expectancy wasn't as high, but it was really because so many more people died young. Once you hit middle age or really full adulthood, like age 24, our life expectancy has been pretty stable for hundreds of years, really. Ben Franklin was an old dude.

Once you made it through – an interesting thing actually is men are just naturally less robust. The male sperm is less robust. There's 125 male pregnancies. I learned this in school 25 years ago, so this may have been debunked, but I'm going to go with it. Like there's like 125 male pregnancies for every hundred female, but only 115 male births to a hundred female births because the male sperm for whatever that doesn't survive to birth as often. And then at the end of puberty, there's roughly one to one, a hundred men and a hundred women. That's because men are dumber when we're teenagers and kill ourselves.

But once you get through that phase, we all pretty much live pretty old, you know, 80, 85. And so I don't even remember what this rant was about. What were we asking? Something about old age or something? Nah, it's about... What you got over there, Andrew? You probably got something brewing. Yeah.

When it comes to people like jumping on a TRT cycle or testosterone cycle or TRT, something that gets paired a lot with it is Anovar. Is there anything that people need to be concerned about when taking Anovar? I mean, not really. You know, like you don't have to worry about estrogen. It was produced for me. People are celebrating. Yes.

Well, I mean, it is liver toxic. I mean, I think it's got C17 methylated, I think, right? Sure. Yeah. I think so. All the or17 methylated, I think, right? Sure. Yeah, I think so. All the orals are. Well, there's like proviron isn't C-17. Oh, okay. Yeah, but almost.

Yeah, I think that might be the only one. But yeah, so liver enzymes you got to worry about. But generally, no. I mean, it was really meant for kids. You know, like that was one of the early reasons for it. I shouldn't say no one should be on anything that affects your liver permanently. You shouldn't take Tylenol year-round. But you could make an argument that it's probably on the order as far as safety of a Tylenol if you're using sane doses.

I'm curious about this because you work with high-level bodybuilders. And there are a lot of young guys that do want to get into the NPC side of bodybuilding, right? So I know that when guys do that and they have to take that many PDs, there's really no way to do it extremely safe, but there are safer ways of doing it. So how do you know if you're working with somebody who's going to actually,

who knows how to do things in a safer way? Because there are guys who like, let's say they have genetic gifts. So a coach will just dump them on a bunch of shit say this will get you big dog it could also fuck you up yeah right yeah well what's crazy is like you can really crazy to me because i could even make an argument that the most rapid progress is is actually the healthiest way to use peds really or healthier way yeah so what in and out kind of wouldn't actually the healthiest way to use PEDs. Really? Or healthier way. Get in and out, kind of? Actually, the opposite. Hopefully I can make this work.

So what causes the main issues? The things that really spike blood pressure, the thing that really affect the liver, those are the orals. So stay away from the orals. What else is there that's really harsh, like a trend? Stay away from trend in the off-season. So what are we left with? The off-season.

Well, I'll explain. Because they have to compete. So basically use two compounds, test and an anabolic. You know, Deca, Nastron, EQ, MPP, Primobolin. And Primobolin is what I would say is actually the best.

That's Nsema's favorite, Primobolin. You better chill, dog. Because people are going to fucking believe you. I don't need that shit. Chill. He doesn't sleep either. We'll get to that later. But that's a very safe compound. You know, it lowers estrogen.

There's like zero risk for, you know, gynoestrogen side effects. It's not terrible on cholesterol. It's not very energetic. And so you do basically those two compounds. And then they're almost self-limiting in dose. And people don't want to believe this because I think the pros are on mass amounts of dose. But what happens is after a certain point,

if you're on like too much testosterone and things like that, your blood volume sky high, your appetite starts going away. You're lethargic as hell. You might get test flu. So if you have the flu, you can't eat and you can barely keep your eyes open. Your training is going to be terrible.

What is test flu? I don't know. To be honest, I don't know what anyone does. I think it's somehow correlated to like, I don't know if it's inflammation of the tissues from the volume of the injections because you have the hormone, you know, the steroid molecule dissolves out of solution and you have that like crystalline structure kind of in the muscle tissue.

It's irritant. There's solvent that's an irritant. Sometimes people get sick after they take a shot. Interesting. Okay. And I don't, it's not like, it's not in a medical journal, I'm sure. But, you know, if you feel achy and you're tired and you can't eat and you have no energy, your workouts are going to suck.

So take those two compounds, which are already like the safest in general as far as they're not the worst for blood pressure, they're not the worst for cholesterol, they're not the worst for liver. And then you have an upper limit because above a certain dose, you don't even feel good. Well, boom, now you have this cycle limit because above a certain dose you don't even feel good well boom now you have this cycle that you can run long term and then then in prop obviously you have to bring the trend in so you think trend for guys at that level is just like a staple it's just not i mean it's just not good it's not good it's hard on the kidneys it's hard on everything it's it

seems to have uh you know like the roid rage thing, I don't really believe, but it seems to, if there's one that does cause people to act different mentally. And Eric Serrano has done a lot of cool stuff on, like, neurotransmitters and brain chemistry with hormones, and I think there's a lot we don't fully understand on that, and it seems like TREN is a big one. Because TREN often converts to prolactin. You get a lot of weird things with TREN because it's so antigenic,

your sex drive probably goes sky high. But then if it increases prolactin, so you don't like the refractory period after you do it, you don't want to do it for a period of time. That's called the refractory period. And the reason for the refractory period is an increase in prolactin. You know, prolactin is what women produce their lactate when they have babies. Well, we produce it after we finish, so we don't try to make more babies for a little bit of time. So what you have is you have this extremely high sex drive, and then with this high prolactin levels, it's like a weird mix of – and then you probably are still horny, but then

you can't finish because your body's not really ready. Your body thinks it's not supposed to be doing this. And that's just like a – It's a weird cocktail. Yeah. Yeah. It's just not – thinks it's not supposed to be doing this. And that's, you know, just like a... It's a weird cocktail. Yeah, yeah. It's just not... And it's... It's like your dog humping your leg after it's been fixed.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. That's a great analogy. You want to still rub it on stuff. It's still there. Somewhere deep down in the cortex is an urge. Yeah. Yeah.

So I just think it's a terrible compound. But some of these compounds might be part of the game if you're a professional bodybuilder. Yeah. And that's the frustrating thing is there's only so much you can do. But if you're smart in the off season, you should be able to enter every contrast prep with normal blood work for the most part, not elevated blood pressure. And the blood pressure is key. And Tren raises blood pressure too.

But blood pressure is really the key because that's what kills bodybuilders. Their kidneys and then heart. And what happens is, is you, you know, if your blood pressure increases, obviously you have a garden hose and now it's pumping blood at a higher pressure. Well, at the end of the one, one end of that garden hose is a, is like a coffee filter. That's your kidneys. You know, if I have a nice slow flow through there, the kid, that coffee filter is going to catch all the gunk and let the water pass through no problem if i start blasting like a fire hose of pressure onto that it's going to start ripping that uh coffee filter apart you

know and that's damaging the kidneys and that's what happens and that one ends up happening is those toxins don't get filtered out uh your kidneys aren't filtering urine as well your blood volume increases even more your blood pressure increases even more your heart has to pump to pump against that. You know, in the heart, the way the heart works is, you know, it's this cavity, left ventricle. The muscle grows inside the cavity. So as your heart's working against a bigger weight, it's building muscle and that cavity is getting smaller. The heart rate increases faster. You know, blood pressure increases even more. And eventually it goes into what's called like a dilated cardiomyopathy. The heart just starts dilating all that back pressure, you know know and it's trying to basically save itself anyway

it can and then you get really rapid fluid fluid accumulation pitting edema in your lower legs and eventually it ends in pulmonary edema which if you notice like how many times as a bodybuilder died and you heard i just talked to him he said he's getting over pneumonia i just talked about he said he had a chest thing some chest cold but he thought he was getting over pneumonia. I just talked to him. He said he had some chest cold, but he thought he was getting over it. He was feeling better. It's always that, and that's what it is. It's pulmonary edema. It's an end-stage arena failure and heart failure.

And heart failure is misleading because it sounds like your heart failed. Heart failure, you know, like I was in heart failure after the plane ride out here. My ankles were a little watery. That's just because for a period of time it wasn't able to keep up with the circulatory demands, and there was excess fluid accumulation. You know, you go to an all-you-can-eat China buffet, you're in heart failure for a little bit afterwards. You're all bloated. But when it never goes away, congested heart failure, that's when it starts getting bad.

The end stage of that is pulmonary edema and death. Kind of curious about this because like obviously we've heard of some of these bodybuilders that have been dying, right? But there are a lot of guys who – like you mentioned, not every guy who takes PEDs is doing it so he can be on a bodybuilding stage. He's doing it because like he wants to be big and he wants to train hard in the gym. And some of these guys are now approaching their 40s, mid-40s, 50s, and we've already talked about getting blood work. But for some of these dudes that are just casuals and weekend warriors using PEDs and trying to train to get big. Is there a reason for them to try to downsize? Because it seems like if this is happening to some of these high-level bodybuilders, it's going to be happening to some gen pop who are just casually doing this shit.

So what do they need to be paying attention to so they don't end up in the same situation? For sure, blood pressure. But that's going to show itself in blood work early on as elevated creatinine levels and reduce kidney function, reduce glomerulofiltration, AGFR. That's really it. I mean, because if your liver enzymes get really out of whack, you can just take a liver supplement, stop taking anything that's raising your liver enzymes, stop working out, and it'll come back down. But your heart and kidneys really don't.

That's just blood pressure. Just keep your blood pressure under control. And I think the medical communities realize that, obviously, they're the medical community. But when I was first learning about blood pressure, my mom was a nurse, so I remember being young, and I remember hearing like 150 over 95 was high. Then I remember, I think when I was in college, we learned like 145 over 90 was what the numbers were. And then it was like 140 over 85, and now they're saying you don't really want it over 135 over 80 they keep lowering it

because we're really seeing like and it makes sense i mean you can reason it through picture any 98 year old person you've ever met in your life did they look like like a big huge dude with high blood pressure no you probably like your old grandma who probably had low blood probably can't stand up too fast or she'll pass out yeah and the one of the issues with high blood pressure? No, probably like your old grandma who probably can't stand up too fast or she'll pass out. Yeah, and one of the issues with the blood pressure, especially for guys that take PEDs, is that their red blood cell count is high. So the blood is a little thicker and it's harder to push through. Yeah, and then the risk of, I mean, blood clotting. And so the more red blood cells

you have, the higher risk of clotting you have. And so what happens is if you have like plaque buildup in an artery, like going to your heart, coronary artery, it might still allow blood to flow through. But if you have really thick blood and a tiny little clot that's floating around, it might be enough to get stuck there and then boom, that causes the heart attack. So that's really, it's like, so I mean, you can get your blood, your red blood cells down by taking like natokinase or giving blood, and everyone really should keep that in a normal range. But if you're on true TRT, it's less likely that you're going to be like outrageously high for red blood cell count.

When you say true TRT, you're not meaning like you're not on a high dose of TRT. Yeah, I mean you're working with like Mericalf, like a physician, and they're keeping you in the optimal range of testosterone. To kind of piggyback off of his question, do you think that people should maybe pay attention to like their body weight? Like maybe, like what do they used to weigh? Like what's their normal like fighting weight? And if you're 60 pounds heavier than you used to be, then maybe you should try to split the difference at least on that one. Yeah, for sure.

And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier, what does health mean? Because what's healthy when you're 22 is probably like, I want to play sports. I want to do pickup basketball. I want to be strong. I want to have sex. It's a different health than when you're 58 because now it's like you're 58. You're thinking back like, geez, I remember seventh grade. That was 40 years ago. In 40 years, I'll be long gone. I'm, you know, I'm really getting

to, you know, I'm closer then than I want to accept. And at that point, you have to think, okay, health for me now might not be, I'm still trying to have sex, but not quite as much. So I don't need to be quite, you know, I'm not like the pickup basketballs less often these days. I'm not trying to go rock climbing. I'm not trying to, you know, get in a fight or I don't have to, you know, like, so maybe the need to be muscular, you know, my, my version of health at that point is now the realization of I'm in 20 years, I'm probably right knocking on the door. And 20 years ago, I was 38 year old, man, that wasn't very long ago. I need to start my, my definition of health changes. And I think that's like, I don't hate the word health, but I hate the fact that, cause what health means is different for every person.

It's different for the same person. Moving target. Yeah, yeah. Because if you define health as just how long you live, then just starve yourself as close as you can to not dying without dying. I mean they do tests on – like they have mice living like the human equivalent of 200 years by just basically keeping them very close to starving to death their whole life and just slows down all the oxidative processes and stuff and they live quite a bit longer, which is also probably why Japan has the highest rate of centennials, highest rate of 90-year-olds because they have thin people and thin people live longer.

Sometimes that makes me wonder if like at a certain point we should purposefully downsize, right? Because like, you know, everything feels good for me now. I'm 260, right? But in 10 years, 15 years, should I, if I'm not actually dropping weight because sarcopenia is something that happens, right? Muscle loss happens.

Should I purposefully just drop a little bit of weight so I could live a little bit longer? Is that something you think people should take into account? Even if they're not on PEDs too? Absolutely. And like you said, muscle loss already occurs. So if your weight isn't decreasing, not only are you weighing more than you should, but now it's not good weight either.

Yeah. But even aside from that. You kind of just weigh this much though, and you kind of have weighed around this much even when you were younger. Yeah. I've been the same weight. You've been this weight-ish for the last like six, know you're i know your weight went down for a while but yeah yeah when i prepped like back in 13 or 14 before that prep i was 265 then i prepped down to 220 then i went back to like 255 250 and for jujitsu i've just

been around 245 250 and i'm creeping back to 260, but I'll be back. This is just my weight. What did you weigh before you lifted? Do you remember? I was 13, 185. 13, 185? Yeah. I was 180, 185 when I started lifting. Maybe you go halfway between just say 200 pounds and 260.

Maybe you end up at 230. Yeah, maybe that's what I do end up at. But it's something I legitimately wonder because you're, you're right, you don't see many big older people. How many? Seven feet? I mean, it's like nature is a cruel bitch, you know? Like, you don't, of all the great NBA players, how many of them are 90?

You know, like, you don't see seven foot 90-year-olds, you know? That's true. It's like little small things. It costs a lot to be that big. Yeah, it's a lot. Energy expenditure, yeah, for sure. There's a lot of's like little small things. It costs a lot to be that big. Yeah, it's a lot. Energy expenditure, yeah, for sure. There's a lot of stuff going on, yeah. It also makes me wonder, like, do you think that maybe some of these people should probably also start adding in some cardio into what they do?

Like you've become very efficient at running. That's probably going to pay some dividends in your long-term health. I hope so. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I don't think you could argue against that in any way. Your heart rate is going to decrease. The improvements on blood work is almost across the board. Just like what a heart attack is for most – there's different types of heart attacks.

There's like if you go into ventral fibrillation where they clear, they call that a heart attack, but that's a different type of heart attack. That's your heart. I've always wanted to use that thing on the bench. Right when you get it down all the way to the chest and have someone just nail you with that. I think you'd be so explosive. In a YouTube video. My hair goes.

If you've ever seen it, it's crazy though. Because the person just looks like their body explodes. What I think is interesting in that is how crude and non-medicinal that is. They're not starting your heart. What they're doing is they're stopping your heart and hoping it starts back up under normal rhythm. That's really what it is. It's called ventricular fibrillation. Your heart's just fibrillating.

It's just kind of quivering. And so what they do is they pass a massive amount of electricity through it to kill it. It's like smashing your computer screen. That used to be – you can do a pre-cordal thump. There's the pre-cordal section right here. If you thump it really hard, I don't think it'll ever work. But that was like before the AEDs. That's what they thought to do.

Yeah. Yeah. But the other heart attack is like a myocardial infarction. That's the common one. That's a blocked artery. And it's rare because people will go in and have no symptoms and they'll see that these arteries are 90% blocked. So they can get blocked pretty closely without causing issues. So what the issue is, is then when the heart needs extra blood flow through there, which would be

like at exercise, and that's when you get ischemia. So if you have an occluded artery and there's not only like 10% of the blood can get through, at rest you might be fine. But then I go shovel the driveway and I need more oxygen and that area of the heart cannot get more oxygen and it gets deoxygenated and dies. So you didn't have like a whole blockage. But you can get – or that's just called ischemia. It doesn't contract as well. And that's really what happens most of the time. It's someone – like smoking constricts blood vessels too.

So it's someone who doesn't have a blocked artery, but they're not healthy. So they have no real adaptation to exercise or anything. And they go out on a cold day, vasoconstriction. They're smoking a cigarette, vasoconstriction, and shoveling the driveway, energy exertion, and that triggers the heart attack. Wow. So even just from that, you being in better shape, your heart is better at utilizing oxygen. You're able to do things at a lower heart rate, and you're going to potentially survive a case like that that would kill someone else.

So if you're ever out smoking a cig and shoveling in the driveway, you're probably going to make it. How do you get these big guys to be able to – these big people that you work with, people that are getting jacked, how do you get them to be able to sleep well? That's – well, we have a product, and really outside of supplements is breathing, you know. I know you're big, like, nasal breathing. My wife specializes in sleep dentistry, and so always a CPAP, or I prefer, it doesn't seem to work for everyone, is I have a dental device you can get from a dentist, preferably one that specializes in sleep, and it pulls your lower jaw forward, and it kind of minimizes the ability to mouth breathe, forces nasal breathing. Makes a little more room for the tongue and everything.

Oh, yeah. It's been a lifesaver for me. It's just I forgot to bring it here. And you can tell the difference. Like my mouth is dry. I feel like I'm not with it. I'm so mad at myself because seeing the difference, it's like a CPAP that you never take off. That's the thing.

CPAP is great, but you pull it off every night. Imagine eight hours every single night of perfect sleep. It's like been a life changer for me. But then on top of that, there's things you can do. So basic like – and I could be wrong on this because, again, it's been 25 years since I learned this. But the brainwave chemistry is like when you're alert, you're in beta waves. When you start getting like calm and ready to sleep, you go to alpha waves.

And then when you fall asleep, it's theta waves. And then the deep sleep waves are delta waves. And then there's REM sleep, which is different, which is actually really active brain activity. But we have a nighttime formula called Hit the Rack. And we have a combination of products that most sleep products will give you like melatonin, valerian root, things, and GABA, things that try to put you in deep sleep. So we have a combination of things that work to put you in alpha waves. So you get kind of like calm and relaxed, you know, like lower anxiety. And then when you fall asleep, we have the normal stuff that everyone has to keep you asleep.

And then when you fall asleep, we have the normal stuff that everyone has to keep you asleep. So it's been great feedback on this because I think the problem with most people is you take like 10 milligrams of melatonin. Yeah, you fall asleep, but you're groggy half the next day. Yeah, so the two-phase action I think is really good. Pat Broccia, family, how's it going? Now, we talk about meat a lot on this podcast, which is why we've partnered with Piedmontese and have for years now because they have some of the best beef on the planet. All right. Piedmontese beef has cuts that are fattier in terms of the ribeyes, and they have also cuts that are leaner in terms of their flat irons. But you can get cuts for no matter what diet you're on. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yeah. Head over to Piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com. Check out EnterProboCodePower for 25% off your entire order.

And if your order is $150 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. What do you think about some of the stuff coming from Andrew Huberman? He's been crushing it with great information telling you to get out and get the sunlight and get the light in your eyes. It can help with your melatonin and help with a bunch of other regulation of your hormones and things like that. Yeah, I love that. And I think it's like you hear that. We're so dumb for how smart we are.

It's like how do – it's so obvious. Like we've been around for 200 200 000 years or something as humans right and for all but when do we get even get electricity you know like for most people weren't even having we didn't even have lights in their home until like 125 years ago so for 199 900 and whatever years we have this state and then we have this state so that our whole human existence was spent when we went to sleep when there was no light we were in light all the time we were outside in the sun all the time we didn't need to supplement with vitamin d because we were you know all the you know what did we eat we ate meat we ate fats we ate nuts we ate organ meat you know we we moved

we moved so much that we we would probably run for our first meal wasn't until we chased an animal for eight miles until they or eight hours until they died of exhaustion you know like clearly we were meant to eat you know like proteins and fats move a lot be outside a lot have our feet on the ground a lot be near water all the time sleep when it's dark and be awake when it's light and now we do the opposite of all that we don move. We have our phone in front of our face all day. We sit in the dark in a cubicle during the day. We're never outside. We never move.

We're never near water. Our feet never touch the ground. I mean, it's like you see all these things like, geez, not really rocket science. I should probably just think like what the obvious answer is. So do you have to like direct your clients on like, hey, try to have these certain things in your day? Because you probably work with people who are – they have office jobs. So they probably do fall into the typical routines that most people do fall into. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. The lack of movement. So it really varies because I have compartmentalized. Like some of my guys just want to be the strongest person they can be. They're powerlifters. Some of them want to be a bodybuilder. Some of them – I have a lot of like gut health issues and I have some cardiology patients, some diabetic patient clients.

So it really depends. But your general health person, yeah. Number one, I try to get them moving oftentimes during the day. We'll do a step count for the week. I don't force a day. I'll say something simple like make sure we get 50,000 steps per week in addition to whatever cardio we're doing. So if you get towards the end

of the week and you're not going to hit 50,000 steps, then walk extra to force it. And then as we go further, it might be 70,000 steps or whatever. And I'll say, so many digestive problems could be helped just by moving more. Walk after you eat. And I have people do that after a bodybuilding contest when they get really bloated.

All I have them do is just walk for a few minutes after each meal or take you know two or three 10 minute walks at some point during the day just move because it makes sense we're sitting you know you know a heart pumps blood away from the heart obviously what pumps it back to the heart nothing how does it get back to the heart well it has to get back there some way so picture the blood in my calf muscles right now how does it get back to the heart? There's blood vessels like this, but gravity's pulling it down. Well, there's valves all the way up the veins. And so when I walk, my calf contracts, it squirts, squishes those blood vessels, squirts the blood up past the next valve, past the next valve. If you're sitting in a chair all day, what am I doing? My legs, those blood vessels are compressed all day and gravity's just

pulling the water in my ankles. Nothing's pushing it back up. If I don't get up up and move i'm not recirculating that blood i'm going to hold water down there my electrolyte balance is going to get off i'm more prone to cramping when i do eventually lay down like at night see if i go right if i'm working all day and i go right to the bed now i'm laying flat where there isn't that gravity gets reversed all that blood now it goes gets forced through the heart system and it's like an overload on the heart. And that's actually like when you're in congestive heart failure, you can even die from that. Yeah, that's great information. I think some of the obvious stuff is some of the more powerful stuff. I think we go from a temperature-controlled house to a temperature-controlled car to a temperature-controlled coffee shop to a temperature-controlled coffee shop,

to a temperature-controlled workspace. And a lot of times in a workspace or in an office, sometimes people get all excited and they're like, oh, this is so great. You have such big windows. I can see outside. But God forbid anybody actually go outside. Yeah, the temperature control is like amazing.

Like think how intolerant we are to heat and cold. Oh, if your AC doesn't work for one day in your car or something or your house. To a degree. You know, imagine humans for centuries. Why is it so hot in here still? You can't wait five minutes or three minutes for it to cool down. Well, and that's like your dog goes outside. They don't put on a coat. They have active brown adipose tissue.

And we probably had a much more active brown adipose tissue system than we do. We don't need it now because I set the temperature to the degree 99% of my life. And somebody else walks by and changes it. Yeah, my kids got it. Andrew, you got anything else? Nseema, you got anything else? I wanted to ask about, sorry if I missed it, but like cardio that you recommend for people for dropping fat.

Not necessarily because you just mentioned walking, which is good for everybody, but some of your athletes, what do you recommend? Well, in general, I recommend HIIT, actually, but I do it a different way. I don't do like 15. My guys aren't running sprints. They're not athletes. Most of my clients are, but I have most people do the same type of HIIT. So what I'm thinking is we need to perform in the gym, and what's the hardest set in the gym, like a higher-up set of squats, a set of 20 on squats,

or like a set of 12 on deadlifts? You don't do them very often, but when you do them, you don't want your lungs to be the failure point. So I have people do one minute hard, one minute light. And it's kind of self-deciding how hard you push because you have to work hard for that minute, but it can't be so hard that you can't recover in the next minute. But then what that does is then it makes training, now training, we can just focus on training.

We, no matter what we're doing, our muscles are the failure point, not our lungs. It increases appetite. You get a little bit of EPOC, elevated post-exercise oxygen consumption, but that's probably on the order of like a few tens of calories a day. So not really much, but you get it. It's better than nothing. And then it also allows us to get a, basically, I have people do like 12 minutes of that kind of a standard three or four times a week. And that's replacing 20 minutes of pretty decently hard cardio.

You get to do it 55 percent of the time and you're only really doing six hard minutes. They suck because it's – you're talking like level 12 or 13 or for me like on the, you know, for someone in shape, that's probably not much. But for me, I feel like I'm dying. You know, I dropped down to like level two or three for the next minute and go back and forth like that. And it improves everything. Your appetite improves, your body fat levels stay a little bit lower. You can eat more calories now.

You can eat, so you have more nutrients passing through the body to build muscle or whatever, you know? So yeah. And obviously you're healthier. That's a good way of regulating it because like that minute you can only go so hard if you have 15 seconds you can go balls to the wall or even 10 seconds right but that minute puts a it puts a governor on how how hard you're going to go so they can actually maintain that yeah for me i thought i mean like

i don't say running especially but the running for what it does as far as what your heart rate is what your calorie count is is really good cardio for all overall health, but you're not going to get bodybuilders to run. And this is about as close as I can get to getting them similar to what, what running would do. I know you mentioned that you have them pay attention to their blood pressure, which makes a lot of sense. Some of you guys are probably tracking their sleep. Do you have them pay attention to their resting heart rate and any of that? Resting heart rate sometimes, but not that much.

I thought you were going to say sleep. I have interesting thoughts on sleep. Almost every really strong guy or bodybuilder I knew slept terribly. So I think there's really not as much correlation. And I would argue probably every world record ever set was done and probably not a good night's sleep because you were stressed the night before. So you think that just like these big athletes in general, their sleep is going to be kind of shit? No. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it is. And I don't think it's like good or bad. I just think it doesn't impact things as much as we probably think it would. I don't think, you know. It's probably individually based. Yeah, but I think like if you sleep less than you want to, I don't think it's going to slow your rate of muscle growth. I mean, you know, and I keep – because that's cause that's where my brain goes. Cause most of my clients, that's what their worry is. You know, it's depending on what your definition of health

is that things matter a lot. Obviously not sleeping is not good. It increases your risk of a heart attack, all, all, all types of cardiovascular issues. You need to sleep, but most people setting a world record slept terribly the night before so i think you could argue that and then like most bodybuilders sleep terribly they all have sleep apnea so i think it's hard to argue that you're not going to build muscle if you don't sleep good you know yeah absolutely not so what what is an alarming resting heart rate number for some of these guys by the way just so people alarming yeah over 100 but i think over 80, you should put some effort into getting it lower. But a 280-pound guy, he's going to be higher.

I mean because his focus is being 280 pounds. 280 pounds with no body fat, his focus isn't being healthy. But yeah, I mean yeah, like a person who wants to be healthy, under 80 for sure. And I think that's not even – because even low in that would be better. But I think one thing people do is they make it seem like – they make health seem so daunting. It's like here is where healthy is. It's like, well, you're down here. This is healthier than here.

So if your resting heart rate is 108, yeah, I would like you to be under 70 if we could. But maybe you're under 60. But you're not going to get there if you're 108. But under 80 is something anyone can really attain with getting their weight down, getting their blood pressure down, and some form of cardiovascular activity. Gotcha. We didn't really talk much about training, but when you are working with some of these guys, I'm just kind of curious. I know you probably pay attention to frequency per body part, et cetera. Do you, I know you probably pay attention to frequency for per body part, et cetera.

But like if somebody wants to, let's say they want to get bigger, do you think they need to focus much on the big three? This is something that we've been talking to people that focus on bodybuilding a lot with. Do you think that they need to squat, bench, deadlift? Well, yes and no. I think there's a couple of things. I think it's a definitional problem also like healthy because, yeah, if you want to add, you want the scale to move, you got to build them up them up you know like getting my biceps bigger is not going to make the scale move yeah so if i want to be an offensive lineman and i need to carry a lot of lean body mass yes the chest back and legs are where most of the lean body mass is adding an extra three ounces to my triceps it's going to look good but it's not going to make me bigger you know but if you're a bodybuilder

bigger then yeah big arms are very important so it's like you kind of really got to define it but then also i think a tricky one is look at power lifters versus bodybuilders legs you know and almost bodybuilders are much bigger legs and so you have to think what's going on so squatting as far as getting bigger meaning i need to see the scale heavier is probably really good because it probably works more muscle groups than any other movement. So the potential for stimulating muscle protein synthesis across the greatest number of muscle groups is probably highest in squat or a deadlift. Yeah.

But if I want really big quads, is squat the best movement? Because I know for myself, I can increase my squat pretty quickly by just winding my stance, putting the bar lower on my back, sitting my hips back further, putting on knee rest, putting on all things that take some of the load off my quads. And I could target my quads much more by putting my heels elevated slightly, doing a high bar squat, you know, maybe more narrow stance and then doing all kinds of things, changing the way my body position is to increase the load on the quads versus the other muscle groups.

So it's a really loaded question. is to increase the load on the quads versus the other muscle groups. So it's a really loaded question. But yeah, I mean, I typically use compound movements almost exclusively. I mean, a few isolations. But I figure I'm trying to stimulate muscle protein synthesis across the greatest number of muscles possible. The harder an exercise is by how out of breath I get means it's probably working more muscles.

And so back to aside from all the science and everything, if you just break it down to what seems to make sense, it's like, yeah, it's working more muscles. It's probably going to create more muscle protein synthesis. Yeah, I think every bodybuilder pretty much forever has used some version of a bench squat or deadlift. You know, maybe they were doing stiff leg deadlifts. Maybe their squats, maybe they were replacing it with a hack squat machine

or a leg press. So you don't necessarily have to load the barbell on your back, but for some guys, they found that to be really helpful to actually do the actual squat itself. Yeah, some movement, yeah. That's a better way of saying it, yeah, because obviously the squat motion where there's a weight above your body

and you're pushing through your legs is, because the weight being above your body is really important because the leg press works the same core muscles like the same leg muscles as a squat but you're not getting the back activation you're losing probably some of the hamstring stuff because the hamstring cross the hips and you're not you know your body's not leaning forward you're losing a lot of the stabilization stuff and so yeah i think that's a better way to put it yeah every like the movements that work the most muscles are going to build the most muscles.

Take us on out of here, Andrew. All right. Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Please drop those comments down below. Let us know what you guys think about today's conversation. And I make sure you hit that like button and subscribe. If you guys are not subscribed already,

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