Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 540 - Sal Di Stefano - Resistance Training Does More Than You Think

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Mind Pump's very own Sal Di Stefano is a personal trainer and co-founder of Mind Pump Media and co-host of Mind Pump, an online radio show/podcast that is dedicated to providing truthful fitness and health information. He is also the designer of the Muscular Adaptation Programming System (MAPS Fitness Products). Grab Sal's NEW book here: https://amzn.to/3xPEFgX Subscribe to the NEW Power Project Newsletter! ➢ https://bit.ly/2JvmXMb Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Eat Rite Foods: http://eatritefoods.com/ Use ode "POWERPROJECT25" for 25% off your first order, then code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off every order after! ➢LMNT Electrolytes: http://drinklmnt.com/powerproject ➢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 ➢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 #Podcast #MarkBell

Nseema, you work with a lot of people. What do you see as a common issue or hurdle or something that people have a hard time with when it comes to maybe drop some LBs or even gain some LBs or just stay on track with their diet? Well, everybody has different lives. Everybody's busy to a different extent. I have this guy I work with. He's a cop, so he's literally in a car almost all day long. And when he gets off, it's very easy on his drive home to go try and maybe get a stop at Jack in the Box or McDonald's. That's why I suggest a lot of busy people to find a way to work with a meal prep company. Try to get some meals on deck so that you can literally just either warm it up at work before you leave or go home, warm it up so you don't spend time cooking. And that's where Eat Right Foods is pretty awesome because they have a lot of great meal selections that you can just literally warm up eat tastes amazing you're good to go yeah and a lot of people don't like don't know you can just hit up a gas station go use their microwave

if you want your hot foods yeah um really though like just the meal prep in general sometimes can be a pain but what's worse is just not being prepared so we want you guys to be prepared and with eat right foods not only is it going to taste amazing, but it's just going to be the easiest meal prep you've ever done because you don't have to do it. Head over to eatrightfoods.com. That's E-R-I-T-E foods.com. At checkout, enter promo code POWERPROJECT. 25 for 25% off your first order. Not going to leave you hanging, though, because after that, use promo code POWERPROJECT for 10% off everything after that.

Again, that's at eatrightfoods.com. Head over there right now. What up, Power Project crew? This is Josh Settledge, aka SettleGate, here to introduce you to our next guest, Sal DiStefano. Sal DiStefano is an author, personal trainer, and co-founder of Mind Pump Media. He is the co-host of the Mind Pump Podcast. It is a show dedicated to

providing truthful fitness and health information. He is also the designer of the MAPS fitness products, which stands for Muscular Adaptation Programming System. Sal originally picked up his first weight at the age of 14 as a skinny and insecure teenager. Fitness was a way for him to apply hard work and effort towards changing and reinventing himself by building more muscle and developing strength. At the age of 22, Sal became an entrepreneur, opening a wellness and personal training facility. Despite his business success and experience of training, at the age of 28, Sal's health took a bad turn. Years of intense training and supplement abuse caused his body to rebel.

He ended up losing 15 pounds of muscle and at one point believed he may have had an autoimmune disorder. This forced Sal to change his personal approach to fitness. In return, Sal made a healthy priority and he visited his insecurities that caused him to abuse his body. It took him about a full year of studying and learning to transform yet again. Sal learned about gut health, hormone health, and how to prioritize health over his own appearance. It was at this point Sal took what he had learned and developed MAPS, Muscular Adaptation Programming Systems, a training system developed by Sal and his close friend Doug that shatters the failed muscle building ideas that had destroyed Sal's body in the past. Sal's new book, The Resistance Training Revolution, centers around changing the way you

think about working out, staying in shape, gaining muscle, and overall fitness. This book takes a fundamental workout paradigm and shows you how and why you should rethink the way you were working out. On a side note, Sal has been quoted in believing the conspiracy that his co-host Justin is lactose intolerant based solely on the evidence of how he paints the toilet. But that is a different story for a different time. Please enjoy this conversation with our guest, Sal DiStefano. My mouth goes here? Yeah, like that. Just ahhh.

Nervous? Yeah, huh? Are you nervous? No, man. You okay? You get me to talk? That's's like most comfortable i'll ever be i'm nervous why are you nervous you always seem super calm and sema you know he's kind of two days in a row i was kind of grabbed me in some spots that i'm

just uh i don't know probably shouldn't talk about on the air i'll do it again if you go don't don't did i keep your hands above about on the air. I'll do it again. If you go, don't, don't keep your hands above the table. I do something wrong or do something right. Some would say you did something right. Someone said you did something wrong. It just depends on the outlook. Wow.

Hey now. Yep. Well, as long as we're not canceled, I think it was just fine. Then we're getting close. Let me know when we're recording. And now.

Oh, all right. What's going on sal not much man thanks for having me on the hell you've been doing with yourself not much it's been a long i think the last time we were here was maybe three years ago it's been a while been a while why you been hating bro i'm not no we love you we watch your stuff all the time you guys are doing great yeah yeah you wrote a book i heard what's going on with this i did i wrote a book called the resistance training uh revolution so do you okay you might remember this there was a running book

that was published back in the 70s i can't remember anything about a running book you'll remember this yeah you actually will remember this it was uh the complete book of running or guide to running and it's a picture of a leg and like a red running shoe and everybody had it i do know exactly what you're talking about i knew it and this book ushered in uh the running revolution you know prior to this book nobody really ran uh outside you didn't if you went outside you saw someone running it would be really weird wow unless you're in los angeles um but this book ushered in kind of this revolution of running i wrote the resistance training revolution to try to do the same thing for resistance training, to try to get the average person to view strength training and resistance

training as accurately as it should be, which is as the most effective form of exercise to combat the ills of modern life, all the problems that we encounter living in modern Western societies. And so that's really the goal of the book is to get the average person to say, I think I'll grab a pair of dumbbells rather than lacing up my running shoes. Fitness seems so simple though, right? No, I think it's really dope because like, I think when a lot of people do think about fitness or going into the gym, they're like, workouts going to be 16, 90 minutes, right?

Cause like even, even me when I started, I was like, if a workout's under 90 minutes, you're a pussy like that. That right. I mean, right. But I'm actually training. Right. Right. But I'm assuming like maybe in your book, the workouts 30, 45 minutes, super effective.

Yeah. Everyone can do it. Yeah. So the target is the average person. So, um, that's what I'm trying to communicate to. So obviously we're all fitness fanatics. Right. But I'm sure you have family members, aunts, uncles who, you know, they're like the typical person, right?

Maybe unhealthy. They don't exercise. And when you talk to them about working out, they'll say things like, oh, I don't want to get big. I'm not trying to lift weights. I just want to go do get on the bike or maybe get on the treadmill or swim a little bit. And so I'm trying to target those people to, to communicate to them differently than I think they've been communicated to in the past.

You know, the old paradigm, the old weight loss paradigm, um, is totally false. It goes something like this, right? So we're dealing with this obesity epidemic.

That's that umbrella health issue. And then underneath are all the connected issues, right? So dementia, Alzheimer's, diabetes, osteopenia, osteoporosis, cancers. But obesity is kind of the big umbrella issue. And the old paradigm said, okay, in order to lose weight, you need to take in less calories than you burn or put it differently, take in more calories or burn more calories than you take in. And so the formula looked like restrict calories. And then the exercise portion of the formula was like this. They looked at exercise and they valued all exercise for one thing.

How many calories does it burn while you do it? So they look at all forms of exercise and they said, okay, we need to burn more calories. Therefore, the most valuable form of exercise that'll combat obesity, improve our health, is the one that burns the most calories. And the problem with that approach is that it ignores the real and true value of exercise, which is how does this exercise, this form of exercise, get my body to adapt? And then what does that mean? What do those adaptations mean? So we've ignored that and just looked at the calorie burn. And when you look at just the calorie burn, it does become quite clear, right? Cardio, sure. An hour of running is going to burn more calories

than an hour of any other form of exercise, including strength training. The problem is the adaptations that we end up inducing through that form of exercise are not beneficial for the average person who's going to work out two or three days a week who wants to lose weight and improve their health. Well, the adaptations look like this, right? So here's what happens when you exercise. And I'm sure I'm speaking to a lot of people probably already know this. But when you exercise, you stress the body. And your body aims at getting better at that particular activity. So if i go

try running and i've never run before one block is going to be very difficult the next day i might be able to do a block and a half and so on as my body adapts what's happening to my body as it's adapting for this form of exercise well that form of exercise burns a lot of calories while i'm doing it doesn't require much strength at all in fact it requires very little strength cardiovascular activity requires minimal strength as evidenced by extreme endurance athletes they're they're they have very little muscle on their bodies so what the body does is it improves its endurance and it pairs down muscle why does it pair down muscle because muscle is expensive it's an expensive tissue so my body's trying to learn how to do this activity, but burn less calories while I'm doing and burn less calories all the time. I'm trying to become more efficient.

So think of it this way. It would be like having an artificially intelligent car that adapted to your driving habits. And then imagine if you drove every single day, you know, 200 miles at 30 miles an hour, it would turn itself into a very small engine or an electric engine. It wouldn't have much power and it would conserve energy. This is exactly what that old paradigm is causing. Restrict calories, do lots of cardio, slow your metabolism down. In fact, studies show consistently that when people diet plus cardio, they actually lose half the weight that they lose is muscle. So if you lose 10 pounds,

five pounds is muscle, five pounds is body fat. Now, why is this a bad thing? Slows down your metabolism. Also, okay, you're not any leaner. You're just smaller. You've lost five pounds of muscle and five pounds of body fat, which means you're a smaller,

same flabbiness, slower metabolism version of yourself. So over time, what is this? And we've all experienced this, either ourselves or definitely clients we've trained or family members. You lose weight initially, right? Half of it muscle, half of it body fat. Then you plateau. Why do you plateau?

My metabolism slowed down. It adapted. How do I get it to move anymore? Oh, better do more cardio. Better cut my calories more. more oh better do more cardio better cut my calories more eventually at the end of that you're left with i have to eat 1500 calories a day and i have to run five days a week just to maintain what i've lost which for the average person is completely unsustainable and it's done a tremendous disservice to people because nobody's considering the form of exercise that does the

opposite to the metabolism which is strength training and resistance training. When you do resistance training, although you're not burning tons of calories while you're doing it, the main adaptation is get stronger, build muscle, and that speeds up the metabolism. And this is what it looks like when you do resistance training as part of your fat loss or weight loss routine. The weight loss starts off slow. You don't lose as much weight initially although the weight that you do lose is body fat not muscle and sometimes you build muscle in the process but over time you get this snowball which i would see with clients all the

time i train people and they would you know luckily i was very convincing so they do what i told them and we would see the snowball effect as the metabolism starts to kick up. Oftentimes, at the end of weight loss with resistance training or proper resistance training, you end up with a faster metabolism than you went into. So I might have been overweight before eating 2,200 calories, but now I'm lean eating 2,400 calories. Far more sustainable.

And there's way more, by the way, that goes into how resistance training affects the body and why it's the superior form of exercise for most people. In the scenario where the person's running and burning calories, it's great. They're putting in a good effort. They're burning, let's just say, 500 calories. But they're trading out their time for those calories, basically. It's manual. It takes X amount of time to burn 500 calories. What you're saying is, hey, we might be better off

maybe going at it from a different point of view. We might be better off just building muscle because muscle will burn more calories for us even when we're at rest. Yes, and by the way, and I want to make this very clear because when you say building muscle to people like us, we get excited. You say building muscle to people like us, we get excited. You say building muscle to the average person.

Now, usually men are cool with it. Sometimes guys are even funny about it. I don't want to get big. You say build muscle to women and they freak out because they think they're getting big. I'll tell you something right now. If I could magically add 10 pounds of muscle to every single woman watching or listening to this podcast right now, they wouldn't look any bigger. They'd just be a lot tighter. They would just feel more firm.

You know, it's funny. When I used to manage gyms, for a long time, I grand opened health clubs and managed gyms. And one of my jobs as manager was to get people in, to sign them up, make sure that they were consistent, get good results, the whole deal, right? So when I would bring in a potential member, I'd do a tour. And I'd walk through the gym. And if it was a woman, the the average woman i'd walk through and i'd say oh here's our cardio and she oh my god i love this part you know here's our aerobics oh i can't wait to take the classes here's our machines and free weights oh i don't care about that i'm not trying to get big then i would talk about the benefits and why she wants to do this especially if she's trying to lose weight

and if i still couldn't convince them we'd go back to my office and I would always have a staff of trainers. And I'm remembering one trainer in particular. It was this young lady. She was about five foot two and very sculpted. Like she had the body that most women would want. So we'd sit down in my office and I'd say, okay, I tell you what, I'm going to call in one of my female trainers if you can tell me if you can guess her weight within 10 pounds i'll give you a free membership for three months and of course she would take that challenge absolutely so i'd say okay attention staff so-and-so sells office and would walk in my five foot two personal female personal trainer and i'd say how much you think she weighs they would say something like oh she's 105 pounds 110 pounds i'd say okay

and i had a scale in my office. I'd be like, stand on the scale, and she'd get on it, but 135 pounds or 140 pounds, and it would blow her mind because people equate weight to lots of mass, but when you're talking about muscle, it's very, very dense. And then I would ask this female trainer, now tell so-and-so what you ate for breakfast. She'd be like, oh, I had four-egg omelet, three strips of bacon, two pieces of toast. so what you ate for breakfast oh i had four egg omelet you know

three strips of bacon two pieces of toast what'd you have for lunch oh i had a whole burrito from you know chipotle they'd say she can eat all this because her body is burning these calories on its own how would you like to have a metabolism that does that for you so that you don't have to worry about moving all the time. And by the way, you know, we were just talking about how ineffective that is because it's such a manual way of burning calories. There was a study that blew my mind.

It came out, I want to say about five years ago, maybe a little more scientists went and studied modern hunter gatherers. So these are people that live the way we lived 10,000 years ago, very active. Like they don't have computers and phones and TVs. They don't sit down. So these are people that live the way we lived 10,000 years ago. Very active. They don't have computers and phones and TVs. They don't sit down.

They're either gathering or they're hunting. And the way that they hunt is the way that we probably hunted thousands of years ago, where you throw a spear at an animal, you wound it, and then you run after it until it gets exhausted. So you're talking about incredible amounts of activity. So they went down and they studied these people's metabolism through some pretty sophisticated testing to see how many calories these people burn. What they found at the end of the study was remarkable. They burned roughly the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. Right around the same amount of calories.

Now, at first you think to yourself, like, how's that possible? But then think about evolution. It wouldn't make sense for you to burn 8,000 calories as a hunter-gatherer. You're not going to find 8,000 calories out in the wild. You'll die. Their bodies adapted to all that activity by slowing down their metabolism. And this is essentially what people are doing by following this old paradigm of exercise. It's no wonder that 85 or 90% of people fail with weight loss. Of course you're going to fail with weight loss. You're setting yourself up for total failure.

So then is resistance training with cardio still a good thing or is that something that you just want to avoid if you are I guess if you have too much to lose? No, that's a good question because sometimes we'll get the moniker that we're anti-cardio. We're not. I want to be very clear. All forms of exercise have value when applied appropriately. That's an important thing to –

Also, wouldn't it be fairly obvious to say that if you were to build more muscle and you did some cardio, I'm not talking about excessive amounts, that you would be able to burn a great deal of calories more because now you have more muscle mass on you. So that hour jog that someone did or mile jog that someone did when, you know, having 160 pounds of muscle on their body is probably quite different than someone having 180 pounds on their body. Yeah, no, absolutely. And again, all forms, if I were to construct a perfect routine for the average person, it would have, the base would be strength training. Then you would have a cardiovascular component, a flexibility and a mobility component.

But here's the deal. I trained regular everyday people for over two decades. And we are totally lying to ourselves if we think we're going to get the average person to work out more than two or three days a week. In fact, two or three days a week is, that's us doing a damn good job. That's us doing a really, really good job. And so telling people to do four different forms of exercise, it's not going to happen.

You know what they're going to do? If we're lucky and we do a good job and we teach them how to develop the skill of discipline and create these behaviors, what they're going to do is they're going to choose one form of exercise and they'll do it two or three days a week. In that context, you want to pick the one that gives you the most bang for your buck. The one that's going to protect you the most against chronic to pick the one that gives you the most bang for your buck,

the one that's going to protect you the most against chronic illness, and the one that's going to produce the leanest physique with the least amount of effort and time. Hands down, that's resistance training. There's nothing that comes close. So that's why I talk so much about strength training. Cardio's got its benefits, though. But, again, average person, when they think, I want to lose weight, what do they do? They don't go grab a pair of dumbbells or do body weight strength training or use bands what they do is they decide they're going to go run or go ride a bike um because that's what they're

that's what we've been telling and i say we as generally as the fitness the mainstream fitness industry that's what we've been telling people that is the most effective way to lose body fat and get healthy which is it's totally false by the way on the health front the studies are finally now showing just how healthy i'm not just talking about how good you look but also health just how healthy strength training and resistance training is in comparison to cardiovascular exercise and other forms of exercise it blows them away absolutely blows them away i think one thing that i really find dope about what you're talking about here, it's, uh, we talk a lot about like circuit type training here because when a lot of people think about doing cardio, think about just stepping on

a rowing machine, stepping on elliptical, stepping on a treadmill and doing that for 30 to 60 minutes. But you know, you can grab a kettlebell, you can grab some dumbbells and you can legitimately, while also doing some strength training, you can do a circuit of these movements, increasing your cardio capacity, doing that for like an 18 minutes, 20 minutes circuit, quick and easy. But you've done some strength training, you've done some cardio. And by increasing your capacity in terms of what you're able to do, you can recover better from session to session than just doing straight up resistance training.

In your book, do you have ways of people implementing strength training and cardio so that they can have that benefit? Yes. Now, remember, again, I'm talking to the average person so the main the most uh the the form of cardiovascular activity that i recommend the most to the average person is walking and here there's a couple reasons why um number one we we still know how to walk luckily we still haven't gotten to the wall-e you guys remember the cartoon wall-e the we haven't got that point yet so i and here's why i don't like running by the way it's not that i don't like running because of all the other stuff i said if you want to run and whatever that's

great nobody knows how to run the average person stopped running when they were 10 years old and then they decide they want to start running again when they're 30 yeah and people don't realize that running is very technical and people don't treat it like a skill they treat it like a workout nobody goes out and runs and says i'm gonna get good at running they go and run till they're tired yeah i don't know what the stats say but it's probably the single uh greatest thing people can do to x to injure themselves yes now imagine if people by the way imagine if people treated strength training this way now some people do luckily with strength training resistance training though there's such a heavy emphasis on form but imagine if people treated squats like people treat running they don't care that's not

about the skill i'm just gonna go out there squat until i get exhausted like injury rate would be through the roof right so i recommend walking because the average person still knows how to walk they're not going to hurt themselves it's easy. I don't need a piece of equipment. And the way I recommend it is I don't recommend structured, like workout type walking, but rather I try to get people to integrate it into their normal behaviors. So, for example, I've had better success telling people walk 10 minutes after breakfast, lunch, and dinner than telling people to walk 30 minutes all at once. The reason is because everybody eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It's part of a routine that they already have.

It seems much easier to do, and it does amount to about 30 minutes of walking. Now, I do talk in the book about circuit training and high-intensity interval training. Now, that type of training is definitely more beneficial than your traditional cardiovascular exercise if you were to compare just head-to-head for most people, mainly because you're turning cardio into more resistance training, right? So if I sprint, sprinting is still running, but it's more like resistance training than long-distance running, right? So I do talk about that. do talk about that the problem though with circuit training and high intensity interval training is when you're talking to the average person because they're so fatigue based inevitably form and technique tend to go out the window so i make a special emphasis in the book to say look here's

a deal only do these when your technique form stability and strength are good now if you're there then they're great if if you're not there, like most people, I wouldn't take the average person and say, we're going to do squats, push-ups, and rows, all one after another. But 30 seconds into the sets, form's gone to shit, and it's not doing them any benefit. So, I really recommend

people stick to straight sets. I tell people, treat strength training like practice rather than a workout. So rather than going to the gym and saying, I'm going to work my shoulders, say to yourself, I'm going to practice overhead press. Instead of saying, I'm going to work my legs, go to the gym and practice the skill of squatting. Long term, you just get better results that way because people tend to perfect the form.

The average person isn't so concerned about the burn, how sore I am, but rather am but rather okay sal said have really good technique and get good at the squat and it just turns into better results over time so how have you been able to have people buy into the patience of how long this is going to take because like obviously we all know that this is a much better way to do things but number one the changes that you're going to be physically seeing in the mirror are not going to be as fast as if you were to fucking go and run on a treadmill and lose a lot of weight really fast. You're not going to see those things as fast. You're not going to see the scale go down as quickly. Although you will like if you take measurements, you're going to see a really positive benefit as far as your waist, all those things. So how are you having people buy into the patient's aspect?

That's a great question. things so how are you having people buy into the patience aspect yeah that's a great question so number one uh i really like to de-emphasize the scale because the scale um for most people just messes them up in fact as a trainer i found a lot of success having clients take their scale and put it in the closet and i tell them don't weigh yourself for the next three months i mean look truth be told i could cut someone's leg off and they lose 20 pounds right that's not the kind of weight that you want to lose so that's my whole deal with the scale as far as the results are concerned it's tough

we are battling when you look at the fitness and health industry at large what we're battling and I say we as in us who are trying to communicate the right way we are trying to sell the right message better than they're selling the wrong message and the challenge is that the wrong message is sexier.

So the wrong message says, take this pill, lose 30 pounds in 30 days. I'm saying it's going to take you a year to lose 30 pounds. And you got to modify your behaviors. And you got to look at your nutrition. And you have to build a discipline of exercise. How the hell am I going to beat that message? Well, I have to be honest. I have to show them statistics. Yeah, you're going to lose 30 pounds, but you'll gain

it right back. By the way, when people lose weight that way, they gain weight back. Remember, as I said earlier about losing muscle and fat, when people inevitably gain the weight back, they don't gain the muscle back. It's all body fat. They end up worse. You know how many times I had clients who came to me who were 40 pounds overweight and I would track their calories and their metabolism and I would be blown away that this person who's 40 pounds overweight, they're overweight and they're eating like 1700 calories a day. Why? Because they've lost and gained and lost and gained so many times that their metabolism now is so slow that 1,700 calories is making them obese. So I have to reverse them out of that and kind of build things up.

So you have to be honest. You feel that that's real? Do you think people are being honest with you about how much food they're eating? I think in some cases, no, but in some cases, yes. You're right. In many cases, people, they'll omit certain information, uh, because they don't. I had a couple of beers last night and I had some chocolate cake,

but aside from that, it doesn't count. No, but, but I have had cases where, you know, I'll tell you my, my,

my most remarkable case was, uh, I worked with a young lady who competed in, um, figure competitions and she had done so many of them in a short period of time that she was eating, what did we start her at?

I think it was like 1,700 calories and she was working out every day for like an hour and a half. She had hammered the shit out of her metabolism. Hormones all over the place. That took us about a year to kind of reverse out of. Your metabolism is incredibly flexible in how it adapts.

What is our metabolism? When you're referencing it, what are you referring to? You know, the metabolism is probably the second most complex thing that we've identified in the universe, right? The human brain and the metabolism. It's very, very complex. When I'm talking about metabolism, I'm talking about our rate of converting food into energy. So I burn 2,500 calories. You burn 3,000 calories. You burn, you know, 3,000 calories.

Like that's what I'm talking about. And I'm talking about the amount of calories your body burns on its own, not the extra activity you have to add to it, uh, in order to burn like a resting metabolic rate. Exactly. So that's kind of what I'm talking about. So, um, and you know, here, here's, I, I'm glad you said that. Cause I do want to touch on this. I guarantee right now, there's some, you know some internet scientists who are like, oh, there's a study that shows that one pound of muscle only burns an extra 10 calories. So it's not that big of a metabolism boost. Okay.

First off, that's still not a little. You add five pounds, 50 calories a day, do the math over a year, makes a big difference. But it's more complex than that. math over a year makes a big difference but it's more complex than that you have a range of how many calories your body will burn with the same lean body mass that you have okay so to give you an example if i took your food intake and just bumped your calories by 500 calories a day we would see a boost in metabolism even if you didn't gain any weight if i cut your calories we would also see a slowdown without losing lean body mass. So part of the metabolism boosting effects of strength training have to do with the muscle that's being built, but also has to do with the fact that I'm telling my body that it

doesn't need to prioritize being efficient with calories. Prioritize strength. So it becomes less efficient with the calories that I end up eating. And less efficient means some of these calories get turned into energy or heat. Again, it's very complex, but there's definitely a range and, you know, we've all experienced it. I don't know if you get, I'm sure you guys have worked with people where you see them, you know, they gain three pounds of muscle, but you're eating 800 calories more a day and you're maintaining, right? So it's, it's much more complex than that. It's how long does it take people to just feel better?

Like in your experience, because I know you did a lot of personal training and you give information out to lots of people. Now in your experience, how long does it take someone not to like see progress, but just to actually start to feel a lot better? Yeah, no,

great question. So one of the, this, I think is one of the best selling points with resistance training. I like to hammer this because it's true. And also because again, I'm trying to sell the right message better than they sell the wrong message. The hormone effects of strength training are pro youth, pro youthful levels of hormones. The hormone effects of other forms of exercise

oftentimes are anti youthful levels of hormones. hormones. So there's studies that show that lots of endurance training will reliably lower testosterone in men. Lots of endurance training in women will create an imbalance between estrogen and progesterone. Why? Why does this happen, right? Okay, so if you just improve your health, generally you should see an improvement in hormones. But why do some forms of exercise reliably raise testosterone in men, reliably balance estrogen and progesterone, reliably increase insulin sensitivity? Well, here's why.

Remember how I said how strength training and resistance training is, the main adaptation is to build strength and build muscle? It's a pro-tissue form of exercise. Other forms of exercise are anti-tissue. Lots of cardio is burn, burn muscle, burn, burn body fat, get rid of these tissues. Strength training is build and add, add active tissue. What hormones are necessary to make that happen, right? If you're a man and you're telling your body to build muscle your body is saying okay let's start building some muscle we need more testosterone right we need more testosterone

we need better insulin sensitivity in fact with insulin sensitivity adding muscle is the most effective way to improve that there's studies on this on the super obese they don't have them lose any weight they just gain muscle you see tremendous improvements in insulin sensitivity because muscle is very insulin sensitive and it stores glycogen in the body. So it's like you're increasing your gas tank to store. It's our ability to regulate carbohydrates. Absolutely. I told you about this study earlier off air. There was a study out of Sydney, Australia where they were looking at Alzheimer's patients and they were

doing resistance training with them. And by the way, a lot of these studies are new because in the past, there were no studies on resistance training and health at all. There was like athletes. That's all it was. In fact, if you go back long enough, strength training, resistance training, it was if you were a strength athlete and that's it in fact sports didn't adopt strength training until a few decades ago it was i'm old enough to remember when uh in a lot of sports they told you not to lift weights because it made you muscle bound and slowed you down now the beauty of sports is it's objective so if a team's kicking everybody's ass at some point they're like all right what are they doing they're lifting lifting weights. It's improving their performance. Nonetheless, there were no studies done on resistance training and

health. And mainly because it's hard to get mice to lift weights. It's easy to get them on a hamster wheel, but also because they just didn't consider it. So all the studies were on 30 minutes or 90 minutes of, of, you know, vigorous cardiovascular activity. Well, now we have studies. One study, the one out of Sydney, Australia looked at Alzheimer's patients. And for the first time ever, a non-medical intervention showed the, the, the stopping of the progression of the amyloid plaques that cause Alzheimer's. It was the first time ever that we've seen anything that's non-medical actually stop the progression of Alzheimer's. Now I i talked about insulin sensitivity it's what led me to talk about this um researchers call alzheimer's and dementia type 3 diabetes

because they they think it's connected to our ability our inability to utilize and process sugars and carbohydrates so when you build muscle improve insulin sensitivity you're going to see improvements in in dementia and Alzheimer's, right? In men, strength training reliably raises testosterone. And this is in all men. So not just men with low testosterone, low, medium, high. Any guy lifts weights, does it right, will see a bump in testosterone. Here's what's even more remarkable.

You see an increase in what's called androgen receptor density. more remarkable. You see an increase in what's called androgen receptor density. So the androgen receptors are the receptors that testosterone attaches to so that it can exert its effects. You see this number of androgen receptors increase in men that start to lift weights, right? Because the body says we need to build muscle. So let's improve our capacity to do so by doing these things. In women, we see a balancing of estrogen and progesterone. So through the process of telling the body to build muscle we're also telling our bodies to produce youthful levels of hormones so you talk about how quickly do people feel good pretty quick pretty quick if it's applied

properly one of the mistakes that people make with with any form of exercise let alone resistance training if they go at it too hard, so the first workout they go in there and they're just hammering themselves, you're going to feel like shit if you do it that way. Here's a good rule of thumb. You should have more energy after your workout than you had going into your workout. You should feel better. You should not feel like you're crawling to your car or you can't move. Now Now there is some value to that for certain elite athletes and advanced

trainees, most of it being psychological or getting your ability to be able to push yourself to that level. But for the average person, there's almost zero benefit. What they need to do is you need to judge the workout intensity about how good did I feel after? If I feel more energized,

it was probably good. Here's the other one. Was I sore the next day? If one was i sore the next day if i was really sore the next day i went too hard in fact i would tell my clients that they shouldn't feel sore no soreness or a little bit of soreness and that would tell me that we did the right thing and for most people this is not very much they're already so sedentary they barely do anything they go into the gym or they or at home i put at home workouts in the book as well to try to train their bodies with with resistance resistance training. If you do nothing all day,

if you sit at a desk all day, if you're in your car all day, it takes very little to elicit some change. So if you do it right and you trigger a little bit of change with the right appropriate dose, which is usually very, very little, you should feel right away. You should start to feel better right after the workout. And then the very little you should feel right away you should start to feel better right after the workout and then the day after you should feel and i feel really good so to answer your question pretty quickly you should feel good pretty quickly immediately when you started talking about the benefits of resistance training and its effects on testosterone i know a lot of people's ears probably perked up because right now there's a lot of popularity between behind HRT and TRT, especially young

guys. Guys are 25, 26, 27 are like, maybe I should start doing that. Right. Whereas like there are probably certain things within their lifestyle that if they changed like resistance training would reliably increase their testosterone and help them feel more youthful and better. So what are some other things that people can be doing along with resistance training that can reliably do that? Yeah,'m glad you said that you know there was a a study that was done

i don't remember where it was done but they went to college universities and they tested college uh aged men's grip strength and this was recent i think it was like 2018 they did the study and they've been doing this study for decades okay what they found this is true was that college-aged males today exhibited the same grip strength that 60 year old men did in the 80s okay so i think a big reason now i'm not saying a whole reason because i think there's environmental factors happening here as well but i think the main reason why we're seeing a decline in testosterone is we become weak we have no have no muscle. The average male today, unless he lifts weights and makes conscious effort, is very, very weak. Our lifestyles have been, I mean, look,

free societies do a very good job of this. If we want our lifestyle to be a certain way, markets are really good at making it that way. what do we want we wanted a lifestyle that was very physically easy and entertaining and that's what we've ended up with right so nobody has to lift anything heavy nobody has to do anything hard physically um it's all done virtually uh the way we entertain ourselves is no longer physical i mean when i was a kid if you got in trouble from your parents they sent you to your room today my kids shit when they get in trouble i send them outside because they want to be in their room right that's true it's 100% true so so a big part of that is the fact that we're weak the second part is i think as a side

effect of that is when we don't get enough sunlight so we're indoors all the time so lack of of sunlight does show a reduction in testosterone. The third thing is that our diets have moved to this heavily processed, a majority of our diets are heavily processed foods, and we're not eating a lot of these kind of anabolic foods like red meat, eggs, milk, which in most people done appropriately with good diet will increase testosterone levels. So we're eating lots of processed carbohydrates and sugars. We've also been told that meat, eggs, and milk are bad for us. And so we're eating fake meat and we're avoiding eggs because we're scared of the cholesterol.

And so our diets have changed quite a bit. And like I said, it's probably environmental factors. I'm sure there's xenoestrogens and chemicals that are affecting this as well. But I would bet my house that a big chunk of it is we're just weak. We're just not as strong as we used to be. I was on a flight recently and they must have had eight or ten people pre-board. And the people that were pre-boarding, they all ended up in wheelchairs.

And I just kind of thought to myself, like, what do all these people have in common? And each person, by the way, they all sat down in a wheelchair. Like they, they sat down in the wheelchair on, on their own, under their own power. And I was just kind of looking at everybody. I was like, it's not, it's not necessarily that they're fat because they were, they were overweight. Um, and they could definitely do better in that department as well. But the main factor was just that they're weak. They're weaker than they used to be because I'm sure they used to be able to get around just fine, even at the current body weight that they were at. And they were able to do certain things.

And I'm not trying to make fun of anybody. It's just a reality. It's just kind of where we're at. And I was like, man, I, I wish that these people would, I wish that more people would just know about strength training and would have some understanding of it, that it's not that difficult. It doesn't have to be that complicated. I would love for, to see more people get into it. And hopefully, uh, by messages like this, by books like this, by your podcast, our podcast. Hopefully we can get our youth into it more so people can avoid a lot of the stuff. Yeah, there was a myth a long time ago that obese people would have more lean body mass, but then they did studies and found that obese people

actually have less body mass. So they were brittle, weak, and obese. So you hit the nail right on the head. But yeah, of all the forms of exercise that exist, I think none have been more poorly stigmatized and stereotyped than resistance training. It's so, and by the way, no one's been hurt more than this than women. Of all the categories of people that have been damaged by this false belief or understanding around resistance training, it's women. You know, when I first managed gyms, there was a separate,

one of the first gyms that I managed, there was a separate women's area from the men's area. And you went in the women's area and it was five pound dumbbells were about as heavy as it went. There were a couple machines, the adductor, you know, abductor machine. And then it was a bunch of cardio. And women were encouraged not to lift weights because of getting bulky. And I'm not trying to get big. I want to get sculpted and toned. Part of that is, a big part of that is media. I mean, think about the, if you go back enough time, I'd say probably the first popular media examples of strength training

were the Muscle Beach movies of the 60s. Remember those? Where you had like Larry Scott in there, right? And how did they display these guys? Big, dumb, tight, you know, couldn't move, narcissistic, you know, kind of whatever. That's how they were displayed. So the first time the public really saw on mainstream entertainment what strength training or resistance training does did is you saw these oiled up you know narcissistic you know guys

and so nobody really wanted to you know typically think those guys are assholes yeah exactly i don't want to be like that or whatever especially if you're a woman i don't want to look like that guy right then later on you had a pumping iron right one of my favorite documentaries i think i've seen it a thousand times. I could recite that thing, by the way, from beginning to end. Amazing. Yeah, I'll sing the song if you want. But that comes out.

Arnold is in there. Super charismatic, right? And it actually goes mainstream. Again, the example of resistance training is this extreme version of resistance training, which are bodybuilders. And I want to make this very clear, clear okay let me ask you guys a question how many times in real life i'm talking about everyday life when you go outside go to the store go hang out with your girl whatever how many times have you seen someone in real life not an nba game or on tv how many times have you

seen someone that's over seven feet tall damn nah. Nah, I don't see that. Never. I don't see that. I remember once because I remember it was like, holy shit, that guy's at least seven feet tall. Never. Okay. That's how extreme, that's the, there's a scale of height.

There's people on one side with dwarfism and then you have people over seven feet tall and it's extreme and super rare, right? Okay. The genetics required to build bodybuilder type of muscles are probably more extreme than people who are seven feet tall it's very very rare to have those kinds of genetics to build that kind of muscle so and the reason why i'm saying that is for anybody who's afraid of building too much muscle you're not you can try as hard as you want you ain't gonna build uh that much muscle it's extreme by the way

if you had those genetics you know you're probably buffed her than your friends who work out and you don't even you know lift weights or work out right most people are somewhere in the middle and the most that they could hope for with good consistent three days a week of strength training or resistance training is a nice tight sculpted physique for women you're gonna look toned i hate that word because it's the made-up word muscles don't tone they build or they shrink but i'm gonna use that word because i think you know they understand what i'm saying visually you'll be toned that's about as far you're gonna be sculpted tone tight and you'll have a fast metabolism get lean that's what'll happen you can even train like a bodybuilder six days a week

that's about as far as you're gonna get so this whole worry about i've never had a client work out with me and then call me the next day fuck sal i'm jacked i told you i don't want to get big it doesn't it doesn't happen and uh women are not going to get like long muscles and tone and all the words that are used to define some of these things through some sort of particular style of lifting or working out. No, your muscle attachments are where they are. The only way you can make your muscles longer is if you surgically reattach them somewhere else. So you're not going to get long muscles. Toned, again, made-up word.

Muscles either build or they shrink. Toned is just the way that gyms sold memberships to women because they're like, well, we can't tell them we're going to build. We're going to come up with a different word. So they either build or they shrink. You're not going to change the shape for the most part of a muscle. Some muscles you can, but boy, does it take a lot of work to do that. But most muscles, the shape is the shape as they build and that's how they're going to look. So all these words that they use, all these marketing terms, it's all complete

bullshit. I think women, unfortunately, don't have a role model in words that they use all these these marketing terms it's all uh complete i think uh i think women unfortunately don't have like a role model in the space when it comes to general uh population because there are women in the fitness community that look great that look really fit but i can't even think of one person that i uh that's a movie star actress or otherwise um that's not like a just a fitness personality um that has a physique where I would think that young women would be like, yeah, that's dope. Like, I want to look like that. You're right. Popular media has not shown women what, you know, by the way.

It doesn't exist. And a lot of these women, by the way, in like movies and stuff that look amazing. When you look at their real routine, you ever read the bullshit routines that they put in the Shape magazine? Why did they do that? It's belonging. If you look at the real routines you ever read the bullshit routines that they put in the you know shape magazine why did they do that it's if you look at the real routines you know what they're doing squatting deadlifting overhead pressing rowing like look at uh wonder woman when uh all those uh what were they called where she went on the island oh yeah yeah with all of her amazon amazonians look at their workout routine now they did do a lot of practicing of the sword and stuff for the movie but they lifted weights so if you look at their workout routine. Now, they did do a lot of practicing of the sword and stuff for the movie, but they lifted weights.

So if you look at their bodies, they all lifted weight. In fact, there were some CrossFit strength athletes in that film that played some of those roles. So what women want to look like is achieved through a lot of resistance training. They just don't know it. And they've been hammered with the wrong information. It's hammered their metabolisms it's destroyed their hormones and it's created this really negative relationship with uh with exercise i think i was watching like entertainment tonight or something the other day mario lopez is on there and then they have a female on there who was like

pretty jacked and i was like oh my god like a jacked girl like on tv like i don't ever see it again the only place i see it might be from like social media i don't really see it uh in our mainstream and this girl was also very very thin so she wasn't like uh you know she didn't have like she didn't look like a power lifter girl or she didn't look like some of the fitness girls that we see so i think it would be great to kind of see more representation from that and more representation of women podcasting too. I think it would be great to have, and there's more women all the time starting up their own podcast,

but I think we kind of need to hear from that other side, and I think they need role models. They do. I agree with you 100%. You know, one of the other hallmarks of resistance training, you know, spot reduction is a myth, right? So we've been told forever that. You want to burn body fat from your hips, do

abduction. Start doing some twists. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. But you can spot build. Yes. Think about it this way. Do you want to shape and sculpt your body so that it looks a particular way? Okay. You're limited somewhat by your genetics, but really only one form of exercise really

allows you to shape and sculpt your body. You want more shape in your butt? You do strength training for your butt. You want more hamstring? You want to improve your posture? Let's strengthen your mid-back. It's the only form of exercise that allows you to individualize to that point. It's so individualizable that it's the form of exercise that's used in rehab, right?

Tell me another form of exercise that's used as much as rehab. I can train anybody with resistance training. You could be in a wheelchair and I can do resistance training. I can't do running with you. I can't do other forms of activity, but I could do resistance training with you. So it's extremely individualizable. And why is that a good thing? Because you guys know as well as I do, the best routine for your body

is unique to you and your body. So now I can take this workout, I can practice these exercises that Sal said in his book and do them and then over time, as I learn my body, I can tweak and change my routine to sculpt my body the way that I want.

And the beauty of resistance training is that there's a million different exercises and a million different ways to do each one of them because specifically because it's so individualizable. You know, I want to rewind real quick because what you said that was super important. But when we were talking about how popular media, for example, for women, they like the entertainment weekly type workouts, they might they like to make it seem like these women were doing cardio and doing these just like stupid easy workouts, even though they weren't on the opposite side of things. For some reason, when the men like Michael B. Jordan and what's his name?

Cal Drogo from Game of Thrones. What's his name? I'm not going to know that, but they always have like the, like the superhero workouts and the stuff. Yeah. But like stupid hard hard like the dude jason momoa there you go okay that's my wife's favorite guy by the way he's everyone every girl's favorite guy but like when he was talking about the workouts that he did for cal drogo like he's

like i was doing two days working out six days six hours a day uh doing cardio then doing weight lifting and i was every single day of the week and i was eating like brown rice chicken broccoli that's the staple meal by the way brown brown rice chicken broccoli for eight meals a day. Like why y'all saying this shit when you know it's not true? Like why do you make it seem like it's this hard when it's not? And why do you make it seem like it's this easy on this end when it's not? Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, the key really.

And again, there's no surprise to you guys. The key with with exercise is sending the signal, the right signal to get my body adapt to adapt and then let it adapt. The workout itself isn't doing anything but that. It's just telling my body to adapt. That's it. And there's a very large individual variance in terms of what I need to do to get my body to change versus somebody else's. If I use another form of adaptation of the body to illustrate this i think

it'll it'll really click right so like my my body's ability to tan when i go out in the sun right if i live in my mom's basement for 10 years never see the sun like it's going to take me very little sun exposure to get my skin to start to darken any more than that what ends up happening i burn yeah and i'm not going to get a tan any faster that way. Same thing with exercise. It's the same thing with exercise. With resistance training, although there's a lot of bad information, at least there's an emphasis on that. I don't see

that with other forms of exercise as much. With resistance training, you hear more of an emphasis on form, technique. You hear more of an emphasis on, you know, do the... I mean, God, Lee Haney in the 80s used to say, stimulate, not annihilate. Right? This is a pro body visit. Mr. Olympia what, seven times? So

again, the right dose is going to get you there the fastest. More than that won't get you there any faster. It'll get you there slower. Less than that will also get you there slower. So find the perfect dose. And for, for, for, if you're sedentary and you're not doing much right now, it's not much the people

that need to work out real hard and long those are the people that are such a high level that it requires that kind of stimulus to get their body to even improve another you know one or two percent but yeah those celebrity workouts are full of shit there's no way jason momoa was doing six hours a day of exercise yeah you know i know, I think that in those particular instances, they have a little bit of a time crunch probably too, right? They got three or four months before this movie comes out and they got to, and they just kind of, everyone kind of relies on like just training

a very similar way that you might train for like a bodybuilding show. And they might do like a bodybuilding like prep. So they might go real low calories, expend a lot of energy every single day, but they're able might go real low calories, expend a lot of energy every single day, but they're able to get through it because there's a lot of money on the line. There's a lot of things on the line, their careers on the line in some sense. And it's, it's very drastic for them, but that's a particular situation. And it's also very

particular with how many weeks they're doing that for. And hopefully they don't do it for too long to cause tons and tons of damage yeah um but let's get out of the gym for a second let's get more into the kitchen because i think this is where people struggle more so than anything else i mean 100 people getting to the gym like hopefully people discover it we talk about it all the time um hopefully people uh understand the value of lifting weights and hopefully you can get more people to come around to it but uh you can lift all you want but if you're not eating properly you're still going to be causing a lot of damage to yourself uh you can maybe mitigate some of that as you mentioned with lifting and exercise and stuff like that but what do you think how should people be eating because

i think in general most people have a really hard time controlling the overall amount of energy they intake every day no you, that's the diet portion. So if we were to look at the obesity epidemic, the biggest contributor has been the – it's not carbs. It's not fat. It's the introduction of heavily processed hyperpalatable foods. No, it's sugar, bro. And now here – by the way, we finally have studies that support this, really well-made

studies. So I'll give you an example of how they'll conduct these. They'll take two groups of people, and these are controlled. So that means that they're not surveys. A lot of diet studies are surveys where they tell people to write down what they ate through the week. And by the way, as a trainer, that is the most unreliable thing of all time. People don't even remember what they had yesterday, let alone on Monday or whatever. So these are controlled studies.

And they'll take two groups of people and they'll give them unlimited access to food in a lab. This group will have heavily processed foods. Heavily processed foods are foods that are in wrappers and bags or frozen and boxes, long shelf life, right? This group has unlimited access to whole natural foods. So like vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, eggs, milk, meat, that kind of stuff. Single ingredient type of foods. And they'll actually control the macros even. They'll even make them so that they're similar macro-wise. They'll let them eat as much as they want, and the researchers are counting the calories.

And then they'll take the groups and switch them. This is the beauty of this study. They'll switch the groups. Here's what they found consistently. Heavily processed food consumption increases someone's caloric intake, on average, by 500 calories a day. On average. That's a lot.

500 calories. If I take someone on a cut, usually I cut them by 500 calories. If I put someone on a bulk, I bump them by 500. That's a big amount of calories. Now, why is that? Heavily processed foods are engineered and designed to make you overeat they're engineered to hijack your systems of satiety do you guys know that the show um man versus food no so it's this guy he goes to restaurants and he does these food challenges

to see you know they're always like can you eat a you know kitchen sink of ice cream or can you eat you know you know two pizzas or whatever anyway there was one episode and uh rob wolf was it rob no chris kresser told me about this i thought it's an ice cream and french fry deal yes i love this he went and he had to eat a whole kitchen sink full of ice cream that was a challenge and as he's eating it he gets to a certain point you can tell he's like he's hitting palate fatigue. He's starting to gag. So what does he do? He orders a plate of extra salty, extra crispy french fries. Eats those and then is able to finish the ice cream.

Because he knew that he could hijack. By eating more, he was able to eat more. We've all experienced this. You have dinner and you're like, I'm stuffed. And they bring out dessert. You're like, eh. more right we've all experienced this you have dinner and you're like i'm stuffed and they bring out dessert like yeah all right so so these food manufacturers are they spend so much research and development on the flavor the smell the texture the sound it makes when you crunch on it the color um the association with the commercials all these all this money and all this science by the way i

interviewed uh the author of uh, what was the book? I'll remember it in just a second. But he is a journalist, actually went in and studied these scientists. You know the tobacco industry when they all went under because the government finally said, you know, cigarettes are not healthy, actually. They actually cause cancer. A lot of those people went over to the processed food market. Nice.

So they've engineered these foods so that they're hyperpalatable and you overeat them. If you look at the percentage of our diet that's heavily processed foods, and then you look at the obesity epidemic, they mirror each other. You can see it go right up, right along with heavily processed food. So when we're talking about diet, now people like us, fitness fanatics, you know, we talk about calories and macros and making sure your timing is right and maximizing performance. This doesn't work for the average person. It just doesn't. Counting macros and counting calories doesn't work for the average person. And it just won't. It's not too disruptive.

Maybe it's just not, it's you're not working with their behaviors. So here's something that I used to tell my clients. I would tell my clients, all right, here's the deal. Mrs. Johnson, eat as much as you want. Just don't eat processed foods.

So, but I don't care how much steak, chicken, rice, vegetables, fruit you eat, eat as much as you want. Just don't eat processed foods.

And she's like, well, why? Well, let's see what happens. I just want to see how you feel. Within a few months, she lost 12 pounds or whatever. And then they would always be like, well, why? Well, let's see what happens. I just want to see how you feel. Within a few months, she lost,

you know, 12 pounds or whatever. And then they would always be like, oh my God, I didn't know that processed foods were so, you know, there's something in them that makes you fat. I'm like,

well, actually what it is is you just, you don't realize it, but you're eating more when you're eating those foods. So that's one strategy. Here's another one. I would tell people, and I tell,

I say this in the book too, when you eat, don't be on your phone, don't watch TV, and don't be distracted. Just focus on your eating. Studies show that when people are watching TV or on their phone when they're eating, they'll eat about 15% more calories. So just cutting that out naturally reduces the amount of calories that someone will consume. So those are two very simple.

Now, they're not going to get you shredded, so you're not going to get a six-pack from doing that, but you will get to a not obese place by just doing those two things right there. And I like to do those because they're easy for people. Okay, I can eat what I want, but just avoid processed food. Here's another one. People tend to have trigger foods, right? So someone might say to me, I do good, but then chocolate.

Like I'll just eat a ton of it. Or I like potato chips or whatever. And instead of telling people they can't have it, this never works, by the way, as a trainer. You tell your client, don't, like, just never touch this or whatever. They're going to touch it. So what I would tell people is I'd say, you can have those foods. Just don't have them in the house. So if you want potato chips, you have to drive to the store and buy yourself a single serving of it. And all I'm doing is I'm creating a barrier between them and that impulsive behavior. Sometimes they drive to the store, but oftentimes they don't. And it

naturally would reduce their caloric intake. So these are the types of dietary advice that I have for people because I've found over the years that they're far more effective than telling people, write down all your food, track your calories, hit these numbers. That works for a while, but almost always people end up going off of it and then it doesn't work. And when you're referring to things working, it's not that tracking calories does not actually work.

It could actually work if they were able to adhere to it, but they're having a hard time of keeping the discipline of weighing their food and so forth, right? Absolutely. It actually starts to create a bad relationship with food for a lot of people. It actually creates a bad relationship for even fitness fanatics. I've worked with a lot of competitive um, competitive females and males and, uh, because of the tracking and weighing and all that stuff. And they literally,

they're so stressed out when they have to eat out or when they can't track or when they go, when they, when they stop tracking, this is a psychological phenomenon. I forgot the name of it, but it's, it basically like this.

Like if I'm supposed to eat this many grams of proteins, carbs and fats, and I do it all the time. And the second I go off a little bit, well, now I'm off. So then I go off in a big way. So then you start to see this like on the wagon, off the wagon type of behavior, the binge restrict type of behavior. The other thing is how people approach nutrition and exercise. And you see this a lot in the fitness space too. Um, but definitely with the with the average person

people go into exercise and nutrition motivated by a lot of self-hate So it's like i'm fat i'm disgusting I need to work out i'm gross. I need to work out and so then what ends up happening because of the of this self-hate Is the exercise becomes a punishment. How many times have you heard this, right?

Oh, I ate shitty yesterday at that party. I'm going to go beat my ass at the gym. I'm going to go sweat it out, right? It's like a punishment. Or with diet, hey, would you like to have a slice of pizza? No, I can't. What do you mean you can't? Of course you can.

You mean you don't want it? What do you mean you can't, right? So it becomes restrictive and punishment. So what I would help people with is I'd say, okay, here's the deal. Number one, let's separate your self-image from body image. So you can look in the mirror and objectively say that, okay, I'm overweight. I haven't been treating my body very well. That doesn't mean I'm a bad person, though.

I'm still a good person. I just have an issue with this. Okay, so separate the two because if you, if you confuse body image with self image, you'll end up either, uh, hating yourself or in being obese or becoming an orthorexic where you have to eat everything perfect and you can't miss a workout and you're stressed out and that's your deal. So separate the two. Number two, realize the real reason why you're exercising. It's not because you hate yourself. It's not because you hate yourself. It's because you want to take care of yourself.

Right? Like those of us who've been doing it for a long time, are you going to the gym because you hate yourself? No, you're going to the gym and say, oh man, I'm taking care of me. This is for me. I love this. This feels good, right? So I'll tell people, look, you're going to the gym because you're taking care of yourself and you're eating because you're taking care of yourself. Now that creates balance.

We talk about balance all the time in the fitness industry, but we do a terrible job of communicating how to achieve that. What does balance look like with nutrition? Well, I'm at a party and, you know, for the most part, I've been eating good because I've been taking care of my body. And, you know, I'm at a birthday party and the mom of the kid comes over and says, hey, I just made these cookies. And I said, you know what? I know it's not good for my physical body, but I'm going to enjoy eating those cookies.

I think I'll have a couple. I think I'll have a couple. Balance naturally comes into play versus restrict, restrict, restrict. Would you like a cookie? I'll eat all the cookies. I'm going to go off, right? Because it comes from that self-hate so how we communicate these things makes a tremendous difference to the average person and as fitness professionals we have to remember that we're talking to the average person

because the way i would communicate to one of you guys would be totally different i can tell you oh your protein's low increase that you know decrease your calories make sure you do but to the average person just that just doesn't work. seems like they're off the races with not just over consuming, you know, a couple hundred calories, they might over consume a couple thousand calories and then they might be off path for like the whole weekend and so forth. Yeah. You know, it's funny when you train people for a long time, you start to realize that you're like a psychologist half the time and you're a fitness trainer the other half time.

There's this really interesting psychological phenomena that happens when we go into diet with this self hate kind of driver and what we end up doing is we end up creating these these you know bear with me it's going to be a little weird but we end up creating these dual uh identities there's the the tyrannical oppressor and then there's the child the tyrannical oppressor saying you're fat you can't have that cookie and the child is you're fat, you can't have that cookie, and the child is like, I'm sorry, I can't have that cookie. So you go to a party, you want some pizza,

I can't have that. You want some cake, I can't have that. I'm sorry, I can't, I can't, right? I'm being oppressed by my other oppressive self that's like, you can't do that, you're fat, right? Now what ends up happening? Look, I have kids. One of them is a teenager.

Teenagers rebel. That's what happens eventually. Eventually rebel eventually you go off and when you go off it's in a big fucking way you're no longer oppressed you're no longer any how many times have you heard this what happened your diet why did you like all of a sudden go off of it oh i just want to enjoy my life as if eating healthy is not enjoying your life to that that person, it was a terrible way to live and to them, enjoying their life was rebelling, right? So how do you prevent the binge? You got to go into it differently. So like with my kids, for example, I'll talk about my kids because I think separating yourself from this sometimes illustrates the point a little bit better.

When my kids come to me and they say they want candy, usually I'll say no. Sometimes I'll say yes. Sometimes I'll say, of course you can have some candy. Most of the time I'll say, well, no, it's not good for you to have. You just had some yesterday, so we're not going to have some today. This is how you end up creating balance with yourself. If you go into it wanting to take care of yourself, I want, I deserve to be healthy. I deserve to take care of myself. care of yourself, I want, I deserve to be healthy, I deserve to take care of myself, then sometimes the value of the food is its taste. Sometimes the value of the food is the enjoyment of eating the food. Other times, the value of the food is how is this food affecting my body, my mind, my digestion, my mood, right? And by the way, if you can start to make these connections, you'll actually start to find that you'll enjoy and crave quote unquote healthy foods.

You actually will. I know when I travel, so with the podcast, especially before COVID, we would do a lot of traveling. So we'd be out and I'd have to eat in hotels quite a bit. And it's hard to get good vegetables in hotels oftentimes i can get a good steak but usually vegetables are not so great when i would come home i would crave a lot of well-cooked vegetables actually crave them now why do i crave the vegetables is because they taste as good all right we got to end the podcast time to wrap it up now no now now think about this right why would i crave a big bowl of vegetables? Because I like the taste? No, but because I knew for me it affected my digestion and my health in a particular positive way.

Now, I'm using vegetables because I think that illustrates very easily for most people that that's not as tasty as other types of foods, right? So you start to create that kind of balance with yourself by making other connections. Most people connect food to one thing. It's palatability. The average person, when they think about what they're going to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, what are they thinking about? Which one's going to taste the best? What do I want for lunch? Mexican food. No, Chinese food sounds a little bit better. They don't think about the other values of food. Now, those of us who've exercised for a long time and ate right for a long time, how many times have you craved a food because, you know, I'm not feeling very strong in the gym.

You know what I want? I want to stay. Or my joints are a little stiff. I think I'm going to have some fish or whatever. Right? How many times has that happened to you? Right? So because you've connected food to its other value.

So part of that is helping people understand the value of food besides just its taste. And this requires a little bit of awareness. Yeah, I think it not only does require awareness, but what you were talking about in terms of changing people's habits initially rather than just having them track. When someone does that and they start focusing on whole foods, what I find is that people just start craving those other foods less. Like it is a good idea, especially for someone like I used to love the fuck out of ben and jerry's and i still do right but i would have like maybe five a week like and like i mean five a week right um by getting that stuff out of my diet for a while focusing on whole foods uh i still have that every now and then but i don't crave it like i used to like it's more of like okay i can have this maybe i can have half because

i'm an adult you know what i mean so it makes that aspect of things controlling your cravings towards those foods much easier yeah and in fact you can see um so rob wolf uses a comparison to kind of show how our bodies become uh desensitized to uh the flavors and palatability of food over time so he uses the example of pornography. So he says, he talks about how the excessive use of pornography desensitizes you to visual stimulus. And then, so now you're seeing young men with erectile dysfunction and stuff because of

too much pornography. I mean, I look, I'll tell you, I'm old enough to remember when I was a kid, you could literally trade your bike for a dirty magazine. That's how valuable that shit was. I swear to God,

that's how valuable it was when I was a kid son what happened to your bike i got a dirty magazine well yeah it's okay so it's so accessible now and people are so desensitized you're starting to see those problems okay so this happens to your brain with hyper palatable food too you eat lots of super sweet foods over time they taste less sweet and fruit becomes very bland. Yeah. In fact, if you've ever dieted down to a super shredded state, if you've done a bodybuilding show, nothing tastes as good as food afterwards. You just eat like an apple and it's like a piece of candy, right? Because you've totally resensitized your food to flavors through that strict dieting. So you're absolutely right.

When people start to remove the – what was that one movie, Super Size Me? Remember that? At the end of it, he was like craving French fries and burgers like it was a drug. This will happen to other people as well. So yeah, if you start to remove them, you'll start to find that you're the way that you

perceive food starts to change and natural foods start to become more vibrant and flavorful than they were before so you just get a little salt on some steak and it tastes absolutely amazing yeah and i think a lot of times when once you uh go down that path of just eating like whatever uh really kills the flavor of a lot of things i've kind of said before if you were to eat a bag of doritos before you had the most expensive steak from the best chef in the world, you wouldn't be able to taste it. You'd just be like, oh, I'm just chewing on something rubbery.

You wouldn't even be able to identify that it was a steak probably after having all those flavors from the Doritos. Yeah. And I mean, look, this is a big deal in all food industries. If you look at the top sellers of health foods, it's the tastiest ones. It's not the healthiest ones. Look at the number one selling protein bars. It ain't the best protein bars. The one that tastes the best. It's not the top protein powder. It's the one that tastes the best. Right? So we all value this so much and the market's so good at giving us what we want. I think, and by the way, marketers are really smart. They know that associations also make

you crave foods. So like to give you an example. When do you crave popcorn aside from when you watch a movie? That's a very strong association, right? This is true. Yeah. And so they can do it. You'll never see a food company advertising their food and then someone like having diarrhea. They'll never show that because they know they'll sell less of that food, right?

So associations are very powerful. You can do that with yourself. Yeah. So I used to tell clients, when you eat this food, I want you to pay attention to how you feel after, pay attention to your digestion the day after, pay attention to your energy. And then what happens is they start to make these connections and then they start to crave foods because of those particular benefits. It's a very natural thing that happens. So I just wanted to ask really quick. So like, what do you tell your clients when you kind of give them a breakdown of the diet? And inevitably the first question usually is, uh, so when do I get a cheat meal? When do I get a break? Like, what do you advise when they ask you something like that? Yeah. So cheat meals don't,

are not conducive for balance because a cheat meal indicates that I'm strict and then I'm off. So it actually promotes this on the wagon, off the wagon type of mentality. Now, when you're talking to a pre-contest bodybuilder, that's a completely different animal. Totally, totally different. But when I'm talking to the average person, you're not having a cheap meal, okay? You want to enjoy dinner with your husband and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But the natural balance will kick in if we approach nutrition the right way. Like I said earlier, from a point of self-care, then you'll find that balance will naturally come in. But if I tell someone Monday through Saturday, follow this meal plan.

Sunday is your cheat day. You will start to see very dysfunctional eating behaviors emerge out of that. I want to know something. What have you found? Because when I talk to people about this, I also tell people to pay attention to if you were to allow yourself to have some of this, whatever, if it's Reese's that you really like, pay attention to how you feel the next day and how much of a drive you feel towards that food. Because some people find when they've actually started focusing on eating whole food and good food, they then find that once they allow themselves to have some of that, they feel good in the moment. But the next day they start thinking about it more.

And they're like, fuck, I want this more today. And then if they don't have it again for maybe two or so days, they're good until they do it again. And you can find that once you start reintroducing it, it then becomes harder for you to get rid of it once again or not to think about it as much. It still happens to me too. Yep. for you to get rid of it once again or not to think about it as much still happens to me too yep yep and also here's another one is that uh you know when i would talk to new clients i would ask them uh you know how's your health and of course they'd be like oh i'm fine but then okay let me go down the list right how's your neck how's your shoulders how's your back how's

your digestion how's and inevitably oh i have heartburn but but i take you know probably a every single day for it and they wouldn't even realize that the food could possibly have an you know any kind of connection to this chronic heartburn that they've had for the last five years right so i would help people make that connection and then be like oh i didn't realize the bagel i had in the morning is what's causing that heartburn or that's causing that particular digestive issue once they they make that connection, you'll see people start to not like that food as much. Oh, you know, for example, dairy does not work with me at all. So what does that do for me?

I don't want pizza. I don't want, I know it tastes good, but I don't want it. It's not worth the pain that I, but if I didn't, like when I was a kid, I didn't connect the two. I just thought, whatever, and I would eat it all the time.

Now I don't because I've associated it with this particular effect that now I find for the most part, it's just not worth eating pizza. As far as like gut health and stuff is concerned, I know you pay a lot of attention to that type of stuff. You just mentioned bagels and heartburn. What other common culprits can maybe some people should some people be thinking about that are just super common and they just don't realize it yeah the most common uh food intolerances are gluten um egg whites dairy um and then legumes i would say are the most common ones now that being said oftentimes a food intolerance is present because there's something else going on so it's either a small intestinal bacterial overgrowth so SIBO um or you or you've developed some kind of leaky gut syndrome that's not created an immune reaction to some of these foods. So you want to look a little bit deeper. Now, that being said, you could be perfectly healthy and gluten, for example,

might slow down your motility. That's how quickly you pass things through enough to cause the buildup of SIBO that's me so I can eat gluten but if I do within four or five days I start to exhibit symptoms of SIBO because it slowed down my motility to the point where it probably allowed the bacteria to creep back up but those are the most common ones that people will find but they can be very individual I mean I had a client once that bananas were causing her uh eczema you know of all foods it was bananas we had to cut bananas out and all of a sudden the eczema cleared up so you can develop an intolerance to pretty much any food especially if you have uh leaky gut issues how did you figure that one out elimination diet okay so we had to eliminate all the common intolerances, still no improvement.

Then one by one, I would start to eliminate food. I mean, the ultimate elimination diet for most people is carnivore. I never had to go that far, but some people will go that far, and then they'll slowly start to reintroduce and find that they have issues with certain foods. Yeah. What about artificial sweeteners on the gut? You know, that's a controversial one. We just interviewed Dr. Stephen Cabral and I asked him that question. Sucralose probably has the most

negative effect on gut health, but I think it depends on your gut health as it is. So if you already have kind of sensitive gut health, artificial sweeteners probably will cause a little bit of problems. Here's my issue with artificial sweeteners. So I have a problem with artificial

sweeteners because they don't work for weight loss. Now, I'm not talking about the guy or girl that tracks everything. So for like bodybuilders or athletes that track their calories, then yes, they do work, right? You cut out 150 calories of sugar, replace it with artificial sweeteners. Yes, you're going to lose weight. The average person never works because they don't track. They cut out sugar, artificial sweeteners, and inevitably replace those calories with something else because they make you eat more. They still make you eat more and they make you hungry. Here's the other reason why I don't like them.

They don't have a natural barrier. And what I mean by that is if I have, and this is how I do it. Same thing with my co-host. In fact, my co-host, Adam, he was like a super diet Coke fanatic. Loved him. He competed, and he was a pro-physique competitor, loved diet Cokes. He does massive. Yeah, and he loved them, right?

And I talked to him about this, and I said, you know, how many diet Cokes do you have a day when you start to have them? He said, oh, six, seven a day. I said, why don't you have a regular Coke? Because there's that natural barrier called calories so you know when you go have a regular coke that's 30 grams of sugar i'm not going to have any more for the rest of the day versus artificially sweetened coke it's zero calories i can have a million of these throughout the day and what ends up happening is it creates this kind of impulsive binge type behavior that's one of the that's the main reason why i don't like

artificial sweeteners i've seen it create more food behavior issues than solve. I want to just kind of point out that make you is probably not the proper usage of that term when you said if you're consuming diet drinks that it might make you over. It encourages. It's not making you. I think these little subtleties are sometimes important because then people will be like oh fuck man i gotta cut out my diet drinks but what you're saying is is that maybe because a lot of people aren't getting the same calorie burst that they would normally

get from their other sodas they're replacing it by eating something else that's probably not great for this is why all the studies on artificial sweeteners that don't have people strictly track their calories, all of them show no weight loss because naturally people replace them. Now, if I'm talking to an athlete or a bodybuilder or a competitor that is very good about tracking their food, then artificial sweeteners in replace of sugar, of course, they're going to reduce your calories. But the average person doesn't do that. The average person says, I drink, you know, two sodas a day. Now I'm going to have two diet sodas a day. Therefore, I'm going to lose weight. Never works out that way. They always end up staying the same because naturally they replace

those calories with other foods. But if they're eating whole foods, right? And they do choose to have those diet sodas and they're not tracking, what do you find that they typically replace those calories with if you have them sticking to those whole foods? You know, it's funny. So artificial sweeteners actually have a very powerful effect on the brain. They're actually far more sweet than even sugars. In fact, if you drink a lot of diet sodas, you'll find that regular sodas start to taste a little bland. Are you drawing a line between what is considered to be artificial sweeteners

versus these fake sweeteners that are utilized that are considered natural, like monk fruit and stevia and stuff like that? So monk fruit and stevia are also quite sweet, but they don't even rank, they're not even in comparison to like aspartame, sucralose in terms of their power. By the way, we're talking

about something I want to be very clear too. This is a nuanced conversation. It really depends a lot on who I're talking about something I want to be very clear too. This is a nuanced conversation. It really depends a lot on who I'm talking about. I'm not an anti-artificial sweetener zealot. It depends a lot on who I'm talking to. But again, to the average person, you know, Mrs. Johnson who says, hey, Sal, I want to lose weight. Do you think if I take out my, you know, my Sprite and replace it

with, you know, calorie-free Sprite and replace it and replace it with, uh, you know, calorie free Sprite that I'll lose weight. And I'll say to her, uh, well, are you going to track all your calories? And she says, well, no. I said, well, then you're not. And the studies are very clear on this. It just doesn't, it just doesn't work. If you track everything, of course it definitely works. But I do think it to be do again, depends how self-aware you are how consistent you are like you know i can personally i can have foods that are not considered health but i that are not considered healthy but i can have them in balance because i have a decent relationship

with food a lot of people don't so you know if i tell someone hey try to eliminate heavily processed foods that's already a pretty big step then i, you can have all the diet Cokes you want. They tend to not go well with each other. It tends to be like, let's remove all of them for now and then see what happens. It's a trigger for people too, I think. I think it's a trigger to want to consume more food or to overeat on anything. So if you're overeating on anything, it doesn't matter whether it's healthy or not. You're still overconsuming calories.

You are. And if you're eating, let's say you're eating something savory and then you're washing it down with something sweet, you'll eat more of the savory dish. The French fry example. Exactly. So I'm eating lasagna and I'm having a diet soda that has no calories. It may cause me to eat more lasagna. And I would throw all sweeteners in that category, me personally, just because I think that they all taste sweet.

They all taste really good. Yeah, and that's what they're designed to do, right? They're designed to taste really good. I don't mind sugar. I really don't. I think if you want to have something sweet, have sugar. Obviously, don't overdo it, but go ahead and have sugar. That's my opinion.

Earlier, you mentioned that study that pointed out that people were over-consuming calories by about 500, uh, when they were eating the highly processed foods. And then you mentioned later on that people are, uh, over-consuming, uh, calories by about 15% when they're like in front of screens or distracted eating. Um, I, what I wonder is like, what's the negative impact of that over time? Because somebody might think, as you pointed out, 500 calories is actually quite a bit. But somebody might not think that that's too big of a deal. But 500 calories of overeating from the highly processed foods and then eating 15% more of that, even higher, potentially from sitting down and watching TV.

I think that this is like driving us like into the ground over a period of time. I think that this is just watching family members and watching people, I mean, literally die right before my eyes many, many, many times over. People increasing the aging process tenfold just by over-consuming food year in and year out, gaining five pounds, six pounds every single year to the point when they're 45, 50, you're just like, man, like what happened to this person? They used to be so vibrant.

They used to move around a lot. And so I think that sometimes when we shout out some of these numbers and some of these stats, people might not think it's a huge deal, but man, in the long run, it's like, this is really crippling us. 500 calories roughly could turn into about a pound of body fat like this is really crippling us 500 calories and it roughly could turn into about a pound of body fat a week that's how much 500 calories it's a big deal and even if it was 200 calories it's still you know do it over the course of a year you gain 15 or 20 pounds right it makes that look i'll give you an example that again this chris kresser gave me this

example and i use it all the time so a large bag of Lay's potato chips. Okay? I could easily eat one by myself. No problem. 15 minutes, I could crush a large bag of Lay's potato chip. There's about four to five potatoes in there. If you gave me five plain baked potatoes, no salt, no butter, and told me to eat them, I would not be able to do it. There's no way.

I would gag after the second or third one. But a bag of potato chips with added calories, like oil on there, I could throw it down. That just goes to show food has become like drugs. And they've put a lot of money and effort into making food this effective at getting you to overeat. Simply staying away from heavily processed foods. Because here's the deal.

I think we all, we have this false belief that because hunter-gatherers didn't have a lot of food around them, that when it was in front of them, they just ate until they threw up. No, they didn't. Like, overeating was just as bad back then as it is today. You get sick, you can't run away from the, you know, the predator. Shit, you get a gallbladder issue or digestive issue back then, you might die. So they would eat until they were full and satisfied, but they didn't go over.

So we're not mindless eating machines. But heavily processed foods do push us in that direction. We have these natural systems of satiety that will kick in, but they don't kick in nearly as quickly when we're we're sabotaging them with these types of foods you know they even show that when people eat heavily processed foods they also eat i don't remember what the number was but it was like 20 something percent faster too so you're not just eating more you're also eating faster oh yeah and it creates this strange behavior how many times have you guys experienced this right you're eating the oreo and it's not about

the oreo that's in your mouth it's about the one that's in your hand yes what how interesting is that right true holy shit yeah it has nothing to do like i'm not even enjoying this one it's the one i want in front that is drug behavior that's not food that right and if you don't if you don't believe that it's when you have like two left and you're like oh i need to get more that's right go to the you don't believe that, it's when you have like two left and you're like, oh, I need to get more. That's right. Go to the store. That's right.

That's right. Chum in the water, right? Yep. Or a shark. And that's the kind of behavior you should see with drug addicts is that they're doing the drug and they're thinking about the next line or the next whatever that they're going to do. How about people that like to smoke weed?

How do you deal with that? Because I mean, I like smoking weed so do i but like that's the thing like let's let's talk about this real quick oh god mom i hope you're not listening but let's talk about this real quick because like okay average people work out two or three times a week well if you do smoke you know what the effect that that could have on your appetite so how how do people control this so you, it's interesting on that. So cannabis is a side topic that I have a lot of interest in. So years ago, and here's why. It's not because I'm some kind of a weed aficionado.

I became one because years ago I had a family member who got terminal cancer, and there was no conventional treatment to help her. And so I did all, I did all the research on unconventional treatments and I found all these studies on cannabinoids and their effects on cancers. And so I just learned quite a bit of it and I ended up getting a medical card so I could give her some and then I used it myself and I learned all about it. And here's what I learned in the studies.

Cannabis users are not fatter than non-cannabis users. It's actually true so a lot of those munchy effects tend to happen to people who are not uh experienced with cannabis also there are cannabinoids that do the opposite so thc tends to be the stimulating cannabinoid you have other cannabinoids like cbc i believe that actually will suppress your appetite a little bit so it depends on the strain and it depends on on the person that's using it. But if you've identified, because it's not just cannabis. Look, there's lots of triggers to eating.

It could be TV. It could be, look, alcohol for me is a way bigger trigger for food than cannabis. I could easily enjoy a joint or vape and not want to go eat a bunch of food. But you give me a glass of wine or a beer, and I to go eat a bunch of food. But you give me a glass of wine or a beer and I want to eat a lot of food. So I think you have to identify that for yourself. But cannabinoids are very interesting science. They also have insulin sensitizing effects. And I, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to tread carefully here.

We're probably going to see in the future, uh, medicines based off of cannabinoids for fat loss because there's some pretty interesting effects on cannabinoids and the way that it affects how your body stores body fat. Yeah, we know with taking Kratom that it seems to help us with fasting. I don't have any research evidence of that, but it seems to make it. I think what happens, I think you change your mood in whatever direction, and it does change some of your psychology and some of the way that you think about food. Yeah, I mean, I can't disagree, but it depends. Look, I know people who, if they have a little bit of weed, they go crazy with food. I think you have to identify that for yourself, but it doesn't do it to me. And again, the studies show that regular cannabis users, these are people who have cannabis once a week regularly, they're not any fatter than the average person.

I mean, but that's not saying much. The average person's pretty fat. Do you discover anything about it affecting testosterone levels? Yeah. So the studies on testosterone in humans are inconclusive. However, the studies on animals and cannabis and testosterone are conclusive. It reliably lowers testosterone in animals. Human studies are a little bit more difficult to, you know.

Variables and shit. Yeah, you know, excuse the pun, weed out. But I will say this. It's probably not good for testosterone. There's a ton of cannabinoid receptors in the reproductive system. And I can't imagine it being great for testosterone levels. I would imagine that it probably has a negative effect if you use it a lot. I would say if it's occasional, then I would say no.

I would also wonder, like, it's hard to measure a good time. You know what i mean like if you if it helps you to feel better if it helps you to relax you know maybe that does lower testosterone for x period of time but maybe in the long run maybe because you have a little less stress maybe you're just i mean that's what we're talking about on this show today is like we're really talking about managing stress whether it be your training whether it be from your diet you know trying to gain control of your nutrition uh and trying to trying to gain control of your, of your training. So it's not, so it, it, uh, it gives you the right amount of stress, the correct amount of stress, not overdoing it,

not underdoing it, just kind of finding that a happy medium. And the same thing goes with like a drink, you know, you might say, Hey, well, it's not great to drink alcohol when you're, you know, on a diet and you're, you're heading in this direction, but might say, hey, well, it's not great to drink alcohol when you're, you know, on a diet and you're heading in this direction. But at the same time, it's like, you know, yeah, have a fucking couple of drinks. As long as you don't have a problem with alcohol and as long as it doesn't lead to binge eating, then yeah, have a good, you know, relax, have a couple of drinks. Well, health is a sphere. So you have like physical, you know, fitness, you have nutrition, stress relationships spiritual health all of these uh affect your health you know there was a study at stanford that showed that people with bad

relationships it was as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day so and it was funny because i read that and i thought of all i know a few fitness people who are fanatical about workouts so fanatical about the workouts and diet that they have shitty relationships because they can't miss a workout they can't eat you have to eat perfect all the time and like man they're they're actually doing their health a disservice by being so uh dysfunctional with with extras so it's a sphere right so does cannabis improve your quality of life uh in a genuine way if the answer is yes, then it probably will contribute to your health. This is true, I'd say, even for medical intervention. But you have to be honest with yourself.

I know a lot of potheads who say, oh, no, it improves the quality of my life. No, you're just addicted to weed. It's a good question to ask, even with something like sugar. Does sugar help improve your life? I would say it does for me. Like I like having sugar here and there. I like having something sweet here and there. Sure, sure.

So yeah, you got to look, I mean, we talk about that on Mind Pump a lot, is that look at the entire sphere of health because it does naturally create balance. You know, spiritual health is another one. Like having a spiritual practice, by the way, you know, one of the things that's interesting about fitness, if stick to fitness long enough because you're what is fitness really right it's improving self-improvement it's really what it is stick to it long enough and you start to look at other ways of improving your life eventually leads you to spiritual health which can be a lot of different ways it could be religion or meditation or whatever but that's in

that's look studies show very clearly that is an important part of health it's what gives you a sense of purpose and meaning because at some point life is going to suck really bad and if you don't have that it can be unbearable absolutely i'm i'm really happy i don't mean to rewind on us but i'm happy that we talked on that cannabis part because when we were talking about the effects of lifestyle on men's testosterone and women's hormones i mean you think about all the things all the negative things we already spoke about, not resistance training, but also a lot of these individuals, they will have the habit of, you know, smoking a lot almost every single day to cope with whatever's going on, drinking a lot.

And these can also be other habits when not done with moderation that can totally put you in that zone of thinking that you need to hop on a hrt or or get hormone replacement in some in some in some fashion yep you know especially here in california where that's just legal yeah no no i mean it's you know that's funny our understanding of um like addiction and drug addiction has changed recently you know the old studies they would take a mouse or a rat they put it in a cage yeah and they'd give it like water and then water with cocaine and then the rat would it would drink the water with cocaine until it died so like ah cocaine is so addictive that the rat kills itself and then eventually scientists were like

hold on a second if you put a person in a cage and they can't do anything they have no mates to hang out with no one to mate with, nothing to play with, nothing. They're just in a cage. And you have access to drugs and water. They're going to do the drugs until they die. Why don't we change these studies? So what they did was they took these mice, and they put them in these elaborate environments that were very stimulating,

and they had mates that they could mate with and hang out with, and they had access to food. And they found that the drug use dropped considerably so you know we can look and there's definitely drugs that have more addictive properties than others but what is the root cause of it like like look let's be honest uh tens of millions of americans every single year more than that use hard drugs occasionally very small percentage of them become addicts look at alcohol a lot of people drink alcohol small percentage become alcoholics why are those few become alcoholics something else it's not necessarily alcohol that's just the vehicle by the way the most abused substance

in america is food that's easily the the most abused substance absolutely yeah i was gonna just again bring up weed again um just because like i think last time you guys were here i was gonna just again bring up weed again um just because like i think last time you guys were here i was actually talking to adam about because he was saying that he would like he would take a couple hits just to go to sleep and then i mean with uh that book um i forgot his name why we sleep matthew walker mentioned that like you can't get in like deep rem sleep if you're high on something but i think it kind of maybe goes along the lines with what Mark was saying. Like if we can get some sleep, isn't that better than,

you know, struggling. So I mean, did the research show stuff, stuff like that when you're looking it up? Yeah, no, you're right.

Um, it might help you sleep, but the quality of sleep does reduce. In fact, Adam has reduced, uh, his cannabis use because of that. In fact,

one of the things of regular cannabis users will notice is they don't dream. They don't have as many dreams. In fact, Adam has reduced his cannabis use because of that. In fact, one of the things that regular cannabis users will notice is they don't dream. They don't have as many dreams. In fact, when you go off cannabis, one of the side effects initially is vibrant dreams. So you are missing a certain quality of sleep by having to rely on

a substance to go to sleep. It's definitely a less than optimal situation to be in when you rely on anything to do something natural. Like I have to, I have to have a drink in order to relax around people, or I have to smoke a joint in order to go to sleep, or I have to take this painkiller so that I can walk.

Right. Anytime you have to rely on something to do something natural, then it's not optimal. But I mean, you know, on an individual basis, I don't know someone's situation and what's going on. And in some cases, it might be the better option. their off days, you're still going to take 10 minutes after they eat, still obviously focusing on good sleep. But what are the other physical habits that you think that really busy people should be having on these days where they're not doing some type of resistance training

to still make sure that they can progress in the right direction? Yeah, so forget the calorie burn, right? Just being active is healthy. So this isn't about trying to burn more calories. Remember I talked about how the metabolism adapts anyway? Besides with resistance training, you're not going to necessarily burn tons more calories by being active, but it is good for you. When I was an early trainer and people would tell me, you know, I'd say, hey, what is your, you know, what do you do for activity?

Oh, I park at the end of the parking lot where I take this there. I used to make fun of them. Oh, that's not a workout. That's stupid. Then later on, we got these devices. We see these all over the place now, but this was early on. They were called body bugs and 24 hour fitness had them

first and you'd put it on and it would measure your activity your calorie burn now like Fitbits and stuff like that can do that for you but back then this was like new technology so I would have clients wear this and then when they'd come back to the gym we'd plug it into the computer and I'd see their activity

and I'd look at them and I'd be like, what the hell did you do Saturday? Like, I know you work out with me on Monday and Wednesday. And I can see clearly 9 a.m. spike in activity. And then the rest of the day, you're not doing anything. But what the hell are you doing Saturday? My God, that activity was, oh, I was shopping at the mall with my friends or I was doing some gardening. And I would see this on step counters too. Parking at the end of the parking lot, taking the stairs, sounds stupid.

Standing at your desk instead of sitting, sounds stupid, makes a big difference. It makes a big difference. And because they don't require structured exercise, it's easy for the average person. So I can tell the average person at work when you're sitting at your desk every hour Stand up and stretch or move for five minutes. That's it for five minutes every hour. That's nothing Well, you're at work eight hours So that's 40 minutes of activity if you just did that every single hour or just stand just stand at your desk and see what happens Yeah, trying to stop looking at uh

All forms of exercise is always having to be stuff that you do in the gym. Yes. Just make it part of your everyday life. And you can also do a lot of stuff at home. And some people that maybe are struggling to get to the gym, maybe you don't get to the gym that day. Maybe you don't get to the gym for two or three days in a row. I don't think there's any reason to really sweat it and get overly worried about it. But do you have an opportunity to walk or opportunity to do something else?

Just pick anything else and get something done. I'm so glad you brought that up because I almost forgot to talk about another really remarkable benefit of resistance training. There's no such thing as permanent results from exercise. In other words, when you work out, whatever you do to get in shape, you've got to kind of keep doing to stay in shape. However, resistance training is in a league of its own in terms of the permanence of results. Yeah. Okay. So there was a recent study that was done where they compared two groups of men. One group worked out every single week.

The other group worked out for three weeks and then would take a week off. So every three weeks, they would take one week off and then they'd come back. Now, predictably, when the week was off, you saw strength decline and then they'd come back and you'd see it come back up. At the end of the six week study, the results were almost the same. They were basically the same at the end. So one group literally took a week off every three weeks, got the same results as the guys that were doing it every single week why is that muscle memory no other form of exercise produces this okay so what is muscle memory you guys know what this is if it takes you three years to build 10 pounds of lean body mass like you it's really hard

you're trying to build muscle and you're for three years yes i gained 10 pounds of lean body mass and then you stop working out for two months you sit sit at a desk all day long. You lose all 10 pounds. And then you decide, I'm going to go start working out again. You know how fast you'll gain that 10 pounds back? It'll take you probably within a month, you'll gain back the muscle it took you three years to gain previously. Muscle memory is a very real thing. Also, you don't lose muscle nearly as quickly as you lose the effects of not doing cardio. When I'm doing cardio, it's the activity that I'm getting the benefit from, the calorie burn. When I stop, it's done.

When I'm doing resistance training, the calorie burn, the metabolism boost sticks with me for quite a while. In fact, I've actually gone on vacation and come back stronger oftentimes. And a lot of advanced lifters will know that because we tend to push ourselves yeah a little bit too hard so probably take months to lose muscle mass unless you were doing something uh to try to strip the muscle mass off right and yes in fact another study came out that showed that roughly one ninth this is a trippy study one ninth of the volume that it took you to build muscle is required to keep muscle yeah you talk to any old-time bodybuilder or strength athlete and you ask them like how hard is it for you to keep

your mass and strength compared to when you were first gaining it and they'll tell you oh i barely have to do anything in comparison like i remember when i was a kid like i was an ectomorph hard gainer right it was so hard it was so hard to get above 190 200 pounds like oh so now as a 42 year old man like if i work out twice a week i'm going to be over 200 pounds no problem very easy to keep once you have it no other form of exercise really has that hallmark benefit and i think that's great when you're talking to the average person because the average person inevitably misses workouts but they're not going to get the negative, such a negative impact from missing the workouts like they would with other forms

of exercise. What should we do with our kids? Because, you know, kids they'll move around a lot until they're about 10 years old. And then they start to see like, they don't, you know, sprint out of the car and jump up on the curb. Like kids, if you're, if you ever hang out with a five-year-old kid or seven-year-old kid, they're all over the place all the time. They'll like lay on the floor and like look at a book and then they'll pop up and they'll just all over the place all day long. So their activity level is through the roof. And so that might suggest some reasons on why sometimes children seem to be able to eat whatever they want and it doesn't have a negative impact. But we all know it's having a negative impact regardless.

But what do we work on and what do we try to teach our children so they don't fall into any of these bad pitfalls that many of us are stuck in and have to think about it so much every single day? Yeah. So this is a tough one for parents because it requires our involvement, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because it can be tough. You come home from work, you're tired, and it's like you want your kids to play.

Go play with them. I mean, that's really the best possible thing you can do is go play. And then play is the best form of activity for kids. The other thing, too, is if you want to give them structured exercise, that's going to give them a tremendous amount of benefit. Gymnastics seems to have the biggest benefit and carryover for children. It teaches them tremendous body awareness, appropriate receptive ability, strength and stability.

And they're finding that kids who do gymnastics, the carryover to other sports later on is tremendous. So if you sign your kid up for something, gymnastics is a great place to go. Get them running. Something like soccer I think would be great. Yeah, and again, we just interviewed, what was his name? A gentleman who's a researcher for sports,

and he says that general athletic activity is better when you're younger and then more specific when you get older. In other words, if a kid only played soccer for their whole life, they're not going to be better at soccer than a kid that played soccer, baseball, football, and gymnastics, who then later also only played soccer. That general development of physical activities is better at younger ages. So a lot of parents, we used to think the opposite. So I think a lot of parents are like, no, my kid's going to be a basketball player. That's why he's going to play.

You're better off having your kid do a little bit of everything than just doing a lot of one thing. There's a really good book called A Range. forgot the author but it's exactly that and he had like case studies of like professional athletes that like really great professional athletes that had a breadth of sports and how they became the best at that versus people that like just only did one sport the whole time so that's a really good book on that subject yeah it's great stuff and it's that's it's a tough one because, uh, when, when we were kids, it was pretty natural. I mean, if you didn't go outside and play, you had nothing to do. Yeah. But, uh, you know, I feel for kids cause I mean, let's be honest,

dude. Uh, it's hard to compete with the shit that they have access to now. I mean, I don't want to go outside half the time cause I got Netflix and Hulu and Amazon and you got video games and stuff and just incredibly entertaining so it's really really tough and so what i do with my kids and and they they get mad but i just all right guys we're turning off electronics and then what do we do i don't care do whatever you want right and they're pissed off for about 30 minutes and the next thing you know they're like doing other shit you got to like take it away because to compete the two man you're gonna lose're like doing other shit. But you got to like take it away because to compete the two, man, you're going to lose.

Yeah. I think you just mentioned something really brilliant right there. It's like they're pissed off for 30 minutes. That's what parents need to deal with. They need to work on that. Like you need to deal with that. You need to, you need to, you know, tell your kid, hey, this is what's for dinner. And they need to, you know, say, I'm not eating that.

And they need to get in trouble and they need to go in their room and slam the door or whatever. And they need to learn, like, this is what we're eating. Like, we're, you know, we're not getting pizza. We had pizza last night. You know, this is what mom made or this is what we decided to make as a family. This is what we're eating. And you need to kind of get them over that. I think a lot of times we don't want to have the fight because you said, like, you're at work.

You don't want to tell your kid to put down the granola bars or whatever because you're about to have dinner like i i find myself doing this all the time and i don't tell them that they can't eat it i just tell them i say oh uh we're about we're we're cooking dinner like it's going to be ready in about 20 30 minutes and they'll kind of look at me and they'll kind of decide sometimes they walk out with the granola bar still and sometimes they put it back dude what i do is I literally only have stuff in my house that I don't care if they eat. It's like, yeah, we have nothing to eat. We have apples. You got cheese slices over here.

You can have a beef stick if you want. I don't want that. All right. Yeah, then starve. Yeah, you know, it's funny. Starve, motherfucker. They won't. Yeah.

You know what that reminds me of? This whole like self, this whole like this, my body is beautiful movement or this body acceptance movement that's twisted and distorted to where they're taking it and saying that being obese means that you love yourself, which is actually not true. You're actually not caring for yourself very well. I use that example of the kids. I love my kids enough to say no you can't have that kind of food all the time that's what love is so I mean you know parent parenting is not being they're not trying to be liked all the time parenting is doing the right thing and sometimes your kids aren't gonna like it whatever yeah I was just sitting over here kind of laughing just because

I couldn't imagine as a kid my mom put some food in front of me and my ass saying no, like the, the quickness of which I would have got my ass beat. Just like, I would never, like, I would never say no. Like, you just didn't even think it was an option.

No, it wasn't an option. My mom's Sicilian, you know, you know how many wooden spoons. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Yeah. What do you mean? Yeah. As soon as I said, I don't want to, you know, I'd wake up. You know how many wooden spoons are broken? Jesus Christ.

What do you mean? As soon as I said, I don't want to eat, I'd wake up. What day is it? Yeah, I think that's the struggle, and that's the fight that parents got to fight. If you want your kid to be healthy, you want to make sure that they're not just having to go through this struggle every day of trying to figure out what the fuck to eat and when to train and all that stuff dude i had a client once bring me her she was coming to train with me and she had her seven-year-old with her and the seven-year-old's eating chicken nuggets right and she goes sal and she's like you know she's hired me because she wanted to lose weight and all that stuff and she she goes, Sal, can you please tell my son why chicken nuggets are not healthy

and why he shouldn't eat those? And I looked at her and I said, who bought the chicken nuggets? I didn't say nothing to him. I said, he can't go to the store and buy this stuff. That's you. You're the one that's buying the stuff for him. And your kids, you know, they say like, oh, obesity runs in my family. No, it's behaviors that you learn from your parents and your kids you know they say like oh obesity runs in my family no it's behaviors that you learn

from your parents and your family so if you're a if you have shitty eating habits and you're trying to get your kids to have good eating habits and you don't want to fix yours it ain't gonna happen i guess it's not gonna happen everybody has to do it it's just the only way to work yeah yeah it starts with what you purchase and what you bring into the house right that's it 100 do you uh does your wife work out too? Is she part of this whole, uh, fitness craziness or no? Yeah, she, she was actually a trainer for, uh, for years. Um, and we just had a seven month old, so now she's getting back into exercise, but

she's a, yeah, she's a fitness fanatic. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So it works out well. Let me, let me, quick question before I, um, cause we were talking about, you know,

weed and stuff before, but how about, cause we never really specifically talked about alcohol. Um, and obviously it has calories and it has its own effects, but how do you have people tread those waters? Same way. It's all about balance.

And is it improving the quality of life? Are you using the alcohol to numb yourself and avoid feelings? Or are you using the alcohol in ways to connect with others or enjoy the moment with the wine or whatever that you're drinking? It really depends. That makes a big difference. If you're going home and you numb yourself with alcohol, it's very different than I haven't seen my brother in a month and we're going to hang out. We're going to have a couple beers. It's a very, very different scenario. So I would talk because it really doesn't work well to tell clients no, never, or only once a week at this time.

You know, my goal was always to teach my clients how they can do this on their own forever. My goal was for them to not need me as their trainer. And it's a long process. It's a long slow process of learning, developing behaviors, learning the skill of discipline. But over time especially towards the end of my career when I got better at it,

I was able to help people become very consistent with these things. I think you mentioned this on other podcasts before, but what led you and the guys on the Mind Pump podcast to starting the Mind Pump podcast in the first place? You know, people ask us that all the time. We all came from the same, so we were all trainers, and we all started at 24 Hour Fitness.

I would manage and grant open clubs. I left, and at 22 22 i opened my own wellness uh and fitness studio so i had personal trainers massage therapists acupuncture the whole deal they stayed there and got into management did their thing i never met them at this point i had heard of them adam in particular i would have people come up to me and say do you know adam schaefer and i'd say well no and they said well you you got to meet him you guys need to work together must have happened five or six times very strange it's so weird say, do you know Adam Schaefer? And I'd say, well, no. And they said, well, you, you got to meet him. You guys need to work together. It must've happened five or six times. Very strange. It's so weird that the same, you know, people come up to me and tell me I need

to meet this random person. So I knew of him because of that. That's about it. Right? So fast forward, I own my, my studio. And remember how I told you earlier that I had a family member that had cancer and I had gotten into cannabis to help her with her chemo and all that stuff. I saw him on social media and I knew that he had left the fitness industry and had opened some cannabis clubs. So he was part of some of the first cannabis clubs in the Bay Area. Adam's a very good businessman. So he saw the opportunity and did that. So I said, I want to ask him some questions about different strains and, you know, what

would be the best ones for my mother-in-law. So him and I started talking and we both were fitness guys that knew a lot about cannabis. So we kind of connected like that. And that's how I met him. Later on, I created a fitness program that one of my clients was an internet. He had some experience internet marketing. And he said to me, if you create a product, I'll help you put it on the internet and we'll sell it. So I put together a workout program.

And we made this whole sales video and did this whole thing. And then I remembered Adam. And I'm like, oh, yeah, this guy, he's good at business. People keep telling me. I'm going to ask him his opinion. So I messaged him and said, hey, would you mind watching a sales video I put together and some internet marketing material? Just give me your opinion. He said, absolutely.

So I sent it to him and he messages me back. He's like, oh shit, this is really great. You want to get on the phone? I said, sure. So we got on the phone and we set up a meeting. And immediately when it was me, him, Justin, there was another gentleman there. But right away, it was chemistry right away. Like we were talking about the fitness industry and how it needed to merge with the wellness

industry. Back then there were two separate things it was like you were either like a hippie or you were like a bodybuilder or performance guy we're like no no they need to merge there's a lot that can happen between these two we talked about the way fitness is communicated all the bullshit that's out there we talked about podcasting because podcasting is long form and you really can't effectively communicate uh how to lose weight or permanently improve your health through instagram or social media you need a long form you know conversation we also like the fact that there was low barrier to enter so it wasn't very

expensive and the fact that we could say whatever the hell we wanted because we didn't have any sponsors that would tell us not to so we all connected that way and started the podcast and loved it and for a year we never monetized we just did it for a whole year had a lot of fun doing it built an audience and after about a year we all looked at each other and said i think we have something here let's see if we can sell a product and we did and then we all sold our you know gyms and left our jobs. What did it take to start it? Like money-wise? No, just, yeah, just like what did it take in general just to start the podcast? Oh, I mean, that was literally it.

We met, we talked. It was like a four-hour conversation. It was like pure fire. We all had a great time. Just kind of had to do it. And then, yeah, Doug, who's our producer, who was at the time, you know, he's the guy that I said to help me create the internet marketing stuff. He had some podcasting recording stuff. So we went to Doug's house, he put up blankets on the walls and we recorded our first podcast and we had so much fun doing it. So we did it basically for free for a full year, just having a blast. And then after that,

like I said, we turned on, but it was, I think our initial, what was our initial limit? $4,000. We all put a thousand dollars in. That's how we started the business. And that was it. I love it. I just like, you know, sharing, having people share stories like that. Cause I know a lot of people have ideas and concepts and they just, they just sit there and hold onto them forever. And I want to encourage people to take that step, you know, work on that book or work on that podcast or work on that damn thing that has been sitting there in your brain for a long time entrepreneurship is uh jumping out of a plane and making a parachute on the way down you got you just look at here's a deal you're selling a product you're putting out media you're doing something the market is what's going to tell you if it's successful

the only way you know if what you're doing is going to work is if you put it out there. You could plan all the ways you want. You could spend months writing the best business plan or whatever. You have no idea. Your idea is shit. You don't know yet. Put it out there. Go do it. See what happens.

Get your feedback. Change it. It probably won't look the way that you think it's going to look at the end, but through that process of doing it. Look, it's like learning how to squat. You ain't going to learn how to squat by reading a book. You've got to go practice it, and you're going to suck when you first do it, but you keep doing it, and you'll get better. It's the only way to do

any of this stuff. You can't, what is it, analysis by or paralysis by analysis? Very common. How do people get your book? So you can go on theresistancentrainingrevolution.com or you can find it Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, anywhere they sell books. I think when we're done here today, it'd be good to set up a future seminar with you

talking about the stuff that's in your book and talking about some of the concepts you shared today. I would absolutely. That would be an honor. I would appreciate that. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. I will. Shout out and thank you to everybody on the live stream. Just so you guys know, this recording will be taken down and then re-uploaded a little bit later today. So if you go back to see it and it's not, it's not there, that's why a huge shout out and thank you to eat right foods for sponsoring

today's episode. That's a eat R I T E foods.com at checkout, enter promo code power project for power project 25 for 25% off your first order. And then code power project for 10% off every order after that. Please make sure you're following the podcast at MarkBell's PowerProject on Instagram, at MBPowerProject on TikTok and Twitter. My Twitter and Instagram is at IamAndrewZ. And Seema, where you at?

I am Seema Inyang on Instagram and YouTube, and Seema Yin Yang on TikTok and Twitter. Good deal. You can find me on Instagram at MindPumpSal and of course the MindPump Podcast on all podcast platforms. What advice do you have for Nseem over here? He's falling apart. He's getting older and he doesn't want to admit it. What should this guy be doing?

He doesn't look like he's falling apart. Is this a real deal or what? Doesn't look bad, right? Little tweaks here and there I'm dealing with right now. You'd have to do a long focus on mobility. Yeah. You'd have to take away the performance stuff for a little while. That's hard to do, too.

Damn, bro. Sucks. I never do. I'm at Mark Smiley Bell. Strength is never weakness. We just never strength. Catch you guys later.