Mark Bell's Power Project - MBPP EP. 688 - Dr. Mike Todorovic: The Sports Electrolyte Masterclass, How to Optimize Your Hydration

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Dr. Mike Todorovic has his PhD in Neuroscience, he is a Senior Lecturer and Medical Researcher at Griffith University, Australia. He loves helping people learn about how the body works and is here to educate us on electrolytes, testosterone and more. Follow Dr. Todorovic on IG: https://www.instagram.com/drmiketodorovic/ Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢Bubs Naturals: https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢Vertical Diet Meals: https://verticaldiet.com/ Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% off your first order! ➢Vuori Performance Apparel: Visit https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order! ➢8 Sleep: Visit https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro! ➢Marek Health: https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Guys, these legendary tasty pastries have changed the game. They're 20 grams of protein, 5 grams of carbs. If you were a kid, and I was a kid that ate Pop-Tarts, those things tasted great. But the difference, man, Andrew, what are the macros on Pop-Tart? Yes, for a regular Pop-Tart, we're looking at 190 calories, 37 carbs, 16 grams of sugar, and only 2 grams of protein. As comparison to a tasty pastry, we're looking at only 180 calories,

5 net carbs, 0 sugars, and 20 grams of protein. And this bad boy is gluten-free. There you go. That's right. And they taste so good. I'm eating it cold. I'm out here. A little bit of coffee.

It's so good, though. You guys can warm this up, man. They have so many flavors on their website, too. to check them out andrew yeah yeah absolutely you guys gotta head over to eat legendary.com uh they have tons of different things they have almonds they have butters they have amazing flavored everything and everything everything is all health conscious everything has loaded no sugar they have nut butters they have nut butters and you can't help a smile when you say nut butters but head over to eat legendary.com and use promo code power project to save 20 off your entire order links to them down in the description

as well as the podcast show notes i know it sounds like we're overhyping it but i promise you we are not you guys have to go try these tasty pastries right now all right what you got there? What I got here? Um Yeah bro, it's the concoction it is the one. Bubz MCT Oh my god. And salted caramel with the new electrolytes You won't do it. You won't do it bro. You won't make a huge mess again. I pray to god that doesn't happen because I am not ready to clean this up

before a podcast. Just being real yo I do not want to have to clean this up. I got me some Starbucks today and I preloaded my shaker cup with What?

Bubz MCT. Pre-gamed it. And the hydration, the salted caramel hydration and some within you vanilla protein.

Why don't you save your money and make coffee at home? Like, buddy friendly, man man what are you doing oh the smoke the smoke let's go baby all right i'm gonna i'm back off of caffeine for a little bit again oh you are what happened uh no with um come on bro gorilla chemist when he was just saying like how quickly your adrenal glands or whatnot whatever the fuck it is that he doesn't know about your adrenal glands he doesn't know about mine personally he was just saying like how quickly your adrenal glands or whatever the fuck it is.

He doesn't know about your adrenal glands. He doesn't know about mine personally, but he just said like how quickly they get burnt out or filled up. You can't see them from all the way over here. You can't. So I figured I would go a week off. So that way when we're in Ohio, I'm like DTF and I'm ready to go. So I'm going to have caffeine over there. Try not to do this on the mic.

That's okay. It just sounds like a vibrator. ain't nothing wrong hey yo well we can't hear you now y'all remember those sex toys that susan sent us yeah so yeah so mark there's there's a toy that came in right uh-oh um so we we all got the octopus. You have it in your ass right now. No, I don't. We didn't get any of those, although I should order that and just get it for free. I've had these balls in my ass for days.

It feels great. There's the octopus, right? The octopus, which is the big black vibrator. And then there's the NOS, N-o-s the vibrating cock rings but there's one toy that came in that andrew's like uh i have no use for this and i mean and when i saw it i'm like and i andrew's like i could give it to mark i'm like no give it to me bro this toy is a head massager oh it's a head massager i like the sounds of that yeah it's pretty wild now pretty wild feels great tested i answer thank you very much um well i was just thinking because i'm

like find a picture of it i'll look it's okay we got a pretty good guest today we'll leave that for another day but no i was just thinking i'm like ah i was like who could afford to bust more nuts i'm like i think in sema has that has that has a couple left in the tank i think he could probably have some released with this machine it's uh it's a winner in my book here we go but we have a great guest on yeah let's get to that careful those reactions that was good reactions that's good save them yeah so can you give us a quick intro on dr michael i can't i'm bad i think to dorovich yeah to dorovich to dorovich yeah yeah i think we got it okay sort of dr t

that's the one there we go uh yeah you know I just some of his stuff caught my eye cause he was just given such

simplified information about stuff that's highly complex like heart disease insulin resistance we hear all these terms all the time and

I don't know sometimes you're just like what like just not sure of what's going on. So I thought it'd be great to have somebody that can kind of clear the air. He knows a lot about muscle fatigue.

He knows a lot about electrolytes, amino acids, muscle protein synthesis, like all this stuff that we talk about here on the show. He knows quite a bit about, so why not dive into it with him? And what you were saying about him earlier that he has a skill of taking numerous types of information within health not just fitness but within the health realm like um heart not you like to mention heart disease but also things about cholesterol things about the brain like literally everything joints

movements etc cholesterol you guys know what the fuck's going on with cholesterol like i'm still kind of lost i just don't even care because i eat well so right yeah but you're right i i know what you mean it gets to be confusing but it's very confusing hdl your total cholesterol oh no it's in comparison to your triglycerides yeah that's another one you got to carry the one but like what you just said carry the two like i eat healthy okay so in certain uh i'll just say groups you know keeping cholesterol down without eating red meat without eating eggs is considered to be eating healthy but i know for sure you eat those things yeah absolutely so that's why it's healthy bro you're yeah you're eating very unhealthy right now and that's the thing

like everything like exactly like some people will look at the way i eat and be like oh you're eating very unhealthy right now. And that's the thing. Everything, like exactly. Like some people will look at the way I eat and be like, oh, you're going to die early. But also we have the physical activity aspect of things, which helps. Like we were talking about Floyd Mayweather outside. This is an aside, but Floyd Mayweather would eat McDonald's after hard training sessions. But the thing is, is like his body is so used to just burning through fuel. Jake Cutler used to drink a Coke after all of his workouts. And that's what people focused on. They're like, that's 40 grams of sugar.

It's like, have you ever seen the size of Jay Cutler? These individuals have built bodies that are quite literally machines. And when your body isn't a machine set up to burn efficiently and you eat McDonald's, you expect you're going to do the same shit. No. Yeah, there's one Floyd Mayweather. I know he's a junior, but I'm saying him. There's only one. And unfortunately, a lot of people are not that.

Yeah, right. And I think when it comes to cholesterol or any of these things, insulin resistance, it always comes back to the same thing. And that's why someone like Lane Norton can be so polarizing and why people always want to point back to him, like, go take this to Lane Norton. They always want him to sign off on stuff. It's because there is an energy balance to everything. You know, you overconsume energy. If you're gluttonous in any one area, you're going to end up with problems somewhere down the line, kind of no matter what it is in life. There has to be some sort of balance.

There's like checks and balances to everything. kind of no matter what it is in life, there has to be some sort of balance. There's like checks and balances to everything. Yeah. And if you overconsume energy, you're going to either end up with insulin resistance, diabetes, or heart disease. One of those things is probably going to happen to you.

Or you'll just have a lot more body weight on you, which eventually over time could wreak havoc on you. And, you know, I don't know how much heavier your body can be than what it's supposed to be. Cause there probably is like a general amount of weight that you could have that's extra. But we don't really know what those numbers are and they'd be highly individual. Some individuals and some ethnicities can hold more body fat than others and live healthy. Like Eskimos.

Yeah. Or I don't know if we call them Eskimos. What are... Oh, my gosh. There's a specific... I'm excited about that. But I know what you're talking about. Yeah, because their diet...

Inuit. Inuit people. There we go. Yeah, like the Inuit people and even Samoans. Yeah. Cause their diet, they actually eat Inuit people. There we go. Yeah. Like the Inuit people and even Samoans. Yeah. But the cool thing about Dr. Mike is you guys should really check out his YouTube channel after the podcast and go subscribe because he has a range of different topics and he explains them in typically less than 10 minutes. And one sign of an individual that really knows something is that they can take really something complex and break it down in the simplest fashion and explain it to anyone so that the lay person like me

can understand it so he's really dope and this is going to be an awesome conversation cool let's let's let the doctor in doctor in the building oh i got a lot of forehead i guess i yeah i should always probably put the video on you. Hey, gentlemen. How are you? There he is. Doing well. Looking jacked over there, doctor.

What the hell is going on? Did you get a workout in this morning already? I haven't. No, I had to come. It's 6 a.m. here, so I rolled out of bed. You just rolled out of bed looking like that. He's lying. He has a pump.

He's lying. Look, 50 quick push-ups can do a wonder. He's lying. He has a pump. He's lying. Look, 50 quick pushups can do a wonder. That's right. There we go. How long have you been into like fitness and working out and stuff? Because it looks like you take care of yourself really well. Oh, years, years. My old man used to work in a gym.

So every, I would say every second day, I'd be in the gym with him when I was like seven, eight, nine. And then I started, I was probably the only one training first year of high school. And I'm a short guy, but I trained hard. And so I ended up in high school winning like bench press competitions and all that type of stuff, which is pretty cool. So training for years, years and years. And then how'd you get into this aspect of, of health and being a doctor and all these kinds of things? That's a good question, man. That's, that's, it's, it's a long story, but to shorten it, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Didn't know what I wanted to do in

high school. Didn't know what I wanted to do at university. So I went to, so here in Australia, I live in a state called Queensland and it's very big. It's enormous. And so I decided to leave the area that I live in, move up north to an area called Townsville and do marine biology. move up north to an area called Townsville and do marine biology. And then about six months into marine biology, I realized I don't care about marine animals in the slightest. I don't know why I left. I said, you know what, I just didn't change. I went and did it and I go, this is not good whatsoever.

Fuck those fish. Zero care whatsoever. So I came back down, just did a science degree, finished that, did an honors degree, finished that, did a PhD, finished that, still not really knowing what I wanted to do. And then I got my first bit of teaching and I realized that's me. I want to teach. Teaching is my thing. I have a question for you. Based off of that, you're going through, first off, it's not easy I want to teach. Teaching is my thing. I have a question for you based off of that.

You like, you're going through, first off, it's not easy getting a PhD. But at the time you're working towards this thing that takes a monumental amount of time and probably money. And in your head, you're like, ah, I don't know if I want to do this. And then you found teaching, which is amazing. But my question would be, what advice would you give somebody? Because there are a lot of people going through the processes of trying to become a doctor, getting a PhD. When I was in my undergrad, my goal was to get into medicine. Then luckily, I volunteered in an ER where I got to talk to a lot of doctors. And a lot of them were saying, hey, a few of them were like, I don't want to be here, but I've spent so much time getting this degree

and working my way here that I don't have the, I don't have the ability to leave now. My family's depending on this. Right. And it would suck to get so far and be like, ah, shit, my life is here and I can't really do anything else. So what advice would you give somebody who is that far in or going towards something, but they're still not sure that it's what they want to do? It's a really good question. And it's hard to answer. You always hear that answer saying, follow your passion. And I think that is true if you are privileged enough to be able to follow your passion, right? So there's so many people out there that financially, they just can't follow their passion. They're going to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. And so I don't want to just throw that out there.

If you can follow your passion, do it. I've always loved science. I've always loved biology. I did want to become a medical doctor. And while I was doing my PhD, I was going to finish my PhD and then do MD. And then I sat down with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, we were having drinks. And she said, so why do you want to do medicine? And I said, I've always wanted to do medicine. And she goes, yeah, but why? And I went, I actually haven't thought about why. It's just one of those things where I thought I just always wanted to. And then she said, but you love teaching. Why don't you just, you know, maybe just dabble in a little bit more teaching. And so I went, it's like an epiphany. I went, you know what, I'm doing it. And so I just did more and more teaching and realized I've got this knack for taking really complex things and making them really digestible and understandable. And it was relatively easy for me to do, which was another great thing for me. And there were other colleagues, other academics who were experts in their field. But then when

they got up in front of 300 students to do their lecture, the students would leave and not understand a word. It would be a two-hour lecture and the students would go, no idea what they said. And I just thought, why do the lecture? What is the point of doing a two-hour lecture if no one understands anything? And that's such a huge thing for me at the moment is obviously in communication. And a big part of what you two do is communication, right? Getting information and sending it out to the masses. And it needs to be digestible. It needs to be understandable. And if people can't understand it, then there's no point doing it. And there's so many experts out there. And there's some experts who have a really big platform too. And I'm talking about

scientists here with big platforms. And then you talk to them and you go, I still really don't understand what you said. And a lot of people sort of just go, they nod their head and go, I don't want to seem like I'm an idiot. So I'll just go, yep, thank you. I understood. And then they'll piss off and not understand a word of it. And I don't like that because in my eyes, it makes knowledge unavailable. It's behind a wall. And I hate that. I hate this whole secret knowledge thing where only academics, only experts have access to that knowledge, and all the rest of the peasants can't do it.

They'll never have the capacity to understand, and it's just such a load of shit. I dislike it so much. And the best way for me that I've realized to present information is to take a two-hour lecture and make it two minutes because the lay average person who's not an expert in a particular topic doesn't want to listen to me talk for two hours. I could talk for eight hours. I talk a lot, but two minutes and I've got their attention. And if I can teach them one bit of new information in that two minutes, then my job's done. I'm all set and I'm happy.

And so that's what I ended up going to. I ended up getting to this point now that I just want to educate and help people. I want to empower people to make better health decisions. If I can teach them about how their body works, then they don't need to find a guru to tell them, you know, here are the five things you must do, and they don't understand it, they just do it. I can tell them, this is how your body works, they understand it, and then they can make their own health decisions. And that's my path. Teach us today, if you don't mind, about electrolytes, because we've been talking

about electrolytes for a while here. I utilize a fairly low carbohydrate diet. I predominantly eat meat. Now I've introduced some fruit into my diet as well and occasionally eat some rice and stuff like that also. But it's predominantly a protein and fat style diet. And I also utilize a lot of intermittent fasting. So does in SEMO. Actually, we all utilize some form of intermittent fasting here and there. What's important about, what should people know about electrolytes when they're trying to lose body fat or even have higher levels of performance? So I think a great place to begin is, and this is like right at the beginning. I don't know if you guys remember year 10 chemistry class with that poster on the wall of the periodic table, had all the chemical elements. And I don't know about you,

but I had no idea what that, even during high school chemistry, I didn't really understand that poster. I didn't really understand it until I was doing my PhD, in all honesty, because I never had a good teacher to explain it to me. But I think what the listeners should understand is that that periodic table is probably the most important piece of information that's ever been produced. It contains all the ingredients to make the entire universe. So every person that you know, everything that you use, everything on the planet, the ingredients to make it is on that periodic table. And there's 118 ingredients that we call elements. And so to make a human, you only need 51 of the ingredients on that periodic table to make a human being. And to make 99% of a human

being, you only need six of those ingredients, which ends up being carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Now, the other, the rest of those 51 ingredients, you only need in very small, minute trace amounts. Now, of the 99% of your body mass coming from those six ingredients, two of them, which is hydrogen and oxygen make up 70% of you. And most of it is bound together to form water and water is H2O. So two hydrogen, one oxygen. And so 60% of you is going to be water and that water is going to be distributed through various compartments of your body. Now that water is either going to be inside the cells of your body and you've got 30 trillion cells, or it's going to be sitting outside the cells of your body, bathing the cells. Now, most of it, two thirds of it is inside the

cells and one third is sitting outside bathing those cells. Now, the interesting thing about water, because to understand electrolytes, you need to understand water, is that the two hydrogen and one oxygen forms this boomerang where oxygen's in the middle and the two hydrogen are bound to the oxygen forming a boomerang. The oxygen has a little negative charge and the hydrogen has a little positive charge. So water is charged. That's the take-home message because every single organism on the planet, doesn't matter where it is or whether it's unicellular or multicellular, it must have water. Without water, there's no survival.

There's no life. And the reason why is because water has that charge. So when you take in the rest of those ingredients or elements to make a person in those small amounts, some of them, once they get into your body and mix in with that water, they develop a charge to them. And that's what we call an electrolyte. And so electrolytes include, well, basically electrolyte is the medical term for salt. That's it. So an electrolyte is a salt. And the most common salt everyone's heard of is table salt, which is sodium chloride. That's an electrolyte. Now in the real world, not in our body, but in the environment, salts are usually bound together, bound to one another, because once they're in the water of your body, but in the environment, salts are usually bound together, bound to one another, because once they're in the water of your body, they split apart to create a charge to them. And so sodium

chloride bound together, stick it in the water of our body, they get pulled apart and sodium gets a positive charge, chloride gets a negative charge. And this is the importance of electrolytes. Because water has a charge and electrolytes have a charge, wherever the electrolytes go, water follows. And so the important thing about electrolytes is that they maintain hydration and fluid balance within the body. So whether it be sodium or chloride or potassium or magnesium or calcium. They're all what we call ions, which are charged atoms or elements, but they come from electrolytes. They are electrolytes. And wherever they move to, water follows. And this is how we leverage this function

to maintain people's blood pressure, for example, through drugs called diuretics. So if you've either got edema, so too much fluid building up in the tissues of your body, or your blood pressure is too high, we can give somebody a diuretic. And what that does is it takes the positive sodium, that electrolyte, and pees sodium out. But wherever sodium goes, water follows. And so if you pee out sodium, you pee out water and the fluid in your body diminishes and your blood pressure diminishes. So the great thing about electrolytes is they promote hydration. And so that's where it comes to performance and fitness and health is the whole hydration side of things. And it was electrolytes or for example, Powerade or Gatorade, I should say, you guys are aware that Gatorade was first made in Florida, right,

with the Florida Gators. So they decided to take not just electrolytes and salts but mix it with glucose because in your gut, you don't absorb sodium unless you absorb sugar as well. So you need to get a bit of glucose and it goes together. Glucose and sodium get absorbed at the same time. You can't absorb sodium without it, but if you want maximal sodium absorption, you need that sugar to go along with it. Okay. So I'm curious about this. As far as like, you know, sodium is concerned, we have,

you know, we've had Stan Efferding on. A lot of people have come onto the podcast and talked about like the benefits of sodium because in the general population, many people, including people in my family are doing the best they can to avoid salt and salting their foods. So why do, why would that be something that people would maybe want to do? And is there a context in when people should avoid sodium if like they're not an athlete or anything, or are, is sodium kind of maybe demonized and people are misunderstanding it? Great question. And it's a little bit of both and it's context specific. So first of all, because we now understand the concept that wherever sodium goes, water follows, our kidneys have evolved to be really good at handling salts. So really good at handling

sodium, for example. I mean, we evolved in the oceans. We've evolved in a salty environment. And even though we've left the oceans, we've still got the oceans inside of us. 60% of us is this salty water. And so the kidneys are really good at handling salt. So a lot of people who take excess salt, kidney's usually quite good. Just get rid of it. But when it gets rid of sodium, it usually has to get rid of water as well. Just get rid of it. But when it gets rid of sodium, it usually has to get rid of water as well. Some people within the population are sodium sensitive, and we don't really know why. So what this means is that if you were to take a group of people with chronic hypertension,

so hyper means above, tension is referring to the pressure, so they've got chronically elevated blood pressure, 50% of them would be sodium sensitive. And what that means is their sodium intake is tightly correlated with their blood pressure, 50% of them would be sodium sensitive. And what that means is their sodium intake is tightly correlated with their blood pressure. And so reducing sodium will also reduce their blood pressure. Now that's 50% of people with chronic hypertension. 25% of people who don't have hypertension are also sodium sensitive, but it's likely that they probably don't ingest sodium to a quantity that is resulting in the hypertension. Now, this is in the average population, not the athlete population. We know that athletes, when they sweat, they're going to be not just

releasing water through their sweat glands, but also various ions like sodium and chloride and so forth. And so they do need to replenish those salts. The thing is, even though we know, one, they need to replenish those salts, we don't actually have any number that's given out by any governing bodies, any research institutes or anything that says this is how much you need to replenish. And this is where the difficulty comes. This is where that context comes is because somebody running a marathon is obviously going to need greater replenishment than somebody doing a 30-minute bench workout. And so again, context specific there. We do need that sodium. The thing

is that because most of that sodium sits outside the cells, it's also in the blood and interchangeable with the bloodstream. So anything outside the cells, that includes the tissue outside the cells, the space outside the cells, but also the bloodstream. So anything you ingest is going to go from the bloodstream to the area outside the cells. And so if you ingest too much sodium, it goes into the bloodstream, jumps out of the bloodstream and then bathes the cells now the great thing is our kidneys like i said have evolved a mechanism to remove that sodium but if we can't one the water builds up outside the cells and in the bloodstream and the blood pressure goes up and sometimes fluid retention can occur but it can also pull water

from inside the cells out if it's not managed. And that's the process of osmosis. And so your body loves to maintain balance. And so in medicine and health and biology, the most important concept for anyone to understand is homeostasis, which is the point that regardless of any function that your body performs, it needs to maintain a happy, healthy balance. There's a range. There's upper limits and lower limits. And ideally, you'll function best within those limits. And that's the same with sodium. Now, with sodium, those limits are greater. So you can have relatively low, relatively high, and still function quite well. But for other things like potassium, it gets more narrow. So other ions or electrolytes, it gets narrow.

And that's because it has a different function and it doesn't sit outside the cells. Potassium sits inside the cells. So again, context specific. What's a cure for like a leg cramp? I used to, in the middle of the night, I would stretch and then sure enough, I'd get like a hammy cramp or a calf cramp. And then I've talked to other relatives of mine too, and they end up with the same, you know, same symptoms. I don't have them anymore. I think the electrolytes have helped a ton, but in your opinion, what do you think causes

that for some folks? We don't know. So that's the first answer. That's the simple answer. Magnesium has always been touted as the cure or treatment for cramps, but all the studies show that it's pretty poor at doing it. We know that it does have something to do with electrolyte concentrations across cells, but it's probably a combination of electrolytes

in addition to things such as the neuromuscular junction. So when the nervous system talks to a muscle, it's a neuron, then there's a little gap, and then there's the muscle. And that neuron needs to release a chemical called acetylcholine that needs to cross that gap. And then it needs to bind to receptors that release sodium and then release calcium. So sodium and calcium are important. The reason why they thought magnesium was the treatment for cramps was because magnesium antagonizes calcium. Now, what that means is it does the opposite, basically, of calcium. It stops calcium from doing what it wants to do. And what calcium wants to do is tell muscles to contract.

So anytime calcium is inside of a muscle cell, that muscle cell will contract, regardless of what type of muscle, right? So you've got heart muscle, you've got skeletal muscle, and you've got smooth muscle. So heart muscle pumps blood around the body, skeletal muscles attached to your skeleton, and that's the locomotion, you to do weights, run, jump, lift, move, and sing. But then you've got the smooth muscle, which are the hollow muscles of your digestive tract, your reproductive tract, your renal system, your blood vessels. So calcium is required for all of those. And so what we used to think was because calcium tells these muscles to contract and magnesium antagonizes, does the opposite of calcium. If we give somebody magnesium, they won't

get cramps. But unfortunately, the studies don't show it. So the best advice I could offer is hydration would be the first one. And just to make sure that you do have adequate electrolytes, not crazy amounts, even though your kidneys are going to be really good at filtering those, but adequate amounts of electrolytes. On that note, I want to kind of ask this because you mentioned that for athletes, we are not sure the amount of electrolytes to take in. It's like, there's no standard. So for an athlete that's doing, whether it be whatever sport they're doing,

what are the physical cues that an athlete can like pay attention to within the way they're feeling during a night workout or the way they feel post-workout? That's like, oh shit, I need some electroly some electrolytes because for example we were doing some i was me and mark were doing some movements from this guy chlororolaster who came on the podcast once i went home i sat down and when i got up i was perpetually stuck in this position because all the muscles in my groin were cramping up drank some electrolytes a few minutes later i was able

to start moving so i should have probably had electrolytes before that but what should an athlete be paying attention to so they understand time to get some fucking electrolytes a few minutes later i was able to start moving so i should have probably had electrolytes before that but what should an athlete be paying attention to so they understand time to get some fucking electrolytes yeah great question generally speaking the body is really intuitive and so anytime there is water balance changes or electrolyte or salt changes, your brain picks it up instantly. And the great thing is that it's one of the most important mechanisms that we have for maintaining life because we all need water, right? And we all need those salts because we need water for survival, but we need the salts to tell the water where to go. And so if you've either not had enough water intake or you've done so much exercise that the water has been removed from your body, that may be either through sweat, but you lose a lot of water through just breathing. So your breath is humid. So there's water molecules attached to the gas that comes out.

You actually release a lot. One of the things that just as a digression, one of the things that medicos need to think about when they've got a comatose patient is dehydration because of all the breathing that they're doing. And because they've got a tube down their throat that takes away what we call insensible water loss just through breathing. So the thing that happens is when the water balance changes or the electrolyte or salt balance changes, your brain picks it up, specifically an area called the hypothalamus. And it picks it up because the cells will either shrink or they'll swell. So if you've lost too much water from your body, that means it's more concentrated outside your cells. So if you think you've got a bucket of

water with a bit of salt in it, if you only remove the water and leave the salt, that bucket becomes more concentrated, even though there's less water. The same thing happens in the body. So when you exercise, you actually sweat out more water than you do salt. So you can become slightly dehydrated in that sense. But also your concentration of electrolytes goes up paradoxically, and your hypothalamus picks it up because the cells start to shrink a little bit because the water moves out and then you get thirsty. So your mouth gets dry, you drink some

water and you start changing your behavior. So amazingly, your behavior changes. That's the very first thing without you even noticing, you just reach for water, you start drinking water. So it's listening to those physiological cues is the first point, but the problem comes in athletes. So because athletes will do intense bouts of exercise, they're going to remove water, remove ions, probably faster than the body has time to say, Hey, go get that drink. Hey, go get that supplement. Hey, go get this. So it's probably just one, listen to the cues, but then figuring out what your body needs over time. And so it might be this hit and miss sort of thing that you do. So you just said that you did that workout, you went home, could barely

stand up. You took some water and some electrolytes and then it helped you out. So now you've sort of learned a lesson. And so now you know to maintain a different type of hydration at a different period. And I think it's just that game of figuring out when we need to hydrate and with what. There's no hard and fast rule. There's no take it at this time, don't take it at this time. It's about just learning from your body and your physiological cues. And it's the same when you go into the gym and lift weights. So you may be doing the same movement as somebody, but you'll do it slightly different catering to your own somatotype,

catering to your own phenotype, your own body shape and body size, because you know your limits, you know what you can and you can't do. So a lot of it is that hit and miss. So it sounds to me like hydration would be pretty important to even fat burning because you're mentioning this kind of combination of the electrolytes and being properly hydrated with water. And then you were also mentioning how we lose a lot of hydration through our breath. And I know like in the middle of the night,

people when they wake up in the morning, they weigh a little bit lighter, things like that. So it's my understanding that when we are burning fat, that we are kind of losing it through breathing, I believe. Maybe you can expand upon that. And I don't know if electrolytes or hydration is a really important thing with losing fat, but maybe you can explain. So there's a couple of things to unpack there. The first thing is anytime we take our macromolecules, which are proteins, fats, and carbs,

and we utilize them to produce energy in the form of ATP, we utilize water in this process. And so water is needed for all of these chemical reactions. And so water is utilized. Hence one of the reasons why we need water in the body, because you need it to either build things up or break things down and either makes water by doing it or it breaks water down by doing it. So, so for example, when you use ATP, so for everyone listening,

you've probably heard of ATP is that energy molecule. It's the energy currency of the body. We can't do something without ATP, which stands for adenosine triphosphate. So the thing you need to remember here is that there's three phosphate molecules. And when you pop one phosphate off, energy is released. And that energy is passed on to something else for you to do some sort of work. Now, when you pop that phosphate off, you actually need water to do this. And what happens is the water splits apart and releases a hydrogen ion, which is acidic. So anytime you use ATP,

you create a little bit of acid in the body, but you've utilized water, hence why you need to continue to hydrate. So that doesn't matter whether you're using fat or proteins or carbohydrates, you're using fat or proteins or carbohydrates, you're utilizing water in this whole process. Now, I think when it comes to the process of utilizing fats versus utilizing carbohydrates and proteins, you sort of probably can push to the side a little bit because it's not the primary source for energy production, but you could hold up carbohydrates and fats together or triglycerides as okay these are our energy substrates you store them as their macromolecules so glucose we store as glycogen and fatty acids and glycerol we store as triglycerides and there's different tissue compartments that we store them in. When we

utilize them for energy, it's tissue specific and it's context specific. And this is one of the things that I love and hate about biology is that there's no simple, I can give simple answers, but it doesn't cover the whole picture. And so we probably know that when you go into the gym, lift some weights for, you know, let's say 15 seconds, you're doing some bicep curls, you're utilizing your saved up ATP stores and you've only got two seconds worth of ATP stored in your cells. That's it. You think it's so important for survival, but you've only got two seconds worth. But luckily for us, we've got mechanisms that can replenish that ATP. But luckily for us, we've got mechanisms that can replenish that ATP.

So creatine phosphate, hence why people supplement with creatine, because one of the roles of creatine is it holds on to phosphate. And so it loves to hold on to that phosphate so that when your ATP, adenosine, triphosphate, when it loses one of those phosphates to give you energy, it needs to gain that phosphate back so it can give you more energy again. Luckily, creatine is holding on to all that phosphate and can just hand it off. Hence why people supplement with that creatine. So we've got all this creatine store in our muscle to utilize. Once that ATP is gone, you replenish it.

We mainly use glucose in the first few seconds to minutes for our energy source. But if you're going longer, then we're going to have to start recruiting some fat stores. And so that's why you have a look at endurance athletes predominantly utilizing fatty acids for their energy source. And you look at these anaerobic athletes and they're utilizing their glucose or glycogen stores. Now, it doesn't mean that they can only utilise those things, right? So you can utilise fatty acid stores

through different types of exercise and you can utilise carbohydrate stores through different types of exercise, depending on what energy storage you've got left. So Mark was saying low carb-ish, high protein, high fat, right? So I would say that you obviously don't have zero glycogen in the body, but you probably have less glycogen, which is the stored form of glucose. Now your liver is the main storage unit for that glycogen. And you probably use the good chunk of it just by sleeping. And if you went to go for a run, I know you like to go for your runs, Mark, you've probably used up most of that glycogen stores and you're switching over to utilizing some fatty acids. Now, if we, and I know that this is digressing a little bit

from your question with the electrolytes, but I thought I'd touch briefly upon ketones and the use of how ketones sort of fit into this process. Because a lot of people talk about ketones, but I don't think they have a nice understanding of where they fit into all these processes. So your brain wants predominantly to use glucose for energy. Now, if you handed your brain and said,

here you go, here's some glucose, here's some amino acids, here's some fatty acids, what do you want to use? The brain's going to gobble up the glucose. But if you don't have any glucose available, what can happen is that the brain can use ketones to create energy. And it works quite well off ketones. quite well off ketones. And there's a whole bunch of evidence out there talking about utilizing ketones for various different neurodegenerative diseases. And also, since the 20s, it's been utilized for a certain type of childhood epilepsy. So, what generally happens, and if I don't make sense at any of these points, please stop me and tell me to re-explain, because again, I want everyone to understand what I'm saying. When you go to make energy from glucose,

glucose will enter your cells from your bloodstream and it undergoes a process called glycolysis where it turns to something called pyruvate. So glucose turns to pyruvate. Pyruvate jumps into your mitochondria. It then turns into something called acetyl-CoA and into something called the Krebs cycle. Now, acetyl-CoA, in order to go through this process of the Krebs cycle, it must bind to something called oxaloacetate. So they're two important things that need to be in your mitochondria, oxaloacetate and acetyl-CoA. They bind together and they produce a whole bunch of these energy-carrying products called NADH and FADH2. Now, all you need to really know about those things is that they go to the

membrane of the mitochondria and hand it these products, which are called electrons and protons, which are hydrogen ions. And through this process, they generate a butt ton of ATP. So glucose produces a huge amount of ATP. Now, let's just say you are Mark Bell and he gets rid of his glucose. He buggers that glucose off and says, I don't want any of it. Maybe not all of it, but let's just say he gets rid of it. That process obviously doesn't occur.

Now, the body wants to make glucose. And so what will happen is that your fat stores start to break down and they release fatty acids and they release glycerol because that's what triglycerides are made out of. Tri meaning three, three fatty acids and the glyceride is the glycerol part. So triglycerides break up into fatty acids and glycerol and they feed into these pathways that I just spoke about. They feed into the glycolysis pathway and they feed into the Krebs cycle. Perfect. But the oxaloacetate sees that there's a gap. There's no glucose. And the oxaloacetate goes, oh, this is my chance. I can become glucose. I've got the opportunity here. So oxaloacetate jumps out of the Krebs cycle to become glucose. But what that means is

acetyl-CoA doesn't have oxaloacetate to bind to. So acetyl-CoA starts to accumulate as fatty acids are coming in and glycerol is coming in and the oxaloacetate is turning into acetyl-CoA. And so acetyl-CoA accumulates. And what you end up getting is all this acetyl-CoA that snaps together like Lego blocks. And that's what ketones are. Ketones are acetyl-CoA that snaps together like Lego blocks. And that's what ketones are. Ketones are acetyl-CoAs snapped together. And so that's beta-hydroxybutyrate and acetoacetate. And then the great thing is they can leave the liver because all of this is happening in the liver. They leave the liver, they travel to the brain and the ketones turn back into acetyl-CoA, And the ketones turn back into acetyl-CoA, undergo the Krebs cycle, make that NADH, FADH2, and then they go to the mitochond and supply the brain with an alternate energy source and supply other tissues as an alternate energy source as well and this is

without the need of insulin and we know that insulin is required it's the key to open up the doors of the cells to let glucose in to be used to make energy but the brain doesn't need insulin and so the brain doesn't need glucose and the brain can utilize those ketones. Now, I know that this is a 40 minute digression, but Mark asked me about, and I apologize, but Mark asked me about the electrolytes. The electrolytes don't necessarily play a big role when it comes to fat burning, but if your electrolytes are out of balance, a multitude of things don't function in the body. So one of the reasons why we need sodium and potassium

as electrolytes is they allow for nerves to send signals. If your sodium and potassium levels are out of whack, your nerves don't send adequate signals. So that may mean you may be a bit foggy. It may also mean that the neurons going to your muscles don't fire properly and you don't get the adequate contractions. Your muscles also need the sodium and potassium there as well for that contraction. Because if sodium, here's the thing, if you've got a muscle cell, all the sodium sitting outside, if a neuron goes to that muscle cell and says contract, what it actually tells that muscle cell

is open up channels to let sodium in. Now, when sodium enters your muscles, it tells calcium to enter. And when calcium enters, the muscle contracts. So if your calcium's out of whack, your sodium's out of whack, the muscles don't contract. But it doesn't play a huge role when it comes to the fat metabolism per se. i know that i could have probably answered that in 30 seconds but i thought a digression was quite interesting on the side no go ahead no i was just gonna ask like so for i don't know i guess i'll say like your average person because maybe not everybody's looking to uh to get jacked and youed. And I'll just say maybe not everybody listening is not going to be an athlete. But for the average person, what, I guess I'll say,

detriment would it be for them to be electrolyte deficient just in their everyday tasks and stuff? Yeah, great question. And it's going to be similar to an athlete. It's just going to be the symptoms are more pronounced in an athlete because they need to utilize those electrolytes in a very short-term, quick phase. But it's going to be those things like lethargy, so that tiredness. It's going to be sluggish, foggy.

They're the basic ones. Now, that's if your electrolytes are just a little bit out. If your electrolytes are way out of whack, you'll be hospitalized. So you'll know. So it's not one of those things where you're sitting down going, oh, am I like really sodium deficient or really potassium deficient? No, you'll either be in a coma or you'll be having seizures. So the body's really good again at – so I'm sure all of us have experienced

that moment where we're like, I need something salty. I need some chips. I need some nuts or something like that just your body telling you you need some salt like listen listen to your body obviously to a point because the body can also tell you eat that whole chocolate cake but the body is quite intuitive dr mike i want to ask you this too um i have a few friends who drink a little bit too much more like way too much uh but i gave them some electrolytes i'm just like drink this after you have a hard night right and they all come back reporting back wow i don't have a hangover or my hangover is way is not as good obviously the solution would be don't drink so much asshole but why is it that electrolytes are so beneficial for people who tend to drink a lot of alcohol?

Yeah. Alcohol is a toxin. That's the first thing. And so when you drink alcohol, the new studies have shown that they used to say a little bit of wine, a little bit of beer was actually good for your health. It's not true. Come on, man. Let me have my wine. Look, it doesn't stop me from drinking.

Come on, man. Let me have my wine. Look, it doesn't stop me from drinking. But any dose of alcohol is good. Look, we don't do things entirely for health benefits, right? I don't know. Sometimes we just do things for fun, and that can include drinking a little bit of alcohol.

I'm Australian. It's difficult not to drink some alcohol. But what basically happens is when you drink alcohol, even though let's just say you're having beer so we'll stick with the just beer when you drink a 600 mil i don't know what are the what are the cans or we call them a stubby but what's how many you guys go in ounces right we call it chodes over here we call it chodes over here I'm serious are you serious? they're called chodes

in the US that's awesome well there you go my guy I'm lying to you I don't want to have you continue that it's not a chode I would have continued by saying chode I know

that's why I stopped if you're chugging down the chode probably thank you for clearing that up. You're welcome. So if you're drinking beer, there's obviously a significant amount of fluid in that alcohol. And there's, you know, so it might be a 5% beer. So 5% of that volume is going to be pure ethanol.

But the rest is going to be mostly water. So you'd think, well, it's going to hydrate me. I'm drinking all of this water while I'm drinking alcohol. But what alcohol does, strangely, is it travels to your brain, the same part of your brain that deals with your electrolyte and fluid balance. And it tells your brain to urinate. And so this is where you get that bursting the seal sort of thing. If you've had a couple of drinks and you go to the pub and the first time you urinate, then you feel like you can't stop urinating for maybe an hour or so. And that's because what happens is alcohol goes to the hypothalamus of the brain. And there's a chemical that the hypothalamus releases called

ADH, which is antidiuretic hormone. Now, what this hormone does is when we're dehydrated, it gets released to tell us not to pee out water and to hold onto it so we remain hydrated. Perfect. But alcohol blunts its effect. It stops it. So when you drink alcohol, that hormone doesn't get released. And so you just pee freely and you end up urinating out more water than the alcohol volume that you drank in. And you do this for probably the first 90 minutes of drinking and then things start to normalize over the night. But the point is it's too late.

And so you end up releasing more water and with water, you release your electrolytes. And therefore, by the end of the night, you may feel hydrated because you've drunk so much, but you're actually deficient of your ions, you're deficient of your fluid, and you need to replenish both the electrolytes and the water. Yeah. I find myself, if I'm not drinking electrolytes and trying to drink just straight water, even just a small amount, I'm kind of peeing all day long. Now, assuming everything is in check, like prostate and stuff, and I'm not, I don't have any issues down there. Hopefully I don't. What caught, like, why is it that when I have electrolytes, like I'm good, like I can usually

drink like an entire shaker cup or two and be fine, but like one shaker cup of plain water, and I have to be close to a bathroom. So you're probably drinking too much water. You probably don't need that excess water. If you have the electrolytes, remember wherever the salt goes, water follows. So if you're introducing that salt into the system, then it's going to hold on to that water. And if your body doesn't need to pee out the salts, the water is not going to follow it. So if you need those salts you need those electrolytes and you ingest them they stay in your body it pulls the water towards it so you're not going to be peeing that water out when you drink those electrolytes but if you're just drinking the

water and your drink and the water volume goes up too high but the electrolyte volume's relatively low then you're just going to pee out that excess water. On that note, because I've been saying this for a while, so I want to understand if we're correct in this. When I started supplementing electrolytes maybe two and a half years ago, I noticed that I was drinking less overall water during the day. I didn't necessarily feel like I used to just drink a lot of water, right? So is it because you have adequate electrolytes, you then will end up, if you're a person who drinks a lot of water because you're conscious of drinking water, that you won't just generally drink as much water? Yeah, absolutely. And you can overhydrate.

One of the big problems with endurance athletes is overhydration. And you would think that that's not the case, but they think, I'm sweating a lot. I need to drink a lot of water. They drink more water than they have electrolytes available and it dilutes the electrolytes out, which is, so they may have, and if you think about absolutes, they may have the absolute correct amount of electrolytes in their body. But if you introduce too much water, you dilute them. And the body is all about concentrations, which is the amount in the volume. And so that's why you may have a normal amount of electrolytes by quantity.

But if you get rid of all the water in your body, the concentration of it, because concentration is amount per volume, it goes up. And that's bad for the body. The same thing goes if you overhydrate. You dilute them out too much, the concentration goes down. And so it's exactly that point. If you've got the right amount of electrolytes in the body, it's going to hold on to the right amount of water in the body and you're just going to pee out all the excess stuff you don't need. The kidneys are great at that. It sounds to me like from a nutrition standpoint that it would make sense to keep some carbohydrate in your diet.

You know, I've been a huge proponent of low carb diets and I wrote a book years ago called The War on Carbs. And in The War on Carbs, I wrote about like, you know, kind of once you've lost body fat and once you're able to manage your diet a little bit better, you can reintroduce carbohydrates. This is just some of my own beliefs and thoughts and just sharing some of my own experience with losing over 100 pounds. But I've come to the conclusion nowadays that just having some carbohydrates in your diet to kind of offset, like I don't really think it's great to be in ketosis. Not that there's a problem with it, but I know that some people are kind of gunning for it. And we were talking about fasting earlier. I think what's happening is there's a lot of individuals, they really want to lose weight and they're under eating every single day. They're not consuming probably much carbohydrate. They're doing a lot of fasting. Maybe they haven't looked into electrolytes yet.

But what I would also say is that maybe they don't need to consume crazy amounts of electrolytes. Maybe they just need a little bit more balance in their diet and they need to pay attention to having their nutrition be nutritious. I think that's a big mistake a lot of us have made. Absolutely agree. And I think that's one of the issues when people start to go extremely strict with certain types of diets is it becomes restrictive. And when it's restrictive, you're limiting the nutrients. You're limiting the vitamins, the minerals. You're limiting a lot of those good things. And if you do that for too long, you can actually become deficient in those things, which is the opposite of what you want when you want to be a healthy person.

And so I think the body does not really care too much about what nutrient it takes in. For most of humankind, our problem has been not enough calories. And now for this very small window that we're living in, our problem is too many calories. So we haven't actually evolved this mechanism that says, whoa, enough is enough. We've actually evolved a mechanism over millennia that if you find food, you eat that food

and you hold on to those calories. Now, I don't think any particular macronutrient should be demonized in any way, whether it be carbohydrates, proteins, or fats. They all have utility in specific contexts. Some people may do better if they have a little bit higher carbohydrates. I'm going to say better. We need to be specific there. Some people may just say, I function better on X or with Y. Now, the question then should be, what do you mean by

function better? Do you mean you just feel better in, what do you mean by function better? Do you mean you just feel better in yourself? Do you mean you train better? Do you mean you think better? Because everyone's benchmarks are different. So for one person, training better, that's it. That's the benchmark. That's all they're after. For another person, it's thinking more clearly. For another person, it's sleeping better. So it's all context specific in that sense. And carbohydrates are important. There's no doubt about it. We have evolved to love sugar. The brain will never be sick of sugar. It doesn't matter what you do because the brain, like I said, if you hand it in a platter of all these different macronutrients, it's going to choose glucose predominantly.

So it will never be sick. And that's just because it's evolved that because it's a quick, fast energy source. And like I said, if you think of the context that we've evolved through most of our life, or I should say most of our history has been we need energy, man, sugar is the quick, fast energy source. So of course, the brain is going to evolve to want that over anything else. But then the issue obviously comes with over ingestion of any of these things, any of these things. But obviously carbohydrates is probably the easiest one to over ingest, hence why it's one of the biggest issues. You know, earlier when you were talking about drinking or athletes learning to be more in tune with their hydration signals, right? An interesting thing came to mind because when we started doing intermittent fasting over here,

initially it was a little bit difficult, you know, because I would be someone who would eat multiple times a day. As I started fasting, I ended up taking it a little bit too far where I was like, ooh, the next day I didn't have enough energy. Right. Um, so then I found this sweet spot and when, uh, where like I knew kind of when I knew when I needed to eat and my hunger signals, it's like they became stronger. Typically, you know, in the morning I'd wake up, I'd have a hunger signal. I'd be voraciously hungry nowadays. Like I can go quite some time. And when I feel hungry, I know I need to eat. And when I eat, it's enough. My body weight has stayed the same for the past, what, two and a half years that I've been fasting. I haven't lost any muscle, but now my intuition, as far as my hunger is concerned,

tells me some days I eat once, some days I eat twice. So I'm curious, how can people, if an individual keeps the standard American diet or the way that most people typically eat, which is every few hours, you're constantly getting the signal, constantly responding to it, eating. And we obviously have so much food available that it's like, when you say you're hungry, you don't, you might not actually be hungry, but you're just so used to eating and eating and eating. But when you do something that kind of goes a little bit too far, maybe with fasting, sometimes you get in tune with when you're actually hungry. So I want to know, in your opinion, what are some ways that number one, people can get better in tune with hydration? maybe getting in the way of people's true hydration signals? And then how can people become more intuitively or intuitive with their hunger signals so they can respond adequately and maybe not stay overweight? Yeah, it's actually a really difficult question to answer, particularly when it comes to the food aspect. The hydration,

easier to answer because we are very in tune with hydration because if if you become dehydrated you know that very quickly and so if you always carry some water maybe some electrolytes as well with you then you will reflexively drink from that water bottle whether you're conscious of it or not because it's such a deep-seated um impulse so just carry water with you wherever you go. And you may drink it reflexively. You may end up just through patterning, drink it. That's fine. You'll pee out the excess, but at least it's there and it's available. And when it comes to the food, man, that's a more difficult question to answer because you can't exclude the psychological aspect of eating. you can't exclude the psychological aspect of eating.

And that is so enormous. And I don't even think we've touched the surface truly with that. Physiologically, we can talk about, you can play around with hormones and you can play around with fasting and you can play around with just reducing the caloric intake. So you can have multiple small meals over a day or you can just not eat at all throughout the day. The body is really good at responding to whatever pattern you decide to put it into.

It's just putting it into that pattern, which is the difficult thing because that's the psychological aspect. So a lot of people obviously eat reflexively because it's a particular time of the day. They go, oh, it's eight o'clock. I need to eat. And that's arbitrary. They's eight o'clock. I need to eat. And that's arbitrary.

They've just created this arbitrary time for them to eat. And they've done that for the past 30, 40 years. But if they change that, man, the body's really good at just kicking over after a little bit of time and getting used to that eating period. Because again, we went through multiple periods of fasting throughout our history. I mean, most of our past, we probably ate once or twice a day. Now, those meals would have been diverse as well.

So, well, depending on the time of the year and depending on the place. So we ate seasonally, obviously, there were going to be certain fruits, certain vegetables, certain meats that were available and we had to stick with those. And then when the season changed, we had to adapt with that environment. That's something we don't do now.

We don't really eat seasonally. And so now there's some evidence out there about seasonal eating. Maybe, you know, will that be of some benefit maybe to the microbiota or the gut flora or whatever it may be? Again, the evidence is still out on that. or whatever it may be. Again, the evidence is still out on that. I think at the end of the day, your body, I think to try and answer the question, which I probably can't, your body is really good at getting into new patterns,

particularly when it comes to eating. The difficulty is trying to overcome the impulse to eat when you're patterned to eat. And that's something that I can't help people with. What is something that frustrates you maybe about the fitness industry when you see other leaders speaking out and having these conversations? Like, is there something that kind of irks you? Oh man. Oh man. It's a whole other podcast. Yeah, there's a couple of things. I think two things. One thing is, and this is probably the biggest thing, is when you've got, and I sort of touched upon it at the beginning

of the podcast, but when you've got somebody who states that they are an expert and they say, I am the number one, there's no one above me, I've got all this information. Come to me and I'll tell you. And then you go to them and you go, well, you're the expert. Tell me this. And you ask them. And then they start to talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.

And then you don't get anything out. You go, I just still have no idea what you said. I have no idea. And I'm truly hoping that that hasn't been the conversation. Nope. and I'm truly hoping that that hasn't been the conversation. Nope. But in my eyes, and so a lot of the time,

the person who's gone to the expert and they go, oh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and then they turn around and they go, yeah, no, thank you, that was awesome, that was great, and they truly don't understand anything. And then they think, I'm an idiot, I don't get it. They're just smarter than me. And I hate that so much. I hate when people think, oh, I'll never be as smart as you. I'll never understand that.

And it's just dog shit. It's absolute dog shit. Everybody has the capacity to understand all of these concepts. And I feel like we don't put enough onus on that expert if they're the expert and they're saying that they can talk about all this information but they can't do it in a way that's understandable it's their fault the person who's listening isn't an idiot it's not their fault it's that person's fault and they need to be held accountable but there's so many people out there that's the first thing um the second thing is i also think experts um in in many fields probably think that the average person

isn't smart enough to understand it themselves and so they'll just say things like look just do xyz off you go now i i dislike that because just doing something without understanding why I feel defeats the purpose. It's unempowering. You want to empower that person. And that's why I like to talk about things from, you know, the baseline to bring it. Everyone starts at the same level of understanding

and we bring them all up so everyone understands. that way i can instead of saying here's three tools or things that you can do go off and do it i'd like to say this is how your body functions under these conditions now what you do is up to you it's your body it's your health it's your decision now they can then if i've equipped them enough, they can then go to the literature and they can discern for themselves what's good and what's bad, what works, what doesn't work. And that's what I like. Personally, that's empowering. That's allowing people to make better health decisions.

And I don't think there's enough of it. And I think it's because a lot of the experts out there aren't actually experts. I think they know a little bit, but they tell people they know this much. And if you can't explain it to your grandmother or your 10-year-old kid, you truly don't understand it very well. And that's how I see it. That's the Feynman approach.

Richard Feynman, one of the best communicator scientists ever to exist, brilliant man, and he had that exact point. You have to be able to explain it to your grandmother or a 10-year-old. Bring everyone down to the same level and then bring them all up together. What are a few things that you would explain to a 10-year-old on how to be fit and how to be healthy or to someone's grandmother? Awesome question. It depends on the concept or topic. Awesome question. It depends on the concept or topic, but I think a really important point is- Just to avoid the main issue, which is just obesity, people gaining too much body fat.

I think the main points is sleep well, eat a balanced diet, and and i know that you hear this over and over and people get sick of hearing it but that is that is it like that that is the basis of health and longevity is exercise sleep well and eat a balanced diet can you give us your version of a balanced diet oh okay so again depends on and and this is what gets tricky. Just trying not to overeat, trying to assist people so they don't overeat. Because that's where heart disease, insulin resistance and obesity comes in, right? Absolutely. I think it is, so when you tell somebody, it's hard when you say to somebody, don't overeat, because what does that mean? And so I'm sure, you know, I've got mates who eat twice as much as I eat, but they're not overeating.

And I'm not under eating. And so, again, it goes back to that body intuition where we usually have good responses physiologically to say, hey, you're full. we usually have good responses physiologically to say, hey, you're full. But over time, we can pattern ourselves out of that response and we ignore it. And so I think a lot of it is, look, eat intuitively as best as you can. I think a lot of us probably do know when we're overeating. And so it's to tell people, look, try not to eat too much. Try not to eat to that point where you feel sickly or you feel bloated. You know, these are those signs that you've had too much.

Try not to eat too much of a single thing, particularly when it comes to those single things that you can ingest a lot of, which tends to be the sugars, the carbohydrates. It's really difficult to ingest huge amounts of protein. So it's really hard to ingest way too much protein. And it's relatively difficult to ingest way too much fat by itself without really feeling quite crook, quite sick. So I think it just goes back to that intuitiveness when it comes to eating. And again, there's no hard or fast rules there because we're all so different. We've all got this patterned lifestyle and a life experience that has led us to this point where we eat the way we eat because one, the way our parents fed us, two, our location

on the planet, three, our privilege due to our financial or economic success. So some people can't eat a balanced diet simply because of finances. And in a way, there is a way around that as well. But again, without the education behind it, without them knowing, hey, too much of this is bad for you, too little of this is bad for you. So education plays a big role.

So I know it fully didn't answer your question, Mark. You failed the test. I know. You're off the team. The 10 year old kid, he walked away already. He's already like, he's already playing video games.

Tell me about it. It's me talking to myself again, as always when I'm talking to my daughter. But that's why I rarely broach this particular topic to 10 year olds. Well, I'm'm curious how about just the i mean you did mentioned real food seasonal food um the the concept for some people there are some psychopaths out there who have the the beautiful self-control to have like some hyper palatable chocolate bar or or a ben and jerry's pint And they can take a few bites and then put it back into the freezer.

They save the lid. They save the lid. Like, how do you fucking do that? But, you know, because I'm not so highly evolved, I had to take the route of quite literally avoiding and not keeping some of those foods around. Because I know that when I have that, it just triggers me to just finish the whole thing. But since I've gotten it out, right, it's allowed me to have much more control over my diet and I don't overeat. It's hard for me to overeat real food. Like you mentioned protein or even fruit or just anything real. It's hard to overeat it. You get those signals to stop

eating. So I think like something a 10 year old or anybody could do is like, if you're, I mean, if you're normal like me and you, you, you can't necessarily control yourself around hyper palatable, really good food, just keep it away. Keep it out. Keep it far away. I've got to do the same. My wife does our food shopping and she says, do you want this? And I go, please. Yeah, of course I want that, but don't buy it because i will just ingest it until i feel sick and then i hate myself i said to my wife god i'm a piece of shit i can't believe i just ate all that what an idiot and she said you say that every single time i go i don't care i'm blaming you because you purchased it so it's your fault and again you know obviously it's all

tongue in cheek um but you're right it's you know just don't have don't reach, obviously, it's all tongue in cheek. But you're right. Just don't have, don't reach. Well, reaching for it's the difficult part, but access to it, you're right. Remove that access. Yeah. And maybe have more other convenient foods around that are maybe healthier options, like fruit or something like that. It's things that you can grab quickly and eat. I think a really big, I think an important point is that if you're raising children, you really need to set healthy food practices early. And I mean, we all see it and we're all part of it. I mean, there's still food practices that I partake in now, which is something that

has just come along with me for the ride since childhood. And I see it with other people as well if they ate poorly as a kid they tend to eat poorly as an adult and they tend to if they gain a lot of that weight as a younger kid it's likely going to be more difficult to get rid of that weight later on in life but if that kid is eating healthy earlier on in life then those food practices are there i've got a mate who his parents fed him so well as a kid that he has zero inclination to reach for a chocolate bar. He has no desire to grab that Ben and Jerry's tub. And I want to slap him across the face because I don't have

that self-control. But it's because it was patterned in him when he was young. So if you do have kids, you know, I think it's a really good time to just go, okay, let's get some good food without being crazy, obviously. You don't want to not give them access to things in this crazy, again, psychopathic sort of way. But I think good food practice is early, really important. We're on our way out to Columbus, Ohio, coming up to the Arnold Classic.

And we're in the bodybuilding space and we're in the powerlifting space. And unfortunately, we've had a lot of friends and a lot of people that we know that are close to us die in the last maybe two years. I think there's been, I guess, I don't even know how many people. It's probably like 10 now. The most recent guy being a guy named Boston Lloyd, who was a big YouTuber and influencer. I think he was only 29 years old. He was 29? Something like that.

Obviously, a lot of these athletes have utilized performance-enhancing drugs, not speculating necessarily on what they did. not speculating necessarily on what they did. What do you think is the role of performance-enhancing drugs potentially on the heart or just on the human body in general? And what do you think it could be doing negatively to get us into this position where we're losing so many people? Yeah, that's a good question. When we talk about, if we just focus

it on testosterone, for example, testosterone is a really important hormone in the body. It's a steroid hormone. It's produced once we hit, as males, once we hit puberty in the testes, we start to produce higher levels of testosterone. Now it's starting to storm here. So I don't know if you can hear all the rain and the thunder, so I just apologize for that. So the testosterone that's made, you hit puberty, that testosterone plays a really important role in developing our secondary male sexual characteristics, which includes things like increased muscle size, increased bone growth, wider jaw set, more prominent Adam's apple, what we call a laryngeal prominence, hair distribution, fat distribution,

so less fat around the body. So testosterone tends to break fat down, promotes lipolysis, fat breakdown, but redistributes it elsewhere. And so these are all the important roles that testosterone plays early on in life. Now, as you get older older if somebody decides to supplement with testosterone for whatever and i'm not going to speculate on what reasons they are but if somebody wants to take testosterone as a supplement um or a replacement therapy or whatever it may be there's going to be um exaggerations of those characteristics we just stated.

So bone growth, muscle protein synthesis, so muscle growth, exaggerations of the jaw set and of the laryngeal prominence and hair changes and body fat changes. Hairy back. Hairy back. And the thing is when it comes to hormones is that, again, go back to homeostasis, the happy, healthy balance. Your body always wants to maintain a range.

There's the upper limits and lower limits. And the same goes with testosterone just like any other hormone of the body. If you start to take what we call exogenous testosterone, so from outside the body in, your endogenous testosterone drops down a little bit because it's saying, oh, the testosterone levels are already high. I don't need to produce my own. And so that drops down. And so hence some gonadal issues associated with lower endogenous testosterone. So chronically elevated and long-term, it can play a role with sperm, for example, because testosterone is important for sperm differentiation and maturation.

But the other things happen when it comes to too much testosterone and the muscle synthesis side of things. So I told you earlier on, there's three pumps of muscle, skeletal muscle attached to the bone, and that's what we use for weight training, smooth muscle inside of our hollow organs, like digestive tract, blood vessels, reproductive system, and so forth. But then you've got your cardiac muscle, your heart muscle. Testosterone stimulates your heart muscle to synthesize proteins similarly as it does to your skeletal muscle proteins. And now, again, homeostasis, your heart is a muscle. And so athletes will perform exercise and their heart muscle gets bigger

because it's pumping harder, it's pumping faster, and its response, just like when you go to the gym and do bicep curls, is to get bigger so that it is more efficient at pumping harder and pumping faster and so an athlete's heart is bigger and that's fine that actually means i have a lower resting heart rate um when they when the heart gets too big though and this includes athletes as well so this can be an athlete who's not on testosterone but an athlete's heart can get too big and then it fails and this is one of the reasons why you get athletes dying

at earlier ages is because of heart failure because their heart has grown too big. Now, it's not just the size, but when a muscle like the heart gets too big, it itself requires oxygen and nutrients. And so the demand for it to get nutrients and oxygen goes up and that then can become difficult to supply that to the heart especially if the diet's not great and some of the blood vessels are occluded or blocked which is what occlusion means um but if you've got the chambers inside the heart right and that's where the blood goes in and when the heart contracts

it squeezes those chambers just like squeezing a tube of toothpaste and the blood squirts out. But if the heart muscle gets bigger, it actually makes those chambers smaller. And then the heart hits this point, it goes over the threshold where it becomes really efficient to being really poor at doing its job. And so then heart failure occurs. And this is where the heart no longer works as a pump. And so that can happen with athletes, not on testosterone, but it can also happen on athletes who are on testosterone because of the increased likelihood to develop a thicker heart or thicker heart muscle. I know you're enjoying this episode, but listen up. We partner with Merrick Health.

They're a telehealth network owned by Derek from More Plates, More Dates. But literally, the amazing thing about Merrick Health and getting your labs done with them is that when you get your labs done, you work with a client care coordinator that goes over your labs and gives you specific supplementation or nutrition protocols or potentially hormonal protocols for your levels. The problem with a lot of these other telehealth networks is that when they do these things, they give everybody the same exact things, which actually can hurt you long-term more than help you. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at MerrickHealth.com. That's M-A-R-R-E-K-Health.com. And if you already know what labs you want to get at checkout, enter promo code PowerProject10 to save 10% off all of those labs.

If you don't know where to start, head over to MerrickHealth.com slash PowerProject. You guys will get directed straight to the PowerProject panel that has 26 different labs that will cover everything you need. And at checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save $101 off of that panel. Again, MerrickHealth.com, links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. And you can kind of stretch the heart too, as well as the podcast show notes. So, and you can kind of stretch the heart too, is my understanding, right? With some types of activity,

like a zone two cardiovascular training, the methadone method, or I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but I believe there's like a lot of runners and a lot of people that do endurance and stamina type things. They utilize that method to help stretch the heart, which in my understanding

is that that's actually fairly healthy because now you have a more fluid heart that can kind of handle these larger needs for more energy, for more blood pumping through the body and those kinds of things, right? Yeah. So the heart has this wonderful capacity to, if you increase the volume of blood that goes into the heart, just like a balloon, it stretches. Now there's this thing called the Frank Starling mechanism, where the greater you stretch the heart,

the greater its responsive contraction is. And so if you can do certain types of training where you increase the venous return or volume return into the heart, it stretches it more and it reflexively contracts better and pumps more efficiently. And that's that process that you're referring to.

Increased blood volume return, increased stretching, increased snapping back, and then more blood gets ejected. And that's a more efficient heart pump. So what are some general practices that athletes who do choose to use performance enhancing drugs and athletes that don't, but what are some general practices that they can make sure to do to just make sure that they keep their heart healthy? And this includes individuals that are like powerlifters who typically don't do much cardio or even bodybuilders or people that strength train. What should they be doing on the outside to make sure that that stays healthy?

I think if anyone has decided to supplement with anything really, they should constantly get themselves checked. So this can include blood work, seeing their physician, getting their heart health or all the other blood pressure done, all those types of things. And doing that consistently will then allow you to hopefully check, find anything that may pop up early. And obviously, anytime you start to change around the body's levels of things, the body will respond reflexively. If you bring something up too high, it's going to try and bring things back down low. If things are too low, it's going to try and bring things back up higher. And so that's why when supplementing with things, you've got to be

very careful. I mean, personally, I wouldn't supplement with anything unless I'm deficient in it. And so I always go, my GP is a good friend of mine. I, every six months, get my bloods done, get myself checked up, and just say, what's the go? And if I'm all good and everything's within the range, I don't take anything apart from protein powder, for example. I'm sorry. Can I interrupt for just a second? What do you get checked usually? Because I think that's important for maybe some people listening. What do you get checked?

Yep. Full bloods. So full bloods is just the general term for them checking red blood cells, white blood cells, electrolytes, and then certain enzymes, enzymes involved with the liver, enzymes involved with the heart, enzymes involved for inflammation and so forth. And so that's, it's like two pages worth of information that spits out and it's all about the range. So they want it to be sitting nicely within that range. Too high, we're going to intervene.

Too low, we're going to intervene. That intervention may be avoiding something or it may be taking something. For example, like if you saw that your liver was off or something, then you might take a supplement that may assist with the liver. If you saw your electrolytes are off, maybe you'll supplement some magnesium for a little while or something like that. Potentially, depending on what it is, obviously. Some of the liver enzymes give you an indication that your liver is inflamed or may be obstructed in one of the tubes, like from the gallbladder going down to the intestines. And so that may tell you, the intervention may be surgical, for example. It may be, I need to get a stone taken out of my gallbladder. But yes, it really depends on what

those levels are. And that's where you really need a good physician to be able to just have a chat about if things are out of whack, what may that mean? And it may mean you need to go do some more tests. So it may mean, hey, let's now go do an echocardiogram and check your heart out. Or let's go do a stress test and see how your heart responds when you jump on a treadmill, for example. And so always getting yourself checked regularly in as many different ways as possible is just a great way of spotting anything early. I'm curious too now, anything early. I'm curious too now, what can people do first off to, I guess, increase their bone density over time? Because that's one thing that you notice in elderly individuals who maybe they haven't done much training or they don't do much. They just start to become very weak.

So what can people do to increase their bone density? And then secondly, you talk a lot about like keeping or joint health. So what can people do to keep their shoulders, elbows, et cetera, healthy? Is there anything as far as supplementation that does seem to be beneficial as people talk about collagen all the time for the joints? I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Yeah. So first thing, when it comes to bone density, resistance training and creatine, those two creatine. For the older person, those two things seem to really be of benefit. Now, again, if you're an older person and you want to take creatine and you've never taken it before, I always recommend going to see your physician just to have a chat with them

because they may give you some information that you're not aware of about your body that they go, probably not for you. But the evidence, the literature, and that could potentially be things like maybe somebody has a chronic kidney disease, for example, or maybe somebody has some specific metabolic disorder in which that supplement may not be suitable for them. But generally speaking, in a healthy population within the literature, if you want to increase bone density

as you age, resistance training and creatine. The great thing about bones is that when you stress them, they get stronger. If you don't use them, they get weaker. And it's all about what we call the inorganics in the bone, which is calcium and phosphate. So most of your calcium and phosphate just sit within the bone. They're just stuck in there. And if you don't use the bone, you lose the bone. And so this is one of the reasons why the astronauts on the International Space Station, when they came back, their bone density is osteoporotic, basically. And so that's one of the reasons why at the International Space Station, they've got like a gravity changed treadmill so that they can put impact on their bones.

So if you impact your bone, it gets bigger and stronger. If you don't do anything with your bones, it's just going to release the calcium phosphate into your blood, and you'll just pee it out and not utilize it. And then the creatine comes along. And then the creatine just basically plays an important role with the energy shuttling. long. And then the creatine just basically plays an important role with the energy shuttling. It allows you to do more work and more work means more resistance training, which again means more strength for those bones. Quick question about creatine, just because like I've had people message me who do a lot of strength training and they supplement creatine monohydrate and they go to their doctor, get their blood work done. And then they're like, my doctor says my creatinine

levels are too high and I need to stop supplementing creatine. A lot of people see that. And I actually got high creatinine levels in the past too. So if an individual, like let's say they eat a lot of red meat, should they still be supplementing creatine monohydrate? Is there any way to overdo creatine monohydrate supplementation or is it just fairly safe to take three to five grams a day? You can overdo anything really, but creatine is quite safe. And when you have, so when people go and get their creatinine done, so there's creatine and then there's creatinine. And creatinine is going to be a breakdown product of, at least in the eyes of the medico, of the doctor, creatinine is a breakdown product of muscle tissue. And it is something that breaks down at a consistent rate, relatively,

and gets filtered. Well, it gets filtered at a consistent rate by the kidneys. The breakdown can change, and it can change depending on the creatine levels. But also, if there's a problem with your heart or kidneys or muscles, and that's where the GP, the physician sort of goes, oh, the levels are high. So maybe there's a problem with your kidneys, or maybe there's a problem with your heart or something like, because that's how they've been trained to work through. So again, I think I don't want to make any recommendations because everybody's different and everybody's situation requires their physician to review them on an individual basis. But if that is the case, talk to the physician and ask, you know, why?

Why do you think this is? If my creatinine is high, why do you think that's the case? Do you actually think it's my kidneys or do you think it's something else? And if so, what can we do to determine whether it's just the creatine I'm taking or whether there's actually a problem? And so to discern those two things would be of utmost importance, I think. Got it. And then you were also mentioning as far as joint health, because you were talking about bone density, but joint health too. Yeah. So when it comes to ingesting supplements like collagen, so collagen is protein. Now,

the thing is that when you ingest it your body's going to break it down into amino acids and because your body can't absorb whole proteins your body can only absorb the amino acids so any foodstuffs you ingest whether it's in the mouth where carbohydrates get mostly digested or in the stomach where most proteins get digested or in the small intestines where most fats get digested by the time it reaches the majority of the small intestines, all those macromolecules, proteins, fats, and carbs are broken down into their micro molecule, which is amino acids, glucose, fatty acids, and glycerol. And then they can be absorbed across into the bloodstream or into the lymphatic system. So fats go into the lymphatic system, but amino acids and glucose

go into the bloodstream. So regardless of the protein you're ingesting, whether it's collagen or any other type of protein, you're absorbing it as amino acids. And so the evidence at the moment shows that ingestion of collagen doesn't specifically result in collagen being made and produced and replenished at particular sites. But if you do require those amino acids for synthesis, they will be available. So that's the other point. So while ingesting collagen doesn't make collagen in the body per se, the amino acids are the building blocks that can be utilized to build whatever you really need, which is probably a better thing because you may not necessarily need that collagen to be replenished, but you may need another protein to be replenished. And now you've provided those building blocks.

You've seen recently that I've been running and Nsema's running a little bit now too. And with jujitsu, it can be really, really taxing on the body. What maybe advice do you have for us and some of the listeners on ways to kind of increase our capacity and ways to be able to handle muscle fatigue? Awesome question. So one of the big things, and this is hard for athletes to hear, is don't overtrain. And overtraining is, again, different for everybody, but I think an athlete knows when they've overtrained. Overtraining is one of the biggest issues when it comes to not just fatigue, but recovery. And this can be something that happens with women, for example, with overtraining and they can lose their period and they can have a

number of different hormonal issues associated with that. The same thing can happen with men. So overtraining can play around with your testosterone levels, plays around with your recovery, it plays around with your electrolytes, it plays around with your sleep patterns, it plays around with all these things that sort of roll off and result in this problem at the end of the day where you're not recovering adequately. So I'd say the number one thing would be that rest. Rest and recovery, Do it appropriately. Do it when you think it's appropriate and adequate and get that sleep in. Diet-wise, I honestly think most athletes tend to have it tuned in quite well. And so to say, oh, eat this, do that to an athlete. I'm not an athlete. Who am I to say that to an athlete?

But I know one thing, because athletes are overachievers. One thing that they probably need to do is probably calm down a little bit and just maybe stop and enjoy that recovery time. Nice. I was curious about this because you talked about communication and obviously your really good skill set is being able to take a lot of these concepts, break it down into ways that literally anybody, even if they haven't taken a certain class, can come in and understand this. So did you do anything over time or listen to anything

or have any practices that allowed you to come and become a better communicator? And then secondly, after that, I hope you remember this, but as far as, uh, your education's concerned, uh, we had a strength coach that came on. His name's Corey Schlesinger. He's director of performance for the sons. He was classically trained through school. Uh, but when I asked him about, you know, what certifications do you think trainers should get? Uh, he was like, fuck, I actually don't think they should get any. Uh, or he said they were fairly useless. Uh, and he said that there's so like that the things in the certifications are behind the information that is being put out by a lot of people in the actual field.

It's still like 20 years old. Um, so I know it depends on the type of education you're getting and what you're trying to do. But since you know a lot of people in the medical field, how do you feel their knowledge is on nutrition? And do you think that people should, because people listen to their doctors. Dr. Oz is like the biggest guy in terms of nutrition information on TV. But some of the shit he says, I'm just like, the fuck? So I know that's a big two-part question, but communication and education.

Yeah. I'll start with the education one, then I'll go back to the communication. Depending on the field, like you said, we are behind in the education sector. So if we think about tertiary education, which is university, I think the problem comes potentially. Now, we do have the best researchers on the planet sitting within universities.

And these are the people that, you know, they do all these great studies. They look at, if we're talking about specifically exercise science, right, which is, you know, you're too bad. So force production, strength, things like that, the best research is, you know, you're too bad. So, force production, strength, things like that, the best research is coming out of universities. But there's a problem coming nowadays, which is only starting to seep in at the moment where the best researchers were actually lecturing on those topics and providing their students with the most up-to-date information. and providing their students with the most up-to-date information.

But universities are changing a little bit. And academics, like myself, the universities are now doing this thing where they start to say, okay, you're more research focused. So you do your research and I'm going to get a teacher to come in to teach that stuff separately. So it does still happen, but it is less and less where you get the expert presenting on that topic, where now they have a teacher teaching and a researcher researching. And sometimes the curriculum at university then starts to lag behind because while that lecturer would present up-to-date information in five years' time, because they're not within the research, they may not update it. information in five years' time because they're not within the research, they may not update it.

Now, they should if they're a good academic and a good researcher. Every single trimester or semester, I go back to the research and I go back through everything. I spend hundreds of hours going through updating myself and updating all the stuff that I present. Some people don't have the time to do that in the university sector because they're just getting blasted. And so there's potentially an argument there that some of the stuff isn't up to date. I think that's one thing. The other thing is in areas where there's client-based practice, where you're dealing face-to-face with a person, academics lose that because they're in the ivory tower of the university. They don't see clients. They don't

see patients or whatever it may be. And so they may, again, over time, lose the client-specific focus. And that may be the main thing that informs how you train somebody or how you teach somebody or what they learn. So I would say that, yeah, potentially those are the reasons why he may have made that statement is that academics may be a little bit out of touch because of that particular reason. Going back to communication, getting to the point in which you can communicate something in a way that anybody can understand. Honestly, the best thing that I did was just whatever I learned, I had to say it to somebody else immediately. If you learn it, go teach somebody it because you may read an article and go, wow, that's amazing. And then you walk away and then you don't think about it ever again.

And then someone asks you a question go oh i read an article on that but i remember not much of it but if you learn that and then my wife's sick of me i'll go hey kel listen to this and i'll just i'll talk at her and just blah blah blah blah blah and she goes okay very good okay and then she'll piss off and not care but that's okay because the the art of going from my brain to my mouth and then verbalizing it allowed me to articulate it in my own words. And then you remember it differently when you say it out loud. It then allows you to go, I don't know how to articulate that, which means you don't understand it, or I can't remember that particular point.

And that's why I said to all my students, when you're studying, don't just read the notes. Don't just watch the lectures, stop it and go tell it to your dog or your grandma or your partner or whatever it may be. And that is the biggest thing you can do when it comes to memorizing stuff. I just don't want to listen to because they just bore me to death. Like somebody could be saying all the exact things that you're talking about right now, but if they talk about it like this and they stare at me and they don't move their hands, like they're fucking boring to listen to. I don't want to hear them. And you are extremely engaging.

When you watch your YouTube videos, you can't look away because you're doing certain things where people are just like, wow, this is great information. And I like it. So you're jacked too. And you're jacked. That helps. Right? That does help. So how did you learn how to communicate these things literally so well that people want to pay attention to you? Because that's the difference.

A lot of people know shit, but no one even wants to listen to them because they're just, you know, they don't communicate it well. Oh man, that is so true. And I know some people who are just geniuses, but they can't articulate themselves and they can't engage an audience for a second. And I think for me, it's two things. One, I'm Italian. is a hell of a storyteller. And I grew up him telling the most animated jokes in ways that would just engage you. And I think that came from it. And then the third thing is it's an art form. So I love, I honestly love nothing more.

And I know that this is an ego stroke for myself, but I love nothing more than getting up and doing a lecture in front of 300 people. I love that because I love figuring out how best to captivate them. And it may be pausing at a particular time. It may be looking at them. It may be moving or jumping or grabbing them or bringing them up on stage or using an analogy that sort of brings things home for people. That's another important point is that for a difficult concept, you should use analogies. So use their experience. If they've

had a particular experience, then they understand that experience. So if you can use that as an example, then you've grounded them. You've brought yourself and them together to this common place. And that's why when people say, know your audience, when you do a presentation, it helps. Because if I'm doing an audience to a group of high school kids or I'm doing it to third-year medical students, they're totally different. So high school kids, I need to think about what are they doing on a day-to-day basis that I can pull into my conversation

that brings this analogy together, that they go, oh, yeah, I get that. Yeah, I watch that show, you know, like using Game of Thrones. I used to use it when Game of Thrones was out. I used to use a Game of Thrones analogy to talk about blood typing and how we've all got different blood types and how all that works. And that's a boring topic. But if you throw Game of Thrones in there and start talking about Tyrion Lannister and all that type of stuff, they start going, yeah, I know what you're talking about. But I've just fooled them.

I've just tricked them into coming along with me for the story. Tyrion might have a little bit more problem digesting carbohydrates than the mountain, right? I think so. The mountain is literally a monster in real life and in the show. Have you seen how jacked he is now? Yeah, he looks absolutely incredible. Have you noticed anything with these blood types? Like on a more serious note, like have you, there used to be a blood type diet years ago. And I don't know if that was like, yeah. Thank you. So what, but what can we learn from our blood types? Like is our blood type, is it going to tell us really much about our metabolism or maybe not? No, no, no. At the moment there's actually hundreds of blood

types, but we always talk about the ABO blood type. So you're either blood type A, B, or O, or AB. And then you've got what we call the rhesus factor on top of that, which makes you either negative or positive. The most important point to get across with blood types is simply when it comes to transfusions. So if you have a particular blood type, you cannot receive a blood type that isn't of your blood type.

So if you're blood type A, you create antibodies or armies against everybody that isn't A. So you create antibodies against B, basically. If you're blood type B, you create antibodies against A. So if you're A, you can't get B blood. If you're B, you can't get A blood. If you're blood type O, you create antibodies against both A and B. But if you're blood type A or B or AB, you don't create antibodies against O because O actually doesn't have any flags on its surface. So in order for your body to recognize something as being foreign,

it needs to have a flag, a protein on the surface called an antigen. Blood type O doesn't have a flag. So it's invisible to the bloodstream, basically. And that's why everybody can receive blood type O. It's called the universal donor. And you probably see at blood banks, it says, we need blood type O. And so they're the universal donor. But the other blood types, the body can recognize. So if you're blood type B, you can't get O. If you're B, you can't get A. If you're A, you can't get B and so forth. So that's it.

When it comes to metabolism, look, in biology, I never want to say never because everything's interrelated in one way or another. But right now I'm going to say anyone who says anything about eating to your blood type is pulling it out of their ass how the fuck did that become a thing not sure what about ethnicity or origins you mentioned being Italian what about our

heritage like is there like our DNA right yeah is there some stuff to kind of look into that I've heard stuff about the equator like the closer you are to the equator maybe the easier you can handle or less likely you'll be insulin resistant. I don't know how true any of that is, but what are your thoughts on that? There's certain populations, because populations throughout history tend to live and reproduce together in these communities. What that means is any genetic abnormality or change that occurs tends to be

seeded within that population because they're all breeding with each other. And so this is where the and so some of these genetic changes can change the way a gene is read and then turned into a protein and that protein has a function. So if there's a mutation or genetic change, it may change the way that protein works. And maybe that protein plays a role in metabolism. Maybe that protein plays a role in oxygen carrying capacity. Maybe it plays a role in as a receptor for something. And so this is where the idea comes along that certain populations do have different requirements or needs or are different in regards to the way that they can maybe handle or manage particular things. One thing is Mediterranean Greeks and Italians, there's something called

thalassemia. And so this is a blood type problem, but's all genetic based so you know its ability to to carry oxygen and do its job is diminished um and this is simply they say you know this is a mediterranean thing but it's only because throughout history somebody had that mutation and decided to breed with a couple of people who decided to breed with a couple of more people in that area. And it just stayed in that area. And over time, it ended up being Mediterranean. Because it doesn't take long for all of us to be, I mean, all of us are brothers and sisters, and we're not that far away from each other, in all honesty. Because if you think about, I've got a mom and a dad, and each of them have a mom and a dad, and each of them have a mom and a dad. So every generation you go back, your number of ancestors doubles. that maths and double every time you go back. If you go back 2000 years, the amount of people that are needed to create you is a billion trillion people. Now, a billion trillion people

have never existed on the planet. So how is that even possible? And the answer is because we're all inbred. We're all having sex with each other. Our cousins back. So family lines cross and family lines like repeat in on themselves. So an uncle may then reproduce with a cousin. And so that's how, so it's not like they're all distinct people coming out. You've got people coming together, refeeding back into the same family tree. And so that's how one genetic mutation can keep seeding into a population. And so that's how one genetic mutation can keep seeding into a population. Along with like we were talking about blood types, body types, you know, you always hear within the fitness space, ectomorphs, mesomorphs, endomorphs, right?

What is the legitimacy? Like what would people in these different, I guess, body types, what should they do different or what could they do differently? Because you do see a practical thing, like certain people that are ectomorphs, their main complaint is, wow, I eat such high calories and I still don't gain a crazy amount of weight. And certain people who will term themselves endomorphs are like, I look at a piece of cake and gain 10 pounds of fat. So there does seem to be something here where these kind of body types have some differences in terms of the type of food and how much food they can handle.

So my question to you is like, are there any practices that maybe these different body types should take into account? Or is that like, it is very individual, but I'm just, I want to know like, how legitimate do you think it is? I think using those somatotypes to ectomorph, endomorph, mesomorph sort of thing, that's just one way of categorizing people on

the way they look really, which is in part quite useless. And so, like you said, everyone is different. And it could simply be that somebody has a higher basal metabolic rate for whatever particular reason compared to another person or their energy requirements are less compared to another person because they're taller or they're larger or whatever it may be. So, you know, truly there's not a one-size-fits-all sort of approach that can be done for any of these groups of people because those groups sort of don't mean anything really. Yeah. And it's funny you say that because I agree with you and I've seen people make training

programs for different body types. Like they're like, if you're an ectomorph, this is the super high volume training that you should do if you're a mesomorph, etc. So fill out this questionnaire and I'll do a personalized program for your body type. Yeah, the body type thing has always been pretty interesting because it's been in the industry for a really long time. That's pretty cool. I mean, look, everyone responds to taking in calories. Everyone responds to resistance training. So to say that I'm going to do this as opposed to this, I don't think it's seeded in a lot of evidence unless you know something very specific about that person that they don't know. But again, at the end of the day,

if it's all just about, if the end goal is hypertrophy or strength, any sort of resistance training over time is going to cause it, right? Any sort of load on the muscle over time will cause hypertrophy and the concomitant strength association as well. So I think a lot of it's marketing gimmicks. How do you train personally and eat? marketing gimmicks. How do you train personally and eat? Training is part of my life now. And it's the same with my wife. It's always been part of my life. And so I don't need the motivation to train. I've got a lot of people, a lot of friends who are like, oh, how do you stay motivated? I go, I don't. Sometimes the worst I feel is the best time for me to go into the gym. And so it's just about having that pattern that I have.

And so every single day, the great thing is the university has an awesome gym. So regardless, I don't train at a particular time. Sometimes I train at 6 a.m. Sometimes I train at lunch. Sometimes I train at 6 p.m. And that just depends on how busy I am. But I make sure I always get a training session in. My sessions are resistance training.

So they're strength based. I don't actually, I haven't used a method of training for, it's all intuitive. And I think it's just because I've developed the ability to be able to do that and do it well since I was quite young. I probably would benefit from having a training program. And the way that I eat is, well, this is interesting. So I have and I lack an enzyme in my small intestines that allows for me to break down the enzyme, the sugar sucrose.

So sucrose is just table sugar, right? And so you've got carbohydrates, that's complex sugar, can be broken down into a whole bunch of disaccharides, and then that breaks down into monosaccharides. So I can't break down sucrose. I can break down maltose and lactose, but I can't break down sucrose, which means things that have sucrose, like all the awesome, delicious stuff that there is, you know, table sugar and cakes and sweets and chocolates and things. It makes me sick. Like it actually physically makes me sick.

So I didn't know this for years. And I always would say, oh, look, don't sweets and lollies make everyone sick? Isn't this just part of eating this stuff? You know, it's the price I pay. And then I realized, no, I just don't have the enzyme. So I actually have a relatively low because of that because nearly everything has, nearly every carbohydrate has quite high amounts of sucrose in it. I don't have too much carbohydrates.

So, I mean, I do eat potatoes and I eat certain fruits, a lot of berries. So berries are quite low in sucrose, but high in fructose and high protein. And my fat just comes with the meat that I ingest, basically. I eat shitty foods every now and then. When I say shitty foods, I mean, I'll have a packet of chips and I don't really drink soft drinks. I'll eat ice creams and stuff like that. Again, they're just shitty in the context of the fact that I don't feel drink soft drinks. I'll eat ice creams and stuff like that. And again, they're just shitty in the context of the fact that I don't feel great when I eat them. They're not objectively bad for you per se unless you eat huge amounts.

So that's the way I eat. The only supplement I take is protein. Sometimes I take creatine depending on the time of the year and if I'm ramping up my training, but I feel like my training at the moment, I get enough meat that I don't really feel like I need the creatine. And I don't have any goals, performance goals per se that I'm aiming for at the moment. So if I do, then I start to do stuff.

You mess around with any fasting? Yeah. So I, just because it makes me feel better, I don't eat anything until lunchtime. And then I'll have lunch and dinner. My lunch is my biggest meal and my dinner is quite a small meal because that allows me to just sleep better, basically. And that's the only reason why.

And it's all, none of it really has to do with health or performance for me. It's simply just what has made me feel better while I'm doing all this. And if I have a big breakfast, I feel horrible. If I do eat a breakfast, it's two or three bold eggs and that's it. But I don't eat anything till lunch, basically. Do you think we'll be able to get to a point where we can give somebody your genetics to where they get sick from eating you know that kind of sugar yeah and on a more serious note like just being able to uh i don't know down the road have babies that that won't have cancer and have like because there's i believe there's a subset of our population that they they literally can't get cancer and i think there's some people out there too that uh can't get heart disease, even though their body has gotten to be pretty heavy.

So do you think that these are going to be things in the future that, I don't know how, through a CRISPR or whatever the hell is going on out there, I don't know. I don't know what you're aware of. of, but do you think we'll be able to have some of these things in our system from when we're young so that we don't have to, I don't know, deal with disease and deal with obesity? I truly do. I truly think that I don't think it's too far away. And when I say too far away, probably a generation probably think we're not going to experience the benefits of these unfortunately but through CRISPR for example and certain types of mRNA technologies where I think cancer will be a thing of the past cancer is a genetic disease so it's based in genetics cancer is a change in your genetics that results in cells just reproducing too much. Generally, you have

signals in the body that when a cell reproduces, so for example, you've got skin cells, right? And you knock them off all the time. You hit stuff and the term is slough. They slough away off your body all the time and we need to make more skin cells. So the cells underneath your skin are constantly dividing to make new, and they push up to make new skin cells. But they've got signals to say stop, right? Now, if they didn't have those signals to say stop, you'd just have all this skin covering your body, these thick, thick, thick layers of skin because it wouldn't stop growing. But that is basically a cancer. So when you have a skin cancer, you'll notice that it's just a skin cell. It may be a melanocyte and then you you get a melanoma, or it may be a basal cell, and you

get a basal cell carcinoma. But it's just a cell growing over and over and over again, and it thickens. So it goes above the boundary of your skin, and you get that lump. And that's the same with a tumor. It's just a cell constantly growing and getting too big, all because the genetic signals say don't stop growing. That's it. You can change those genetic signals with appropriate technology, which we are just developing now, like Mark said, with CRISPR. And I truly think CRISPR will be the end of cancer,

hopefully within a generation or at least a number of cancers. So that's probably one of the most important points. The second thing is that when we first screened the human genome, which is probably 30 years ago now, we thought, all right, we now know every single genetic base pair of this 3 billion long code. Now that we know that, we can identify every disease and cure it. And then we realize that not all diseases are genetic in their basis, and that our DNA actually has another level of complexity called epigenetics. And so you've got 20,000 genes, 20 odd thousand genes within our DNA, and those genes turn into proteins, and proteins do all the stuff in our body.

If there's a change in the DNA, there's potentially a change in the gene, potentially a change in the protein, and then things go downhill from there. So if you fix the DNA, you fix the protein, and then things are all good. But then we found out that it's not just that simple. and then things are all good. But then we found out that it's not just that simple. There's all these other things that sit on top of our DNA that tell the machinery of our body, hey, don't read this right now, read it later. So you don't make that protein for a certain time period. Or it says, hey, read this thing over here and read it like crazy, make huge amounts, but only for a short period of time. Or it goes to a certain tissue of the body and says, only read this protein in this tissue. Don't read this protein in that tissue. And so then you've got this other level of complexity, which makes it difficult to,

and this is one of the reasons why cancers will only develop in certain tissues is because of epigenetics. It's sort of holding onto it and saying, no, no, no, don't make it here, make it over there and so forth. So there will be certain cancers very soon, I think that will be cured due to CRISPR, but other diseases and disease states, I think it might take a little bit longer. Obesity, that's a tricky one because again, it's more than just genetics. Genetics does play a role, but it's more than just genetics. Being that you're a professor, you've gone through schooling, you've gotten your PhD, you've had to probably have pretty good tactics in terms of how you go about learning things. And I mean, like, what do you do on a day-to-day basis?

Because you even said that as far as research is concerned, after every semester, you go back, you take a look at what's new. What am I learning now? What do I need to change, right? So a lot of people, you know, they're in school or they themselves are trying to continue to learn more and study, et cetera. But some people have a problem with focusing and actually maintaining the information they take in. What are your learning practices? How do you make sure that when you're learning something, you learn it efficiently? Do you put yourself like Lex Friedman talks about how he has a four block hour during the day where he has no music on and he just sits and he reads and he codes. What do you do?

How do you go about it? How do you tell your students to go about it if they ask? Yeah, I can't do that. I've got very, very poor attention span. Very poor. And so my GP even said, I think you should probably go see if you've got ADHD. I haven't done that yet, but probably do. But that's fine. It just means I've got to figure out ways to focus. And so I learn, I can focus better if I hear it and see it. So if it's a video

or audio, great. I do very well there. But when it comes to research, it's all written publications and it makes life very difficult for me. So what I do is I'll take a paper if I want to learn something and I will read it and I will then take bullet point notes from memory. And then what I'll do is I'll take that piece of paper and I'll go for a walk around the whole campus. And so while I walk I in my own head I go through everything I just learned as best as I can and then if I forget it I'll pull the piece of paper out and go oh yeah that's what I forgot and then I'll do it then when I get back to my office I'll go back to that paper and see what I missed and then that is and I'll be saying it to myself as people probably think I'm a loony

walking around campus talking to myself, but that's okay. I think they're used to that now. But I'll come back to my office. And then by the end of that, I've got that down pat. You know, I will then do a video on it, for example. And that's one of the, another reason why I did the videos and my podcast is it just was a way for me to solidify what I learned and know. And sometimes I have to go back to my videos because you don't remember everything. The thing about me is that

I'm a jack of all trades. So I know a little bit about a lot of stuff, but I don't know a lot about very niche areas. And a lot of the experts you'll get on will know a lot about these tiny areas. And that's just not me, but pick an organ of the body, pick a function, and I'll be able to have a conversation with you about it. And I think that's because I record the videos. I go for a walk. Walking and exercise is shown to solidify that memory as well. So exercise is a big thing. If there's something I really want to understand, I'll go do a hard workout and then I'll come back to it. And when I come back to it, I've got it. It's just, and I don't think about it while I'm doing the workout. That's

the great thing. You just get into your zone and then I'll come back and I go, all right, now I can focus a lot better. So yeah, they're the tactics that I sort of use. I must, if I want to remember something, I have to move. I can't sit down and do it. I have to get out of my office and walk or go to the gym. You mentioned picking an organ. More recently on this podcast, we've had a lot of people talking about penis health and I don't think it's an organ, but anyway, do you know anything, know much about this topic? Because we've had a lot, a lot of great responses to having some people talk about how to cure erectile dysfunction and how to just get more blood flow downstairs and things like that. So interestingly, when an erection occurs,

what's happening is that the nitric oxide, and I don't know if anyone has spoken to you about nitric oxide in this whole process. Yeah, we have, yeah. Awesome. So nitric oxide is an important chemical know if anyone has spoken to you about nitric oxide in this whole process not awesome so nitric oxide is an important chemical tells blood vessels to relax and when a blood vessel relax heaps of blood goes to that area and because the penis is filled with spongiform tissue the blood engulfs that area and obviously what happens is it gets engulfed with blood and then it blocks. And then, yeah, that's it. And then it's blocked the venous outflow. So obviously arteries go in, feeds tissues, and veins drain things out. But when you fill the spongiform tissue with blood,

it blocks the veins. And so blood can't leave. And this is one of those things that happened with Viagra, for example, is Viagra was made originally for heart health because of the nitric oxide effect. It vasodilated the blood vessels, opened up the blood vessels in the heart, so the heart works better. But they also realized that these people taking it were getting erections. And they thought, well, there's probably more money here in erections than there is in heart health. So they're going to start selling it for that.

Terrible side effect. But it's the same mechanism. Yeah, what a horrible side effect that is. So one thing that can stimulate nitric oxide is testosterone. So testosterone stimulates nitric oxide to be released. And there's some evidence in the literature that people with hypogonadism, and so hypo meaning below gonadism is referring to the sexual reproductive organs and having issues associated with that. And it might be erectile dysfunction, for example. That sort of goes hand in hand a lot with metabolic disease, too, in some ways. So metabolic disease are things like high blood glucose levels and insulin

insensitivities and high blood pressures and things that increase your likelihood for getting heart disease, cardiovascular disease and such down the track. So hypogonadism and metabolic disease sort of have this association. There's a Venn diagram that overlaps a little bit. And one of the theories is that utilizing testosterone replacement therapy could be of benefit because of its ability to promote noxious oxide release. But you can also promote noxious oxide. So I know I digress all the time, but back in Italy, back in the day, they used to castrate young boys so that they would have a higher voice because women weren't allowed to sing. So they thought, well, what can we do? I know, let's cut the balls off a bunch of dudes and then they will maintain that higher pitched voice. secondary male sexual characteristics, which was the hair, the musculature, the lean body fat,

the wide set jaw, the laryngeal prominence. So they had this fat mass around the belly. They had low musculature. They didn't have a lot of facial hair or wide set jaws or anything like that. And their voice was high pitched. They also thought that they wouldn't be able to get erections, but they could get erections. And the reason why is because nitric oxide can be released through touch stimulation and also through thought stimulation. So you can release nitric oxide through thought and through touch in addition to testosterone. And that's where my knowledge ends either one of you guys have any other questions no no we're good thanks yeah thank you so much for your time today i really appreciate it uh one of my uh friends used to live out in the area that you mentioned you were uh that you grew up in uh queensland his name is nathan jones do you know

nathan jones he's a i don't know nathan jones is he Nathan Jones? I don't know Nathan Jones. Is he still here? I don't know where he is at this point. He was a strong man competitor. He's like 6'11 or 6'10. He was like 300 something pounds. He was in the movie Troy and he is the giant in Troy

that got killed by Brad Pitt. Anyway, where can people find you and where can they find out more information about you? So I'm all over social media. I've got a YouTube channel that you can find and it's going quite well. We've got 300,000 subscribers and 20 odd million views.

It's called Dr. Matt and Dr. Mike. It's just us talking about how the human body works. I promise you in short segments, not these monster chunks that I tend to do. We have a podcast again called Dr. Matt and Dr. Mike's Medical Podcast, but I'm also available on social media. So you can get me on Instagram and TikTok and Twitter.

And it's at Dr. Mike Todorovic, D-R-M-I-K-E-T-O-D-O-R-O-V-I-C. So come have a chat with me. Come say hi. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. Have a great day. Thank you.

Thank you, gentlemen, for having me. See you. See you later. Take care. We got to have a stubby. A stubby. Yeah, you got to have a stubby. Oh, man.

You got them going on the chode pretty good for a minute. After that, I was like, I can't have this guy going out calling cans chodes because an American said that's what you say. Let's go guzzle some chodes. I just love downing some chodes. You know, his learning process, I think that's really cool. I think a lot of people would use that because the typical academic setting when most kids and most people are learning, it's like you just sit, you read, you write, blah, blah, blah. You're just looking to pass a test not looking to actually retain that well sorry i shouldn't speak that way but at least for myself that's what i was trying to do in school like i was just like i just need to remember this shit for the test at the end of the whatever but no

absolutely like when i learned all the biomechanics stuff like me and josh got together and did a video and i was just like oh fuck, fuck, I actually remembered it all. But now it's like, yeah, since I haven't verbally said anything about it, it's like, yeah, it's kind of fading away.

Just like speaking Spanish. Like I don't practice it so it's fading away. But yeah, I really like that. Yeah, this stuff works so good when you're,

you know, moving and just you get to like kind of think and ponder what it is that you just learned. I think it can work really well too.

Like if you have, he talked about like some public speaking. If you have like public speaking or you have like a job interview or a job review or any of those kinds of things, I think a little exercise before it, and you can kind of think about that as you're doing your walk, maybe for that particular time, you have just some music playing or you don't have headphones at all and you're just kind of concentrating on whatever it is, the task that you're trying to do that's upcoming.

And he's reading and kind of like reviewing his notes and kind of going over it as he's walking. So I think that's amazing. And what about uh taking like a journal you know take take your journal if you if you write stuff down if you journal take that journal out and the most important thing about journaling i think is to actually go back and read some of the shit that you wrote down uh the writing is is great and that's fantastic people develop that habit but imagine doing that on a 10 minute walk i'm actually going to give that a try because i think it sounds really cool yeah man and um his literally we just got a master class on electrolytes like you know he went deep on a lot of different aspects of that i'm glad that we honestly a lot of things that he was saying was

things that we've been talking about just in deeper form so it's really good that we now understand this and understand why this stuff so freaking useful yeah and then just to plainly put it the the water will go where the salt goes and i'm like oh all right cool no wonder like that makes a ton of sense like nobody else said that before uh-huh fuck that's awesome we had uh when we had uh is it cole robinson right when he had a coal on Cole Robinson, right? Yes. When we had Cole on, he was talking about how he actually thinks that people drink way too much water. And he just kind of, he mentioned people are like addicted to it.

Yeah. And then our guest today kind of mentioned something similar where when you have that water bottle next to you, you're continuing to like hit it up. And I think maybe you're kind of thinking that you're thirstier than you really are. Continue and hit it up. I think maybe you're kind of thinking that you're thirstier than you really are. Who knows what does that to us? Could be the diet drinks and could be all the different things that we ingest during the day. And maybe we just think we're thirstier than we are because we have that bottle next to us. Just the way that we think we're hungrier than we are because we smell food.

Somebody else walks past you and eats. You see a commercial, whatever it might be. It's sort of like, I know you were looking for chapstick earlier, but like some people will like, oh, my lips are so dry. I got to put chapstick on. It's like, when was the last time you put chapstick on? Oh, like an hour ago. It's like, I haven't put on chapstick in like a year. And I'm not like more hydrated than you or like, you know, it's just because I think

you get into that habit, right? Yeah, I just don't know. I never used it. But I haven't put on haven't been in a while and my lips have been kind of dry for a few days so i was just like oh i'm licking that like no but that's just i mean because you were looking for it earlier and that's what i was thinking of because that and like hand lotion too like i i don't like hand lotion but like my wife same thing she's like oh my hands are so dry i'm like but you put on lotion like every day you know like i never do and it's not part of my routines and stuff she's lubing up so now you're gonna make me put on lotion well okay so he's checking out my hands that are cracked

sorry dude a man man hand okay guys so i just checked out andrew's hands and my man has the driest knuckles i have ever well some of the driest knuckles I have ever. Well, some of the driest knuckles I've seen. Yeah. You're a man though. Let's talk about this real quick. Here we go. This is different for yourself, Mark and me.

You're a Latino man, but you are a fair, you're a fair skinned Latino. This is true. You are a white male. Did you, you did use some lamb. Did you use any hand lotion today?

No. Yeah. Well, I got sweaty though today. Yeah. You got sweaty. Maybe i'm lubed up yeah now let me let me let me tell you guys this oh here we go when i become dry is this the uh can i say what the segment is remember i told you off air like i don't know if i'd get in trouble

if i said it on air i don't remember but just say it man we're brothers okay well that's what it was the ask a black dude segment like where we ask questions that we could not otherwise know unless we had our black friend next to us now this is why my friends i keep some gold bond hand cream and i keep body lotion in the office because when i get ashy we talked about you can't just go plug your own sponsors all the time if you'd like to save some money on gold bond hand cream you can head to gold bond.com use code power project for 25 off your entire order of gold bond now um yeah when i get ashy my knuckles look white my kneecaps look white my elbows look white it's not a good look for anybody that's a little bit darker is it frowned upon in your community it's frowned

upon and like oh no no even you if you saw me ashy you'd be like is there something wrong you look unhealthy you wouldn't be able to pinpoint what it is because you don't pay attention to that but you'd be like something about it semen looks kind of poor today but what about your i'm serious what about your friends that are black what were they oh yeah they just like you're ashy that's why we all we use lotion because like it's it's not a good look. People look at you differently. When I start to get tan, though, I'll get real dry.

If I scrape something or whatever, it just looks gross. I'm like, what the fuck? Yes. It happened to me. Yes. So we can't do that. Anyway. So the Ask a Black Dude segment is sponsored by BubzNaturals.com. At checkout, enter promo code powerproject for 25

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so thank you guys for sponsoring this segment the ask a black dude segment and please yeah guys really check out

bubs cause they're the collagen protein they're MCT oil they're so their products are really good like they mix really well they're high quality they are not white labeled they're legit and white labeling means that they don't just go to other companies and put their label on this is

originally like they do all the ingredients themselves yeah i wasn't paying attention my wife has the collagen the collagen protein every day i'm just like what like no wonder why you're making so many awesome gains there There we go. She keeps getting compliments on her hair and stuff. So I'm like, I think maybe that's part of why.

Could be. Yeah, it's supposed to be good for your hair, your nails, your skin, all that stuff. Why not engage

in having some of it, right? Yeah. I think that's it for today. Take us on out of here, Andrew. Alrighty.

Thank you everybody for checking out today's episode. Please drop us a comment down below on the YouTubes and if you guys are on the iTunes or the Spotify's or the Google plays, whatever the heck you're listening to this on,

head over to YouTube and drop us a comment on anything you learned today or anything you found interesting. We would sincerely appreciate that. And for those of you on YouTube, make sure you guys like and subscribe. If you guys are not already subscribed and turn on all those bell notifications, please follow the podcast at Mark Bell's power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on TikTok

and Twitter. My Instagram and Twitter is at I am Andrew Z and SEMA for the shot. And that was online though. Like Andrew said, guys, make sure number one, go on YouTube, check out Dr. Mike's channel. You guys will learn a lot. I love the way he dispenses information. It's like that's that's goals man he's amazing um and come leave a comment let us know what you like about this episode and see my ending on instagram and youtube and see my yin yang on tiktok and twitter mark we are leaving for columbus ohio i don't know

when this thing comes out we'll be back uh we just got back what an amazing trip wow that was great it was awesome that uh question about the mountains dick i couldn't you know i was i was shocked i didn't think he'd take his pants off i didn't think you guys are gonna put a penis pump on him right on the show that's looking like crazy i mean i don't want to give it away which way we were surprised but we were surprised and his wife looked hell uh like she looked like she was enjoying what we were doing. Yeah, she was happy. It was crazy. It was wild. I don't know. Anyway, I'm at Mark Smelly Bell.

Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later.