Mark Bell's Power Project - Power Project EP. 90 - Stan Efferding

Episode Date: August 1, 2018

Stan "The White Rhino" Efferding, the man behind the Vertical Diet joins Mark Bell in Malibu at the Beach house. Stan is considered world's strongest body builder, and was seen on Shark Tank promoting his Kooler invention. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots ➢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/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject ➢ YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

All right, so I don't know how it happened, but you know, I think somewhere in your career, you, I think you started out with bodybuilding and then I think you ended up in powerlifting and I think you went back to bodybuilding. I've never messed with any bodybuilding. I've never even been to a bodybuilding show, but I had the powerlifting career for a long time, held onto that, try to be as fast as I can for as long as to that, tried to be as fat as I can for as long as I can, tried to be as strong as I can for as long as I can, and now here I am, sucked into some bodybuilding. You used to make fun of me for that shit. All the time. So bad, yeah.

I came to your gym, I'm like, where are the mirrors? And then the time I told you that my legs were 30 inches, you're like, how do you know that? So I measured them, and you said, that's the gayest shit I ever heard. Yeah, yeah, what's wrong with you yeah yeah do you have a tape measure after you saved him yeah it is you know bodybuilding is a lot of it's weird a lot of it's new to me I mean like shaving your body being tan trying to find like posing trunks and like all these things are really foreign to me. Posing.

Yeah. You know, even the act of posing can be a little weird. But there's so much discipline that happens. Sometimes you have six meals a day, seven meals a day. You have a tremendous amount of meals, multiple workouts per day. Looking back at your bodybuilding career, do you think those were the right things to do? The seven meals, the cardio, the training, or did you do something different? Yeah, well, I mean, I did everything because it was a 30-year career. So I did the steady-state cardio. I did the many meals. I did the meal timing. I did all of that.

So I've tried everything. And so that's why I've kind of said the things I've said on your show and many shows about what I think is the optimal way, but there's many paths to the same destination. And all I'm trying to do is caution folks against doing things that might ultimately put them in a position to where they're metabolic adaptation and creating micronutrient deficiencies. And so I'm kind of preaching around the corners to, Hey, you know, do that because I'm, you know, no bigger prude than a reformed prostitute. I'm the last guy to tell you, you know, don't do this because it's not good for you.

You know, my, my rant on, if you want to be healthy, don't compete. Yeah. What kind of life is that? You know, most people push themselves in some endeavor, whatever sport it may be. I'm just trying to say that, that in order to both optimize performance and try and prevent yourself from doing a significant amount of damage, which is going to happen in any sport, there's a few things that I think people should be consistent with and it's the same old stuff I've been nagging on. What has changed with your thoughts in the last several years versus maybe some of the thoughts you had when you competed as a bodybuilder? Well, you know, I redefined myself.

Just like you, you went from powerlifting, you were at a significant body weight, which obviously has… Fat. I was really fat. Yeah. A bunch of health consequences. You went into bodybuilding, which is more healthy than powerlifting. Right. Just based on the body fat loss. Right. More so than anything.

And since I'm not competing now, I didn't want to hold on to the additional weight either. So now I've whittled down to 230. And I'm looking at the- I'm 230 as well. Yeah. So here we are. We met somewhere in the middle of where we were. But I'm trying to redefine what my priorities are, which of course having a six-year-old

and a four-year-old is to be healthy, to be active, to have energy. And you know my hypochondria has always been in effect, and so I continue to do the blood tests. And just yesterday I had a sonogram on my liver and kidneys and bladder because I wanted to see, you know, here I am at what, you know, under 10% body fat and I'm worried about my liver and I have no elevated AST, ALT, but I still go in and get the test just to see if there's anything. The size of my kidneys as a result of all those years that, that I competed, uh, you know, I had that, um, uh, cardiac angiography because I wanted to see if there was any calcification. And then I focus on blood pressure as my recent, as you, you know, had those troubles historically

when you were heavy. Absolutely. And, you know, now that I'm 50, I'm focusing on making sure that the blood pressure is good. But there's a lot of athletes that still want to compete at a heavy weight. They can still monitor those things. They can still get a CPAP for sleeping. They can still monitor their blood pressure. And since it's kind of a lifestyle disease anyhow, they can make the effort to keep a reasonable blood pressure while they still compete. And I introduced some methods to do that, just increasing your

potassium and calcium and getting a CPAP. Those three things right there will probably, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, probably solve 90%. Once you throw a number at it, everybody goes crazy. But the vast majority of high blood pressure is lifestyle issues with nutrition in particular. And I provided links to research that suggests that when you do a few of these things, you can stay healthy. Obviously, as we get leaner and leaner, the health gets better and better. But, you know, I don't want to be an hypocrite. Are some of the deficiencies perhaps even just from lack of sleep? That's a huge one.

Lack of sleep is a monster. Yeah, because it increases. And then maybe not having enough variety in the diet to be able to focus. That's what I worry about now. You hear me talking about people. I worry that they're doing too much egg whites and chicken breast and tilapia and broccoli. Or they're too keto or too carnivore or whatever it may be. Yeah, overly restrictive.

And I know some people have said, oh, well, Stan, your diet's restrictive. And in comparison, it's very generous. Right. What I restrict is things that cause gastric distress, give you poor gut health. Let's talk about that for a second because a lot of times you'll mention you want things to digest fairly quickly. Well, red meat doesn't digest very quickly but it digests efficiently. Is that kind of the more the word you're looking for?

If you're going to compare red meat to egg whites or to chicken, it's much more nutrient dense. Higher in B12, significantly higher. Higher in iron, higher in zinc, and even the fatty acid ratio. Chicken might be a 17 to 1 omega-6 to omega-3. We got all these people running around talking about the omega-6s, the polyunsaturated fats, trying to get that ratio down to four to one or two to one. And, uh, we're pushing people to take, um, uh, omega threes and fish oils, which doesn't solve the problem. You know, we were

talking earlier about, you know, you can give somebody a really healthy program, but then they run out and they eat a, uh, you know, a terrible meal, uh, candy or pizza or something that's going to undo any of the efforts that you make. Chicken's 17 to 1. Omega-6 to omega-3. Steak's 4 to 1. And then the conjugated linoleic acids that steak. A four-ounce serving of steak has 400 milligrams of CLAs.

Chicken has like 8. A four ounce serving of steak has 400 milligrams of CLAs. Chicken has like eight. So comparatively speaking, I'm not saying you can't satisfy your protein requirement from chicken. Hell, you can satisfy that from soy. And I'm not a fan of goitrogens and increased estrogen, so I'm not recommending soy. But as far as your protein requirement goes, it's what it takes to get the amino acids to build muscle. But that's only one very small portion of the of all the things that are necessary to optimize in a diet and so you have to have all of those micronutrients that

obviously the iron the zinc and the b12 but in addition to all those electrolytes the sodium the potassium magnesium the zinc the vitamin d3 that increases calcium absorption the k2 that makes the calcium uh decalcifies the artery and puts it into the bones and teeth. So what I tried to do with my diet is to stop focusing on just macros. Because when you focus on micros, which I believe is the second most important thing after controlling for calories in terms of body losing and gaining weight. Right. Then becomes the quality of the food you eat and then the macros. And so let's go in that order.

Let's control calorie consumption. And then let's look at the quality of the food that you eat. Because when you do that, then the process can become more healthy and you have more energy. It's probably a lot easier if you're not deficient in nutrients. Probably a lot easier to concentrate on your diet. Something that I rarely hear anybody talk about but if you're also not nutrient deficient and you're getting proper rest it's probably easier to make the correct

decisions you just have more energy on the diet yeah you're recovering better from your workouts but well a lot of people talk to me about my diet in particular about the vertical diet is that they have more energy there what's happening is there website for this diet? Yes, theverticaldiet.com. If you've never heard of it. Oh my God, there's a website? Yeah, actually a website. Verticaldiet.com, huh?

Yeah. That's where people can get jacked? So what I've done is I've tried to have people take one step beyond macros or get in front of that equation and just make sure that the process feels good. Because if it doesn't feel good, as we know compliance is the single most important factor in terms of success on a diet all diets follow it you know those that are strictly adhered to for whatever period of time it's hard to comply to

some diets and i know some people may enjoy them but generally speaking a keto diet is a little harder to stay on long term right so is intermittent fasting so is a carnivore diet it's not to mean that any of those are bad but how long will someone to stay on them and when they go off do they really go off the rails right and that's the concern and so I try to find something that's more of a lifestyle I'm not in the camp that believes that any of those foods are bad for you, any of the macros are bad for you. You know, I'm not afraid of carbs, obviously. And I'll adjust them based on an individual's response to them, but that's really individualistic. I can't generalize that.

How do we bodybuild and utilize your diet? Because, you know, egg yolks and steak and bison. I mean, bison's pretty lean, but bison still has significant amounts of fat in bodybuilding terms, because in bodybuilding terms, a lot of people are going to get, even a big guy is going to get under 100,

probably under 80 grams of fat per day. That's okay, 75, even 50 is probably enough to say healthy. How do you manage? Is it just kind of small amounts of meat and small amounts of these things? Again, it's a calorie equation. And as long as you control for calories and protein, wherever you move those other two macros, fats and carbs, we see similar results in terms of weight loss and body composition, both short-term and long-term. What did you do with somebody like Larry Wheels? You helped him in his bodybuilding prep. Is that correct? Larry used somebody else more closely,

specifically for his bodybuilding prep. I didn't actually monitor all that. What I helped him was just to improve his diet overall. I tried to get him to move away from chicken and into red meat. I tried to get him to salt his meals. A lot of huge impact on his powerlifting, for sure. Exactly. And just because a guy that works as hard as he does and as big as he is and such a huge demand on nutrients in his body we had to keep fueling him but this is something that's not talked about that much but there's a lot of people that exercise they put in a great effort and exercise and they really are just kind of spinning their wheels well yeah especially when you get into people that are working out twice a day or three

times a day you get into the strongmen or the CrossFitters. You know, recently I started working with Camille LeBlanc. Oh, awesome. And Ben Smith. Yeah. And Becca Voigt. All prior to their regionals. Ben Smith and Becca Voigt.

A decade of making it to the CrossFit Games. Yeah. Unbelievable. And they started using the vertical diet. And one of the biggest things we focused on with them was hydration. Because they have three events, three days in a row. Yeah. And some of those events are rather lengthy.

And some of them are very brief. Ben Smith, as a matter of fact, about a month before regionals, he went out for a heavy day of training. He had a morning session. Then at night, he went out for like a 55-minute run. And it it was a very hot day Yeah, and he ended up getting heatstroke Wow a month before training He couldn't go outside without getting overwhelmed with a pain in his stomach muscular and Digestive wise. Yeah

and so I reached out to the folks from The heat Institute Sandra Goddick's group and she put me in touch with one of her team that reached out to us and we created a hydration protocol for him. One, just to recover from the damage he'd already done, which was a lot of the stuff we've talked about historically. It's sodium, potassium, magnesium, but the shuttle for that is carbohydrates. The shuttle for that was glucose. You have to have enough glucose, a significant amount, and enough salt to absorb and utilize those electrolytes. Why is the glucose important? The carbohydrates, why are they important? Because you can't get the electrolytes into the cell without the glucose.

So that's kind of shoving it into the muscle, shoving it into the right spot, basically? Yeah. Something like that? Yep. They work together. And so a lot of people were putting salt into their water. Yeah. Or conversely, they would use a carbohydrate drink like a Gatorade that didn't have enough salt in it.

And so they had to try and make sure that there was enough salt. They test athletes. They put patches on them and they test their their sweat rate and they look not only how much they sweat but what kind how much salt and potassium they excrete and then they design protocols to help replace that and they found on average they sweat out 2500 milligrams of sodium an hour my clothes today for my workout or my double workout i weighed them on the scale at gold's Gym, 4.6 pounds. You know, obviously there's some weight to the clothing, but it's probably a good 3 pounds or so of actual sweat. It's interesting you say that because it's exactly the protocol. Ball sweat in particular. And you can sell that on the internet.

People who will buy that. Use posing trunks. You'll start getting the requests here shortly. This is going to be great. I didn't know there were side benefits to all this. You can make money on that. One of the things that the Heat Institute recommended that Livingston was the gentleman who reached out to us and spoke with Ben is that you strip down, weigh in, you pee, strip down, weigh in before your training session. And then you have your training session. And usually you want it to be a substantial session, 30, 45 minutes plus. And then you weigh yourself after, towel off, and weigh yourself after. And that will tell you your water loss.

It won't necessarily tell you whether or not you're a salty sweater and you lost two or three or four grams of sodium. It will give you some ballpark idea of how much you have to replenish. And so what we did is I used their information and, of course, the work that I did with George Lockhart and his protocol to design hydration protocols for them both prior to and after. And we set that up for them for regionals so that they knew how much salt to take in, how much water to take in, how much glucose to take in before an event, during an event if it was a lengthy event, and immediately after.

And then if there were three events a day. They did the same thing with Hofthor and Shaw, because in Manila it was very, very hot. It was humid. So they were losing a lot of water. And Shaw was saying it was challenging to get enough. You can imagine how much carbohydrates and how much sodium those guys excrete. Now, if we're talking on average, two and a half to three grams of sodium an hour, mind you, that's only 40% of the amount of salt.

So say if they're doing 3 grams an hour of excreting sodium, then they're going to need 7 to 8 grams an hour of salt during their training. What does that look like? Is that like in tablespoons or something like that? Like what is... It's about 7 teaspoons...3 teaspoons. Wow. 3 to 4 teaspoons of salt. or something like that? What are we talking about? It's about three teaspoons. Wow. Three to four teaspoons of salt.

And then you've got to find a way. If you pour all that into a fluid, you're not going to be able to drink it. Yeah. So now you've got to find a way to get that into them. Some of it can go into the hydration vehicle, but there has to be an adequate amount of carbs to uptake that salt,

or else the bolus in the stomach is just going to draw water and you're going to piss it out your ass, really really is what's going to happen. Yeah. It's like getting into the ocean and swallowing water and mixing, you know, it'll make you kind of sick, right? Yep. Yep. Some people do those sort of, I don't know what they call them, those salt water. Salt enema. Yeah. Salt enema. They drink it just to clean their system out. Right. Clear everything out. Yep. So you're saying it's carbohydrates, sodium, did you say calcium? Water, usually it's just sodium. They do want to put some potassium in there, usually a two to one ratio. And they found that, now are these all your recommendations that you're doing, like specifically with some of these CrossFitters or people that may not have time to, you know, eat a lot of food or whatever it might be?

Is it specifically supplemental, like a supplement like a powder or let me be specific then like with an athlete like off the workshop I'll put I haven't put half a teaspoon of pink salt on their tongue and wash it down with say four ounces of orange juice and eat maybe a quarter cup of rice 30 minutes before an event. Now, mind you, two hours prior to the event, they had a significant meal, two or three hours prior. They had a significant meal with salt on it and carbs.

It might have been a monster mash, right? So they get all that in. But about 30 minutes before the event, I want to get them 1,000 milligrams of sodium. That's a half teaspoon of pink salt. And to put that in a drink, you're not going to drink it. It tastes horrible. So I just put it on their tongue and they drink it. And I give them the rice because it tends to settle their stomach. And it acts as that, I was just about to say that when you have two carbohydrate sources, dextrose, or which is glucose essentially. And then another

one could be a maltodextrin. Fructose seems to marry up well if it's easy on the stomach. And if you use a fructose powder. Those two together, the science indicates that you can absorb about one gram a minute of glucose. Right. You've got to consider the fact that you can't, this is like people refeeding after powerlifting weigh in. I've seen some of George Lockhart's numbers before.

He wrote them out for us on our board. Yeah. It was like a beautiful mind equation. It is. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. George does an extraordinary job. We it's like a beautiful mind equation. Dr. It is. Dr. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. Dr. George does an extraordinary job. We'll have to talk more about that. If you get about a gram a minute of absorption with glucose, if you add fructose to that,

it's almost two grams. Add salt to that, almost three. Add caffeine to that, almost four. Dr. And potassium may even help a little bit too. Doesn't it mimic insulin a little bit, right? Dr. Yep, absolutely. It mimics insulin. So with the two to one ratio, and you can just do that maybe adding some coconut water. I think

eight ounces is about 600 milligrams of potassium. So there's your two-to-one ratio in terms of sodium. And that is actually what he puts in his hydration drinks for his athletes that weigh in these UFC fights. He has some coconut water in there with the sodium and the two, the double glucose, the glucose and fructose blend. But now you've got, let's say 75 grams of carbs in that drink and you can absorb about four grams a minute, right? So you need to drink that drink over about 15 minutes. You don't want to be just slugging it down. And if it's ice cold, it seems to absorb a little better as well.

Then it's getting into the testes faster. So that's what he feeds his athletes, and that's kind of what I cue off of to feed the Hoffords of the world and the Camille LeBlancs of the world, is to have a hydration protocol in place. Because if you're properly prepared, and then during the intra-workout, you're sipping on something that has those nutrients and then immediately following then the subsequent events, if it's a two a day or three a day for three days, you have to be on that from the very first event on the very first day, or you're just going to progress and they get worse and worse. It's hard to recuperate from that. So if they have three

events, three days in a row, then this protocol wants to be implemented before, during and after based on their workload. Some events are seven minutes, some events are 40 minutes. In that way, they perform just incredibly better and feel better in the process. It's important to point out that Camille LeBlanc-Bazinet is probably 5'2", 125 pounds. She's got some thick legs. She's muscular.

She's probably in that weight frame and that height. And then what's Hapthor Bjorn? I mean, how big is this guy? 4'40". They'll have different demands. There's no question. They'll burn different amounts of calories. But the information is similar.

It's similar. Just adjusted for body weight and sweat rate. And then what you're talking about is it's supplemental, but it's supplemental food. It's not it's not a supplement. They're not like down in BCAAs before they go and do their thing. No, they have orange juice. They have different different things. I use a pulp free orange juice. Right. It depends on how it feels on your stomach. So this sounds like, well, this isn't a lead athlete thing. Is this a UFC fighter thing? So this sounds like, well, this isn't a lead athlete thing.

This is a UFC fighter thing. They train twice a day. So getting this hydration drink after their first workout or first event makes their second one perform much, much better. It's really significant. And I think the sports science industry also recognizes that. It's in their website that this kind of rehydration can absolutely improve performance. I know there's some debate over the anabolic window in terms of protein consumption, but with respect to carbohydrates, and particularly in those circumstances,

replenishment when you have subsequent bouts, three-a-day, two-a-day types of training, it's essential, and it is absolutely a performance optimizer. But how do you apply that to everyday folks? Because this isn't always just about the Hofthors and the Camille LeBlancs of the world. Right. A lot of the people that listen are like, well, how is this going to benefit my workout? I don't train twice a day. Well, if you don't train twice a day, then after your workout, you probably don't need that many carbs immediately.

Right. You'll replenish your carbohydrate stores adequately over the next many hours. And the immediacy isn't as important. But what about before your workout? What about coming to the workout and feeling like you need some sort of caffeine for a pre-workout? And I've talked many times about this before. There's a reason why you don't have energy. And that's because you have a deficiency in some other factor that should be controllable. It's a lifestyle factor that you shouldn't manage with drugs. And caffeine is a drug.

Let's just be honest about it. It's not a nutrient. It's not a protein, fat, or mineral electrolytes. None of those things. Vitamins, none of those. It's a drug. And there's a reason you're taking that drug. And who am I to talk, right?

But there's a reason you take it. And you don't need it if the sleep is right actually pap whatever if you're well hydrated and adequately fed and so my goal with salting every single meal is that you get to your workout and you don't need the caffeine anymore because there are obviously side effects to taking caffeine you're gonna have higher highs and lower lows can it be a performance enhancer yeah but are you competing right you know at that every single day and do you attenuate to that over time and does it cause you to drop does it hit your adrenals and cause

adrenaline and cortisol to be released and what is what's the net effect of that and so all those things you know so salts the biggie you can utilize that as a post-workout drink it's euphoric I assure you but if you want to perform better at workouts then I get people to salt all their meals and then take in adequate potassium and calcium and their blood pressure is perfect. When you get adequate potassium and calcium, more than 90% of people, I think, who are even salt sensitive, because I think the measurement of salt sensitivity doesn't take into the fact whether or not they're deficient in potassium and calcium. When they remedy that problem, I think the vast majority of that goes away and your blood pressure becomes normal. What does a pre-workout

food or drink look like? Well, two hours or so before a workout you're going to want to get an adequate meal. And then I mentioned that the 30 minutes before a workout, if you put half a teaspoon of pink salt on your tongue and wash it down with four ounces of orange juice, pulp-free orange juice and maybe four ounces of water, and you can take in a little bit of rice if you want. You wouldn't even need it necessarily.

You could just do the OJ. And you might head off to train with that. When I have folks that wake up in the morning, one of the biggest thing I get asked about my diet because I- Fasting. Either they're fasting or they're getting up and training at four o'clock in the morning. They don't have time to get in a full meal. My diet plan has breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever.

What I encourage them to do is eat a little something and on the same note, I'll have them have a hard boiled egg and put a decent amount of salt on it and then get that four ounces of OJ and a quarter cup of steamed rice because you can have a rice cooker going with a timer so it's ready when you get up in the morning. So imagine you're coming downstairs, you've got like five minutes before you got to get out the door, get in the car to go to a four or 5am workout. You've got a hard boiled egg sitting right there. Cause you know, whatever Costco makes some pre-made throw some salt on it. Take your four ounces of OJ and scoop a little scoop of rice in, and you can head to the car and eat it down, going down the road. It on the stomach it's performance enhancing because now you've got your sodium you've got your

carbohydrates that help shuttle that sodium into the system and you'll have a great workout on that i want i don't like the idea that people have adopted that the more you suffer the better your results are and that seems to be where we're at. The more sleep you sacrifice, the more successful you'll be. The more foods you restrict, somehow that's going to improve your weight loss and body composition, whether it be your egg white diet or just the deficiency to begin with, 1,000 calories, 1,200 calories. Hell, the 600-calorie HCG diet. That was even popular for a while. I don't like the idea that over-restriction. I like to give the body what it needs so that it's enjoyable. The process is enjoyable. You go to the gym and it actually feels good to work out. Things that are fancy aren't going to work very long.

No. And things that are over-restrictive aren't going to work very long. And digging too deep a hole that you can't recover out of, that's why I like to be adequately hydrated and have all the nutrition I need. The gym for me was always euphoric. That was always the best part of this. I didn't have to do that. I got to do that. And because I was so disciplined outside the gym with my sleeping and eating and hydration,

every time I got to the gym, it was PRs all over the place. I just felt amazing. But I couldn't imagine what it would be like to go to the gym and just be exhausted not want to work out and have to drink a cup of coffee just I remember you know your workout a lot of your workouts didn't even make sense you know you're like I'm going to do this weight this week and then you know I'm going to go from you know 765 I'm going to do that for a double and then the week after I'm going to do 825 for double and then the week after that I'm going to do eight and double. And then the week after I'm going to do 825 for double. And then the week after that, I'm going to do eight. And I'm like, that's not a natural progression,

especially not a natural progression for somebody who's, I think you're in your mid forties. Yeah. Like, it doesn't make any sense, but because of, because of what you were doing, it was, it was working really well. You were coming into those workouts prepared. You seem to be very performance based. Now, if I think this is an undersold thing, and I think that, um, a lot of people, there's, there's also some information that says, you know, due to, uh, you know, that basically only expend like 10% of our total calories from exercise. You'll hear that all the time. But after experimenting and doing the things that you're doing, do you think that's a little bit of bullshit? Because you're having people perform on a higher level, so their energy output is

better. Are we underselling the value of going in, lifting weights, and exercising? Well, I think everybody does. Because people are like, oh, I'm dieting, and so my performance course is going to be hindered yeah but maybe that's really like maybe that's not a great statement i think that's a problem maybe that's a shit statement yeah because if you're getting weaker all the time that's a sign that you're getting worse that's a sign that the muscles are getting smaller not bigger. That's a sign maybe that you're not recovering. And so I don't accept all of it. Although when you diet, you're going to lose some strength. So maybe there's, maybe it's a time period that that happens. It's the, it's

the battle. That's the tug of war. If you go all in with your egg whites and broccoli and your two hours of cardio a day, you can expect to lose a significant amount of muscle and be tired all the time and pull minimized sodium intake. It's going to be the icing on that cake, the exhaustion cake. But your goal should be to battle that every step of the way. One of the ways to do that is to lengthen the prep. So many people think that they're going to do an eight-week prep. You're going to lose a decent amount of muscle with that fat.

Yeah. Because the longer you prep and the less weight you lose each week, 1% of body weight instead of 2%, the more muscle you're going to be able to maintain. And so now preps are 16 to 20 weeks long for some people. A lot of the natural guys will even go double that. Some guys will go 30, 40 weeks. If need be.

That's so they can hold on to as much muscle tissue as possible. There's a host of other things that I try to incorporate in there like avoiding the steady state cardio and like doing the two-a-day hypertrophy workouts and like keeping steak in and salt in and fruit. Those two day workouts that you're talking about, that's what you did with Flex Wheeler, right? Yeah, I think that's huge. There was no cardio. No cardio. Because again, it's a calorie equation. So if you're at a calorie deficit, you create that deficit with workouts instead of steady state cardio, then you've still created the deficit. You're still losing weight. But now what's the stimulus

and what's your body responding to? Is the stimulus steady state cardio, then you've still created the deficit. You're still losing weight. But now what's the stimulus and what's your body responding to? Is the stimulus steady state cardio, in which case you're burning up muscle tissue because it's inefficient and it's got a high water load and energy demand. And in order to be efficient at doing that cardio, you want to lose muscle. Or are you stimulating it with workouts? And here's another reason why, and it's hormonal, right? I talk about this in terms of the 10 minute walks. Why three 10 minute walks is better than a 30 minute walk because you increase insulin sensitivity, you fire up the muscles and your body's absorbing and stimulating the right hormones. The same thing happens when you do a two-a-day workout instead of a one-a-day workout.

Now you're stimulating growth hormone again. You're increasing amino acid uptake. Just the fact that your muscles are being asked to contract and move, now you're stimulating all the processes internally that are going to contract and move. Now you're stimulating all the processes internally that are going to help grow muscle. That's why volume becomes such a key component in hypertrophy. There's, I think, three key components. One is obviously going to be mechanical tension, and this is Brad Schoenfield's work. Obviously, you have to have a loading phase, right? You have to be lifting weights, and you have to hopefully have loading phase, right? You have to be lifting weights and you have

to hopefully have a progression to where you're lifting more weight. The second one that's is volume. And that's, you know, it could be frequency at which you're how, how many times a week you work out. Usually it should be twice a week per body part. How many sets and reps you do pounds per hour, pounds per week approach. So you've got the mechanical tension. Then you can start increasing volume. and this is what we did with Flex. We did a lot of 20 rep sets for legs. We'd do quads in the morning, hamstrings at night.

We wouldn't train for more than an hour at a time. Usually the morning workouts were 40 to 50 minutes. The night workout was 20 minutes. Maybe three exercises a piece? Yeah, or four times four, four sets of four reps. Might do 16 total sets, so it'd be 32 sets a week. That's kind of how we looked at it. Right.

And the only way we'd be able to do that kind of volume is we had to be careful of the third component of muscle hypertrophy which is muscle damage and that's your eccentric loading that's your heavy weights and uh is it is it all muscular or is some of it uh i hate to use the word cns because so little is understood about that is it neuromuscular is it are you hitting your lumbar spine? When you do that with squats and deadlifts, now your delayed onset muscle soreness is extended. Maybe use a hack squat machine instead of a, right, like just in place of, not that one's better than the other, but takes a little off the back. And Dorian always did that. He did leg presses and hack squats instead of squats. One, because he couldn't get the focus onto his quads. And one of the ways to fix that

obviously is a ramp, a squat ramp, like Ben Pack, B Pack uses with his people down there. Like you were doing recently with your heels on the plates. That can get you to focus more on your quads. The challenge with the damage portion, which a lot of people just think in terms of you're only going to grow a muscle if you break it down, if you tear it down. Just kill it, yeah.

It's a small portion of the three components that go into it. Obviously, when you lift, when there's mechanical tension and there's volume, you're going to break down muscle tissue. There's no question. You're going to have some soreness. But that's not the only driver. It might not even be the primary driver. And there's some suspicion it's probably the smallest of the three. and there's some suspicion it's probably the smallest of the three.

So the idea that you can go in there, and this is your four-second negatives, your squatting kind of movements. There's a big battle going on between pumping and tearing down. There's a big battle going on right now. It's a tug-of-war. We don't like the pumping. That's the Phil Heath style of workout. Very effective for Phil.

He probably would have grown on anything. We like the Ronnie Coleman type. Get into the 800-pound squats and the 800-pound deadlifts. That's the family, right? I'm that guy. I like that stuff, but it didn't bode well for me in terms of hypertrophy. I wasn't as good a bodybuilder as I could have been if I had focused on a little more volume more often throughout the year because I went into the... Remember, I told you when I was training with Flex, I built my legs up to 30 inches. We did a lot of range of motion. It was a lot of knee bend. The muscles were at full stretch on every repetition. And then we did a lot of volume and frequency. And then when I came to train with you, we worked up to 800 pound squats. We were doing doubles every week. I lost an inch and a half on my legs, but I gained 30 pounds of body weight. How does that happen? And that's, you know, if just damage, if just eccentric loading was the

primary driver of hypertrophy, then that wouldn't have happened. But volume seems to be a bigger component. And my volume went from huge 36 sets a week to six sets a week and my uh you know total pounds per hour pounds for week went way way way down so it's something for i think people to consider that there i think all of it needs to be employed yeah uh there is no panacea and you can't just pick one or the other uh but you should be cautious i think uh as you get closer into powerlifting me obviously i've always said you should start decreasing volume increasing uh rest times uh and and decreasing frequency and as you go into a bodybuilding show you should absolutely be increasing i don't know both our wives are drinking wine right now i know yeah we're it's all down here

uh last last thing to address so my brother and i are trying to crack the code on uh you know basically why america's so fat how do we help people how do we help people i'm glad you're asking learn more about nutrition how do we how do you help families how do we i think i'm on to something and it's not a pill it's something i wish i did i wish i had a pill buy it now i got my thermos makes your dick hard my thermos love my Thermos. I put my hot meal in there in the morning. It lasts for eight or ten hours. I put three meals in there when I left home this morning, and so now I'm good for most of the day. What's in there? Monster mash.

Oh, there you go. I just put my shit on a shingle. Your bison burger rice and bone broth, and sometimes I'll throw in a little spinach and peppers. throw in a little spinach and peppers. So you asked me what I think the solution is, and I kind of segued into the thermos, because it's discipline, it's consistency, it's compliance. What's the best diet you'll want and you'll follow, right? And the biggest problem now is, and we're losing this battle miserably. Obesity has skyrocketed, right, since the 1920s. It's just skyrocketed, and it's the worst it's ever been. Yet, amongst ourselves up here, the people who aren't obese, we're arguing about, you know, whether it's keto or intermittent fasting or carnivore or no carbs. Yeah, we're

arguing amongst each other. We're preaching to the choir about our diets, and we're, you know, some people are getting very dogmatic about it, whether it's vegans versus carnivores and what have you. And we're completely missing the boat. We're not solving the compliance issue. It's an education component, but it's a compliance issue. So I've danced around for the last few years now, talking on seminars and podcasts about, you know, macros and micros. And I've got a diet, a vertical diet out, I think is great for this and that. It's no better than any other program if you don't stay on it.

I think the next evolution is how do we improve compliance? One way that's always worked for my wife in particular and for us in the business is prep meal prep right right and so I started a meal prep company right I've got these meals and you can eat three these three meals a day and you can stay in your diet and you get your calories under control and that that's helpful but it's not the solution to the problem I think the solution is going to be compliance now we've got these apps out the Fitbitsbits and stuff like that, that help you track your

calories and they track your walking and stuff like that. So along with the meal prep company that I started, we've started formulating a compliance app. There's a medical compliance app and a name I won't mention because I don't think I know it. Under Armour, I I believe purchased Fitbit. Fitbit purchased a compliance, a medical compliance app recently that was helping doctors keep people like type 2 diabetics and people with blood pressure problems, heart disease.

Is that Virta Health Chris, is that what it's called? Is that the one? Am I saying that right? Virta Health, right? That's the guy we interviewed, yeah. Yeah. His success isn't necessarily the nutrition program. It's the compliance to a program. Yeah. And they've been very successful. They've shown a much improved compliance rate.

Doctors can't help with that. They get, what, seven minutes with you? They're certainly not going to be in your pantry at home or finding out if you did your 10-minute walk or checking your you know how much sleep you got they just can't do that right but their app is what we're trying to do for the general health community that kind of thing where we do compliance and some artificial intelligence is involved there people that may not necessarily be may have a disease but it's people that

want to be in better health and better shape. Just want to lose weight and need a little help and a little prodding here and there. And what we do is we set up, you know, some matrix for that and have some artificial intelligence involved such that maybe you weigh in on a daily basis, right? And you put your record in there, you keep track of that. And if we know what your goal is, and we see you're going the wrong direction, or you haven't met your goal, then somebody intervenes. Somebody or maybe initially the compliance app intervenes and says, hey, you missed weight this morning. What's going on? And we start to create artificial intelligence that then helps you become more compliant.

Hey, you didn't take your 10-minute walk this morning. Are you going to get that in this afternoon? And then we know how much they've moved. People are like, this damn app, man. it keeps bugging me. It keeps bugging. And that's kind of what you need is something that can keep you on track. The one that we're going to do is you'll, when you have a meal. I like what you're saying because anytime I've ever been on a diet or any suggestions from you, I'm checking in with you constantly, right? I'm checking in with you. I'm checking in with you. You'll say no, yes, or okay, you know, you can do

that. Or you'll have these different set of rules for each person, right? Yep, and what we want to do is then Here's the next step of that is that maybe these people need someone to monitor this along with the artificial intelligence so we're setting up sort of a crowdsourcing app for clients of You know trainers. Hmm. So now if you're a trainer, you register, you know, you download the app and you become a trainer, an admin. And then you tell all your clients when they download the app that you select them. Now they can see all of their clients' statistics.

They can, when they onboard, then they're putting in their height, their weight, their goals. And then they have a list of compliance issues, whether it's your 10 minute walks or you're taking your vitamin D3 or how much sleep you got last night, how many steps you took that day. And then your meals. And what we set up on this thing is, is that when you have a meal, you just take a picture of the meal, done. It's time and date stamped, it appears right there, and if your admin wants to look at it, they can just go back and look at Fridays Thursdays Wednesdays they can look at all your

meals and immediately be able to see well this is what you ate and then if you're having a problem gaining or losing weight they can they can hone in on the problem immediately and so we'll try and set it up so that practitioners or coaches or trainers can have hundreds of clients and and then be able to set up queries whereby they only have to focus on those that need the help. Those people who are complying and getting the results they want, then they probably don't need a lot of help. Those people who aren't, they might need a phone call. They might need a text.

In that way, we can manage more people with fewer practitioners because that's the ratio, utilizing the app system. We hope to release version one of that next month. It'll be the vertical diet. It accelerates the programming company behind it. But that's cool to do an app. Of course, we'd love them to buy the meals along with it, but it's not required. The app is going to be a free download. The crowdsourcing portion of it for the clinicians or personal trainers will be free and they can be an admin over their clients who also have a free download and the goal with this is now we're going to generate all of this data all of these people are going to come on to this app and we're going to be able to see their initial weight their ongoing you know what how much they move, how much they comply, and see which trainers

have the greatest success. And we can start finding, you know, how that happens so that we can try and replicate those protocols to other people who aren't so successful. So these are the key things to focus on. We kind of know what they are. I have to say, before we wrap up, that I learned a lot from in this hydration protocol recently. I've talked about wanting to do a hydration protocol and put it into my vertical diet. And I talked about releasing it like a year ago, but I keep learning.

George has revised his, George Lockhart. I learned a lot from the Heat Institute and their involvement with me recently, Sandra Goddick's group. And so I'm still working on the hydration protocol for these athletes. And I was able to get more experience working with the CrossFitters. George has, and he may have talked about it on your site as well, he has a clinic that he puts on that's extraordinary. You go inside, you pay to go learn, and he has a week-long clinic where you go to an actual UFC fight.

And I went and participated in this. It was in Chicago a month ago and I went to the you saw a picture of me with Yoel Romero yeah I went to the clinic and I spent five days there Monday through Friday and you're in the driver's seat with those guys handling a UFC fighter prepping for a fight this would be like getting in an Indy car at the Indy 500 and the guy says, here, hop in the seat, and you're actually racing. You're personally checking their weight,

getting them their meals, making sure they're getting their hydration. You're personally going in and helping them with their sweat, whether they're doing the hot bath soak, all of the statistics that go into that. And then behind the scenes, you're learning how to cook and plate their meals. You're tracking all of this stuff for them. And there's an extraordinary amount of education, like you just said,

where he gets up there and he's looking at their body weight and their sweat rate and all of that and their rehydration protocol. You're designing all of that and actually creating their drinks for when they come off of the scale and giving it to them and then timing them 15 minutes later and giving them another one. You're right there. You're doing it. You're handling that. So he's got clinics that he does. You can just go to his website, Lock, Heart, and Leaf, L-E-I-F, or just Locked and Loaded MMA.

But I had such an extraordinary experience I had to talk about it. Locked and loaded MMA, but I had such an extraordinary experience I had to talk about it. August 4th, coming up in L.A., he's doing a full-day seminar on hydration that you can get more information from him. But that was incredible. I was part of that. And it was such a huge deal because Yoel Romero missed weight by 0.2 pounds. And I don't know if you heard behind the scenes. Yeah, they called it off.

Yeah, Dan Leaf talked about the fact. Early, right? Yeah, they didn't give him the full two hours, but he showed up at 2.09 on Monday and had to get to 1.85. They had to pull 24 pounds off him. Wow. It was an extraordinary effort that went on that week. They got him down to 1.86, and then they didn't get the full two hours. They got him down to 1.85.2 in about 30 minutes, and they were chilling.

They go, oh, we have plenty of time. You only got to get two pounds off. That's another seven minute soak in a hotbed and a little towel wrap and he's good. And then the phone rang and boom, he couldn't go. So I just had to throw that in because there's so much to learn out there and I'm still, it's almost like you hate to release something that's incomplete, but it is what it is until we learn more. Are you surprised at the success of the vertical diet? I mean, you've told me you've sold a few thousand. Overwhelmed.

We've had, you know, we can track downloads when people access the server. And there's over 50,000 people now. Wow, that's awesome. That have utilized it all over the world. I get hundreds of DMs and emails every week. I try my best to answer at least briefly most of them but I'm I think I deserve like half I think with all your kids like without being on a super training YouTube channel right yeah I never would have happened 25% something

give me something well that's that's that's the car that is that is really fucking cool we're excited and how many pages is the book? I know it kind of keeps evolving. It's 50 pages. It's 100 references I do to show the science behind it. But I tried to keep it really simple so that you could follow it step by step. It's sleep protocol, hydration protocol. Obviously, nutrition is in there, hypertrophy training, HIIT training, strength training is all in there, programs.

So it's really comprehensive i've gotten nfl football players on it now um major league baseball players on it now obviously the crossfit folks that have come on board olympic athletes medalists and that's the high profile people but the more exciting part is is that the people who who send me testimonials which my site's turned into a testimonial site, almost every day about decreasing, you know, type 2 diabetics getting off of insulin, type 1 diabetics cutting their insulin in half and feeling better and having more energy, people with high blood pressure in the 190s getting down to 120 in a very short period of

time. You know, a lot of these things happen within a week. If the lifestyle changes are made, you know, the CPAP and getting the potassium in and cutting down on calories, losing 10 pounds or whatever, that can happen really quickly, implementing the 10-minute walks, those kinds of getting the iodine for the thyroid gland, getting a little bit of fruit and stimulating the liver. Those things happen really, really fast and people feel great immediately and their gut feels better and they're not bloated. And then the side effect of that is the performance benefit. I don't even think that's the primary goal in my mind. The primary goal is if I can get them feeling better and get them healthier and, uh, you know, kind of fix some of these sleep deprivations, high blood pressure, high blood sugar kind of problems,

then performance is just going to improve as a side effect of that. I think that's the gap is that a lot of people don't understand when you say something like, I haven't had pizza in three years or something. They don't get it. And the reason they don't get it is because they've never been on a quote-unquote diet and felt as good as you feel yeah because a lot of times there's so much restriction within that diet but if you follow a plan that has enough variety and keeps you feeling good and keeps you feeling healthy

there really won't the desire to eat those other foods will be less than how great the results are that you're getting on a daily basis. And the gut health issues are huge. When people improve their digestion by improving their stomach acid, both the amount and the acidity of it, all of a sudden all of those digestion issues start to go away. The leaky gut, the IBS, the Crohn's disease problems. Farting. All the farting.

It really kind of starts there, doesn't it? It does. And I get some registered dieticians have turned their nose up at it recently because they say that I don't put in legumes or cruciferous vegetables like broccoli. Well, there's a reason for that. You know, beans, beans, musical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot. And that's not good. And I have some alternatives to provide the prebiotics and to provide the fiber.

I put some things in there that are low gas. And I don't exclude, you know, a majority of foods. I keep in there that are low gas. And I don't exclude a majority of foods. I keep in a dairy product for calcium. And I keep in, say, a soaked oats or something. There's a little of everything in there. It's really helping people. I'm proud of it. And it's just the industry is the way it is.

And as soon as something new comes out, everybody's got to shit all over it. And try and stake their claim to to knowing everything about everything i've known stan efforting probably for about 10 years and uh extremely proud of success you're having right now uh it's been amazing to see you kind of come into the sport as an entrepreneur bodybuilder and seeing your growth over the years becoming a pro bodybuilder setting multiple world records as a power lifter and then now having so much success actually in the fitness industry it's really cool to see all of it but the coolest thing i've seen from you in a long time is a picture that you put up on instagram with your family i thought that was really cool

seeing other dads kicking ass that means a lot to me because a lot of times i get asked hey like you want to come to this thing or you want to like hey go to this concert i'm like i just that's not even part of anything i can even register because i'm like motherfuckers i have kids yeah you know i can't be a part of a lot of those things and so when i see other people that are kicking ass and have kids and staying on point with the diet being successful in business and still crushing it in the gym, I really admire that a lot. I try and take them everywhere. I travel a lot. I try and leave on Friday afternoon and come home Sunday night. They're like four and six, four and six now. Yep. And I'm doing seminars every weekend. I'm going to be in Switzerland this year, the UK, I'm in Canada seven times and

I'm gone every weekend, but I try and leave as late Friday as I can and come back as early Sunday as I can. I spend the rest of the week leave as late Friday as I can and come back as early Sunday as I can. I spend the rest of the week at home with my kids doing anything and everything that I can to enjoy that time. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never a strength. See you all later.