Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 233 Live - Stan Efferding

Episode Date: August 12, 2019

Stan "The Rhino" Efferding, the world's strongest bodybuilder in the world, inventor of The Kooler and founder of The "Vertical Diet". He earned his IFBB Pro card and is one of the only people in the world to skwaat 800, pull 800 and bench over 600 lbs in one meet. From bodybuilding and powerlifting, he’s done all kinds of diets, and has found that eating Vertical is the way to go. He now helps athletes of all backgrounds perform better in their sport through the Vertical Diet. ➢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

Are we good? We're on? I can hear everybody check. Hello? Check. We're good. How much Monster Mash is Smokey going to eat in one day? What did you make there? Yeah.

I see some broth. Is that a little bit of broth in there? That was some broth, yeah. Some green beans and corn, though. Delicious. Looks the same coming out as going in. Yeah. Excuse me? It's almost like you could harvest it and re-eat it.

If you needed to. You know, you talk about some people in the desert, they drink their pee. If you had to re-harvest. Wow. That wouldn't be good. Well, it depends. It depends on how much you've had to eat. I'm guessing if you haven't eaten for like a week,

your poop would probably look pretty appetizing at that point. It might, yeah. Because you haven't had shit else. I've been detoxing away from coffee, and that's been fucking stupid. I didn't know you were hooked. When were you hooked on coffee? I've always detoxing away from coffee and that's been fucking stupid. I didn't know you were hooked. When were you hooked on coffee? I've always liked coffee.

Really? Yeah. I go through times where, I don't know, I'll drink like five or six in a day. But lately I only have like one or two. But after a while I was just like, let me just see what it looks like if I just pull it out completely. Headaches. Cool.

So I'm five days in and like day two was miserable and day three was miserable, but now I feel like I'm fine. So that's not really that bad, you know? Yeah. But I picked up a cocaine habit. So, you know. Have you been doing anything more? Like, has your sleep been better?

Has anything improved? Yeah. Actually, I didn't even think about that yet. But yeah, my sleep has been pretty good the last couple days. Okay. You don't feel like you're working at a lower bandwidth at all? No, I do. So I did.

In those first three days, I felt cloudy and just not great. Even when I went to work out, there was like nothing there, which doesn't normally happen. But yeah, it felt, you know, I felt like I was missing something. I think it might've been partially mental too. And then even just driving back from like Bodega Bay, I was like, it's routine. I always stop at a Starbucks and I always get a coffee. I couldn't do it this time. Yeah. It's the habit. That's one of the things that's hard to break. I usually recommend somebody gets a good taste in bone broth just to have the warm something to drink in the morning with your breakfast. Yeah, and you can switch to like tea or something too.

I mean, there's a lot of teas that don't have any caffeine at all. Yeah. Just go to the supermarket and look and just see if it doesn't have any caffeine in it. Might be a good option. But yeah, at least with the bone broth, you're getting something towards your goals because at least you're getting some salt and some collagen, right? Yeah. Well, there's been some interesting research. Of course, there always is from the coffee industry.

But they say that there's some cardiovascular benefits and you don't have to have the caffeine to receive those. So even decaffeinated coffee seems to infer some of the same benefits. I've been smashing with questions all day. So I'm going to let Nsema have at it here in the beginning. So go ahead, fire away, whatever you got there, buddy. Shoot. Are we not supposed to talk about nutrition and exercise? I thought we were staying away from that. That's all I know. Yeah. We're not supposed to talk about powerlifting. No talk about bodybuilding. Yeah. Yeah. Cause he's got a big lawsuit going on. So. Okay. All right. So I'm going to talk about,

let's see here last actually you know your habits first because um like we know about the vertical diet we know a lot about stuff you do in terms of work like working out but what are some like daily habits that you think that people you know whether it's powerlifters bodybuilders athletes should be doing because we know like 10 minute walks but like what can people do to like optimize their sleep and optimize their daily habits to lead them in the right direction as far as all of this is concerned? Yeah. Well, you've got to start with sleep. I mean, that's the number one thing, everything else keys off of that. Um, and there are some things that work for sleep. There's some

good research. Uh, first and foremost is setting your circadian clock, and that happens when you wake up in the morning. So if you want to get to sleep pretty consistently and have a better sleep at night, that really starts the time you wake up in the morning and get exposed to light, particularly sunlight. It'd be nice in the areas that you can't, and you can use artificial light. But that kind of starts the clock so that by the end of the day, your melatonin is ready to be released. You're ready to go to bed. Also avoiding napping too late in the day. I'm a big fan of taking a short nap, but if it gets to be after one or two o'clock, that might actually impair your ability to get

to sleep at night. And the length of that nap should be under 30 minutes. I kind of recommend around 20. If you end up getting into REM sleep, you're going to wake up very groggy and be groggy for hours. So those are all huge things for sleep. And that's if you already got like a full night's of sleep, right? Yeah. Short length. Yeah. Short length of the nap. And then getting adequate sleep, seven to nine hours seems to be optimal because, you know, I get a lot of folks that tell me they're shift workers. And so they might come home, firemen, whatever,

and they only sleep for a few hours and then get up and go about their day and then try and sleep for a few hours later. Not a good idea. You're better off trying to control that environment, getting blackout blinds, some sort of noise control. So when your neighbor turns on his lawnmower, you're not woken up. And the temperature becomes really important as well. If it's too warm, it's going to be hard to sleep. So if you control that environment, the studies have been shown,

they did this research with some soccer players, I believe, and whether they went to bed at 10 o'clock at night or 3 o'clock in the morning, so long as they got their 8 to 9 hours of sleep they anticipated to get, they had equivalent performance. Anything less than that, they had a decline in performance, an increase in injuries. And one of the studies that they did out of Stanford, I think it was on basketball players and in the NBA and the folks that were conducting the study did not have the names of the players

or the teams. All they had was their schedule and they were able to confer from their schedule what, who had the back-to-back um games and the ones that were cross-country and they could kind of see who was getting the least sleep and they could they predicted with about i think it was the mid 70s 78 accuracy who the winners were just based on sleep deprivation they had no idea who the teams were they also saw an increase in injuries i think at that time is when um i think thatBron James took that information to the NBA. He was head of the Players Association at the time, it's my understanding, and got them to change that. They were doing four games out of five days, I think, back to back, and the ones that were cross country, they tried to change the schedule such that the players could get more sleep because it decreased injury because there was a direct linear relationship between loss of sleep and injury. So there's a few other things that work for sleep. Magnesium is hard to get from food.

400 milligrams, ideally with the last meal of the evening, probably in order to absorb it properly. You want to have that with a meal when you have acid in your stomach. What about topical magnesium? Is that good at all? As long as you can absorb it. I think, I'm not sure if the topicals will cause diarrhea is one of the concerns, is that magnesium has a tendency to be a stool softener. So you have to be careful, which magnesium citrate I think is probably a little more easily absorbed and doesn't have as much of the stool softening problem.

But that's something 400 milligrams I think is a recommended dose, hard to get from food. And so it's kind of one of the few things that I recommend actually supplementing. Vitamin D3, another huge one for sleep as well, seems to help. Taking sleep aids is a bad idea because it tends to impair stage three or stage four restorative sleep. And then you, you can get to sleep, but you wake up and you're not really rested. And for that reason, the same reason as getting seven to nine hours in a row is that you, you have cycles of sleep throughout the night where you go into REM and stage four and then

come back and start over the cycles. Each subsequent cycle, when they're strung together, you get longer and longer restorative sleep. And so it's not until that sixth, seventh and eighth hour that you get in the deep sleep, but you get those long restorative sleep cycles. A couple other things. This is some research from Dr. Matthew Walker. People are pretty familiar with now from his research is that a warm shower before bed helps cool the core. The body will start pushing the blood into the periphery and help cool the core. And that can be one thing that helps you get to sleep. Also the worry journal, something I talked about in my stress for success rant, and it could just be a to-do list to just have something there at the night

table that you can write down. Sometimes I think about things I have to get done the next day and then I'm preoccupied and I can't get to sleep because I don't want to forget them. And so the worry journal seems to help. Or it could be stressors, just things that you unload, set on the night table. You can go to sleep. They'll be there in the morning waiting for you, as they always are. And that might help you to sleep. Also contracting and relaxing your muscles throughout your body, including your face, cheeks, forehead, eyes, can help you to relax and get into a deep, relaxed state. So those are some of the things I think that people can do pretty consistently. Obviously,

avoiding the screen time before bed, that'll prevent melatonin. Mark's been a big advocate of getting rid of, um, uh, the phone, keeping it out of the room. Um, and yeah, I just, I don't allow it to be even be in my bedroom. Yeah. Cause I don't, I don't need it in there. So, yeah. And the temptations, I talked to a lot of athletes who, uh, you know, they'll stay up, use their phones, you know, catch up on their social media or what have you. The biggie is not just quantity, but quality of actual sleep is that a lot of the folks that I work with, because they're larger athletes in many cases, um, are have sleep apnea or some degree of sleep apnea. And, uh, it's not just for big athletes. I think, uh, Dr. Jordan Fagenbaum from Barba Medicine talked in his seminar about him using a CPAP. He's only 198, but he has a thick neck.

He's a squatter. And the crowding of the airway can happen with muscle just as well as fat. It's obviously more common with people who suffer from obesity. But the apnea is huge for just a whole host of reasons. You lose sleep, obviously. You lose the amount of oxygen circulating through the blood. And you can test that by using one of those, um, meters on your finger, the tech tested blood oxygenation level, and that might be a wake

up call for you to see that your, your periphery, you know, your oxygen starts dipping. It pools around your organs, obviously end up losing a lot of sodium. Uh, people get higher blood pressure, which is huge because people think that salt causes high blood pressure. And in fact, it's a very small contributor only to people who are salt sensitive, hypertensive individuals, a small percentage of the people. Sleep apnea can cause up to a 20 millimole systolic blood pressure difference. So you might have 160 blood pressure. And if you can remedy apnea just simply as using a CPAP, it might go down to 140 within just a short period of time. So it's an almost immediate fix. So there's a whole host

of benefits that can be gained from using a CPAP. It's one of the first things I did for just about every one of the popular athletes that folks have heard me work with. Thor didn't have a CPAP. He snored. Obviously he's 430, 450 pounds, depending on, you know, whether he took a shit recently and, you know, Shaw was the same way. It wasn't wearing a CPAP, you know, they're, and they're uncomfortable. And so recently, uh, I started working, uh, helping with Lane Johnson, who's the, uh, uh, offensive, uh, lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles. And, um, and shout out by the way, to his coach, uh, his trainer, Gabe, who reached out to Jesse and Jesse Burdick reached out to me, uh, for getting some input from me. Most people tend to be pretty territorial about their athletes.

And, uh, it was really nice. Uh, I, I tend to be the same way. I ask for a lot of help and I reach out to a lot of people when I'm trying to work with a client because I want to get them all the benefit. So, and specifically with respect to Lane, he's a salty sweater. He's a level five sweater. And so Dr. Sandra Godek from the Heat Institute goes in and she puts patch tests on these athletes. I had her group help me with Ben Smith whenever he suffered from heat stroke before the CrossFit regionals last year. And she did the same thing, sends out the sweat test, find out the rate of sweat so you can start create a protocol to help them rehydrate.

But one of the things that I did for Lane, the first thing I did is he told me he wasn't wearing his CPAP. He had one, he'd been diagnosed. Obviously, he's 325 pounds. Come on. I've been going through this since the early 90s as I started gaining weight, 220, 230, 240, 250. It just gets worse and worse and worse. A lot of people that lift have it too, right? Just if you start to get kind of bigger, you might get congested, right? Absolutely. And it's huge for recovery.

So the very first thing I did, the very first intervention I do for all of my athletes is try and find out how their sleep is. And it was reprogram his CPAP. He had a, his CPAP had a ramp set up, which means it would start at a very low pressure. And so it was really uncomfortable. He wasn't able to get enough air. And additionally, the new autopaps, they have these EPR, expiratory pressure relief. So when you exhale, they stopped forcing air in. Back in the early nineties, when I first got a CPAP, it was a continuous pressure. And so when you're exhaling, it was still blowing in. It's like driving down the

freeway with a Jeep with no front window. And you wake up in the morning, that's the way you feel. Wow. You know, like your eyes back inside your head and your throat just dry as can be, you know, in your nose. But you do that to get sleep because the alternative is much, much worse. So we made a few adjustments to that, got him a new mask and he started wearing it and immediately started to have some, some, you know, health benefits as a result. Your joints are a huge thing that benefit. I, uh, and your recovery from workouts in addition to all the other benefits. So that was a huge one. The, uh, it's kind of the first thing I start with. I hope the original question was something to do with sleep. You said the most. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, it was like, like, like habits along with like sleep habits, which is huge. You did mention sleep. I guess that's why we went off on that, that, uh, that train. And you know, this isn't just big athletes. This is, I've said this before on Mark's show, if you're waking up at 4 a.m. to do fasted cardio after only four hours or five hours of sleep,

you're stepping over $100 bills to pick up nickels. I find the same thing with the bikini competitors and figure and physique people that I train. I'm working with Nadia Wyatt, who took third in the Olympia last year. And she's, you know, she had a kind of a habit of only sleeping five and a half to six and a half hours. You know, she worked and, and she thought that that was fine. The problem is, is that you end up burning more muscle than fat when you lose sleep.

Yeah. And in addition to being tired, obviously is a huge problem, uh, slows your metabolism. So I have to really encourage, I take away that morning cardio. And if I can get people to sleep just another hour, hour and a half, their lean body mass improves, their energy improves, their digestion improves. So many things, uh, improve just from that extra bit of sleep. And that's probably the first area that most of us, we burn the candle at both ends. We get up a little earlier than we should go to bed a little later. And that's probably the first area that most of us, we burn the candle at both ends. We get up a little earlier than we should go to bed a little later. And so people immediately will ask, you know, Hey, well, Mark gets, you know, she trains at 4am in the morning. Well, Mark goes

to bed at eight. Yeah. You know, that's the way you do that. You back into the equation, you've got to get your seven to nine hours and everything changes for the better. And that includes things like, um, you know, mental problems and stress and anxiety and a host of those things are directly linked to how much sleep that you get. Have you looked into mouth tape at all? I was about to ask about that. I wanted to beat you to it, actually. Yeah, I've heard some benefits. You know, anything that people can do to try and optimize sleep, I'm all for it.

There's certainly no adverse effects. And for some people, it might provide a benefit that they can keep their mouth shut and breathe through their nose. And that includes the tracking software that people can utilize, the apps, et cetera. I actually ask all of my clients to send me the number of hours they slept the night before to track it. The app that I've been putting together for damn near a year now, and hopefully shortly going to be out, includes that as part of the checklist of things that I want to know. I want to know your daily weight. I want to see how many hours you slept. And I want a picture of every meal that you ate that day.

That's the only way for me to be able to really effectively manage a client's program. I know everything's important, but do you have like a hierarchy? Like if someone just comes to you, maybe they're an athlete, maybe they're not. But do you have a hierarchy of things you want them to get in line or is it just get everything in line? Yeah, I throw a lot of things at them because I think it's never any one thing. It's always when you put together a whole combination of these disciplines, these things that you do consistently, like you said, the daily habits that, you know, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. What did Eddie Cohen say? When you improve everything, everything improves.

Right. But sleep's at the top of that hierarchy. That's definitely the number one thing, that first intervention that I get involved with. If you're tired, you also have cravings. I mean, there's scientific evidence of this and stuff, right? Yeah, ghrelin hormone. Yes, you'll definitely get cravings from getting tired. It's hard to get satiated when you're tired.

Make bad decisions when you're tired too. Absolutely. Matter of fact, they recommend that you engage in business before lunch, not after, that people are more apt to make, not only to make good decisions, but just to make decisions period period, earlier in the day. They'll get more off of their little checklist. And then come afternoon, they kind of slow down

in the speed at which they make decisions and the value of those decisions is worse. So if you're going to set up a business meeting, set it up for 10 a.m., 9 a.m. Starts with sleep, and then what do we creep into after that hierarchy? You know, after that, I'm looking for health mostly. We're back to digestion.

A lot of people present with problems with, they'll have some sort of, don't want to use too many scientific terms like gut dysbiosis or that kind of thing because it's a whole field of science that's still very fluid. But just generally speaking, if they've got, you know, if they don't have consistent stool or if they've got gas and bloating, diarrhea, constipation, then there's something wrong with their nutrition

program. And I want to try and resolve that first because everything else downstream in terms of their energy levels, et cetera, can be kind of tied into that. And that's pretty simple to do. I usually just send them a questionnaire, ask them what they're currently eating, whether or not they have any adverse effects to certain foods, and we just kind of clean that up and get started. I track everything. You mentioned what are your daily behaviors.

I haven't competed in six years. I still have a in six years. I still have a little Excel spreadsheet. Some people use a, you know, a phone app. I still think that tracking is really important because then you can at a glance discover what things you're short on. And my checklist includes sleep first and foremost. The 10 minute walks are very consistent with me and have been for years. After that, I'm looking at things like how many meals they consume that day and the type of those meals. And I ask about consistency in terms of their stool and that. It's one of the first things Shaw said to me when he got on the diet. He says, you know, I'm regular. So I've been regular in years. And that's, you know, it's good. Plus,

he said i'm hungry i think a lot of bodybuilders and a lot of people that are lifting uh think it's normal to have like gas and to you know be blowing up the toilet all the time yeah and it's especially common in in the physique figure bikini world that they feed them foods that are supposed to tons and tons and tons that's not normal though not normal though, right? It's not normal. It's not necessarily to some degree unhealthy. You do need some fiber and a diverse group at that. And your body will to a point adapt.

When you introduce a whole lot of fiber immediately, you're going to get a lot of gas. And then you're better off introducing a smaller amount gradually over time until you get a reasonable amount. And the type of fibers that you use can matter in terms of your response for gas. But that's one of the things that I manage. I get texts every day from clients that are talking about whether or not they were bloated on certain foods. So we manage that by doing elimination and then reintroduction of foods that they can handle. But that's kind of the main things that are on the checklist,

things that I do every day. I try and get the bulk of my work done in the morning. Recently I mentioned I took the CSCX exam for the NSCA, and the only way for me to do that was just to go to bed an hour, an hour and a half, maybe two hours earlier at night, and then get up in the morning and read their textbook in the morning. I do the same thing when I'm writing. I'll have to get up early in the morning and write. And so I try and get that out of the way because once the day starts to progress, it just gets away from you. You start getting pulled all different

directions as you know. So those are probably the big things that I focus on is just the consistency of the sleep, the nutrition and the 10 minute walks and vitamin D supplementation, magnesium supplementation. Those are things that I do every single day and I check those off on my little checklist. It's not a lot, but if you do it consistently, you benefit. The things I hear the most are, you know, like I hear a lot of excuses, you know, I can't eat good because of, you know, I travel. I can't eat good because I have kids. I can't eat you. So you travel, you have kids, right? You, you have, you have a busy lifestyle. What are some things that you've done to kind of like safeguard yourself against eating convenient foods that probably wouldn't be great for you?

This is huge. It's probably the second thing that I tackle with my clients is logistics. Just trying to make things, I say, simple, sensible, and sustainable. Because we know, as I said, the compliance is the science. And if I can get them to stay on the program, then I'm much more likely and they're much more likely to obtain the benefits that they're reaching for. If I assign them or prescribe them a particular nutrition plan or exercise plan that they cannot comply with, that's doomed for failure from the get-go. So, you know, I was in 10 countries and 40 states in the last 18 months and I have a huge schedule still ahead of me. I'll be in Dubai this year, China this year, Moscow this year. I've got seminars almost every weekend. I enrolled in

UNLV. I want to get my master's degree there. You learned to speak Russian and Chinese. Yeah, before I went. I woke up an hour early every morning. And I do have two kids and I walk them to school and pick them up every day and I go to classes myself. And so, yeah, I'm very, very busy. I run a few businesses, you know, between kids, clients, companies and all of that. I stay busy. But I find that one of the reasons I'm able to do all the things I do is because I plan. And meal planning seems to, especially for someone, you know, in my position that eats

a decent amount of food and likes to train, I need to do something that's convenient. It saves me time and it saves me money. And so one of the things I do is I meal prep and because it's, it's huge for success, whether you're dieting or gaining weight. And so I'll just prep my meals in advance. And when I travel, uh, Friday or Thursday morning, when I left the house, uh I left the house, I would eat my meal and then I would use a thermos. Some people pack plastic containers into their bags and carry them around. I can't do the cold food or trying to hustle for a microwave somewhere to reheat it. I tried that for years. So now I just use a $20 thermos off of Amazon, a little 24-ounce thermos.

And I'll heat up two meals depending on the length of my trip. When I went to the UK, I took five. It was a 16-hour day between the layover and getting there. And those will stay hot for 14 hours or so if they're moist. When I put them in, I can get them through security as long as they're not water. They make me show them the food every time I have to open up the thermos and I just get there 10 minutes early. So I actually, I plan that now I don't have to eat airplane food. I don't have to, uh, or airport food. I don't have to get at room service wherever I land. I don't go run to a restaurant and wait. So I have more time and I

save money. Obviously when I went to Washington DC for the NSCA conference I was there for seven days I put 35 frozen meals into a Coleman cooler and I just put it on I checked it onto the plane so when I landed and I just just like a bag just like your normal luggage I was wheeling along all of my meals for the whole week and I stayed at a place with a fridge and a microwave same kind of thing I planned for Thor I got together with his agent some years ago when we started working together. I said, make sure that he stays at a hotel with a fridge and a microwave and make sure that he takes his meals along. Same thing with Shaw, coordinated with his wife to do grocery lists. Those guys are traveling to some weird spots too. And it's like,

they could get sick if they eat some random food. That's huge. You know, your stomach's your first line of defense for pathogens. And as you know, we had a discussion earlier. We want to share that with the group here. That those things happen, you know. And we talked about this. Some athletes get to, you know, Africa to compete in the World's Strongest Man and eat some local food or Brazil. You know, I hear it over and over again. Athletes that go down there, next thing you know, they got Montezuma's Revenge or eating something they shouldn't have eaten down there.

And they'd be really careful with that. So I take everything I need, even if it's just taking the items that you need to prepare. Everybody's seen the videos of me going to Costco and buying a refrigerator and a microwave and a rice cooker, along with all the food to take to Hawthorne Shaw because they stayed in a hotel that was, um, the host hotel for them at the Arnold strongman competition that didn't have any of those accommodations in the room. So I brought them all of those things. And then we would, uh, get, I'd get up at six o'clock in the morning and some, you know, this is in Columbus, Ohio in the middle of winter. And so it was snowing and I'm out there flipping steaks. And, uh, that's, if there was something more important than that, I'd be doing it for

them, but there isn't. And I feel the same way about my, my own nutrition and that of my clients that that's, you know, next to sleep. Secondarily is just the logistics of coordinating your meals. Meal prep's the number one, most important thing for success. And if you have a prepackaged, planned, prepared, uh, you know, Tupperwares in the fridge, or whether you use Jenny Craig or, you know, the vertical diet meals and whatever you choose, you know, even those programs, the, the shake for breakfast, shake for lunch and a sensible dinner, those were actually successful because they were consistent and they managed caloric intake. So I'll use, those are some of the methods that I use. I take my meals with me. I pre-prepare intake. So I'll use, those are some of the methods that I

use. I take my meals with me. I pre-prepare my meals. I'll take my thermos. So when I'm traveling, I'll take, if it's just a short trip for the weekend, I might just wrap a dozen meals in a towel and put them in my checked luggage with my clothing and have my dozen frozen meals there. And I'll pop them in my fridge and use the microwave in my hotel room when I get there. But that's all planned out for me. Today, Mark and I got here early. We worked out. We've done some podcasting.

We did a couple of training sessions. And all of our meals are here for us all day. And it takes us five minutes to prepare and eat. And it's certainly half the cost of traveling. Even if I have to go buy a rice cooker, it's certainly half the cost of traveling even if i have to to go buy a rice cooker it's cheaper um i think recently you may have seen uh it's at the world's uh strongest men doing um on the history channel yeah it's the name of the show that they're doing strongest man ever strongest man ever history yeah oh yeah all of those guys uh i think Nick Best showed a picture of his hotel room. He travels with his rice cooker.

I've since started using Costco's little Bibigo pre-cooked rice. I love those. They're amazing. Yes, they are. Yeah. We sell rice. I'm telling everybody to buy Costco's Bibigo rice. I'd love you to buy mine, but that thing is so convenient.

It's the right size. Ours is like six servings in one container. But it's really convenient. They take 90 seconds to heat up. You can travel anywhere with them because they don't need refrigerated. And you just pop one of those into, like if I've got a Monster Mash and I want to add extra calories, my Monster Mash might be 700 calories and the BB Go's are 300. I need about 5,000, between 4,000 and 5,000 calories a day.

So I'll eat four to five meals. And that's kind of how I prepare them. But Nick best travels with his rice cooker and he showed a picture of it on, on his Instagram. And I noticed that it was dented. It was crushed, which always happened to mine when I traveled with it, because you know how those airlines handle your baggage and hucking them around. So I had to laugh to see that, but that's what he does. He takes all of his meals with him. He's, he got together with me some time ago and then we went over the same kind of protocol for traveling, how to have what you need when you need it. And so he just cooks his own rice and, uh, and has all his meals on the road already prepared,

stays at a place with a little kitchenette, maybe like an extended stay. And I kind of got this because 10 years ago, this is, you know, I lived out of an extended stay for many, many months, uh, three months training with Flex and a few months training with Mark, uh, like for six months, I lived out, out of suitcases and an extended stay. And those were my accommodations. You know, I just went to Costco and loaded up on steaks and rice and, uh, a host of other things that I threw into my diet. And I had to meal prep every day. So that is huge. And if I can solve that problem for people, this firemen do it. Real estate agents who are, you know, driving around all day in their cars and have to eat out of their trunk.

prevent people from having to go to restaurants because we're, you know, we're not really very good at judging those calorie counts, um, as much as possible than, than I will. My business partner travels all the time. And so, and he's not very good at preparing. And so I had to actually show him, I had to take him to the airport and to restaurants, which restaurants to go to and which food items to pick so he could stay compliant. And he lost 30 pounds in 30 days just from making better choices. So it's really, it depends on someone's schedule, busy, uh, you know, moms and, and, uh, you know, dads who are, who have a tough schedule, they, uh, they need to, if they implement a plan like this, not only be more successful, but they'll save time and money. Yeah. And I've urged people to do this before on the show, but

you know, don't leave the house without a plan. You and I talked a little bit about eating schedule. Like what if you just ate the same four or five times every day and then you know where you're supposed to be on a given day. Cause you know, approximately your work schedule and it says, you know, you're going to eat at nine, you're going to eat at 12, you're going to eat at four, you're going to eat at seven. Just eat at those times every day and then adjust appropriately. However many meals you need to bring with you in accordance to your eating schedule, try your best to stay on track with that. You made a great example. You said you don't send your kid to school without a lunch. So when you leave the house in the morning, you know, you're not going to be back for eight or

nine or 10 hours and you have no meals, have a, have a plan for those two meals. Because what happens is, is if you get hungry, you're likely to eat more. Or if you go to a restaurant that, uh, to eat something that you like, you usually choose the restaurant based on what you're hungry for. Then food reward suggests you're going to eat more of it. Yeah. So those are two really difficult challenges. People who tend to eat the same things more often, uh, tend to be successful dieters. People tend not to go off their diet as often tend to be more successful dieters. Would you even call what you're doing a diet at this point? Because it doesn't seem like you don't, you know, you're not stressing about it. It's just what you do, right? Yeah. I like what your diet is, what you eat. It's not something

you go on and off. Yeah. The vertical diet to me, I hate using the word diet. I look at your diet as what you eat. It's not something you go on and off. Yeah. The vertical diet to me, I hate using the word diet. I just tried to provide, uh, the foods that I thought would give people the most energy, um, manage their hunger, provide them the micronutrients necessary to, to, you know, not suffer from, uh, nutrient deficiencies, easy to digest, you know, those kinds of things. So I kind of designed it around that necessarily. And you're, you're a hundred percent right that, you know, this isn't something that should be temporary. It should be a lifestyle. Yeah. No, it's like so crazy. I think for the past few weeks, I've been any night that I was underslept the next day, I would try to see how I felt. And I did notice like I would have cravings for food that I typically don't crave. Like I want some cookies and the brain fog and like it happens

all the time. So like when we were talking in the break room, you mentioned you haven't had pizza in like two months. Do you eat, do you even have cravings for those things or not really? Cause I'm able to eat a lot of calories and kind of need to because of my metabolism and my workload, you know, I train and lift heavy weights. I have a lot of muscle to because of my metabolism and my workload. I train, lift heavy weights, have a lot of muscle tissue. So my challenge is getting enough to eat. I have just the opposite problem is if I don't eat enough, I'm going to lose weight. When I manage clients who have a problem, who have to maintain a calorie deficit or can't eat as much as they want. And then I'm really focused on things like cravings and sodium and potassium. If I can get them to start salting their food and get adequate potassium a day, 4,700 milligrams,

and then you have to cobble that together from a host of different resources, they have fewer cravings. So that's one of the feedbacks that I get from my clients that are dieting is that I don't have cravings. I'm not, from my clients that are dieting is that I'm, I'm, uh, I don't have cravings. I'm not as ravenous or hungry. And then on the opposite side of the spectrum from my clients that are trying to gain weight, they tell me that, that they actually have an appetite. A guy like Shaw, he says, you know, I haven't been hungry in years because he, he's forced to eat enough food to maintain calories is the first most important thing that he has to get

in. And irrespective of, of what types of calories they are, if he doesn't eat enough, he's going to lose weight and that's going to compromise his strength potentially. So, uh, you know, on both ends of the spectrum, there's, there's small changes that you make to try and manage people's hunger. It's important whether you need to be hungry or whether you don't want to be hungry, you have to manage both of those things. What about the people that use the excuse of like mouth fatigue? Like I can't eat the same thing every single meal every single day. Yeah, there are folks that need some more variety.

I get that. And, you know, as a coach, you're going to want to give them more options. But also palate fatigue is something that will encourage you to eat less. So, you know, it has its pluses and minuses. Meal prep is still the best for those folks as well, because then you actually know the calorie intake that they're taking in. So they might have a lot of variety, but at least if you're managing the calorie count, you know, one day they might decide they want a burrito as long as you know what the total calories is in that burrito. You want to focus on proteins first for satiation, obviously, and you can get that from a variety of different sources. So that's the hard part is everybody's different. They're not going to like

the same foods all the time. I've just turned in terms of success, in terms of looking at what's been measured, meal preps, number one, and people who tend to maintain consistent habits the more cheat days people have the less likely they are to comply that's it's just the way the math works so the best thing we can do is try and find enough variety for them but manage closely if they choose which restaurant the likelihood that they'll stay in compliance is pretty slim because restaurant calories can be off up to 50 percent labels can be off by 20%. We choose inaccurately by off to up to 30 or more percent in terms of just the portion size. Uh, and we can't see things, you know, oils used in certain foods that are going to add a lot of calories without our, you know,

our ability to, to sense that or, or to calculate that. So that's, that's one of the challenges. I do have people that want more variety. That's why I added an extra menu to my vertical diet is because one of the colleges reached out to us and said, Hey, our girls don't want eggs and they won't eat red meat. And so I had to, we had to create a whole sideline menu. And some of it might not be fully vertical compliance, but that takes a back seat to the calories that they want. I think something important to understand is that you're not saying goodbye to certain foods forever. So in the case of someone who's having like a palate fatigue,

they want something different from their meals, then just set it up so you can have something different. Audible your way into it, audible your way out of it. Maybe make some adjustments to your training. Maybe if you want to have pizza, you want to eat some extra calories, maybe have, uh, have it surrounded by an extra hard training session, you know, um, just, you know, just, uh, try to always realize there's, uh, dues that need to be paid to kind of cancel out whatever it is that you did. If it is your goal to try to continue to lose weight and to stay on that path. But I don't think anybody would argue that having a couple slices of pizza every week would be a problem or eating burrito every week or eating ice cream every week.

Or even having a drink. Yeah. The quantity matters. The dose matters. There's many paths to the same destination. And all diets work when they're strictly adhered to. And you can get there from a variety of different ways, whether it's keto or intermittent fasting or high carb.

And it doesn't really matter. You're just going to have to exercise some sort of control and consistency over that. I like to measure. And that way you can make adjustments long term by just taking an ounce out here or a quarter cup there. That seems to be a better way to kind of titrate down the food quantity. And if your bad food leaves you down a bad path, then maybe you need to stay away from it for longer too. Yeah, that's true as well. Whether or not you just use a smaller amount.

Mark and I talked earlier about the fact that some people, if they eat carbs, they eat too many. And that's a good if they eat carbs, they eat too many. And that's a good reason to restrict carbs. And some people who intermittent fast just naturally eat fewer calories because of the shorter time window and a better satiation that people seem to be able to get from that type of diet. And for those people, I think that's a great option. So a lot of different choices. It's just, at some point you're going to have to track it. If you want to make progress progress longterm, it'd be no different than coming to the gym and adding one rep or adding two and a half pounds to a bar and to progressively

over time, be able to build strength. Um, nutrition is kind of the same thing. If you can, if you can track it closely enough and make small adjustments over time, it Nutrition is kind of the same thing. If you can track it closely enough and make small adjustments over time, it could be any kind of food that you enjoy. The caveat to that is, is long-term, I don't want to create micronutrient deficiencies. Some people go on a particular diet and then within 30, 60, 90 days, these deficiencies start to manifest. And I've talked about some of that in the dieting industry with the figure physique bikini girls, when they start over-restricting and they don't get adequate iodine in their diet or adequate biotin for skin, hair, and nails, they get a suppressed thyroid, then their hair

starts falling out. Those kinds of things happen just because of nutrient deficiencies and they get ravenously hungry because they're not putting any sodium or don't have adequate potassium in their diet. There's all, there are little things that make a huge difference, particularly long-term. I remember when LeBron James, a couple of years ago, was talking about how he went on the vegan diet during that summer and he lost some weight and he was talking about how he felt light on his feet. At the time, I wanted to do a video talking about how to be cautious because being light on your feet doesn't have anything to do with his diet, but being light on your feet and losing weight is, in many cases, for an athlete that's that lean and has

that high of a demand results in loss of strength and potentially compromises your puts you in a position to get injured and sure enough in pre-season that year he got injured and turned right around and started eating more food and put back on the 10 pounds you need that you know as an athlete you need the weight now maybe he could have done that with a properly executed vegan diet and supplementation. That remains to be seen. But nonetheless, that's my concern. When people lose size and strength, especially with athletes, then it compromises performance. Yeah.

I like how when you were mentioning the micronutrients, you weren't talking about just taking a multivitamin or something like that. You tackle it mainly through food, correct? Yeah. We saw that. The Linus Pauling era showed us with those antioxidants, the vitamin E and vitamin A megadosing, that there's toxicities that can occur. Same thing is true with calcium. Some studies show that when you eat calcium from food, it can decrease cardiovascular disease. When you take it for the supplement, it can increase it.

So there's cofactors within food that help metabolize and moderate those doses. I think always better to get from food. Sometimes it's really hard to get vitamin D3 from food, and it's hard to get enough magnesium from food. It's like vitamin D in dairy maybe? Yeah, a little bit in there. Not a lot and so and it can be depending on the territory that you live in you know if you're not getting

a lot of sun you could have a greater demand but i'm definitely uh you know big on trying to get as much as you can from whole foods nutrient-dense food a broad range of foods i don't cut out any entire food groups or any macro groups and I think that also making sure that those nutrients are highly bioavailable or easy to absorb because some foods that you eat, you know, talk about iron in particular, heme iron from meat is going to have a lot higher bioavailability than say a vegetable iron from spinach. So there's a big difference. Okay. In the beginning, you actually mentioned something that I'm curious about because obviously there are people that don't live in sunny California, right? They can't get, even getting enough sun, they can get outside and get some sun, but you mentioned artificial

light. Do you see that that has any like beneficial uses or? You know, I've seen literature on both sides. Juvie, I think Jovee, Juvie, is that your group? Juv, Juv that juve juve yeah they've got some pretty good science and behind their their product uh it can be expensive but just any as much light exposure as you can as early in the day and if you have to to use that some people go do tanning beds for there's some that that give you a greater benefit for tanning and a lesser, depending on the type of bed. But it is important. I lived in Seattle for two decades,

and a lot of people up there have seasonal affective disorders or antidepressants, and that's just because of lack of light. Sunlight in particular, vitamin D3 is a nice supplement that it's better to get from the sun. It's almost like the whole food option of vitamin D3. It's manufactured by the skin, cholesterol in the skin for exposure to the sunlight. And it seems to provide additional benefits if it's from the sun. I actually recommend that people go out and get exposed to sunlight whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Obviously, the dose matters and your skin type matters. But I think light is a huge part of this whole plan because of its effect on sleep and melatonin especially. Those are huge. Any other supplements? I know you mentioned like D3 and magnesium. Is there any other like vitamins or minerals or supplements? That's kind of where I stop in terms of vitamins and minerals.

They had the, I think it was the physician's health study where they looked at multivitamin consumption. I think it was an epidemiology study, to be honest with you. And they didn't see any improved health outcomes, reduction of all-cause mortality from whether you took a multivitamin or not. Now, the author of the study, he says he still takes a multivitamin because why not? That having been said, I don't think that, you know, potentially you can expose yourself to toxicities, as I mentioned, and some of those vitamins, you know, the artificial ones probably aren't giving you the benefit that you think they are. Having said that, there are some supplements that are beneficial and proven, you know,

scientifically proven to give you some performance benefit. Obviously creatine is one that can work. And it's going to work better for people who eat less red meat. The more red meat, if you're eating two pounds of red meat a day, you're getting your five grams of creatine. Whether it comes from a supplement or it comes from a food source your body utilizes it the same and so you find that and people who who get enough salt a part of the benefit of creatine in addition to the fossil creatine system is just the the retention the intracellular retention of fluid and the way that that helps with with the muscles as well so um if you're getting adequate red meat and adequate sodium, then you'll probably get lesser benefit. But if you're not, then creatine certainly works.

Beta-alanine is another one that definitely infers some benefit. HMB might have some benefit as well. Caffeine obviously has been shown to provide some benefit, although there is some attenuation over time. You get a little less benefit. You don't really like caffeine much, right? You know, I'm not a big fan for a few reasons. I think people use it as a crutch to compensate for poor hydration,

poor sleep, and poor nutrition. They get to the gym and they're tired. That, to me, is a problem. You don't fix that there. It's just like I talked about. You wake up in the morning, get exposed to light so that you can sleep better at night. I feel the same thing when you come to the gym.

When I go to the gym, I'm excited. That's my favorite time of day. I love to lift. I don't want to be there tired and do it begrudgingly because I feel it's an obligation. That's not why I'm there. And the only reason to go to the gym is to, you know, to get better. And if your performance sucks, if you're not having adequate sleep or hydration or nutrition, and you're not able to lift, you know, within a reasonable range of what you've done historically, you're not going to create the stimulus that's going to provide the adaptation.

If you can bench two and a quarter for 10 on a good day and only two and a quarter for seven on a bad day, about two and a quarter for seven is not going to give you the long-term benefits you're looking for. You've got to come there prepared to be able to do the two and a quarter for 10 consistently over time. So it can become 12 and then eventually 240 for eight. And then, you know, it has to, has to work like that. That only happens with proper recovery. So do you think the pre-workout stuff that people are taking, maybe it's not really doing for them what they think it's doing for them? Yep. I don't think it's giving them a little boost while they're tired, but that's not,

I think it does. I think it acts as a stimulant. And I think it, it's a crutch. It compensates for the deficiencies that they brought to the gym with them. That's my concern with it. Not the caffeine's bad for you. It can be a good performance and answer.

But if you're, if it's taking you from 40% to 80%, when you should have showed up at 99%, that's a problem, you know, and then there are obviously some adverse effects with that. 40% to 80% when you should have showed up at 99%. Yeah. That's a problem. You know, and then there are obviously some adverse effects with that. Some people end up getting diarrhea, you know, increases peristalsis. So your, your intestines are moving your food through too fast.

And so you might get some mineral malabsorption. Obviously you just mentioned that when you tried to come off of caffeine that, you know, you get the headaches and those kinds of things. Five days in, no coffee. Yeah. And I'm not telling people they have to get off of coffee. I'm just saying that it doesn't replace good sleep, good hydration, good nutrition. Don't use it as a crutch.

Also, if you're a person that works out at night, if you take your pre-workout at night, that can also mess up your sleep too. Oh, 100%. You don't want to take caffeine too late in the day. I recommend iodine in my diet, whether it's iodized salt or whether it's cranberry juice or sea kelp, because you sweat out iodine, and if you're not getting a replacement source, then that's going to affect your thyroid, and of course that's your metabolism and everything else. But I don't encourage people to take too much of it too late in the day for that very same reason. It might increase your metabolism.

I've had some people complain that they weren't able to get to sleep, and so we do it earlier in the day. The only other supplements I'll chase might be for specific reasons. If I have somebody present with elevated liver enzymes like AST, ALT, then NAC, N-acetylcysteine, and Tudca, T-U-D-C-A. I won't even try and pronounce the name of that. I've seen both in myself and in many athletes that I've worked with, they can bring their AST, ALT numbers down, cut them in half,

and I can only say within 30 days because that's when the blood tests are typically done, on myself and people who I do testing before and after. If you don't have some sort of bookend, you don't have a starting point, do testing before and after. If you don't have some sort of bookend, you don't have a starting point, it's really hard to tell whether or not you had any improvement by just getting a blood test later. So that is a good combination that helps with that. I've also found fruit to help with that of all things. I've seen that eating fruit can help improve liver function, increase body temperature and metabolism. The studies confirm that. So I've seen some benefit from that if you don't want to jump right into a supplement.

And it's important for appetite, particularly for strength athletes, football players, strongmen, powerlifters, even bodybuilders. It's important, particularly for those that are using performance-enhancing drugs, will have an adverse effect on their liver the liver will start to get affected by what is essentially a poison to it, it will shut your appetite down when you utilize fruit with that I've seen people's appetites improve now certainly with Tudkin NAC it's significant and immediate and if I can restore their appetite then of course

performance is the benefit of that. Your appetite goes up when you take those supplements? If it was adversely affected prior, which is why I wouldn't really recommend it for everyone all the time. Right. I think there's a, you know, if you don't have a deficiency, then whatever supplements you take, unless you were talking about some sort of exogenous performance enhancing drug, you know, more isn't better since anything with sodium too. I recommend people

salt their meals and take salt before and after training. Um, and not just me, the ISSN recommends this and recommends that 500 milligrams per liter of water, 500 milligrams before and after training is kind of their recommendation. Um, if, uh, you know, if you take too much, you're going to piss it out your ass. That's the side effect of that. So it's not a more is better scenario. And I know people are concerned. I talk a lot about sodium. We've been over and over it. But the fact of the matter is, is that we talked earlier about how sleep apnea could have a 20 millimole difference in your systolic blood pressure. Hypothyroidism, low thyroid, it's just a study they did on women the hypothyroid women versus

normal thyroid women and the difference in their blood pressure could be up to 20 millimoles these are significant with sodium it may vary as much as two to seven millimoles even in salt sensitive individuals that's a small percentage of the population who are hypertensive when you introduce adequate potassium that effect completely goes away wow And when you get below three grams a day of sodium, it has an adverse effect. It increases all cause mortality, even in heart patients. That's what the research suggests. So there's a safe range, probably three to six grams a day for just about anyone. And you go beyond six grams a day.

And for people who are non-hypertensive, it doesn't have any adverse effect. Your body will flush it out. Uh, so, but I think potassium is the key component that, that most people don't pay attention to. Fewer than 2% of the population is estimated by the NSCA's research suggests that it's getting adequate potassium a day. And that has so many different positive effects that it's, it's worth looking, uh, you know, I provide a specific list of foods. You kind of got to cobble to them. You got to be deliberate about getting enough potassium. That's why I have a daily potato in there. As we mentioned for potassium, I have a daily orange in there and there are 400 milligrams of potassium, maybe two, um, you know, yogurt can provide

another four to 600 milligrams of potassium salmon. We talked red meat, a hundred milligrams of potassium per ounce of spinach, 700 milligrams of potassium is a, we talked red meat, a hundred milligrams of potassium per ounce of spinach, 700 milligrams of potassium is a whole host of things that you can put in there that are part of my foundation that, uh, and the reason why they're in there. Okay. Yeah. I think, um, you know, looking at food as the ultimate supplement might be the way to go looking at food as like a vitamin or a mineral might be a great way to go. We were talking earlier about like a potato having a thousand milligrams of potassium. Yeah.

Like rather than looking at that as being like, you know, somebody who doesn't eat a lot of carbs and might think that's a bad thing. It's like, well, no, that's a great source of potassium for you. That that's going to be something that's going to help you.

That's going to be something that's going to assist you. And you're looking at all the different foods that you start to add up during the day. You were talking earlier about a checklist and you start to check all these things off the list. You're like, okay, did I have enough vitamin C? You know, then you kind of look at the different foods you ate. Did I have enough potassium? Did I have enough sodium? And when you start to add all these things up at the end of the day, you end up feeling better. You end up sleeping better. You end up recovering from your workouts better. And we talked about steamroller. We talked also about about satiety and if you look at a satiety index and that's the you know how full you remain after eating certain foods uh potato and orange are at the very top of that index yeah and so there's multiple benefits reasons kind of reasons

why i selected the foods i selected along with being low FODMAP. So you have less of the digestion problems, but because they're also really have a high nutrient value and high satiety for, for folks. When you're dieting in particular, you're restricting calories. You have a, I think you have a less opportunity to get all of these micronutrients. And if you don't fulfill all of your micronutrient needs because you're doing an 80-20 or if it's your macros, you don't have a lot of room to move. You kind of have to pick foods if you're only taking in 1,600 calories. And I don't like the idea of over-restriction,

but if someone has to create a deficit to lose weight, I want to make sure that I get the most value out of every single calorie that's in there. So I throw red meat in for the iron and B12 for energy. You know, it's hard to get that. I don't want to take that in supplements. I want to get that from food. You know, so there's a whole host of things. And the, the egg yolks for biotin and choline, we talked about hair falling out, skin, hair, and nails, choline for, for liver health. You know, I've got athletes I work with that have fatty liver disease because they've gone too long at too heavy a weight and have elevated blood sugars.

One of the ways to effectively cure fatty liver disease, obviously you want to lose some weight, but you've got to get choline and B12 and folate into your system. And that helps prevent or helps cure the fatty liver disease and keep it in. So that's the reason why I pick the foods I pick. I think they have greater health benefits and more macro calories first than macronutrients and then maybe micronutrients. Uh, I think they all kind of,

they have to, you can't just, you know, create it necessarily just a hierarchy and exclude one as, as being less important than the other. They all kind of go together. Like it's important for everybody to understand if you're overeating or if you're undereating. So if you're obese or you're dieting, there's probably a huge likelihood if you're not paying attention to the vitamins and minerals that you're eating from your food, that you are nutrient deficient and that your low calorie diet probably isn't going to work for very long because it's going to be hard to sustain because you're going to have cravings because you don't have the nutrients in your body. And a lot of times I don't think people realize that even obesity is a nutrient deficient disease. So I think you're thinking like, oh, like you're eating more food because you accumulated body weight, but you're filling up your cup for your calories.

body weight, but you're filling up your cup for your calories. You're filling up your cup for the amount of food that you ate, but you're not filling up your cup for the amount of vitamins and minerals that your body needs for that day. And same thing when you go on a really harsh diet that you're not, and you're not paying attention to those nutrients that you mentioned. Yeah. And, and having a lot of body fat, I mentioned the fatty liver disease. So on one end, you got the metabolic adaptation and all those deficiencies, potentially micronutrient deficiencies talked about resulting in, you know, the, you got the metabolic adaptation and all those deficiencies, potentially micronutrient deficiencies. Talked about resulting in, you know,

the female triad, I think they call it, with the amenorrhea and anemia and those issues that come with the lack of iron and lack of calories in general. Lack of B12 for energy. They always cut out red meat.

They cut out dairy. They cut out salt. They cut out fruit. And there's so many, and they cut out eggs, eggs whole eggs they're eating egg whites and a dollop of peanut butter so there goes all the micronutrients that's going to keep the hair on their head and to keep their thyroid functioning and then you know their coach gives them some thyroid medication to compensate for that problem a thyroid medication doesn't fix an iodine deficiency that's the problem and iodine is important for so many other things than just thyroid deficiency. So that goes on and on. And then on the other end

of the spectrum, you've got your, you know, your, your fatty liver disease, your metabolic syndrome from people that have eaten too much pizza, pasta, pancakes, and now they're partitioning nutrients into fat storage. And we used to think that fat was dormant in the body. And now we know that there's actually a whole entire hormonal cascade that occurs with fat. It releases, I think, dipokines, cytokine, that's leptin and a host of other hormones. It actually increases insulin, which suppresses SHBG and gives you more free testosterone, which is not too great because then it gets converted into estrogen because of the fatty tissue converting your testosterone into estrogen. So it's like compounds, like the snowball of a problem. And so, you know,

that's when Hofthor came to me, he had elevated HA1C and he had elevated rested blood sugar, fasting blood sugar. And so we took weight off of him. He was 335. We brought him down to, or 435. We brought him down to 395 and fixed, you know, with the CPAP and the vitamin D3 and changed up his diet. And his HA1C came down and his blood sugars came down. Now he was 455, the world's strongest man. And his blood test showed his HA1C at 5.1,

which is better than mine, by the way. And I'm a lot leaner than he is, older, I'd say. And his fasting glucose was 83 and his inflammation marker C-reactive protein was under one. I think it's like 0.6 or something like that. So, you know, he's doing quite well in that regard because he went back up. First of all, he got rid of the problem. Then when you back up, we kept choline and biotin, B12 and folate in his diet. And we took him back up without the pizza, pasta, pancakes. And he was throughout that process. I think it's the reason why he was able to add on more muscle is because now the nutrition that he's eating, his body's partitioning it into muscle instead of fat.

Did you happen to catch when he was on ESPN and they asked him about anabolic steroids? I did. Yeah. A real uncomfortable moment. It's unfortunate that the news media is still caught up in that whole charade. I thought it was great the way he handled it though. I thought it was great that he answered the question and he said, yeah, I use them. Yeah. And I said that in my rant, if you want to be healthy, don't compete. And really what I do behind the scenes is try and mitigate damage. I understand. I lived it. I've been there and there's ways to do it that, that are less stress on the body and

position you to be more successful. And I've done both. I've done it wrong on both ends of the spectrum. I've dieted incorrectly down to, you know, 4% body fat to, to stand on stage in a bodybuilding show. And I've done, you know, the gallon of milk a day and the dirty bulk to get up to well over 300 pounds. And I've seen through monthly blood tests, how it would affect my health. And so I was able to make, uh, decisions that, that, uh, optimize that. Cause I kept doing this. I did this for 10 or 30 years since 1986,

started getting blood tests in 1990, 1991, uh, and all throughout the last 10 years of my career. So I was able to see how my body responded to which diet I used and obviously my body composition. And now I try and apply these same methods to my athletes and they've responded accordingly. And through their blood tests shows that there's better ways to do this on both ends of the spectrum. So all of your athletes do blood tests, right? Yeah. I encourage all of them to do it. Now an ordinary you know dad bod or soccer mom doesn't want to throw 500 or 400 at a comprehensive blood panel and um the one i do is pretty comprehensive it's about 350 bucks so it's not cheap um i'll encourage them just to start on on a program first get a good you know

nutrition program and sleep and exercise program. And then if after 30 days or 60 days, they don't respond accordingly, they're having difficulties, then maybe there's an underlying problem that the blood test might be able to, to identify. So it's not something that's, that's required. Athletes, you know, you're, you're trying to wring out every percentage possible. And if, if I don't know that, you know, Brian Shaw comes in, he's got a 25 vitamin D 25 hydroxy same with Dan Green, you know, much like myself, that is pretty significant when your vitamin D is, is well below the normal range. That should be up around 50 to 60. Um, and that matters for, you know, for calcium absorption.

It seems to matter for muscle. It has a whole host of different benefits that if I can remedy that right away, I can get some significant results. Same with the blood sugars. If I see that they've got problems with fasted glucose or HA1C, I got to fix that ASAP. They're not going to be building muscle efficiently. So the blood tests can be huge. Most of the problems, like if somebody, I get this with firemen that are young guys come in with a 250 testosterone count just because of loss of sleep. So, you know, this isn't to say that if someone takes a blood test and they present with, you know, hypothyroidism or hypogonadism that they need to run down into the HRT clinic and start to get shots.

It's just to say that once they remedy their sleep or lose a little bit of weight, these things start to fix themselves. Maybe some of them are over cardio. That will cause a suppression of thyroid as well or just lack of iodine, excess body weight, a host of those things. So generally speaking, the vast majority of people who do present with some of these problems can make significant progress in the absence of supplementation or hormone therapy. You know, well, I don't want to touch too much on the topic of sleep, but I'm curious what you have to say to this or solutions because there are a lot of people that listen in that are shift workers like nurses or they work nights and they literally can't avoid that because of the nature of their work. Yeah.

How can they do things to get the best out of their current situations? Let's say this. Sleeping three hours here and three hours there is not optimal. If that's the current plan, the goal should be to get seven to nine hours straight. I mentioned the study on the soccer players. I think they were Korean soccer players. Whether they got to bed at 10 o'clock at night or three o'clock in the morning, if they got a consistent seven to nine hours, they had equivalent performance. And so really what they have to try and design is, is if they get home at 7am, they worked a night shift of 10 to six or 11 to 7am. When they get home, they need to create a window that they sleep rather than trying to go to bed for three hours,

wake up and then nap later in the day. And that's going to take controlling the environment. First and foremost, the light that's coming in through the window, you have to use blackout blinds. Secondly, the noise of your neighbor's lawnmower, you're going to have to use some sort of earphones. I use the ones that are the backpack blower from Home Depot. I use those, and it just cuts out all the noise. I didn't bring them with me, and my flight landed at 1 a.m. I got to the hotel room, and I went to sleep. And sure enough, at 5 a.m., the neighbors upstairs in the hotel woke up and they got two kids and

they're just running around and zipping all over the place. And so I didn't get back to sleep. So here I am preaching about sleep and I was, I was unable to control my environment. I feel like at this point I need an entire helmet because I have, I have like an eye mask on, I have a breathe right strip on, I got mouth tape on and I got earplplugs in. It's like I need a whole thing to go over my entire head. Got to invent that. Yeah. Sleep helmet. You know, some of my athletes will sleep in separate rooms if they've got kids or, you know, I try and encourage them, of course, to keep the pets out of the bed.

If your child is sleeping with you and the child moves or squawks, which they all do, I've got a five-year-old and a seven-year-old, I get it, you know. But if they move, you come out of deep sleep. And it may not be enough such that you really remember or recognize it specifically, but your sleep cycle got interrupted. And if a dog moves or something and hits you in the middle of the night, it's going to pull you out of REM sleep. And you may not even think about it, but the quality matters. So seven to nine hours. So if you get home in the morning after a night shift, you've got to try and see if you can commit that period of time. I know that's challenging for folks, but that's the best solution. You have to understand you're talking to a guy who had a garbage can next to his bed.

Oh, my goodness. For what reason? Goodness. He doesn't like For what reason? Goodness. He doesn't like, he doesn't like when I talk about this. Why isn't there any like edit button

over here? You know, like that little beep and when somebody drops the phone. So he didn't have to get up to use the bathroom. Oh my God.

Flex Wheeler Talk about dedication. Flex had us drinking a ton of water and so I was getting up two, three times a night to go pee. And so eventually I just grabbed one of those Rubbermaid kitchen garbage cans and set it next to the bed and said, fuck it.

I'm not going to get up and go to the bath. Did anyone sleep with you? No. I was at a hotel training with Flex every day for months down in San Jose. The worst thing is one morning I forgot to pour it out. And the cleaning ladies came in to change the bedding and clean the room, and I felt really bad about that. You know, something interesting on that note,

sleep apnea will cause you not to release antidiuretic hormone, and so you will get up and pee more often throughout the night. Antidiuretic hormone will prevent the kidneys from making urine. And it seems that if you remedy the sleep apnea and you still have an issue there, sodium will increase antidiuretic hormone and may prevent you from getting up to pee as often or let you go longer without having to get up. I had luck with that recently. I'd take three thermotabs, which is about 500 milligrams of sodium before bed. And I find that I can sleep longer now. I can get, you know, go six straight hours before I have

to get up and go pee and then go back to bed and try and get the other couple of hours. So it's, it sounds counterintuitive, but it, it's, it's, that's how it works. That's the. What's the deal with cholesterol? I mean, we get asked questions all the time. People are always asking me about my cholesterol with eating meat and eggs and stuff. I get a lot of questions about this and it is something that they want to pay attention to. A lot of folks will come in, they've got issues with total cholesterol or LDL. The ones that are worst, which is unmanageable, are the people that are taking performance-enhancing drugs almost always have an adverse effect, particularly Winstroll, Tren, and SARMs. SARMs will crash your cholesterol.

It will drop your HDL down to damn near nothing. I'm on all the things you just mentioned. But I often have people, I'll have some people say, Stan, you know, I've been on your diet, and I just got a blood test, and my cholesterol is whacked. What do you have to say about that? Well, send me your results. And sure enough, their HDL is like 20 and their triglycerides are 120.

I'm like, how's that SARM treating you? Oh, yeah. I've been using them. Then they tell me their cycle afterwards. First, it's the vertical diet and then it's, oh, no. I got some labs to show you later. Yeah. A few things about that. You at dave feldman's work uh he's done a lot of work with cholesterol and he can manipulate

his numbers just with in a very short period of time just with a simple diet change i think he took his ldls from damn near i'm gonna say 300 270 or something now one one thing he points out i think that's great. And you've pointed this out to me when you've been helping me with my blood work is that it's just a marker of health, you know, so it's not the only, so let's keep an eye on it. Let's make sure that's in a reasonable range. But look, you're, you know, this is in better range. This is better. So if you have a lot of things, you know, in your favor that are health markers, then you're probably okay, right?

Yeah. And we'll talk a little bit on the surface of this. I don't want to pretend to be an expert on this, but I'll give you, because I do try and help clients remedy that or improve that. He ate white bread and processed ham for seven days and brought his LDL from 270 something down to, I think it was 70. It was ridiculous. But there are some better indicators of cardiovascular disease. It seems that HDL, having adequate HDL, is a good indicator. I think it was the Framingham study that showed that people with elevated LDLs had an increased risk of cardiovascular disease

unless they had HDLs in the 60s, 50s to 60s, in which case they didn't show the increased effect. I like to see a more improved triglyceride to HDL ratio, something 1 to 1 or less than 2 to 1. But I can't say that I can put my finger on that. HDLs are pretty important. But generally speaking, and some people, they'll have familial hypercholesterolemia and have high cholesterol as well. It's important to pay attention to it.

I think sleep affects it. I think thyroid function, I've seen definitely the research suggests that if you have inadequate thyroid, hypogonadal, your cholesterol will rise. And so you want to pay attention to that. If you have a high TSH or you have a low free or free T4 or free T3, that will have an adverse effect on your cholesterol numbers. Ultimately, if somebody's really concerned, you'd want them to get in and get a CAC, coronary artery calcification scan. It's kind of the gold standard now to be able to test and look and see if you do have any calcification. It's kind of good to get one.

It's like $70. You know what's funny about that is I had one done. They make it complicated to get because I don't think they want people to get one of those. It's become more and more common. I think I paid $1,500 to get one seven years ago when the technology first came out. Don't quote me on it, but I think that that is

what it cost me. And more recently, paid $70. It's good to get one of those as a baseline. Again, I talked earlier about testing before and after, so you have some way to bookend this. If you have a CAC score, let's say of a hundred and then, you know, two years later, it's 105, that's good. That's a slow progression, right? But if you have a CAC score of 102 years later, it's 200, you have a problem. And so I think we kind of got to look at the trend. It's a, it's a great idea to get that test. It hope it doesn't give people some superficial sense of relief to keep taking their SARMs if they go in and get a CAC scan, but they're only in their 30s, so they don't have calcification yet. What's the other test you can get in your neck or something, right? The artery test or something?

Yeah, yeah. I'm forgetting the name of that one, but that one's even a little more superficial. It's a, it's an ultrasound, I think, isn't it on the neck? I'm talking out of turn here. Cause I don't specifically remember, but I know what you're talking about. The carotid. It's pretty low. It doesn't have, let me try to think of here, it doesn't have as much. You worry about those scans. What am I trying to say? I know what you're trying to say, like radiation. Radiation, yeah. I'm sorry.

I was thinking about too many things at once here. But it's pretty low in terms of the amount of radiation that you get from a CAC scan. There's other scans that doctors give that can have 200 times the amount of radiation that you get from a CAC scan. There's other scans that doctors give that can have 200 times the amount. But I think it's about the equivalence of a mammogram. So it's pretty small. That's the gold standard. If anybody's concerned, I would have them do that. You can calculate your VLDL. That's kind of what they call your remnant cholesterol. And that's the difference between total cholesterol, LDLs and HDLs. And if that's under, say, 17, it seems to be that's a pretty safe range. This is some information that comes from Dr. Ford Brewer, who's a good preventative medicine doctor and MD who used to run the

preventative medicine clinic out of Johns Hopkins. Someone else who's really good at this stuff, if you need somebody to consult to, is Dr nadolski uh i think is he with barbell medicine or is he with rp strength i think he's with rp strength spencer nadolski yeah and he's he kind of specializes in obesity and cholesterol uh quite smart on on this stuff so you know if if you want a better answer than than you know the meat neck bodybuilder guy uh then that's where you're going to find it if you're going to actually, um, but I'll, I just wanted to expose what some of the worst offenders are and how you can crush your, your cholesterol. And that's certainly going to be, uh, those medications, the Winstroll and, and Tran and, and SARMs in particular. People think

SARMs are safe and, but they crash your cholesterol. And also maybe your cholesterol, somebody's cholesterol is not great because they're eating a lot of just junk, right? They're eating sugar and fat and they're, you know, they're over-consuming calories. That'll shoot your triglycerides up. Yeah. Carbohydrates, sugars in particular, that'll shoot your triglycerides through the roof. So you want to control those. You want to control your, you know, and a lot of the stuff with cholesterol really is, is kind of, it's probably predicated by diabetes or markers of prediabetes, just high HA1C and blood sugars. If you can get control of those things with something as simple as maybe 10 minute walks, possibly a can reduce carbohydrates. Now, the calorie deficit itself and losing body fat will provide an equivalent benefit. I mentioned that in the McDonald's diet. The teacher that did the McDonald's diet with his students, he lost 40 pounds in, I think it was 40 days or two months, and he walked daily.

And his blood pressure improved, his blood blood sugars improved and his cholesterol improved even eating big macs every day he just limited it 18 i like this i don't want to be i just don't want to be a zealot about what type what manner in which you choose to reach that loss of weight it seems that and it doesn't necessarily mean you have to lose a thousand pounds seven percent loss of body weight whether you're 300 pounds or 220 pounds seems to provide significant health benefits. And so the 300 pounder would have to lose 20 pounds. Mark and I know when we were 300 pounds, you'd lose 20 or 30 pounds in the first month if you just cleaned your shit up and started walking and actually paid attention a little bit to your nutrition. And we didn't do

anything extraordinary. I didn't do anything more than than walk i remember it was like two or three weeks after he competed and he was like i weighed 260 or 270 or whatever i was like holy yeah i was damn near 300 and he was like i'm running stairs and i cut back on this and i was like holy and the stairs was a progression i started just walking i was like i gotta do something three 10 minute walks after each meal daily and and that was all i did for cardio and i just cleaned up my diet. I stopped eating massive amounts of calories that I was eating. And then eventually I started sprinting stairs. You know, I'm curious about that actually, Sam, because you were 300, but even when you were 300, you were like a jacked 300, right? I was jacked around 280. When I got to 300, it didn't look so good. I kind of had to take a deep

breath. He was fat for Stan. Yeah. Not fat at all. Fat Stanley. Now, I mean, so obviously for the specific sport, your body has to get like a lot of power lifters. They'll get really big cause mass moves mass. Um, but you know, you're working with Brian Shaw, you're working at Hapthor and do you, do you think that certain athletes really need to be as big as they are to move a certain amount of weight? Or could they do this in a better fashion being leaner? Boy, being leaner. The guy who won is like 330 pounds, right?

Yeah, yeah. I like the idea of being leaner, but I was a lot stronger at 275 than I was at 250. It was significant for me. Shaw felt the same way. When he was 440, we took 20 pounds off of him or so. He said he felt a little unstable under the 1,300 pound yoke. And I said, well, that's because it's a 1,300 pound yoke. But we had to put some weight back on him. And the only change we made is we went from using a top sirloin steak, which is relatively lean, to using a ribeye steak and added some more whole eggs in. And he was able to put some weight back on him. And the only change we made is we went from using a top sirloin steak, which is relatively lean, to using a ribeye steak

and added some more whole eggs in, and he was able to put more weight back on. He did have to increase calories to get back there. And he's a little more stable and a little more strong. Thor, the same thing. He came down to 395. I think he squatted at maybe 400 pounds. He squatted 970-something with a six-pack. It was ridiculous.

But the loads are so heavy at those meets. Uh, now the, the Arnold and the world's strongest man, there's not a lot of, um, uh, you know, medley events anymore. And so he had to put more weight back on as well. Uh, Thor did, and he was stronger at the heavier weight now it worked against brian at the world's strongest man the qualifiers were all on hard ground and he of course won the qualifier on thursday uh thursday and friday i think it was well on sunday the first event was in the sand he had a 455 pound guy trying to run a medley in the sand and that really kind of killed his numbers that and the fact that it was so hot and humid out there that the bigger guys were were draining pretty quick

i was pumping sodium tablets and water he loses a lot of water he sweats a lot yeah about every hour on the hour we were trying to to keep them hydrated they were sweating quite a bit and then you know thor tore his uh plantar fasciitis uh plantar fascia his tendon uh in the qualifier in the second event after he did the truck pull the second event was supposed to be a 1300 pound yoke and they put they misloaded it to 1400 pounds which initially i would have complained about but uh rob kearney world's strongest gay he smashed it he took that fort he didn't even know it was fort and then neither one of them did because they misloaded it. Wait, did I hear?

World's strongest gay guy, yeah. Okay, cool. Rob. Okay. And I think he did the same weight, and he smashed. He did a great job. The dude's incredible. He's only like 285 pounds.

Yeah. I was amazed. I went up and talked to him. I was going to ask him, you know, what have you been doing? I wanted to find out. How does this 285-pound guy, you know, come out here with these giants and compete at such a high level? And, you know, he was winning events.

And I think he won the Arnold Strongman, didn't he, in Australia? I think so, yeah. Wow. Australia's Arnold? I'm pretty sure. Well, then, sure enough, he looks over his shoulder and he says, oh, I'm training with Derek Poundstone. I mean, I immediately knew the answer, you know. There's very few people on the planet that trained as hard as Derek Poundstone? I mean, I immediately knew the answer.

There's very few people on the planet that trained as hard as Derek Poundstone. And so he went on to tell me that some of the workouts that Derek put him through were pretty incredible. He'd come in, he's supposed to be doing- Derek Poundstone, I saw him deadlift 800 pounds for nine reps. Oh yeah, yeah.

Insane. No, he was a grinder. It kind of reminds me of Dan Green in that sense. There's a guy who, you know, he'll lift a Dan, Dan will squat something and you'll think that that was about a nine RPE. Then it was squatted again and it looked kind of like a 11 RPE and then he'll do three more reps. It looked just like it. Yeah. You know, his,

Dan, what, what, what, uh, what do you think, uh, we're watching this clip of you, you know, handling these 215 pound dumbbells. I look like the stay puff marshmallow. this clip of you you know handling these 215 pound dumbbells i look like the stay puff marshmallow you look jacked and tan um but what like what drove you to you know go after some of these numbers what drove you to do some of this stuff what drove you to grab attention with like the world's strongest bodybuilder thing i mean you were already it wasn't like you were a 25 year old kid like coming up and you wanted to show everybody what a badass you were you were already, it wasn't like you were a 25 year old kid, like coming up and you wanted to show everybody what a badass you were. You're already like in your mid forties, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And you know, it's, you already had a bodybuilding career kind of going and like, well, it's just goals, you know? That's why I mentioned that, that some people ask you, how do you stay motivated? You know, you can't answer that question. You just are, you know, you either are, you aren't. And those you just are you know you either are you aren't and those were just goals and somebody mentioned that this is the record and i'm like i want to beat that record that's all that matters the blinders go on and you just focus on that one thing you know you lived it you know you know what it was like yeah so that's all there is i can't if i knew the answer to that you know i'd I'd be a billionaire if I could motivate people,

you know, in anything, not just sports. Well, I think your actions are motivating. You know, the fact that you are a professional bodybuilder. Like, when did you get your pro card in bodybuilding? 2009. And how old were you? 40.

And then here you are also in like 2009 or something, right? Breaking all-time world records in powerlifting. I mean, shit, if that's not motivational, then somebody doesn't have a pulse. That's amazing because a lot of times, I mean, look at the young guys that are coming through the sport now. That's why you and I have kind of tried to move out of the way. Yeah, I just talk about it now. I just have to wear a shirt that says google me bitch the things that these guys are doing i show a video i'll show it tomorrow at the seminar i'd

kind of do an intro video with some of these lifts that we're looking at right now and the first thing i say is that used to be really impressive until larry wheels came along oh my god it's just a whole new generation of really incredible lifters yeah and remember when like eric lillibridge was coming through he was like 19 20 years old ripping up 900 pound deadlifts and stuff yeah well eric set a whole new standard to his records are going to be around for a while that guy's then we went from chasing 900 squat together to him doing a thousand then you're like that happened then you're like oh i guess i'm out of that race yeah you blame i'm glad he went up to 308 it's embarrassing to and that's you know that's kind of the nature of the business. Now there's so many people getting involved in the

sport at all levels that the outliers are starting to spring up. You start to see people who probably have some predisposition, uh, and they're also very committed and working extraordinarily hard. The strength of the women has been really mind boggling. Who's the girl, Amanda. Oh my goodness. Yeah. It's every week, squatting 550. Yeah. Totally embarrassing. When you do your workout and then you see hers on Instagram

and you're like, oh my God, she kicked my ass again. And it's unfortunate, of course, that folks always want to chime in and find some excuse for why they're not better for themselves. And I talked about this in my rant about fuck Mike O Michael Hearn. Uh, you know, there's a guy much like a lot of these

athletes today who just for year after year after year was so consistent. And I would watch him, you know, come down to gold's gym and watch him and sit over there with no camera, no fanfare, no posse all by himself with at least 400 or 500 pounds on the bar, doing set after set of squats. You know, week in, week out, month in, month out, year in, year out, decade in, decade out. Now, I know some of these athletes are young, but they're still, like, Eric was probably squatting when he was 12 years old or nine years old or something.

And, you know, Larry Wheels was, when he was 19, the kid, he just barely missed a 900 pound bench or I'm sorry a 600 pound bench press he benched a 495 for five and 545 for at least a double and then 585 for a single and then 19 at 19 I barely had to tap the bar on his 600 press and if he hadn't done all those sets beforehand so yeah he'd been pretty much lifting weights consistently, I think, since he was, I think he said, what, 12, 14 years old. Stan beat him a long time ago when Larry Wheels wasn't old enough to be strong enough to compete with Stan.

That's what I do, yeah. I take him into deep water. I went out there. I told that story before. I went to a gym down the street first, and I warmed up really, really well. It was a lot of leg pressing and stuff just to get myself all warmed up. And then I went and I took him from 135 to two and a quarter to 405 to do twenties. And so I could gas him out. Uh, you know, who's famous for that is, uh, Rich Gaspar used to do that. He would take people through

these, these deep water workouts and just run them into the dirt with his endurance because he had some incredible stamina yeah there's some real uh mutants in the sport how were you able to like you know obtain this kind of strength because when we were when i was working with you when i was helping you you know um years ago you know we did certain things we had a certain plan but you were like really rigid and really like into like putting on a spreadsheet and everything like what were you doing what were you doing with uh some of your numbers yeah you know i don't think i had a i didn't really have a plan other than to be consistent and to do more than i did previously over time and again mind you i you know i only

powered it for a certain portion of the year and then I would bodybuild. And so I would come back to it. And I, and I, you know, after many, many years, I've come to find out that's the way Eddie Cone always, that he'd lifted throughout his whole career. Uh, he would do a power lifting meet twice a year. And then in between them, he would do hypertrophy training and he would come back to hypertrophy or to, to the, the new strength block. And that's kind of the way I did it. So I broke it up to two strength blocks a year and two bodybuilding blocks a year, pretty much rotating through those. And each time you start the power lifting block,

of course, you're weaker than you were when you competed previously because you were just bodybuilding and you just lost a whole bunch of weight. But it seems like very quickly, as you remember, I was struggling with a 405 squat when I first came to you. And seven weeks later, I, what did we hit? An 850 something or 821 or something like that.

Just within seven weeks. Of course, I had put on in excess of 35 pounds during that seven weeks. And it was rebound weight that I had previously had. So I can't claim it was his gains, but the strength comes back really, really quick. And the reason I mentioned that is because I don't want people to think as though if sometimes you've got to take a step back, Hofthor went from 435 down to 395. He took a 40 pound step back. Shaw now is, um, he was 455 at the world's strongest man. He's 416 right now. And so he'll be bulking up over the course of the next five weeks for this next meet. Don't be hesitant to step back and to introduce a different

training stimulus, such as a bodybuilding stimulus, if you're a strength athlete, and get yourself healthy. Bodybuilders do that anyhow. They diet down, bulk up, diet down, bulk up. And as long as you're not bulking too much and doing too much dirty bulking, and you're not over-diet much and doing too much dirty bulking and not over dieting and losing too much muscle, I think that that's a good progression. I can't remember who it was. It was just talking about it recently. I think it was, um, uh, Mike from, uh, Mike Isretel from RP Strength. He said, look, if you're not willing to, to add a few extra calories and take your six pack down to a four pack, the likelihood that you're going to add

any significant amount of muscle over time is pretty slim. And I see that with our, uh, you know, physique and figure guys, uh, they're not willing to lose that, you know, because every weekend they do a photo shoot on Instagram.

And so they have to keep their nine pack. And, uh, what happens is, is that if you're going to go from one 75 up to 200, you got to stay at 200 for a while. And eventually your body composition can improve there. And you have to, because your body's homeostatic, it's going to want to start to drop

back down. You have to struggle that. Those are the plateaus that I went through. Remember I started at 140 pounds and I worked my way all up at, at, um, in 1985 and worked my way all the way up in 1990, 1995, I was 300 pounds. So it took a long time and there were many plateaus along the way, weight that I had to hold on fight and scratch and claw to hold on to long enough so that my body would, would stay there. Uh, and I wouldn't have to, because if, if I had backed off at all, it would just, it would lose five, seven pounds, you know, just in a couple of days, just because I didn't own that weight. And so you got to kind of own it, let your body adapt to it. And then it'll start to, to improve your body composition, start to improve at that new weight. And the next time you diet,

you, uh, hopefully, uh, we'll show you tomorrow the difference between my 19 or 2008 and 2009. I competed in 2008 after over 20 years of competing. I was 224 on stage and mind you, I was meeting a weight class. And so I did diet a little harder. Um, in 2009, I was 254 on stage. The difference between the two physiques is, is extraordinary. 2008, I was dieting without flex wheeler and I was using chicken breast and egg whites and doing cardio. And in 2009, I was eating four pounds of steak a day, 600 and egg whites and doing cardio. In 2009, I was eating four pounds of steak a day, 600 grams of carbs and doing two a day hypertrophy trainings with flex. And I, the difference between the two physiques is night and day. I was, I was equally as

conditioned, but I was 30 pounds larger. I held onto significantly more muscle. Uh, and you know, it was, again, I was, I was a experienced bodybuilder and, uh, you know, the question that comes to most people's mind listening now is the drug protocol must have been different. And the fact it wasn't, it was extremely similar. Flex had, uh, was very conservative. Uh, I've talked about it before on other podcasts, but it was, uh, uh, much less than, than one would predict. I was never a big believer in using a ton of stuff for bodybuilding because you're at a calorie deficit. All you need to do is maintain muscle tissue. You're not going to build muscle tissue while dieting for a show. You're just holding onto it. And it takes a very little

bit of performance enhancing drugs to hold onto muscle tissue. It doesn't take much at all. Was there a time difference in terms of the length of your cut in 2008 versus 2009? Or was the same pretty similar yeah yep and the off-season weight was pretty close to probably within 10 pounds all right yeah and what are what what do you think people are confused about when it comes to cardio like what are people because i've heard you mention it a couple times today and um you're kind of mentioning like doing cardio sometimes like the stairs and then sometimes you're talking about cardio what kind of seems like in a bad light.

Yeah, I mean, I guess just understand what the purpose of it is. If it's strictly for weight loss, cardiovascular things like treadmill and stuff has not been shown to be very effective. Again, the studies, two groups, one that just diets and one that diets and does cardio, have pretty similar outcomes.

Why do you think it's not, like, from the research, why do you think it's not effective? Like, why is it not working well? Does this make people hungrier? That could be one of it. The more you train, the more you sit and eat. That's definitely a factor. Also, just because it's such a small contributor to the overall amount of calories that you burn.

Your basal metabolic rate is 70%. Your non-exercise activity thermogenesis is 15% of your daily calories. Your thermic effect of food is twice that of your exercise activity thermogenesis. So it's a small sliver of the whole pie. And it can also have adverse effects in that it can cause a decrease in muscle tissue. It can cause a suppression of thyroid function. Those kinds of things is your body's adaptation to that cardio. You know, this muscle's heavy. It has a high oxygen demand.

It has a high nutrient demand. This guy wants me to do 40-minute treadmill. I got to get rid of some of this muscle if I want to be efficient at that. You know, the body responds to the stimulus that you provided. And then you see that with marathon runners as compared to sprinters. It's pretty obvious what happens. And so, you know, I always say that your, uh, form follows function. And so it's important to remember that. So it's

not terribly effective for weight loss. It's great for, uh, to have a sufficient VO2 max for cardiovascular fitness for health benefits. It's very different than using cardio for weight loss. Cardio for weight loss, not terribly effective. And if different than using cardio for weight loss. Cardio for weight loss, not terribly effective. And if you're using cardio for weight loss, it's really just to burn calories. You could do that equally as well by just increasing the number of hypertrophy sessions, which is what I opt to do. But now you're getting a different stimulus. You're getting one that actually provides all of the hormonal benefits for retaining or growing muscle. And so all of my athletes, I remember Stephanie mentioned Stephanie Sanzo went through the same thing.

She was doing, you know, two cardio's a day now down to three 10 minute walks. And again, I don't do those for weight loss. I do them for insulin sensitivity and digestion and recovery just to help with delayed onset muscle soreness. and digestion and recovery just to help with delayed onset muscle soreness. But she does two hypertrophy sessions a day on the days that she trains. And so that's adequate to create, if you want to create a calorie deficit with workload, then you can do it with the kind of stimulus that's not going to compromise muscle tissue. So now if you have a sport that requires a higher level of cardiovascular fitness, obviously you're going to do more cardiovascular fitness, but you'd like that to be, um, uh, you know, consistent with

your, your actual type of sport. You know, if you're playing soccer, you want to be able to do some sprints, uh, you know, not just too much road work. Uh, also things like, uh, MMA fighters, you know, they're going to want to do a lot of explosive sprint type of work and work on muscular endurance, um, rather than just straight cardio. Cause there's rarely an opportunity in an event like that, that you're doing a steady state. Uh, so those are the kinds of things that you just have to be specific about what type of training you're doing for the outcome for this, for the sport that you want to do. But in terms of body composition, I don't think it's, it's very beneficial at all. You know, for you personally, you sometimes do like farmer's carries and things like that, right?

Yeah. I like the idea of HIIT training. I like the idea of getting your heart rate elevated. That, that appeals to me. I just like to do it, uh, in such a way that also promotes my goal. And my goal is, is to be stronger and maintain more lean body mass. Um, so other people may have a different goal and the cardio may benefit their, um, you know, their fitness goal. If they want to do CrossFit and have to have more cardiovascular fitness, then they're going to have to do more cardio. Um, so I like those things. I like the loading. One of the things I like about the weighted carry is, is I can get a significant amount of loading, a lot of, you know, improve, get a lot of high heart rate work in without adversely impacting my lower back. And not that my lower back hurts, but because it creates more fatigue and then it takes me longer to recover from the workouts. My back's real stable. I can squat, you know, 600 pounds and, and it's fine. But, uh, the

more I load my lumbar, the less I can train and it takes longer to recover. It's just a fact. So the more fatigue that you accumulate, you can't train as often, you don't recover as fast. And so I'm really actually trying not to create too much muscle damage when I train anymore. I'm trying to, uh, trigger hypertrophy, which can be done with frequency and volume and trying to be cautious about how much damage I do, because I don't like the way I feel for the next two days. You're just sore. You know, we used to live with that because it was necessary in powerlifting to be under those loads. But now I don't do a lot of heavy sets. If you see me squatting 600, that might have been the only set or maybe I only did two that day at that weight.

And then I'll go do some leg extensions if I want. Or maybe I started with some leg press to get a little more volume in. But generally speaking, the heavier loads like the deadlift and the heavy squats, I might only do one set there. And that's plenty for strength. Okay. For, um, when you were mentioning cardio instruments, the physique athletes, do you think that, cause you're mentioning like how it can have an adverse effect on muscle gain. So what's something like, you know, you already have these athletes walk, but athletes that are doing this, just like walking on a treadmill, would that have a negative effect? Or are you talking about like jogging? Low intensity, steady state probably doesn't have,

you know, that big of an effect on, on loss of muscle tissue. I just think it's unnecessary and, and generally pretty ineffective from what the research shows. So if I'm going to invest that time into something, I would like to get a better return on that investment. I don't think that's the much rather do a 40 minute workout in the morning, a 30 minute workout at night and just do hypertrophy training or get some extra sleep. That would be fantastic, right? Yeah. That's definitely a big improvement for body composition. What's been going on with the vertical diet as a business? I know that you, uh, are working with a, uh, a company, uh, making monster mash and all these different things.

What's going on with that? We partnered with a company a little over a year ago now. I think we're on our 13th month. And they serve 4 million meals a year. It's a fantastic organization. And they went about making the vertical menu. We ordered all of the specific food items and they prepared them. And we started marketing my

business partner, Dr. Derek Molesworth and I, uh, started marketing our vertical meals. And you know, we've, uh, we've had, it's just been an extraordinary success. I'm extremely grateful. We did over 2 million in sales in our first year. And, uh, it's not to brag, but just to say, you know, how grateful I am and how thankful I am. And, uh, it's a testimony to, I think that people like the product. It tastes fantastic. It's really easy to digest because it's the types of foods that I promote in my diet. We make it with bone broth. We use a little beef tallow when we cook some of our vegetables. So we don't have any vegetable oils in our foods. You know, it was really even hard for us to source eggs because most restaurants, when they get eggs, they're, they have vegetable oil already in them. They have, they're cut with canola oil. So people can claim not,

and I didn't know this. And so I would go to, um, you know, I would go to an IHOP or something and say, Hey, can you just make my eggs and butter? And thinking that I wasn't going to get any canola oil, you know, canola oil affects me adversely. I get terrible gastric distress from canola oil, gives me diarrhea. And I didn't know this for years and it's in everything. And so I would get my eggs and eat them. And sure enough, you know, I would have problems. And that's because the, the oils in the egg, I go to whole foods, there's canola oil and damn near every one of their prepared items that's out there. I can't eat any of that stuff. I'm allergic to it. I don't think it's a good food anyhow to begin with, but so we were able to make our menu. Um, and now we've been, you know,

distributing nationwide now for a year and it's, uh, we've started picking up some colleges, uh, Warner or, uh, uh, Morgan state is now working with us. Um, Tyrone Wheatley, the head football coach over there really liked the meals. And so he's a former, uh, Michigan running back, right? Yeah. NFL all-star. I mean, I was a savage. I think 10 years, he was fantastic. Yeah, yeah. He, yeah, he was out of Detroit. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. I think he played for Michigan, and I think he had, like, some game where Michigan-Ohio State played each other, and that's, like, you know, that's the end-all, be-all that game, and he ran for, like, 300-something yards, and it's, like-all, be-all that game. And he ran for like 300-something yards, and it's like this legendary game that people still talk about today.

He went off that day and just single-handedly basically beat the Buckeyes that day. It's an honor to be able to have him accept our service there and have his athletes try our products. We've just gotten a fantastic response and we're, you know, we're excited to keep moving forward. We've, uh, we have really high reorder rate because the food tastes so good. And we just added a whole new menu for people who, um, uh, who want more variety and it's kind of a more comfort food meals to me line. And, uh, you know, folks, maybe their parents or something want to, uh, to get the meals. So, and that way, you know, exactly what you're eating, how many calories it has, and you can consistently have meals

prepped for you, but it's been great. We're, you know, we're full speed ahead on that and starting to talk to more colleges now about developing that market as well. The food is great. You know, when you sent me some a while back, uh, I tried it and then like, I don't know, I was just a few hours went by i was like oh that was that was good you know that was really good a few hours went by and i was here and i was working and then i started getting hungry and i'm like i want another monster mash like that shit's good and i tried to make it at home and stuff but it's not it was not i used to always make my own and prep it and take it with me i'd get bison bison from Costco and make my own rice and bone broth and I'd make my own monster mash. I

did a video on that, the monster mash video like two years ago now. And, uh, that's kind of what we asked them to do, but they just did it better than me. And we sourced the same bison from great range out of, uh, Colorado. And so we got a lot of the same foods that I would personally was already using and felt good on. I could tell you a story about the same foods that I would personally was already using and felt good on. I can tell you a story about the Monster Mash. It's funny how that developed. I told you Flex had me eat a ton of steak back when I was training with him. And after a while, my teeth got sore. And so I ate some white fish and chicken breast for a little while, or for, I think it was like two days. And Flex thought my physique wasn't responding well. He called me out. He's like, what are you doing? He said, you're flatter. You lost

two pounds. And so I told him, I said, my teeth hurt. And he says, suck it up. And so, because we were making top sirloin steaks on a foreman grill, and those can be pretty tough. And that's what we were eating. Well, fast forward a few years, I had a surgery done on my throat. And it was trying to fix apnea. I had that uvula lasered, which doesn't work, by the way. And it's a horrible idea. And if I saw that doctor today, I'd smack him in the face. That was the most painful recovery I've ever been through in anything I've ever done.

They basically burn your uvula off with a laser. And so it's a, you know, just full on burn on the roof of your mouth. Well, you can't swallow damn near anything. You're just on a liquid diet for, for, you know, at least I think this went on for almost two weeks. And after a few days, I had a water bottle, one of those, one of those squeezy squirt bottles with a, uh, like one of those Gatorade-type bottles with the tube on it. And I was just squirting food way back in, squirting not food, but milk, whole milk, because the only thing I could get was calorie-dense enough that was liquid, back in my throat and just kind of swallowing it so it wouldn't hurt.

And after a while, I was like, I need to get some more food. And so I thought about Derek Poundstone's chicken shake, you know, how he used to mix boiled chicken with water in a blender. And Blaine Sumner is drinking some of those too. So I thought about that, but I wasn't going to do chicken because I thought it was disgusting. And so somehow, I don't know how I came across the idea of the bone broth, but I started, so I used the ground beef and a little bit of rice and a little bit of bone broth and tried to make that into something that I could squirt through a squirt bottle and squirt in the back of my throat and just swallow. Needless to say, it wasn't terribly effective, but it was okay.

Needless to say, it wasn't terribly effective, but it was okay. And one of the things I noticed when I started eating that meal, the mash with the broth and the rice and the bison all mashed up real well, is that my digestion was amazing. And the quality of the stool was like Mark always says, you know, may your shits always be tapered. It was like it was awesome. And so even when my throat healed, that's from that point forward, that's all I would eat was Monster Mash. That's all I would recommend to my, my, you know, clients that, and they're all the same thing. It really is great. And it feels great on my stomach. It's easy to eat. Easy to eat. Yeah. And they were able to, you know, it resolved a lot of digestion issues. And for those guys who have to pound down a ton of calories, it was easy for them to utilize. You know, one other thing I

do is that they have to take in about 1200 grams of carbs a day just to fuel their workload. And those carbs are generally white rice because that's the only thing they can tolerate in that quantity. I could no way I could give them that much oatmeal or pizza, pasta, pancakes, bread. It would just bloat. So, uh, they were having a hard time eating that much rice. And so I had them start to sprinkle a little bit of dextrose on it. And the dextrose wasn't to drive calories. It was simply for amylase production and it helped them make it so they could eat more of the rice.

They could eat twice as much with half the effort and they really enjoyed that. So now they carry dextrose with them when they go to competitions. And, um, matter of fact, I had tiny tiff recently worked with her the power lifter that yeah she got world records world records yeah she came to me she was about 112 111 pounds and she had to get down to 103 um and so we dieted her down for the meat she just did over the weekend i think where was she costa rica something? Or was it out of the country? I'm not even sure. Yeah. Well, Jesse Burdick had me get involved with his training. So we helped her with her diet and used a lot of the same foods. We kept red meat in, we kept iodine in, we kept fruit in, we got to get a dairy source in. And we dieted her down to 103. She didn't have to do any water cuts,

a two-hour weigh-in. And she didn't have to do any hot uh, water cuts, a two hour weigh in. And she didn't have to do any, um, hot baths for sweating or anything like that. Uh, and she hit weight 102.9 weighed in and, uh, one. And so, uh, use the same kind of foods, same thing we're doing with Amanda Wyatt right now. She's last year, she dieted on chicken and broccoli and she was bloated and, and, uh, uncomfortable and she, and her strength was going down this year. She's just posted recently. She's fuller. She's got more muscle. That was always kind of the knock. The coaches told her, the, the judges told her that she lost a little too much muscle. She was a little too thin shoulders in particular, um, legs straightened out just a little bit. And so this year now she's a lot fuller. Uh, she doesn't have any digestion

problems. She's her strength is, is't have any digestion problems. She's, her strength is, is still really, really good. She's getting ready for the Olympia just from using different, making different food choices. So it, yes, you can get there. There's many different ways, many paths, the same destination, but how you feel and how you perform on the way there is what's really important to me. Do you personally bulk and cut? Like, do you personally still mess with that? Or do you just stay the same weight? Yeah, I've stayed pretty close to the same weight

since I dropped the weight after competing. I'm right at, I stay around 145. I've been as low as 132, probably not much heavier than that. Two, right? Or yeah, two. Yeah, I was like, whoa. Yeah, I was busy talking about Tiny Tiff. Yep.

So yeah, I stay at 245. Got down to 232 probably at the lowest and then maybe 255 at the heaviest. But most of the time I stay right here. Push the food up a little bit if you want to lift a little bit more or not really? Yeah, not a lot. I'm not trying to break any records anymore.

So I'm just trying to stay healthy. I stay at maybe five pounds heavier than I could be just mainly because I feel like I'm, um, I'm able to, I'm a little more resilient here, uh, with the extra weight. If I get in a situation where I have to have a long weekend of work, I want to have a few pounds to burn up. What about fasting? What are your thoughts on fasting? And do you ever mess with it? You know, I've done a lot of breakfast skipping, particularly on days I don't train.

And I think it's fine. I don't think that there's been shown to be any benefit in terms of weight loss unless you end up eating fewer calories. But there is some also. I used to suggest that you, you should probably get four protein feedings a day. This is kind of based on Jordan Tromlin's work and, and, uh, protein frequency for optimizing muscle protein synthesis. But a recent study that, um, that Greg

Knuckles was talking about recently, um, uh, I don't want to pronounce the author's name because I'll probably butcher it, but Tinsdale, Tinsdale, I'm probably getting it wrong. He did three feedings on a 16-8 window and they had three feedings, you know, say at noon, four and eight. And they showed that the body composition was the same. They didn't lose muscle tissue for trained athletes that were using that for their protein intake. So it does seem to matter, you know, how much protein you take over the course of the entire day, but whether or not you get four feedings in three was adequate. Fasting seems to maybe also help people with hunger and cravings and stuff like that. Like

if they can get used, if they can adapt to the starvation, I guess you'd say, then they can maybe, you know, maybe lower their calories through that mechanism. Yeah, one of the studies, or more than one I'm sure by now, showed that if you didn't control for calories, some of the studies control for calories at equivalent weight loss. If you didn't control for calories, the intermittent fasting people tended to eat less and would lose more weight as a result.

And you'd say, obviously, because they were at a calorie deficit. But the fact of the matter is, is they weren't controlling. And so by choice, they were able with the extra satiation and the timeframe, it just ended up happening that way. So something you can tolerate. I will say that the weight control registry tracks weight loss for over 10,000 participants who have lost over 60 pounds and kept it off for five years, 78% of those people eat breakfast. So in terms of what actually works or what people are doing and what's effective, it seems that it doesn't matter whether you skip breakfast or not. Yeah. Any information on like your last meal, like any benefit to not eating, you know, four or five hours before bed or two hours before bed or can you eat right before you go to bed? That's one of the things in Tromlin's work where he talked about the fact

that that is your longest window without protein. There's no mechanism in the body to store protein. And so if the amino acids aren't there to do repairs, you got to wait. And that might be a good time to get a meal in. Maybe the 8 p.m. feeding was fine. You probably wouldn't need to go any longer than that because overnight, that's your longest fast with a lack of protein. Carbs before breakfast or before dinner, before sleep, seem to help with sleep. Your brain utilizes glucose as its primary energy source.

And if it's not there, it's going to release adrenaline and wake you up and then cortisol for gluconeogenesis to get the carbohydrates that it needs. Now people will say, well, what about ketones? And that's fine if you have ketones. If you don't have ketones, meaning you're probably eating a hundred grams or 150 grams of carbs a day and maybe you're eating around your workout, but not in the evening, that might be an uncomfortable sleep for some people. So if you're going to use ketones, you better make sure that you are in ketosis

so your brain does have something to utilize during sleep. Otherwise, it could have an adverse effect. So I save some carbs in a lot of my clients' diets and have them eat them before bed. And I know that a lot of folks are afraid of that, but with calorie control, it's equivalent outcome. It doesn't matter when you eat them necessarily. On that note of like bulking that you were mentioning before, you know, when you were talking about gaining weight, holding, gaining weight, holding, um, how do

you suggest that like a guy that's bulking or woman can have a visual idea of where they should stop? Because a lot of guys, they'll just be like, oh, I'm continuously bulking, but they'll get way too big. Yeah. Well, I think that you got to kind of, you got to take stock in the fact that you're not going to just put on massive amounts of muscle if you're gaining lots of weight. There seems to be a sensible rate of weight loss, about 1% of your body weight a week probably will be ideal for maintaining lean body mass and losing fat and not creating too much adaptation. And you might reverse that for, for weight gain and just say, you know, some sensible weight gain might be a pound or two a week, which even at that wouldn't be all muscle. Uh, because it, and so if you're trying to gain

more weight than that faster, then, then the percentage of body fat would be greater. And then potentially you'll start getting yourself into the situation where the insulin resistance comes and all of those other issues. Then the whole thing kind of turns on its head and suddenly you're not partitioning nutrients very well. And, uh, and all those extra calories are ineffective. So just be more patient, uh, use a calorie deficit. If you don't gain, gain a pound that week,

then you, you got to bump your calories up, try and gain a pound the following week. Uh, and it's not linear, obviously it's going to have some, some fluctuations, but, um, I, I typically recommend depending on the body fat when they start and the, you know, ideally the results of their blood tests and their blood sugars, that they lose some body fat first, sensitize their body, turn around, use the training stimulus, and then the food to fuel that stimulus. On that same note, you said something earlier that I thought was really cool. You said you got to hold on to a weight to own it. That's huge. I love that.

Based on your experience, how long did you have to hold on to a certain weight before you could like, okay, now I can the same weight as I am today, I made progress because I knew all of my friends that were also competing in training would be losing weight over the course of the summer. They wouldn't be as disciplined. The heat would make it harder to eat and they might miss a few days of working out. It was summer. And sure enough, that's what would happen every year. And by the end of summer, I was still the same weight going into gain season, good season, uh, through the winter I had maintained and held that weight and everybody comes back and they're 10 pounds lighter. So I felt like that to me was progress. And you look at that in terms of dieting, you know, they say statistics suggest that six out

of seven people who go on a diet lose weight. And then the vast majority of them gain it back. And so when somebody says, you know, I've, I've hit a plateau, I'm not able to lose weight. And I'm like, well, did you gain it back? And they said, well, no. And I said, well, then you're doing better than 95% of the people before you. That's, that's progress. That's success. You know, hold, hold the line, hold steady. Uh, presuming that they're not miserable on, on the diet, which we've gone over in, in detail today. Yeah. Vertical diet, red meat, eggs eggs bone broth fish cheese yogurt carrots spinach yeah anything else obviously some fruit uh oh forgot yeah write that down uh any of the low gas vegetables so we're uh you know obviously you mentioned eggs salmon uh epa dha i don't think you

need to supplement a whole bunch of fish oils if you're getting EPA, DHA, salmon. Avoid omega-6s. It's just as much about kind of what you avoid as what you use. You care about grass-fed? It doesn't seem to make a big difference. The nutrient density is the same. There's a tiny, small difference in omega-3s, but there's not a lot of omega-3s in meat. You have 200 times the amount of DHA and EPA in salmon as you do in red meat. I just use the ruminants because, you know, they convert

cellulose into nutrients for you much better than, say, a chicken or a turkey. And so you get the iron, you get the B12, you get the selenium, you get the zinc in much higher quantities. And so that's why I choose those. Well, They seem to be really easy to digest. And that'll depend on whether or not you're eating a full steak, which I do for people who are on a calorie deficit because it's satiating to have to cut and chew and delays the time of their meal consumption, which sometimes that timeframe can benefit the hormonal response to satiate, to trigger your body to want to stop eating.

And I use the ground beef or ground bison or ground top sirloin for people who are trying to gain weight, increase the surface area a little easier to digest. You might want to eat more sooner. So that's kind of how I manipulate that. If you want to gain weight, what do you do with these foods? A few things. If you're trying to lose weight, the recommendation is you actually increase your protein intake.

An equivalent amount of calories from protein as compared to carbs or fat increased will result in a differential weight gain. The protein doesn't seem to cause the same weight gain or any for that matter. So when somebody's dieting, I might go up to 1.2 grams per pound of protein for the satiated effect, for the thermic effect of food. When somebody's trying to gain weight, I have to cut protein back because it's satiating and because you're only getting 70 out of every 100 calories you eat. It's just the net effect isn't great. I also have to keep fats reasonably low because otherwise they're going to be satiated,

about 0.3 grams per pound. So a 200-pound person might only have to take in 160 grams of protein. And that's not going to have any adverse effect on gaining muscle because you're going to be getting in a significant amount of carbs, which is protein sparing. Plus, I think that creates a more anabolic environment for growing. And the stimulus is important. When people are gaining weight, I actually have them do more hypertrophy training more often. I talked about the flex and I training twice a day, more shorter sessions. And then I drive carbs through the roof. And again, I can't feed them pizza, pasta, pancakes. I can't throw a whole ton of oatmeal at them. I had a client recently

who's registered dietitian, gave them three cups of quinoa or four cups of quinoa a day. That's obviously a diet that person's never eaten, you know, because it looks good in a book, but if you've never actually consumed that stuff, it'll wreak havoc on your gut. So carbs is the thing to drive. And we talked about the ways in which I can, you know, obviously we get the potassium in first with a daily potato and some fruit. But then I'm pushing white rice up to, as I mentioned with orange shaw, 1,200 grams a day, almost 5,000 calories is just white rice. And the mash and the broth and the side of rice with a little bit of dextrose is kind of the way to get all that down. And if you recklessly eat carbohydrates and you eat pancakes and burritos and these are all things that you can eat, but you can't get to your next meal, you know? So if you have a big burrito at lunch,

it's going to be very difficult to get to your next meal. Hence the vertical diet, you're trying to stack everything on top of itself. Yeah. That's the hard part with the satiation with those foods, the beans, the fats, the proteins are too high as well. Even too much fiber, you know, of course I have fiber in my diet. I'm a big fan of it, but you know, based on the needs of the individual, I have to make some adjustments somewhere. And if I have to preserve appetite, that's, those are the things I need to, to reduce. If someone's trying to gain weight and they can handle lactose and milk might be a good option? Yeah, it could be.

I would probably go down to 1%. Again, the fat would be, not that I'm afraid of fats at all, but just too much of them could be too satiating and hard for you to eat the next meal three or four hours later. I'm not asking them to eat every two hours. There could be some adverse effect of that in terms of the refractory period for muscle protein synthesis resensitization. So, uh, you know, about every three hours probably in order for them to be able to eat enough food throughout the course of the day, flex had us get up early because we were

doing such a high workload and our metabolism was just on fire. He would have me get up and eat my first breakfast and then I could go back to sleep in the morning. So just so I could get my meals under my belt, I wasn't forcing them in as I got later and later to bedtime. How many calories were you consuming at that time? It's a shame I didn't even count them, but we were about 600 grams of carbs and probably 3.6 pounds of top sirloin steak.

Aside from that. Which is fairly lean, right? Yeah, it's really lean, yeah. And that's another thing. Like when I started Nadia out or even Thor or Shaw, I might start them out. We'll flip this on its head. I started Nadia out with a New York steak.

And then after her weight stalled for one week, we went to a top sirloin, which is leaner. And I waited until her weight stalled for one week, and then we went to a top round or a sirloin tip, getting you down to 20%. You're starting to get a little dry, and you've got to chew the hell out of that thing. Hockey puck.

I was just slowly kind of pulling back on fats. I never got them. I still don't have them below 0.3 grams per pound. I want them in there for health. And that way she can keep the carbs in to fuel her workouts because she's training two a days in many cases. Shaw was just the opposite. I initially put him on top sirloin.

He lost almost 20 pounds. I need to gain the weight back. I put him on some ribeye. And also we do 36 eggs a day, six eggs with each of six meals. And folks initially might... Does he have chickens? Yeah. Initially that might cause some folks to react. But the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture no longer designates cholesterol consumption in your

food to be a nutrient of concern. It doesn't seem to have, but for people with familial hypercholesterolemia, it doesn't seem to have an effect on your cholesterol levels. Cholesterol can make you stronger, too. You sent me over a study, right? Yeah, that was one of the things. Two studies. One, the burn patients that were consuming egg yolks tended to recover faster,

and their blood tests confirmed that they weren't having an increase in cholesterol. And two, I think it was done in men that were over 60. It was this particular study. And the ones that they had matched protein intake between egg whites and egg whole eggs. So they equivocated for protein intake. And the group that did the whole eggs had a significantly better response for hypertrophy and a substantially better response for strength. And so I think there's, and their conclusion was, is that the micronutrients that were additional to the egg white protein, the whole eggs had the additional micronutrients,

seemed to give you a better physiological response. And that's what their study- That's why I'm dumping egg yolks on everything, right? Yeah. And some people don't respond well to eggs. And so I have them pull the white out because the egg yolk, you're less likely to have adverse effects to. Abaddon protein in the white tends to be what some people respond poorly to. When you cook the egg, of course, the abaddon is greatly reduced.

But some people might have, they might consider it to be an allergy, but they just might have some stomach problems with eggs. So I'll have them maybe hard boil them and just eat the yolks. Just to get the choline and the biotin in really. That's the primary driver for that, the K2. I think there's any difference if you like fully cook the yolk versus like having it

sunny side up or something like that. I don't know. I over easy mine and now I throw them onto my Monster Mash for extra eggs. Because the yolks, they're a fat and when you overheat fats in general, certainly polyunsaturated

fats, then they oxidize and that can be adverse effect for your body. Cool. I think we drilled you long enough here with all these questions. I'm glad we avoided talking about nutrition and training. That was the whole point. We wanted to show people another side to you. I don't think we accomplished that at all. Where can people find you?

Oh yeah, that side's not bad. StanEfforting.com, at Stan Efforting Instagram, Stan Efforting on YouTube. Pretty easy. Get the Vertical Diet. Do yourself a favor. Don't just try to look it up and YouTube it. Just go buy it. Just do yourself a favor.

Go buy it. He's giving you a lot of updates as he learns more. He's giving you constant updates on things that he's learning. Yeah, it's a living document now. It's a username and password access. And so as we update it, you get all the new information for free. And it's now 250 pages with over 200 references to articles, videos, and peer-reviewed published research, everything we talked about today, and I think some of the best academics in the industry. And it's not just diet. You talk

about everything we just talked about today, right? Yeah, and then some. Well, there you go. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.