Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 190 - Jim Brown

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

Jim Brown has been lifting weights since he was 13 years old with the sole intent of becoming a competitive bodybuilder. With 33 years of experience, he became knowledgeable in every aspect of body transformation, hormonal optimization, and elite performance. He created the Forged Training system to maximize muscle gain in a minimal amount of time that allows you to design your own workout programing for the rest of your life. He is also the co-owner of the Optimized Life Nutrition and is one of the “Fitness over 40” experts in Iron Man Magazine. Download Jim's eBook for free: http://powerproject.forjlife.com/ ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Cleveland, Ohio. Played for the Browns for 10 years. Won a couple championships. Retired as the greatest running back in the history of the NFL. There we go. Done. Done deal. He does look a little different than his playing days.

Yeah, things have changed. Tone down a little bit. It's an honor to have a legend, though. So I thought I'd been lifting for a long time. And then Seema probably feels like he's been lifting for a long time. But Jim, you've been lifting for a really long ass time. How many years? Started when I was 12 and I'm almost 48.

Damn. That's a long time. How'd you get started in all this? I found, well, I started working out early in martial arts. My mom was a black belt and a hard ass. Oh, wow. And so I always had trained in that and show Ray Rue, which is an old Okinawan style.

Oh, how cool. And, um, it was, I guess it was pretty cool, but, uh, interesting household, you know, because of that. But I was doing pushups, duck walks, all these for punishment and part of the, you know, whatever. Um, so I, I was used to that, you know, I had some kind of the, you know, whatever. Um, so I, I was used to that, you know, I had some kind of outlet, you know, and, um, when I was 13, I met a bodybuilder guy came to my house. Um, we were, my stepdad was big into archery and guy came out

and, um, they were shooting this archery tournament and it was this dude from California. It was like the, the epitome blonde buff, California dude. And I remember I was a little kid. I'm looking at this guy and go, okay, man, who are you? What do you do? How, how do I look like that? And so, you know, he gave me some tips. Oh, we need to work out. This is what you do. And, uh, I literally next two days went down to Kmart and bought the DP weeder set with my paper route money strapped down on my bike and, you know, walked at home, man. And that's, that's when I started lifting weights. Yeah. That's, that's great. Uh, with the martial arts background, did you kind of have this, uh, maybe a little bit more, uh, body,

mind, spirit type thing going on, even though, even though you started at such a young age, I think some people, uh, just go in the gym and they, I don't know, they tend to just kind of like grunt it out and get real intense. But I think that, you know, martial arts being like a practice and I think it has provides a lot of value because I think that our lifting should look like that. But is that how you kind of started out or is it look a little different than that? I was a little bit different, but I spent a lot. I was the only kid, spent a lot of time alone with my dog or whatever. The exercise was kind of an outlet for me. I got it.

And so by the time I started lifting weights, you know, I went to school and I was like, Hey man, I'm better than everybody else at this man. And it was really an outlet for everything that, you know, was negative. And I mean, in essence, it saved my life because I had kind of a violent home and that was the way I was expressing myself as a kid before I started doing that. And, um, I was really able to focus in on that. And so it, it, it became, I guess, intuitive for me because I could focus my effort or all my rage and everything into that. Right. And do you have your own gym? I don't know. You, uh, you, you've been training people down in,

uh, in Florida for several years now. And a friend of a friend of a friend who set this up was sharing with me that you extremely educated in training, but also with like kind of unorthodox methods and some unorthodox protocols as well. Well, do you guys know who Dante Trudell is? Absolutely. Okay. So I've known him for a long time. Um,

I think we're at 20 plus years. He has one of the bulk nutrition companies. What's the name of the true nutrition? True nutrition. There you go. Yep. So, um,

back in the day, um, you know, all my ideas and most of my training methods and everything I've stolen part in part from him. Um, yeah, dog crap training.

Have you ever messed with that before? I heard about it when I was like, like on the internet a few years ago. Yeah. Doing like basically five sets in a row. They're all till failure. It's brutal. Yeah. Um, so I took a variation of that and, um, kind of made it my own, made some twist and that's how I've been training for, I don't know, since, since I was about 27 that way. And I was pretty big then. Um, 27 is when I was still competing naturally and I started on anabolics. And, um, that's when I really blew up. I stopped doing the hour and a half, two hour long workouts, beat myself up. Um, I couldn't recover from going to positive

and negative failure like Yates style. And so Dante was, was one of the guys, Phil Hernan kind of convinced me to back off, do less, train my body more times in a week, less volume. And that's when I exploded. It's interesting getting on anabolics and training less kind of simultaneously. Well, it didn't work quite that way. I've started anabolics, you know, doing the long workouts. Right. Couldn't, you know, couldn't recover in time. Couldn't, I don't know. I couldn't get a workout done in two and a half hours. You know how it is when you're that adapt to that much exercise, your recovery's out of control. Um, you know, training was, was very long. So anyway, those guys convinced me to back off, do more times a week and things really started to

happen for me. That's when I got the biggest shift in strength training. Uh, the last couple of years has been years ago when, when somebody was into taking performance enhancing drugs, it usually meant that they were like, quote unquote, like more advanced as a lifter. They've been lifting for a long time and they decided, Hey, you know what? I've been lifting for 10 years. I'm not getting the progress that I want. Uh, I'm going to look towards something else. And so these people that would, a lot of times they would choose PEDs, but at the same time, they also had some training knowledge. And so the people that were on PEDs versus the people that weren't, the people that were on them usually trained less frequently, overtrained less, not just because they're on stuff, but

they literally overtrained less. overtrained less, not just because they're on stuff, but they literally overtrained less. And the guys that were natural were trying so hard, almost trying too hard, where they were kind of overdoing it. They were overtraining. But now we've seen a big flip because of all the information that's on the internet now. And we've seen a lot of tested athletes, I'll say, do really well and break all all time world records that were set by guys that were clearly using. So the a lot of the natural athletes have caught up. And I think part of the reason is just having that information about, look, you're regardless of whether you're on stuff or not. It's probably not a great idea to spend three hours in the gym.

Why not? Unless it's meaningful. Well, I've always operated on the theory that almost everybody over trains. meaningful. Well, I've always operated on the theory that almost everybody over trains and if you get them to kind of reconsider and back off a little bit, um, do a little bit more frequent training for the body parts. I usually have a really good result. And Jim, like, don't you like training the really high rep ranges? Like 20s, 30s? Yeah. And that kind of started back then because you know, when you're a beast and you're, you have hammer strength all maxed out and your friends are holding plates on like, right shells you're 25 reps still getting bigger still getting stronger so all right it works um for me now yeah it's more of a protection of joints

and i have you know soft muscle tears belly tears all over my body so um if i keep adding weight those re-tear and re-injure and so um, I'm usually in the 25, uh, rep range in my first set to failure and then subsequently dropped down to, you know, maybe a 15, maybe an eight and occasional eight after that. Do you see, Oh, do you see this being used for like all types of, I guess, physique athletes? Cause I mean, I don't see many, obviously strength athletes, they would hate to train up in the twenties and thirties rep ranges. Yeah. But how do you see it like benefiting certain types of athletes? You know, strength is really out of my wheelhouse because that's a whole different game, right? Just like, you know, Olympic lifting where you're keeping your weight down, all that stuff. That's really, I don't know.

I know when I was doing reps at weight like that and going to failure, I continue to get stronger and I was either adding reps or any weights in growing muscle. So, um, like DC talks about, you know, you can, if you had one machine to do shoulders on a desert Island, you just keep adding progressively, progressively getting stronger and you're going to get bigger. And, um, I don't think if you're doing, if you're training to failure with, with 20 reps, you're still going to get bigger. I don't know how that's going to translate in terms of strength, like you guys do,

but, um, definitely for growing muscle. I think that's very effective. Well, it definitely translates into strength for sure. Um, whether it transfers over into like that one rep max, like that's kind of like what we're looking for a lot of times. So it will transfer over really well into sets of eight and sets of five and stuff, which can help with hypertrophy, which in turn will help, you know, if you have a bigger muscle is oftentimes going to be a stronger muscle. And so it's definitely beneficial. And so we'll go through different phases of training where we might do some stuff like you're talking about, but a lot of times in powerlifting in general, it's pretty uncommon, like go to failure. So are you still doing stuff like that where you go to failure? Cause yeah, I go to positive failure every time. Yeah. So I'll warm

up completely on an exercise and then depending on, you know, my training cycle or what I'm doing, what my recovery rate is, I'll do, you know, from two to four sets to positive failure. So this makes a lot of sense now, because now if you're on a positive failure and you're trying five reps, you probably get hurt. Yeah. But especially now you're doing sets of 15, 20 and it's a rep, you know, number 20 through 25 where you're getting some assistance. Maybe I don't. I go, you don't get a true positive. Yeah, it's positive failure.

So what about negatives? You mess with negatives at all? No, because when I, when I do negatives, I get too sore. Right. And recovery doesn't support that to doing multiple sessions a week. Even when I was enhanced, you know, the Dorian Yates training, I'm going to failure, Mike Menzer stuff. I couldn't ever recover from those. You know, when I'm, when I had a negative, those workouts are brutal, heavy duty and blood and guts training.

Yeah. Yeah. He's like, Oh, we're only going to do four exercises. Okay. Yeah. But it's going to snatch your soul, you know? Well, you do one set, but a lot of times it was like,

you'd pre-exhaust first with like leg extensions and then you'd squat and then you'd die pretty much. Yeah. You mentioned, you know, anabolics like around what year did you start getting involved with them? And then how, how did you even like, I would imagine like years and years ago, it's probably harder to find out information on them. Yeah. So I did my first bodybuilding contest when I was 18 and, um,

you know, started living the dream, right. I'm going to be a bodybuilder, blah, blah, blah. I got out of the air force, came back home and I was training natural competing, doing that, doing okay. Um, but I always knew that I that I wanted to look like those guys, you know, like the guys in the magazine. I wasn't going to get there. Continue to train, research. Muscle Media 3000 was real big back then. So I was starting to get some information.

I went to the Las Vegas meetup that they had one year and you got to sit at a round table with Dan Duchesne, with Charles Poliquin, with Bill Phillips, with Sean Phillips. And, um, I had pieced enough together by then to, to kind of get an idea of what I wanted to do, um, what I was going to look for, how I was going to test, you know, I started doing blood tests from the very beginning and this is, um, I don't know, this is like 90 something, 96, 97. Um, anyway, so I got to talk to Dan Duchesne and, you know, I had a list of questions and, you know, it was hilarious across all that shit. I'll take that and that and

you'll get big. Okay. When do I stop? And I remember him saying, stop, you're like cycle off. I go, yeah. That's when you get sick and you can't do it anymore. Then you're done. Okay, man. And so, um, right after that, what would you stop for? And it served me well. Um, once I started, I never stopped. I never went off. Um, but, um, I had higher doses and lower doses. That's right. Change of compounds. But, um, when I was 27, I had enough information. I felt comfortable. Um, buddies and I took a trip down to Mexico, got blood work done. I determined that, you know, I had some kind of a baseline to go on. And then I started

systematically taking compounds by themselves, kind of seeing how it made my body feel, how he reacted to it. Um, about a year later, then I started combining and going full blast. And, um, I was topping out about, um, two 35 to 40 on stage. Um, natural in pretty decent contest shape, but in natural contest, you know, it's by height. So I'm standing next to a guy that's like five, nine and, you know, get blown away. Um, anyway, uh, then I worked my way up to my last contest. I was two 75 on stage. Still 30 pounds short of being what I would consider competitive in nationals. And that was my max. Wow.

Yeah. Dan Duchesne, just so people know, he wrote the book Body Opus. And then I believe he partially wrote the Underground Steroid Handbook, I think, right? I think that's right. He was part of that. The Underground Newsletter. Yeah. He was part of that.

Yeah. And the Underground Newsletter. that newsletter yeah he's part of that and underground newsletter and his whole mission was to um his whole mission was to give out information so people wouldn't get hurt and so i think people misunderstood he was giving out a lot of information on steroids and how to use them and how to inject i mean he would give you like every detail he could imagine this is before the internet this is before there was forums this is before you could before bigger stronger faster which is my brother's film like it's before uh this stuff was like more out in the open it's before you know doctors were prescribing in a lot

of these things and so dan duchesne did a huge service to everybody by explaining like hey look this is how it was going because a lot of guys were getting sick. People were like sharing needles and all kinds of weird, crazy stuff was going on. Yeah, it was, um, there were some crazy stories out there, man, for sure. But, uh, he was, you know, when the internet first started, he was one of the guys that, um, you know, was, was on boards that you could get to and get information from. And it was amazing. You never knew who you find out later who it was. Um, but he was, he was a really cool guy, man. Um, I was fortunate enough to have some interactions with him after Las Vegas meet. And, um, just always a real interesting, cool dude, man. He was one of those people that really broke down, you know, how a lot of these supplements were made. Um, and then he really

studied a lot of the kind of chemical side of things, I guess, in terms of like PEDs. And, um, in his book though, he actually talked a lot about like the future and he was like, there's going to be stuff around the corner, uh, that, that will come and maybe, uh, even better than steroids. Have you seen anything yet that compares, um, when it comes to performance enhancing drugs? Is there like, what about like SARMs or what about, uh, uh, we have these, uh, peptides and things like that and growth hormone and stuff, stuff along those lines. So my opinions are, my opinion, SARMs are a complete waste. Um, if you're going to do SARMs, you might as well do

anabolics. At least we know what's going to happen. Um, you know, I, I know that may be a popular, unpopular opinion, but, um, I, I haven't had any real use for him. Had a lot of people try him out. You've tried them yourself? I've tried them. And with clients like guys who don't want to jump on but want to do something, just get a much cleaner, more predictable, better result just using anabolics.

As far as peptides, I've experimented with a lot of those. Started with TB4 at real high doses. The only thing that i'll use consistently is like melanotannin because i'm super white and i live in florida right keep you dark yep so that helps um but as far as the growth hormone releasing peptides and stuff um i mean if i'm injecting myself five seven times a day i could equate that to roughly about a two iu dose of growth hormone i'll just do growth hormone.

So you have to, you have to administer it a lot and that's kind of the flaw. My experience was, yeah, I'm doing it a lot and you know, I don't mind taking shots. But you know, when you're out of like five, six a day. What about TB 400? Isn't that something that can help with injuries? Yep. So when I first started using that, I had started my medical device career. I was standing in the OR sometimes 18 hours watching surgery or standing there on a hard surface.

And so I still weighed 285, 290, and my body started to fucking hurt, man. Had body aches all over. I'm certainly not going to hit NSAIDs for that. So I looked into TB4, started doing that at real high dose and had experience, had good experience with it. Overall inflammation and pain seemed to be reduced. Um, and then, uh, I got, I got onto curcumin after that. So I tried injectable curcumin at high dose and found that just oral at a certain dose matched what I was injecting. And so kind of switched off with curcumin for that. What is curcumin by the way? I'm just listening. It's it's turmeric. It's a spice basically.

And curcumin is the active ingredient in turmeric. And you know, Dante just did a real good job on Instagram of breaking down why he recommends curcumin, why, why he had us, you know, pushing for it back in the day. Does a lot of beneficial things for you. But one thing it does is it really knocks down inflammation. And for me, for me, that's probably the main benefit why, why I've stayed on it. Um, TB four is real interesting though, because if you have an acute injury, um, like the last time I had a, you know, my pec, um, I have scar tissue in my pec minor that every now and then pulls away, get a little bruising. Um, I would use. I used to treat that with TB4, seemed to be effective,

but BP157 seems to be a little bit more effective for acute on-site, and so I have better luck with that. And these things are not illegal, right? Yeah. Yeah, kind of gray. Yeah, the gray area. I mean, you can order them. I mean, I guess because you can order them online doesn't mean they're not illegal,

but they're like, I guess you can order them. I mean, I guess because you can order them online doesn't mean they're not illegal, but they're like, I guess you can order them and they're, they're not a scheduled drug. It was my understanding. It just says not for human usage or how they sold it. But yeah, it's one of those kinds of gray market areas, but a lot of, a lot of the anti-aging physicians and more forward thinking physicians, especially in the TRT space are prescribing or writing scripts for, for some of the peptides now. And there's compounded pharmacies that will fulfill those. And so you get more of a maybe human grade or, you know, it's not put more of a, maybe human grade or, you know, it's not put together in a guy's bathtub or something, you know, you started training when you were, or you're not going to start training,

but you said you started using when you were 27, right? So you already had 14 years of training in. And I know that a lot of young guys come to you, maybe they're like 18, 19 and they're trying to figure out, should I start? Should I not? What's your advice to guys like that? Like, do you have like a general, you should be training for this long. And then if you feel that you want to do this, then maybe it's a good idea. Yeah. I think, I think that one, you know, the older you are, the better chance that you're going to have to survive it.

The guys that I've seen start really, really young, whether they had a genetic predisposition for cardiovascular disease or whatever, the guys who started really young and hit it hard and stayed on it. Um, just in my experience, man had a, had a bad result later on in life. And I don't know, you know, health wise. Yeah. Health wise. And again, you know, one of the things that I try to talk to somebody about if they're going to do that is you really have to determine your risk and that's genetic predisposition. Do you have cardiac, um, you know, disease history in your family, taking blood work, um, seeing what your risk is kind of, kind of weighing that out before you do it. So all that said, um, yeah, I think that the

longer that you train and the more familiar you are with your body, the more, um, able you are to go in and do a workout and you've, you've taken your body to extremes, you've dieted, you know how to put on muscle, you know how to lift, you know how to recovery. Then you add anabolics and you get a really good result out of that as compared to not, you know, um, one of my favorite things when I lived in Vegas, you know, people would say, do you think that guy's on? Do you think that guy's on? I'm like, all right, man, I'm a gold's gym at five o'clock in the afternoon at gold's gym in Vegas. Um, 90% of the dudes are on something right now. I guarantee it. How many of them looked really great? Well, like five, that's a difference, man. I mean, those guys, you know,

that guy's injecting whatever he's bench pressing, he's going home and drinking a beer, you know, it's not going to work, man. I mean, it gets stronger, but you know, that's, that's a difference. So I think you really want to consider if you're going to do it, what your risk factors are and what your end goal is going to be, because you're not just going to do a cycle and go, ah, that's it, man. I'm buff now, bro. Everything's cool. It doesn't work like that. You know? Um, so I always try to explain what's your end game. When are you going to stop? What do you, you know, what are you doing it for? Is it to win one contest? Okay. Let me know when you stop then, you know, talk to you. It seemed like a lot of trial and errors has happened over the years for you. Um,

what are some things that you've done that were just not a good idea? Uh, drug wise or workout wise, drug wise. Yeah, whatever. Um, well, I've loved training. I used to really love training hard. Um, you know, I had a, I had a mindset that I could pull energy from and go and destroy myself. Right. Um, well, I've loved training. I used to really love training hard. Um, you know, I had a, I had a mindset that I could pull energy from and go and destroy myself. Right. Um, love to do that, but realize that was really unbeneficial. And so, um, you know, that's probably the biggest lesson that I really had to back off of. Um, you know, drug wise, uh, we, we chatted a little bit earlier about DNP. That probably wasn't the smartest decision.

Yeah. What is DNP? So DNP is a dinitrophenol and it's a, it's a substrate when they make TNT. Everyone's writing this down right now. Like D and P. Okay. So it's, it's basically bug poison and bodybuilders take it, unwise bodybuilders take it and it raises your body heat and you can lose fat

faster because of it back in the day dan duchesne had kind of speculated that that was going to be this thing that you could get you know to four percent body fat shredded i think he said a pound a day you can lose a pound of body fat a day jesus um i tried man uh i tried um there was a few times you know i've lived in flagstaff a Arizona at the time, and it's 7,000 feet. It's cold. It's already a million degrees. No, it's cold. It's 7,000 feet.

I remember walking to my car to start the car on a tank top, and there's steam coming off of me as it's snowing. Because it raises your body temperature up so much? Yeah. So I'd be walking around with a 102, 103, one or three temperature all day long. Um, probably wasn't too smart. And it leads me back to, you know, why was I searching for something like that? And it was because I was, I was searching for something to make it easier instead of just concentrate on what I know, put in the hard work, suffer, do it that way. So there's something exciting about some experimentation. Yeah, you're right.

You're right. But, you know, if I were to look back and say the biggest mistake was always trying to look for something rather than, hey, man, I know this works. I'm going to put in the work. It is definitely, I feel that way a lot of times with myself. I feel like I always, I always, for some reason, tell myself I need something I need. Like it could be anything could be really minor, just leaving my house. I like won't leave my house without like bringing something with me. And I think that I need it. And I don't know if that's ingrained from all the years of lifting,

you know, like I won't leave the house without food or like now I fast more often. So that's not as common, but even um, even if I go on like a trip, I'm like, all right, I got to bring like beef jerky with me and I need to bring like these, uh, you know, cold brew coffees or, I mean, look how much shit I have sitting right. You know, like I always just think I need stuff. Like, so maybe that's just something that you picked up along the way, you know, could be man. Um, you know, the joke is I haven't left the house without food in 20-some years. Everybody at work, everybody, hey, how much chicken you got in the cooler?

Hey, man, that's just what it takes. You've been messing around with some fasting yourself, right? Right. Before you go into fasting, what did you think about fasting when you first started to hear about it? Because he and I, we were like, this seems like the dumbest thing ever. Yeah, it's for yoga chicks. Why would I fast? They were like, don't eat.

Like, that sounds awful. That's ridiculous. I'll be so hungry. So my old partner, Jay Campbell, and I, we wrote a testosterone therapy book, you know, put out a bunch of content. And one of the things that always came back was diet advice. And so we wanted to put together something to give people and have a resource. At the time we were experimenting with intermittent fasting. He responded way more positively to it than I did. I found that even if I try to upregulate and adjust calories on my training days, my metabolism would start to slow

down. And I'm not a super smart guy. I don't know everything, but I do know my own body. And, um, for me being on a consistent eating schedule is best for me to lose weight or gain weight. Um, the fasting, if I do it more than two, three times a week, um, my recovery sucks and my metabolism slows down. Um, so that's my whole take on it. But for most people, um, you know, a lot of people that just are trying to do something, get something done. Um, so that's my whole take on it. But for most people, um, you know, a lot of people that just are trying to do something, get something done. Um, intermittent fasting is great for them and teaches them a lot of very valuable things. One is, you know, a lot of people haven't fasted more than eight hours, right?

And so you get somebody to do hit like a 16 hour mark and they go through those two massive hunger pains that you go through like first thing in the morning and then sometime around lunch. And they successfully beat those and get through them. It empowers them. It really gives them something that they've never experienced before to say, oh, man, I don't really have to eat. It's my body kind of playing tricks on my mind trying to get me to eat. And so from anything, you know, the book we put together, that's one of the very valuable lessons that I think everybody gets out of fasting. I like what you said there that it empowers you because you know, a lot of the people that I help, um, it really kind of depends on the person. I don't

always suggest fasting and I, I'll just say this again, cause I always mentioned this. If you're starting a diet, don't start out with fasting. If you're not a veteran of dieting, don't mess around with it. Give yourself some time to adjust to the proper foods and meal prep and just get used to the whole process before you go diving into fasting but when I do recommend fasting I've seen people that typically had a really hard time with like willpower, um, have gotten a lot stronger, a lot faster in terms of their will, uh, with food. And you, and you mentioned in SEMA, like you were really attached to food, right? You were like working and you're like, I need to eat. And you were getting hungry, right? Yeah. Like I'd be working. I was just talking to you about this, Jim. I'd be working

during the day and I'd always be thinking about my next meal. Um, and I mean, I used to like, I still can eat a lot of food, but I don't, I don't need it as much. Um, it's, it's, it's a lot of like, it allows me to control myself much better. And I didn't really think I'd ever really be able to feel like this because, you know, I come from a bodybuilding type background or an athletic type background where I eat a lot of food. Um, not to have to eat so much to be able to perform in what I do feels really, really good. So it's, it's a really, like you said, it's super empowering. But my question to you is like for you in terms of athletes, cause you work with a lot of people that, you know,

are in the gym trying to get bigger. You mentioned that. And you also mentioned you don't even fast, you don't fast every day. How do you handle that? I don't recommend fasting for people trying to radically change their body with muscle weight or muscle, you know, doing what we do. I can't upregulate enough to get ready for training sessions. And so one of the things that I do when I ever, when I run an experiment, I run it to the extremes, right? I take it to both extremes to see where the middle is and where it's effective. In the diet book that we put together,

you fast on non-training days and then you overeat slightly on training days. For me, that didn't work with the type of training I do. Through exogenous insulin in the mix, still couldn't recover and successfully navigate that. For most people though, starting out, most people that are just starting to lift, just starting to get into fasting and, you know, came from like a standard American diet,

that works great, but they're not, you know, they have a long way to go before they get to a performance place where they need to start really optimizing everything to keep gaining. You know, if you take somebody who's never lifted weights and you feed them cat food and have them do leg extensions, oh my God, cat food grows muscle. Yeah, man, but look at the experiment. But for somebody who's a little bit more advanced, I don't see that fasting on a regular basis is beneficial. But that said, the benefits of fasting,

like I'll do every three weeks, I do a very long fast. And then about every week and a half, I'll throw in like a half calorie day. What's a long fast for you, by the way? So long fast is hitting 24 hours. It depends. So if I'll do my, you know, what I call my Dr. Manhattan protocol, where I hit the ketones at about 20 hours in, um, I'll go to 24 or 30 hours, but that's more for health benefits. And to get into this crazy flow state that I get in, you know, but mostly the health benefits, reset insulin sensitivity, all those things that I do. And I have metformin on board. So I get into a little bit more efficient state of ketosis when I fast. What does the metformin do? So good question. So metformin, um, I've always been, well, not always for the last five years,

I've been involved in metformin and been a proponent of it. Just to give you the background of it back in the day when I started using exogenous insulin, I was talking to some of the guys were like, man, you're going to, you're going to ruin your insulin sensitivity. You need to reset it with metformin. This was probably,

I love it. You just need, you need to grab a hold of another drug to reset this other drug. Don't get off of it and let your body reset naturally. you need to grab a hold of another drug to reset this other drug that you're using. That's the best. Don't get off of it and let your body reset naturally. Just switch over to something different. So Metformin was very difficult to find for me back then. I couldn't find it.

Finally ran into a guy's grandmother that had a tub of it. Tried it, but I'm on 18 different things. Didn't notice anything. Fast forward to where growth hormone was available, got on growth hormone. Growth hormone definitely makes you less sensitive to insulin. So metformin really made sense then to me. I was able to get it, went on it, didn't really notice anything. Fast forward to about five years ago, my partner Jay and I hooked up with this guy named Dr. Osborne. He's anti-aging guy. He's on metformin.

This guy's you need to take a little look at this. So dove back into the information, went through everything that I could read on metformin. It's a heavily studied drug and just looked at the mechanism of action. So the main benefit and like Ben Greenfield and my ex-partner Jay, they just did this amazing podcast where they kind of dispelled some of the myths of metformin, but they missed the main, the big point of why you would want to take metformin. So the mechanism of action is it inhibits your liver from producing glucose. And so your liver contains glycogen. And when your bloodstream needs glucose, it releases your, it's stimulated with glucagon, but then it releases glucose in your

bloodstream. Normally your liver plays a game back and forth or your pancreas plays a game back and forth and it balances your blood glucose. So you get an insulin release, you get a glucose release, insulin release, glucose release. And that all throughout the night goes on. When you're on metformin, that's inhibited. And so you're exposed to less insulin over time. And I think insulin exposure on your vascular system is what causes vascular inflammation and damage and disease. And so if you're on metformin, you're exposed to less insulin, you become more insulin sensitive. And so when I started taking it about five years ago, I noticed that my relationship

with insulin improved radically. It felt like I had a reset of about 10 years on my metabolism. And so it was easier to diet. I noticed fat coming off better. I could eat carbohydrates. I could read glycogen more efficiently. Everything that I wanted to happen, happen. When you fast, when you, when you enter a fasting state, eventually you run out of glycogen from your liver and then you start to, it depends on metabolic demands at the time, but you get into a mild state of ketosis. That's one of the benefits of fasting because you have the absence of insulin, you become more insulin sensitive. That's actually what most people think that most people think the benefits of fasting come almost strictly from that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I would, I would argue it's probably the main factor besides autophagy and all the

things that, that happen cellular. But so it increases your insulin sensitivity when you're on metformin, you fast. I think you hit that state more effectively. When you're on metformin, you do fasted cardio. I think you're lipolysizing fat more efficiently,

faster. When you're on like insulin and carbohydrates just aren't in the, they're not in the way, so to speak. Um, and then had a friend introduced me to Don Lehman. Don Lehman's a high end protein researcher. He did studies because one of the things my wife went on the carnivore diet because she's allergic to all these different foods. My concern was, well, how are you going to recalcitrant efficiently for your workouts? Cause she does orange theory and she's a freak anyway. Like we were talking about. She's alien DNA and buff by looking at it. So I'm like, I don't know if you're going to be able to glycogenate efficiently.

Anyway, he did rat studies where they fed rats protein and carbs at night or just protein, equivalent amounts. The rats that were fed just protein re-glycogenated their muscles more efficiently than the protein and carbs because the protein and carb model, you're getting this release of glycogen from your liver in response from the insulin. And when your liver needs glycogen refilled, that takes priority over your muscles. And so I kind of noticed that if I eat carbohydrates on metformin, if I eat carbohydrates and a little bit of protein a night, I glycogenate very efficiently. Like I'd never had before. If I eat protein only, I still glycogenate, but not anywhere near having a mix of protein carbs. So I think metformin makes that process even more efficient as well. Does that make sense? What about if you use metformin and don't eat carbs? Would that be a recipe for disaster? No, no, no.

So it's not a glucose disposal agent. Got it. So it won't, it's a long story, but it can make you go hypoglycemic, but not really. It's difficult to get in that situation. So your blood glucose will remain constant. Your liver just is inhibited from releasing as much glucose and being exposed to that much more insulin. And so if you think about like insulin exposure, just to touch on vascular health. Um, so, so if you had cardiovascular, yeah.

So if you had, you know, vascular disease, what are the things that you would want to do? Well, a ketogenic diet. Yeah. But aren't fats bad for you? Well, it doesn't matter because you don't have insulin, um, low carb diet. You have less insulin exposure, metformin. Well, okay.

That lowers insulin exposure reverses. If change lifestyle, reverses vascular disease. So all the things that we think about and we do, I think need to be considered with vascular health. So even as a bodybuilder, if we're fasting, doing all these things, I would recommend that everybody does something to increase their insulin sensitivity and make that relationship with insulin healthy. And you're not overexposing your vascular system to it. So lifting weights can help with that, right? Absolutely. And then your dietary choices, I think can help to some extent. What are some other things people can do? What about just walking or something like that? Cardiovascular training or anything like that?

Does that help at all? Yeah. Any exercise will improve your insulin sensitivity losing fat improves your improves your insulin sensitivity and your hormonal system you'll produce less estrogen so even in the case of like a power lifter or maybe an athlete that's in like a weight class division type thing it might be wise for them to even if they compete kind of heavy might be watch them to take a little bit of weight off, get a little healthier in their off season, and then kind of go back to doing what they were doing just for health purposes. Yeah. And if you think about it too, and on the bodybuilding side, right? I mean, when you're carrying around, when I was carrying around 300 pounds, I wasn't healthy, man. You know, my blood work was pretty decent. I never had high blood sugar, but don't fool

yourself, right? If I was doing, um, if I was a heavy power lifter, I would be doing things to reset my insulin sensitivity. One would be maybe dropping weight in the off season. Another would be doing a long fast every three weeks. Um, maybe a half day where you're doing like half caloric intake, because if you do like a mimic fast like that. So if you're, you know, I take in about 2,400 calories a day. If I drop it down with bone broth and do like a six, 700 calorie day, that mimics a lot of the effects of fasting. Little things like that, cardiovascular eating, less sugar, being exposed to less insulin, all those things can contribute to better vascular health.

Aside from like the drug protocol and stuff, it sounds like most of the stuff you're recommending sounds pretty easy to implement. Like there's somebody listening right now is going 24 hour fast. Like I don't, you know, but it's, it's not hard once you get a little bit used to fasting.

Do you think that that's one of the other benefits of fasting is just that it's so black and white. It's so simple. Like you just don't eat. I mean, I think that's what draws people to the carnivore diet too. Right. I mean,

you just eat meat. That's it. That's it. I don't have to think about it. I'm's what draws people to the carnivore diet too, right? I mean, you just eat meat. That's it. I don't have to think about it. I'm hungry. I keep eating meat. What's the diet? It's meat. Yeah. Bacon, nut, T-bone, yeah, whatever you want.

Yeah, there's simplicity to it and also the mental state that you get, like you touched on, right? So when you hit a certain amount of time, for me, it's somewhere around 12, 16 hours. I produce more ketones and I'm, I'm an idiot. You know, I always test myself. I got the keto mojo. So I'm testing my glucose and my ketones. Um, when I started pricking your finger all day long, making it bleed, right? I love needles. Yeah. Um, so when I heard, when I hit, uh, like trace ketosis, my, my cognitive ability goes up, enhancement's there. I've, I'm more clear headed. And yeah, I mean, that's one of the huge benefits, you know, and anybody can do it. And if you get to

that state and you feel that, I think it makes it even easier to do and more self-powering for you to go back there. It sounds like some of this practice too may have some, you know, it's, it's hard because cancer is such a tricky thing. We don't really know why people get it all the time, but it seems like it might even be anti-cancer, right? I mean. Right. So there's a bunch of research on that, the way that your body cleans its cells out when you fast. Yeah. So it could be anti-cancerous. If you look at the metformin data. Just keeping the insulin down may have some benefit towards that. I mean, that's what some of the research is leaning towards right now.

Right. So a lot of the data on metformin is anti-cancer. And I think that's because of the list, the insulin exposure in part, but I think that's probably the, have you heard of the keto pet sanctuary that was funded by some of our people over at quest nutrition is pretty, pretty cool.

But yeah, they basically had these dogs on a ketogenic diet. I don't, I'm not sure if they used metformin or not they basically had these dogs on a ketogenic diet. I'm not sure if they used metformin or not, but I know they used a ketogenic diet. And with the dogs, it was not hard for them to put them on a diet because they served them the food. Whereas with people, it can be a little bit trickier. But a huge percentage of the dogs went into remission. They did lose a couple of them. And that was kind of their focus.

They were like, hey, we still lost a few. But they did have a large percentage that went into remission. They did lose a couple of them. And that was kind of their focus. They were like, hey, we still lost a few, but they did have a large percentage that went into remission. Doesn't mean a ketogenic diet cures cancer, but it does show you that maybe there is something there. Well, Dom D'Agostino, there you go. Thank you. He's down there in Florida too.

Yeah, so he's done a bunch of amazing research and there are types of cancers that respond very efficiently to ketogenesis in ketone bodies. That's why some thrive on it. But the ones that he's identified, if you had that, that would be a very good idea to follow for sure. And what's the deal with these keto esters?

So there's a different, different keto products. I guess maybe, can you first explain what a ketone is for some people that maybe. So ketones, a, so ketones, a fraction, that is ketones, a fractionated fat that your body uses for fuel.

So if you think about like a storage version of fat, that's the broken down piece that your body can utilize for energy. Basically. Right. High level view. Don't tear me apart. Yeah. Yeah.

There's somebody like, that's not true. That's not Elaine Norton said. I'll just hear it. And anyway, so that's the energy substrate that you use um back in the day john perillo was having his drink high high caprylic john perillo mct oil mct oils with the caprylic acid um that actually produces more ketones than the ketones

still alive he is man i gotta. Yeah, he's on Facebook. So anyway, yeah, we were doing it back then. You notice an uptake in energy and stuff. Then the keto war started when the MLM companies came out and everybody was trying to prove it. And, you know, I fought in the keto wars for very long and hard. And anyway, the ketone salts. The keto wars, I like that. It's the internet keto wars. So basically ketone salt is a ketone molecule stabilized

with some type of mineral salt. It's got to be attached to something, right? Right. And then there's keto esters. So ketone ester is different than a ketone salt, or you can use like an MCT oil with caprylic acid to get them. So the people who were selling MLM products to ketone salts were making all these outrageous claims, all this stuff. Turns out the study data indicated if you just took MC2 oil with a high caprylic acid, you produce more exogenous ketones than if you took the ketone salt.

If you take enough ketone salts, you shit yourself. And so there's a very staunch limit of how much of those you can take. Yeah, and the amount that you need ends up driving up your sodium maybe kind of through the roof and things like that as well, right? Yeah, you can run into issues like that. Yeah, for sure. And you don't really get into a super deep state of ketosis. And when I say that, I'm talking like four to six millimoles ketones where you're like if you were in nutritional ketosis for months and you were fully keto adapted deep in, then you feel all these benefits. So when I fast and I'm on metformin and I go long enough and I hit ketone esters, then I, I go into a very deep state of ketosis.

We're talking five plus mil moles. And that's when, you know, I turned into the blue guy, the Dr. Manhattan and feel great. And everything's amazing. Um, I can't get there with ketone salt salts. I'll ship myself before I get there. I feel like you're just meditating in Tibet somewhere. Yeah. Like I'm on Mars. Ketones are making your head float around. It's super cool. It's really, you know, they're expensive. It's 33 bucks a hit, but, um, do it once a month. It's amazing. The, the MC2 aloes I can't get close with, um, ketone salts are ineffective for me. So that's, uh, where,es I can't get close with, um, ketone salts are ineffective for me.

So that's, uh, where, where, how would you recommend somebody, uh, maybe go about trying some of this protocol that you're suggesting? So maybe get on a ketogenic diet for how many days? Well, you know, I'm not an expert in ketogenic diets, um, but you have to be in a ketogenic, a state of nutritional ketosis for my understanding months. And, um, you know, if I do, if I did a two month run or so, um, I'm still not in a real deep state of ketosis, but also I hate eating fat, nothing but fat, right? Yeah. Like it's kind of gross. Yeah. Two eggs and a half a tub of, um, of, um, uh, cream cheese. That's not, That's not my ideal breakfast. So I never lasted very long.

I'd get two, two and a half months, maybe three. And I was never fully- Yeah, real keto diet's like 80% fat or something. Right, it's amazing. Yeah, it's not what you think. Yeah, that's like an avocado at your lunch. But to get in that deep state, you're fully keto adapted.

Then you're hitting these deep keto numbers where you're like three to five all day long. And then I would say that's when people rave about having all these benefits and all this magic happens. But it's difficult to get there. You got to put your time in. It's difficult, I think, to eat that way and get there. There's a lot of products out nowadays that help you do that. But it's a low compliance diet,

at least from my end. Do you think the ketone esters are still beneficial? Um, when maybe you're, you're, you're eating carbohydrates and you have a kind of a, uh, more almost like bodybuilding style diet, which sounds like you kind of have. So I I've tried it. Um, so John Meadows came out with a product that had some ketone esters in it. And, you know, I was right up his ass busting his balls about it. And he just said, hey, try it out. So go low carb, go flat. You're depleted.

You're out of glycogen and take this. Has a little bit of carbohydrates and some ketone salts in it. And you kind of experience a benefit from that. You do. I haven't tried that with ketone salts because in my training sucks. I'm flat. You know, part of the way I train, I never train on empty glycogen, you know, and it's, I absolutely have to for cutting or something, but always train with glycogen. But I don't know if that would be beneficial to add ketones in. I know people do it. I know they work

out that way and they train, but I haven't talked to somebody that said, Hey man, here's my decks of results. I put on 10 pounds of muscle. I've been training for eight years and I did that in ketosis. You know, I've seen anecdotal like, Hey man, I just started training and I put on muscle. Okay. That doesn't tell me anything. Or, you know, I, I've, uh, I took this 140 pound guy and put him on ketone salts and we, he got stronger.

Yeah. He just started training. So to answer your question, I haven't, um, I know, I know guys use it for a purpose, but I don't see it in a benefit for what I do. I use it to turn into blue guy for, you know, half a day and have amazing productivity, but right. The, that Dr. Manhattan protocol that you were talking about, um, cause my, my head's going to here, you know, you mentioned that you go on like a 24 to 30 hour fast. Yeah. So someone like me, I don't find it too difficult to do a fast like that. Um, and you mentioned that you only do it like what, once a month or something like that.

Once every three weeks or once every three weeks, could it be possible to do it once a week or twice a week? I mean, and, and achieve that state, you know, twice a week. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I think I get there a little bit more efficiently. We've met foreman on board, but you don't have to, right. You can use berberine if you wanted to, or, you know, whatever. I think that makes a fast, more efficient. When I get into that state, then I hit

the, you know, you have to take carbohydrates with the ketone esters, long story behind that, but you don't really feel them. Yeah. Every time that I've done that, I get into that state, no matter what. I think you could do that once a week without a problem if you wanted to. I don't know what the effect would be on your training. Um, but I think you would have that same effect. Okay. And I mean, you mentioned like obviously the mental benefits and what, what are like the overall benefits of doing that specifically for you?

Well, I mean, we, you can talk about being adapted to different fuel sources. So, you know, if you, if you, the more times that you're supposed to ketones and the pathways that those turn on and activate, um, the more efficient you are or getting into that state and using those as fuel. Um, so we talk about that, um, the anti-inflammation for brain, neural tissue, all that. Um, there's, there's a lot of benefits to being in a deep state of ketosis like that. I don't know how long you have to be exposed to it, but I feel fantastic the day afterwards. Okay. But I do it for the mental state and, you know, I feel amazing and I set it up right. So, you know, I clear out my desk, I clear my office, I outline the projects that I'm going to work on.

I have specific things that I know I'm going to do and I give myself time limits. It's like, if I'm doing a microdose of LSD or something, you know, I set up the project, I have everything outlined that I want to do so that I'm kind of enhancing the state that I'm going after. It makes a lot of sense. You're getting prepared for what you're about to, what you're about to undergo, what you're about to do. Yeah. And it's 33 bucks a hit. So I don't want to, I don't want to waste that, you know, that is expensive. Yeah. The esters. Yeahers yeah so there's there might be other companies but uh i get it from hvmn and um i'm not a fan of the nootropics because mine rapes theirs but um the ketone esters they make i feel

that it's very quality product um every time i've used it it's worked and i think they're the only ones that really commercially you have some of your own supplements. Yeah. So I have a nootropic. Oh, cool. Brought for you guys. What's in it? Um, just the normal stuff,

you know, a little bit of LSD. Like, Holy shit, man. He gave us some good stuff. DNP, you know?

Yeah. I took three of them. So we'll see what happens midway through the podcast. I thought you were taking five. I was. Yeah. I chickened out. Chickened out.

Yeah. Um, so I just going to start floating over there. Yeah. I don't want to turn into the blue guy. I got stuff to do five. I was, yeah, I chickened out. Chickened out. Yeah. Um, so I, you just going to start floating over there. Yeah. I don't want to turn into the blue guy. I got stuff to do today. Very cool. How'd you get into that stuff?

Um, always been experimenting around. I, you know, I ran a supplement store for seven years. I tried to, I tried to supplement back then. It didn't work.

Um, it was actually for brain health, but I figured out that marketing was important too. Uh, anyway, so I've always been in the nutritional space. Marketing's the only thing that matters, actually. Unfortunately. So ran into some partners. They wanted to take a run at, at a nootropic again, long story short, three years of mixing shit in my bathroom and, you know,

in the kitchen, handing it out to everybody I knew. I came up with something that I really liked, but it had 22 ingredients. Um, it was awful to make and talking to Dante and those guys, company can't make it. It's too expensive. So I kind of gave up, went back at it, did some research, found some new stuff, came back with five, five supplements, combined them. Fortunate enough to have a beta group of about 20, 25, 30 guys that I can always send stuff to and they'll give me feedback on, sent them a million different capsule combinations.

Tried it for myself. Everybody since has gotten their PhD. Right. It's the limit list. Came up with five ingredients that I really liked. And my goal was to make something that I felt was equivalent to 100 milligrams of modonafil. And so very proud of the product that we made. What's modonafil? So modonafil is provig proud of the product that we made um what's modonafil

so modonafil is provigil it's a um wakefulness drug um i got turned on to it um and i used to work in trauma and surgery and i i'd be there all day come back at like three o'clock in the morning and i'm asleep these guys are all awake you know partying doing you know working i'm like all right what the hell's going on man the like, oh man, let me give you a script. All right. Do I want to take this? Did some research. Oh, it's a wakefulness drug. So, um, anyway, it's, uh, it's prescribed for, for sleep worker syndrome and narcolepsy. Um, you can get it online, you can get it off offshore, but, um, it's, it's one of the more nootropic drugs that everybody uses and plays with. So cool.

Do you sell some other supplements as well? Nope. Right now we just have the EMF. And how long have you had this out for? So it's been out three years. Oh, cool. Yeah. That's great.

That's exciting. Is it mainly like for like wakefulness or is it all the focus and like? So if you do the research on the ingredients does everything, but when you look like at an herb, like rhodiola or bacopa, which I have in it, it says it does all this stuff. And there are studies that prove this. But overall, they're adaptogenic herbs. They have shown cognitive benefits. They help you deal with stress. Do I think they enhance learning?

I think you setting it up to be in a state to learn is a little bit different. And you having discipline. Yeah. Cause you eat a giant ass, a big Mac with it. It's probably not going to write. Yeah. Well,

I mean, need like a little protocol with it probably. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know if I would claim that it really makes you learn better, but it does help you focus,

especially if you want to be focused on a task does give you energy. I made it so that if you have to have a kick ass day, you can have a kick ass day. And that's how I use it. If I you have to have a kick-ass day, you can have a kick-ass day. And that's how I use it. If I have a big day. There's some people that talk about like neural drive, like, does it help tap into the central nervous system or anything like that? I don't know how familiar you are with that. We, we have a, we have a stimulant called tea cream in it. Um, and it's similar to caffeine, but it's not, it's from, from a African tea. Um, it doesn't attenuate like caffeine does and so it

stays the dose that's effective for you now stays effective for you um that does increase everything so it's a stimulant um very cool but uh yeah i'm very proud of it it's uh turned out really well and have you seen a little bit maybe more of an effect if someone's in a fasted state or not really so we put that in the book too, right? So that was part of our protocol that you could use something like this to train or if you're going to do cardio fasted. And it didn't seem to kick us out, even though you're ingesting calories. It didn't seem to kick us out of that fasted zone. I didn't notice a glucose or ketone different rise.

Technically, you're not fasting. But yeah, you could certainly use that as a stimulant to get through workouts and it does curb your appetite a little bit. Does it work a little bit better on an empty stomach or does it matter too much? Uh, I like it on an empty stomach. I take it with caffeine first thing in the morning. Um, I might hit a little bit. It's another caffeine hit in the early afternoon and maybe another one or two capsules. How far down this rabbit hole have you traveled? Do you, you know, are you adding weird stuff to your coffee and stuff like that too?

Cause there's, there's things that you can add to your coffee. There's like amino acids and there's, you know, there's all kinds of stuff you can add to your coffee to get like more benefits from it. Have you messed around with some of that stuff? Dude, I constantly experiment. Yeah. So I mean, I don't know how much time you have, but your kitchen probably looks like mine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, pow mean, I don't know how much time you have, but yeah, yeah. Your kitchen pie looks like mine. Yeah, yeah. Powders and stuff everywhere.

I've tried a lot of different things. When I, when coming up with this formula, you know, I wanted to make something that you're not going to, you know, we add on in the future, but yeah, there's a lot of different things that you can add, you know, alpha GPC we were talking about as one that, um, I really like, I eat a lot of chlorine in my diet, so I don't really see a massive benefit from taking, um, alpha GPC like some people do. But to me, that's one thing that you can add in, even if you take coffee with it, um, takes you on a little bit better ride and leaves you better for it afterwards and uh so there's there's all kinds of stuff we were talking about the other day like thionine or something like yeah uh theanine yeah there you go yeah we were talking about it earlier too and what i was going to ask you so like you know with alpha brain if i if i take it on a consistent basis i seem to need to need i'd need more and

more and more um with, um, with your nootropic, can you take it consistently for like a big, a long duration, or do you have to kind of like wean off it and then take a break and then come back to it? I recommend taking breaks because that's what I do with everything. But the data on the theanine, uh, or on the, um, tea cream suggests that you don't have to take a break because it doesn't attenuate. And so people that take that every day, um, I think they upregulate with caffeine by adding caffeine. So it's hard for me to say that, yeah, if you took it every day for a year, it would still be effective.

I would suggest that you cycle off. And that's one of the reasons why we put 20 servings in a bottle because I want you to take weekends off or at least two days a week. Come on, man. What did Dan Duchesne teach you? You're not supposed to come off. You've got to step in the machine. Could you explain a little bit more about the tea cream?

Because I know there's a lot of people that do take a ton of caffeine. We were talking about pre-workouts yesterday and how you just seem to need to take more and more and more and more. Yeah, so I get too far in the weeds, but you guys familiar how caffeine works? Not really, no. It's a wakefulness. Go for it. You take it and you feel great. So basically it's a wakefulness. Go for it. You take it and you feel great. So basically it's a wakefulness agent on your brain and it stimulates your adrenaline production and kind of regulates that way.

But in your brain, there's adenosine receptors and caffeine blocks those. And once those get full, that's kind of your body's way to say, hey, I'm tired. I should rest. Caffeine inhibits those. Your body will respond by making more of those adenosine receptors. So you have to take more caffeine to feel like you once did. Um, for me, you know, I've been, I detox on caffeine all the time. So when I get to the point where I'm hitting a gram, gram and a half a day of caffeine,

I cold Turkey it, I back off, I'm out for a week, reset my receptors a little bit. Sometimes it takes longer. Two weeks is a better protocol. It's hard to fast away from caffeine, man. It's awful, man. It's awful. If you take something like tea cream, that helps. It doesn't affect that pathway. It doesn't affect the adenosine receptors. And so you can have a stimulant effect to get through it or madonafil or, you know, any other kind of stimulant. But that's why caffeine really upregulates a fast and you don't feel the way you did when you first take it. I recommend that you cycle off, cycle your dosage of caffeine, you know, if you can to keep it somewhat effective because, you know, we've all been there where you're drinking those things. Have you used other pharmaceuticals to enhance your training?

Such as? Well, you're mentioning like something like Madonna, Phil, like have taken anything uh that like heightens your senses or gets you fired up or anything like that for training um i mean um like it seems like you kind of have a sport just about everything so there's fentamine um and the amphetamine based kind of scripts that you can get so there's um adderall trained on thatenamine. Phenamine is amazing at curbing your appetite, but all those drugs, you know, like Dan Duchesne said with the Clinbuterol, Hey man, it's great drug. Don't take it very long and don't take it very often. And so if you take some of those or even Madonafil, I don't stay on for more than a few days. Um, I do tend to have a better training session.

I'm more focused on more in the zone, but it has a detrimental side effect. You know, I do tend to have a better training session. I'm more focused. I'm more in the zone, but it has a detrimental side effect. You know, I'm, I'm awake, screws up my sleep. Um, I'm keyed up longer and I can't relax. It might bring you down too, right? That kind of does, man. You crash, what goes up comes down a little bit, right? There's no free ride, man. There's no free ride.

So if you do any type of stimuli, you take a pre-workout, there's a back end to that, man, where you got to pay for it. Yeah. I had to cut back on caffeine a while back just because I wasn't sleeping and I would have caffeine still really early in the morning, but I was just having too much. Yeah. And it would still affect me, you know, 10, 12, 14 hours later, you know, it'd still be, I guess, in my system because I would be restless, you know, going to bed and someone's like, man, you probably just drink too much caffeine. I was like, but I have caffeine at like seven in the morning. You know, that's,

that's as late as I would drink it. Have you really tuned in your sleep? Have you been able to, I, you know, I've been working on it and it's been a work in progress. I actually was super pumped today because I actually stayed in bed until like around, uh, four 50 in the morning. So that's like a world record for me. That's been like the longest I've slept in a while. I can force myself to go back to sleep, but it's pretty rare for me to be able to stay asleep. I can keep going back to sleep, but I wake up often and use the bathroom and stuff like that.

So I've tried all kinds of stuff, taping my mouth shut. I've got the iBlocker things on, and I do all kinds of stuff, taping my mouth shut. I got like the eye blocker things on and I, you know, I, I do all kinds of stuff to try to, um, you know, I put my phone away early. Um, I haven't really messed around with any, you know, supplementation other than like some magnesium and zinc and stuff like that. Have you, have you always been that way where you got up at a certain time or has it been um just so so long you can't remember i've been this way uh probably since i would probably for the last 10 years or so yeah when i was when i was a really high level competitive power lifter it was way worse i didn't sleep for a few years i mean

it would be uh it would be a big deal for me to get more than like three hours of sleep at a time. You know, I might, maximum might get like four hours. So now, you know, nowadays I get six hours sleep, seven hours of sleep. I always try to get eight, but I've not gotten there yet. That's my next, that's my next thing, man. I'm really trying to improve my quality of sleep. We were talking about earlier yeah when i was huge on everything ghb was the only only way i could sleep for four hours literally and man the way that that i i think that shortened your life and and um is bad for

your brain health and and just overall i do track my sleep but i i think that that is like um you know just a note for people that do track their sleep, like just be careful with it, you know, because don't let it alarm you. Like just track it and just like let it happen naturally and work on it. So that's what I've been doing. At first I was freaking out. So I'm like, holy shit, man, this thing's only showing that I'm sleeping for like three hours, four hours. But over a period of time, I've gotten a little bit better with it. But I think what happens is I'll look at the reading

or look at the information that I have and then I'll feel tired because I'm like, oh, I didn't sleep that long. But it's not any different than any other day I've ever had, you know? Yeah, I'm trying to decode that. So I'm researching beds, you know, because the fat guy, he always blow out beds. And I've never had a bed last more than two years, you know? I'm in the canoe, that. So we're, I'm researching beds, you know, because the fat guy yells blow out beds and I've never had a bed last

morning, two years, you know, I'm in the canoe and my dogs are rolling on me. You know, my wife's side is perfect. So if anybody out there knows a bad man, throw it,

throw a brand at me. I'm, I'm researching everything, but I like the ones now that regulate your temperature up and down through the night. Right. So that's kind of what I'm leaning towards, but breaking,

improving my sleep is my next thing. I'm really going to try to try to crack. Do you have certain foods that you eat before you sleep? Because recently I found out, and it's kind of weird. I never really paid attention to this, but, um, when I eat mainly fats before I go to bed, I have, I don't have like much carbs before sleep. My sleep is really, really good. And I've noticed that on a consistent basis. Initially I was like, uh, no, probably nothing. But then when I purposefully tried it out on certain nights where I wasn't eating too many carbs a few hours before or carbs at all before bed, I had mainly fats. I've had the best sleep in comparison. Do you know anything about that? Or if there's any type of, so there are some people that will say like sugar will

kind of wake you up and almost make you want to eat more sugar. type of so there are some people that will say like sugar will kind of wake you up and uh almost make you want to eat more sugar and i've also heard some people say like you know kind of be conscious of uh potential vitamins you know because the vitamins could be breaking down like something like vitamin b i don't know how much truth there is to that yeah just something i heard it can man i think if you're in a real dieted state and you eat carbohydrates at night i think lane refers to it as carb backloading or whatever he calls it. And there is, you get a hit of dopamine, you get a hit of something and it makes you feel good and it kind of satiates you and puts you to rest. But for me, if I'm not in that depleted state, I don't respond real well to carbs before bed either. I respond a little bit better to protein and fat. But, you know, I don't know. I find inconsistency with that as well, you know, because I eat the same, you know, I eat cottage cheese and way before I go to bed, I could sleep, you know, okay.

Or I get up at 3.30 every morning. There's a lot of people right now, I think what's popular is to try not to eat, you know, about three hours before bed, which can be really difficult. You know, I know for him, he's like lifting. And then you do jujitsu and that's usually when your fast is over and then you're going a bit. Right. So I think it all depends on the person and maybe depends on like what, you know, what does your lifestyle look like? I've heard you mentioned that in another podcast and I thought that was great because you were talking about your diet protocol.

That's which we should get into next, which is like a 30 or 60 day, you know, assault on body fat. But I thought it was interesting that you factored in lifestyle and you, that's really rare. You know, most people don't ever factor in like, you know, this guy's got a nine to five job and like, how is he gonna, is this realistic for him to do? And. Most people aren't thinking that way. Well, I mean, if you're, if you're doing something like a major energy expenditure, like you're lifting and then you're rolling around for an hour or so. Yeah. I mean, you have to eat after that.

You have to. Yeah. There's no choice. No, no. For me, I try to go to bed and be starving. It's ridiculous. Yeah. I think it's really lifestyle driven.

If you're a guy who sits in an office and doesn't have a lot of physical activity. Yeah, you can probably eat six o'clock at night and then not eat before you go to bed. But if you're guys who train and you have to get up the next day and put out, I think that you have to feel your body appropriately. You know, you have to see, you always have to be thinking ahead. I think that's how I view it. You know, I'm eating for two hours a night. I'm eating for the next day. Tell us a little bit about your diet plan. It's a something torch, right? I remember the metabolic blowtorch diet, blowtorch diet. Yeah. So one thing we'll give it away for your

viewers if they want a free downloadable copy. Um, one of the things that I really like about that book and one of the reasons that we wrote it is because, you know, a lot of guys like us were advanced. We don't really need a diet protocol. We don't need that. We know what fasting is. But everybody always asks us, hey man, what do you think about this? What can I do for this?

So in this book, we really broke it down. We broke down everything about fasting, cited everything about what the benefits are, how to do it. We broke down how to determine your overall caloric need based on body fat, somatotype, what your activity is like. So somebody with no prior knowledge can really say, okay, Hey, I kind of fit into this. I'm going to start with 1800 calories a day. Here's how to do it. Here's the foods I'm going

to eat. Here's suggestions on how to prep it. Here's the days that I'm going to fast. I'm going to do this. And then there's like sample workout of my, you know, watered down forge training program. Hey, you're just going to do this three times a week. And it's a really good guide for you to give when your relatives, anybody, you know, kind of something that you can give them and get them started. And then they come back with questions or more often than not, I get, Hey man, I tried that fasting. And like we were talking about, I feel empowered with food now, or I finally know what my basic caloric need is. Now I can manipulate it.

And then we can have a discussion where I'm really benefiting and helping this person. Do you suggest that people weigh their food in this book? Or do you kind of have them eyeball it a little bit more? How do you have them track their calories? I do. So one of the things when I try to help somebody is I have them log food just so I can get an idea of what they're eating. Because when you talk to somebody off the street, they're like, Oh, you're pretty good. Okay, man. What's up?

Oh yeah. How many people tell us all the time? Oh, I eat clean. And you're like, Oh, I don't know what you consider clean, but it's not working. Whatever you're, whatever you're doing is not working. Let's just start off with that. So you're trying to gain weight and you're eating 800 calories, right? So a lot of people don't have any idea. So I do. Yeah. When you're, when you're establishing or I'm having them establish what their basic caloric need is, I have them weigh food till they get used to it. Once they, once

you get used to it, you've been weighing food for a while, you can kind of approximate, but then you're closer to what an idea of what your caloric need is, how much you're going to eat for the day. But I think it's something that you have to develop. You just can't general rule of thumb. Yeah. I was meeting vegetables, man. Make your dreams come true. So you play with meat and the rest of the vegetables, you're good. But when you're talking to somebody that's, that's trying to learn, trying to get, learn the body, get into something. Yeah. I like to have them away and, and really diagnose kind of how much they're eating because they probably have never done it before. Well, and also two people get

stuck, right? Like they're like, Oh, I've been doing the diet for three weeks. I lost eight pounds in the first, you know, the first two weeks and haven't lost anything since that time. And it's like, well, you know, now we got to really kind of hone in and pay a little bit more attention. What, how many calories are you eating? And then they can learn about how hungry they should be. I think that hunger is a big part of, hunger is a big part of nutrition. It's a big part of dieting, big part of losing body fat. Uh, maybe not in terms of, uh, you know, losing or in terms of gaining weight or in terms of performance. But I think that, um, being hungry, I think it's definitely important to lose body fat. A lot of people maybe don't know what they're getting into

sometimes when they hop on a diet. I don't know if you should be like starving all the time, but you should probably feel a little hungry here and there. Yeah, that's another thing I will say, man, especially if you're a trained person. If you're not hungry, you're not losing body fat. I've never lost body fat without being hungry. I mean, it's a rare instance. Yeah, you go to a bodybuilding show,

I mean, everybody on the stage is starving. It's miserable, yeah, yeah. So, you know, metformin, incidentally enough, curves my hunger a lot. And most people that go on metformin incidentally enough, curves my hunger a lot. And most people that go on metformin or berberine, um, insulin, I believe is a hunger driver. When you cut down on insulin exposure for a lot of guys, it cuts her appetite way down. I mean, I, I describe it like when I first went on metformin hunger was like 150 pound Timberwolf on metformin.

Here comes a little lab puppy and like, all right, I can control you, man. I'll eat, I'll eat, you know, when I want to. But yeah, uh. Here comes a little lab puppy. All right. I can control you, man. I'll eat. I'll eat, you know, when I want to, but yeah, uh, insulin's a major hunger driver.

And on the metabolic blowtorch diet, it's a mouthful. Um, it's mainly, uh, it's lower carb, right? Like lower carb,

moderate fat, or is it? Yep. So it depends, man. Um, we recommend kind of a moderate carb, moderate fat,

uh, on the days that you're not training, you're fasting for a longer period of time. You're consuming less calories on the days that you're training, you're operating, eating, eating slightly overeating or caloric intake or your maintenance, caloric intake.

And does like nutrients. Cause I mean, I, I, you touched on a little bit in terms of like around your workouts when you eat your carbs, does nutrient timing come into play within this? Like when you eat your carbohydrates, when you eat certain things for me personally. Yeah. But for this kind of generalized rule of thumb, um, I try

to have people make their carbohydrates around training, but if you're training three days a week and you're not a really high trained athlete, I don't think it really matters. And especially if you're eating vegetables, you know, I don't think that it's important to recalculate. You're not worried about all those factors. For me, that's a big thing. But yeah. Why is it important for you? Like, I guess as a bodybuilder, as somebody that wants to maintain muscle mass, why is it important for you to, I guess, kind of live off of stored carbohydrates during training sessions. So when, when I, you know, the way that I train, I go to positive failure, I do a little damage. I want to recover as fast as possible so I can do it again and repeat those cycles over and over faster. If I train a muscle that that's out of glycogen, like I'm flat, I'm trying to get to a lean

body weight. You go in the gym, you've been there. It feels like you're a deflated tire. You know, your shirt's all loose, can't get a pump. You feel it, you know, You feel like it's a wasted training session. For me, I incur more- That's the worst, by the way. And you keep searching for it and it just never happens. No, no, no. And then it's- I mean, you should just leave, but you're not smart enough to do that. Keep going for it, you over-train. Right. And so I incur more muscle

damage. I don't recover as faster than that really hampers my training. So as a rule of thumb, I don't like to train a muscle group without glycogen. What about a post-workout nutrition? Do you do anything in particular post-workout or you just eat? I just eat normally. You know, it really depends on where my recovery's at, when I'm,

how hard I'm training. But yeah, I use food meals before and after immediately. Have you messed around with like cyclic dextrins and all these different things? Have you screwed around with some of those powders and things like that? Yep. So I have a pre-workout made, I have a post-workout made some of the things that I've used off and on.

Um, I like the cyclic, cyclic dextrin. I like the, you know, I like short acting or short chain aminos around training, inter training, all that stuff. I think it, it comes into play a little bit on my training, but if I eat properly before and after, I'm not really sure that it makes that big of a difference where I'm at. When I was pushing my limits of humanism,

you know, and looking for everything. Yeah, I mean, there was a 10 year period where I had a whey shake on the toilet. Every night at three, I go into piss, I'm drinking a shake. And I think that helped, you know, but I'm searching, you know, I was trying to get a millimeterey shake on the toilet. Every night at three, I go into piss and drinking a shake. And I think that helped, you know, but I'm searching, you know, I was trying to get a millimeter here, a millimeter there.

Drinking protein shake during the training. For me, where I'm at right now, I haven't seen a benefit to that. But again, I'm very vigilant about eating before and eating immediately afterwards and re-glycogenating so that I'm training with glycogen for that muscle. Does that mean you bring food with you to the gym?

Or do you just wait until you get home? In my car, I have meals. And so I have my post-workout, my pre-workout meal, and food on the way home. I love it. I love that dedication. It's hard. You know, it's tough.

But you did bodybuilding. You competed as a bodybuilder, right? Yeah, I competed in 23 shows. Stopped about, I think my last was 2001 um shoulders kind of fell apart i wasn't you know i wasn't ever going to get the 330 and 300 pound on stage kind of made a decision to stop competing stayed 285 290 till about 38 everybody i knew started dying um you know dante was having some serious discussions with guys and he kind of made the first step that says,

hey, man, I'm going to a max of 260 body weight no matter what. I followed along and said, that's a pretty good idea. Yeah, he was huge. Drop down. Yeah, he's a big guy. I mean, he's still big. Yeah, so I think he stays. He's been vigilant about that to stay under 260.

I'm usually about 255. Still an enormous person. Big guy. No matter how you slice it yeah what do you do anything in particular for recovery uh massage therapy cold therapy anything like that um i have a whole mobility setup at home you know like the newest thing i got was that so right have you guys ever yeah yeah we have one in the gym oh my god man i thought i was using it wrong first time i tried it because like my whole leg my my whole leg went on fire.

I was like, that ain't right. And then everybody, everybody in the gym, they're like, no, that's the way it feels when you're jacked up. And I was like, oh man, I'm like, this thing feels terrible. So you know who Donnie Thompson is? Yeah, absolutely. I had the, the fortunate enough to make friends with him online and went out to his compound when I lived in Alabama. We drove over there and really got into the whole recovery, the body tempering, the compression, dove full balls deep into it,

have the whole setup at home. I do a lot of mobility work to try to keep myself together. I did Krav Maga for four and a half years. So it tore both my biceps, man. But that took a lot out of me, destroyed me everywhere up and down. And the mobility really helped keep me together. Still doing the mobility. I find that if I don't, I slowly degrade and things get worse. So yeah, for recovery, I'm pretty diligent on that stuff.

The mobility stuff, you're doing like distraction work where you're doing some stretches with bands and that's distracting the hip and things like that. Yeah. So if you, yeah, if you guys are wondering about that, Donnie Thompson puts out a lot of massive free content, that's super valuable. He makes some products, but yeah,

the distraction of the hips, the distraction of joint. He does a compression of, of joints, all kinds of crazy stuff, but it really helps. Yeah. I went with Donnie Thompson probably five or six years ago he went to kelly stirretts

gym and he took a uh donnie thompson took a tube of like a bicycle tire and like wrapped it around kelly stirretts like ankle yeah i was there that day and he showed him like this is how you can press these joints and then you know kelly was like, Oh man, I wonder if you like, I was like watching it all happen. I'm like, this is pretty cool. You got like a, one of the greatest power lifters of all time with a mind like Kelly Sturetz and they're, they're coming together. And it was, it was really cool to see that. Donnie's a national treasure, man. If you don't, I mean the, the knowledge and the stuff that he puts out Kelly's too. Yeah. Donnie, Donnie has done some really good stuff, man. Well, he's been under those weights.

And Donnie Thompson, you know, he broke the all-time world record for total. And I think it was like, he was somewhere between the ages that you and I are now. I think he was like 45 or 46, something like that. Yeah. I mean, that's not young. Yeah. And also at that time, he was already, you know know 20 years into powerlifting and then he had a football career as well so it's like this guy obviously knows what he's talking about and you

see the pictures of him when he was a bodybuilder yeah yeah like oh he was insane yeah he was insane as a bodybuilder yeah dude incredible guy he's got the body tempering stuff as well the uh the ex-wife he calls that one it's like 200 pounds. That is amazing. They use it a lot. They use it a lot in here. Yeah. We have one. Yeah. It's amazing,

man. That's just that big ass heavy center block thing that, that everybody puts on their back basically. Yeah. There, there, there he is. Here he is at super training.

Yeah. His, his ankle port of call changed my life, man. You know, he, he had some really interesting techniques. One thing that I loved and I just, I love when people are crazy. I really do.

I love when people just have a mindset. Look at that fat face. I love when people have a mindset that's just a little different than everybody else's. And so West, West side barbell, they used to do a sets of two reps on their, on their dynamic work, on their speed stuff. And, uh, Donnie would do sets of three. And I was like, Oh, why do you do sets of three reps on their on their dynamic work on their speed stuff and uh donnie would do sets of three and i was like oh why do you do sets of three you know louis says to do sets of two he goes it's one more than west side he's like and that's my competition i was like i love it i love that that it's no regard to science or any any other information it's just one more rep than everybody else just mental but he was a beast, man. He would squat.

He would do dynamic effort squats with 515 pounds. He used the same weight every week, he said. No gear. And I don't even think he wore a belt. No knee wraps or knee sleeves or anything. He'd do these box squats, picture perfect form, super fast. He'd do like eight or ten sets of three reps. And then in between that, he would do

kettlebell swings, um, for about half the workout. And then he would do kettlebell cleans in between. And I was like, I'm watching him. He's just drenched in sweat. I'm like, this is a big, big guy. This guy weighs like 400 pounds. I'm like, how is he, how does he, and I was trying to do the workout with him one day and I nearly died and I probably weighed a good hundred pounds less than him. So I was like, how does he have this work capacity? There's that, that video with him and start at where,

um, Donnie's big, right? I don't know how big he was. I don't think he was his biggest, but he's big and he gets in that squat position. And you're like, are you fucking kidding me?

I mean, he just moved that. Like it was zero pounds. It was 1065. Yeah. He's a, he's an amazing dude man he's one of the bigger guys that we've ever had here too um we had Ray Williams here um and I think the two were very similar I've never seen anybody with such a large back Ray Williams back is like the size of this damn table it It was unbelievable, just super wide, but you need a big body like that to be able to pick up these. Have you ever gotten into some powerlifting stuff

yourself? No, no. In high school, you know, we had some, some powerlifting in my little hometown, um, had some local little stuff, but you know, I'm, I was never super strong. I mean, I, I, um, I think my top bench, I did five 65 for double, but I'm only 300 pounds. So it doesn't really, you know, it doesn't mean a lot. A lot of bodybuilders say that, and then their strength is actually always kind of like through the roof. That's not, I mean, in your world, that's nothing. That's still a big thing.

That's not a lot. 565? Yeah. Yeah, 500-pound bench is a lot. Plus, I mean, you're- Well, I never got the double. I never got my double body weight, you know. You're a tall guy, though, too. I mean six four six five six three i was close to the double body

weight a few times but i was light yeah but never really had a massive squat or deadlift you know but but i could do rack pulls with seven plays for 20 reps yeah but take me to the floor yeah yeah i'm not it's well it wasn't something you were practicing a lot no with the bench press did you even work the bench press that often or were you more incline and a dumbbell guy? No, so there were so many guys, there were so many guys tearing packs in my gym. I did a lot of dumbbell work

and then I'd mess around at my main gym. We only had dumbbells, I went up to 175 and I'm doing those for 20 sometimes. So then I started going up 10 degree inclines to try to get a little bit more work capacity out of them. But I think with a dumbbell, I've maybe hit 15 reps on a flat bench with a 200,

but nothing like the beast. Like when I was a kid, I'd drive out. I lived in Arizona. I'd drive out to LA and go to Venice and watch some of the guys work out. Always get humbled, man. And compared to those guys, I was never, I was never strong, ever strong. You said your wife does a carnivore diet. How's that working for her?

How long has she been doing it for? So she has, she has major food allergies to anything, soy, any dairy, anything like that. A lot of weird kind of allergies. And so even when she was a bodybuilder, you know, she ate the same things all the time. You know, three ounces of sweet potato, three ounces of chicken. It's literally what she ate for years. Came off of that, you know, trying to live a normal life.

Everything messes with her. Talk about the elimination diet. It is weird, you know, when you restrict your food down so much sometimes. Yeah, when you go back to trying to eat regular food, you can't do it anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, you know, we were, we were talking about when, when Dr. Baker first came on Twitter and stuff, you know, I'm throwing killer vegetable memes out of his stuff, you know, making fun of him, but he's, he's definitely onto something. And, um, so we, we kind of dove into it and she said, Hey, I want to try this out as an elimination diet.

So she did eight weeks of nothing but ground beef and some bone broth on top of it and salt. Great result. Of course, you know, she's not lifting weights, but she put on more muscle, you know, all this stuff because she's a freak. But digestion, everything massively improved. Gut biome changed, bowel movements, all that stuff improved. Compliance was getting at the point where she wanted something else. So we started adding in one food source at a time. Green peas worked perfect in her.

So she, her main diet consists of ground beef or beef and green peas. She'll add in a few more little things, but so consistently, very consistent with those foods. When she goes off, definitely notice it, definitely have issues, but she's probably hitting six months now. Have you messed with that diet at all yourself? I can't do it, man. So you try, you try, you messed with it a little bit and it was just too much of the same food or something. For me to re-glycogenate and really have good training sessions i have to eat a fuckload of meat man and i just wasn't able to keep up yeah that is kind of the problem with it i mean it can work without the carbohydrates but then you better have a pretty good appetite otherwise right right i know with dr baker

he's developed the appetite over over a period of time i think he's always eating pretty you know pretty good but when he came over my house like i was like he he cooked up some meat and i went to use the restroom i came back and it was gone it's gone it's like three pounds of steak or something was like holy shit yeah do you ever can eat do you ever recommend that type of diet for like anyone within forged or is is do you do you not really mess with that with like your clients you know if it's a if it's a specialized person that's having issues yeah i like the elimination Or do you not really mess with that with your clients? If it's a specialized person that's having issues, yeah, I like the elimination diet. I like to take people down to the foods.

Just like, I forgot who said this, man, but if you give somebody a workout program, you're doing them a disservice. Hey, here's your bench. Do this three times a week. If I give somebody a food list, hey, here's your diet list. I'm really not doing them a service. I feel so. I try to teach people how to eat. And we do that by, Hey, let's start eliminating foods, picking foods that work well in you identifying those. So we know what they do in your body. We know we have a reaction and that's going to, you're going to build your food list of stuff that you can eat. And that's what you're going to concentrate

on. And then demanding on your, your particular goals, we're going to eat more of this, less of that, but it all comes down to less processed food, normally more meat, more vegetables and carbohydrates as you need them. And then on what those sources come from or depending on how they work on your body. So. Tell us a little bit more about how you train. You mentioned the higher reps. How many times a week are you training and kind of what is uh what are some of these workouts look like so i'm doing about uh i do five days a week i'm hitting shoulders three times a day now i'm trying to bring them up they've always been kind of a weak spot for me um so i'm concentrating on those three times a day or three times three times a week three times a week yep and so um i'll do chest like man i gotta get to work so i'll do chest front delt medial delt get to work. So I'll do chest front delt, medial delt, go back in and do back, rear, and maybe some calf thrown in there. I'll go back. I'll take a day off.

I'll hit arms and shoulders, a full set of shoulders. I'll do a leg workout. And then sometime in there, just a feeder workout of shoulders again. But depending on my recovery ability and what I'm doing that week, volume looks something like chest. I'm doing three movements. I'm doing typically I warm up depending on what movement it is. It takes me a while to warm up. That might consist of like five, six sets where I'm just progressively adding weight, getting some blood in there.

I'll do two to three sets of positive failure, then move to the next exercise. DC style at the end of the workout for that body part, when I'm full of blood, I'll do a forced stretch. And then there's all kinds of different techniques that I'll use to not add weight because I can't keep adding weight anymore because of scar tissue, whatever. So some things I'll play with is like a rest pause set

where you go to failure, take three deep breaths, four deep breaths, hit another set to failure. We'll do full stop reps where I pulled the weight down completely and then do a press, um, play with hanging out in the stretch position and then execute the lift. Um, puts more tension on it. I don't have to keep adding weight and I'm not hitting, you know, 20, 30 reps so I can cut down the rep, but increase damage or stimulate, you know, damage needs to be fixed. And then I repair it. You have other people that train with you? I don't, man.

My boyfriend, my, my girlfriend's boyfriend. Let me correct that. My, my, my daughter's. What did we get into here? That was interesting. My daughter's boyfriend. There we go. So my daughter's, my daughter's boyfriend. There we go. So my daughter's almost senior in high school.

She has a boyfriend that's kind of a, you know, like a, a dark match me when I was in high school, he's a meathead, you know, he's into lifting all this stuff. So, um, part of our relationship building is I take him to do legs when I go do legs with him on the weekend, you know, beat him up a little bit, get some extra sets in. But typically it's alone, um alone workouts about 40 minutes or so. And then, you know, I'll hit the stair mill or something for 15, 20 minutes. You kind of have like main main movements or are they kind of all almost like more accessory movements? I try to do main movements.

And then depending on the body part. Yeah, I'll do a few accessories or I'll start with like an isolation movement, like cable crossovers, flies, and then I'll do a bench type movement with a machine, something like that. But I change it around. So anytime that I start to stall on my reps and I'm tapped out, man, I keep adding weight. And although I beat some of my rep records this last year, you know, I can't always go in there and try to shoot for that. So I'm going in there trying to be, you know, trying to hit as many reps as I can for that day. When I hit a movement and I'm stalling and I know I'm not progressing, I'm just having bad days consistently on it. Then I change it all around, reverse the

order of I'm doing, or I go to a different gym and use all new machines. I know a lot of people are listening, like, cause you mentioned positive failure a lot. So a lot of people are probably curious about what's the difference between positive failure, negative failure. So, so positive failures, when you can't execute the lift anymore, when you can't shorten the muscle belly. Um, and I consider it when you start having to cheat, then you're not, you know, you're going past that point. Um, negative failures when you have kind of a negative descent in your, you're having assistance descending the weight. Um, I can't recover from negatives. I think they do a lot of muscle damage. This is a very effective way to stimulate your muscle growth, but it's hard to recover from. So I just

do the positive failures. Um, it's hard, you know, part of the discipline of training like that. And, um, one of the things we were talking about is, you know, part of the discipline of training like that. And one of the things we were talking about is, you know, when I met my father for the first time, like five years ago, and he destroyed my whole workout mentality when I worked out, it was a good thing, but, you know, I can't get into that mode anymore. But when you train to true positive failure day in, day out on all these reps, man, you have to be, you have to, your shit has to be tight because that's the pain zone, man. You really have to be determined to go there and you have to be honest with yourself when you're there because those last few reps, man, you know how

it is. That's self-talk starts and you can talk yourself out of anything. And even though that's only like three or four seconds, it seems like an hour you're in there trying to talk yourself out of, no, I can quit on this. Oh, Hey, that tear's coming back. You might want to back up. No, all this bullshit that's going on your head, but to go to true positive failure, it takes a discipline to get there. But that's part of the discipline, you know? Yeah. Did your, your dad kind of disarm your workouts because you met him and he was cool or what? Yeah. So I never met my biological dad. I guess, evidently I was carrying around something from it. But the way that, you know, I kind of got through and survived my childhood and did the things I did was because I had this want to be something different.

I had thought about trying to look him up before. I kind of tried. Anyway, I didn't speak to my mom before she died. A couple of years before she died, we had separated. died a couple of years before she died. We, we had separated. She died. I got a death certificate with a marriage certificate, found the guy's social security number. I'm like, all right, man, I'm going to look this guy up, found out where he was, sat on it. Um, hitting like 42 years old. Now my, my wife and daughter are like, you should really find this guy, you know, give him a chance. Just, just find out what's the worst that can happen. I'm like, well, nothing, you know, I'm going to punch him in the mouth and we'll be good. You know, so I called this guy up and he's like, oh my God, I've been waiting for this phone call forever. And I'm like, what?

Long story short, the guy's at my house a week later in his RV with his wife. You know, he comes with a court records of all these times that I was moved around as a kid. I knew what was going on. You know, this guy's trying to get custody. Anyway, have a half sister I never knew about. All this good stuff. Amazing human being, great wife, you know. So I have this extended family now. About a week later, I go to the gym and I used to write, you know, I used to have a forged training like pamphlet.

I would give someone, hey, how do you train? Here you go. My mindset was a full page, how to get into this murder mode, what I called, right? And I went to the gym about two weeks after meeting this guy. And it's like somebody snuck into a nuclear power plant and took the fuel rods. I sit down at the bench. I'm like, all right, here we go. Nothing's there, man.

It's gone. Had to completely retool everything in it. You know, I guess I didn't realize what kind of weight I had been carrying around about that, you know, and, and I think it was beneficial, probably not. I mean, it probably acted negative on me somehow, but, um, yeah, man, it totally, totally screwed me up, totally screwed up my workout. Um, so I really had to retrain my mind and retool and now it's totally different than it was, but I can still go into that, that positive failure zone. You still communicate with them now? Yeah.

Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. So it's a good story. It's a rare story. It doesn't happen often, but I'm really good dude, man. And, um, you know, somebody, I wish I could credit him, but somebody had said, you know, when you look back on a, on a, an emotional event or an event in your history that, that you gives you like a negative energy from, or something that you're not resolved from that. You're not, you're

not over it. And, um, you know, there's, there's a lot of things in my life that I've worked through. I look back on time as a kid, whatever trauma is happening. I don't have any negative reaction from it. I don't have a heart rate increase, all that. So I think I'm over it. I've dealt with it. I'm cool with it. It's good. It doesn't affect me. I thought I was there with my dad, but obviously I wasn't.

When I met him, all that shit was gone. There was this weight. It was gone. Yeah, it gives you that at such a young age, you turned a negative situation in your house into something positive by taking that energy and going and releasing it and working out. A lot of people sit around and feel sorry for themselves. So that's pretty awesome that you're able to do that. But if you didn't have that negative energy, you probably wouldn't have been able to build what you've been able to build. It's, it's, it's basically a gigantic part of like who you are. Right. So it's like, you know, there's kind of that people always say like, Oh, what would you tell your,

you know, 20 year old self? And the answer, everyone should have the same answer. The answer should be nothing because it's, you have to go, you have to be 20 years old. You have to go through the things that you need to go through. i think there's times and places in your life where you probably should have some hate in your heart for somebody and you probably should have some hurt and so you probably should go through some shit i mean i think it it helps get people places people that have no uh no adversity they don't really they don't usually get anywhere. They usually don't have, you know, a story like this, you know, I call it rocket fuel, man. It's, it's hard to get,

get through all the things and to accomplish all the things that you want to and to pass everybody up or to escape a circumstance. Right. I mean, I grew up at a young age. I remember looking around my house and me saying, fuck, no, man, I am not doing this. I'm going to change. I'm going to get out of this somehow. I'm going to escape it. And that was the rocket fuel, man, that hate to change everything and not, and no, I was not going to grow up in a trailer. I was not going to grow up with broken windows, you know, all this stuff. And, um, it is hard, man, when you're, you know, raising my boys and raising my daughter, man, it's hard to instill that in them because you can't put them through that. You know, I my boys and raising my daughter, man, it's hard to instill that in them because

you can't put them through that. You know, I can't put her through that, but you still have to give them enough Rocky fuel freaking launch, man. And, um, it's real difficult, man. It's difficult raising kids like that. I mean, my, my step-sons, I have five step-sons, one passed away, but the four, all of them, you know, we went through this period where it was rough man i was a hard ass and they all grew up and eventually we all got to that point where it was like hey man i understand what you did i understand why you did it and thank you you know and so i watched them all hating me you know or being have this adversity kind of thing to grown older. And then we all become like, I get it, man, friends, you know, and it was, it was always a fine line with that, with my daughter, um,

slightly different, you know, girls are a little bit different, but it's hard to instill in your kids, man, that, that fuel that they need to get through life, I think. And it's your point. Exactly, man. It's very hard to do without adversity. You know, it's, it's very hard with children because, you know, your kid shouldn't have to do anything spectacular for you to love them, you know, and for you to say, Hey, I'm proud of you. They shouldn't have to really, you know, in my opinion, they shouldn't have to really do much for that. You know, like,

not that you want to give them everything and kind of supply them with everything, but they're your kid, you know, you should. And so it should be, it should be a fairly simple transaction in terms of like the way you feel towards them and the way they feel towards you should be fairly easy. But in some households, it gets complicated. Like who knows, your mom maybe grew up a certain way. Your dad maybe grew up a certain way. And you know, as you know, now a lot of weird circumstances happen that sometimes not everything's under your control. Yeah. I mean, what was your, I mean, as you know, now a lot of weird circumstances happen that sometimes not everything's under your control. Yeah. I mean, what was your, I mean, when you go lift, what's in your head? I mean, is it different now than it was? I mean, how did that develop?

There, there's, I mean, there's a lot of different things that I can, uh, draw upon. Um, most of the things that most of what I've learned is most things are like fake. Most things are kind of artificial. There are things that you make up to, you know, put like a football team will, you know,

take what the other football team said and they'll put it in their locker room and they'll route. That'd be like their rallying cry. Or you hear it time and time again, a team will win a championship and they'll be like, everyone counted us out. And it's like, well,

no one really counted you out. Your're a professional team, just like everybody else. I'm sure there's, you have some fans that were like rooting for you. Some people are behind you. But for me, you know, a lot of times it was, you know, stuff that I had to deal with in school. You know, I was always in classes, you know, with kids that were mentally disabled and things like that. And so a lot of it's, you know, I draw upon things like that. Um, and then that's happened with business as well. Like, all right, well, I'm not smart. We'll, we'll see, you know, that kind of thing. And then same thing with, um, with the lifting, uh, you know, competing against other people and, um, you know, just trying to, uh, you know, utilize whatever fuel I have, you know.

And so sometimes I would draw upon, you know, like my brother's death or something. And it's not a good place to go to really because it's too intense. It's like too fierce to really go there. But other than that, I mean, I grew up very, very fortunate. You know, I grew up with great parents and I grew up with an awesome upbringing. fortunate. You know, I grew up with great parents and I grew up with an awesome upbringing. Everyone from my aunts and my uncles and my, you know, both sets of grandparents, both sets of my own parents. So I grew up very, very fortunate. That's something I share on the show all the time because like, I didn't come from what you came from. You know, I didn't come from what he came from. I came

from where I came from. And so if I share a story of success, or if one of you guys shares a story of success, it's important for people to understand like, okay, where did this guy kind of start from? Because then you can kind of compare your own life towards somebody. Like maybe you didn't have the upbringing that maybe like a Steve Jobs had, or somebody who's very highly educated, who kind of started out, not to discredit anything anyone does, but maybe they started out with a little bit cleaner push than, than, than somebody else, you know? And as we said, uh, either way, uh, it's still difficult to really try to make it because you probably need some

sort of fuel from somewhere. Cause I don't know where you're going to get it unless there's something at least a little bit negative. You know, Michael Jordan didn't make his basketball team right um you got tom brady who was like slighted by michigan and then he was drafted really late there was like 200 quarterbacks or 200 draft picks or whatever before him and he was going to prove to everybody that he was the best but what i really love that tom brady has said is that he said uh you know you ever feel like going back to michigan and being like you know hey i told you i told you guys i told you so and he goes no because i don't

have to yeah i always liked that i always thought that was that was a really cool thing but yeah i think we all got something fucked up inside our heads to drive us forward you know what ronnie coleman said you got what kind of crazy motherfucker do you have to be to get on his plates? Or he said something like that, right? Right. Yeah. And, uh, it is, man, I, I see guys that lift like that. And, and, um, I think you really do, man.

You have to have something. Yeah. You have to be able to kind of flip a switch or, you know, there's some people that, um, also just, you know, when it comes to the, when it comes to training, there's sometimes a complete opposite look to it where it's like, this is a process. This works this way. This works from a scientific standpoint. It doesn't matter how mad, sad, or happy I am. I'm going to go over there and I'm going to pick up that weight.

weight but i do think that you when it comes to the heavier weights where they're more intense sets i do think that there has to be something inside that is at least a little aggressive you know how do you feel about it because i know you lift pretty calm he he lifts really like stoic like uh he'll even like kind of just be off on his own like meditating and meanwhile the music's cranking in here and everyone else is going bonkers. Yeah. Like we've talked about this over and over. For me, it's different. Like I do a bunch of meditation and stuff. And I mean, I used to there's videos of me in this gym like years ago where you could see me trying to get angry before I lift. But for me, that was that was very artificial. Like I really had to try. Like when Mark does that, like like he's drawing from from something i don't draw well from anger at all like and then that that's always been how i've been and i just did it because i saw okay other strong people do it so there's something here i'm gonna headbutt

the bar but it like it it always took more energy for me to do it it was never something that i could like i couldn't do that often so i like switched the way I go about it. And instead I did what came more naturally to me, which is like just being calm, calming down before a lift, even a heavy lift, trying not to think about anything. Um, and that's, I mean, that just worked for me. And that's why I was, I was curious when you said like, after you met your dad, um, and you went and trained, like you felt like you had no field or you, you just, you didn't have it. What, what do you have now? Like, do you still draw from something else? Is it something different or do you train differently or is it the same type of, I wish I never met my dad.

I've joked about that. But, um, I mean, when I had it, I, I was fighting aliens. I mean, people were, you know, trying to abduct my daughter. I mean, and all the, I had a movie in my head at all times, you know, I could just click on and I was there, but afterwards it's a little bit different, man. You know, you see me a lot of times in the gym, I got my eyes closed while I'm doing my sets a little bit more kind of into a zone like you're talking about.

Like a mind muscle connection. Yeah. I mean, it's different and I'm starting to kind of rebuild, you know, it sounds stupid, man, but I'm rebuilding this avatar. And when I had it, you know, I could, I'd sit down and I visualize myself and I would be completely, you know, made out of stainless steel fibers, like a robot, you know, I'm lowering the weight and I could see the muscles move in and I'm building this energy up and, you know, I'm lowering the weight and I could see the muscles moving and I'm building this energy up and, you know, just feeling everything. And I'm back to a place where I have that kind of rebuilt and I can pull on. Um, and that's a really good place for me right now. So I can kind of go into that and I'm, you know, transform myself into this robot guy and I'm watching the muscle fibers contract and I feel it and I can go to that place I need to go to. But it's different now.

It's real different. You know, so it's interesting. I've heard Michael Hearn talk about like how he's thinking about, you know, if he's doing like a tricep pushdown or something, he's thinking about like separating striations or, you know, for somebody that has like a hurt elbow or hurt shoulder or something, when you're doing the exercise, you're thinking about the exercise, like healing it. Like you're, you're not thinking about like, you're not thinking about like the delt and what it looks like and the makeup of it and the aesthetics of it. You're thinking about it from like the inside. You're thinking of the tendons and ligaments, like, oh, this is restorative. And he'll even close his eyes, you know, when he's training, he'll close his eyes and you're like, what is he doing? And

sometimes he's lifting some pretty heavy weight. Yeah. You know, he's got no facial expression. His eyes are closed. He looks like he's almost half asleep, but here he is, you know, pumping out four or five for reps on a reverse grip bench press or something wild. You're just like, he's an alien. He is an alien, but he's took, he's taken principles from martial arts. You know, he's taken principles from martial arts. You know, he's been into martial arts from the time he was a kid. And so he, you know, a lot of the stuff that he was learning in martial arts, like you're learning in jujitsu, was the kind of, you know, hey, like, you know, you got to calm down. You know, if you want to be good at this and you want to be able to master it, you can't be doing it like a maniac. It takes a lot of technique and it takes a lot of discipline.

You can't be doing it like a maniac. It takes a lot of technique and it takes a lot of discipline. Yeah. When you're describing that, I, I could see you as a jujitsu player doing that because that's, that's what it takes, you know, that calmness and that,

I don't know that reservedness. That's, that's what I see when I see somebody doing it, what I think is a high level, you know, or somebody doing it, that's scary, you know,

just that calmness and that reservedness and you're kind of real intuitive in your own head and you remember hoist gracie back in the original ufc i mean he would lay on his back and everyone's like what is he doing and he would just like he just like lay there and like this other guy's going crazy i'm trying to you know we're trying to just to pound his head into the mat and he would just like put his head back and just wait and wait and wait. And next thing you know, the guy was tied up like a pretzel and the guy was tapping out and nobody at that time even knew why the guy was tapping out. They're like, what happened? Yeah. He's holding his shirt. Like, yeah. Yeah. Like he was just whole. Yeah. They're like, no, no, he choked the guy out. Like, wait, what? I didn't see that. What happened? Yeah. No one even knew what was going on back then. It was pretty crazy.

It'd be great to get Dante on the show. That'd be cool. Yeah. I mean, I've tried to get him on a podcast forever and, um, you know, he's like the,

like a Yeti man. You're never going to get him. But yeah, super, super knowledgeable guy. Yeah. Um, you know,

I, I created him to probably save my life, you know, talking me to back off this, back off of that. But, um, a guy that's really put

out great information and cared about people for a long time, man. Um, he's killed it business too. Yeah. And he should, man. I mean, the true nutrition is a legit company. I, you know, for me, it's beyond reproach with quality. Um, I just, you know, he's a great dude, man. I remember getting a supplement from them years ago. A friend of mine was like telling me about this caffeine, type of caffeine they had. And it was like from chocolate or something like that. It's called chocamine. I don't know if you've ever heard of that before.

Cocamine stuff, yeah. And I was like, oh, I'll try it. And my friend just had, you know, some of it. And I just took a scoop of it and I mixed it up. I was in his kitchen and i drank it and i was like man that stuff's really strong he goes did he goes he goes did you use that spoon right there and i said yeah i just used a teaspoon he goes no no it comes with like a tiny little tiny little scooper thing he's like you didn't see that in there i was like whoops he's like man

you're gonna be like we're going for a ride. It was like, I don't know, 1500 milligrams of caffeine or something crazy. I was like, yeah, I felt sick and just, I was like, Holy crap. I got myself in some trouble with that one. Have you, I just remembered this. Cause you, okay. Sorry to divert, but you talked about the super high rep sets, right. And how it's like good for the joints. Do you ever mess with the blood for restriction? You know, I did back in the day, um, when it, when it kind of became popular, I don't remember

when it was early nineties, maybe. Yeah. I remember. Um, and we were talking about when I was doing it, there was kind of the theory behind it that I was loading my blood up with a bunch of stuff, meaning anabolics, aminos, everything, exogenous insulin, and then doing those types of sets. And for me, I didn't see a benefit from it. Okay. But I was pretty, pretty close to my maximal jackness anyway. I always got massive pumps. Arms were always really good.

I just didn't, you know, and I was training in partials and kind of doing that. I didn't ever get a real good benefit out of it. I see it. You know, I could see a benefit to it, but I would want to load the blood up with stuff too, like Milos talks about, you know, you want to have empty blood and do that. But yeah, I'm not a, I'm not a big fan of it. Okay. Okay.

Just curious. You, you mentioned a lot about, you know, checking your blood work over the years. Yeah. Have you seen a lot of improvements, you know, because when you were starting out, you know, checking your blood work over the years. Have you seen a lot of improvements, you know, cause when you were starting out, you know, years ago, I'd imagine you're probably making some mistakes and you probably learned a lot over the years. Have you been able to keep your, keep yourself pretty healthy? Yeah. So I was very fortunate. So when, when I started working in the health food store, I was maybe 21, 22 ish,

started doing blood work then started, you know, I didn't ever have any issues. I've always had catalog of blood. Yeah. Um, I've always had super great lipid levels. My, my cholesterol has never been over one 20. Um, never had any issues with that. When I started using anabolics, um, always was testing, but I wouldn't test afterwards, like after a contest or after I did something. I would test in the height when I was taking everything at once to see what the damage assessment was. And maybe it's one of the reasons why I'm still alive, but I never really had a lot of red alarms. I mean, I never really took a blood where and go, oh my God, this looks really bad.

Maybe I should back off of stuff. I always handled it very well. My lipids never crashed. Um, when I started hitting late thirties, when, when, um, you know, I decided to back off and go to a TRT dose. That's when I felt that my body wasn't handling it as well anymore. My hematocrit started climbing. Um, iron was becoming a problem all the time and I had never experienced that before. And so that's when I went up the dose. So that's really when I went from my base dosage of seven 50 tests a week to a legit two 50, 200 to 50. Um, did you have to, uh, donate blood on occasion? Is that something you recommend to some people or I do? I think it's healthy. I think it's, um, you know, if anything to maintain your ferritin level. And, um, there's a guy named PD Magnet that has a PD Magnet on Twitter and he does a lot of writing, has a book about ferritin levels and the danger it has. I don't think that's the most effective way.

You know, if you're having hematocrit issues, what I think would be alarming above 57, 58, and you're doing stuff like cardio, then that's time that I would consider backing off the dose. You can donate blood and you can hydrate, but it comes right back to where it was. Has there been anything from a training perspective or nutrition perspective that you've been able to do to manipulate, you know, any bad readings that you've gotten, or is it pretty much just a manipulation of what you're taking? For me, I started taking fish oil 21 and I've always been on it. I haven't really noticed. I had good, good, I guess, a genetic predisposition for blood work anyway, that in the way I've eaten and I've supplemented with omega-3s, I haven't ever noticed a big swing in that. In clients, I can take a client with bad lipids

and usually having them exercise, change the way they're eating, maybe some supplementation. We can change those numbers pretty effectively. But, you know, it takes work. And that's people usually don't want to put in work. What have you noticed with these higher fat diets? Have you noticed anything changing for better or for worse with some people that you might work with?

Um, that kind of comes back to the insulin exposure debate. So if you're on, if you're on a keto diet, a true keto diet, where you're eating a massive amount of fats, you're going to have a rise in blood lipids and your LDLs are going to be higher and triglycerides are going to be higher, but that's to be expected. I think your vascular health and all those markers have improved. And I've seen calcium coronary scores go down in that where you have high fats, your lipids are a little high. Coronary calcium scores go down. I think it's because of lack of insulin. So, yeah, if you know what you're looking at and somebody's doing a keto diet, there's a couple of things that you'll notice with the blood lipids being higher.

But those are okay. That's a condition where that's acceptable. And it actually is improving vascular health. What's the best steroid you ever take, ever taken? It sounds like he's taken all of them. I think it's changed over the years, man. I mean, when we first made Fina pellets, that was, that was something special, man. Tren. He's talking about Tren. I felt, I felt like Zeus came down and had on me a dark urine colored bottle.

Why was that so strong? Even in a smaller milligram dosage, it was really strong. Yeah. Cause there's all that, all that stuff in it from the, from the cattle, right?

The cattle injects. That was pretty amazing. I think. Cause it's half, half estrogen, right? It's filler. It goes right to kill your kidneys. NPP is pretty amazing. I think it was half, half estrogen, right? It goes right to kill your kidneys.

Um, uh, NPP is pretty amazing. I always had like a Nandrolone, like a Deca type thing, right? Short acting Deca. Yeah. But, um, testosterone has always been real well to me. Yeah. So you have your clients take a lot of blood work, right? Okay. So when you like run into a lot of male clients that maybe they do have really low testosterone, um, what, like, what do you have them follow a certain type of protocol to deal with that? Cause a lot of males actually separate from that. Correct. Right. So, you know, getting into the TRT world, man, I think everybody, especially males today are going to have a problem ongoing and it's environmental factors. It's our lifestyle factors. But if you just take a population of males with low testosterone, yeah, I don't know what the percentage is, but there's going to be a lot of

them that could change and improve that or delay the onset of needed therapy with lifestyle changes. But you're a guy that works a 40-hour-a-week job. It's high pressure. It's high tense. You're on the freeway for four hours a day. Can you really change a lot of that? I mean, can you lower your stress levels and sleep better and do the things that you need to do to lower cortisol and, and improve your testosterone markers? I don't know, man. Most people can't effectively change their lifestyle enough to really make a difference. Some people can. And I think if you're working with a, like a functional medicine person or somebody that's very tuned into, into TRT, they can make those recommendations. And if you fail that, then therapy is the option. But, um, you know, that's kind of why we, we made the TRT book. You know, we wanted people to have

kind of a clinical resource for anybody off the street to say, Hey, I'm kind of having these symptoms. You know, you see, I saw the commercial on TV. Maybe I'm going to educate myself a little bit. You can go into a physician's office, a clinician's office and say, Hey, I'm, I'm exhibiting these symptoms. I think we should do some blood work. If my blood work indicates I low I'm low and I have these symptoms, I think we should talk about exogenous testosterone or, you know, TRT. Um, I think that, you know, the, the evidence is out there in mounds, but if you have low TRT, if you have low hormone levels, it's a major health risk. Cardiac, prostate, it's very damaging to your health. And so it's not like a performance so much thing.

I know people think that you're going to get this big performance boost, all that. It's not about that, man. It's about being in an optimal health space. If your hormones are out of whack low or high, you're out of that space, man. And it's, it's very damaging. Not, not to mention quality of life. Do you do any cardiovascular training? Yeah. So, um, for me to stay semi lean, I have to do, you know, probably a couple hours a week. So I have a German shepherd that demands I do fasted cardio in the morning and then, uh, then one at night. Um, so I get about half hour, 40 minutes of walks in. And then at

the gym, I'll hit like the treadmill or something a little bit more intense for 15, 20 minutes and push it a little bit. Um, but, uh, that's, that seems to help my recovery a little bit. Even when I was really big, I always walked afterwards or did some kind of cardiovascular because it kept my hunger up, increased circulation, and I always felt healthier and I was able to eat more. So, um, I've always incorporated it. And I think especially in clients, man, if you take somebody with, with bad lipids, um, you can improve lipid markers with having them do be compliant with cardiovascular work. So you mentioned a lot, being on your feet a lot for work and, uh, being in the medical medical community, what do you do exactly? So, um, I sell surgical equipment and I'm in the

cardiovascular space. So, um, so perfusion equipment, things they use in open heart surgeries. And so it's, uh, it's pretty cool, man. I get to use my anatomy physiology knowledge when I train clinicians. Um, I also like being in sales and I also like being part kind of, I'm, I'm, I'm not really helping patients, but I'm part of the extended team because I'm getting stuff into these people's hands that are helping them save lives. And it's kind of cool to watch, man, when you, you know, they call you, Hey man, we really need this or, you know, please help out with this. And you show up and you give them something and they turn around and save somebody's life with it, life with it, you know,

you kind of get a boost out of it. And, and you know, overall it's, to me, it's kind of rewarding because I'm interested in it and I get to play a little part in helping somebody out. It's pretty cool. You ever see that episode of Seinfeld when Kramer drops a juju beat into the guy's chest because he's watching a junior man. Yeah. Yeah. Because he's watching. A junior man. Yeah, yeah. Because he's watching the surgery. That's a pretty damn sick list. Yeah.

What about the most effective peptide? Man. Melanotannin. What is that? Makes you tan. Oh, gotcha. So it increases your melanin production. And for me.

It must be anti-carcinogenic too I believe right possibly or am I making that up yeah well it protects

your skin from the sun I guess yeah and it gives you random erections so it's kind of fun to have around random

just be standing around you're like alright see Mark I told you I'm on this peptide

every time I see you it's not told you i'm on this peptide every time i see you it's not because of that it's the uh the peptide yeah yeah write that down yeah how about uh prp therapy yep so um i have a prp setup at home because i'm an idiot yeah and uh well i was doing the math one day i'm like um you know, like I had hair implants and stuff and I've been losing my hair. So I'm like, all right, man, I'm going to check into PRP. So I talked to a buddy of mine that had it down. I go, what do you think? He's like, I don't know. How much was it? A thousand bucks. Like, fuck that, man. So go online. I buy a centrifuge, I buy a setup.

I'm in for 800 bucks and I got it all right. So, um, you know, I'm able to draw my blood out. Take your blood out, spin it. Spin it, separate the PRPs, do that. The bitch is injecting your scalp like 30, 40 times. It takes a little sand. It's a little tough. I didn't notice a lot from that. But yeah, I've injected all my joints, injected my junk, done the whole protocols.

It's kind of cool to inject your junk. Yeah. What was that for? So, uh, so one of the protocols they do in these anti-aging clinics is hit your junk with sound wave. And what that does is it cause mini vascular damage in your vascular

pathways and your penis, right? And then they hit you with PRP, which heals that. And then it improves your vascular structures in your, in your junk. And so for guys that have poor vascular health, that makes a massive difference,

man, your erection quality, all that. So I go, well, you know, I'm talking to a friend of mine that's urologist. I'm like,

all right, man, how do I simulate this at home? He's like, well, spin it down and you're going to have to cause some damage. All right, well,

how am I going to do that? You know, the old lady's only going to take so much, you know, joking aside, well, you could use a bandit, engorge it with blood.

You can call it, cause vascular damage and then hit it with a PRP. So, um, did a couple of rounds of that with that protocol. I didn't notice a really big improvement in erection and quality because, uh, I think it's in part because I don't,

I don't have calcium in my arteries. I have a very good vascular structure. So kind of cool to experiment with. Failed experiment. Didn't really. Something that I recommend or ongoing. Everybody's about to write that one down too. Dang.

They were close. Helped my knee capsules though. I felt a definite improvement from that. But the problem now is I'm dealing with almost 48-year-old stem cells that I'm putting back in, not as effective as they once were. So, um, I think if I was going to continue that, I would, I would do like an umbilical cell or something that I'd get a harvested cell, stem cell, the younger stem cell. Yeah. Have you messed with that at all? Stem, like regular stem cell? I haven't, man. That's, that's like 3000 bucks a hit. Um, I just haven't had an area that I would,

I was considering really doing that. But next injury I get or if I have something catastrophic that's going. I don't know if we're there yet with all that stuff really is that great yet. But we're getting there. It's getting closer, man. Yeah. It's getting closer. Isn't there some benefit of like prolonged fasting and stem cell production or something like that?

Yeah. I mean, it upregulates all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the benefits. Yeah. But you're not going to notice a massive increase with that. That's, that's something you probably won't notice per se, like in a healing, especially like you've have a, an acute joint or something like that. But yeah, it's interesting, man. Um, I think, uh,

if they keep going the way they're going now with the stem cell research, we'll be closer. Maybe when we're 60, we can benefit from that. I don't know. What's the biggest difference between when you're a competitive bodybuilder and training now? Drugs. Just a little less of them? Way less of them. Well, that calorie consumption, right?

My metabolism has changed drastically. Is your diet any freer or not really? Yeah, man. I'm like at like 85%, 90% on plan. Right. You know, I ate a quart of ice cream. Which is like the equivalent of 120% for most people. You know, I'll have a beer every now and then, something like that.

But I don't go too crazy. And, you know, I'm at the age where I don't have the flexibility to, man. If I start pigging out or eating bad, I feel it. And then fat starts to pack on immediately. So I try to stay pretty close to plan. You want to compete again anytime soon or anything? Any goals to get in shape, do a photo shoot, anything like that? I do.

Like last for the training session, I think it was a year and a half ago, dieted down. I got pretty close. I was probably about a month out. But as I mentioned- It's hard to do it without actually like stepping on the stage, right? Yeah, yeah. I do have the two proximal tears on my biceps.

So I don't know if I'd really compete with those again. And then bodybuilding has changed a lot. When I used to compete, there'd really compete with those again. And then, you know, bodybuildings change a lot, you know, you know, um, when I used to compete, there'd be a super heavyweight group of like five dudes that were pretty on point. You know, now I don't even know if they have super heavyweights left. It's heavyweight. And there's like two guys that you're like, all right, bro, did you just wake up? And no offense, but I don't, I don't want a picture next to you. Um, classic bodybuilding,

the weights a little off for me and and to be honest with you dude i don't know if i could make myself go through it again i mean you went through that recently you know what it took yeah it's um it it takes a lot man you have to you have to dig deep man um there's a lot of pain zone in there for me i was dieted about 20 weeks and um man it's freaking brutal yeah i don't know if i could do it hard on like your home life too if you're married or have a significant other yes it's hard to mix in with all that or you know you have kids as well it's hard with family like trying to go out to eat or i mean it's like you really start to run out of options the closer you get to the contest you know

i was drinking iced tea while my wife and kids were eating and everything. Because it's like you don't want to risk it. You're like, I'm not going to risk like eating some weird food from some restaurant. I don't know. You know, even if I tell them not to cook it in something, they're still going to. And just easier for me to eat before I go. And then I would just sit there and just watch them eat like chips and salsa and burritos and everything else. I was like, oh, this is horrible. watched them eat like chips and salsa and burritos and everything else.

I was like, Oh, this is horrible. One of the first times I went down to my wife's family's house when I first, when we first got together, I was about 27 years old, like two weeks out of a contest. It's, it's coming up on Easter. And they have this family tradition where they load up all the Easter eggs with candy for these kids. There's like 80 kids, right? So she has me on this bed with like two pounds of candy loading up these, these gel, these little eggs, man. I'm like, do you have any idea what you're doing to me right now, man? I mean, you have any idea, you know, you'd be at the kitchen table eating, you know,

you got cereal bouncing off your head and some, yeah, it takes a lot, man. It's a Cadbury egg. It's still an egg, right? I mean, how bad protein in there? Yeah. How, how bad, how bad could it be? Right. I mean, how bad protein in there? Yeah. How, how bad, how bad could it be? Uh, anything coming up? Anything cool coming up that you got going on? Any family vacations or anything? I think we're going to hit the keys again. Yeah. Um, we just, we just bought a couple of used jet skis, so we're getting into that. I almost killed myself. Yeah. It's a jet skis go a lot faster than they used to, man. 70 miles an hour. Really? Yeah, dude. I fell off it at high 60s. Holy shit. I didn't know it was that fast.

70 miles an hour? Dude, it's skipping across the water for- What was that like on the- Yeah. That's fast. That's going fast. It's like riding a motorcycle. Just plowing through alligators.

Do you even try and get that fast? Yeah, I'm an idiot, man. I got a fast car. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So that was a brutal wreck but uh uh it's fine man it's it's gonna be like landing on the road i fell off the side and i just remember skipping for a long time i'm sure everybody else had a good time watching

people counting one two three two four get knocked out or anything or no it wasn't that bad no no no but um i could i was i was pretty sore man my neck my neck felt like broken glass for about a week two, three, get knocked out or anything or no, it wasn't that bad. No, no, no. But, um, I could, uh, I was, I was pretty sore, man. My neck, my neck felt like broken glass for about a week. I had no idea they go that fast. Yeah, I did. They're crazy, man. It's insane. Crazy. Where can people find out more information about you? So, um, I'm on all the social medias. Um, I got Twitter, Facebook. Um, what is your, is your Instagram? Cause Jim Brown's probably not going to pop up. Forge for life, F-O-R-G for life. And Twitter's at TRT Jim. I do have, like I said, if your viewers want to get a giveaway of the book, I also have an email that goes out every so often. I'm not somebody that's going to hit, I don't hit people with

emails regularly, but when I come up with something cool, like probably the next thing will be if I discover some sleep protocols, I'll write it all up and share with everybody. But you can go to powerproject.com or powerproject.forgelife, F-O-R-J-L-I-F-E.com. Get a free download copy of the book,

share it with whoever you want to and a coupon code for the nootropic. Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great having you of the book. Share it with whoever you want to. Coupon code for the nootropic. Awesome. Thank you so much. It was great having you on the show. Thank you guys. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.