Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 27 - Ben Pakulski

Episode Date: March 29, 2018

Live with Bodybuilding champ, Ben Pakulski. Ben is an IFBB professional bodybuilder and winner of the 2008 Mr. Canada competition. This episode was recorded live on 3/14/18. Rewatch the Live Stream: https://youtu.be/s_yJgL6s9b8 ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Stitcher Here: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play here: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud Here: https://soundcloud.com/user-921692324 ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell

Uh, you know, the camera adds 10 pounds and so we're just trying to be nice to you so it doesn't make you look too fat. Okay, good. Yeah. So you're not actually lifting right now? Are you just doing mostly cardio? I don't, I don't work out. No, I try to work out, but there's just, you know, it's just so pathetic compared to, you

know, what I was used to for a long time. That's pretty much what I feel like right now. Usually like 20 minutes of cardio in the morning. Kegels and butt clenches. And that's pretty much it. Is that all you're doing? How does he know about our workout? That's part of our workout.

That's part of the Bell program, part of our system. That and Cheerios. Right. That's all you need. How's it feel being, you're retired from bodybuilding, how's it feel being, uh, you're retired from bodybuilding, retired from professional bodybuilding, right?

Retired from the stage, retired from competing. Is that correct? Yeah. How's that feel? Uh, it's a relief, man. Cause as you know,

man, to be, to be the best in the world than anything, it's completely all encompassing and selfish. So it's been a great, yeah, it's been a great, um,

load off my back to be able to spend time with my family to be able to focus He said load. He did. Write that down. Or keep couch. Get my couch.

Casting couch. How long did it take you to get that pro card? Like how long was that like in your sights for? Truthfully, like I'd been aspiring to get bigger

from the time I was 15 years old. Um, didn't compete until after university. So I got a four year degree. Um, and then just wanted to get in shape cause I was fat and got in shape and won shows and kept winning shows. And then got my pro card from the time I started competing to the time I got my card was two and a half years. You were fat? In college.

So that's kind of rare for a bodybuilder, right? Like most pro bodybuilders aren't fat, are they? I grew up fat. They're usually thin, right? Yeah. So bodybuilders aren't fat, are they? I grew up fat. They're usually thin, right? Yeah. So I grew up as a fat kid, man. Everyone in my family is overweight and alcoholic. Fat kid or just kind of fat?

No. Pudgy? Depends what you do. Fat? I'd say I was pretty fat, man. How much did you weigh? I don't know, but I was probably 25% body fat. Oh, okay.

That's pretty rare. Normally a lot of bodybuilders, and we know professional bodybuilders. Yeah, most people come from- They usually don't ever really accumulate a lot body fat. Oh, okay. That's pretty rare. Normally a lot of bodybuilders, and we know, professional bodybuilders, they usually don't ever really accumulate a lot of fat. They usually come from being skinny, which makes it easier for them to stay lean. So did you ever have a problem with staying real lean? Because you were one of the leaner guys out there. I got shredded for contests, man, but I struggled every minute of that shit. I was the guy who was crushing every, I had to do i had to kill the fat kid you also had so much muscle on you that it was kind of insane what was your uh i

settled down over there what was your weight i was an attractive man but jesus christ what was your weight at we'll snuggle later boys um there we go my weight for contest heaviest ever was 283 284 maybe wow in a contest holy shit yeah that's a lot of muscle to be carrying how tall are you 510 yeah 510 283 boom bodybuilders always throw a couple extra inches on everything don't they can't i get a hey now, did you have to do a lot of cardio? I did. Um, especially younger, like ignorant, like most people just did a lot of cardio thinking it's the best method for losing fat. Didn't know any better, but, um, I did, man.

I mean, for most contests, I was doing two hours of cardio a day, uh, especially early in my career, toward the end of my career, I stopped doing cardio pretty much altogether because I learned how to train. I learned how to manipulate training. Like if you were to train a bodybuilder today, you know, like a new up and coming bodybuilder, you wouldn't have them doing two hours of cardio a day. That's not what it takes to be. No chance. I'm not against cardio, man. I don't think cardio is a bad thing, but I think it's misused and misunderstood. So, um, you know, cardio is not

your best opportunity to burn fat. The only time cardio becomes your best opportunity to burn fat is if you're in a really low carb state. If you're in a really depleted state, then low intensity cardio becomes your best opportunity to burn fat. But if you're eating high carbohydrate, like most bodybuilders, high intensity exercise. Are things changing in the bodybuilding world as far as this goes? It's like the diet and the training and stuff. Are things evolving? I certainly hope so.

Like everything in life, it should be evolving. I certainly hope it's evolving. If we're doing the same shit they did in the seventies, we're stupid. What are some of the kinds of things that you, you guys used to do that maybe you don't do anymore? Like is a six meals a day out the window? Is that still a thing or like what? I think that's necessary for somebody,

but it's just to get the sheer number of calories we need. Right? Like when I was, when I was off season, I was eating, you know, upwards of 7,000 calories a day. Like're not getting that in at three meals, right? So just spreading it out, right? You're trying to give your body a chance to actually- What's that like, eating like that all the time? It's terrible, man. It's the worst thing ever, especially when it's clean food, right? Like if I eat junky food, I get fat, so I always have to eat clean food. It's terrible, man.

But you don't have an opportunity to even like, in a lot of cases, you don't even have an opportunity to use like teriyaki sauce and stuff like that. It's just chicken, rice, broccoli, kind of over and over again. You can't really put much on it, right? Maybe mustard or something. I don't even know. I was doing mustard. Yeah, for sure.

I did mustard. Sometimes you do ketchup, but that's pretty plain. I got addicted to sea salt. We're getting a little frisky around here. Hardcore. Yeah, sea salt. High fructose corn syrup. Yeah, exactly.

Bleeding into the diet. No, no, no. Come on, man. I'm doing the organic one. You got to know better than that. Yeah. Organic ketchup. There you go.

That's right. Yeah. No corn syrup for this guy. That's a crazy amount of discipline. I've heard Jay Cutler. He's just like, I hated every meal. He's like, I normally would like to eat like two or three times a day. And, you know, the day I retired, that's what I did.

I've been doing that ever since. He said he feels a lot better. A big thing with bodybuilding is a lot of times we see people come out of it really unhealthy, really damaged, worse for wear. You look pretty damn good. That's mainly because of the pay, right? Yeah. That's a different podcast.

But how old are you and how do you maintain your boyish looks here? Man, I'm 36. And I just made sure I got out. That's why I got out, right? Because I knew for me to go to that next level, if I wanted to be top five in the Olympia, it was another level for me. It was another level of commitment. It was another five years of, you know, really committing and going hard.

And I was just happy to get out with my health, man. I mean, inevitably at some point, it's going to catch up with you, right? Even just walking around at 300 pounds all the time is going to catch up with you. So luckily, completely got away with my health, minimal injuries, aches and pains and bumps and bruises like everybody. But, um, yeah, man, I feel awesome.

One thing I love about bodybuilding and I think it could be applied to life and it can be applied to any other sport is the 24 hour discipline that it takes. You know, it's one of the few sports. If you're trying to be professional and you're trying to be the best, then it totally makes sense to jump all in and to be in 100% and to devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week to your craft. But, I mean, let's kind of face it. Most sports don't really do that. Right. And also, you know, you can also kind of say like genetically and there's a lot of other of get in there, but, um, it doesn't seem to matter that much in other sports, but on bodybuilding, where you're getting judged on stage, where every little thing matters, whether you have, uh, your arms are a certain size or whether you, you know, strip all the body fat down

and all the right spots, uh, you have no choice for it to be 24 seven discipline. The way that I explain it to people is in sports and athletics, it's an external focus, right? My, my objective is I need to run faster. I need to jump higher. You score more goals,

bodybuilding. It's all internal. So you need to manage every one of your internal systems, your internal state and in every one of these systems. So you have to pay attention to everything. Otherwise you have no control over it. And bodybuilders, unfortunately,

a lot of us are still focused on the external. How much do I lift? How hard did I work today? All this stuff is, stuff is always irrelevant. It only matters in as much as it's creating this internal response that I'm looking to achieve. Is it creating the muscle building response? Is it creating the fat loss response inside my body? And that's the separation that bodybuilders have to start making is like all these things that happen outside of our body only matter if they're creating the exact internal response that I'm after.

Are, are most bodybuilders, uh, weird question in some way, are most bodybuilders kind of boring, like by nature because of the, because of the structure that it takes? Absolutely, man. It has to be right. Like what do you eat, sleep and drink? And unfortunately that's just the reality of it. And that's one of the other reasons I'm so grateful. I'm not partying and being wild. Well, people would always comment.

I'm like, I watched Ronnie Coleman's video. And there he is eating. And then he's like sleeping through like half his meal. And then he's lifting. He's the worst cop of all time. He's like, here I am eating chicken. And they're like, is that supposed to be working? People are like, that's all he does in his video.

It's so boring. But they watch it a million times. And they get into the routine of doing the same exact thing. Apparently there's a Marcus Rule video where he actually goes and they watch him on the toilet. Like he's smoking a cigarette on the toilet. And I was like, that's literally the most exciting thing a bodybuilder does in a day. Yeah, kind of. It's the bowel movement in the morning, right?

Yeah. I think that that's like a big thing is like a lot of people think it's boring. And they wouldn't want to do that every day. But there's a lot of people think it's boring and they wouldn't want to do that every day. But there's a lot of people that do do it. We saw that with John Cena. When we first met John Cena, my brother and I worked with John at a company called Mass Movement where we moved fitness equipment. One of the worst jobs of all time. Get killed every day.

And John was like, I i mean he was in amazing shape already but he's like i'm gonna do a bodybuilding show and you know he at the time he was just doing what he thought was best and so that was uh chicken breast every other meal and whey protein uh in in between he did that he also didn't have any money to like do it yeah yeah he yeah he was partially financial right yeah he was just scraping together whatever whatever he had and i was just thinking to myself there's no way this guy's gonna do that fucking diet what's he talking about he's got six times a day and he's gonna do it for the next three weeks i'm like there's no way and sure enough he just does it and uh he did his bodybuilding show and he's

completely shredded and leaned out and everything and that's when i realized i'm like okay well first of all i don't ever doubt this guy again and secondly uh anything that he wants to do he's going to be able to accomplish yeah and i think everybody always everybody will just live that part of their life at some point right it's like no money and like figuring out some way to just achieve this end result man we all this this objective i want to be this guy yeah and there's a there's people that say like oh i can't do bodybuilding because i don't have money i can't do this i can't do that and mark and i saw john cena literally have no money uh was out here in california expired protein by himself living living on expired protein he had this giant bucket it was like a six pound he loved it he loved when

he's like oh yeah and it wasn't even optimum nutrition it was something like cheaper at the time like a cheaper brand than i'd even and it was like i don't know this big bucket of like a metrex wannabe it wasn't metrex but it of like a Metrex wannabe wasn't Metrex, but it was a fade Metrex. And he would have that six times a day and did that for until the bucket was empty, you know, and then got another bucket of it because it was on sale because it was expired.

I lived there, man. Like, you know, the six to eight cans of tuna a day because they were 49 cents when I was in, you know, high school and college. Like that's, that's what it was, man. I was very lucky, very young to be sponsored by MuscleTech when I was 19. Wow. They saw the calves, man. They saw the calves. Yeah, calves are gigantic.

So honestly, all through college, I literally lived on, if you guys remember the Mesotech bars. Yeah. I had a closet full of those things. I had that, NitroTech and CellTech. And I literally like, that was my caloric sustenance through all through college. Yeah. That's it. And that's how I got through.

And I traded it. Well, stuff tasted good. Yeah. So if I needed something, I would trade it with my buddies. I'm like, yeah, I need some of this. Like, you know. I remember the trading used to go on like crazy because a lot of my friends were sponsored by different companies. Yeah.

We'd actually bring it into the supplement store and trade it into them. And they'd resell it and give us some supplements for free. And they'd also start getting smart and they'd put stickers on it like, you know, supplement or athlete product, not for resale, we'd sell it and they'd take the sticker off. Yeah. We had all of our friends were sponsored. We like, that's how we'd figure out how to get our supplements was trading them out with people. When it comes to like protein bars and stuff, there's, there's really, when you're a professional

bodybuilder, there's really absolutely no room for anything like that. Right? Never. No. I mean, especially for myself, like you guys say, the reason I was able to maintain such health is that I pay attention to everything that goes into my body. So, you know, there's no artificial flavors,

no artificial sweeteners. I'm kind of, I'm kind of methodical like that. And even during the career, man, I definitively noticed a difference when I ate crap. So you're not like a crystal light guy. Like sometimes some of these guys, instead of the water, they're drinking like a baby. Throughout my career, there was points where,

you know, during a contest prep, you're so, you're going to either go crazy or have a little crystal light, in which case it's fine. Especially early in my career. But later on, man, it's just, if it's not making me better, I'm not putting it in, right? I'm so committed to that end result. That's, it's a, it's a, it's a smart mindset. It seems like everyone should have that mindset. This kind of mind muscle connection, is this something that you got into later, uh,

after you retired? Or is it, or is it something that you were practicing? There's a story behind it. So, um, you know, I got my pro card in 2008,

did the 2009 Tampa pro, got third, did very well relative, um, you know, Dennis James won the show and he was one of my idols growing up. And then 2000, um,

after that. So I wanted to prep for the New York pro cause I thought that was a great show. Um, so I had eight months to prep for the show and I literally committed everything in my life. Like I turned my cell phone off. I trained twice a day. All I did was eat, sleep and train going to

that New York pro. I was shredded. I was 17 pounds heavier on stage. Uh, and I was so confident I was going to do well. So yeah, two 67 on stage and I got crushed. I got fucked, just destroyed. I got seventh place and I got beat by some

guys that I would say, you know, are shitty bodybuilders. And I was pissed. It got fucked, just destroyed. I got seventh place and I got beat by some guys that I would say, you know, are shitty bodybuilders. And I was pissed. It's all politics, man. Right. And that's exactly the first thing that came out of my mouth.

I was like, screw this. You know, I'm Canadian, so they're trying to screw me. Or it's just politics. And then, you know, it was two weeks. Fucking Canada. I was literally going to retire.

Fucking Canada. Yeah. And I was going to retire. I was like, fuck this. I don't want to deal with this bullshit, the politics. And there's two weeks. I went off the show. I took my, fuck this. I don't want to deal with this bullshit, the politics. There's two weeks. I went off the show.

I took my girl to Mexico and spent some time. Mexico came back. Didn't look at any pictures. When I finally got back, I looked at the pictures and I was like, fuck, I look like shit. So at that point I was like, what? So what, you know, kind of looked at it objectively and I said, what is it that I did that I didn't like? So my strengths got really, really strong.

So my legs and my shoulders got really, really big and my back and my arms got small and my proportions were weird. So at that point I started, I made the realization that if you can build any muscle, you can build them all. Like, so people, people attach to this idea of like, oh, you have genetically strong and genetically weak body parts is bullshit. You have different shape, but if you can build one body part, you can build them all. It's all the same internal chemistry. You just have to learn to direct tension there. So the difference is some body parts, your, your body will naturally put tension through really easily when you train some body parts it won't so at that point it was kind of the catalyst for me going well how do i

start manipulating this stuff so i had a biomechanics degree prior to that so i'd studied it a lot but at that point it was like canada though from canada which obviously that's not that's void yeah let's not try to make it something it's not right so that's what happened for it something it's not. Right. So that's what happened for me, man. It's just like me realizing that I'm doing so great building these other body parts. Why can't I build these other ones? And that's how the calves exploded?

No, the calves exploded at the beginning. So when I was 16 years old, I saw a picture of Dorian Yates in a magazine. I was like, I just want that. So I literally trained him every day for five years. Are those pictures of Dorian in Flex Magazine? yeah is that the ones yeah people at gold's gym i literally cut them out and pasted them on the wall people at gold's gym venice would talk about your calves they were like stuff of legends right they're like the legendary they're big at some point man i was so how big were they i was almost 23 inches at one point. Holy shit. Yeah. Some bowling balls.

That's, I think my calves are like 17 and a half or something. People always tell me I have huge calves. So. Right. There's some pictures from the New York pro from actually must go to a magazine. Jesus. Parabra now.

Um, yeah, I got nothing compared to that. So. Oh, it's like, yeah, there's like, the one on the right where I've got a great tank top and a hat backwards.

Pull that one up. Up to the top on the right. Right at the top right. Right in the corner. You're really messing things up over there. It's hard because I can't see both screens. Come on. We don't want to hear excuses.

I'm wearing Vibram 550 shoes. You know what those are. So that's where my cows would have been the biggest. At least in contest. Offseason, they probably would have been the biggest, at least in contest. Off season, they probably would have been nice and swole. You played sports growing up? Is that kind of what would add to the calves being, you know, genetic? Calf off. Or not being genetic, but just being kind of prepped to be big in the first place?

Did you play a lot of sports? I did, yeah, man. I played everything. I played hockey, I played baseball. Just running around, being on your toes, and maybe the way you walk, along with a lot of heavy lifting. Sure, literally like every single day for five years, right? I did every workout, every, you know, high reps, low reps.

Yeah, that's crazy. When you were young, were you strong? Weak as a fucking kitten, man. Yeah. Dude, this is no joke. I remember celebrating curling the 12 and a half pound dumbbells when I was 17 years old. Like that was a big accomplishment for me.

I just celebrated that yesterday. Right. That was a big accomplishment fors when I was 17 years old. Like that was a big accomplishment. I just celebrated that yesterday. That was a big accomplishment for me. I was so weak, man. So the funny story about my, my beginning was I started as a vegetarian and a long distance runner. And the reason I became a vegetarian was because I believed meat was bad, which is a funny conversation to have with you guys now. This is before you got into bodybuilding? I knew nothing, man.

I was 14 years old. Somebody told me meat was bad. So my solution was I'm going to eat muffins and bagels because that's going to be healthy for me because I thought. Yeah, whole grain. Right, yeah. Where are your parents at this point? They're not concerned? They're Canadian.

I don't know. No, man. My parents were never really around to influence anything I did. So I was kind of a lone wolf. And that's probably why I chose bodybuilding was the independence of it. Just me and nobody else. Yeah. That's a big reason a lot of people choose bodybuilding.

Completely. They feel like it's them against the world. I sucked at team sports. I was always a great athlete. I was always the captain of the team, but not because I was a leader, but because I was the best. So I was just like, shut the fuck down. I'll do it myself.

I was that guy, right? And that's why bodybuilding called me. Were you angry when you were young? I was just like, shut the fuck down. I'll do it myself. I was that guy. Right. And, uh, that's why bodybuilding called me. Uh, were you angry when you were young? I was, I was an angry teenager, man. Even all the way through,

you know, my early, a lot of people that kind of like lift angry, like, uh, you know, my brother and I have been going to gold's gym, uh,

Venice for years. Um, and, uh, we see the guys, the headphones on and they, they kind of, you know,

get the mean, mean mug it a little bit, and they're focused, like totally understandable. Everyone's going to train different, and I don't expect everybody to be like dicking around and joking around the whole time, especially if it's your profession. But what have you kind of learned from that, having that mindset in the beginning to kind of where you're trans?

I love that you're asking that question, man. So as a kid, you model people, right? So you see these bodybuilders and all of them, like, you've got to be focused, you've got to be angry, you're asking the question, man. So, you know, as a kid, you model people, right? So you see these bodybuilders and all of them, like, you got to be focused. You got to be angry. You want to use your fuel. You use anger as fuel. I think that's the worst thing people can do, man.

Because every time you train, you got to realize, like, you know, if you walk into a, you know, an ex-girlfriend's house, or if you walk into the police station, if you walk into whatever, man, your brain remembers those scenarios and the stress response, whether it's a stress response or a happy response is always going to be the same. So if you're, every time you walk into whatever, man, your brain remembers those scenarios and the stress response, whether it's a stress response or happy response is always going to be the same. So if you're, every time you walk into the gym, if you're, if you're constantly indoctrinating that like angry, angry, angry, every time you lift, every time you contract that muscle, your brain's remembering anger and fear and resentment, all these, these things. And the worst thing you can do for your, your psychology is keep ingraining that into your nervous system.

So, uh, man, I started that way for sure. And, you know, I'm so grateful that at some point I realized, like, why the hell am I doing this? Because I hated it, man. Like, you can imagine as a pro bodybuilder how much I attached to every single workout needed to be world class or I was a failure. It was hard, man. It was a hard thing to learn.

But I definitely did toward the end of my career learn to love the process. And that's probably why leaving bodybuilding was such a great thing for me was I didn't have to be that anymore. I could learn to love it again. It's a vicious cycle because you end up going to the gym. You have this specific focus. And it's almost like you're searching for something to throw you off and make you even more angry. Yes. And then it throws you out of your routine of what you wanted to do. Like if you had a specific exercise you wanted more angry. Yes. And then it throws you out of your, throws you out of your routine of what you wanted to do.

Like if you had a specific exercise you wanted to do, you've already, you've already planned it out that somebody is in your way. They're not really in your way. They're not actually in your way. You could go do something else. You could warm up. You could be productive somewhere else.

There's tons of other shit you can do in the gym. But you kind of like made up your mind that this motherfucker is in my way today and I'm going to storm back and forth and I'm going to be all grumpy. Man, I hated the gym so much for the last few years of my career that I would literally sit in my car for 15 minutes before I went in the gym to try to get my brain right to go in there. I fucking hated it, man. And I built that into my nervous system to the point where it was just,

it couldn't be any other way. I had so much stress. Maybe that's what Paul Dillard was doing. Maybe he wasn't waiting for a spot. Maybe he was. I think though, like I've gotten like that too, where I've gotten to the point where I'm,

I've just gotten sick of the environment of the gym. And I don't know why I didn't want to go in, but there was times where I did the same thing. Like just sit out there waiting, going like, I know I got to go in there and get stuff done, but I just don't feel like it. So man,

this is why what I'm trying to do now is a complete shift is I'm trying to empower people. And a lot of people hate the gym because they feel like they don't have the ability to get results. A lot of people go, I don't have the genetics. It's bullshit, man. You just haven't, you don't have the skillset. Like if I say, Hey man, we're going to, we're going to bake a world class cake, right? We want to build, bake the best cake in the world. Anybody can bake a cake. If all you got to do is go to the baker and go say, hey, man, give me the recipe for the world-class cake. Everybody can build a world-class body. You may not be a Mr. Olympia competitor.

You may not be a fitness model, but you can build a world-class body. You just got to have the skill set. You got to have the process, right? And that's really all it's about. That's what I'm trying to empower people with is realize like all your excuses around time, around genetics, around nutrition is fucking bullshit. Let's just learn how to do it for your body and and you know i i've i've struggled more than anybody to build my body you guys let you hearing my struggles man as a kid i was fat everyone in my family was lazy and alcoholic never been never graduated high school right um so realizing that

everyone's excuses are bullshit um just learn the learn the system man it's it's really and put in the time you know of course but a bigger- Don't you feel like everybody likes the things or they want to do the things that they like or they're good, right? So when you have a skill set and you actually feel

like you're getting results, like, fuck, I want to go more. I love this. And that's what we're trying to do is empower people with that. Yeah, it sucks doing things that you're not good at. Like nobody-

Yeah, if you're not getting results, you're like, fuck this, man. My joints hurt. I don't want to go do this. I'm going to be sore tomorrow. Like, it's just because you're doing the wrong thing you just keep hitting the wall every day and it should be uh progress every day right you know rather than my pecs growing my shoulders are sore who's gonna want to go back and do that again like yeah fuck that whereas if we just make some slight changes oh now i actually how do you figure out ways around that how do you

help people um stay healthy and not get injured and stuff not attaching to watching what other people do. The worst thing we can do, man, is like, hey, go watch me on the internet or go watch somebody else on the internet. Actually, it's the stupidest thing you can do. We're not built the same, man. We all fit into exercise differently. We all need exercises that are built for our body. And that's the worst thing we can do, man, is watching these other pros and going, oh, you know, Ben has great legs and he squats, therefore I should squat too. It's just not the truth, man. Like we have to come up with different things that work for our body. And that's, hopefully we'll go through later today is just looking at what your body needs to do to accomplish the goal you're after, right? Is it muscle building? Is it strength is whatever, is it specific to

specific development of one body part? Let's develop that. Don't be attached to how you do it. Don't be attached to squatting and deadlifting and rows, whatever, like. I think you're right. Cause when you get attached to like how you do it or Don't be attached to squatting and deadlifting and rows, whatever. I think you're right. Because when you get attached to how you do it or the specifics of it, then you're locked into that and you have no other options. If I say, hey, I want to squat, your body goes, okay, I'm going to squat and go all the way to the bottom, all the way to the top. But what muscles are being challenged the most? And the reality is we can manipulate what muscles are being challenged the most in any exercise by learning how to set up differently for our body.

Yeah. I mean, there might be one person that, and I've talked about this many times with power lifting. There's some people that can squat really efficiently. And I've actually seen you squat. You squat super efficiently. So therefore, what I immediately think of in terms of strength athlete, well, here's somebody that can handle probably more volume and more frequency because you're

going to recover from it because you're not squatting like a retard. You're not leaning real far forward and you're not getting into these positions where you're dumping all the weight into your lower back. It's actually on the muscles that are supposed to be working. Sure. And there's a lot more options, you know, so with each person, there's going to be specific movements. I've heard you talk about this before, it's something that uh power lifters use quite often there's going to be

certain moves for certain people that uh that they need to address and they need to work on more than others and there's going to be certain exercises that are that really fit perfectly into some somebody's body type and even just manipulations of different exercises like you know doing different doing squat differently, like different, different widths. Like people attach, I'm going to do a sumo because Dan Green does sumo or, you know. No, man, let's figure it out. One guy's got some legs. Yeah, Dan's a freak.

But, you know, not attaching to watching other athletes and going, oh, I want to do what he does. Like, no, I need to do what works for my body. Otherwise, you're going to break. If you want to be great at something or even good at something, you got to do what works for you. Otherwise you're going to break, you know, like bench pressing. Some people are great bench pressers. And so, whereas some people,

most people, you know, if I say, how do you work your upper chest? Most people go, well, you do an incline bench press. At least 80% of people will not be using their upper chest or an incline bench press. They'll be using their front delts.

Whereas they actually will use more upper chest on a flat bench press, which is so ridiculous. And I'll show you guys that later today, but it's such simple stuff, man. Rather than being attached to, oh, an incline bench press works my upper chest. Just fucking watch, just look. And I'll show you how to do that. It's very simple.

It's possible. Like if he and I are lifting together, that if we're doing the same exercise. You're doing completely different. Yeah. You might have him doing the bottom, you know, from the bottom up. And I might be doing hitting a different range just because we got different arm. Just different muscles. Yeah, you might have him doing the bottom, you know, from the bottom up, and I might be doing hitting a different range just because we got different arm lengths. Or just a different angle. Yeah, just a completely something different exercise.

Yeah, you move the bench a tiny bit, right? Like you move it back, move it forward. So the best, you know, metaphor to think about is like, so let's say we're doing any exercise, we're doing a bench press. Your body's got five different muscles that can use this weight. And your body's going to disperse that weight according to its strongest body parts. Your brain's very smart.

Obviously it's meant for survival. It's going to disperse it according to whatever strongest. So what we're trying to do as someone who's trying to hypertrophy a muscle is we're trying to take away all the other muscles from assisting. So if I have five that can assist, but I want my pecs to do the greatest amount of work, I need to learn how to set up to take those other four muscle groups out of it as much as possible.

So now my body sees the pec as the greatest solution rather than just arbitrarily going and lifting and letting my body use its strongest body parts. So therefore my, my strength, my strong body parts, the key getting stronger and stronger and stronger. I want to, I want to isolate the ones I'm trying to lift. And that's, that's completely different than just getting in there and mindlessly throwing shit around. It seems to be a big deal in bodybuilding, trying to figure out how to isolate and concentrate on one thing.

Well, if you want to develop weak body parts, it has to be right. Yeah. I mean, just, it's, it's not about moving away from putting it to put me where it's powerlifting. It's like, I'm trying to get as stable as possible and get as strong as possible to move this way from here to here. Bodybuilding is complete, literally polar opposite where I'm trying to isolate a muscle and make it the

weakest link in the chain. It's amazing how that transfers over to everything in life too i mean you're on a daily basis you're trying to do a bunch of stuff you're trying to get a bunch of work done but you're trying to isolate things to try to concentrate on like one given thing right and the people that are the best they execute the best on just that one thing somebody like steve jobs who made 400 million dollars in like three years or whatever it was, something absurd like that. His company and he was able to kind of hone in and focus in on one thing. I mean, even the iPhone itself and the iPad and everything else they made looks similar to that one product. And everything was in an effort to make that one product as good as possible.

Running faster and faster in the wrong direction doesn't get to where you want to go, right? Like it's not the idea. I'm ready to do it. Right. Working hard isn't the solution. It's working smart first and then learning how to work hard, right? Like if you're working hard on the wrong things, it's stupid. So this is what I try to teach everybody.

It's always, it always has to be, you know, for bodybuilding or muscle building, it's always has to be execution before effort. Effort definitely is a huge piece, but it has to be an execution first. And that's the same in life, man. It's like, you got to learn how to read before you can learn how to read fast.

Right. We're talking a little bit before about, before the podcast about overtraining and about like how much is too much. And, um, as you get older, what have you found as far as, um, lifting, you know, uh, the amount of times you lift per week and the amount of volume you put in per week and how that affects you. Yeah. I think that may be one of the biggest mistakes that I made. And most people make, um, early in my career was, um, just being attached to, I'm going to be the hardest working mofo out there. If anyone was in training, they would have crushed them. And

the idea of hard work, we all attach as the badge of honor and we love to be able to work hard. But for most people, it's just too much. With the amount of stress we're subjected to in our day to day life, and we talked about this, it's like, you wake up in the morning, your phone's going off, you're getting emails that are causing stress. Then you're on you know, you're on your way to work and somebody cuts you off, you're stressed. You get to work, your boss is yelling at you, Mark's being a prick, you're stressed. You know, you open your email, you're stressed. You know, you get home from work, your wife's pissed off, you're stressed. Like all these things are just stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. And then we add the workout load on top of that and your body's just in this

constant state of stress. So if the workout itself is just an additional stress, it can't build muscle. Like your body is just always in this sympathetic state as we were talking about the autonomic nervous system. So the thing that I've done, man, is learning to one, manage my life stress, manage my perception of stress. I've added meditation and breathing, which has changed my life. And I think everybody who wants to build muscle should must make that a part of their routine. If you truly want to build muscle or get strong or get lean, you have to, because, and it's just in looking at the science of it, it's just like

the autonomic nervous system has two branches, sympathetic and parasympathetic. And if you're in a sympathetic state all the time, all those things you're trying to do are literally an impossibility. So finding a way, whatever means that is for you to get into this parasympathetic state. And especially, you know, as soon as you're done training, the thing I teach everybody

now is like, Hey man, when you're done training, go sit in the corner by yourself, put your phone away, five minutes of breathing, uh, stimulate that parasympathetic nervous system. That's probably really hard for people to do. They're like, I want bigger arms, dude. What the fuck? Right. It's weird. Right.

But like, if you start to understand the mechanics of the science of what actually needs to happen, the sympathetic nervous system is fight or flight. The parasympathetic is rest and digest. If I'm in sympathetic, I can't build muscle. So I want to be in rest and digest 22 hours a day. Two hours a day, I'm in the gym. Let's go parasympathetic. Let's go hard, which is cortisol, adrenaline.

I want all those things running. 22 hours a day, I want to be anabolic. I want to be parasympathetic, which is you got to chill out, man. And you guys know bodybuilders, man man bodybuilders are on their own schedule the best bodybuilders in the world are the least stressed guys you know yeah they're all like you know chilling out the two hours late they seem very laid back yeah and that's the reality of it man is that's just their genetic programming they have just these relaxed personalities right if you want to be a great bodybuilder you got to learn to be stress-free yeah and a lot of them you look at it you're like ah guys it's like big and lazy but they're

they're really it's part of it's part of the bodybuilding like docile almost right yeah like they're not putting in too much energy doing anything during my career i attached to i was able to block out stress really well i literally said like you know there could be a you know bomb going off next door but there's a gym over here i gotta get legs done man done, man. Like as soon as legs done, I'll come help it. Like I got to get this done. And that was always like, yeah, my perception of stress was always great. And that maybe what allowed me to, you know, be successful as a bodybuilder. Well, I think as you get older too, your perception of stress changes a lot.

Massively. You're like, oh, that's not that. I mean, that's not that. Speaking of stress, like what does it feel like to be involved in, I mean, the Mr. Olympian contest,

that's gotta be a huge deal. Like how does that feel to be up there? I think at that point the stress was over for me. That was the easiest. The day-to-day grind in the gym

was the stress for me because I hated it, right? Like I put so much pressure on myself to be the best. Like every day had to be a world-class workout. Otherwise I was pissed. And if you got in my way of accomplishing a world-class workout, I was going to, I was

pissed. Yeah. Do you have training partners? Yeah. Early in my career, I did. I, you know, when I grew up in Canada, I had some really great training partners, man. And, um, you know, as I get older, I really didn't like, and to be honest, like not, not to be arrogant, but I would try, like, I'm like, Hey man, let's try to find some training partners, but nobody ever wanted to train hard. Like everybody goes, I don't want to train legs with you. I'm like, I had some great guys. Don't get me wrong. But like a lot of guys just didn't want to, didn't want to work hard.

Well, and maybe your mind is drifting off into worrying about their intensity level and you're not even thinking about your own as much anymore. I mean, yeah. Right. It always ended up benefiting them more than it benefited me. Right. Because I would do my best as a training partner. My objective is I want to make your workout as good as it can possibly be. And I would expect that in return. And if I didn't get that,

like, what the hell's the point? It's hard for people to do that. You know, it's not that hard for somebody to meet up with you on a training session and to put in a good effort for, you know, one training session where they run into you like, you know, once a year or whatever. Right. But yeah, for them to do it every day, like they get done with the workout, you're both demolished. Obviously the other guys more demolished and be like, all right, see you tomorrow. Right. You know, the guy's like, huh? It's hard to be consistent though with somebody that's a savage.

I used to train with O'Hearn and like, you know, I'd get run down a lot because he was like a machine and I would get run down, you know? So it's hard to, it's hard to even keep up, you know? Yeah. Some people that build great work capacity, you know, and that's something that a lot of bodybuilders have a like great work path work. That was one. If I had a genetic gift, that was it.

It was my aerobic capacity was superior to most people. You know, even at 310 pounds, I feel like I could run a marathon. My aerobic capacity was fantastic. I feel like that's important for a bodybuilder to get a lot of work done in a kind of short condensed period of time. Yeah. I mean, ultimately it's about creating stress, right? It's about creating a novel stress to your body.

You have to be able to do that. And most bodybuilders don't have good cardiovascular capacity, which could be actually a benefit looking at, as I learned to understand the biochemistry a little bit more. benefit looking at, as I learned to understand the biochemistry a little bit more, I think it's important to be able to have the ability to manipulate the amount of stress. So sometimes it's really dense, sometimes you space out the density. But for me, that was literally the only advantage I had because I wasn't strong. Like, I mean, I was weak relative, right? But those guys are much stronger than me.

But my genetic advantage is I do two sets to every one. Health seems to be a big factor because you're talking about like meditation and stuff like that. Is that something you realized early on or is that something you realized later? And I've been meditating since 2007, the first time I moved to California. And I kind of did it sporadically. But now since retiring from bodybuilding, I mean, we all know that mental health is everything. Yeah. Your health is everything, man. Yeah.

Your brain is everything. So, um, I view my body now, man, like I'm, I'm trying to live forever. I want to, I want to take care of everything. So I'm paying attention to everything. And, and I realized that, um, it doesn't, it doesn't even matter so much what goes into your mouth. It matters what your body does with it. So, um, you know, eating great food and being stressed all the time, it's not going to solve your health problems. So learning how to manage your mental stress is very important. Are you able to battle through just the pain?

You know, bodybuilders, for some reason, maybe it's a practice thing, but they're able to just handle a ton of punishment in a workout, squat workouts where you're supersetting squats and, like, leg extensions and stuff like that. That's a great question. That was actually part of the reason I retired was. It feels like part of your brain is, like, almost on fire in some weird way. You're like, what is this? Like, I can't get away from it.

The only answer is clarity of purpose. If you don't have a very clear purpose as to why I'm doing this, you don't stand a chance. I was so clear on what I wanted to do from the time I was young. It's like, I'm going to be in the Mr. Olympia. And every time, every time somebody said no, I

just smile and keep walking. And I knew I was going to be in the Mr. Olympia. There was never a doubt in my mind for a second. And that was the only thing I would picture. I wanted the best legs in the world. Um, and I just, that's what I was envisioning every single time on every single rep. Every time I got tired, I literally had this visual of like, what exactly I wanted my legs to look like.

And without that clarity, man, you don't stand a chance. And the reason I said that's a, you know, um, why I retired was I no longer had that purpose. Right. You know, for after two, after my daughter was born, to be honest, my daughter's now four. And after she was born, I couldn't be the same person. I didn't have that same purpose, man. Cause it was taking away from my time with my

family, with my daughter and I have a son as well, but. Yeah. Um, yeah, that, that clarity of purpose for anybody out there who wants to accomplish and go, you know this man, like you have, you have a clarity of purpose for your business. Right.

For your family, for like, you're like, I want to be this person. And if you don't have that, you can't be successful. You learn a lot in the squat rack. Yes. Yeah. I mean, you learn a lot about yourself, right? You learn a lot about your, um, your desire to be lazy,

which I know I was very lazy as a kid, man. You learn a lot about, um, your balls. You learn a lot about your character. Right. Um, I learned a lot, man. And, um, I learned a lot about my ego, uh, my ego's desire to, to crush everybody else that came through. And, uh, yeah, I learned a lot, man. Um, I mean, it sounds funny in some ways, but there, there are a lot of lessons that you learn that are, you know, literally from being under the bar.

Yeah. And, uh, you know, you, sometimes you get in the middle of a set and you did, you know, rep number nine, and maybe you're set out to do 12 reps. And just because you do 12 reps, you stop there. But if you really try to push it past that, it kind of almost seems like in most cases, as long as your form's not breaking down too much, you can keep going.

You know, there's like another rep and another rep, and there's not only one more rep a lot of times. Sometimes there's three, four, five more reps that you can squeeze out. I don't attach to reps anymore, man, to be honest. Now, I mean, now that I'm retired, during the last couple years of my career, I didn't really either. It's just I attach to like, it's funny, 95% of the time when I'm training, my eyes are closed and I'm inside my body feeling the muscle, and I'm going until I can't go anymore or until I, until the form starts to break. So until I feel like something other than my muscle that I'm training is being challenged, uh, it's just, I just try to get so zoned into like

beating that muscle. Is going to failure crucial for a bodybuilder? Yes. Yes, it is. I really believe it. And people are argue that, but I think your, the only argument would be, um be going to failure too often may not be the best thing, but if you're going to failure, like actual failure, just do less volume. Right. And we're not talking about maxing out to failure necessarily. We're talking more like in the middle of a 10 rep set where it's the last set, you know, a great training partner. So you feel mentally safe is massive, right? So I want to make sure that my, my focus is the muscle not completing reps. And that's one of the things that I say a lot is like, you know, focus on contraction, not completion as a bodybuilder, as an, as a power athlete, you're like, Hey man, just get, get this rep up. Whereas a bodybuilder, it's like, no, no, no, no. I don't want to finish this rep. I want to challenge the muscle. So my only objective is how hard can I contract this muscle? And then how much stability

can I create so I can contract the muscle harder? That's a very different objective than powerlifting. Yeah. It's, it's, it's interesting that to have the form and technique so locked in, uh, you know, you kind of see these like bodybuilder reps, you know, sometimes you're seeing somebody doing like partial, uh, it looks like they're doing like a half bench press and not locking out. Why do bodybuilders do that sometimes? The objective is, like I said, to challenge the muscle. So what is this muscle able to do right now? Like I'm not, so I'm not attached to completing a rep. I'm attached to challenging a muscle. So if, you know, let's say I'm doing a bench press and I can do, you know, a full rep and I get to six and like, oh shit, I can't do another full rep. So rather than finding a way

to complete the rep, which my body will, you know, start using shoulders, start using other muscles, I'm just going to stay in that range that I'm still able to do with that working muscle. So the rep may get progressively smaller, but I'm still challenging the right muscle. When it comes to social media, you know, what, how has social media, you think been beneficial to the sport and how has it been negative to the sport? Well, I talked to a lot of people about this actually recently, but just the idea of the instant gratification that's necessary with social media is probably crushing the long-term goals of these people, right? It's like, I need to get that instant dopamine hit of somebody

giving me a like today. A lot of times bodybuilders, and this is a very big generalization, but a lot of times, you know, our dealings with a lot of bodybuilders is if you came into the gym and I said, Oh man, you know, what are you been sick? You lose some weight. You'd be like demoralized. Sure. So sometimes the ego of a bodybuilders can sometimes be a little, a little fragile and we would just do it messing around just to be dicks. But it can be fragile because you're so focused in on that. a little, a little fragile and we would just do it messing around just to be dicks. But, um,

it can be fragile because you're so focused in on that. That is everything to you, building up size, building up mass and, and getting all the details, right? Yeah. For most guys it is. And ideally it shouldn't be right. It should be attached to the process and attached to like, if you master the process, your body's going to grow. It has to be like, you leave it no choice. Right. Uh, but yeah, I think social media is crushing it for a lot of people. And we all, we all need the PR today. We all need to post our abs today rather than like, Hey man, I have this 10 year plan or this five-year plan of going to Mr. Olympia contest or building a world-class body part of building a world-class body. Uh, it's definitely taken away from a lot of people. I can feel exactly what you're saying. Cause like as a, a filmmaker,

you work on the movie. That's the big goal. Right. And then like, but every day I feel like I need to report something to everybody. Like I got to tell everybody wants to see the movie now. Yeah. I got to tell everybody something.

Where's the fucking movie by the way? There's a new one coming out May 29th. Where's the link? Can I swipe up? Yeah. But so that's, that's a thing. Like you said,

the instant gratification is, it's very important for people to get it now. Like I need it up? Yeah. So that's a thing. Like you said, the instant gratification, it's very important for people to get it now. Like I need it now. Yeah. And I really think that the greatest bodybuilders are the ones that don't need that. They have this internal focus, this internal locus of control, and they just go inside their own little world. Like talk about Dorian back in the day, right? He didn't need anybody else to tell him how great he was.

Yeah. He's like, fuck you. I'm going to show you. When I step on stage at Olympia, you'll know. But I don't need you to tell me every day. And that's such an important thing. And most people are so insecure in themselves. They need that external gratification. Yeah.

So a truly great athlete doesn't seek that or they don't need it. And I mean, I think Instagram develops that culture of, I need this. Cause once you, once you get it, you want it more, right? Like, yeah, I need it more. I need it more.

Here comes a question I have to ask. So in bigger, stronger, faster, I need this. Cause once you, once you get it, you want it more, right? Like I was, yeah, I need it more. I need it more. Here comes a question I have to ask. So, um, in bigger, stronger, faster, I had a huge, uh, moral dilemma with, um, using anabolics, you know, um, jumping over to what they call the dark side or whatever, you know, and I did it of course. And then like, um, just wondering as a professional bodybuilder, do you face that or is it just part of the sport? Do you just accept it or? So, man, you know, my perspective now is different than when I was a kid. Obviously, as a kid growing up in Canada, I knew nothing about it. I knew it was part of the sport and nothing about it.

And I was very lucky to have some very good advisors very young that didn't fuck me up. Because I think that's a huge part for young kids is they get these idiots telling them what to do, or they learn from get big. And this is what Kai Green stack is. And you're like, no, it's not, man. It's just some idiot on there telling you what he thinks it is. It's that gigantic list of drugs. Oh, it's ridiculous. Right. And they're going to kill themselves. And then they're like, oh, you know, this is what I need to do to be because of Mr. Olympia. And like, no, you don't, you need to do the smallest incremental dose. So you keep moving forward um so obviously it's a part of bodybuilding man and um the realization now is i try to advise people at least for a long time to not do it like let's learn let's learn how to actually train first because most guys go oh if you want to be

a bodybuilder you just got to take this it's so much more than that man like it's and i think the big difference between the 70s and 80s and now is back then it was a training culture like you trained hard you trained twice a day after done training you're done training what'd you do you went to the beach you laid on the beach which is meditation in itself you recovered you connected with the earth now it's a drug-based culture so people think rather than having to train harder i just take more drugs and that's what's the difference in the physique now it's like people are so attached to the dose and yeah like well they think the drugs do everything and they don't really do much at all really like when you really look at it um i think the biggest favor the world did to mark and i was just keeping us off of steroids and away from them until we were

like in our you know late 20s and early 30, because, um, just being that young and diving into it, we would have, it would have been detrimental to both of us. And so like looking back on, I go like, I'm glad I didn't try it when I was young, you know? Yeah. Cause I didn't know enough about it. Yeah. I was very lucky, man. Like I said, to be exposed to some bright people who one got me good things that were, you know, not real, not crap. And I didn't need a lot.

As soon as I touched it, I responded. So I didn't attach to like, oh, I need to take ridiculous amounts of everything. I think that's what a lot of people, that's a big mistake a lot of people make too, is dumping a bunch of stuff on, you know, into your system and not knowing how much you need. The amount of toxins are in there, like the heavy metals, people are killing themselves, man. And it's unfortunate. And I think it's killing bodybuilding.

And, you know, I wish the government would at least legalize it, but a lot of people like, hey, man, if you're going to do it, go to your doctor, make like, let your doctor control this stuff. Because ultimately, man, like the stuff coming from China is just killing people. And it's really difficult. You know, we talk about this all the time. I wish the process was actually easier to get your stuff prescribed and stuff like that. But it's not as easy as it should be, you know. But there are some people out there trying to make it easier. And your blood work is kind of an inconvenience.

Yeah. It costs money and, you know, it's kind of a pain in the ass. Yeah, completely. Try to find somebody that knows how to even read it. There's a whole lot. And I love that you brought that up, man, because most doctors are like, oh, I just need testosterone. You don't fucking just need testosterone. It's all a cascade, man.

It's all the axis influencing all these different hormones. You know, your luteinizing hormone, your follicle-stimulating hormone, your DHEA. All these things are such massive components that just taking more testosterone is not going to get you the results you're after. You're one of the smarter bodybuilders out there. In my opinion, you have a lot of information. Um, where are you pulling a lot of your information from? What are your, what are your sort of go-to, uh, spots for information? Like you guys, man, I'm blessed to have a podcast where I get to literally call the smartest people in the world and ask them all the questions that I'm thinking about. So that's what I do now. Prior to that, man, like I said, I've got a university degree in the area of science and kinesiology and how the body moves and a lot of exercise physiology.

Just being a student of it, man. I take as many courses as I can. I read as many books as I can. I'm always trying to kind of decipher through and find the best information out there because we know there's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of people out there, especially in the fitness industry. The fitness industry, I always say, is 30 years behind everybody else. So that was maybe the greatest thing I ever did was look outside the fitness industry for advice and looking into professional athletics, professional trainers, Olympic trainers, the best researchers, finding those people. Olympic trainers, um, you know, the best researchers finding those people. Cause those are the guys who, um, you know, have a, if they have a very specific amount

of knowledge that you can take and apply to your, um, your necessity, what you need. Yeah. All of a sudden you've maybe made the sport better. Right. And that's kind of where my brain was. It's like, don't, don't listen to other bodybuilders. Don't listen to other people in this industry. Look outside and finally you can deduce some information and apply it to what you're doing.

Do you think people can be leaner without drugs versus with them? I've seen some of the, like, you know, they're drug tested. So I don't, you know, you don't know what the hell people are doing.

Right. But sometimes the drug tested athletes have like kind of a harder look, you know, because, uh, taken testosterone and things like that can cause some bloating and some things of that nature. So, you know, for those, for people that are listening that just want to get like lean and get in good shape, you can accomplish a lot of these things. My opinion on that is that's a great question too. I understand your question now. Um, I think it's, I advise every single person who wants to compete to compete natural first

because as we just spoke about, what do bodybuilders do to get in shape? Most bodybuilders don't want to train. They don't want to diet. They just take more shit. Yeah. Like I'm going to take

Clombuterol, I'm going to take Ephedrine, I'm going to take those other things that are drug-based culture rather than like, hey man, I'm just going to fucking diet. I'm just going to do some hard cardio.

I'm actually going to do some hard leg workouts to burn some fat. And it's unfortunate, but that's the reality. You guys, you guys know that as like a lot of times, that's why I respect natural athletes so much as like, these guys are putting the work, man. Like it's hard, man. It's hard to get in shape naturally.

You're going to suffer. So I suggest everybody do that at least once in their life and like learn how to learn how to diet, learn how to suffer. A couple pounds of muscles, fucking brutal. Yeah. It's really, it really is. And a couple pounds of muscle is fucking brutal. Yeah. It really is. It takes a lot of dedication. That's where the six meals a day and the rest and the sleep and recovery and everything's going to be.

I mean, it's always important, but it's going to even be that much more important. Yeah. And the inflammatory factor is obviously very different. And the growth hormones adds just a whole different dimension that people aren't aware of is making people insulin resistant and making them look bigger than they are. So everybody goes, oh, man, I screwed up my last week before the contest. You know, I, I lost 15 pounds in the last three days. Well, no, you didn't screw up. You just actually lost the water that you're holding. So that's the problem. Most people is not actually dense muscle, right? It's just that all this hyperemia from, you know, insulin and growth hormone and stuff. And then I screwed up

my last week. You think people put way too much faith in uh the idea of the drugs because like i'm saying like a lot of people will look at somebody and they'll say like oh that guy if i just took steroids all day and did this and that like i'd look like that too but like i actually have done that like i've actually had points in my life where um i took a lot of steroids and drained like crazy and and like i didn't look like those guys show you know what i mean so it's like i think that a lot of people um put well it was like after i did bigger stronger faster and i was like oh it's okay to try to do this and took a bunch of stuff and nothing really great happened i felt that way about growth hormone like i just got injured i didn't do it

went out until i was pro and i was i was expecting, it's just going to take me to this next level. That's what I was expecting. Especially about 10 years ago or so, people were talking about it like being such a crazy, crazy thing. And I've used it before myself. And all I got was joint pain. Right. You know, my hands got numb and my shit hurt. So I got my bench press back up to like 455 raw.

And then I blew out my shoulder and So, and my tricep, so it wasn't even, it wasn't worth it. And then not to give like some, you know, scary tale of like, Oh, don't do it. You'll get hurt or anything. But it's just the plain truth of it was, it wasn't what it was sold to me as that it was going to be like this awesome, you know, thing I get on steroids all of a sudden now, like now I'm ripped and now I'm in great shape. It is so hard to get lean and in great shape with the amount of dieting I'm doing. Right. That there's no drug in the world that could even match what I'm trying to do right now.

I love this conversation too, because people need to realize one, steroids aren't the solution to everything. But that being said, they are, I think a massive tool. A tool. For, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Especially for men over 35. On the flip side. Yeah, every man should, I really believe, should be living a great life.

Not just living. Like, you should be living a healthy, vigorous, rigorous life where you feel fucking awesome. Right, where you feel awesome, right? I don't want to live to 100 and feel like shit and have no sex drive. Like, I want to live to whatever, and every one of those years is excellent. And I feel like a million bucks on her every day. Yeah. I think it's, I think it's an awesome tool, but people shouldn't be afraid of it, nor should they think it's the Holy grail. That's going to get you everywhere you want to go at the end of the day. Like, Hey, there's no shortcuts, man. I think that's true with like our diet too. Like we, we want to, you know, like I I'm on this

ketogenic diet and it's working great for me, but like, it doesn't mean it's going to fit everybody. It doesn't mean it's going to be the answer for everything in my life. Like I still have pain and inflammation in my body. Right. We haven't completely gotten rid of everything yet. So it's, we keep going until we find. And, you know, I talk about this all the time is people attached to one particular diet, but man, I'm a vegan or I do it if it fits your macros. Like keto, like man, like it may work for you

for a short period of time and you may have to change it. So you just got to watch. You have to observe. I'm a person that eats food is what I am now. That's what I look at it as. I love keto.

You're not doing the same thing forever, right? Dude, I love keto. It makes my brain feel great, but definitively my performance goes to shit and I get fat every single time.

Maybe my ratios aren't right. You could argue whatever it is, but that's just my observation. I feel mentally on point. I feel amazing maybe my ratios aren't right. You could, you could argue whatever it is, but that's just my observation. I feel mentally on point. I feel amazing, but I can't train. My performance goes to shit. No matter how,

what my keto levels are, if I'm supplementing. Let's talk a little bit about diet. Do you have to, do you count how many carbs you eat? Do you count how many calories you eat? Do you count anything? Man,

right now I'm not counting anything. You just did way too much of that. I did way too much of that, man. I attach now to eating less, less often, but I'm not really training. You just did way too much of that. I did way too much of that, man. I attach now to eating less, less often, but I'm not really training that much now. So.

That's the breakfast I served you this morning. Yeah, exactly. He's like fast motherfucker. Yeah. I'm like, okay, Mark,

I will. You're like, Hey, you want to meet for breakfast? Nope. Nope. You're fasting. Mark's writing my diet.

That's my script. No food. And a pat on the back. Yeah. Send you on your way. Smack's writing my diet. That's my script. No food. And a pat on the back. Yeah. Send you on your way. Smack me on the ass. Don't worry, it'll be better for you. Yeah.

Yeah. So diet now, man, I'm trying to support health. I attach, like if I were to say I attach to any type of diet, I attach to a low inflammation diet. So whatever's going to minimize inflammation for me. So I'm not eating anything that's what I know to be pro-inflammatory. So there's no sugar, not a lot of omega-6s. Yeah, I mean, like, so I always say- What's high in omega-6, like chicken?

No. Well, yeah, so anything that's- It can be. Yeah. What are we looking at? Grain-fed chicken. So anything that's like vegetable oils. Don't eat a lot of vegetables, like not a lot of corn products. What are these things called?

Like PUFA or something like that, right? Yeah. Polyunsaturated fats. Yeah. Or monounsaturated. Yeah. So I'm manipulating. I just try to eat a lot of vegetables.

I try to eat really high quality meat. So everything is either wild or grass fed. I try to eat really high quality meat. So everything is either wild or, uh, grass fed. I eat a lot of omega threes, um, a lot of,

um, avocado, olive oil, like omega nines. So I don't. Sometimes you go to like a restaurant and, uh, they,

they like black bear diner, for example, you go to like one of these, you know, diners, these, uh, greasy spoon type places.

And people sometimes wonder like, fuck man, I had breakfast at eight and they're not hungry until three o'clock, four o'clock. Right. And part of the reason for that is they're cooking this, cooking these things and these vegetable oils, right?

Exactly. Yeah. You can't really break them down very easily. It caused a lot of inflammation. One of the best things about retiring from bodybuilding, because I'm not attached to having to eat every two to three hours anymore. Like I'll go six or eight hours and I won't eat. So I'm not, I usually don't eat out anymore.

Cause like if I'm hungry, I'm like, Oh, I just wait two, one hours. I'll be home. I can actually cook something that's good. That's pretty awesome feeling. Do you cook most of your food? You're saying? 95%. Yeah.

Yeah. 95%. I don't even eat sushi anymore. More economical too. You know, people ask a lot about, you know, how much, you know, shit, man, this is going to cost a lot and that's going to cost a lot. Well, it can. how much, you know, shit, man, this is going to cost a lot and that's going to cost a lot.

Well, it can. But in the case of trying to feel good, in the case of trying to be healthy and to try to be leaner, normally the goal is you're going to end up eating less at some point. And so therefore, even if the quality of food is high, the price shouldn't be too terrible. I think the price of food for me is still really high because I am seeking out that really high quality stuff. High quality stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

But I'd much rather do that. What about the rest of the family? How do the kids eat? Man, it's funny. My daughter, since she was six months old, has eaten at least 80% of her meals on my lap, which means she's eating the same food as me. Yeah, it's like Brian Shaw has been doing something similar with his son. He's just kind of eating the same thing. His son plows through steak.

Steak and rice and salmon. Sweetheart, what do you want for breakfast? Steak and kale. I'm like, okay. Amazing. Breakfast every day. My son is a completely different ballgame. My son just wants-

He likes cereal? Yeah, no, he just wants junk, man. Yeah. But we still, we always pick- And how old is he? He's six. We pick good versions of junk. So I'll still make it-

Does he have calves? I think my daughter's got the physique, to be honest. She's got the calves? Yeah, my daughter is the athlete in the family. She's got calves and bubbly forearm. And how old is she? She's four. She's got calves and bubbly floor. And how old is she? She's four. She's four.

She's four. Yeah. She's a gymnast. She's a dancer, but she's a beast of an athlete, man. My son's the emotional one. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

So, but yeah, so he doesn't eat well, but we always try to still like, you know, my rule is if it's in the house, you can eat it. So we still try to find great versions of the junkier foods. So there's no cereal, man. Like, but so, but I'll make them pancakes, but I'll make them keto pancakes. You guys appreciate that. So, you know, like coconut flour. Since you have kids being conscious too.

Yeah. Do you ever obsess about their nutrition or you ever think about that a lot? Like, what are they going to, what am I putting into their gut microbiome? More than I probably should. Well, so I fight with it. Right. When I was, when they were very young, I tried to be a little bit laid back about it. I'd be like, oh, it's okay.

Going back, I would have been even more neurotic about it because as soon as they get a taste for that crap, they're not going back. Sure. They're not going back. There they are. There's my munchkins. My daughter's Presley and my son is Benjamin. Very cool. Yeah.

Awesome human beings. See, I agree with what you're saying is like once you taste it you know you're gonna want that forever right and then people argue well they're gonna get it at school and you're depriving you know you're depriving kids and everything's like are you really depriving people like i you know i got picked on a lot i every day i spent in school like upset because i was i was fat you know like i was i didn't like myself like i't, I don't think you're depriving people of anything in a way. So you can look at it as being mean, but. We're human beings.

We're meant to eat what comes from the earth. We're not meant to eat what comes from the grocery store. Some parents are, you know, you're there to protect your child. Yeah. And sometimes, uh, you know, food might be the enemy. I don't think a mac and cheese is a meal. Right. I just don't think it is.

And most parents are so concerned about, you know, being the good parent that they're going to give the kid whatever they want. And that's not a good parent, right? A good parent is someone who develops a strong child, not someone who just fucking gives them whatever

they want. Like, oh, shut up. I want you to be happy. Like you eat these Doritos. Like, and there's a difference between giving your kid

a treat and giving it to him every day, you know? Right. Yeah. And man, there's so many, you know, the nutrition community has evolved so much, so many healthy options.

You can give your kids stuff that tastes good. That isn't going to ultimately destroy their brain. Yeah. I've been teaching my kids about nutrition from the time they were really little. And my daughter is 10. And at one point she was like, oh, you know, I'm, she said, she's getting rolls. She's like, I'm getting, I'm getting these rolls. And I was like, okay. It was like, oh, you know, I'm, she said, she's getting rolls. She's like, I'm getting, I'm getting these rolls. And I was like, okay. It was like, well, we've talked about nutrition before. I was like, I was like, there's a lot of options.

I was like, I can go over a bunch of stuff with you. I said, we can even look at like a book on Amazon and we can, so I got her eat this, not that it's for kids. She lost like nine pounds. She didn't do anything. She didn't do anything drastic. My response to that is I don't even tell them about the food, man. I just let them eat. And then I said, well, if you, if you feel that way, let's go do some more exercise. Like it's not even exercise. Let's

go play more. Let's go for a run. It's never exercise. It's like, let's go to the park. Let's go for a run. Let's go for a walk. Walk more often. Just manipulating their energy output. Right. Like that's, that's the reality in life. You've got two opportunities, right? You've got calorie intake, your energy output, and it's one or the other, man. So just like, Hey, let's, let's go for a walk. As soon as they get up in the morning, let's go for it. I just think it's so important, like moving forward with what we're doing, that it's important that we inspire the younger kids out there.

And the only way you're going to get a real, I don't really care about inspiring somebody my age to eat good at this point. I might've already lost you a long time ago, but if you're 15 years old and you're following Mark and I or you want to get stronger and powerlifting also, and you're following what we're eating now, I think that we're setting a good example. And that's what I'd like to continue to do

is just set a good example and provide real solid, good information. I didn't realize you guys had a desire to help kids, man. I've got a really interesting project that I'm starting on that I think is similar idea, man. It's like, well, let's change the fitness industry. And if we're going to do it, we're not going to start with the adults. That's what I think. Yeah. We're even looking forward with the documentary that we're doing.

It's like, how can we sort of teach the younger generation to eat good? Because it's one thing that Mark and I really missed out on when we talk about like bigger, stronger, faster. Like we were just talking about this in the car on the way here it's like we wanted to become bigger and stronger our whole life but we got bigger and fatter because we just didn't know we were unaware we had the genetics we had the tool set to be strong but we didn't have the tool set to be lean because we just didn't know right and sort of if we can guide kids in that right direction,

I found out a lot earlier than you found out a lot younger than I did. You did have the ability to be lean. You absolutely did. We all do. Yeah. Like maybe some of us will be easier than others. We didn't have the knowledge, I guess.

Yeah. Like knowledge, but that's the cool thing is let's empower them with that. We just, the knowledge of like, I call it the internal locus of control. Like if you want it, you can do it because someone out there has the steps.

It's just, it's not that you can't, you just don't know the steps yet. So that, that realization is so empowering. It was really weird too, because like we're, we've been talking about this for a while. Like I did the carnivore diet way back in 1993, 20 something years ago, Mark and I both did it, but we didn't know why we were doing it and we didn't know why it worked. So when you come back 20 something years later, it needs to drop some weight, drop some weight. But when you come back like 20 something years later and you realize like why you were doing that and why it worked and why you were able to stay strong while you were

powerlifting and things like that, it becomes a lot more interesting. So you guys both following the carnivore diet now? Just, yeah, right now, I've been doing it for two months. My body fat's improved. My blood work's improved. I would love to go over it with you and show you the stuff and see what you think can improve even further because there's always more work that can be done. My first thing that comes to mind, and I've never done it, so I won't talk to it, but my first thought is just micronutrients. Your body needs micronutrients. Your mitochondria are responsible for everything, right?

Sure. And without the proper, um, micronutrients to support digestion, to support cellular processes. I just, I don't know, but I speculate that at some point there's gotta be some deterioration, but again, look at your blood, right? Yeah. I speculate that too.

Like it seems at some point there's going to be something that's missing, but you're right. Like look at the blood and see if that type of diet seemed like if you look at the the idea of eating for the seasons like you know if you lived in the north you probably in the winter time all you probably ate was meat because you didn't have access to plants whereas there was a seasonality so you're doing three four months yeah and you're doing three four months and then maybe in the spring oh now i've got all these plants and right and maybe there's a seasonality to eating. That seems to make most sense to my brain.

Like, where did your ancestors evolve? It is really interesting that now, like, all we're thinking about is, like, what people used to eat a long time ago. And we're trying to figure it out, like, reverse engineer it. I feel that after doing this for, you know, 20 plus years on and off and after going, you know, into this carnivore diet, it seems to me the ketogenic diet seems to be fairly effective for a lot of different things. But it also seems to me that riding that fine line of really not getting into ketosis, it feels like to me that's kind of the best spot to live in. Metabolic flexibility. Yeah, you have the metabolic flexibility to have some carbohydrates here and there. So for me, I'll have a sweet potato here and there. I'll have some rice here and there. I'll have an orange here and there. It's kind of like the only word I like, probably a little less than maybe what you're doing, but I will shift into

adding more carbs in. I feel like I've had to kind of correct myself for a long time. It's exactly what I'm doing. And you know how I choose when I'm having carbs? So three or four days a week, I don't have carbs. The days that I train, I put in carbs. Because what am I doing? I'm depleting my body's glycogen stores.

Yeah. So you're just putting them back in. Yeah. Based on how much I train. If I train hard, I do high volume. I do a little more. Here's where the carbs, I think, are really interesting. And you'll know a ton more about this than I train. If I train hard, I do high volume. I do a little more. Here's where the carbs, I think are really interesting. And you'll know a ton more about this than I will. But you know, when you

bring in the carbohydrates, I think people forget that it's a carbohydrate. It does help hydrate your body and it's going to help bring nutrients into the muscles. So the carbohydrates can be used as a, almost like a supplement or a tool. You want to bring sodium, potassium and whatever else into your muscles. And that's, that's where I feel like you can't perform. I want to bring sodium, potassium and whatever else into your muscles. And that's, that's where I feel like you can't perform. I mean, you know,

Dom and D'Agostino and Jacob Wilson may, may refute this, but I just don't feel like you can perform maximally on that type of diet is, you know, as a bodybuilder, I tried it for a long time, you know, even get it ready for a contest.

I was very low carb, relatively high fat. And definitively I knew my performance wasn't there. I agree a hundred percent. I don't, I don't think there's in my, in my opinion, I don't think there's even a debate. I think that the best diet I've ever been on in terms of, uh, being able to lift heavy,

being able to stay lean has been a bodybuilding diet with a small modification of bumping up the fat a little bit. For me, it, it, I needed a little bit more energy. That was it. That's the limitation of the bodybuilding diet. For everybody out there, like, you know, what diet do you follow? You follow the 90s, I call it the 90s bodybuilding diet, where it's like very high carb, very high protein, very low fat. The problem there is you're not supporting your brain.

You're not supporting the hormone development. You're not supporting your nervous system. So I always, like I said, I'm manipulated according to my training. If I'm doing a high amount of neurological training, which is a strength-based training, body needs more fat. You know, if I'm doing a very metabolic style training, so then I need more carbohydrates. When you were bodybuilding professionally, were you eating a lot of fat then? Or were you a low fat guy? I cycled through it, man. Always early in my career was like zero fat. Like most people, when they started out. But as a show came along, you probably had to pull some of the fat out, right? I did. I pulled some of the carbs

off. Often I'd pull the carbs out and put the fats up. Okay. Just again, it was cycle. It was. How much do you think that calories matter? There's a lot of debate about that. I think at some level they matter, but it's the most important thing is not what you eat, but

how your body absorbs it and what your body does with it. And I think the realization that the type of food does matter because it's all creating a different biochemical response. Like if I eat a sweet potato compared to a pop tart, it's not the same thing. Um, my bike or my microbiome deals with it differently. The different types of polysaccharide, a different length of carbohydrate chain, uh, all this, it matters. It has to matter. Your biochemistry is different. So, um, you know, how much, I don't know, like, I mean,

it's all speculative, right? But definitively, if you're trying to get in the best shape of your life and perform the best that you can, you can't just concern yourself

with just calories. Some of it's about volume too. You just don't have the room for stuff that's not going to advance you. Right. I mean,

plain and simple. Anyone who does flexible dieting, you look at their diet and as they get closer to, if they compete, you're like, okay, well, that just turned into a bodybuilding diet. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're like, it looks exactly like the same way everyone else preps for a show pretty much.

So at some point, it's all going to have to kind of swing in that direction. You know, one thing is that I think we undersell ourselves on is the training. The training is crucial. The training is crucial. The training is huge. So if you, and I'm sure you've dealt with this going into shows before, if the diet obviously is a huge part of it, but if you're dieting so hard that you can't train, how are you going to look on stage? Right. And I think a lot of people live that life and they get attached to like, I need a pre-workout, I need a caffeine, a stimulant. And then you get into this idea of the more stimulants you're taking, the more sympathetic stress you're creating.

So you're thinking about you're getting your waistline down. You're thinking about being leaner. And that's where your mind is at. And even just for the average person who's thinking those terms, it can be detrimental. Because the training is going to be not the most important thing, but it's a huge factor. You got to be able to go in the gym and you got to be able to a huge factor. You got to be able to go in the gym and you got to be able to fuck shit up. You got to be able to really train hard.

That's your greatest opportunity to burn fat, your greatest opportunity to burn calories. So I think that's where cyclical nutrition comes in, right? Cyclical calorie or carbohydrate consumption is probably your greatest opportunity because you have that one or two days of replenishing your body and that's probably going to sustain you

for three or four days after that. So you get those few days of really, really high intense training sessions and build your workouts around it. So if you get two days of like replenishing, we'll build your highest effort and your highest intensity workouts around that. And then allow your body,

expect your body to be, you know, phasing down for a couple of days after those replenishing days. Anybody that you modeled your bodybuilding career after, you looked up to a lot or just- Dorian was my guy, man. Like most guys in that era. He was the man.

Dude, he's just so hard and just crazy, right? Like the first bodybuilder I ever really attached it to, like, holy shit, I want to look like that. I literally cut his pictures out and then paste them around. Yeah, we were inspired, fired up by him. Blood and guts. He got all these pictures of his underwear, and his underwear hanging up. We're inspired, fired up by him, blood and guts. They got all these pictures of his underwear and his underwear hanging up. We're like,

who cares? He's so jacked. No, we had pictures of him in his underwear. All those famous pictures were like, I love where he's evolved to now. And if you guys have talked to him lately, man,

but he's great. Yeah. I love that, man. So, I mean, you know, I'm doing yoga and stuff.

I'm living a very similar life because we realize, you know, I always talk about life, this transcendence of life where we spend so many years and you guys are related, so many years accumulating things. We're trying to accumulate money. We're trying to accumulate muscle. We're trying to accumulate strength, whatever it is. And you get there and you get to the top of the world and you go, oh, it's not quite what I expected it to be.

For most parts, it's a lonely place. Yeah. Well, it's very similar to growing your body. You're like, man, I just want to have fucking big arms. I want to fill out the sleeves of my shirt. And then what do you do? Yeah. You wear a long sleeve shirt.

You're exactly right, though. It's a long way place at the top. Right, you get there. So then once you've achieved it, you're by yourself. And then you spend so many years trying to realize, oh, it's not what I thought it would be. Now I'm going inside. Trying to get back to being normal.

No, well, I'm going internal, right? So we all have this external, like, I want to accomplish money or muscle or whatever it is. And then realize the true journey, the true benefit is going inside of yourself and, you know, just mastering this thing. Yeah. There's a lot of working, you know, working out and not a lot of working in. Yeah.

People aren't like internalizing. They're not paying attention to what's going on inside their body. And I think your, your training sessions are a great opportunity for that. Like, I almost don't even know. I love it, man. I don't even know how to, I don't even know how to figure out how to get that from anything else. You know, relationships, you can, you can find it within relationships, uh, uh, occasionally, but it's, it's really like in the training session when you're trying to push yourself

a certain way, or even just maybe not even push yourself, but just trying to kind of feel what you're supposed to be feeling. Pay attention. And I always say, man, I love that you say that. Cause I feel like I was the only guy having that conversation. But it's your training ground for life, right? It's like every day I get to go in there and see what my ego wants to do, see what my body wants to do, learn my body, learn my mind, learn where my mind wants to be lazy, learn where my ego wants to puff up and not actually complete the objective. But attached to, I want to post my PR today. complete the objective, but, you know, attached to, I want to post my PR today. I think it's such a great breeding ground for success that every day practice of challenging yourself and, you know, sticking to your routine and showing yourself you have the discipline

to win every single day. It can sound really corny, but like if you were to go to the gym and you were to start to warm up, let's say you hopped on a bike or something, and it'll say it's a leg day and you're thinking about training. If you're sitting there convincing yourself, it's going to be a great day. You're going to build up, build up what you're trying to build up. You're going to accomplish what you're going to try to accomplish. You're visualizing, maybe you said closing your eyes, maybe even for your first couple

sets of squats, you know, you don't have any weight on the bar. It's just, it's just the bar, maybe even some body weight squats. You can really kind of walk yourself through what this day is going to look like and set yourself up for success. Give yourself the best opportunity. Maybe, you know, maybe it's a very particular thing. Maybe you're a bodybuilder and you need to work on a very specific part of your quad to bring up, or maybe you're a power lifter and maybe you lean forward too much on your squats. Or maybe, you know, maybe you just have a shitty squat in general. But if you think that you have a shitty squat or you think they have shitty legs, then you're correct.

And it's going to always stay that way. Walking in the gym, slump shoulders like, oh, man, I got a deadlift today. Right. Well, yeah, of course, you can deadlift like shit like that. So the way I look at it is every time you change those thoughts, you create a neurochemical signature, a neurochemical design in your mind. So you have, you know, your basic neurotransmitters and that's going to be associated with the state of mind. So you're literally creating the state of mind. And every time you do that, it's either going to be a positive one or a negative one. And you just keep, every time you go back in the gym,

like we talked about earlier, you're bringing that back. So, you know, taking that five minutes before you train to create that ideal brain state for yourself so that you're ready to go in there and crush it. It's, I mean, it's such a great opportunity. And if you look at the neurochemistry of it, there's a great book, if anybody's interested, called Buddha's Brain. It tells you everything about the neurochemistry and all the neurotransmitters that are going on and how you can influence them. Super interesting stuff. I grew up with a lot of support. You know, we grew up with a lot of support from our parents and stuff like that. It sounds like you, it sounds like you did not, you know, where I had a, we had tons of, tons of love, tons of affection, tons of support.

And that support kind of allowed us to, I would say, dick around, allowed us to play different sports and to explore lifting and some different things and kind of stumble upon some of the things that we've stumbled upon. But at this point in your life, you must feel fucking great to have reached this, this like, I'd say like area of like clarity in your life where things are coming more clearly, almost like an enlightened life in a way. Yeah. You know, I struggled a little as a kid and, you know, that's why I chose bodybuilding and it allowed me to face my struggles, allowed me to face my insecurities and my inadequacies, I guess.

And because I've been able to face all those things and learn to become comfortable with them, it's allowing me to just continue to evolve. And by no stretch am I, you know, the most evolved person, but at least I'm aware of it. And I think becoming aware of it is step one in changing it, right? And I think for everybody, just taking complete control for everything is the first step. So, yeah, man, I feel awesome.

I feel like the world's a great place and we all have such great opportunities if you create them that way. That's cool. You share some of these things that you've learned with your kids or you feel they're too young like uh i kind of sometimes find myself you know having these weird conversations with my kids and i'm like oh my god it's embarrassing i think they're like way too young for me to be talking to them this way but i kind of still do anyway yeah um for my kids man i realize they're my greatest teachers because as you'll you'll know this man is like their reflection of you and their inadequacies are just the reflection of your inability as a, as a parent.

Right. So I think it's pretty awesome. You know, they've been a great learning opportunity for me, but you know, the thing I teach them, man, it's like, I just try to teach them, um, that they're in control. Like that everything they do is like, Hey, you guys can, you can change it. And I don't, you know, I'm not good at this dad or I can't, you know, no, I can't yet. You know, just, just opening that door for them where they can go, Oh, I have the ability to change these things. I think empowering kids to realize that they can, they can control anything. That's all they need. Like, cause, cause ultimately they're so creative. There's so much energy. They can do anything.

They just need someone not put those put those walls around their brain. And that's kind of my only objective with my kids, man, is let them live their life without any walls. Yeah. Sometimes they'll say, oh, I'm not, you know, I don't really like that that much. I'm not that good at it. And then you can say, well, you can be better at it. It just means something you have to work on. It takes time.

But if you don't care to be good at it, that's fine too. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It takes time, but if you don't care to be good at it, that's fine too. Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. That's always the fine line with children is, you know, trying to figure out, you know, when to be their friend, when to be just strictly their parent type deal. Yeah. Have you, you know, exposed your kids to sports and kind of said, hey, this is what we're doing. And they begrudgingly are getting, you know, driven to gymnastics practice or whatever. I started that with my son. So, uh, as I said, prior to the podcast, my son's a very emotional kid and I grew up like in a hard family. So I would be like, man, shut up, man up. Like, you know, like you have it way better than I didn't kind of thing. Right. And I've learned now that you can't do that, man. Like, so like I said, he's emotional.

There's a feminine side to him, right? He's just, he's just an emotional kid. So I've learned over the last couple of years. That's a hard thing to like understand is that like, we're so, everybody's so different, you know? So my daughter will fall and scrape her face on the ground, literally get up and go, and my son will get up and like, you know, for three days, they'll be like crying about it. At first you're like, God, shut up. Like you're a boy,

but now I'm just like, Hey man, let's just love him. Right. At the end of the day, he just needs to know you love him. And, uh,

so answer your question. At first I did drive him into some, um, you know, martial arts and things like that, like Taekwondo, because I grew up a very afraid kid. Like I was afraid of everything.

That's why I built this armor and I didn't want him to be afraid. So I was deflecting my insecurities on him. I'm like, I don't want, you know, like picked on whatever it is as a kid. Um, like I don't want him to live that. I don't want to be confident. I want to be happy. I want him to be secure, um, and not be afraid. So yeah, I drove him into, like I said, Taekwondo and a bunch of other things.

And, um, he didn't like it, but I made him keep like, until you, until you get your red belt or something, you got to keep going. Right. And I was like, okay, now, so I just let him go. And I'm like, you don't want to go. You don't want to go. And maybe he'll come back to it. But, but yeah, I definitely did put some of my insecurities on my kids.

Yeah. You know, we all have our own story in those ways. And when it comes to stuff like that, it's like, I think about that with, with my kids and stuff. And you think, you know, is my kid going to be able to protect himself like in a fight or whatever, but it really, ultimately it's just up to them. You know, like, uh, I do think as a parent, it is important that you, um, like sports, sports are, are cool. Like I played sports as a kid. I loved them. And I really value the lessons that I learned from sports. Um, but not everybody needs all these different things. And, you know, like my son doesn't need to like,

take like boxing class or jujitsu to be able to defend himself. Only if he wants to figure out how to defend himself. You know, maybe he does get into a fight one day and maybe he gets his ass kicked and maybe he's like, shit, man, I better like learn how to defend myself. And he comes to that realization.

I think every boy needs to get punched in the mouth at some point. You become the realization on your own. I mean, you know, with the influence of my two older brothers, you know, I came to the realization that like,

this was going to be my life. I was going to end up lifting the rest of my life. I didn't like it at first. They just kept lifting and I kept seeing it over and over again. And it just kind of, sorry. Yeah. Cause kind of fell into it and messed them up,

messed, messed me up forever. But, uh, we all have to come to these conclusions on our own. Yeah, ultimately, you can't be forced into it.

Yeah. Cause they're going to resent it anyways. Right. We've got some questions brewing up over there, Andrew, not too much, but people are interested in any and all poop stories. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Bodybuilding poop stories getting deep in those, getting deep down in those, in the and all poop stories. Oh, yeah. Bodybuilding poop stories. Getting deep down in the squat. Any massive blowouts from the different diet changes and, you know, preparations and nervousness of. No, but I'll tell you what, I'm not even sponsored by this guy talking about poop stories. You guys should be sponsored by Squatty Potty. Oh, yeah yeah I have one so they sent me one

and I was like whatever so I put it in my house like put it in like the spare bedroom we want a more advanced version let me tell you

it's fun I'm not sponsored by these guys but if you have two bathrooms and one has a squatty potty and one doesn't

you'll definitively I believe do you definitively go out of your way to use the squatty potty when you can yeah I want to yeah

yeah I want to use it for some reason and I've read all the research on it too I don't know if it actually works because i've read the research says like it's kind of you know but i think it works i feel like it forces out that little extra it's supposed to kind of make it more more of like a natural poop like you'd squat in the woods and you'd be below parallel and you'd you'd get all this fucking juices. We're so fat, Mark. Is this true? I think so. We're so fat that he wants to build one

into the floor of his bathroom so that you just sit down and it just pushes your feet up. I want them to work on the design. You should be able to push a button and then it should come up. I'm sure they exist. It's like a monolift for a squatty potty. Maybe a lever.

It's helped. Yeah, I think it's great. squatty potty. You can just cut a hole in the floor and take for it. But that, it's helped. Yeah, I think it's great. It leads to That's the only real poopster I have. The first thing that came to mind.

What about just going to the bathroom in general? It's great that they sent it to you though. Just like they knew he's a bodybuilder he's going to need this. Yeah, exactly.

It's like all the food this guy's been eating over the years. Yeah. Yeah, what like you know, when you eat six, seven times a day I mean, you're probably going

to the bathroom a lot, but then when you get closer to a bodybuilding show, is it hard to, you don't have a lot of calories. Do you not shit for a week or how does that work? It definitely changes the consistency, man. So, no, I mean, all kidding aside, like when you get close to the contest, your fiber is very low, right? Because you're not actually taking the soluble fiber, right? Like the carbohydrate type fiber.

Right. I'm still eating vegetables, which is insoluble, but the soluble fiber that creates kind of the bulk goes away. So you end up having the little deer dropping, the reindeer poops. Little pellets. Yeah. So when somebody comes to you now, I know that you teach, you've got these seminars and camps and all these different things. Somebody comes to you and they want to be fucking jacked. You know, they're 200 pounds and they want to be 250, 270, 28, whatever it is.

Obviously, it's going to depend on a lot of factors. But typically, what style of diet do you put them on? It's going to depend on their training. So their diet is going to change almost weekly or biweekly, depending on the type of stimulus that I'm subjecting their body to. So everybody starts, you know, I believe to, to build muscle, the most, first and most important thing is creating stability. So if you don't have a stable platform to contract, you can't build muscle.

So I put them through a four to six week primer phase, which is basically teaching their body one movements for themselves and two, how to be stable in all these positions that, you know, they're going to need to get into. So if you want big legs, you can't create big legs without, without a really stable pelvis. So let's do some stuff to create stable pelvis. And that just means maybe squatting, but spending time in the ranges where you're typically weak.

That's usually when you take the guys into the posing room. Right. Exactly. The Colton posing room. Not to talk about that. Yeah, so creating stability. So we'll start there. And then from there,

if you're subjecting your body to a strength stimulus, you're going to need a different type of diet. If you're subjecting your body to a hypertrophy stimulus, you need a different type of diet. Strength-based stimulus,

you guys know, it doesn't require a tremendous amount of carbohydrate. You're not really depleting your body all that much. Right. So we don't need a tremendous amount of carbohydrate. Whereas hypertrophy-based,eting your body all that much. Right. So we don't need a tremendous amount of

carbohydrate, whereas hypertrophy based, you know, a little more volume, I'm going to use more nutrients and use more carbohydrate. Whereas a metabolic stimulus would need something completely different. So it's always very, very dependent, but it would definitely be a carbohydrate, depending on somebody's body composition, right?

If they're fat, they're not going to get a lot of carbohydrates, but typically they're going to get a high carbohydrate diet, probably medium to high protein and a moderate fat. So I'm an advocate of carbohydrates. I just time them specifically, right? I'm a fat person.

What range of protein usually for somebody that's trying to gain some muscle? Minimum is a gram per pound. I truthfully believe you need a high amount of protein and probably up around 1.5 grams per pound. And then would carbs follow suit? Carbs, yeah.

About the same depending on the. For most people, assuming you're under 12% body fat, I'm going to start you at a gram per pound. And then if somebody's leaner, I could go a little higher. Ideally, we want to push it up kind of as high as we can, you know, like. I find that to be really interesting. I find that to be fascinating is like this idea of Stan Efferding does this a lot, you know, cause he trained, he's working with some mutants now he's working with, I want to see their diets.

He's working with Thor and he's working and he's working with Brian Shaw and these are guys that are, you know, 400 pounds and he does what he calls a vertical diet. Um, it's a lot of the same things over and over again. It's a lot of things that, uh, are easy to digest. So you can get from one meal to the next, very similar to a bodybuilder. Part of the reason why bodybuilders eat chicken, I mean, first of all, the calories are part of it, but chicken and rice are going to digest pretty quick because there's not a lot of fat in them. Correct? Right. lot of fat in them.

Correct. Right. And so they'll be able to get from one meal to the next very easily. Whereas opposed to, uh, if you have a big omelet or something like that, it might be a lot harder to digest all that shit. We got a problem going on. Yeah.

Blow out. The audio just cut out, but, uh, it's back on our boy. DJ just checked in David Webb and he wanted to know if Ben, if there's anything you can change in your bodybuilding career early on, what would it be?

If anything, training like it be, if anything? Training like a dummy. Training, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just attached to training hard, and I think that caused injuries, it caused inflammation, it prevented me from getting leaner, it prevented me from building muscle. So like I said earlier, man, running harder or running as fast as you can in the wrong direction isn't going to get you where you want to go. So I'm learning how to do things for my body earlier would have saved me so many injuries and so much problem and so many weak body parts and heartache ultimately, man. So that's, that's massive. And, you know, Chris and I were talking about earlier, like stress more is not always, is usually not the best solution, right? It's not just about more and more and more. It's,

it's about subjecting your body to a novel stimulus. You need to change the type of stimulus because your body is designed to respond to a novel stimulus. So that would be the thing, man, is learning how to vary the stimulus, learning how to train for my body rather than attaching to what everyone else does. Awesome. And then some other person whose name I absolutely cannot pronounce, they want to know if combining bodybuilding and powerlifting for a natural bodybuilder is beneficial. Absolutely. I don't know if they're asking and powerlifting for a natural bodybuilder is beneficial. Absolutely. I don't know if they're asking me or asking you, but absolutely.

So there's a massive strength component in bodybuilding, right? And the idea behind strength training, as it applies to a bodybuilder, is to increase the efficiency with which you contract muscles. So if I'm training my pecs, some of you guys will attach to the idea, if you have a weak body part when you contract it, it's usually a fluttery contraction. It's not usually a really hard, intense contraction. So the objective then should be to increase the efficiency with which we contract muscles. So if you contract now, maybe using 30% of your muscle, you want to get towards 40 and 50 and 60. So strength training is going to be the best way to improve that. It's going to improve your nervous system's ability to contract more muscles at one time. So provided your execution is great, we want to just incorporate that strength training

to improve the efficiency with which we contract. And then when we're contracting more, a greater percentage of muscle fibers, now that hypertrophy workout is more beneficial because every single rep I contract, I'm actually using more muscle every time I contract. So you kind of want to cycle through strength and hypertrophy phases. So we're constantly trying to push that, that nervous system's ability to contract muscle

higher and higher and higher so we can ultimately use as many muscles as we can. Oh yeah. Thanks dude. Yeah. Being able to push more weight is going to help with muscle growth. Absolutely.

Well, I don't even attach to that. I don't like that because people hear weight, they assume putting more weight on the bar means more muscle but i was like no learning how to contract muscles harder right or more muscle at one time more muscle fibers in one muscle at a time have you done any power lifting i started a power lifter man so um from the time i was 17 to 21 i trained three times a week it was squat. I usually squatted twice a week. One week I'd squat twice, one week I'd deadlift twice, and then one week I'd do kind of upper body.

I think we saw a video earlier. You were squatting about six plates. Is that right? Or five plates? No, there's some videos out there of me doing seven. Hey, there you go. Yeah, so, I mean, I was 21. I squatted 750.

I deadlifted 750. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I was a strong kid at those two lifts. Yeah. I think, you know, and I think this is a cool topic is that, you know, bodybuilding, bodybuilding can be used for a lot of things. You know, I think kind of what we're talking about with diet. Why not switch up your diet here and there? Why not be a proponent of everything? Why not try, you know, a lot of diet here and there? Why not be a proponent of everything?

Why not try a lot of different methods and techniques? Why not Bruce Lee it a little bit? Why not utilize things that work and let's not get dogmatic and think that only one thing works. I think when it comes to- That's a pretty poor one, but there's some better ones out there. Yeah. What kind of weight is that right there? I don't know, six maybe. Yeah. What kind of weight is that right there? Six maybe. Yeah. Um, but a lot of bodybuilders are strong as fuck. And a lot of

times, you know, I think the myth has been dispelled. I think, um, some, some of the more recent bodybuilders have kind of put a lot of that to rest. Uh, but a lot of power lifters, they just power lift all the time. And you're like, dude, you're just doing the same thing all the time. You're just going to do ones and threes. You're never going to do set of eight. Yeah, you're never going to do set of 12 or the hate on CrossFit. And it's like, man, if you were healthier, you'd be fucking stronger. If you were

able to do four sets of eight reps in a condensed period of time, you'd be stronger. You know, rather than you always focusing on these sets of three. Also, get mad and I'll blow off people because they did reps. There you go, Mark. You can think I'm less of a vagina. Look at this guy.

I think I actually get to the bottom on this one. I hurt my knee on this one too, though. Of course, you're a bodybuilder. You're going to get injured doing anything. I'm going to wait to swap around at the top. That's fucking insane, man. And at that stage, what are you, 270, 280 right there? No, I'm probably about 300, maybe 290.

Just like no big deal. You always stayed pretty lean in your bodybuilding career. Right? I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, for yourself, you probably would feel, you know, quote unquote fat, right? Because you're so critical. I think in 2000, after the 2013 Arnold Classic, I was trying to grow. I think I went up to 318 was the heaviest I got.

Holy shit. And that was probably pretty, I mean, like you said, I don't remember, to be honest. I probably didn't take any pictures. What's your body fat around now? I don't know, man, but I'm fat. You don't look fat. I mean, relative to me, like for the last- You look handsome as fuck.

Yeah. You look great. I'm just trying to get a piece of that. So, you know, for the last few years, I walked around under, certainly under 10%, probably close to eight, because my training volume has gone down so much lately. Definitely started to accumulate more fat. And I find for me, fasting is the worst thing I can do. Yeah.

Not if you guys fast, but like I get leaner when I fast, but when I eat again, I eat like, you know, I haven't eaten in three months. You have that hyper eating when you go back to it. Yeah. Some people do. Yeah. So, and I, but for me, it's like, because I mean, the only thing I really eat that I overeat on is nuts. So I'll eat Mark's nuts, um, nut butter nuts. So I guess you end up getting 2000 calories.

It's a really easy thing to just crush like, you know, a lot of the nuts and seeds and then, you know. Peanut butter, man. Fuck. Jar at a time, right? Yeah. It's not done. Now they make all the flavored peanut butter. I just don't buy it.

I don't buy it anymore. I just don't buy peanut butter anymore. I'll kill it. My kids eat it. I love it. My kids eat it, so it's always in the house. But when I was dieting, I was like, I said to my wife, I'm like, that's not allowed in the house. Yeah. I can dieting, I said to my wife, that's not allowed in the house. I can smell it.

Yeah, because it's a whole damn thing. Yeah, because it's just one tablespoon. That's like this. And it's all the fat that way. Why is that even in bodybuilding diets? It's like a cruel trick. It's like the fat that we don't want. Tablespoon of omega-6 fat.

And that's the thing. Most people don't get it. They think, oh, it's a healthy fat. It's not a healthy fat. Yeah, it's not really. No, it's not at all. Is there such a thing? As a healthy fat? I believe so, healthy fat. Yeah, it's not really. No, it's not at all. Is there such a thing? As a healthy fat?

I believe so, yeah. I believe avocado is great for you. I believe omega-3s are great for you. You know, I eat a ton of olive oil. Because there's more information coming out all the time that saturated fat's not necessarily bad, right? No.

It's said to be relatively dormant until it's combined with carbohydrates. And that's the problem in the American diet. What do we eat for breakfast? It's bacon and pancakes, right? Yeah, we smash. And that, that's the problem in the American diet is, you know, what do we eat for breakfast is bacon and pancakes, right? Yeah. We smash it together and then that's the

problem. Yeah. And that's when it becomes a problem. I don't think either one of them is necessarily a problem by themselves. Sure. Eating apart, you know?

I love that you brought that up because that's actually usually how I design a diet is I will never usually combine a high fat meal with a high carbohydrate meal. So this is one of the things Dr. Baker talked about a lot, the carnivore diet guy. He was basically saying, you know,

when it comes to things like vitamin C and it comes to these minerals and stuff, he said, well, you know, a lot of times people do need those minerals because their diet, because they're sick, because their diet is, is not, is, is not, yeah, it's not fitting the needs. And he says like in the presence of carbohydrates, sometimes you need more of these vitamins. And there's actually been a little bit of, a little bit of research that actually backs up some of the stuff that he's saying.

And, you know, who knows, maybe he's onto something. Maybe he's, maybe he's way off too. Right. Uh, it's all just kind of, um, you know, kind of up in the air for now, but it is interesting. And the other thing that he said is that, uh, when people are obese, uh, that they're malnourished, which is fascinating because you're like, oh my God, I never even really thought about that. But yeah, they are a lot of times, a lot of times their vitamin D is way off and this

is way off and that's way off. It's a cascade of problems have happened. Um, even though they have an abundance of caloric intake. Yeah. Because they're eating the wrong foods. They're eating calorie dense, but nutrient depleted. So yeah, absolutely the truth, man.

I mean, like we say, I think it's always paying attention to allowing it to go through cycles. And I like, you know, thinking about the biochemistry of what would happen if you just ate a carnivore diet, your body would become really good at using that meat, would become really good at using that fat. But maybe at some point it's like would become really good at using that fat.

But maybe at some point it's like, I'm going to be missing something. And then, you know, the, the idea of mixing in more carbohydrates may not become the best thing because your body has become so adapted to using these fats and meats. It's now not used to using carbohydrate. And ultimately it's just figuring out what works for you. Right. Right. Well, it does, it does appear that appear that it there's uh there's really just no reason to completely swing one way or the other for for too long right now i mean you know

it appears that uh you know the answer kind of always lies down the middle yep and we you know it seems like uh that pops up all the time and we're like oh yeah that makes the most sense and for some reason we don't see it. Well, because people mindlessly just want to attach to something and they, you know, everybody wants to tell you they're vegan. Everybody wants to tell you they're whatever they want to do. I do CrossFit.

Like, well, just do what's best for you ultimately. Right. And, and, uh, yeah, changing it all the time and eat healthy foods, man. Eat what comes from the earth. Your body will figure it out. If you didn't eat shit from a box, you're going

to be healthy. I think that, that might be the simplest thing. It's like. That's the easiest rule. That's like the number one. I think it's like the one rule people can actually agree on. Right. But everybody still eats everything from a box.

And we're faced with so much marketing, right? We're, we're, we're bartered with this nutrition industry. 600,000 food products on the market. That's crazy. Absolutely bananas. I mean, how do you decide what the hell to eat? Right. And then you're getting so much marketing from, you know, the milk board and like, all

this shit is just marketing, man. And everything's slanted against each other. So like, if it's like, the milk is against the grain and the grain's against the milk and the wheat's against the, you know, meat, whatever. So it's like, everybody's fighting. And then there's the consideration, you bring up wheat. There's, you know there's you know people like oh that's from the ground why don't you eat that and there's the consideration of glyphosate right which yeah it just adds a whole different dimension to everything well there's a great documentary uh what's with wheat have you seen

that no joe rogan talks about it a lot but um it's a netflix documentary so most people have access to it yeah but it's a great thing for most people to watch because it'll tell you all the problems that come just from the modern version of wheat that we have. Not that it's necessarily such a bad thing, but they tell you like, look, it wasn't that bad, but now it kind of is. And here's all the reasons why. Gives you a lot of information to move forward with your diet. And you could argue that all the vegetables are probably being exposed to that amount of glyphosate. And glyphosate we know know, is destroying our bodies. Yeah, absolutely.

It's destroying our mitochondria. It's killing the bacteria. So that's ultimately what it does, right? I think people are a lot sicker than we even think. Oh, what's with me? I think people are viewing these illnesses and diseases as only being a thing when you have them. Right. But there's a lot of people that are suffering from anxiety, depression, ADHD.

I mean, there's all kinds of complications that are happening to people. I used to kind of sit there and think and say, oh, well, you know, it takes 10, 20, 30 for you to kill yourself slowly with food. But now I'm starting to think that that's not even close to being true. I think you can kill yourself a lot faster with it. I wonder, you know, thinking about the neurochemistry of it, serotonin and melatonin are most predominantly produced in your gut, produced by bacteria. So if, or at least in your gut. The gut's called the first brain by some people. Right. So people's guts are so destroyed,

they're not producing serotonin, which is going to be that thing that allows your brain to be calm. You know, melatonin is going to be that thing that allows your brain to be calm. Melatonin is going to be that thing that allows your brain to sleep. And we know it's going to prevent cancer. So people who are being exposed to all these environmental toxins like glyphosate, like pharmaceuticals, it's literally destroying your gut and inhibiting your brain's ability to produce serotonin, melatonin, therefore causing depression, causing anxiety, causing all these things. And there's a direct downstream correlation. Making it harder to deal with stress, which you mentioned earlier. There's such a huge problem in this country with mental health that I think a lot of people do not realize at all that it starts in the gut.

Yeah, tell them what you said earlier about somebody losing 10 pounds that comes up to us. What do you mean? Just how fired up they are. Oh, yeah. People are just like, so excited to tell you that they've, that they've done something that they've been,

you know, they're part of what you're, they lost 10 pounds, 15 pounds. And what we recognize, they want to tell everybody, it's not so much about the, you know,

it's not just the weight loss. It's, it's, uh, they're, they were probably depressed before. They're probably just maybe, maybe not even like really like clinically depressed, but maybe just in a fucking slump.

Right. They just weren't feeling great about themselves. They lost his 10 pounds. They lost his 15 pounds. They accomplished something. And now they feel fucking awesome. Right. And so, I mean, most of the time that's from making better choices of food.

Right. So when you make better choices of food, your mental clarity is something that like almost instantly changes, you know, like the, if you get rid of sugar, getting rid of the brain fog and all the other stuff that people talk about, it's pretty easy, you know? And I think it all ties back to that, to the brain chemistry, right? The neurotransmitters, man, we're all chasing dopamine. Sugar is going to give us dopamine. You know, Instagram's giving us dopamine. We're all chasing dopamine. You become addicted to it when you don't get it. Yeah. When you don't get it, you become depressed, you know? So people when you don't get it. Get those likes, baby. Yeah, when you don't get it, you become depressed. So people are just

constantly chasing that. And that's the problem with kids, right? You get exposed to Instagram at seven years old now. Every seven-year-old kid has a cell phone. You get exposed to so much sugar by a 10-year-old. Do your children have phones? No, man, never. I told them when they can pay for themselves, they can have it. Yeah, and then they hit teenage years, and then

the sugar's not doing it for them anymore. Then they hit drugs. And people are so addicted to this dopamine thing that it's an uphill battle that nobody can win, you know? So learning to remove the dopamine hits, learning to remove the sugar, the Instagram, the social media, whatever is the drugs, is the first step, I think, in like starting to pay attention to your own mental health. Like taking control of it. Is it going to be hard? Absolutely, it's going to be hard because your brain literally chemically is addicted to this stuff. Like you need it.

Sure. But like any drug addict, you have to go through a period of withdrawal. It's going to be tough. You have to find some support network, but then, Hey, now I'm in a little more in control.

I don't need these things externally anymore. No, you know, I think that's a huge step. You keep mentioning the same word over and over again. You probably said it four or five times and that's control, having control. Having control.

And for he and I, the war on carbs, ketogenic style diet, even this carnivore diet has allowed us to have control. And that's why we're so fired up and excited about it. I do realize there's a lot of other options when it comes to nutrition. Like we know that. If I was able. There's a lot of other choices, but this gives us really good control over what we're doing to the point where we're not even really enticed or thrown off by a protein bar or protein shake.

I mean, we'll still have them here and there. There's still part of some stuff, but that to us is almost like our cheat now, you know, whereas before we'd have a whole cheat weekend. It'd be like a fucking cheat marathon where we'd be getting peanut butter cups and ordering pizza and doing all kinds of stuff. And so it's given us a lot of control.

Our major issue was control. And we didn't understand that. If we had the control that you had as a bodybuilder, we could probably eat carbohydrates and be fine. Like, you know what I mean? We, we were just gluttons, you know, it's like when we would eat carbs, we'd eat the whole box of cereal. Right. That was just like, once it's open, it's gone.

Well, even our choice of carbs. Open box is empty box, you know? Right. Yeah. So we would always choose the wrong things, choose things that were laden with sugar. That's the problem with depriving yourself of anything. And that's, that's what I believe is the biggest problem in the fitness industry is you get,

particularly women, is they do a contest and they change their relationship with food. Now food becomes a reward mechanism. So after the contest, I'm going to reward myself. And how much do we see of that on Instagram with the women with the donuts? Huge donuts. Right, the power lifting.

Donuts are the worst thing possible. And I know they're having fun. You know, I get it. Yeah, but you're literally destroying your relationship with food man i just tried to dissuade all people from competing particularly women who who like if you're gonna compete it's not about the competition it's about changing your life because if you if you create food as a reward up mechanism you're destroyed for the rest of your life you're gonna fight it up a battle with food forever and you guys guys are probably living. Well, and I think our original version of the ketogenic diet was eating no carbs all week.

And then on the weekend eating whatever we wanted to. And that's just disaster. Way to happen basically, because you're just taking in these giant sugar and fat bombs on the weekends. Inflammation, man. You're causing so much inflammation. And as much good as you're doing in like the couple days that you're in ketosis,

you only actually get into ketosis for like a day because you're actually minimizing all the damage from the cheat meal the rest of the week. We would lose weight, you know, utilizing some of those techniques and methods.

And then we, you know, switched over to having one day a week. And then we made it like a meal or two where we cheated. But again, we just didn't understand that the main problem, uh, was control. And that's. Well, and the problem is with that too, is like allowing yourself that one day will turn right back into seven days pretty quickly.

Right. You know, it's like one day I'll do two days. Ah, we did the weekend. Let's do a three day weekend, you know? And then. Yeah. I mean, if you're talking to the general population of people to the thing that they're, you guys have control, but the thing they're missing is just not even paying attention, right?

That that's step one. Yeah. You gotta pay attention. You guys have that because, and maybe that's the benefit of the ketogenic diet is it makes you pay attention for most people for the general pop. I just pay attention. And that's what the carnivore diet did to me more was, um, I was on a ketogenic diet and I kept swaying.

I kept going, you know, because it really isn't about like so much the fat and the protein. It's about like, um, not eating carbs is what it's really about. Like when you really boil it down to like why it works is like, you're not eating carbs. So you find carbs slowly creeping back into your diet. And that's where like a,

a tool like the carnivore diet, it's like, okay, go back to zero. Now I'm back to zero carbs, you know, for at least a while. And that's, that's sort of what helped me. It's like another control mechanism, you know? Yes.

And I mean, it's important to have that discipline. How has, uh, was becoming a professional bodybuilder, uh, everything that you thought it would be? Yeah, man. Um, I think it was, you know, cause you were really striving for it when you were young. I mean, I was a kid and I wanted to do it and, you know, walking on that stage at the Olympia for the first time was everything that I thought it was going to be. Um, I think for me, I've been able to leverage it and

create a platform that allowed me to help other people and not hopefully, um, not have to live the same, uh, troubles that I did as a bodybuilder. Cause obviously I made a lot of mistakes, man. So, you know, I kind of use it as a, as a leverage or as a platform to take what I learned and help other people, man. So, you know, for me, it was definitely a stepping stone. It was a great journey. I loved it. Uh, some days I still miss it. Some days I still want to get back up there, but I just don't want to put my body or my family through what I went through. How hard was it on your family? Well, like, man, my wife is amazing.

So supportive. Just crushes you socially, right? I mean, you can't like. I don't do it. The thing that killed me. You and your wife can't go out with friends type of deal. Yeah, the reason I stopped was even, you know, cause now I'm still busy. Like I'm still working just as much.

I probably see them just as much, but when I'm with them now I'm with them. Whereas before, you know, you train twice a day, you're up before in the morning, you do cardio or whatever. You're just thinking about getting back to your next workout. Well, yeah. Or at the end of the day, you're, you're, you're tired, man. Like I couldn't, didn't have energy to play with them and get on the, getting on the ground was hard. You know, I'm like, I gotta get on the ground and like play with these guys. Right. Yeah. You get it, man. I didn't have energy to play with them. Getting on the ground was hard. I'm like, I got to get on the ground and play with these guys, right? Yeah.

You get it, man. If you're all sore. Yeah, like I just did legs. The only time I'm laying on the ground is if I'm out, right? Because you're not going to get back up. Right. Yeah, and that's the other reason why I'm so focused on getting away to office because I want to be able to do things with my kids when they're in high school.

Yeah, I think that's important, right? Be able to move a little bit. I was the man in high school. My kids need to know I'm still going to be the man when they're in high school. That know? Yeah. I think that's important, right? Be able to move a little bit. I was the man in high school and my kids need to know, like, I'm still going to be the man when they're in high school, right? That's the idea. Yeah. How has your personal growth changed, you know, after retiring from bodybuilding? Cause you know, when you're in the sport and you're focused in on being competitive and focused on being the top dog and being the best that you possibly can be, it consumes a lot of your mental reserve.

And you can't really, it almost in some ways makes you stupid because you can't really, you can't focus in on anything else. Dude, it doesn't almost, it absolutely does. Well, I mean, you're so, imagine how much food you're consuming. So your body's always digesting foods. You're always tired. People don't think about that. Like you're eating a lot, it must have energy.

Walking around big and dumb. Right. It's absolutely true. And you know, when you sit down to read a book, what happens? You get it. So now,

I mean, just the idea of not having to eat and not having to be on a schedule. It feels like it's, it's freedom, right? I can, I can read, I can work.

I can go for six, eight hours, 10. I mean, I'll sit down and write for 10 hours straight and I won't even look up short of having some water. And just, it's such a great liberating feeling and allows you to go so much deeper. Whereas before it was all superficial growth. Now I'm like, man, I'm reading whole books and sometimes reading two books a week.

Just like, just knocking them out because I'm able and I'm not so attached to like every two hours I had to eat. Imagine how much, how consuming that is to time, right? Like you're prepping your meals, you're eating your meals. Like that's three quarters of your day. It could be a half hour to cook it. It could be 15,

20 minutes to eat it. It could be another half an hour, an hour sometimes to digest it. Right. You do seem to do a ton of research reading. You have great guests on your podcast. Thanks man. What are some of the awesome books you've read?

A couple of them that you can remember. Well, like that you'd recommend to other people. Like the one I just said, if you're interested in, I really believe that there's two things that are governing everything, and that's the gut. So there's a couple of good books on the gut. There's Brain Maker, which is David Perlmutter. Yeah, that's a great book.

I really like that. There's one called The Good Gut as well. Yeah, you were talking about that. The Good Gut, I have that. Yeah, that's a good book. And then as far as the brain goes, I just finished one called Buddha's Brain. And just getting into the neurochemistry of understanding what's actually happening in all these different brain states we're in and how we create, you know, like I said, walking into a room, you're creating this neurochemical signature that either allows you to be really, really happy and elevated or allows you to be really down and depressed or anywhere in between. And you can, you can create that and you could stage that so that every time you walk into any situation, I'm there, I'm right on, I'm flipped on and at war, I'm conversely, I'm depressed and so the shoulders are slumped and you get to choose.

Yeah. Does it take practice? Of course, like anything, you can't just do it the first time, but practice, I mean, you can create that peak state anywhere. I recommend a lot of people, uh, audio books too, because I listen to them all the time. We go on our 10 minute walks. Like all I do now is I buy a book a week, you know, and I'll just listen to it because I'm too lazy to read it usually.

I mean, see, I learn more when I read, but like you, time. We all suck in things differently too, right? We take in the information differently too. So like when I hear it, I'll remember it. When I read it, I sometimes don't remember it, you know? Right. Yeah.

So I'm the opposite. So the couple of the books, man, you'll love is Joe Dispenza. If you've never heard Joe Dispenza stuff, break in the habit of being yourself is a awesome book. And he's got five or six books that are really great. First time I heard it,

I was like, eh, it's a life changing book. And then David Hawkins. So David Hawkins wrote power versus force. And he's also got a life-changing book. And then David Hawkins. So David Hawkins wrote Power Versus Force, and he's also got a book called Letting Go, both of which are absolute essential books related for anybody.

Power Versus Force, that sounds pretty cool. Right, exactly. What is that? It's based on his research that he's actually been able to quantify the states of people's existence, basically. So everybody kind of lives at a different level. So if you're living at a level of force, it's a very low level of conscious awareness. And then you may elevate to a level of love or joy or ultimate power.

It's really, I mean, it's basically, so it gives you kind of a framework for allowing you to identify where other people are in their life and giving you a framework to understand how you fit into that context. Interesting. Very, very interesting stuff. Man, it sounds weird. Med didn't do a good job explaining it, but it's awesome. Somebody once said that, you know, if they had 10 years to live, they'd spend nine years studying and researching, preparing for the last, you know, I think that's. That's pretty brilliant, man. Yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting quote. It sounds like, you know, you're, you're really doing your, doing your homework.

What do you think you're in search of? That's a great question, man. I love that. So here's the irony of my life. What you looking for, man? Yeah. We're all looking for something, right? Yeah. Brilliant question. And I've posed that to myself a lot lately. So here's the irony of my life. When I was a kid, I was fat. So I became a professional bodybuilder. I had- That's very opposite, right? Well, I had a learning disability.

So now I've become an educator and a speech impediment. So now I am a motivational speaker. So, uh, now, yeah, now I don't know. I don't know what it is, man. Um, but, um, I honestly don't know, but I, I am, this is the irony of it is I just like to learn everything I can about, for me, it's about the mental game. It's about understanding why we act the way we do and how I can improve my life, how I can improve other people's lives. But I love that you asked that question. When you look back at your bodybuilding career, you're sometimes surprised at what you're able to do.

Um, you know, not like you're marveling at like the size of your legs or anything like that in particular, but, uh, are you, you, you kind of marveling at, uh, you know, where you were able to put yourself? No, that may be the only thing that I've ever done in my life is, you know, my nickname growing up was seek and destroy. Like if I say I'm going to do it, if I do it, if I say I'm going to do it. That's got to be the name of your book. Yeah, there you go. Seek and Destroy by Kolsky. Yeah. Um, if I, if I say I'm going to do it, I get it done. Oh great, here he comes Yeah, there you go. Seek and Destroy, Pokulski. Yeah. If I say I'm going to do it, I get it done. Oh, great.

Here he comes. Seek and Destroy. That's a great. That's like my fucking bike going down the street. Exactly. Pink basket in the front. Yeah, man. So that's always my thing is I don't look back and kind of marvel at it.

I'm like, it sounds arrogant, but it's almost an inevitability. So if I set my mind to something, I know that I'm going to do it. And I think that maybe is my character trait that I'm most attached to as being something that's great. Right. It's like, if you say it, you always do it. And, you know, maybe that's something to be learned for people out there is just that follow through. Yeah. With all this research and you, you know, no longer like being angry, lifting angry type thing.

What have you learned about people? You know, there's a lot of, you know, there longer like being angry, lifting angry type thing. What have you learned about people? You know, there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of interesting people in the fitness industry. And, you know, I'm sure you've spent many times in your life, just like myself, just like my brother, just fucking absolutely hating somebody, you know, just being like that motherfucker, da, da, da, da, da, you know. What do you do now when you're faced with some of these things? Yeah, dude, great questions. So I realized that, first of all, I always thought everyone else was like me and I've learned that's not the truth. So I used to believe that everyone is inherently good and everyone has great intentions and

I've realized that's not the truth. And that's a very important lesson to learn. I also realized that people can't give you anything other than what they have. So don't expect someone to don't, don't expect anything of people really like, you know, people get angry at the lady.

The analogy I always use is people get angry at the lady at the grocery store for being slow or I'm like, she's a grocery clerk for a reason. She's not a fucking brain surgeon, right? Like people are only able to give you what they have. So I'm trying to see the world through other people's eyes has really changed my perspective. So if I'm having a conversation with you, uh, it's always like, I'm trying to flip that

around rather than wanting you to see the world the way I see it. I'll try to see the world the way you see it. And, uh, allows me to kind of meet you where you are and hopefully, um, you know, if need be, we'll try to meet on common ground somewhere or I'll try to, you know, try to understand a little bit differently. So my interaction with people has definitely changed a lot. And, um, you know, I've learned to not be emotionally attached. So like you, I'm sure at some point there was a massive emotional attachment to, um, I don't know, like the way people treated me or the way the interaction went. Um, but now it's, um, you know, I don't get

angry about things anymore. I'm much less emotional about it. I'm just, uh, you know, it is what it is. Yeah. And you have your circle, right? You got your wife and your kids and it's like, beyond that, it's like, there ain't a whole lot, maybe a couple of family members.

And it's like, we're just, we're going to stay right here and stay in this pocket. And I hate that, you know, like growing up, I was always by myself. So I love the idea of bringing great people into my life, man. I love the idea of, um, there's the synergy of, of great people. You don't want to lose hope. You don't want to lose hope in everybody. But, but at some point you do.

Yeah. Well, it's going to be your, if you get sick, you know, it's going to be your wife. That's going to be there with you. Those types of things. Right. Yeah. Well, it's going to be your, if you get sick, you know, it's going to be your wife that's going to be there with you. Those types of things. Right. Yeah. Unfortunately that, but like I said, I'm trying not to lose hope, man.

I'm trying to create a circle of great people working toward a common mission because I know that great people can do greater things as a group. Together. Yeah. Strength in numbers. Yeah. Yeah. But like you said, and I also realized, I guess, extending that conversation that when put under stress, people always act in accordance with survival. So if they're stressed, someone's always going to show their true colors. So I'm always aware of that. So I try not to be attached, like I said, to, you know, having these great relationships with people, because if they're stressed, they're always going to say, you know, two middle fingers to you. I'm going to worry about myself.

That's just human nature. Um, so there's very few people in the world that I know would, uh, you know, ultimately lay down in traffic. So what about money? What you're doing for money? What's your, what's your work? Don't ask. Uh, no. So I've got, um, this is where he whips out the G string. So I've got, there you go. So I've got an online business. It's actually shown on the screen right there. So I'm teaching people. I'm teaching people exercise execution for their body. Because I think that to me is the most empowering tool you can give anyone.

It's like, hey man, stop watching what all these other monkeys are doing. Start doing what fits your body. So you stop hurting yourself. There's no more such thing as weak body parts. There's no more plateaus. Because now we just learn how to, to, um, distribute tension in our body. So, uh, that's effectively what I do, man,

is, um, you know, I'm the guy. What's this, uh, philosophy of forget everything you ever knew? You know, I kind of hear you, uh, preaching that. That's almost like a little, uh, matrix like deal I've heard you talk about. Well, forget what you thought you knew about

muscle building, right? So, um, you know, we attached, if I ask you, you know, what do you do for chest? I do a bench press. I do dumbbells. I don't want people to think like that. Exercise is. Damn, that was fucking good.

You were fucking insanely jacked on that. When you're on stage. Exercise is only a means. Exercise is only necessary or it's only a means of inflicting internal response, right? So rather than attaching to how much do I lift or what exercises do I do, it doesn't matter unless it's creating this internal response. So that's why I want people to stop thinking about exercise and start thinking

about, well, how do I challenge a muscle? So if my objective is building a muscle, the only objective I should have is challenging a muscle, right? I'm trying to put as much tension or torque or load through this muscle as possible. And that just means manipulating the variables of exercise. So, um, these, this is all what we're teaching here is people how to do it exactly for your body. So obviously we still use conventional exercises, um, but not being attached to any particular, um, mechanism, just being attached to exactly how we're getting it done. This, uh, mind muscle connection and this control that you have over, you know, every little detail of your body is remarkable, I think, in a lot of ways. And I think that under normal circumstances, people would never, you know, people got into this mindset of

sports specific training, you know, that you're going to take a heavier baseball bat and you're going to swing it or you're going to do, you know, an exercise like a wood chop type movement with a cable because you're trying to swing something, you know, trying to learn to create more torque to swing a baseball bat or whatever it might be. But I think that bodybuilding has a great fundamental approach to it and has a great foundation in building somebody to be stronger and to be able to connect and to be able to coordinate their muscles in a way and organize their muscles in a way that when you're learning how to flex, you know, lower part of your hamstring or whatever it is that you might actually be teaching or coaching somebody that can have great application to somebody doing a sprint. You can create a great application to a lot of different things. And I'm not saying that you would specifically only train an athlete, you know, with bodybuilding, but I think that sometimes people think that this effort to build muscle, that it's kind of a all show and no go type deal.

But a lot of bodybuilders are extremely athletic. And a lot of times building this muscle mass, as we pointed out earlier too, can build up tremendous amounts of strength. Right. Well, ultimately the application for an athlete is resilience, right? If you're a powerlifter, if you're an athlete, the reason you'd want to do bodybuilding is because bodybuilding is ultimately about resilience. It's about, or it should be at its core.

It should be about getting strong where you're weak, you know, addressing your weaknesses first. Because the only thing that's ever, you're only going to be as strong as you're weak, Slink, you know that? Right. So the way we train is literally like trying to isolate all your weaknesses and make you absolutely resilient. You know, Dave Asprey stole my term bulletproof, but that's ultimately what we're trying to do, right? Is I want to make you absolutely resilient so that every, you're strong at every single part of the range of motion that a muscle has to go through.

And that's how a muscle will develop is, is not just developing one part that's really, really strong. Another part that's really, really weak. I want to make everything absolutely resilient and bulletproof, bulletproof so that one, we're less likely to get injured and you know, you're not going to tear a weird muscle doing something like lifting a grocery bag or something. Right.

And ultimately improve your ability to perform. What have you learned about business in the last couple of years? Everything. I learned that I didn't know anything and I still don't. Cause you really probably didn't have much of your own personal business going on during your bodybuilding career, other than some relationships, maybe with some sponsorships or something like that. Yeah.

So in 2011, I found out my girlfriend at the time was pregnant. So I started building a business. I started in, well, actually in 2010, I started in 2011. You're like, I should get some sort of job. Well, I had, I didn't come from sponsorships, but you know, with sponsorships at any one time, if they get pissed off or if you have a bad placing, they pull it. Or they get sold or whatever. Yeah.

Right. Sounds like, well, I need to be a man here. I need to get a job. I need to build a business. So it started then. Um,

but what have I learned about business? Well, it's endless. Um, do you read books that are specifically about business? I read more business books than I do about the body now,

man. Like I read everything about learning about marketing. I'm learning about just leadership. I'm learning about, you know, organizational strategies. I'm learning about finance leadership. I'm learning about organizational strategies. I'm learning about finance and learning about

everything. It's kind of constant. But yeah, I mean, I think the thing that is maybe most important for most people that they're trying to start a business and you know, this is having a very clear mission, having a very clear culture because without that, what I've run into is, is finding employees that

underperforming because they don't have a very clear objective. If everyone's working, you finding, uh, employees that underperforming because they don't have a very clear objective. If everyone's working, um, you know, altruistically toward a mission, then it makes it much easier for, you don't have to micromanage people. You just lead. And there's a big difference there, right? And being a leader versus a manager. So, um, yeah, learning how to make sure that that vision is crystal clear, um, and still

working on that. But, you know, ultimately, um, that's been the biggest takeaway. And then there's a lot about marketing. There's a lot of the, you know, the X's and O's of, of learning how to actually execute on this stuff that it's all very new to me. Right. So for me, the business has grown organically, you know, just because, Hey, this is a huge

Jack dude with big muscles. I should listen to him. Um, but now it's, uh, if you want to take it to the next level, you have to learn some marketing strategy and the X's and O's. Yeah. With, with this business, it's, if you want to take it to the next level, you have to learn some marketing strategy in the X's and O's. Yeah. With this business, it's been interesting. I don't like being like a boss or CEO or any of that kind of stuff. When I've left, the more that I leave people alone, it seems like the better off they do.

There's going to be people that, you know you know, occasionally you're gonna have to replace people. And I mean, there's certain things, certain decisions you got to make that, uh, just fucking suck. You know, there's no other way to put it. It just sucks. Um, but in general, uh, with these guys, with this crew that I have, I'm, I'm really lucky and fortunate. Uh, the, the less I hover over them seems like actually the better the things are. That's one thing that I've learned over the last couple of years is that if I pass something off to somebody, don't be such a dick to think that, you know, what I just gave to you is going to be worse. Have the strength to understand that what you just turned over to somebody else can actually turn a whole lot better by you giving it to somebody. And by you communicating with that person on what your vision is, if you're not communicating with that person, then they are going to, everything that you ever give them, they're going to make it worse. But with these guys, you know, I'll come in here at seven in the morning to hit a training session sometimes.

And they're already in. I'm like, what are you doing here? Like, oh, working. I'm leaving at six or whatever it might be, depending on the day. And there they are still fucking plugging away. I'm like, fucking go home. What are you doing? Yeah, no, I get it, man.

And communication is something, as you can imagine, as a bodybuilder, I wasn't very good at. And that's probably why I chose bodybuilding, even in my relationships. Like, I guess I was okay with my wife, but it just wasn't something I very good at. And that's probably why I chose bodybuilding, even in my relationships. Like, I guess I was okay with my wife, but it just wasn't something I was good at. So I'm learning, man. I'm learning. It's just about transparency. And really being a great leader, as you know, man, is finding something to be grateful for in your employees,

in your team. Always pointing out the little stuff that sometimes goes unnoticed. And I think that may be one of the biggest takeaways is, you know, I was always one who just, if I ask you to do something, I just assume it's going to get done, but I don't do that anymore. Like I'm very grateful when it actually does get done. And I make sure I point out when they're doing something well.

And I just, I honestly, it sounds, sounds crude, but I speak to, or I draw similarities between kids and, and team members is like, just like, give them, give them acknowledgement, man, let them know they're doing a great job and they'll always work so much harder. I think that's always important to tell people they're doing a good job. You know, it doesn't take, it doesn't cost you anything. Right. And it doesn't hurt.

And what a hurting feeling it is sometimes. And then if somebody recognizes that you're losing weight or somebody recognizes that you're, you're just doing something a little bit better, you're like, oh shit. All right. It's working.

And I never, I never wanted that or never needed it as an athlete or as a kid. So I just didn't do it. Yeah. Or I never got it. Not everybody's like

you, Ben. Yeah. Well, I'm just learning that stuff now. Right. So yeah, man, lots of lessons to be learned in business.

You know what they say the worst thing about communication is? What's that? Thinking it ever happened. Makes sense, right? Yeah. Cause you're like, I told, and then you're like, I didn't tell him.

Then you think about it and you're like, I didn't really tell him exactly. Right. Like I mentioned something to him because I'm the worst at that just because stuff pops up in my head and I'm like, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then I walk away. So, yeah, you know, I started doing now, we've got a couple of channels to like, every time something comes in my brain, I just record a voice note and I send it to somebody and I'm like, so I know it's exactly, it's there. Before you forget it. Andrew's shaking his head over there. Yeah. I got one last night. Yeah. I was like, I'm doing an AMA thing with Reddit.

And I'm like, no, you're doing a photo shoot at the exact same time. And I was like, you don't need me. Yeah. I was like, you don doing an AMA thing with Reddit. And I'm like, no, you're doing a photo shoot at the exact same time. And I was like, you don't need me. Yeah, I was like, you don't need me for the photo shoot. And he's like, I think you're a main part of it. Turns out I was wrong, so. Yeah. When it comes to scheduling, I'm always wrong. That's for sure.

Yeah, I've just hired somebody to exclusively organize my life because it's getting to the point now where I'm like, I hate looking at my phone. I don't want to open my email anymore. I'm like, well, just wake up, send me, give me a piece of paper and tell me what I'm doing all day. And then I'm happy. It's an important thing is to, uh, you know, as, as a business owner is to, you know, hone

in on the stuff that you really like doing. Otherwise what you're doing it for. Yeah. Then you got a job, not a business, right? Yeah. And then you're more stressed than you need. Anything else in closing her out here? What else we got going on?

We've got, where can people find you? Well, I've got camps like we spoke about earlier. I've got one camp a month teaching people to go deep on mastering their body. And it's literally a life-changing experience. How do you get involved in the camp? So it's all over the internet as far as my websites. I want to go to one. Dude, we'll do some stuff later today and you

can give me a shout out if you enjoy it. Yeah, absolutely. It's mi40nation.com slash camp. That's one of them. Or you can go to the MI40 gym website. So I got a gym in Tampa, 10,000 square foot gym. Awesome. It's funny, man.

We get people from all over the world, people from Australia, people from- How long have you had the gym for? Three years. Cool. So you get people from Australia, Europe from. How long have you had the gym for? Three years. Cool. So you get people from Australia, Europe, South America, like literally everywhere. Obviously US and Canada, you know, three days

going deep on mastering everything about your body and small groups. So I intentionally keep it to 12 to 15 people so I can give you individual attention. And it's honestly, man, I'm there giving you all my time and attention with the intention of changing your life. And I'd imagine you have a few coaches with you as well.

Yeah. So all last year and the year before I never taught these, these camps. I had other guys teaching it for me. But, you know, I actually really like connecting with people, man. So it may not be the most efficient use of my time, but I actually like connecting with people.

So I'll keep doing it for a little while longer until I can't afford to do it as far as time. If you like doing it, it's important. Yeah. And then I've got a member site where we're, you know, we're really striving to empower men and women with a skillset to take control of their body.

And that's ultimately, man, we know your body is your vehicle to living your greatest life. Without a great body, without excess energy, you can't be creative. You can't be productive. You can't be happy. So. Yeah.

Try and teach everything that goes into muscle building, not just the X's and O's of like, hey, here's how to train. It's like, hey, here's how to optimize your gut. Here's how to optimize inflammation. Here's how to optimize your brain. Your mind can't be sound if you're in pain. Yeah. Right.

So all those things are going into the website. Fucking awesome, man. Thank you so much for coming out and sharing this experience with us. And thanks for fasting this morning. Yeah. I'm very grateful that I'm here. So thank you so much, man. Big fan of both of you guys.

Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Where can people find you on the Instagrams? IFBB, Ben Pack. That's Instagram, Facebook. And YouTube is MI40. Muscle intelligence is what MI40 means. Boom.

Booyah. Awesome. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Bye. Later.