Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 328 pt. 1 - Eat Like a Bodybuilder ft. John Meadows

Episode Date: February 12, 2020

Part one of our two part series with legendary bodybuilder John Meadows. In part one, John talks about dieting during his competition days, his success and failures and what is the best way to gain weight. John “The Mountain Dog” Meadows is an IFBB Pro Bodybuilder, training and nutrition expert and entrepreneur. John works with many different athletes across the country to help them reach their physique goals. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Visit our sponsors: ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Perfect Keto: http://perfectketo.com/powerproject Use Code "POWERPROJECT10” at checkout for $10 off $40 or more! ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject  ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject   ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok ➢Power Project Alexa Skill: http://bit.ly/ppalexa FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

What up Power Project? Today we have one of the most highly anticipated guests, one of the most requested guests of all time, the one and only legendary bodybuilder, John Meadows. We wanted to make this interview as easily digestible as possible, so we decided to break it up into two separate pieces. Part one today is going to be all about diet. John is going to share some of his successes, some of his failures, when it came to his diet when he was competing. These are all things that you can implement right now as we teach you how to eat like a bodybuilder. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by Perfect Keto. You guys know Mark is on his Carnivore 100 where he's decided to eat nothing but meat for 100 days straight. One of the things that we hear from a lot of people is that they tend to get headaches or they tend to get even dehydrated while eating just meat. Salting your meat sometimes might not just be enough to get electrolytes.

Head over to perfectketo.com slash power project. Check out the electrolytes. And Seema utilizes these when he's rolling all day long doing jujitsu and power lifting. Head over to perfectketo.com slash power project at checkout. Enter promo code powerproject10 for $10 off any order of $40 or more. And if you hit the century mark, if you spend $100 or more, use promo code PowerProjectBundle for $25 off your order. Again, this is a

two-part series, so this is part one of two talking about diet. Tomorrow's episode is going to be all about training, so make sure you come back and check that one out. But for now, enjoy the show. We've been talking a lot of bodybuilders lately yes we have it's been awesome we're trying to we're trying to bodybuild over here no one will let us i don't know yeah well so it won't be live because we're recording oh yeah

but we are but we're on oh snap yeah andrew's on a lot of shit i just came out of the bathroom guys got needles hanging out of his butt all right it's like dude what the i see those all the time dude what is he stopped but he hasn't no he can't stop you are my coach can't stop shut up can't stop won't stop like he did he over here um i did bring in homemade peanut butter cups oh my god i saw that you did see okay so i wasn't sure if you were in that text my metabolism's already offended. Are you allowed to? Oh, you can't have that, can you? Nope.

Nope. I'm eating meat. That's good. I brought them in. I brought them in because I can't eat. I had plenty yesterday, but I can't have them now. You brought a lot, right? So there's some left after. There should be some left.

I don't know for sure. Shout out to the Kansas City Chiefs on a well-played game. That was pretty awesome to get a chance to see it. I didn't. You didn't care. You still don't care. The biggest game in all of sports and he doesn't care. That's awesome.

That would actually probably be the World Cup. That's true. I mean, it's probably true. No, you are right. In all of football currently, yes. In the States, we'll say in the States. Yeah, in the States. That's fair.

For sure. Yeah. But, I mean, yeah. Unfortunate. It was very unfortunate and upsetting. We got a Sacramento native on the Niners. El Gro. What was it?

Armstead. Yeah. Eric Armstead. A bunch of my homies know him. I don't know the guy, but he's huge. He's massive. He's a big boy. I was at some CrossFit this weekend.

I was CrossFit. No, I wasn't actually CrossFitting, but I was at some CrossFit like seminars and stuff talking nutrition and things like that. And I got to go to Greg Glassman's house on what day was that? Saturday night. Yeah. And then Sunday was the seminars, which they don't care about football either over there at CrossFit. Did you miss the Super Bowl for that? No, they just played it. We watched it there. So it was cool. But I understand. I understand CrossFit a lot better.

There's people that might listen to this going, no, you don't. If you get too close to the flames, I've heard it can sometimes be dangerous for some people. But everything I saw, they were, everyone was extremely welcoming, including Greg Glassman. And we'll, you know, hopefully get him on the show someday. And I said, a great experience. Got a great time. And I can kind of see why they made some of the big moves that they made more recently. They, you know, had to let go of like a hundred people.

They got rid of a lot of media. They got off of social media completely and brought everything like in-house i don't know if they're still yeah they got they got they got away from everything really i think i think there's still like reebok crossfit games because that's a combined effort i believe um but when i went there i recognized why they did that because so there's two seminars going on that day one was like the whole nutrition summit that was going on which is kind of like a health summit talking about um prevention and also a lot of rebuttals to game changers they had us watch game changers which was really funny you

guys went through the whole documentary went through the whole documentary and then uh additionally they um additionally they had their level one certs going on during the day. But I was fed from the time I got there until the time I left. And it was like, okay, now I see why they cut out the outside world. Because they don't need it. They built such a wonderful structure within everything that they're doing that they don't need it. They don't need it. It would be like if you showed up at jujitsu and you got there at breakfast

time and they fed you, then they fed you for lunch and you kept training and practicing and watching movies, continuing your education. Right. And then your, um, your sensei was like, you know what, dude, like we're shutting down some of this cameras and like, we're not going to worry about social media and stuff. We're just going to concentrate in here because people keep giving a shit no matter what we do. And we don't really care so much anymore about that we're focusing on

we're going to bring everything in in the in uh in-house and we're going to work on the people that already believe in it isn't that um interesting i'm just curious what you think like because i i don't know exactly what you saw that um that i guess lets the reason that it's good but wouldn't that cause kind of like an echo chamber? Like, you know what I mean? Where it's only one idea being shot through. And I mean, I guess it's like,

they don't want anything else coming in, but couldn't that be a negative or it was what you saw there, which I don't know what it was. Yeah. It's a positive. I think it's a positive. Cause there's still, they still have so many outside influences.

Like I have nothing to do with CrossFit, you know, and they, they invited me in. It's not like they, it's not like they're vetting you and checking everything that you've ever done. Although, although they do, uh, they, they do have their discretions, I'm sure. But like they, um, you know, they welcomed me with open arms and there was like, you know, guys like Gary Tobbs were there. There's other CrossFitters there. There's a guy I met as just

a physician. He's just, I'm not just a physician he's just i'm not just a physician but he's you know like a ear nose and throat doctor you know there's people from like kind of all walks of life and so um and there's people that have disagreements and you know there's people that had different points of view on certain things some people liked some of the stuff that was said in game changers other people you know refuted it there were some people uh you know they most were pro crossfit i would say but um yeah there were some people with some different different backgrounds and stuff like that and even greg glassman himself is a former meathead he used to train at goals gym venice and so he knows a lot of like bodybuilders

and stuff like that and dave castro has his military background and stuff and yeah i don't know i just I think it's uh it's cool but like I said like that's day one for me you know I haven't been around it as much as someone like a Jason Kalipa or something like that you know and it's still primarily paleo yeah yeah paleo yeah they well they so they have their health side of things which is different than um it's probably a little different than what they, they're teaching that in their boxes to help fight disease and help people be healthy. So they're not necessarily, like if someone wants to be a CrossFit Games competitor, it's not necessarily like, hey man, you can't eat any carbs, you know?

And they're not really, they're not really saying that you can't eat carbs either. They're just saying like, they really just do it. They do a good job from what I've seen so far of just presenting information. You know, here's the way that you can eat. You could use some protein leveraging. You want to primarily eat meat because you're going to get a lot of your nutrients from that. And then any of the extras that you get are on a need basis for yourself, for for your goals you know that type of thing cool so what can you guys tell me about today's guest we got a guy on here today his name's like the mountain dog or something is he a pro wrestler yeah yeah mountain dog i got we gotta ask him

how he got that name so what i i mean he's one of the most like requested like guests like ever i don't know he has a lot of different body besides from all the porn stars yeah well yeah them too but no he has a lot of different bodybuilding techniques a lot of like it's like he just takes everything in bodybuilding and puts it together logically it's like everything he does make sense we need to find smaller bodybuilders to get on the show you know we need to find people that are like a little less just not in as good a shape. So then we can be like, yeah, look at this is a bodybuilding community and we're like

kicking their ass, you know, but that hasn't been the case. I mean, we had big Ron in here and he's fucking jacked. Oh my God. John Meadows is jacked. I mean, these guys are, I guess, you know, the truth of two is like IFBB pro, like it's just, it's just not a game. You know, it's, these people are, it's, the truth of two is like IFBB pro, like it's just, it's just not a game. You know, it's, these people are, it's like the UFC.

Yeah. No, it's seriously shocking. Cause like, I think John, I'm going to steal this pen from you since you have two. I think John, he got his pro card recently, but he's been bodybuilding for a long time. Same thing with our last guest. Like he was bodybuilding for decades and he just got his pro card and then he retired. And I'm just like god dang it's like this is a long-term sport this isn't just something you can enter into and

yeah it's interesting nowadays to try to get a pro card as a heavier person you know even if you're just upwards of 200 pounds it's going to be hard no matter what yeah you know because if you're a smaller guy then you'd have to uh i i would just imagine you you have to be hard no matter what, you know, because if you're a smaller guy, then you'd have to, I would just imagine you have to be short. Right. And then if you're six, three, like, good luck filling out that frame. You know, it's going to, you got to, you got to be absolutely just gigantic. When we had Jay here, I was like, Hey, can you turn this guy into a pro bodybuilder? And he was like, he'd have to gain a lot.

Like he was being serious. He's like, he'd have to gain a lot of size. His eyes lit up, you know, you have to gain a lot of weight. And serious he's like he'd have to gain a lot of size his eyes lit up you know yeah you have to gain a lot of weight and i'm thinking like wow like and semen is fucking huge so like how much bigger does this guy need to be no dude in the off season like for ifbb if i wanted to do bodybuilding i'd have to be in the 300s off season like like cool off season 330 340 pounds if i wanted to be an IFBB pro. That's a lot of that'd be so cool. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. John Meadows on the show today. Really excited to have him on. And, you know, he's got, he's got an interesting background. You know, we talked a lot about

lifting through it. And I know he started at a really young age with, you know, at 13 years old. And we'll just get the, you know, some of the information straight from him. But then he's worked with some great people. He's worked with Dave Tate and he worked with a guy named Eric Serrano, who people don't know. But Eric Serrano, and we can get the more information from John, but Eric Serrano, in my opinion, is the guy that brought branch chain amino acids and fish oil to the market over 20 years ago, maybe longer ago. And he kind of did that through Charles Poliquin. Charles Poliquin brought the information to the masses because he's a different personality. He's a special person. And Eric Serrano is a little bit more behind the scenes type of guy. I don't think he cares that much about uh the limelight and stuff like that but yeah a lot of the stuff came from him and then i know eric serrano also works with uh oh man he works with corey gregory who's corey gregory corey gregory is uh max

effort muscle yeah former muscle farm guy oh wow okay yeah he's uh you'll You would know who he was if you saw some posts from him and stuff. And we're trying to link up with him at the Arnold, too. Yeah. That'll be fun. Corey Gregory, I think the other day on IG, I think he squatted six something. He weighs like 170. Okay. Time to find Corey.

And he pulled up his shirt and he's like- Still ripped. Yeah. Still ripped. Maybe he's 180. I don't know yeah he's dope look at this guy oh here we go the mountain dog is um look okay or it's a little blurry uh it looks it's great yeah it looks all right yep

yeah there we go all right this looks kind of funky on my end i didn't want you to put out something that looks crazy. What's happening? Yeah, everything's happening. We got the Mountain Dog on the show today. We're pretty excited. How did you get the name the Mountain Dog? Let's start there. Well, I am a big fan of Bernice Mountain Dogs.

And I used to be on a lot of forums back, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago. And I'd write stuff and I would say, well, here's what I think about this. Here's what I think about this. And people started saying, oh, well, that's Mountain Dog this, Mountain Dog that. And it just kind of stuck. I was like, well, I love Mountain Dogs. And so it just kind of stuck. So, yeah.

So there you go. We were just talking before we had you on the show here. We were just talking about how tough it is to get a pro card. And I believe you got yours kind of towards the end of your bodybuilding career. How long did it take you? You know, it's probably a lifelong worth of work. But how long did it take, like a real concentration towards getting that IFBB pro card? Well, my first contest was in 1985. Okay. And my,

were you even born? No, that was my birth year. I didn't know they had bodybuilding back then. That's crazy. I did my first pro qualifier in 1998. I did, I want to say 16 pro qualifiers and finally won it in 2014, I believe. Wow. So six, you know, so that's, you know, what, 15 years, 16 tries. So I definitely didn't take the quick road. And what was the, what was the thing? What was like the, was there a turning point? Was there like a, you know, was there like a year or two where it really started to was like the was there a turning point was there like uh you know was there like a year or two where it really started to seem like it was like in sight and then you just had to like bring up your legs a little bit or you know take a bunch of extra peptides like what was what was the kind of you know what was the thing that you were like oh man i'm probably

not that far away right now okay Okay, so a couple things happened. So, number one, back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the competition was very, very tough. It was very tough. And the depth at the national shows was amazing. Like, we always wanted to make the cut, we called it. The cut was in the top 15 if you got 15th place at the nationals and like 1998 for example you were a stud wow so um they started giving out a lot of pro cards so it kind of watered it down you know i had gotten as high as fourth at the usa fourth at the north american eighth at USA. So I was kind of like in the middle, but I didn't win.

And honestly, I hate to admit it, but the truth is it just got to be a little bit easier to get a pro card. And then a couple other interesting things happened. So I don't know if you guys know, but in 2005, I had a very rare disease that caused me to lose my entire colon, my large intestine. And so, you know, I was told that, you know, you can forget it. You know, this career is over. Everything's going to be a little different now. And it took me years to come back from that. So there was a delay there.

And then when I came back, I had actually, other than having a bunch of scars on my stomach, I actually made myself even better. And people were like, I don't understand. You know, all these guys lose their colon. They're all emaciated, you know, and somehow you've added contest weight and look better. So I started knocking on the door. I got a couple of second places. And then, you know, then it finally happened. Can you map out that process of recovery for us?

Because like, I mean, I just had a friend that had a surgery too. I forgot what it was. It wasn't his colon, but he lost a lot of weight like that. So you must have lost muscle. Was it difficult for you to get back in? Like, how did you go about that? How did you plan things out for yourself? Well, you know, I had trained for many, many years and the old saying about muscle memory and all that stuff, you know, is absolutely true.

The hard part for me was I ended up having so many surgeries done on my stomach. My linea alba basically disintegrated. My fascia tissue right there basically disintegrated. I started getting what pregnant women get, this diastasis recti where your abs kind of start to split out. I actually had a very unique surgery done where my abs are actually sewn together. So I mean, they're actually sewn together, which is pretty rare. So I had to be really careful from the perspective of how I was training to not, you know, cause any more damage. But in terms of the muscle coming back i'm a big believer and there's a you know i'm i'm a big believer and as long as you you kind of activate load and exhaust the muscle fiber it's going to respond you don't have to do the same exercises

over and over as long as you're hammering the fibers you're loading them hard you're exhausting them then you'll be okay so fortunately it worked out do you almost kind of think that the body like maybe just doesn't really know you know that big of a difference between a, you know, a seated lap pull versus a one arm lap pull if the stress is similar? Is that kind of the thought process? a little different a little different you know depending on the angle you're gonna have a little different activation you know where you know an incline bar ball for example versus a decline bar but obviously that's going to work a little differently in terms of stress on the muscle fibers you know muscle fibers have an origination but they don't all insert in the same place you know like

if you look at your chest you know that, all that basic stuff. So yeah, Mark, that's, that's what I think, man. I think that if you're hitting the right angles, then it just becomes a matter of, and I know a lot of people disagree with me on that and that's okay. But I think as long as you have a really good mind muscle connection to bodybuilding, you can really tap into the right fibers uh and then again you just load them with the right amount of resistance and you exhaust them you know a lot of people are on the bandwagon these days we'll just touch the muscle more often just touch it i that's just a warm-up to me you know going in and training your arms every single day and then three sets of 10 of curls to me like that's just kind of a warm-up um unless those sets of 10 of curls to me. Like that's just kind of a warmup.

Unless those sets of 10 are all to failure, maybe a little bit beyond failure. I just think that, you know, you have to have, you have to not only load the fibers, really exhaust them, really challenge them, give them something they have to adapt to. In particular, as you get more advanced, okay, then obviously you need to be even more creative. You need to push the fibers a little harder.

You know, if I tried to do the same things now I did when I was 12, 14, 16, 18, 25 years old, it wouldn't work. So, you know, anyways, rambling a little bit there. How were you able to keep your stomach from getting big? Cause you were mentioning the surgeries and stuff, and that seems to be a huge problem, especially amongst guys that are really trying to get big because we we a lot of times use the compound exercises to get big. But then sometimes it's at the cost of losing, you know, being like symmetrical. Well, I went that route in back in 2001, where I just tried to gain as much weight as I could. And I got to 260 pounds, you know, I'm five foot six. And it did not help. All it did was give me a bigger stomach.

And I think one of the problems, I don't even think it's so much the exercise. I think I think guys overeat nowadays. even think it's so much the exercise. I think, I think guys overeat nowadays and then, you know, you kind of mix in insulin and some other things and, um, get a little visceral fat going and all of a sudden your stomach is bigger. But I think that the whole notion around just gaining as much weight as you can, like it's a double-edged sword. Like, you know, you need to have a certain amount of fat, but there's a certain point beyond that where I don't think it's real productive. So I made the wrong decisions. I made a lot of mistakes. I tried to gain too much weight and it backfired. And then the, and then what really sucked was, okay, now I got to do more cardio. I got to lower my calories even more to get in shape. And by that

time you eat up some muscles. I'm like, well, damn. Yeah. You yeah you know you know let's talk about this for a little bit bulking because i i i love this topic when should an individual like what how should guys think about gaining weight and gaining size because when most guys want to bulk they like you mentioned eat as much as possible they want to see the scale go up three or four pounds every single month um how should one structure how much weight they're gaining and then when they should stop They want to see the scale go up three or four pounds every single month. How should one structure how much weight they're gaining and then when they should stop the period of bulking and maybe just maintain that for a while? How should guys think about it? Well, there's a couple.

There's actually a lot of things to think about there. There's, okay, what level is the person at? If they're a beginner, they're going to be able to move a lot faster than somebody who's advanced. You've got that to look at. Are they enhanced? Are they natural? You've got that to look at. I see a lot of these natural guys that'll go into these big caloric surpluses. And I personally think that's a bad idea. I think if you're 300, 400 calories, maybe 500 in the surplus, that's plenty. If it was just a matter of eating as much as you can,

then we would all eat 10,000 calories a day and we would all be monsters. Your body can only build so much muscle tissue so fast. And even the guys that are enhanced, they think it gives them kind of an unlimited ability to eat. And it sure helps. It sure helps. I mean, it's nice to have muscle protein synthesis that's ramped up through the roof and maybe you're taking GH and so you're staying leaner. But so you do have a little bit of flexibility there. But I think, I think probably the biggest mistake people make is this, they're just in too much of a caloric surplus. And then, you know, as you continue to gain weight,

you know, then things probably the number one thing that comes to my mind is insulin sensitivity. So a lot of people just think, well, it's just carbohydrates. If you're eating too many carbohydrates, you get kind of insulin resistant. And that whole process of pushing nutrients in your muscle cell starts to malfunction, but it's not just carbohydrates as calories. So if you're in this big surplus month after month, after month, you get eventually get to where you're a little insulin resistant, which means you're not partitioning nutrients as good into the muscle. And so then what happens is your body starts getting inflamed, you start getting more fat. You know, nothing good is really happening,

like you, you can continue to gain weight, but you're just continuing to gain fat, you're not really gaining any muscle. So when I tend to see things like that, I think to myself, okay, I need to pull back on my calories pretty hard and try to reestablish some insulin sensitivity, you know, and everybody's a little different in that regard, um, how long they do that, what it takes to get them there. But I think just generally to answer your question, you know, get in that surplus, stick with it, push and push and push. But then when you can't get a pump, you're not getting muscle, you're not getting stronger. Like when you see all these things happening, it's like, okay, a bell should be going off. I need to change something now. Do you think your average person, um, should employ some bodybuilding type of things? Like, should they bulk, uh, should they,

uh, like cut, um, even somebody that, you know, just, uh, just want, they just want a better physique. They don't necessarily want to be a bodybuilder. They just want to have, I guess, like what I'm trying to say is like, they want a better body fat composition. And it seems to me like no one does it better than bodybuilders. So a lot of the methods that they use, it might be hard though, for somebody to understand, you know, a regular office worker that's 200 pounds and feels kind of fat, but maybe they came down from being 250, but they've been dieting for too long. And maybe it's time to, you know, implement a little bit higher calories. How would you handle somebody like that?

Yeah, I don't see any downside with that at all. I've always thought that, at all. I've always thought that, you know, your body has this desire to be in homeostasis. So, like, no matter what you're doing, your body just adjusts to it. You know, if you're on low calories all the time, your metabolic rate slows down, all these things happen, and it makes it to where it's really a dead-end road. You can only cut so many calories. And the same is true for just eating a ton. That's, that's not a good idea either. I've always felt like, you know, it's good for people to do that. You know, eat extra, get stronger, gain some muscle. You know, there's, you can only do it for so long then pull back a little bit and i think those complement each other it's kind of like bodybuilding and powerlifting you know

i've always felt like they complemented each other i always felt like there's things powerlifters do that can help bodybuilders you know and i trained at louis like yourself and i always felt like there's things bodybuilders do that can help power lifters. So I see that kind of in the same mold as I think it is a good idea to be in a caloric surplus and a caloric deficit. And like I see, I see a lot of benefits to that as well. For someone who's focused on, I guess, gaining muscle, because a lot of individuals that listen to this show, they don't do high carbohydrate diets. So what do you feel is better for someone who wants to put on a good amount of muscle? Obviously, adequate protein is important. But do you believe that higher carbohydrate, moderate fat is superior to lower carbohydrate, higher fat, and when protein's equal on each side? Well, so first of all, I think I'm not into any dogmatic type of diet. I'm not an anti-carb guy.

I'm not an anti-fat guy. I think that foregoing carbs is probably a mistake because it's a very readily available fuel source to drive not only workouts, but to help with some insulin response so you recover better. I think cutting out your fats is a very bad idea you know hormonally um and things like that so there's um i'm not i don't really have a way that everybody should eat i think if i were to characterize it i would say it's a balanced macronutrient profile you get enough protein i'm not real big on these massive protein diets either not because i think they're unhealthy i just think it's unnecessary you know i mean i've ate a lot of the higher um percentage of however you say it in my diet through the years but i think if you're getting a gram to one one to 1.25 grams per pound i actually think that's plenty as long as your other macronutrients are fine. Now, carbohydrates, I think, you know, if you really want to fine tune it, now you can start putting them around your workout.

So, you know, if you're consuming carbohydrates before training, I know a lot of people say, well, it hasn't been converted into glycogen, blah, blah, blah. Well, I don't like training hungry, so I at least need something that is in my stomach for mechanical digestion. But I still feel more energy if I have some food in me. The difference would be like in the morning. I don't think you necessarily need anything in the morning as long as you had a big dinner the night before. I'm actually a believer in intro workout nutrition just because I think it's the recovery part's the recovery part. You know, there's, you drive some insulin response, you reduce cortisol, they can measure muscle protein breakdown. There's a couple of different ways to do it, but you know, we see three methyl histidine, which is a marker

muscle protein breakdown is greatly managed by having essential aminos and carbs during your workout. And then afterwards, you know, I'm not in any particular hurry to eat and I'm not, I don't think it has to be incredibly rapid carbs or incredibly rapid protein, unless you just haven't ate and you're fast, then you probably speed probably matters a little bit then. But generally I just like to have people eat a balanced whole food meal. Um, but, um, so yeah, I mean, you know, and you just kind of play around with it. Um, if I'm going to play around with somebody's diet for, as they're gaining weight and I tend to, uh, you always want that peri workout time to be very, very heavy with nutrients. And then as I have someone gain weight, I might start adding more carbs to the other

meals. And then the converse is true. If I'm trying to get them leaner, I'll start pulling carbohydrates away from the other meals, but I leave them intact for the workouts. I think it's very important that when people go to the gym, they're fueled and they can train hard and keep their muscle or build it as opposed to going into the gym to think, I'm just going to burn fat. I'd rather someone go to the gym and think, I'm going to build muscle,

and then just let their overall calories determine if they're losing fat or not. Yeah, I like the approach. And just to kind of make it make more sense for some of our audience, we've been talking quite a bit about lower carb diets. We've also been talking about intermittent fasting and utilizing some of those strategies. But what I want to make perfectly clear here is that the style of diet that you're identifying, in my opinion, is allowing for a more maximal performance in the gym. And also, I personally wouldn't advise someone to do that style of diet if it was someone that struggled with their nutrition and really had a hard time with carbohydrates. Not saying that the carbohydrates make them fat, and really had a hard time with carbohydrates. Not saying that the carbohydrates make them fat, but they have a hard time controlling themselves in the presence of carbohydrates.

And so therefore, sometimes with a lot of people I work with, I'll just say, hey, man, let's just see if we can ditch those and we can bring them back when we can fix your insulin sensitivity issues. But you're consistently overeating and you're consistently eating carbs. And the two things are, they coincide and they have a lot to do with each other because you're eating carbs, you're tending to overeat. But I love what you said there about the perinutrition. A lot of people have never heard of some of these things before.

When is the first time you kind of heard about that? And then how have you utilized that? Because I feel like it's weird, you know, some of the things you pick up over the years and some of the things that you just, you know, don't do for convenience and things like that. Like I don't do it anymore, but I did do that style of nutrition for like 20 years straight and I always liked it and it seemed to have a good impact and it felt like it was something that worked well for me, especially when I was natural. I was natural at one point.

Yeah. Well, I, you know, for me, I was stuck in bodybuilding at a certain weight and I couldn't gain any more muscle. So what I was trying to do was figure out, you know, am I at my genetic limit? Am I just stuck? Am I ever going to get any bigger? Because I was at the national level and I was competing at pretty much the same body weight for three or four years. And I can assure you, I was training very hard. And I assure you, I was eating a lot

of food. And I was just kind of stuck. So I started looking at the different variables. It's like, well, can you train harder? Like, well, you know, I was trained with a guy named Dave Tate, he's a really good friend of mine. And I can assure you, we were killing each other. I don't think that's the answer. And so then it was, long story short, it ended up being, I'm going to have to find a way to recover better and train more often to get more sessions and to stimulate the muscle more while not pulling back my intensity while still training hard. So I really dove into, um, the intro workout stuff. I had just read about a carbohydrate called Cluster Dextrin that looked like it was very easy on your stomach. And I had had kind of some bad experiences with supplements during

training. They upset my stomach and bloated me and made me run to the bathroom, things like that. So I was pretty sensitive as to what I wanted to put in my stomach. So anyways, long story short, I don't want to bore you on that too much. I found some combinations that seemed to really help with recovery and allowed me to train more often and not train more often and still keep a high level of intensity. So I wasn't sacrificing my intensity and just kind of touching the muscles, as I mentioned earlier. And when I did that, I had an incredible year, year and a half where I gained more muscle than I'd probably gained in the previous five years. So, you know, this is 2000,

2011, kind of around there. And now I've been coaching people for a long time. So I'm, I'm employing these strategies with other people and they, it's working. And these guys are telling me, Hey man, I don't think I'm training hard enough. I'm not getting sore anymore. I'm like, that's good. It means it's working. So I saw a lot of success over and over and over and over and over. And I said, you know what? This isn't placebo effect. There's something to this. So I started really diving into it. And I do a lot of seminars, I was talking about it. And of course, everybody's asking me where the data is, but there's really not a lot of data only because most of the studies and things of that nature are done on pre workout and post workout. And not only that, they're all centered around muscle protein synthesis, they only look

at one side of the equation, like, well, it doesn't matter. Muscle protein synthesis is turned on for, you know, this many hours, 24, 48 hours, but they never look at the, the, the other side of that equation, which directly correlates to how you recover. So when you get really good at managing how you recover, now all of a sudden, you know, you're not digging that ditch 10 feet deep. Now you're only digging a two feet deep and you can fill it back up a lot easier and grow. So, you know, those things all kind of came together and really, really helped me and kind of shaped my thoughts around nutrition with that style. I know you communicate a lot with Ed Q, or at least maybe you did. I don't know if you still do, but Ed was sharing some information with me about some like intro workout shakes and stuff. And I was trying some of these things out and you know the shake started out being like kind of just a medium regular size

shake and then it just kept growing and growing and growing and like i couldn't find a i couldn't find a fucking cup you know big enough to throw all these carbs and uh and protein in there so how much obviously it's going to depend on the person on what they weigh uh but somebody listening how would they start with this? And, you know, where would you aim them in terms of supplements? I believe you have your own supplements. So if you want to drive them towards that, that's totally fine. Well, you know, I mean, if you look at the essential amino part of it, I like essential aminos myself. I've always kind of. So EAA instead of BCAA, correct? Yeah. and, you know, just for the folks that are listening,

BCA, there's, there's essential amino acids. There's, you know, there's a list of essential amino acids and BCAs are in that list. Right. So these are amino acids that your body can't produce. You have to get them through to intake. So what I'm not saying is don't take BCAAs. I'm just saying the BCAAs with the other aminos that your body can make, make a complete protein and a complete protein gives you substrate to actually build muscle. I think BCAAs are great for recovery. I don't think they're a bad supplement. I know a lot of people that are bad. I just think they're a lot, I just think they're better if it's full spectrum. Now, how much do you need? You know, I mean, with leucine, we've always heard the three grams.

It's kind of a leucine threshold where it triggers muscle protein synthesis. And that's really what you want. And then, you know, so if you've got three grams of leucine, I don't want to bore you guys with all these details, but, you know, if you're at six grams of essential aminos and three of them are BCAs, then you're probably fine. You don't need to have a bucket this big. And as far as the carbohydrates, what's interesting is, you know, you have some muscles that just get more sore than others, right? Sometimes you train your legs and they're sore for five days. Your shoulders are maybe never sore. So the way I use it with people is I tell them, let's use it on the muscles that need to recover. We're using it for

recovery. So, you know, a leg workout that maybe really punishes you, maybe we'll use 40 grams of carbohydrates for that. Whereas another body part, and maybe it gets a little sore and maybe we'll only use 15 to 20 grams. You know, I, I can mix that up real easy in a 28 ounce shaker and drink it. No problem. Now I will say this, I've done it your way. I have done the two liter, a hundred grams of carbs. You know, Ed, he's super, he's super, super particular. Ed Koo is like super particular.

So he's like, it's gotta be like really cold. So you have to have ice in there and like take your first sip. Like after your, you gotta do your warmup first and you can't take it until you get done with like your first hard set. You know, he had all these, all these rules and I had to take stuff like after the training session and

everything. But you know what? It worked really well. It was the first time I got really lean. He helped me get in really good shape for a shoot that I did with uh BSN years ago and uh it worked it worked it fucking worked you know that's that's all I need to know you know what a podcast you're sneaking in here at the very end hope you guys enjoyed part one of this two-part series with John Meadow uh wanted to thank everybody that's been rating and reviewing

the podcast we sincerely appreciate it it helps us out so much We wanted to take the second to thank white spy nine, uh, white spy says great guests and standard crew quote, really enjoy the stone cold interview short and sweet. We love it either way, man, that little bit right there helped us out a ton five-star review plus an actual like comment review. Um,

this goes a long way. If you right now listening, if you want to hear your name and your review read on air, please head over to iTunes right now, drop us a rating and a review, and you could hear your name at the end of a show just like Whites by Nine. We'll catch you guys on the next one. Peace.