Mark Bell's Power Project - Ep. 403 - Hypertrophy CALL IN SHOW

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

It's time for another Call in Show! Today we're talking about winning that Hyper Trophy, Hypertrophy and building muscle! Have questions about making some gains? Give us a call: 206-737-7369 Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting 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 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: 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 ➢ https://www.facebook.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 FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Hootenanny #MarkBell

Power Project crew, what's going down? Hope everyone is having a fantastic day. This episode is recorded on June 24th and it is with just the crew and we did another Hootenanny. Yes, this is our call-in show. We have a ton of fun with these and today we had an absolute blast talking to everybody on the fan lines. Today we talked about nothing but hypertrophy and gaining muscle. Yes, we talked about winning hypertrophies, as we said, on air. But we took a bunch of calls. And what was amazing about being able to do this sort of thing is that we were able to essentially give consults on air, you know, full on like one on one consultations with some of the callers. And, you know, and Seema took a brunt of the duty for that. And what's

amazing is, you know, and Seema is an awesome trainer. He's an awesome coach. He coached me, he helped me get into the best shape of my life. And he actually, you know, he charges for this sort of thing. So everyone that did take advantage of our call-in show got a free session from somebody who's really good at what they do. So, um, again, we just absolutely love this format. And if you guys missed out, um, if you guys are listening to this, like, uh, you know, after, after the fact, um, you really do just, all you have to do is text, uh, the word power to 2 0 6 7 3 7 7 3 6 9. And the next time that we are accepting phone calls, the next time we go live doing this type of show, you guys will actually get a text notification right on your phone and

you guys can just click a button and you guys will be watching, or I should say listening to us live. And then of course, when we open up the fan lines, you guys will have an opportunity to ask us questions. We are definitely trying to hone in on like certain topics. You know, the first time we did it with Jesse Burdick, we kind of just opened up the floodgates. The next time we had a certain topic and it was a little bit better. And so that's what we did with this episode in regards to winning a bunch of hyper trophies. So be on the lookout for something like that in the future. We plan on doing this a lot more. If you guys have certain topics that you want us to talk about,

reach out to us. We have numerous ways of how to do so. Check the links in the description and the iTunes show notes or whatever podcast app you're listening to. Definitely reach out to us and let us know what you guys want to talk to us about. And real quick, before I get out of here, us and let us know what you guys want to talk to us about. And real quick, before I get out of here, time's ticking. It's almost over. Your opportunity right now to get a free 30-day trial of markbell.com. This is a paid service, okay? And now there's two tiers of this. There is the first tier, and then there's now a premium tier where you got to pay a little bit extra more dollars for. But if you guys register and sign up right now before the end of June, you guys will gain access to both tiers.

Absolutely free. Uh, Mark is doing a ton of content on there. He's asked, uh, he's reached out to a bunch of his buddies to help him with, uh, you know, various content from Jesse Burdick to even like, you know, guys like Jeremy Buendia, when we have them in, in, in house, you know, we end up getting more content and instructions from those types of people. So again, right now, it's absolutely free. You have nothing to waste or nothing to lose and only time to waste. Head over to markbell.com, register, and you'll gain access to the entire website for absolutely free.

But you have to do it before the end of June. Because after that, this free trial is over. Thank you, everybody that called in. Again, if you missed out and you want to hop on the phone with us in a future episode, please text POWER to 206-737-7369. And you guys will get a text notification the next time we do one of these call-in shows. So that's it for me. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy the show with just the crew

and you guys. Catch you guys later. Peace. Oh, man. I can't wait for them to come back. They're just out of season, that's all.

2020 has fuel. Oh, man. Can you imagine? They're going to smash shit. Cool. What's going down today, y'all? We're going to have a hootenanny.

A hootenanny. Mm-hmm. Yes, sir. Yep. We just went live on the hooten hootenanny line what just now yeah our last two numbers are six nine right yep that's what i remember six nines that's funny two zero six seven three seven shit i can't remember it someday i'll get it one two three four five no hold on let me pull it up 206-737-737-7369 oh 206-737-7369 that's what it was okay as i was reading it i was i said it and then i did it over anyways yeah if you guys are listening right now now, you'll eventually have an opportunity to call into that number and talk to us live today about some hypertrophies.

What's a hypertrophy? Is it like a super trophy? A very large trophy? I understand. This is my understanding from just hearing Mark talk about it. When you actually reach the level of hypertrophy and you get jacked you actually get you receive a trophy a hyper hyper trophy yeah that's awesome it's the last level you have to beat the boss at the end and you have to hit the boss in the eye 10 times that's the secret i think

i got like six of those when i was 19 yeah see i forgot they're they're my basement a bunch of trophies you probably have so many. Yeah. Okay. Cool. That's okay. What'd you guys eat yesterday? I had a New York strip. I was talking to Mark before I left here, and I'm like, hey, I haven't eaten today.

I feel fine. Like, should I fast the rest of the day and then maybe eat like a big breakfast? And he's like, no, dude, you got to go home and eat some steak. And I was like, all right, like darn. So, I ended up cooking up a Piedmontese New York strip. It was incredible. I had it with some potatoes, but the steak itself is just salt and all's good to go. That's good.

Yeah. How about you guys? Like a regular baked potato or like the little potatoes? No. So, it was a regular potato, but like I sliced it real thin. And then I actually didn't even know this was possible. You can make scalloped potatoes in the microwave. So, I just threw butter, salt, pepper. I was supposed to put some other things on there, but I just like, just going to keep it basic.

And throw it in the microwave for like four or five minutes. It was so good. Dude, a potato is underrated i think they stay hot forever they do they stay hot forever and they can fill you up pretty damn good you have a big old piedmontese steak and a potato oh yeah go yeah steak and potatoes it's classic now i pulled out my cast iron after a long time yesterday and uh cooked up a bunch of ground beef that ground beef is really really good i told you you couldn't find a flat iron huh no my girl's been eating all my flat irons because like she wanted some steak a few weeks ago i let her try it she's like i like this a lot and now i don't get to eat flat irons anymore i think that's that's enough for a sit-down conversation of like hey we i, hey, I'm not sure how we're going to be able to move forward if you keep eating my flat iron steak.

I'm not sure about how this is going to work. Yeah. It's tough when your kids really like Piedmontese stuff because you're like, no, you can have some other steak, but then you just feel terrible because you don't want to take away the best thing that you have in the house. Yes, you can. I mean, you can, but you feel bad. I forbid you. I do, and I feel bad. There you go.

They'll grow. Yeah, I guess so. Any hoot. For more information on Piedmontese, please head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E dot com. And check out InterPromoCodeProject for 25% off your order. And if your order is $99 or more, you get free two-day shipping. Thank you, Piedmontese, for all the support.

If you guys like the show, please support them. Hit them up. Take advantage of this amazing 25% off deal. You won't regret the meat. Yeah. Yeah, today we're going to talk about being jacked and tan. Talk about hypertrophy, some techniques, some things that you can do. Also dive into a little bit of what SEMA does with some of his clients, what to try to keep track of.

You know, is it good to get, you know, body fat testing done? How do you kind of just pay attention to the changes that you're going through rather than like just only like weighing yourself or only looking in the mirror? Might be other ways to productively, you know, analyze kind of what you're what you're working towards. But, you know, kind of start out to kick things off. You know, trying to gain muscle mass is an interesting thing because there are so many different ways to go about doing it. And there's so many, there's a lot of techniques you got, like, you know, you have drop sets, you have super sets, you have training heavy, you have frequency can even help with hypertrophy. There's just a lot of different techniques out there. You can even utilize some tempo training. You can do some isometrics.

But if you break it all down and you really start to look at it and analyze it more and understand how most people got big, most of the time, there's a good history of trying to lift some heavy weights with some compound movements. It's not the only way. We know a lot of people that haven't really explored bench squat, deadlift all that much, and they still got big. There's a lot of bodybuilders. Sometimes you might see like a Kai Green or something like that using like 30 pound dumbbells doing curls or something along those lines. But those guys, you know, they have a history of strength. And I don't know if you know how much bodybuilding stuff people have looked up before, but like you'll see Kai Green, he's like, Oh, yeah,

I love to train light. And then he's doing 405 for reps on incline and it's absolutely just like effortless or he's squatting 315 for 20 reps and it's just perfect form his heels are close together he's you know putting his butt on the ground basically and so these guys while they may not really challenge themselves with the most amount of weight that they can use they're challenging their muscles by going through a range of motion and not only going through an entire range of motion, but also staying connected to that weight the entire time and keeping themselves under tension. They actually become like a professional at that. So I think that might be a good place to start here today is maybe talking a little bit about

like some time under tension and, and SEMA, maybe sharing some techniques that you utilize when you're hitting the gym. Cause I, I, when I, when I watch you train, it's like, you're always sticking to the basics.

I see like pull-ups and if you're doing like a isolation exercise or doing like a curl or something like that, you're usually going pretty heavy. You're usually doing like hammer curls. The list of, you're usually going pretty heavy. You're usually doing like hammer curls. Um, the list of things I've seen you do is like, I've seen you bench squat, deadlift, bent over row, overhead press, pull-ups curls. I haven't really seen you like, I've actually never seen you do like a cable crossover. I've never seen you do like, and I'm sure you've done those things, but you know, what has been effective for you because you're pretty damn big um i'd say the big thing

is first off keeping it simple so obviously my training right now especially since i've been focusing more on jujitsu i don't train with as much volume as i did in the past um but when i look at and when i see the people that come and work with me, and I look at the perspective of themselves, a lot of them are strength athletes, like they've been focusing on trying to get stronger, which is great. And even a lot of them who've tried to get bigger over time, when I asked them to send me their training cycles that they've been doing, when I see it, it's not that much volume. One thing I noticed is that, like when you mentioned Kai Greene and a lot of these bodybuilders that they have a base of

strength, right? They're still typically not as strong as like your top level power lifter. That's even lighter than they are and has less muscle than they do. What it seems and what tends to happen is that when you're an individual who's focusing on gaining strength, gaining strength is so fun and it's so addictive and lifting heavy weights is just, just so exciting that you get so wrapped into that, that what happens is that a majority of your training sessions are so focused on going heavy on your bench and doing a lot of deadlift volume or a lot of squat volume that after you do those movements, you're just too damn tired to do anything really in terms of pushing, you know, accessory work, like your cable crossovers, like your hamstring curls,

like your leg presses and lunges, you're just too tired to do it. So you'll end up doing a few of those movements for a very short period of time and then leaving the gym. And that's what all your training sessions turn into. But when a lifter backs off of that a little bit, so you can still do those movements, but you're not beating yourself up as much, you're going very moderate. very moderate. You might finish your squat session and be like, I can do so much more, but now you have energy to go do leg presses, lunging, Bulgarian split squats, uh, hamstring curls, uh, GHR. So you have that much energy to do all those movements. You're going to first off gain a lot more muscle over time because you'll get more training volume into those small muscle groups. Um, but also what tends to happen too, is you might even gain strength faster because you're not beating yourself as much underneath your compound movements. So it's almost like if you want to gain muscle, a good amount of muscle while also gaining

strength, you kind of want to become a Jack of all trades. And like, when you look at bodybuilders, they tend to be pretty big and pretty strong they're like the jack of all trades and the power lifter individual is like the master of strength but they mean you'll see jack power lifters at the top but a lot of power lifters you see they don't look like bodybuilders yeah i think a lot of it has to do with the central nervous system you know when you're power lifting it has to do with the central nervous system. You know, when you're powerlifting, you are trying to enhance the central nervous system. You're trying to give your body a message that we're going to be explosive and we're going to be strong.

We're trying to prime the central nervous system. We're not really necessarily doing things that promote hypertrophy. Although in some cases, depending on the person, depending on their like fiber type and all these different things, they can factor in. And that's why sometimes you'll see someone who is a collegiate wrestler who has a really jacked neck. And you see another guy who just doesn't have a really jacked neck. Or sometimes you might see somebody in jujitsu who's like super lean and you

might see somebody else who's been practicing the same thing for just as long and they don't have nearly the same you know muscle definition and stuff we're all a little bit different when it comes to building muscle and and how our body ends up looking obviously nutrition is a huge factor in the whole thing but when you only power lift you most likely you're going to have some ability to grow. But as Ansema's pointing out here, you're going to be good at that. You're going to be good at the thing that you spend the most time doing. And a lot of times with power lifting, even people that are like, oh, yeah, I do my accessories.

They're usually like they're an afterthought. You know, they're secondary, they're third, they're fourth, they're fifth. Sometimes they're, you know, just kind of tossed in there at the end of a workout and they might not be enough to really promote muscle growth. And also, I would say they could also be like non-productive in a way because I don't think it's great to do too much in one given training session. And you could be, like, think about it. You could have taxed your central nervous system. You could have taxed your joints. And you could have smashed your muscular system as well.

Like, that's a lot. And the next day, you know, how are you going to recover from that? How are you going to repair from that? So maybe a better idea might be to, you know, occasionally switch things up. Maybe for a few weeks you do something. I think this is one of those things where somebody says, well, Jay Cutler does leg extensions before he squats. So that's what I should do. And that would just be like, well, yeah, sometimes.

Like Jay Cutler utilized that, I think, throughout his entire career. And it worked really well for him. But if I would imagine and see if a 15-year-old kid came up to you and said, I want really big legs, you might suggest something different. Why would you perhaps suggest something different? Instead of leg extensions before squats? Right. That'd be too fatiguing. I mean, even if we were to think about trying to do some leg extensions before squats, like our legs would be fried. If we're trying to go heavy,

we wouldn't be able to go as heavy because it's going to, yeah, it's going to limit the amount of weight that she can do. So again, these are like sometimes situations like that might be good to do sometimes. So you got to keep in mind too, Jay Cutler, Ronnie Coleman, these people that we see, uh, Kai green and so on. these are people that are professionals. They really know what they're doing, and they've been doing it for a long time. So it doesn't mean that you don't do that. It doesn't mean you can't be inspired by that. It doesn't mean you can't try that. That will elicit a lot of muscle stimulation.

And there's actually a huge advantage of once you have gained some strength, what a wonderful thing to do before you squat. have gained some strength, what a wonderful thing to do before you squat. If you normally need to squat 600 pounds for five reps just to get any sort of, you know, to get any sort of real stimulus, well then, yeah, doing the leg extensions beforehand might force you to use a little bit less weight, more reasonable weight, and now we're not beating up all aspects of the body all in one day. We're solely focusing on hypertrophy and you can get more out of using less weight. So there's a lot of different methodologies. There's a lot of different things to utilize.

Yeah. Like, for example, in the Jay Cutler situation, the thing is Jay Cutler is probably already so strong in the squat that doing leg extensions, it's not necessary for pre-fatigue, but it's to allow him to activate his quads better when he's squatting with a moderate load. Because you imagine he's not going to be squatting with a super heavy load. Well, super heavy for him after doing leg extensions. He's still squatting five plates.

He's still squatting five plates. For 10 reps or so. But he could do substantially more than that if he didn't do leg extensions. Right. But he's trying to get the most out of quad activation before doing that. So if you really wanted to do that for yourself, you could, it could be actually really beneficial, but you have to make sure that the load you're doing on leg extensions isn't crazy heavy. You don't do too many reps where your quads feel like they're on fire and you can't squat and you can do that,

take it to the squat and get a similar response. But you just got to be smart about how you do it. It could be a really cool thing to do. What about muscle soreness? How, you know, I think you've mentioned like nowadays you don't really get very sore. But what was it like for you when you were younger transitioning from, you know, being a fairly thin soccer player to being 240 or whatever you are nowadays? Yeah. So initially, like whenever anybody starts training, I think that we all kind of go a little bit overboard, especially when you're starting with bodybuilding. Cause I didn't

start with like, uh, I've always done bodybuilding type work since I was a kid. Um, but when that became my only focus and I wasn't able to play soccer anymore, I just went, I just went ham with a lot of volume. Um, and every session, and then maybe even just stopping soccer probably helped with growth as well. It helped. Well, yeah, it helped with recovery, helped the growth because I wasn't running around and doing cardio all day long. Um, but I think what every lifter and what I had to figure out for myself was how can I get done with this session? Have had a good workout progress, but be able to come in and progress on something else the next day. That's the big thing.

Um, I had to learn how to stop leaving every session feeling like absolute dog, dog shit. So I could come in and get another training session and i think that's also where um spreading out your training volume becomes really important because uh it was only when i was really younger that i did like the typical bro type split and there's nothing wrong with it but the bro splits like you know uh chest back legs you just pretty much do every body part once a week. But as we've talked about multiple times on this show, you should be able to maybe hit each body part

if you have the time and your schedule twice a week. So what that allowed me to do was to get in more training, but I also had to limit, like, for example, if I was doing an upper day, I had to do enough volume so that next day I could do lower. And then the next day I could do a push, but not be so fatigued for my first upper day that I can't progress on that push day. So it's figuring out how you can spread out your training volume throughout the week. So you can hit your muscle groups multiple times. I think that's one of the

things that helped me to grow even more as I progressed. Hitting each body part as much as I could. Once it's recovered, hit it again. Once it's recovered, hit it again. But again, not doing too much on one day that it would take too long for it to recover so that I could hit it again. What if you are sore? Do you skip that day or do you just say like, I should probably wait an extra to say your, say your quads are crazy. So like really sore from the last training session, do you go in and hit them again? Cause it's just time to hit them again. Or do you kind of pass on that? If that's the day where I need to hit quads, um, I mean, it's two options. You could either wait till another day or just go lighter on that day. My usual decision is just to go a little bit lighter on that day. Um, so not pushed as much,

maybe just back off of the load that I'm going to use, still get some type of stimulus in, but use it as a session to allow for some recovery. Because you know that if you do feel sore, it is sometimes beneficial to go in and get some blood in there. Oh, absolutely. Even though you're tired, but not look to hit any PRs, not look to do anything crazy. Just get blood in the muscle group and get it moving, and it'll help you actually recover a little bit faster. So I typically don't skip unless I'm feeling like I didn't get enough sleep. It's not going to be a good training sessions. It's not going to be productive. If you know you're not going to be

productive, then it's probably a good idea to do something else. I think just a really simple thing people can do. Like if you have a body part that you want to bring up, you got to, you know, you're just like, man, I got skinny legs or I got, you know, a puny biceps or whatever it is. You can put, you can prioritize those things. You can maybe, you know, put those in the front of the week, you know, like whenever your week starts for you, you can put that in the front of your week. So you can do that, you know, on Monday. And you can make sure that you hit that hard again on, you know, maybe Thursday or something like that. You can also put a priority towards doing things in the beginning of a workout. Or trying to have a, you know, like let's just say somebody wanted to get bigger arms. You know, we hear that all the time, right?

If you want to get bigger arms and you're not currently training heavy, I would suggest that you go heavier. If you're somebody who's already going heavy and your arms still don't seem to be growing, I would suggest just moving into a little bit more bodybuilding stuff and play around with that and see how that helps. But there's a lot of different ways to go about doing this stuff. The way that I work out nowadays is almost the complete opposite of the way I used to work out. I do a lot of isolation stuff first because I don't really care to have the heavy weights in my hands. Like bench press might be the last thing I do. Deadlift might be the last thing I do. Squats might be second or third, kind of depending on, you know, how I feel. But it acts as a good warm warmup if I'm doing, if I don't want it to take away from

the squat, but I still want to get some good leg activation, I might do, you know, a couple sets of glute ham raises or a couple sets of leg curls or something like that. And then I get a little bit of work done. I get some good muscle stimulation going in the hamstrings and then I move on to the squat. But, you know, it just depends on like, where you're at in your like lifting career. There's a lot of different it's kind of neat, because there's a lot of different ways to do it. I would say most most people that that have, you know, like a massive, like body part, like huge, huge biceps or huge shoulders or huge legs, almost, almost always, almost in all cases it's like they

quote unquote over trained they did a lot of training for a lot of years and maybe made some mistakes along the way and then they learn that maybe they didn't need to go quite as crazy but a lot of times when you see somebody with uh with good leg development they're like oh yeah it was a soccer like your legs are huge they're like oh, I was a soccer player. Like, your legs are huge. They're like, oh, yeah, I was a soccer player. It's like, okay, well, that makes sense. You were running around a lot. So your legs are – and then as you got into strength training, the cool thing about having, like, a sports background is your ability to recover

from not only, like, session to session, but from set to set and from rep to rep, Not only like session to session, but from set to set and from rep to rep, which is why we encourage people to work on some GPP type of stuff or some sort of cardiovascular training so that you can recover from workouts. Some of the bodybuilders I've worked out with, most of them, a lot of them are like professionals, and their work capacity is unbelievable. A lot of them are like professionals and their work capacity is unbelievable. Like you would, I mean, they're able to get through a lot of work in a condensed period of time where you're like, whoa, okay, this is what it's like. This is how these guys train. It's not three sets of ten, you know, and it's not, you're not there just kind of chilling and flexing in the mirror. It's a lot of hard ass work is what it is so we just opened up the fan line so i see some questions that are happening right now in the uh the chat room um now is an opportunity to actually go ahead and ask these questions um the number is 206-737-7369. But while we wait for those quite are the, uh, the fan lines to get full,

I actually had a question for you guys. Um, you know, like I had told you guys in the past, like, well, I told you that I couldn't get abs. And then you're like, no, you're a different person now and everybody can get them. Um, I was super skinny with skinny fat. It turns out I had a lot more body fat than we all kind of assumed. But can somebody go from being like a more skinny type person to just saying, okay, I'm going to just go ahead and start adding muscle. Like that's the goal. But can they do that without like getting going through the fat stage? Like can a lean person remain lean, but still just start developing more muscle to look jacked? Because I feel like for me, I did have to go through the long period of trying to add

as much muscle as I could, regardless of what I look like. You know, my body composition was still like kind of, you know, skinny fat, but I actually started developing some size. And I feel like I needed to do that in order to be able to shred down to actually show something. Whereas before I would have just showed, you know, skeleton. You know what I mean? Go for it.

It just depends on how patient you are, how patient a person is, because it's hard, especially like because when I was a teenager, I was watching YouTube videos on getting bigger. Right. And you always see like how you got to go on a dreamer bulk, just like eat and train and eat and train. Um, and it's really hard not to go on that route. I think anybody can get bigger without putting on a crazy amount of body fat. But the thing is when any guy or a woman, if she, if any woman or woman wants to get bigger, it's really hard to be patient with yourself, to not just see the scale go up. Because I mean, let's be real, when we're getting bigger, we're not just, you know, just training. We're also looking at the scale. Like if you started off at 160, you're really keen on seeing 185 as soon as possible. You're really keen on seeing

that two in front of two zeros as soon as possible. So it really keen on seeing that two in front of two zeros as soon as possible. So it's rare that you're going to see someone take the time to get stronger because the biggest thing I think actually, not just getting stronger through the compounds, compound movements like squat, bench, deadlift, but getting stronger with all the movements you're doing in the gym, your bicep curls, your dumbbell, chest press, all those things. If you're doing in the gym your bicep curls your dumbbell chest press all those things if you're getting stronger with those movements over time and you're like eating to gain to gain to gain size you're not eating an excess amount of food but a good amount of food you'll get bigger without gaining a crazy amount of body fat but the thing is everyone wants speed so to answer your question it's possible but it's not generally as fun for most people.

Right. A lot of, a lot of, you know, bodybuilders, they, and the reason why we're going to reference bodybuilders a lot is that no one does it better than bodybuilders in terms of gaining muscle mass. They have, they have acquired the most amount of muscle mass with the least amount of body fat. And we get questions all the time. Can I gain muscle and lose fat at the same time?

And the answer is, yeah, you can do that, but it's a really long road. There's also the other option, which is steroids, right? They can help get you there faster because it can kind of amplify everything. It puts you in an anabolic state and makes everything easier. But, you know, for the sake of this podcast,

let's just assume that you're not going there. We're not encouraging anybody to do that. What we're encouraging people to do is to work through the process and figure out a way to get it done the best way that you can. And what I think is that when it comes to looking at bodybuilders

and dissecting how they've done it over the years, it kind of just comes back to some very common principles over and over again where they have a certain amount of time under tension per each set. They are normally in a, I would say, it could be anywhere from like an 8 to 12 rep range. But obviously, they do use lower reps from occasion and higher and higher, sometimes 15, sometimes 20. They do, they just do a tremendous amount of work and they just kind of blitz the muscle. And over a long period of time, they learn, you know, exactly how that's supposed to feel. And it takes, it takes, it takes a long time. It takes years. But with your question specifically about, you know, I think it depends a lot on how lean somebody is to begin with and what their metabolism is like. From our experiences together, you don't seem, you haven't seemed like you're that interested in food.

Like you're not crazy about food. Like you eat, but you're not like nutty about food. If you were nutty about food and you were still really thin, then I think that that's the ultimate, that's like the crescendo of like finding someone who's going to be, who's probably going to potentially be a great bodybuilder. Like just, just without, without as much effort as the next guy, because they have a quick metabolism already. And as they start to eat like a bodybuilder, a lot of that is just going to go towards supporting more muscle mass. A lot of guys are, I mean, you ever see a picture of like someone like a Bradley Martin, you know,

Bradley's huge. He's got, I mean, his arms look like they're like 20 inches or something nowadays. You know, he, he looks great. Or even just like the transformation that Tom made, he was able to make a transformation super quick. Tom is, you know he he looks great or even just like the transformation that tom made he was able to make a transformation super quick tom is you know by by nature i mean if we were to have a picture of tom in eighth grade he's like probably rail thin he's probably super super skinny so i think that for bodybuilding purposes that is the greatest uh an ectomorph is is a really good purposes, that is the greatest.

An ectomorph is a really good place to start. Cool. You guys ready to take a call? We're ready. All right. Let's see what we get. Hello? Hello?

Oh, that's a good echo. What's going on, man? Hey, is this Andrew? This is Andrew. You are currently on Mark Bell's Power Project call-in show. Yo. Oh, shit. Oh, sorry.

That's all good. What's your name? Where are you calling from? I'm a little out of breath, man. I'm in the middle of my workout right now. Atta boy. Yeah, so honestly, first off, I just got to say thank you to you guys for everything that you do. I've been listening for about a year and I feel like I've learned more from your show

than I've learned anywhere else. Awesome. I got to say thank you first and foremost. Nice. Thanks, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. You guys are amazing. So I'll try to keep it short.

Cause I know you probably got a lot of people trying to call in. So I recently decided that I was going to do a physique show. You know, I've been working out for a long time, but I've never really done anything with it. But I've worked so hard to gain strength and, you know, just feel stronger and everything else that goes with it. And so, Mark, I know that you, uh, you know, you obviously work for a long time on strength more than anything else.

So how did, how did you abandon that ego, you know, to just be strong in order to build muscle in order to, to change your direction and, uh, you know, know, be productive with your new goal of bodybuilding and everything else. Yeah, I find that this is really hard for people to do. It's very difficult for people to shift gears away from something that they feel is them. But as much as I love powerlifting, I just always felt like I'm not just a powerlifter, that I have a lot of other things that I do. Powerlifting is, it was something that I did. It doesn't really define who I am. I'm a dad.

I'm a husband. Those things to me are more important. So when it came time to shift gears and it came time, when it came time to move away from that, it wasn't that hard. I mean, I still like to lift heavy weights. I still like to slap some plates on the, on the bar and load it up here and there. But I just, I was just done, you know, I, I did it for 30 years and I, I did it. I also, I guess, you know, something that's, that I can feel good about is I feel like I just, I feel like I maxed it out. You know, I feel like I did it to the best of my ability. I don't think, looking back at it, I could probably nitpick it a little bit and say like, oh, I think there's a couple of things I could have maybe done a little bit better,

especially just because now I have more knowledge, but I really just, I gave it my all, you know, I put everything I had into it. And so it just felt for me, it felt like it was time to shift gears for other people that maybe are newer that are trying just to shift away from it, maybe because they just don't like it as much anymore, or they're uninterested, or maybe they got injured or whatever. I would say that, you know, just, just follow what you're most interested in. You know, don't worry about, you know, thinking that you, you know, you deadlifted 500 pounds and don't think that that has anything to do with who you are. That's just something that you did. It's an accomplishment that you did and you should be

proud of it, but there's really not a lot of great reasons. And I've had other top level power lifters tell me this. The only time to be as strong as possible is for a power lifting meet. That's the only time that mattered. That's what it means to be a power lifter. to like hit a certain lift or you just no longer care about it, then don't care about it and, uh, you know, move on and move, move into something else and put everything that you have into that. Like if the goal is now to be lean, don't even, don't look in the rear view mirror and just keep looking ahead of, of what you, uh, what you can do today to, to make the right steps towards that. Awesome. Um, just, uh, I'm sorry, one more quick question. So when you switched over to bodybuilding,

did you kind of, did you abandon the compound lifts for the most part and start honing in the different muscles or are you still keeping those as a part of your routine? I think bodybuilding is, you know, has a lot to do with your nutrition. That was the biggest change. I think, you know, there's a lot of bodybuilders that squat bench and deadlift or use variations of them. Maybe even through like, you know, some machines and things like that. But yeah, squat bench and deadlift was still part of it. It was just more like it was more of a change in in nutrition than it was anything else small changes to the workout just like less rest and stuff like that but those are all techniques and those are all

things I've been utilizing even when I was a power lifter also let me tell you this real quick man as you're getting ready to gear up for a show you want to remember that you're trying to hold on to as much muscle as possible what tends to happen when an individual starts thinking about doing a show is they're like, okay, I'm going to drop as much body fat as possible. Most people start, you know, I'll do a lot of high reps, low weight. They drop strength in terms of their compounds and they'll stop doing their compounds altogether. The thing is, it's that it's inevitable that you're going to lose strength during your prep. You're going to be losing quite a bit of weight, quite a bit of fat, but you want to keep as much stimulus as possible to all of those muscle groups. So in your case, should you drop

your compound movements? No, probably not. But what you should do is you should focus on, um, still doing those movements and getting in enough stimulus. So instead of going to 90% in a training session, maybe you go to 70 or 75% and then you do all the rest of your movements. But your goal is to, if you can try to slowly hold on to strength and as you're getting weaker, just train right there where like close to where your edges, you're going to be stimulating enough muscle that you're holding onto as much as much muscle as you can as you're dropping body fat. But if you were to stop doing strength altogether or stop training for

strength altogether, um, and you lowered your training volume and things got a lot easier, you're going to be losing a lot of muscle as you're losing body fat and you're not going to be as big by the time you hit the stage so keep that in mind awesome guys i i appreciate the info again like you guys are you're great and you deserve all the recognition that you guys get i really appreciate it appreciate it have a good rest of your day you too guys thanks awesome thank you that was awesome he's getting his workout in too

that's dope yeah mid-workout yeah you know people uh that are you know uh gonna call in you know keep in mind that uh you know when you're when we do pick up that you're you're on the air we don't have a screening we don't have a way to screen you uh at the moment with the technology that we were using uh here today also keep in mind that Encima, whoa, we had a blowout over there. Also, keep in mind that Encima has done a lot of bodybuilding and has competed in powerlifting as well. How many shows did you do in bodybuilding? About six or seven.

Yeah, that's pretty good. Wow. That's a pretty good amount. I did one. I did one show. I did one photo shoot. There you go. All good. Wow. Yeah, six or seven. That's a pretty good amount. I did one. I did one show. I did one photo shoot. There you go.

All right, let's see who we got next. Caller, what's your name? Where are you calling from? Hi, this is Aaron from Oklahoma. Aaron, what's going down, man? Oh, well, I just wanted to call in and just say thank you guys for all you do. Between you guys and Stan Efferding and Matt Winning,

I've learned a lot. Awesome. Just about self-development and getting big and getting strong. Cool. I appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, you got any questions for the crew?

Yeah, so my question, I know, I work full-time, and I eat right, and I've gotten real consistent, and I have a very good split that works for my schedule. It's four days a week. I've run into some problems with programming in the sense that, you know, I try to do kind of a heavy day one week and then a kind of a speed day, kind of the conjugate style the next week. But I'm having a hard time figuring out how to kind of work in some kind of periodization and progression with that kind of system and my split. And I'm not really working towards a peak or a meet i want to do something sustainable but what could you guys suggest that i do to kind of keep things keep keep breaking prs but also not kill my shoulders

well it kind of sounds like you're you're maybe mixing some programs together. And it might be wise to, for a period of time, just to try to stick more to one concept and work on that for a little bit and see where it takes you. Because if you're doing conjugate stuff and you're utilizing some speed training and some max effort work, it's a specific program that kind of needs to be done a specific way. And if you're going to utilize periodization, like the Westside Barbell method, it's not a great method to utilize along with periodization, like trying to consistently do a regular bench, a regular squat and regular deadlift. The program is based around the idea of doing alternate exercises while still improving strength in some maybe areas where you're weak so that when you go back to the main movement, that you are stronger for that movement.

So I would just consider, you know, really trying to follow along with one style and one way of programming, because in the Westside method, they really don't use periodization. Okay. Well, yeah, that helps a lot. What are some of your thoughts on that? three, one to kind of just, just do some kind of linear periodization just to see if, you know, that would help, you know, break through some PRS where maybe the speed training is kind of holding me back a little bit or something, you know, so I don't think the, I don't know what your program looks like, but there's nothing wrong with speed training. Um, you said you had a good split set up. You said it's, I can tell tell you you know monday is left bicep tuesday's right bicep wednesday's left bicep and i just keep doing switching off i was like wait what

i get a full body and it's you know i hit each body part twice, twice in a week. And they still have, you know, three days in between to recover. But I'm just trying to keep getting stronger, you know. I would say like, so just normally, just so you understand programming in general, a really great way to look at it is that you always want to prepare yourself for like whatever it is that you're about to do next. What you're about to do next has to align well with a particular goal, a particular destination, something that you're trying to get to. So having a particular goal would be a good place to start. And then you maybe work your way backwards into like,

how am I going to get to this goal? And if you think about like where you're going to start, you may have to, you know, bring up some conditioning. You may have to start with some reps and some sets and some, you know, kind of higher volume. You hear a lot of athletes use those terms, use some higher volume and then move yourself through higher intensities. And then you should be able to, you know, be lined up with your goal. If you don't know what any of that means, then that can be a little bit difficult. But in short, it just means you're going to do more reps and more sets in the beginning.

And as you get closer to your goal, you're going to lower the reps. You're going to lower the sets. The intensity of the workouts, the weight that you use in the workouts is going to increase. So why don't you just maybe tell us what exactly is your goal, and then we can kind of help you work towards that. I mean, like I said, I'm not really preparing for any meets, but I do want to continue getting stronger as efficiently as I can without being overly obsessed with the little minute details.

you know being you know overly obsessed with with the little minute details um i kind of like the idea of um i guess like ed cone you know would do like three months power training and then three months hypertrophy and um kind of switching off that way just remember you know you can't hit a target that you can't see so we need a target like what right what would you like to do you want to bench 315 you want to deadlift 500 pounds? Yeah. So I guess I could do like every three months I could aim for 110% of my last PR, you know, just trying to hit some PRS.

Okay. Yeah. Basically just keep getting, keep getting stronger. Okay. Well, I mean what, okay. so you said you have two full body days during the week what are the other two days well so i i do a on mondays i'll do like back

and deadlifts i mix those two days so i get some legs and back and then tuesday i'll do like tricep and shoulder and then i take a break wednesday thursday would be squats and accessories and then friday would be the like when you say accessories and leg accessories and triceps so i kind of get legs twice a week and i kind of get upper bodies and push pull twice a week and it works really well with my schedule but i want to try and figure out a way that I can, I like the split, but I need to be, I guess, keeping track of my sets and reps and weights a little bit better. Yeah.

I think that that's one thing, keeping track of the sets, reps, and weights better. You said that on one week you do power training or you go heavier, and then the other week you do speed training. So let me ask you this. power training or you go heavier, and then the other week you do speed training. So let me ask you this. When you say you go heavier, are you going heavy on all those movements, deadlifts, bench, and squat on one week? Not so well. Yes.

And that also becomes an issue because by the time Friday rolls around, you know, I'm kind of worn out from the other days. Okay. So I think a really good idea is I'll go, you know, I'll go 85, 90% on the, on the, the heavy lifts, but then the accessories I'll do, you know, I'll aim for 12 to 15 reps sometimes, you know, just to get a bunch of blood flow and volume. Okay. So a good idea to try is this. Okay. So right now you have your speed work set on, let's say week one is those heavy days, 85 to 90%. And So right now you have your speed work set on, let's say week one is those heavy days, 85 to 90%. And then week two is all your speed work for all of these movements. Instead of doing that, how about on week one, right? You kind of mix in your speed days and

your power days each week. Okay. So you have your day one where you have your deadlifts instead of on your first week, having that be a power day, have your deadlift day one be a speed day. Okay, your next day, you said you do triceps and shoulders, which is just accessory work. And then your squat day on that same week, instead of having that be also a speed day, that'll be your power day. Okay, and then your bench session at the end of the week, you can do that as either a power or speed day, whatever you want. But the next week, the week one, you did deadlifts to speed the next week, do deadlifts as power, because what's going to happen now is your first week.

You did deadlifts to speed. That's not going to fatigue you so much that when your squat day comes in the same week, you'll be able to hit a good training session and it's heavy. But now the next week you'll instead do, instead of deadlift speed, it'll be deadlift power. Instead of squat power, it'll be squat speed, which will allow you to recover for whatever bench session you have at the end of the week. And what this is going to do is it's going to help you be able to recover better from session to session. Because if you're doing really tough

power days, deadlift and squat and bench on the same week you're going to be so fatigued from that week and then you're like your next week is going to be just speed but you're never going to get that much out of each of your power weeks now if you you know you if you mix it up a little bit and have deadlift speed week one deadlift power week two deadlift speed week three deadlift power week four and then the same thing for your squats squat power week one squat speed week two squat power week threelift power week four. And then the same thing for your squats, squat power week one, squat speed week two, squat power week three, squat speed week four, you'll be able to recover from session to session a little bit better. And you'll probably be able to gain strength for a long period of time. But it seems like right now you're messing yourself up for one week,

recovering on a week, messing yourself up again on another week and not being that productive with all the time you're spending in the gym. That's something you could try out. Yeah. And what this leans you towards, this leans you more towards a Westside Barbell program. And also keep in mind one way that Westside Barbell gets away with lifting the way that they do is that they just don't do a ton of deadlifts from the floor. And when they say they don't do a ton of deadlifts from the floor, I guess the only thing that that excludes is speed work. So most of their deadlifting that they do that doing like a reverse band deadlift, like variations

of a deadlift all the way to the point where it might not even be a particular deadlift. It might just be an exercise that can assist with the deadlift. Like every three weeks or every four weeks or so, Louie would just tell people just not to deadlift at all, just to take off from it completely. Because the deadlift is a weird animal you know um you can build up a work capacity for it you can train it frequently like any other lift and you can get better at it but you can also train your deadlift through just train just blasting your core and blasting your hamstrings and your quads and and squatting and things of

that nature that that will all be supportive towards increasing that deadlift. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, try that stuff out. What I've gathered here is I need to mix up, you know, in the same week, do some heavy and some speed stuff on those same muscle groups. And then I need to finally bite the bullet and keep a good log of sets and reps and weight and be that nerd with the notebook in the gym. I think that would help me a little bit.

Yeah, and you don't have to keep track of everything. But the more that you keep track of, probably the better. But just keep track of the main stuff. Keep track of the stuff that you really want to improve on. Otherwise, you might just be writing stuff stuff down just for writing stuff down sake. And on top of writing things down, one of the main things with journaling, and this is like something that people don't do enough of, you want to be able to reference that journal often.

You want to be able to go back. So make sure when you are writing it down that it's stuff that you're going to understand. Maybe even like, you know, when something works well and feels good, put a little smiley face next to it or put a little star next to it or something just so you know. You're like, yeah, that workout was great. And a lot of times when a workout is great, you can run it again. You can run the same play. You can do it again. So, you know, don't think that it always has to be like so switched up or you got to, you know, confuse the muscles and all this other stuff. Anyway, man, thanks.

Thank you for, uh, for calling in. We really appreciate you, uh, being a fan and being a listener. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you for your time. And I just got the gangster wrist wraps and they helped a lot. So awesome. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. All right. Nope. My bad. I hate doing that. I wanted to point out um you know there's some people that you can follow too uh that have great information and uh one of them would be i think one of the somebody i know that's like one of the best at kind of toggling back and forth between some

bodybuilding and some power lifting is nick wr. That guy gets in some damn good shape. Yeah, he does. And he's strong. He came here and he squatted 600 pounds. He's a strong guy. And when he came here and squatted 600 pounds, he looked good. His arms were big. His quads were big.

But, like, he wasn't lean. And then, like, a month later, he throws up some pictures. I'm like, oh, these are probably old pictures. And I was wrong. They were pictures from now times. I was like, damn. Like, he throws up some pictures. I'm like, Oh, these are probably old pictures. And I was wrong. They were pictures from now times. I was like, damn, like he just switched, you know, he, he switches it up a lot. Um, and he's somebody that I think he's over dieted before and got himself really weak. And I think he's over trained before. So he, he's got a good, uh,

he's got a good grasp on it. You know, I think, um, definitely um definitely uh i'll say this if you're someone who you want to get strong and you want to get big but like this guy was saying you're not really aiming for meat right or maybe you're not really heading for a bodybuilding show uh what tends like what i'm hearing a lot is like a lot of those people they still go really heavy really often, right? It's almost like they're trying to train for me.

If you want to get big and you want to get strong and you're not heading for a competition back off of the percentages of your, of your compound movements. Yeah. Is there really a reason for it? You know, is there? Yeah. Because now you're taking away from the amount of size you can gain,

but you can still train decently heavy and still get a lot of good accessory volume in so that it'll help you it can help you get bigger and that'll allow you to be more productive but you got to kind of it takes it takes a lot to stop lifting crazy heavy all the time cool you know when's the last time you i mean you uh you did a you went for a heavy deadlift in here um three four months ago yeah and but like i haven't seen you try anything all that heavy aside from that in a long time in like a year no i haven't lifted like that uh i mean a few months before that i probably did something around six something but i haven't done anything within like six or five since then. Right. So like, yeah.

And then in terms of like, uh, when you do your assistance exercises, how are you treating those? Are you trying to go like heavy on them? Or is it more like, I'm going to go by feel, I'm going to do some pull-ups today and yeah, it'd be cool to, you know, hang some weights around my waist, but I'm not able to see where it goes. For me personally, I'll do one top heavy set, and then the rest of the sets will probably be something that's doing a little bit of tempo or adding something like that in so that I

can get a lot out of using lighter weights. So for example, with like a dumbbell chest press, I'll maybe go up to a heavy set of six and then come back and do really slow tempo work. So I can get, again, get a lot out of using lighter weights. I love that kind of stuff too because, yeah, earlier in the workout, you're going to be stronger. Earlier in the workout, you're going to feel better. So once you're warmed up, once you're kind of ready to go and you've got your body ready to go, that's when you can hit that 500-pound

deadlift for a set of three, and then you could do some back offsets with 365 or 405 to help build up the hamstrings and glutes, stuff like that. All right, you guys ready for another call? Sure thing. Let's go. Caller, what's your name and where are you calling from? Yes, sir. I'm in PA.

My name is Cameron. Rough connection. What was your name? Cameron Mowgli. All right, man, what you got? Let's see if this works Cameron Mousley. All right, man. What you got? Let's see if this works out. Hold on.

All right. I just wanted to say that I had a freaking awesome amount of followers that you guys asked you. And I was really interested in what you guys are all about. I like how you're all about, you know, kind of like getting into like the whole freaking fitness thing and like, you know, getting jacked and stuff like that. The jacked and tan thing. That's so freaking cool. And Mark, you know, with, with the freaking, you know, power lifting background, that's so freaking cool. Like me, like I'm not, I'm not like necessarily a,

a, uh, power lifter or bodybuilder. Like I started getting into lifting when I was like 15 and stuff like that. Like, cause I'm a swimmer and I figured, you know, I'd get ahead of, uh, the competition by starting to lift and stuff like that. And, uh, I gotta say like, it, it really improved me. Like I got, uh, first at our conference, like last year and, uh, the year before that. And like like i'm going into my senior year now of college and uh you know it's freaking awesome but like you know i i really enjoy your guys podcast so much i just want to call and just you know tell you guys how much i appreciate it you know what i mean i sometimes i go in the dms and mark and sema and like you know i uh freaking

just you know feel more connected to you guys than I do with a lot of other like fitness channels. And I just wanted to say thank you guys. Cause it's freaking awesome. And, uh, I really appreciate you doing everything you guys do. Cause I've learned so much and I know a lot of my friends have and stuff like, you know, it's just freaking awesome. I just want to say thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, man. Thank you. Yeah. Cameron and congrats on that. Uh, that conference when dude's just freaking awesome. I just want to say thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you. Yeah, man. Thank you. Yeah. Cameron and congrats on that. Uh, that conference when dude, you're awesome.

Yeah, dude. Yeah. That's freaking awesome. Yeah. I think I just, um, yeah, man, it's freaking awesome. But you guys are so cool. I just wanted to know like when you guys are like lifting and stuff like that and like, I know you guys kind of talk about it every now and then on the podcast and stuff like that. Like when you guys like,

um, lose motivation sometimes and get back into it and just kind of like, you'll yourself. And like, I freaking love that shit. And, uh, you know,

it's, it's awesome. But like, what do you guys like do to like keep yourselves motivated? Cause like, I know it can be hard, especially during the quarantine and stuff like that. Like I'm over here here in PA and like I came back like in the middle of my semester and uh you know it was rough because like I don't have my gym open I'm working out at home I'm like

riding a bike like every day um doing pull-ups push-ups trying to keep it like you know simple but like effective but it's so hard because it's so hard because I don't really have weights to expose. Now I'm starting to go to my uncle's to work out because he's got a weight set. I just want to know, what did you guys do to just keep yourselves going? You know what I mean? You do exactly what you just said. You find a way. You said you went to your uncle's house and lifted some weights in his garage.

That's what it's all about right there. lifted some weights in his garage. Like that's what it's all about right there. And, um, you know, when it comes to motivation, I think that people are looking for, uh, like they're looking for something external to try to motivate them. They're like waiting, they're like waiting for something to hit them. Um, and, or they're also just like forcing themselves to do things. And, uh, what I've learned is that I don't have to force myself to do stuff. There's really no there's no reason for me to force myself to do stuff. If I'm just interested enough, I'll just do it. And so I try to I try to just lean into like whatever whatever I feel like doing.

Like if I feel like only walking for the day, I'll just walk. If I feel good enough to run i'll run if i want to go lift i'll lift and i've been trying to do that with with with everything but then also like within reason because you could fall off and you could say oh well i feel like having ice cream and you can kind of slide slide downhill but i know i know what's in my best interest and so for, what's been really helpful is to just try to attach yourself to just doing one thing. So if you're thinking about exercise and you're thinking about motivation for exercise, just attach yourself to that principle

and that idea of like, Hey, you know what? I just, I'm supposed to do one thing every day, because I know that when I do one thing of exercise every single day, that it's good for my body, mind, and spirit. It's not just good for your looks. It's not just good for being strong. It's in your best interest to do so. And it can help with your mental health and help with everything else. And motivation builds motivation. Once you start heading in a direction,

it's easier to continue in that direction. And Seema, how's it work out for you, buddy? Well, for me at this point, whenever I find it hard to work out, actually, you know what? I think the big thing for most people is just doing it long enough where it doesn't become an arduous experience. Because when I was thinking about what he just asked, even during quarantine, I never really found it. I mean, it's not like I kettlebell work is different than the barbell, but I still just went and I did it because it was a habit at that point. It was a habit to exercise each day. And when I don't personally, for me, when I don't exercise each day now, it feels like I missed a big part of the day

or something. There's just something not right. Like I have to do something that makes me sweat, that makes me spend a good amount of energy, or I literally just don't feel good about myself. So I think, man, that, I mean, you said you've been working out since you've been 15, you swim a lot. Um, I think just making sure that that I mean, you said you've been working out since you've been 15. You swim a lot. I think just making sure that that's something that it's like brushing your teeth. Just making sure that it's something you do all every day or as much as you can, even if it's a really, really easy workout. I think a lot of people can get something from that. But, yeah, I think for me it's just it's a habit.

It's one of those Yoda things, you know. You don't want to try. You, you want to do, you know, try, try not is going to be, is going to be the answer. Like, how do you, if you can eliminate motivation, then you'll never have a, you'll never ever in your life have a problem again with going to the gym. I know that sounds weird, but like when you just take motivation out of it, you don't need a big speech you know that that will help like i don't know i think that's so cool man like like i just saw you guys podcast going live and i was like damn i'm just gonna try it and like damn that's freaking cool you

guys answer like i feel like that you know you guys are just so like cool because like last year like man like i was because i would do this thing where i would kind of like not necessarily like i would i would like kind of like cut in the summer like not like shred but like try to you know try to get leaner try to get the lower abs showing and shit and like it was so freaking it was hard but i really enjoyed it i was a little bit run down because my diet was just it was weird you know i was eating good but like i feel like i could have ate a little more but man like i started listening to his podcast and it was like freaking cool like the whole carnivore thing because like i started watching like bigger stronger faster when i was like a kid and like that's when i got introduced to you mark and your brother like it's just freaking awesome your whole family's like so cool

and then like i've watched your podcast and and you guys have so much personality on your podcast. Don't get me wrong. Joe Rogan is freaking, I guess, you could consider him one of the best guys on the podcast right now. But I've got to be honest with you guys. I have something different, and it's cool because

in my opinion, I think you guys are right at his level. You guys are really interactive. It's official. It's official. We'll take'll take it we take it we're better than rogan i feel like that you know i feel like fitness should be a thing that you know no matter whatever like race color you know whatever all that stuff you know you can always like be like hey you work out that's freaking cool you know and like that just starts a conversation that i feel like people just need to have nowadays you know what i mean it sucks because you know it's like you know you look in the media and it's like you know seems like we're more divided than ever and you know especially with all the gyms closed around me it's like you

know damn like because like you know it's just it's the quarantine really took down that sense of community i feel like a little bit know, which I kind of get. You know, no one wants to get it, you know what I mean, at the time. And then people are arguing and stuff like that if it works or, you know, should you wear the mask and should you just create a little more divide. And then the George Floyd thing happened. And that sucked, you know what I mean? It really does. And, like, you know, I just wanted to get this show running again so we can all just all, like, come over and have something come night behind and i

feel like you guys really do that and like you guys have been there since like you know if you want to look quarantine talking about it you know contesting the arguments and it's just like you guys give so much information to me and i'm sure many other fans and other listeners that you guys have and like i know mark you're always worried about losing followers on instagram sometimes and i'm just like bro like you don't gotta worry about that because the real ones that I mean, like, I know, Mark, you're always worried about losing followers on Instagram. Sometimes I'm just like, bro, like, you don't got to worry about that because the real ones that are going to be staying are the real ones. You know what I mean? Like, you don't need those bots or whatever the heck you need on Instagram. Because I really, you know, you guys, again, you guys are just so freaking nice, man, genuinely.

You know what I mean? And I feel like, you know, it sucks because when people create, like, the divide, you know, in fitness, like the CrossFit versus bodybuilding, powerlifting versus bodybuilding, all that stuff, it's just like, why can't we just do all of it, you know what I mean? Like, it's just like, you know, we can try these things. And I feel like, you know, you shouldn't be judged for, you know, trying a certain aspect of your training that maybe isn't necessarily going to help you get aesthetically good or like athletically good, but it's going to be good for your mental health. You know what I mean? Like, it's cool to change it up a little bit and like,

you know, try to like contest your ideas. You know what I mean? I feel like a lot of people just need to hear like, it's okay to do CrossFit. It's okay to do bodybuilding or powerlifting or, you know, whatever you want. You know what I mean? Cause at the end of the day, it's kind of like, you know, you're still working out. We appreciate it, my man. Thank you so much for calling in thank you thank you yeah no problem thanks man thank you man appreciate it joe rogan status we got it we got it it's official like that officially official now that was the board and they just said that better than yeah better than rogan all right i'm gonna close

up the lines right now we actually had an interesting question from somebody overseas. They're in the UK. So right now with our call-in show, it has to be a US number and it can't be like a Google voice number or something like a burner line or something. So maybe that's why he couldn't get in. But Tom Newberry, it's a really complicated question, but what he's essentially getting at, he's talking about his central nervous system. He doesn't want to overtrain, so he has light days and heavy days. And this is more of a cumulative thing.

So, on his light days, he'll do more reps at lighter weight, but the total weight that he lifts is more than that of on the heavy days where he does less uh reps so does that have a huge impact on his cns like is he close to overtraining on the light days even though it's supposed to be his light day he's actually still lifting more training volume yeah so is that okay does he need to pull back even further or is he kind of on the right path? Want to answer that? Yeah, your intensity is lower. So therefore, you shouldn't be really doing that much to your central nervous system. Your central nervous system is going to be, you know, more, I guess, like taxed from, you know, getting into that 80, 85, 90, 100% range. From, you know, getting into that 80, 85, 90, 100% range.

It's not that it doesn't get worked at all, you know, when you do sets of 10 and sets of 12 and stuff like that. But from a bodybuilding, like bodybuilding just feels different. It feels way different than powerlifting. Powerlifting is really weird. You feel like somebody took like your soul away from you or something. Yeah. Bodybuilding is like you kind of have a little bit of a pump all the time, and you're also sore. And powerlifting is just like, I don't know, you get out of the car slow. You just move around like an old man.

You might move super fast in the gym. I remember when I was squatting six and and seven plates i could i could squat seven plates you know faster than somebody could get up off their couch you know they could try as hard as they wanted they could get up off their couch as fast as they wanted to and i was able to just boom in a blink of an eye be able to explode up with those weights but how i moved later on the rest of the day the rest of the week four, seven days later, I was fucked up. Yeah, man. So the bodybuilding stuff and, you know, getting in more work via the higher reps shouldn't really have the same negative impact on your nervous system.

Yeah. So if you're only concerned about your nervous system, the day that you're doing more training volume, right, where you're doing the lighter reps, but more training volume, that's not going to tax your CNS much, but you will be physically fatigued. Because this is why I said bodybuilders are just the great jack-of-all-trades athletes. They adapt to training with a lot of training volume, like he does on those days, but they also adapt to training heavy sometimes, right? So it doesn't hit them as hard. So I would say that's fine what you're doing. But when Jesse Burdick was here, we mentioned this, and I think I want to mention it to

you too. You seem to have a good knowledge of training, so you're probably already doing this. But make sure that every four to five weeks, you give yourself a one to two week deload. Because if you don't do that and you're continuing to train this way, you'll drive yourself into just the ground over a few weeks and you just won't be able to recover well. You really, you just really won't be able to be productive. So I hope you're not missing out on that. But yeah, it doesn't seem bad. I mean, it just all depends on how it's set up and seems sound. You know, we've talked so much about nutrition on this podcast, you know, many, many, many times. But it's important that we just mentioned briefly that, you know, it's important that you're fueling yourself enough, you know, especially when you're trying to gain muscle mass.

We talk a lot about sleep. You know, you're going to have to adopt some good sleep hygiene if you care. adopt some good sleep hygiene if you care. And especially if you want to try to lose body fat and gain muscle at the same time, which is the kind of the unicorn of fitness. It's not an easy thing to acquire. You know, you want to try to make sure you get proper sleep, make sure you're getting nutrition in just in short, you know, maybe start out with a gram per pound of body weight in terms of your protein. You can kind of pick carbohydrates or you can pick fat as your fuel source. You could even cut it down the middle and split up some of your calories between the two of them. Protein is not much of an energy source, but it is a rebuilding resource for your body. I would just say maybe start out with about

a gram per pound of body weight of carbohydrates and maybe go about half of that or so with fats. And that should be a decent starting point. You can kind of move those things around. So if you weighed 200 pounds, you might have about 100 grams of fat. It might be best if it was a little bit lower than that. But 100 would be the top end, about 200 grams of protein and about 200 grams of carbohydrates. If you wanted to, you could scale the protein up a little bit and back the fat down. That would probably land you in this perfect spot where you would be able to gain muscle, lose fat, same time, you might have to implement some cardio just to get a little extra

activity, the 10 minute walks, or you might need something, um, a little bit more regimented than that. Um, but you know, in our experience, you, you can do those things at the same time. It's just, it just takes, it's a longer route. It's like, we're talking about, you know, months over weeks, you know, like it might be, it might be like in six months from now, you might be able to lose a couple pounds of body fat and you might be able to gain, you know, a pound or two of muscle if you're a newer lifter. But in a lot of, in a lot of cases, I think people are thinking that they're going to like lose 20 pounds and put on like three to five pounds of muscle. And that's going to be harder.

That would, again, that can be done. But that's now we're talking about let's be more realistic that you can do that in a year or you can do that in like eight months or something like that. And Seema has some good practices that he utilizes with his clients to help them track, you know, not just, he's gathering as much information as he can to make sure that these people are really making progress on the diet. It's not, you know, he's not just, you know, using fat calipers that he's cheating with each time to tell his clients that, oh, you were, you know, you were 25%, now you're eight, you know. He has them, you know, taking measurements, weighing themselves. So I'll turn it over to him to, to mention some of these things.

Yeah. So a lot of people ask me about like tracking body fat and it's really inconsistent in terms of tracking body fat for stuff. Like I can't track these people. They live all over the place, but the best things that I think an individual can do for themselves is I think number one is actually taking measurements. And it's free. It's free. Free. Yeah. Go on Amazon.

They have those measurement things where you can put it around the arm and it makes it really easy to self-measure. But the cool thing about measurements, especially when you're gaining or when you're losing, is that you can really see what's going on. I think a good place to really make sure that you measure is your waist area. So your belly, two inches above and two inches below. When you're trying to above your belly button, two inches below your belly button. And some,

something that I try to do with people is to make sure that even as we're gaining or yeah, trying to put on muscle, we don't want to see that area go up much if at all. And a lot of the times I'm actually looking for that area to slowly go down because if you're, if that area is going down, you tend to accumulate fat there, but that's going down as you're gaining weight slowly, that means you're doing the unicorn. You're losing body fat as you're gaining a little bit of muscle over time. It's a slow process. It takes a lot of patience,

but it's a good determiner if that's going down that you're actually not putting on body fat as you're getting stronger. The other areas that I have people take measurements are the chest, right arm, left arm, two inches above the belly, two inches below, hips, right thigh and left thigh. I have people do that weekly. Is there a difference if it's a female?

No. Just because sometimes we tend to store body fat a little differently than females. Waist area still. Waist area is still a good place to keep an eye on. The hips at that point, you also want to pay attention to because a lot of the women I work with don't want to lose too much there. Right. But the waist is still a good determinant if they're trying to gain.

And if you're trying to lose, obviously, like it's kind of the same deal, but when you're losing, you want to focus on not losing too much size in the areas like the right thigh, the left thigh, the arms, the chest. You want to see the big areas going down, typically the waist area, and potentially you might see some go down in the hips because most, a lot of people also hold a lot of body fat there. So I think taking measurements weekly is a really good thing to do. Um, so I think taking measurements weekly is a really good thing to do. If the scale doesn't cause you too much anxiety, it's a really good idea. Scale really bothers some people, right? It does. It bothers a lot of people because if they don't see the scale moving as fast in one direction or the other, it demotivates them and makes them less compliant to what they

need to do. If you have someone like that, you just say, Hey, don't worry about it. I just have them not weigh themselves, or maybe we'll do one way in a week on the same day. But the measurements is what I really try to have people focus on because the measurements over a long period of time will really tell a good story. Like this guy I was, I was talking to you about, he's like 44. He is the same weight now than when we started about like seven months ago,

one 92, right? We fluctuated. We got up to like one 96 and back to one 92. But the thing about him is that he's substantially stronger. He looks substantially different. The waist area has gone down about four inches in total. His legs are bigger and he's much stronger.

But the thing is, is like we, you know, I've been having him focus on performance. Like, even though his goal was to lose body fat, instead of focusing on losing body fat, we focused on getting stronger. If you can, and so what Mark was mentioning, the whole unicorn thing, losing body fat and gaining muscle over time. I think for a lot of people, it comes down to like, and you also mentioned Stan Efferding talked about owning your weight, right? If you're, I don't know, 15, 16% body fat, if you focus on staying the same weight for seven or eight months while getting stronger in the gym, you're going to look substantially different in seven to eight months. Definitely better if you focus on gaining strength and increasing your performance in the gym. Because naturally, you're just going to be gaining a little bit of muscle because of the increased performance.

And because you're holding on to that weight, you're going to slowly be losing a little bit of body fat as your performance increases. And you're just going to look better. So it's a slow process. And it's not something that a lot of people like to do. But after a while, you're just like, damn, I'm looking substantially better at the same weight. It's something that you can do. So measurements, weighing yourself each day if the scale doesn't cause you anxiety and taking pictures, I'd say every single once a month, because you're going to be taking pictures of yourself more than that. but you'll be able to see a big difference with the same pictures,

same lighting every four weeks. You'll be able to see a good, good difference in those pictures. Yeah. How about monitoring their sleep? Uh, yeah. If you've monitored sleep, um, it's, it's important. Uh, but like monitoring your sleep, it's something you should do, not from like, I guess the aspect of tracking the way you look but just making sure that you perform well if you're like so i like this whoop thing because it just like it it helps me keep track of like how i'm sleeping every single night and then i can it can help me optimize that so and then how does that work like doesn't it tell you like you're like you got a good amount of sleep?

You can perform really well today. Is that part of like your plan or whatever? It pays it or this pays attention to like heart rate variability, which is like if it's really, really low, that shows that you're not really like and I can actually tell on the days that my HRV is low. I'm actually not feeling as good physically. And the days where it's higher, actually, like I'm not paying attention that i actually do feel better um so cool yeah it is pretty cool but yeah you do want to pay attention to your sleep because obviously if you're not sleeping well consistently your performance is going to be crap if your performance is not good that's going to affect your body fat loss and all of that over time it gives you like a sleep score type of thing right

it gives you a sleep score gives you a sleep. I know that like when I was doing my bodybuilding show, I just, I got to a point where the sleep was really hard and there was like, I was just, you know, I was just, I was wrecked. When you get leaner, that happens. Yeah. I was just like, you know, pretty much killing myself. But then as it got closer to the show and as I started to feel it more, I'm like, I really need to pay. I know I keep telling myself I need to sleep and I still just wasn't doing it. And then I finally committed to it. And I can't remember the exact amount of weight. It was like five pounds or maybe seven pounds. Just it just completely disappeared off of me and didn't come back. It wasn't just like,

it wasn't only like a shift in, in water weight. I mean, I'm sure some of it was water, but it was within about a two week time period. And it was just like, I got a lot better sleep. And I remember even one specific day where I woke up in the morning, you know, probably like four o'clock or something, but this was a day that I didn't have to train with Mike. And, you know, I weighed myself and I went back to bed. And, you know, I stayed in bed until maybe like seven or something like that. And when I woke up, I was like three or four pounds lighter and veins everywhere. Like it was wild.

And I was just like, wow, like that's the fucking power. That's the power of sleep right there. Then I was just like, wow, like that's the fucking power. That's the power of sleep right there. And obviously it's, I'm not saying that, you know, sleeping is going to like burn fat necessarily, but you do burn fat and a lot of restorative things happen when you sleep. That's why we need sleep. That's why all living, all living things have to like either sleep or like, you know, recharge in some way, even things that aren't alive.

It's like all this shit needs like batteries or some sort of electricity. If it doesn't need, you know, if it doesn't need sleep, it needs to be fucking plugged in. Otherwise it just doesn't do anything. Right. Yeah. You know, body fat loss happens so much more consistently when you're getting quality sleep each night.

And it's, you know, I was thinking about this recently because I've been having some stress, some undue stress for the past, I don't know, two or two and a half weeks. And it's fucked my sleep up so much. And like, as I track it on this, I'm just like, God dang, man. When like, you gotta just make sure, you gotta chill out.

Well, like when I was prepping for my photo shoot it was the same thing i'm like in sema like dude i'm like taking so many steps backwards like what's going on like we're getting so close and you're just like what was your sleep like it was okay what was it really like all right i got like maybe six hours last night you're like okay you need to get some sleep and again i've said this before but i'm like i know how important sleep is but when i could physically see a difference in my body like from one day to the next was like whoa like okay then it was super like uh motivating to like okay it's time to go to bed but it took that for me again somebody who understands we you know we talk about on this

podcast all the time and i understand it and i was like, it didn't hit me about how important it was until I could actually see it in the mirror from one day to the next, how much of an impact it made on my body. So that stuff was huge. This is from our boy Rhino, who actually sent over two chunks of literature on like weighing yourself. So, you know, to weigh yourself or not to weigh yourself, you know, people always ask that question. I'm sure that, you know, for as many papers as we can pull up that are for weighing yourself, we can probably pull up as many that are against it, right? And they could be for various reasons.

But there is some evidence, at least there's some evidence based on some pretty good research that weighing yourself frequently is beneficial. And that the avoidance of the scale, if you think about, let's say that you're weighing yourself, I don't know, like twice a week for a little while and you were doing pretty good. You're like, wow, I lost 10 pounds. I feel great. What would be the thing that would lead you to start to avoid the scale again? It would probably be that you're like, I haven't been sticking to my plan, so I'm going to stop weighing myself. Right? And it's like that's the action that probably starts first.

It could also be that you are sticking to the plan. You get a little frustrated because you might be seeing some various, just maybe you reached a little bit of a plateau and that can be really frustrating. Or if you're a female, some hormonal things are going on and you see, sometimes people will kind of, they'll be like, man, I was so pissed off.

I weighed myself this morning and I'm up two pounds. And you're like, hey, two pounds, like relax. Like, you know, everything's going to be okay. It's easy for somebody to say that's not in the moment for the person that's not doing the work. But it can be really demoralizing and frustrating for the person that is doing the work. But what I would encourage you to do

is I would encourage people to weigh themselves and to weigh yourself frequently enough to where you even know what you weigh without getting on a scale. I think that's important. I think that's how much, yeah, you don't have to be obsessed with it, but I think that you should weigh yourself enough to be like, yep, like I can tell what I weigh kind of in the morning. I weighed 239 this morning and I thought I weighed 238. So I was like close enough,

right? Um, you know, each, each, uh, each day is going to be a little different depending on what you eat. But if you start to learn a lot about that, then you can start to, uh, you can make better choices. I ended up making better decisions sometimes. I'm like, ah, I already ate, you know, that earlier today. So I'm not going to, I ate a lot earlier, so I'm good. Or I have this coming up, so I can – it just helps you manage it. But anyway, the conclusion based on some of these studies on frequently weighing yourself, it says the conclusions are based on consistency and evidence reviewed. Evidence reviewed frequent self-weighing, at the very least, seems to be a good predictor of moderate weight loss and less weight regain, which I think that is massive. You know, weight loss is one thing, but avoiding, you know, gaining your weight back is huge. The avoidance of the initial weight gain in adults, and he listed out a study that, that, uh, that he referenced, but

I found it to be really useful for me. And again, I think, and Seema pointed out some other great resources, some other things that you can do that are just different, you know, because maybe you do like get super freaked out by it. And if you do, what a great idea just to not do it for a little while. Yeah. I think a big thing that also, I mean, it kind of falls in line with measurements, but a great thing that I think people underestimate is just the way clothes fit. I find that that's a powerful thing when you're trying to like, let's say you're going from bigger to being smaller. Let's say you're not seeing the scale move as fast as you'd like, but your pants are way looser. And, and like that shirt that used

to hug your belly, isn't hugging your belly as much. Like those are things like you gotta count these wins. Like you always say, Mark, like, you know, figure out where your wins are, figure out where you're winning. Even if it's small, you gotta figure that you gotta, you gotta understand that. I think a big thing too. And I hear this a lot whenever, like when, when you look at yourself every day, right? And you're trying to get bigger, you don't see it much. But when somebody's like, oh, you're looking bigger, right? That is actually, that's a very honest assessment, even though they're not trying to do that. That's a very honest assessment of the changes that you're making, even though you don't see it. When someone says, wow, you're looking bigger or you're looking more muscular and you've

only gained like a pound or two, that's a big deal. And you need it. That's one of those ways that you can actually see those results. So when people tell me like, oh yeah, a friend of mine said I got bigger, but I don't see him like, yo, your friend's right. Like your friend is like, they can actually see that difference because they don't see you every day. You know, you're biased. A good example might be, uh, you after jujitsu practice. Probably if somebody saw you then because you actually lost a bunch of weight, you lost some water weight, maybe you lost four pounds or depending on how hot it is and how hard the practice was. Somebody would be like, oh, my God, you're huge. But you're literally, you literally weigh less than you did when you started practice. Yeah.

You're just hot and you just sweated a lot of it out, you know. Yeah. And once people can see more definition definition then they think you're getting more muscular like what are you doing different you're like i lost five pounds yeah sometimes that's all it takes cool i think i think we hit up a lot of good points you know just to kind of reiterate there's a lot of different ways to stimulate muscle growth, to get some good old muscle mass going. You know, training heavy is one way to do it. Time under tension. There's so many different things that fall under time under tension. There's so many different methods.

There's so many different methods. If anyone has never really implemented or tried some rest pause methods, I really like that method a lot. And there's many different ways to do rest pause. But basically what it allows you to do is it allows you to handle a heavier weight and still do drop sets or even repeat sets with a similar weight. All that you do is you just rest a little bit in between the sets. So let's just say that you were doing some – it's kind of easier to do on like a regular bench press than it is to do with dumbbells because you've got to keep, you know, bringing the dumbbells up and down.

At least with a regular bar, you can just rack it each time. But let's say that you can bench around, I don't know, maybe, say you can bench 300 pounds. If you can bench 300 pounds, you might want to try 250 pounds or 275 pounds for some reps. And maybe you can do about seven to nine reps with that weight which would sound like you would be like way way stronger than a 300 pound bench probably 250 or 235 or something like that depending on the person you can get two or three reps a clip and you can do three sets of it you can do like three you know three sets of it and each time know, you'll do three reps, rack it, rest about 15 seconds, three reps, rest about 15 seconds. The advantage there is just that you're able to use more weight.

You were able to use more weight for more reps than you would normally be able to do. Another form of doing stuff like that is, you know, forced reps. Having somebody kind of guide you through some reps. You know, again, your best bench is, you know, 300. You have 275 on and you tell your spotter, hey, I'm going to go for like five, six reps. I know that I'm probably going to die at like the third one, but I want you to kind of bump me through and guide me through a couple extra reps.

Some people like to do eccentric work where they bring the weights down really slow. I've never really been a fan of, I've liked drop sets and things like that, but I like tempo work, but not moving around too slow, just more controlled than anything else. That's what I've found to be, like, felt the best to me because when I've done eccentric work before, and it just hurts. It just makes you really, really sore. If you do, like, a six-second eccentric with a really heavy weight, it's just, like, impossible to recover from.

It's great for deadlifts. Yeah, it is absolutely brutal on something like a deadlift. And it can, yeah, there you go. It can benefit your strength a ton too. There's just so many different ways of doing this stuff. You can pause in the middle of a rep. I do that sometimes with bicep movements. I might kind of get a little curl going, hold it for a second, kind of flex, maybe go back down, then go all the way through or do like one and a half reps.

I mean, just the list of things that you can do is endless. And that's what makes training so fun. You know, Andrew trains with me here and there and pretty frequently. And it's always so different. A method we've been utilizing lately is starting and finishing with the same exercise. That's a lot of fun. Give it a try. Try to start your workout with leg extensions and end your workout with leg extensions or start your workout with a squat and end your workout with a squat.

It's brutal. Maybe on the first round of squats, maybe you do three sets of five, but maybe when you come back to the squat again, maybe you do three sets of 15. You'll be torched. But it's fun. And it ends up being, it ends up being like kind of new every time.

And Seema was saying that he likes to push heavy. And then, you know, once he pushes heavy, maybe he does a set of six with a bunch of weight wrapped around him for some pull-ups. And then you go into doing something a little lighter. Yeah. I think one thing that you mentioned there that I think a lot of people can get a lot from, there's the guy that just called. He was asking how to build up that motivation to go train in the gym, right?

As much as some people may talk about, oh, this training is optimal or if you set up your percentages this way, this is optimal. I get it. It's great. You want to set up your training in a smart way where you can recover and make progress, right? But make your training fun and something that you're going to look forward to. And if that means like, you know, you want to start with a movement and end with a movement. Cause that, cause that actually sounds really fucking fun. You can find a way to do that in a way that's going to allow you to make progress, but also

will motivate you to go into the gym because it's new and it's exciting um i think that's something that a lot of us underestimate when we're just looking to make progress we kind of put enjoyment on the back burner and only focus on optimizing right and that's not always the best thing i don't think that's the best thing to do all the time yeah and what makes the uh like starting and and stop or starting and finishing with the uh the same workout is like so we did dips yesterday um i'm not fantastic at dips but like i can do whatever rep sets that mark you know is doing and it's good triceps were popping by the way thank you yeah my triceps are your triceps your triceps they're really sore right now um so we did a whole chest workout and then we finished with uh dips again and i i could only do jump dips like right i'm

down and then i had to jump up and then slowly yes yeah it was tough i've never kipping dips i've never been able to get to that point. You know, like, I usually don't have the patience to burn out all the way that bad. But it, like, fast-forwarded everything. You got lit up yesterday. That killed me. Because, like, when we went to the bench press, we were using the Cadillac bar. Andrew was toast, man. It was so good, though.

It's like, we're going to put a five on each side for you here. Yeah, I was like, can we turn on, like, the anti-gravity? Because this shit's impossible for me uh yeah i was absolutely crushed but you know like if you can think of something to where like you maybe don't have the patience to do to burn out like that that's a really good way to do it and man like i said i am sore right now i got to hang out with my buddy, Mark Uyama. He's been a strength coach in the NFL for 14 years. And one of the things that he's always done is he's always had a day that's just for the guys. Just a day. He says, man, you know, hey, you know, do what you want.

You know, like this. So each training session, you know, he's got it real mapped out. Hey, we're going to go through these stretches. We're going to go through these drills. And you got to, you know, use's got it real mapped out. Hey, we're going to go through these stretches. We're going to go through these drills. And you got to, you know, use this machine and do things this way. On like a Friday, he'll say, it's up to you guys. You do your thing. And they just always crank whatever music they want.

They're dancing. They're lifting. They're having fun. And, you know, they're able to gravitate towards whatever exercises they like. And why not do that for yourself? Why not be like, hey, fuck all this stuff, man. I'm just going to go have some fun. Even if you're on a specific program and you look at it one day and you're like, man, that's a lot of work.

I just don't feel like doing that. Don't feel bad about it. There's going to be more time. You have more time to continue to work on yourself. Have a lifetime. have a lifetime it's it's a it's just it's a form of self-improvement right just getting yourself to the gym period so just fucking relax a little bit and get it in there and have you know have have some fun with it that's how you're gonna uh that's how you're gonna outlast everybody that's how you're gonna to outlast everybody. That's how you're going to be doing this for five years, 10 years, 20 years.

And it doesn't matter what your genetic background is. It doesn't matter where you started. It matters that you're able to hold on to this for a long period of time because you'll pass up everybody. You'll pass up every single person that has stopped. It doesn't matter what they've, you know, what they were able to, you know, what they had before. If they stopped, that's all you need them to do. And you can get a victory over them.

Andrew, want to take us on out of here, buddy? I will. That was an awesome show. Thank you, everybody, for calling in today. If you guys are listening to this after we go off air please make sure you text uh we'll say text the word power to 206-737-7369 to get notified the very next 69 did you hear that yeah too bad it wasn't like 420-6969 or something like that what was your comment about the nose so that was from uh burt kreischer i think he was talking about so when he was young and seem is real

interested yeah and scared i'm just thinking there's something i'm thinking about i don't know if it's gonna go it's going that way oh yeah so when he was young before he ever like had had sex or anything he's just like i can't wait to do 69 like that sounds like it's gonna be amazing he's like and then it happened and like i didn't know where to put my nose he's like, and then it happened. And like, I didn't know where to put my nose. He's like, it was just really uncomfortable. He's like, so ever since then, it just was like, nope, no go on the 69. I don't think that's awesome. Yeah, I was thinking about that. Of course you were.

Everybody was. Anyways, 206-737-7369. You guys will get a text notification. So text power to that number. You guys will get a text notification the very next time that we do a live call-in show. So if you missed out, please do that so you guys get that notification. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Biles Power Project on Instagram, at MB Power Project on TikTok and Twitter.

And then also, you know, Mark was just probably texting Stan Efferding. We have the opportunity to literally just call anybody that we want. So if you guys have ideas for who you guys want to hear on a call-in show, and then you guys will have an opportunity to speak after them, let us know in the comment section down below, wherever you're watching this, whether it be YouTube or Facebook. And then of course, reach out on Instagram if you guys have anybody that you want us to reach out to and talk to on the phone and then maybe afterwards

like us as a whole group you guys included we can discuss what we what we heard from our guest my Instagram is at I am Andrew Z and Seema where you at? and Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube and Seema Inyang on TikTok and Twitter Mark? Dude why are you so jacked? Why don't you just tell us just fucking just And Sima Yen Yang on Instagram and YouTube. And Sima Yen Yang on TikTok and Twitter. Mark.

Dude, why are you so jacked? Why don't you just tell us? Just fucking just let us know. It's a safe zone. Why you got to have secrets? I mean, you did tell us some stuff on the show, but I still feel like you're not. I don't know. Yeah, you're like, I'm stressed. I'm not really getting sleep.

And I was like, uh-huh. Still waiting for the, I can see my I'm not really getting sleep. And it was like, uh-huh. Still waiting for the, uh, I can see my body's not as jacked as it was. That's not the case. It's just funny how like, how like crazy, like,

yeah, stress can really like mess up sleep. That's all. It's a killer. Yeah. But no, there's no secrets, man.

I don't know, man. There's no secret. Andrew, what do you think? I don't know. He's wearing glasses. He wouldn't, he wouldn't punch a man. There's no secret. Andrew, what do you think? I don't know. He's wearing glasses. You wouldn't punch a man with glasses?

No, but maybe he's hiding something behind those frames. You know, one thing I wish we could do, we could just give everybody. Testosterone was pretty high, wasn't it? It was surprisingly high. No, it was in the normal range. Normal range is not normal. It was in the high end of the normal range. It didn't say high.

It said normal, but it was at like the highest end not normal. It was in the high end of the normal range. It didn't say high. It said normal. But it was at like the highest end of normal. Which I was surprised about. You were knocking on high's door. Yeah, I was knocking on high's door. Yeah, I would have thought that you would be really high in estrogen. Just by the looks of him, right? Yeah, right.

Yeah, you don't look like you exude testosterone at all. No. I mean, I was raised by women, so. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Maybe that's a secret. I don't know like you exude testosterone at all. No. I mean, I was raised by women, so. Oh, there you go. Yeah. Maybe that's a secret. I don't know. Could be. We got to follow his program.

I don't know. What is it? Goats or something that you said you eat? Goat milk? He eats a whole goat head. No, no. I have a few people that pump breast milk for me. Oh.

I don't know if that's what I thought everybody did. Like, I have a fridge full of breast milk at home. Not for me. First the creatine,ine now this but isn't that normal is it is it cambodian breast milk um no okay i don't necessarily want to no i'm not gonna go he's gonna end up telling us that he's on a gram of vitamin c a day probably too 1500 oh but isn't that what you do i thought you were natty bro well that's i thought that's what you do too I thought you were natty, bro. I thought that's what you do, too. This is why they say you should meet your heroes. Wait, pause. I'm not claiming to be natural.

Neither of you guys do the breast milk thing? I do almond milk from time to time. So maybe that explains my physique to yours. Oh my gosh. I thought it was... I gotta go home. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength.

Catch you guys later.