Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 2645: Muscle Building & Fat Loss Shortcuts for the Over 40 Crowd With Stan Efferding

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Over 40 Muscle Building & Fat Loss Shortcuts with Stan Efferding The impact of ‘island time’ on his overall health. (3:16) Shakes are for fakes, eat steaks! (11:55) Supplementation vs whole foods. (16:22) Busting cholesterol myths. (18:18) Energy intake versus energy expenditure with weight loss. (19:48) The components of lifting responsibly as you age. (25:14) Doing the least amount as possible to elicit the most amount of change. (39:08) The benefits of isometrics. (44:21) Eliminating junk volume. (53:19) The value trigger sessions. (58:03) His attitude toward sodium. (1:00:30) Peptide intervention: The good, the bad, and the ugly. (1:12:54) Related Links/Products Mentioned Visit Seed for an exclusive offer for Mind Pump listeners! **Promo code 25MINDPUMP at checkout for 25% off your first month’s supply of Seed’s DS-01® Daily Synbiotic** July Special: MAPS Split or Anabolic Metabolism Bundle 50% off! ** Code JULY50 at checkout ** Vertical Diet | By Stan Efferding Whole Egg Vs. Egg White Ingestion During 12 weeks of Resistance Training in Trained Young Males: A Randomized Controlled Trial Comparison of once‐weekly and twice‐weekly strength training in older adults Get your free Sample Pack with any “drink mix” purchase! Find your favorite LMNT flavor, or share it with a friend. Try LMNT totally risk-free. If you don’t like it, give it away to a salty friend and we’ll give you your money back, no questions asked! Visit DrinkLMNT.com/MindPump Stan Efferding - YouTube LEVELEN™ | The Leader in Athlete Sweat Testing | Sweat Test Mind Pump #2597: Before You Take Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro Listen to This! Mind Pump Podcast – YouTube Mind Pump Free Resources Featured Guest/People Mentioned Stan “Rhino” Efferding (@stanefferding) Instagram Website Mark Bell (@marksmellybell) Instagram Jay Cutler (@jaycutler) Instagram  Ronnie Coleman (@ronniecoleman8) Instagram Parrillo Performance (@parrilloperformance) Instagram Robb Wolf (@dasrobbwolf) Instagram Ben Carpenter (@bdccarpenter) Instagram Michael Israetel (@drmikeisraetel) Instagram Dr. William Seeds (@williamseedsmd) Instagram  

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. If you're over 40, you won't want to miss this episode. Stan Efferding is on the podcast. He's an expert on fat loss, muscle gain, and he breaks it down. Now this episode was brought to you by our sponsor, Seed, the world's best probiotic. Look, there's a lot of documented benefits from probiotics

including, of course, better digestion, but mental clarity, better skin, and better athletic performance. And if you want a probiotic that actually works, go with Seed. Go to seed.com forward slash mind pump, use the code 25 5 mind pump, get 25% off your first month's order of Seeds Daily Synbiotic. We also have a sale on workout programs this month. MAPS split and the

anabolic metabolism bundle is all 50% off. Just head over to MAPSFitnessProducts.com and then use the code July 50 for that discount. Here comes the show. Dan, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, brother. It's been a while, man. It has been, yeah. Been a little while. You look extra relaxed this time.

I escaped. Is it the island life or what? It is, it is. Last summer I sold my home, packed up, and my family and we all moved to American Samoa. It's where my wife was born and raised, and we've been visiting frequently over the last 20 years and finally decided to head on down there for good. So I've been enjoying island life.

This is the first time we've been back to the States since I left and it's kind of a whirlwind trip. I flew from American Samoa to Honolulu to Vegas and then stayed in Vegas for a day and then I went to Toronto, Canada. I was up there doing a seminar at Fortis Fitness for the weekend, and then I flew down to see my pops in Iowa via Chicago and spent a few days with him. He's 94 years old now.

And then I zipped over to Cincinnati. Matt Whitmer from Beat Training, he was the guy who helped me with John Jones and Henry Cejudo, and did a seminar out there. And then I dipped down to Dallas, Texas to do a podcast with Jordan Syatt. Yeah. Yeah, I love him.

Yeah, I had a great time. Love him. And then up to, back to Vegas and then yesterday I was in Sacramento with the Bell brothers, with Mark Bell and here I am today in San Jose. I'll be back in Vegas tonight, and tomorrow morning back to the island. Oh, good. So you have the best time. Did you keep the gym and property there?

Do you still have it, or did you get rid of it? I still partners with Eric Acetrine, who owns Sin City Iron. Beautiful spot. We finally moved into a spot with air conditioning, which is kind of nice. Did you see? Yeah, I'm spoiled as I get old.

The good old days are gone. Those, you know, those dungeon gyms with no air conditioning and just sweating. And so, but we sold the home. We have no place in Vegas to stay and just moved down to the land that my wife grew up on. She had 11 brothers and sisters, so there's nephews and nieces and cousins.

Oh, that's great. And the whole works. And I have a little 10 and 12 year old that just turned 11 and 13 actually. And they've settled in nicely and it's just a, the whole island is built around raising children. So you're the perfect person to ask this question because you're really smart and you've also

have a lot of experience. Really, it's unique to find a combination of both. Somebody's got the education, intelligence, but also has worked with lots of different people, has trained themselves. Decades of wisdom. Yeah, so there's some really great wisdom. And we were talking off air,

you're talking about the slow pace of the island. In fact, you said something funny, you said there's no streetlights on the island, 25 miles an hour is the speed limit. Everywhere and it took you, you said three months or so. It took me months just to calm down. I felt like there was something I needed to do. You know, you're so hurried in the US. So someone like you, perfect person, asks this question. What's the impact been on someone

like your health and performance? Because you still train, assuming you still eat healthy, it's always been important to you. The only difference is the environment. Vegas versus the island, how has it impacted your health, performance, like all the metrics that you know to pay attention to? Yeah, I think most of it would just be the less stress possibly. The island, most people don't have a, you don't look at a clock or a calendar,

most of the time they have what's called island time. You get there when you get there. And if I'm standing by the car with my keys and tapping my foot because we're supposed to be at dinner at five and my wife's like, nobody's going to get there at five. We show up at 530, there's still nobody there. It's going to be dead, nobody's coming. At six o'clock it's packed. And that's the way it is. And it's been very peaceful not to be so hurried, not to have such a tight schedule. Here in the fitfluencer industry and other people

surrounded with social media, they often come on and put on a, you know, a day in the life of, and it's, you've seen the funny ones with some guys up at 3.30 in the morning, and they've got this whole thing before 8 a.m., they've accomplished more than most people do all day, and they brag about it. And I just have just the opposite opinion now.

And I get up when I get up, and obviously I gotta get the kids to school. I drive them back and to and from school in a golf cart. It's pretty easy going. And it's just less, I've been able to be more calm and less stressed and it's pretty good impact. Like you say, the training routine is pretty consistent. They have gyms down there and I swim and oh my God, I picked up this nasty little addiction about a year ago in Vegas. I lived right on Sunset Park where they have a 26-court lighted from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. pickleball.

Oh, you're doing pickleball. My brother just got the blog, dude. Is it the gayest thing in the world? How far from grace can one make? Oh, dude. He's definitely, he has definitely, he's all in too. He's got himself a little thing that's shooting him home and he's practicing. Anybody can pick it up though. That's the appeal, right? You can pick it up quick and it's fun to play. And it's one of the reasons we moved to the island, to be honest with you. We were there Christmas before last and we had a great two

weeks of Christmas break and we went snorkeling and we went out fishing in the ocean and we went golfing and hiking at a new island and all sorts of different things we did. We just had a fantastic vacation. One of the things they have there is a pickleball association of American Samoa and they have an indoor pickleball facility. And so I made sure to set aside a couple hours every day to go join them for pickleball. And there's a big group, a wide range of people from teenagers to elderly folks that are in their 60s

and up in their 70s. You get these little ladies with a 65 year old with their little tennis skirts on, whooping your ass in pickleball. When you're running around, you know, fuck, fuck, fuck. And the Smolens love to talk shit, you know? So it was so much fun and I met such a big group of people and when my wife asked me if I'd ever be interested

in moving to Samoa, I was like, oh yeah, I move here. And I'd mentioned the fact that the number one thing was probably because of the pickleball. So, and yeah, I talked about my trip from, I said I left America, Samoa went to Honolulu in Vegas. When I landed in Vegas, I talked about my trip from, I said I left America this morning, went to Honolulu in Vegas. When I landed in Vegas, I played pickleball. When I got up Toronto, I did the seminar, then I

went out and played pickleball. When I got to Iowa, visited my pops and the evening at time I go play pickleball. I got to Cincinnati to the seminar, went over and played pickleball. Got to Dallas, did the podcast, I went over and played pickleball. It's a neat thing about pickleball is that you can

go anywhere, anytime, just by yourself with a paddle and you can just join in whoever's playing. They have open play or whatever, put your paddle up and you're joining. Last night I was at Sunset Park in Las Vegas playing pickleball. Oh, that's great. And it's a, you know, it's kind of a social thing.

Yeah. And it's fun. And you know, I've always said to everybody, what's the best exercise of the one you'll do? You'd never catch me in the gym walking on a treadmill. It's just nauseatingly boring, and it's just not anything anybody looks forward to. But I wish people could find something

that would help them move more. And I'm fortunate that I was able to kind of happen onto this little activity. But yesterday, end of my story, I'm talking to Ensema, who's a black belt in jiu-jitsu, that's Mark Bell's podcast host and partner up there, who wins tournaments. He's just a phenomenal athlete for those people who are familiar with Enseema. And I started comparing Pickleball to jiu-jitsu.

And you have to know what a nice guy Enseema is. But the look on his face, and I was just fucking with him, right, I was like, oh, it's just like Jiu Jitsu. Maybe a little harder. And Sema's the kindest guy on the planet, and his face just went blank. And then he starts kind of playing along. Yeah, you can just show up, and then you can like have a match with someone.

And he starts actually trying to. Support your argument? Yeah, support my argument. I let it go on and on and on. I just laughed my ass off. Sometimes when I go for an overhead smash, my shoulder, do you ever get shoulder problems in jiu-jitsu? That's awesome. You know, and Seema's win in competitions is a black belt in jiuitsu, and I'm playing pickleball with a 65 year old lady with a plastic wiffle ball. And I was making a little affairs with poor Ensema,

but he played along. You mentioned the social aspect, and I think that's one of the most important parts of all of this. So you have this social life, this connection to your community, a reduction in stress. How has it impacted things like inflammation, this social life, this connection to your community, a reduction in stress, how has

it impacted things like inflammation, movement, exercise, like objective things that people who listen to our podcast tend to get motivated by, they hear the conversations around stress all the time, but it's hard for them to put that together with what they love, what they're focused on, which is like, how does it affect my fat loss, muscle gain? Are you noticing anything different in your body from this different lifestyle? what they love, what they're focused on, which is like, how does it affect my fat loss, muscle gain? Are you noticing anything different in your body from this different lifestyle? Yeah, well, you know, I've always had that foundation of the 10 minute walks, moving often after meals, et cetera.

And I've of course lost a significant amount of weight from when I was powerlifting. I lost even a little more weight intentionally because I was trying to get better at pickleball. And I haven't moved laterally since college. And pickleball, especially when you're playing doubles, you're not supposed to be much movement, but when you're as bad as I am, and they keep moving you around, I'm just running from side to side. It must have taken me six months or better to get over a lot of the aches and pains from the side to side change of direction movement in my hips and my knees and my ankles and my feet. I had to wear these Joe Biden hookahs, hookah shoes because my feet were sore from playing on the concrete for two, sometimes three hours a day. I would limp home at night and then wake up in the morning and do it all over

again. But there's, you know, the movement is key. Yeah. And the frequency of movement as we know now, we've talked about the 10 minute walks in the past, but even five minutes an hour, just sitting is like the new smoking. And so I do try and get plenty of movement in.

I have lost, you know lost additional weight and more than what I had additionally dropped from power lifting. So my health has been great, obviously. The psychological component of just being less stressed and relaxed is probably the biggest change. I feel like you look the best right now. You look very healthy. Thank you very much.

You look really, really healthy. Yeah, yeah. I feel good. And what's cool about the enjoyment factor, as you mentioned, two hours, three hours, You look very healthy. You look really, really healthy. Yeah. What's cool about the enjoyment factor is you mentioned two hours, three hours. You're not going to exercise for that long unless you're really enjoying what you're doing. It sounds like you're having a lot of fun. Something else you said, Off Air, which I would love to veer off into is we were talking

about the difference between getting your calories and macros from things like shakes and bars versus whole foods. There's this debate, right? Well, it's all the same. Same macros, same calories, whether it's bars and shakes versus food, there's no difference. But you have experience in this. You've trained lots of people yourself. Adams talked about this when he competed.

I knew this with my clients. There's something else about whole natural foods Even when we even we when we count everything and measure everything that seems to be the same What do you think it is or do you think we just don't know what it is with whole foods that makes it different? Well, I think there's two things we can certainly say there's plenty of evidence to support that are pretty obvious One is the satiety value of whole foods over drinking Even if it's a protein shake. We know it doesn't have the same satiety benefit as if you have, say, a steak.

And I've used that to my advantage in the vertical diet as we've talked before, whether I'm trying to, I've got a client or whether I'm either competing in powerlifting or bodybuilding, whether I'm trying to gain weight or lose weight. So on both ends of the spectrum, you can use whole foods differently to impact satiety. When I'm working to people trying to lose weight or having them cut and chew steak. When I'm working with people who need to gain weight, I'm using ground beef and white rice and

bone broth to make the moisture content and the consistency, the softness of the food so they can consume more. So those are strategies that we use that I think are important when you're talking about shakes. The other thing is going to be the micronutrient density of a food as opposed to a shake. The protein might be the same, but are you getting the iron and the B12 and the zinc and the choline and the...

Are you getting what you get from steak or eggs or yogurt? I don't think shakes contribute anything to your digestion, improvement for your digestion. And we know that fermented foods, at least in the Sonnenberg trials at Stanford, they fed either yogurt or kimchi or kefir or sauerkraut to some participants in their studies and found that 100% of them improved their gut microbiome diversity and density. So the vertical diet always intended to be more diverse because as far back as the late 80s when I was started training people for competition and I was

competing already, I found that the over restriction was causing a lot of problems and we still see that today. A lot of digestive distress comes from being in an over restricted state. Same thing happens, of course, with the bulkers doing the dirty bulking. They get a lot of digestion problems. And so, particularly with respect to say the bikini competitors, they tend to demonize and exclude too many foods. They end up with that egg white, tilapia-

And asparagus diet, maybe a tablespoon of almond butter or something like that. I'd always intended the diet to be more diverse to help avoid things like anemia with iron deficiency and things like calcium deficiency. We keep the dairy and fruits and egg yolks for biotin for skin hair and nails and getting them to salt their meals. So we have the diversity matters, some salmon for mega threes. I think that people just get too restrictive.

I think that's what's pretty important about whole foods as opposed to shakes. And then there's the bro science like we mentioned earlier. Sometimes even the academics will say the bros were right. And I said on Mark Bell's podcast some 10 years ago, you know, shakes are for fakes eat steaks. And I think that, that Jay Cutler also said in an interview once he was never able to gain or maintain a significant amount of lean mass on shakes.

He always had to incorporate plenty of whole foods. I hate seeing people drink shakes after shake, after shake. If you're going to throw shakes in, then you know then mix them up, whole food shake, whole food shake, something like that. And how much science is behind that? I'm not sure, but we have plenty of good reasons to eat whole food as mentioned, and the rest is just kind of my experience. Yeah, I think that there's a lot we know about food, but there's so much we don't know about

food, especially in relationship to mammalian metabolism, which is incredibly complex, one of the most complex things we've ever identified. I think a lot of it's mystery. At this point, it's like, this is just what we've seen. I've experienced this as a trainer. You could count everything, make it as equal as you want. It just doesn't work the same. Is there any data that supports that nutrients from whole foods tend to be more bioavailable or your body tends to use them better?

In other words, low iron, if you eat a certain amount of iron from liver versus taking an iron supplement or you need more B vitamin, eating it from meat versus taking a B supplement, is there any data to support that? It's just more efficacious when it comes from whole food versus a supplement form. I don't think we can say that. I think that the supplements are, a lot of them are made to be identical too.

But the diversity is different in food, like you said. I mean, even when Metsone Price was doing his research, the dentist that traveled all over the world and did his research back, I think it was in the 1930s to be honest, it was a long time ago. It was a fantastic book. I think we've all read that some time back, maybe a decade or more ago. He found there were certain nutrients that he couldn't even identify or wasn't aware

of at the time. I think they were referred to one as an Activator X and they weren't aware. Eventually, as time progresses, we see, you know, we weren't even aware with scurvy that it was vitamin C. So we are discovering new things. I think we've got a pretty good grip on it now with the level of, you know, the advancement of science now, but you know, now it's a different kind of

problem is that we're eating foods that are, like you mentioned, they're devoid of a lot of nutrients just because those are the cheap, highly palatable, ultra-processed, calorie-dense foods and those tend to be deficient of it. And then they end up having to put vitamins and minerals in those just to meet some minimum requirements. You just made me think of one, bioflavonoids. We know that, we know that. Actually, if you get a vitamin C supplement, sometimes they include them, but that makes vitamin C and like an orange

more effective, whereas before we didn't understand that whether it was just a vitamin C, orange has other things called bioflavonoids which help with the vitamin C. Yeah, the phenols were important to many of those things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I read a study, there was a study a little while ago, and people quoted often that compared whole eggs

to egg whites, controlling for mac macros the whole eggs produced better muscle protein synthesis levels. Do you think it's the cholesterol? I know old-school bodybuilders swore by it. What is it? I do recall the study. I quoted it myself some many years ago. I think there was a calorie difference. Okay. I don't think they controlled the calories that the macros were controlled, but I don't think the calories were controlled. Interesting. Okay.

And we're discovering now, like we used to think that cholesterol from eggs would raise LDL and increase cardiovascular disease risk, and now we discover that the cholesterol, dietary cholesterol is really a cholesterol ester that the vast majority of people can't break down. Only a small percentage, 15, 20% of the population who are hyper absorbers actually absorb cholesterol from the diet.

We've also been able to find out that the, one of the confounders was, is that a lot of the foods that have, are high in cholesterol, also high in saturated fat. Right. And that makes it difficult. And it was the saturated fat that was raising the LDL and not the cholesterol. Most of the cholesterol that is in your bloodstream is made by the liver or recirculated.

And most of it that's in your small intestine is free cholesterol that was put there by the liver. And in the absence of a sufficient amount of insoluble or soluble fiber that it doesn't actually get taken out of the system. And so a lot of it's just recirculated from your own endogenous production. or soluble fiber that it doesn't actually get taken out of the system. And so a lot of it's just recirculated from your own endogenous production. You know, staying on the metabolism talk, I don't know if I've heard you communicate

this or not. Really curious to your thoughts on, and this is a debate that I feel like we find ourselves in, I can't count how many times I've taken a client that was eating 16, 1500 calories and can't move the scale, stuck there, and we reverse diet them, build, you know, say five, six pounds of muscle, and this is over a period of time, say six months to a year, and I've now got that female client that was eating 1500 calories, eating 2700 calories and staying lean, sometimes even losing weight. Yet you get the science nerds that want to argue that it's not the muscle that's burning those extra calories.

It's, you know, maybe a pound of muscle burns another four to 10 calories a day. Yet I've seen this example over and over of where I've just added five pounds or so on and their metabolism is through the roof. How do you communicate that to somebody? There's a few variables there. Oftentimes the individual that says they're eating 1600 calories isn't really eating 1600 calories. That's a challenge. That's the most common problem when somebody's weight loss stops and they claim

of a certain calorie consumption if they were actually to very accurately weigh it, they're probably going over sips, bites, licks, snacks, those kinds of things can add up, sauces, just oils that you cook food in. It's not a good food, bad food conversation, it's just hidden calories. Secondarily, a lot of times when they raise their calories up, we're putting in more protein. We know the thermic effect of food, they net out 70 of the 100 calories, right? So they're actually getting kind of a benefit from that. They also tend to use more fibrous foods and fiber doesn't really count in the calories necessarily. So they're able to eat more food volume. Maybe the calories on the package

or, you know, on the label might say one thing, but what you net out could be different. And then on the package or on the label might say one thing, but what you net out could be different. And then on the muscle discussion, yeah, you burn around six calories an hour per pound of muscle. Is it per pound or is it per 10 pounds? It's per pound, I think. It's about 60 calories a day for about, I wanna say it's 10 pounds of muscle, isn't it?

For 10 pounds of muscle at rest, that's the key component in the energy expenditure side of the equation, is that at rest, the BMR only burns that extra 60 calories a day, but when you move the muscle, now you burn significantly more. It's not. Yeah, so.

So it's not accounting for that probably because- It doesn't account for that. The reason why I wanted to talk about it is because I think it's a really terrible message and it comes from our space sometimes. We're again trying to argue and debate with each other and I think we lose a lot of people that were maybe considering strength training and building muscle and then they hear this, oh, well it only burns an extra six calories a day, like what is that to me?

That's, yeah, what's the point of that? I'd rather just get on the treadmill or do something else. And I just think it's a terrible message, and it loses a lot of people when I know I've helped many, many clients that were eating 500, 700 less calories just by simply building some muscle on their body. Yeah, and I've got to say in this whole conversation about the energy intake side and the energy

expenditure side as it relates to weight loss, the energy expenditure side isn't very promising. But 99% of the weight loss occurs from the calorie deficit on the energy intake side. More exercise doesn't equal more weight loss. And so the idea of having someone try and do more exercise And that's because of Herman Ponser's constrained energy model of obesity and the fact that people Compensate in a number of different ways when they exercise more they also tend to sit more and it increases their appetite They get hungry and eat more And additionally the body becomes pretty efficient

hungry and eat more. And additionally the body becomes pretty efficient, more efficient. Say day one you go in and do 30 minutes of treadmill and you burn 300 calories, just an estimate. By day 30 you're burning 120 calories for the same 30 minutes at the same pace. Now ideally you'd increase the pace and duration over time I guess, but it's just not the most effective. You get diminishing returns, it's not necessarily the most, people don't adhere to it as long, particularly the hard workouts, the battle ropes and burpees where they're just sweating and their heart rates going crazy and they think they got a great workout, but that's not a client that's going to do that consistently over an extended period of time. So I'm cautious with the energy, talking about the energy expenditure side as it relates to fat loss, but exercise is great for health,

and then the weight lifting is fantastic for everything else. Yeah, and I would even say, I think we could speculate quite a bit. I think a lot of it we don't necessarily understand, because I've experienced the same thing that Adam says. I mean, just changing how your body responds to insulin and testosterone,

all things being equal will change body composition. I know when you build muscle, you increase androgen receptor density and insulin sensitivity, both of which might change how much body fat you store, even with the same calories. Yeah, and that's different than scale weight. You're right.

And so the calories might determine the scale weight, but how your hormonal milieu or your training, your strength training is gonna change body composition. So that's very, and can increase your caloric expenditure over time, your basal metabolic rate. So that makes a big difference. Yeah, you know, I wanna ask you this

because you're interesting in the sense that you've done power lifting, body building, you train heavy, hard, you've got a history of that. To my knowledge, you don't have like these lots of major crazy injuries. And now you're an older guy working out, like how have you been able to do that? And what does lifting look like for you

as you're getting older? Because you often hear the argument, and people will use examples like Ronnie Coleman, like oh, well he's, you know, look what he did himself. He's really injured because of his heavy training. And I can get that rationale, like how do you communicate, oh you know, you can lift heavy, not injure yourself, or what does that look like?

Yeah, Ronnie Coleman's in a wheelchair because of some bad back surgeries, not because of heavy lifting. If he had never had a surgery, he recovered from the heavy lifting. You get little bumps and bruises along the way. And back pain, and people have more back pain who don't lift and people who lift have back pain. So there's a whole pain science, the people who are really good at that I think is Jordan

Fagenbaum and Austin Barocchi at Barbo Medicine and they pursue a biopsychosocial method of pain, Dr. Larimar Mosley's work out of Australia and it's fascinating stuff and they do a very good job of that so I won't try and get too deep into that. So people do, with Ronnie's example, worry about lifting heavy and how it might injure them but in fact lifting responsibly, but you should lift with enough weight to maintain strength as you age. You should live with enough effort to within a couple reps of failure. That would be your effort such that you get a sufficient stimulus, that you're actually getting some result from the training. Probably the biggest thing with me, and I had a few bumps and bruises along the way, you know, popped a hamstring and a shoulder torn rotator cuff and things that happen when you're power and competing at a very high level. I've always said that health and fitness are not the same thing and that if you want to be

healthy, don't compete. As we know, the fitness level required to compete is often at the sacrifice of health. People don't know you were lifting insane weights., I mean, you could expect to have maybe an injury there. Yeah, and the same would be true of a football player. I was just saying, at that point, it's a sport. It's a sport at that point. Or a 14-year-old gymnast in the Olympics with carpal tunnel syndrome, or Achilles tendons popping, or 10-year-old badminton players in China

blowing out lateral collateral ligament. So, it's not specific to the lifting. As a matter of fact, lifting actually prevents injuries. And we see that American Academy of Pediatrics has said that it is essential for adolescents to lift weights. And it has a huge impact on decreasing exposure to injury. So, and it's not, you know, the highest percentage of injuries in the gym, 65% of all injuries in the gym

is dropping a weight on yourself. It's not from the lifting itself. And most injuries are incurred, I guess this gets us to the original question. What I did then mostly was I would periodize my training. I would power lift for a while and then I would body build for a while. And so I would go up in weight and lift heavy weights and then I would actually be dieting down and with more frequency and volume, which was, bodybuilding can be a,

it can be a, how do you term this? Because you're not using maximal weight and you're doing more frequency and volume and you're incorporating more cardiovascular fitness, it can be more healthy than powerlifting. And with that, I was able to have more longevity in the sport. Eddie Cohn trained the same way. He competed in powerlifting meet twice a year and in between the meets,

he would do bodybuilding stuff. High repetitions, lighter weight, more frequency and volume from a variety of different angles and maintained really good health that way and had a pretty long career himself. So that was big, but what I didn't do then that I do now, after learning more about this, and I did a video, the best way to recover from training on YouTube on one of my rhinos rants and I was talking about everything that I did after the training stimulus. I talked about passive versus active therapy.

I always said that the things that are done to you or for you are not as effective as things you do for yourself. So if someone's giving you a chiropractic or a massage or dry needling or a guasha or any of the passive therapies that you go in and have somebody do to you to try and recover from workouts, foam rolling, we're pale in comparison to any kind of movement that you just do. The 10-minute walks, that's how that kind of originated for me as I found out my doms would go away much quicker if I was doing, if I was moving frequently following big workouts.

So that's how I was managing fatigue back then. I was doing everything after the training session. Now as we've evolved with her knowledge, we announce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. We look at everything on the front end in terms of load management and try not to do too much damage to begin with. We try and do just enough training so we get a sufficient stimulus so that we can then get super compensation from that. Not so much training that we're, I always said to John Jones,

hey, we're not digging ditches here, we're building mountains. I just need enough. I just need you to take yourself to a place where it's a little more than last time and then let's cut off and let yourself recover. And I look at the days off as growth days. The training days are breakdown days, right?

You don't grow in the gym, you break down muscle tissue. Even though muscular damage is not a driver, that's just a phrase, but muscular damage is not a driver of hypertrophic strength, and neither is metabolic stress as we know now the pump. It's all mechanical tension, and you have to get a sufficient stimulus to get mechanical tension and recruit maximum muscle fiber, and that just requires that you lift

to within a rep or to a failure. And there's some variance here between power lifting and bodybuilding, of course. So that just, the effort has to be significant enough. Probably even more important than effort, if we wanted to start from the top, we would say that consistency. I've said compliance is the science. Just you have to get in and train regularly.

Can't be on and off, on and off. You're just going to, whatever results you get are going to go away. Joe Rogan said it was like building a sandcastle, bodybuilding. It's just eventually it all washes away. You have to keep at it, obviously. So that would be compliance is science. The next one I think would be frequency is probably the second most important thing on that list, a hierarchy of the most important things for the results for strength or hypertrophy. And the frequency now we're finding, you get far better results from doing three sets twice a week than you do from doing six sets once a week. Far better results.

Now whether or not you go to three days a week, you might may see a tiny bit more results, but the big difference is that twice a week is better than days a week, you might, may see a tiny bit more results, but the big, the big difference is the twice a week is better than once a week. And what's interesting is the academics have always coined the once a week training as, as the bro split. And I thought that was funny because the back in the early nineties, when I used to drive down to Golds Venice from Oregon and take my road trip, so I could watch these guys train and, and ask them questions.

Every one of them trained everybody part twice a week. And most of them trained twice a day. They would split the logs and hamstrings and do the double split. Most of them would do six days straight. It was a push, pull legs, push, pull legs day off. Now we've kind of involved in our thinking and can mentioning that the days off are the growth

days and we've tried to do a little more with less and have more days off. So maybe push, more days off. So maybe push-pull day off, or yeah, we do upper lower day off, upper lower weekend off. Would be an example. If I were, when I design programs now for my clients, I give them one of a couple of choices and that's an upper lower day off, upper lower two days off.

If they wanted to do everything in a six day window as opposed to a seven day window, then they just go upper lower day off, upper lower two days off. If they wanted to do everything in a six-day window as opposed to a seven-day window, then they just go upper lower day off, upper lower day off, and just keep repeating it like that. If they wanted to go to an eight-day window, they could go upper day off, lower day off, upper day off, lower day off. That's twice every eight days. So those are progressions, twice every eight days, twice every seven days, twice every six days. Those are potential progressions that you could design into a program for someone. Start them at twice every eight, then twice every seven, twice, and see if they're still progressing.

So that's your frequency. The next thing on that list after frequency is probably going to be your effort, and that's going to be getting you within a rep or two of failure. For bodybuilding, you can get closer to failure. It's okay to grind some reps here and there. For powerlifting, you kind of want to leave a couple reps in the tank and not do slow reps, uh, because speed is a component for powerlifting. It's a lot of

central nervous system adaptation for powerlifting. And so generally speaking, if you're doing 85% of your one rep max, you, that might be a five rep grinder. Do the three, leave the other two in the tank, uh, for powerlifting. And another thing to consider, two in the tank for powerlifting. And another thing to consider with respect to powerlifting is that strength is specific and so it does have to be a heavier load, 80, 85% of your wind rep max.

Hypertrophy, as you know, can be on any range. You can do a heavy five rep or you can do a light 20 rep. Here's what's interesting that I didn't realize 10 years ago. I thought the lighter 20 rep set would be less fatiguing than the heavier weight, just looking at load. But now we're discovering that it's not, it's more fatiguing. More fatiguing, absolutely. And we know now that it's because there's a lot of metabolite accumulation, possibly calcium channel ions,

or maybe it's not lactate, but hydrogen ion clearance. We're noticing that that's what is causing the Doms. It's not necessarily muscle damage, although some of that can be accumulated in a good workout, but that's, the muscle damage doesn't drive the workout. The tearing of the muscle fibers and repair, we used to think that that was a driver of strength or hypertrophy, and now it's a passenger

and it isn't necessary. So back to, we said effort was the next most important and I guess that takes us to volume. And volume is where we have this huge argument going on right now, right? In the social media industry amongst the academics and the lifters and some people believe in high volume, some people believe in low volume.

At my age and with athletes, I'm much more inclined to believe in low volume. I think a lot of the high volume studies are confounded by a number of different variables. I think that they measure the muscles too close to completion of the study, in which case it's influenced by swelling and water accumulation, DEMA, whatever. I think that they're newbies. In a lot of cases, they're new lifters. And so a lot of the initial volume is probably neural adaptation from lack of experience or coordination with the movements, whereas seasoned lifters would very quickly adapt.

Oh, I agree. I think a seasoned lifter can get more out of one set than a newbie can go out of 10 sets. Yeah, 100%. And the third variable, which I think is the largest variable that confounds a lot of this literature, is that all of the participants who made gains also increased strength. There was a progression in the, or reps.

Right. And that, I believe, is the ultimate driver. You cannot build muscle without getting stronger. You can get stronger without building muscle. You cannot build muscle without getting stronger. And if that's happening inside of a volume study, then who gets credit for the results? Pete Slauson I'm much more interested. I'm far less interested in the most you could do to get the best results. I'm far more interested in the least you could do to get the best results. I'm far more interested in the least you could do to get results.

I just read a study, I just quoted it. Now this was with people over the age of 60, still fascinating. And they took one exercise once a week, over six weeks, 33% increase in strength. Like that to me is far more interesting than the, oh you can do up to 38 sets per body part and see whatever and get 15% more growth than somebody who did, I don't care.

Well here's what we know or we think we know, the first set that you do of an exercise in the gym, you're going to get X result from that set. The second set is going to be 50% of X. The third set, 50% of the second set. So you get diminished returns. Yes. It's not nothing, but it's going to keep diminishing. Right.

And each subsequent set is going to accumulate more and more fatigue to the such, the point where eventually if you're going to do a really high volume workout, you'll get less and less result from each subsequent set and you'll get more and more fatigue, which will create DOMs. Now DOMs and hypertrophy are two different things. You can, usually the hypertrophy stimulus only lasts for about 48 to 72 hours after the workout to which you're growing. And then you see the decline.

So that's when you wanna pop in a new workout. But if you've done so much damage that by the time you do your next workout, you're still sore and you're unable to perform at the level of the previous workout. You're just healing, you're not adapting. You're healing but you're not adapting. And so you have to separate those two things.

And I think a lot of people, they confuse how hard the workout is or how much pain that they're, how much soreness they have. And I did, we wore it as a badge of honor. Look, a lot of this conversation, a lot of these questions that I answer with respect, you know, now that I have the opportunity with my years of experience to reflect upon some of the things that I did wrong, I don't wanna sound like a curmudgeonly old has-been that's just shitting on everybody's program.

I've listened to guys like that as I came up in the third of the years who would just sit there and complain about everything. That's not my intent. It's just, I really want to be able for people to look at this and figure out what's meaningful, what works, and what is probably unnecessary. So they don't have to go through a lot of things.

It's wisdom is what it is, and a lot of the progress that we made was in spite of the mistakes that we made, not because of those mistakes. One question I want to ask you, I would love your input on this, because this is something that we noticed. We released a program recently and the intent initially was for people who don't have a lot of time with their workouts. And what we ended up finding was some of our seasoned lifter listeners,

many of them, followed this program and were breaking PRs. I broke a PR. Adam got great results. So here's what it was. You're doing two lifts a day, six days a week. You're doing 20-25 minute workouts versus let's say two, one hour, one and a half hour workouts. Same total volume but because it's spread out every single day, the fatigue that you just mentioned is removed. Do you think that separating out sets and doing a little every day is more than doing a lot

sometimes, or what do you mean is happening there? I think you should get 48 hours. Ideally, when I said you go from twice every eight to twice every seven to twice every six, that to me is a progression. I'd like to pinch that down so where I said that that hypertrophy only occurs for 48 to 72 hours after a workout. So I want to hit that muscle every 48 to 72 hours.

If you're doing it daily and you do the Chinese with their Olympic lifting, I mean, they do 16 workouts a week. But it's pretty high. Now they're not maximal efforts. No, and the fatigue is not even a factor. And fatigue is not a factor. It's way down. They're not doing max loads and they're not trying to. No, and the fatigue is not even a factor. And fatigue is not a factor. Intensity's way down. They're not doing max loads,

and they're not trying to do a lot of muscle damage, but just doing a couple of sets and grabbing all of the stimulus with very little fatigue, and coming back and doing that as soon as you can. Especially if you're gonna do an everyday workout, you're gonna wanna do maybe two sets. Yeah. For like a chest workout, you're getting all the good stuff without any of the potential bad stuff.

Yeah, and we noticed that people writing in are like, eh, I've been working out for seven years, I followed this program because my time was limited, and I'm breaking PRs. You know what's hard is I just took on a client last week. I still train clients to this day, I still do online coaching, and I was a personal trainer in college

and worked at box gyms. I've owned numerous gyms over the years. And I still do it. And I took on this and I learned something from all of them. Particularly the athletes, the collaborations. It's more of a, you know, a shared experience. Took on a 71 year old client last week. And he was telling me all about all the trainers that he had.

He trained with the former Mr. Olympia and the Mr. AAU whatever. And he's been me all about all the trainers that he had. He trained with a former Mr. Olympia and the Mr. AAU, whatever. And he's been training for 40 years and blah, blah, blah. And he wants to put on 10 pounds of muscle, tall order for 71 year. Yeah. But then I looked at his training program and it was the bro split and it was way too much volume and less frequency.

And, uh, he was lifting lighter loads and, uh, not that load matters. Of course, effort matters more, but, um, I saw opportunities there, a lot of opportunities there. And so the same type of deal. And when I told him he was only going to do two sets for chest, he was like, I had to explain it to him. I said, look, you're going to, you know, I just want you to give it a try. Because I said, all I'm interested in is PRs.

That's all I'm interested in. Every time you go to the gym, I want one more rep or five more pounds. Not every time, but you know what we're talking about. And like you said with all your people who followed your new program, they're setting PRs. And that's all that matters. Did you get a one rep or a five pound PR?

Is all that matters. You can't get bigger. How's his results? Stronger. So far he's doing great. Isn't that great? He loves the program because he's not sore all the time. And I remember for years after I stopped competing

in powerlifting, I kept trying to go back in and do a lot of the same workouts. And even while I was competing, you'd walk around for two or three days after a big leg workout, just in this fog state. You survived. Yeah, you'd just walk around and you just, the brain fog was outrageous.

Your whole central nervous system was drained. Yeah. Really, what we've learned a lot now is that firing muscle contraction is a signal that's sent from the brain. It's not the muscle that fails. It's your brain's perceived level of exertion, which is why my co-author of The Vertical Diet is Dr. Damon McKeune, PhD, RDN.

He was an instructor in the exercise phys department at UNLV and head of the dietetics department. And he did his PhD thesis study was on taking in carbs pre-workout versus swishing a carb drink around your mouth and spitting it out. That's been repeated, there's a number of different studies on that. Such a weird result.

Same result. It's psychological. CNS related. It's CNS related, it's psychological, and it's about perceived level exertion. That's why when somebody goes to the gym, if you're stressed from work or you're tired from a missed night of sleep or let's say you missed a meal and you're hungry, if you get to the gym and you're hungry, that's a distraction. That's why things like caffeine theanine work so well, they keep you focused, you know?

And we just saw another study just came out this week on, I think it was pre-workout stims, that multiple ingredient stims versus just caffeine versus no stimulants, but it was a placebo that was to taste good, they had equivalent results. Isn't that great? In terms of performance. I'm going to sell a pre-workout and call it

placebo. Largely psychological. Even some of the caffeine benefit. Largely psychological. Just to back you up, we just talked about the Chinese Olympic app, by the Soviets by the way, they did a lot of that stuff. What they're practicing, they're training the central nervous system and just to add

more credence to what you're saying, we've heard stories of the mom, the car flipped over, it's on the baby, oh no, all of a sudden she can lift the car, right? There's some truth to that and really what's happening is you're not able to be as strong as you can because your brain limits it. It's afraid that you're going to hurt yourself. In some cases, an extreme duress, you can override that, but through training, you can maximize that. When we first started working together, Justin brought up isometrics.

Now, isometrics, strength athletes use forever and they kind of fell out of favor, but Justin perked my interest. I started looking at the data on it. I'm like, oh my God, like now it doesn't work as long, but in a short period of time, if you want to build strength and activate muscle fibers, isometrics, there's a crazy slope of strength gain and stuff from them. You're starting to see them start to pop back in into training. How do you feel about isometrics? What do you think about them?

And do you use them? I think they're great for a lot of reasons. One is it's probably one of the most, probably one of the most effective forms of exercise for reducing blood pressure. More than running three times more than walking. We thought of that angle. Yeah, it's huge.

And I wasn't aware of that, that research has been nice. Interesting, we've never shared, we've never talked about it. No, that's the, he had another benefit. We talk so much about isometrics, I don't think we've ever talked about that. It's post-isometric contraction, right? Pain relief is a big one for me. 16 and 90 second wall sits, do a few of those

every other day, maybe even a leg extension to a hold, or just a gripper. All three of those have better output than running or jogging or walking for reducing systolic blood pressure. Is that because of the, I'm assuming it has to do with the CNS and how it dilates blood vessels and so you're training the ability to contract relax.

Yeah, I wouldn't be the best guy to explain it but I see that the outcomes are consistent. Wow. How funny when you think about the journey of that, like you probably as an early trainer scoffed at the wall sits and then like, oh this must be, you know what I'm saying? And then here we are full circle,

recommending that before you recommend doing cardiovascular exercise or something else, it's so wild to me. Yeah. Yeah, and in the bronze area, strength athletes, a lot of their training was holding things and pushing against things that couldn't move. And it just, they're very safe and yet super activating

when it comes to muscle fiber. And the strength gains on her, great. If you look at the studies on us, wild, the strength gains you see in isometrics are, you don't get that with any other form of muscle contraction, which is really, really cool. You know, Perillo performance, he's been around for decades. Loved them. It's early as the seventies, I think, or certainly by the eighties, he was

doing the Golgi tendon organ desensitization program. I don't know how effective those are, but that was always, Perillo was trying to turn off or desensitize the Golgi tendon organ is what kind of interprets the load for the tendon to make sure that you don't hurt yourself and it will shut down your muscle contraction or turn off the nervous system because it's worried that you're going

to break yourself. And so he would perform different exercises to try and desensitize that. That's right. I remember that. It was his theory. Yeah. I'm not certain what works for that,

other than just loading over time, which is why I say strength is specific, because you have to lift a heavy weight in order to get your body. And you know what? A recent study that came out in terms of warmups, we've all argued about what the best warmup is, and a lot of folks, they'll foam roll, or they'll ride the bike for 10 minutes, a recent study that came out in terms of warmups. We've all argued about what the best warmup is. And a lot of folks, they'll foam roll

or they'll ride the bike for 10 minutes or they'll stretch either dynamically or statically. And they went through and looked at all these different warmups. And they found that as far as, and whatever warmup gets you to be able to work out is great, okay? But if you're asking what the research says

about which warmup helps you perform the best, none of that stuff, dynamic, static, foam rolling, biking, none of that stuff actually improved performance. The one thing that improved performance was actually lifting, working up to about 80% of your one rep max on the exercise that you intended to perform. And we know that because of post activation potentiation.

You know if you go up and lift, do a single at a particular weight, and then maybe drop down, you can do more reps. So saying get to about 80% of your one rep max, and it's just potentiation of the central nervous system, and then when you do your final set, you'll do better. You'll get one more rep. So I'm gonna add to that because there's a little bit

of context there or nuance, right? So essentially what you're doing is you're turning on your CNS. You're turning on your CNS so it works more effectively. Power lifters know this, by the way. A power lifter's gonna warm up a bench press by bench pressing or warm up a deadlift by deadlifting or a squat, but power lifters and experienced lifters

know how to turn those muscles on, get in that position, get tight, grab the bar, squeeze the back, whatever, to get into that right position to set them up. When you're training a novice person, this is from a trainer perspective, if I have a novice and I'm teaching them how to squat, I can't warm them up with a squat because the warm up is going to look like crap. So we will do what's called priming. And priming is, it's second best, but it's best for a lot of people

because they can't perform the squat properly to begin with. So with them, I would look at them and say, okay, you got a little thoracic issue there. Let's get you in a position where we could squeeze the rhomboids, bring the scapula down and back, let's hold that contraction. And I would piece it out, then get them to do the squat as the first warmup and then they jump in the exercise.

So we call that priming is what we do. I've told this story before, but when I was preparing, when I was backstage warming up for a powerlifting meet, there were a couple things that I would do, because a lot of it I understood was psychological, and that post activation potentiation. I would get on the bench and I had said that I didn't like to do a lot of junk volume or get a pump.

When you're powerlifting, you don't want to get a pump. No. And now I believe that when you're bodybuilding, that you don't chase a pump first. It usually comes along with a hard workout, but can actually decrease the number of repetitions or load that you can use on your top set if you have a pump already. It interferes with the way that the muscle fibers can slide and contract. So two different conversations, very briefly. Whenever I was powerlifting, I would get under and I would maybe just warm up with a band

and get my body temperature up and walk around the room, right? Get your heart rate elevated slightly. I would bench 135 for a couple of reps and racket, and then I would sit there for a minute or two or whatever. And I would bench 135 again for a single. The second time I benched it, it would explode

off the chest. Put two and a quarter on. I'd come down, I hit a single, rack it. I'd wait three minutes. I'd do two and a quarter again. The second time, just fly off the chest. I'd do that with 315, do that with 405. And then I was ready to hit, you know,

probably get out on the platform and hit your opener. But each time I hit the weight the second time, it just... Felt faster. And again, perceived level of exertion is going to dictate or determine your muscle contraction. And my perceived level of exertion on the second set was the single rep on the second set of the same weight. It was like, this is nothing, this is light.

Everything's just flying off the floor. But the first set was like, the second one's, pow, pops right off of you. So I make this analogy when somebody goes in to do a hypertrophy workout. Traditionally, we've all done this in the past. You go grab the, to do an incline dumbbell press, you go grab the 60s and you do a set of 10

and you set them down and you rest a little bit, grab the 70s and you do a set of 10, rest a little bit. And then you grab the 80s, you do a set of 10 and you set them down and you rest a little bit, grab the 70s and you do a set of 10, rest a little bit and then you grab the 80s, you do a set of 10, you rest a little bit, then you grab your top set, your heaviest set that you can handle and you do like six, you know maybe your partner taps you on number seven. You didn't do four sets, you did one set.

One set. And the other three to me are junk volume and they probably interfered with the number of repetitions or the load that you could have used on your top set. Right. And so I would rather do back down, if at all. I'd rather do two top sets than a bunch of junk volume leading up.

That's your, that is what you learned from power lifting that I think made your bodybuilding better. Because the pump, I think the reason why we value the pump, well there's two reasons, I think we like it, you look bigger, so it's really cool, right? I also think getting a good pump really is just a sign that you're well hydrated, well rested, good diet, so when you get a good pump you build more muscle,

probably as a result of the other things, not necessarily the pump. But what's funny what you said about the pump, that you don't wanna chase the pump early because it messes with the, every athlete knows this. You talk to a jiu-jitsu fighter, hey do you want a forearm pump while you're in a match? No, absolutely not.

I can't grip the gi anymore. I suck. You talk to a cyclist, do you want a quad pump while you're out there trying to compete? No. It was never beneficial for me. No. I remember my first time encountering this, an early trainer. I was a young trainer.

I had this kid who hired me, his parents hired me to train their kid who was a motocross racer. You know what his question was? I had this kid who hired me, his parents hired me to train their kid who was a motocross racer. You know what his question was? I need you to help me not get a forearm pump while I'm riding and racing. And at that point, I thought the pump was the best thing ever. How do I train this guy to not get a pump,

you know, type of deal. But yeah, the pump reduces performance, so what you're saying makes absolute, you know, absolute sense. So what does that look like if you went back and you were to kind of reprogram, you know, leading up into a powerlifting meet in terms of like managing fatigue and then also like, you know, eliminating the junk volume? Yeah, well, I think the big thing about powerlifting is, as I mentioned, that you don't want to do grinder sets. So if you're with an 85% of your one rep max, you might be able to grind out five reps, you only do three.

You only do three. And that'll allow you to accumulate less fatigue. You may be even do an extra set there if you want, or you can train again sooner and potentially benefit from that super compensation and start to progress your loads. That's the goal really is not how much you can do in any one workout, but how you can grow by stringing together a series of workouts.

What was that on social media? The lady that said, you go to the gym and you train real hard and you come home and you look in the mirror and you'll see nothing. Yeah. You know? Over and over again, you're like, yeah, go in the gym the next day, we're trained real hard,

you see nothing. So, you know, you could train long or you train hard, but you can't do both. And so I just, I believe in those shorter training, you said you created those workouts, you probably also did some synergistic or antagonistic body parts. You do chest rest a minute, back rest a minute. So now you shorten the training session out of 20 minutes, but you got the same

volume, the same total number of sets for the body. And it's just as efficient as if you'd sat there and done just your chest rest, chest rest, chest. There's a lot of things that you train in those workouts like that dumbbell example that I was giving. You know, eventually I would have the client just do two sets with the 60s, or two reps with the 60s. One rep with the 70s, one rep with the 80s, time to take your top set.

Dorian Yates put all this in his blood and guts, he was right, he was 100% right. Because you're not training hypertrophy at that point, now that we know it's all mechanical tension and everything else is a passenger, there's other things that happen whenever you do a set to work out. You know you're having a central nervous system impact that takes time to recover, which is why people who rest for two and three minutes do better on the subsequent set than people who rest for one minute and they get better hypertrophy and strength outcomes because

the one minute people, their central nervous system didn't recuperate and so they weren't able to lift as significant amount of reps or load on the second set. And we talked earlier about whether it's calcium ion buildup, whether it's cardiovascular fitness, whether it's creatine phosphate is something that you utilize in the first 10 or 12 or 15 seconds

and it takes you time to replenish those creatine phosphate stores. That's why creatine helps, uh, as a supplement for getting that extra rep. But when you deplete those in a 10 or 12 or 15 second or 20 second set, uh, that needs to replenish itself. Uh, and so you're training something else other

than, you know muscular contractions, mechanical tension. You're training something else and that's fine if that's your goal. We say this when we train sprinters too, if I'm training a sprinter and let's just say for example that you're, we don't do hundreds, we usually do forties, but if your hundred meter dash

is 10 seconds and you're training for speed, as soon as you're 10% slower, you're no longer training for speed. No, now it's a little stamina repeated. Yeah, there's all those other things. So as soon as you're, either you rest longer or you go home because you've. You're not training what you want. This is our biggest pet peeve

with plyometric training that you see. Yeah, they turn it into. They bastardize the hell out of that. I mean, you rarely ever, it's at least rare for me to walk into gym and see plyometrics being applied correctly. It's just like- Well, a lot of people try and combine

Cardio. Cardiovascular exercise with their strength training. Even Henry Cejudo, when we were down there working with him, fighters wanna keep moving. They wanna always be moving, get their heart rate up, and they wanna go from, they wanna have short rest periods, they wanna go from exercise to exercise. It's not the most efficient way to train strength. They want to always be moving, get their heart rate up. They want to go from short rest periods, they want to go from exercise, exercise. It's not the most efficient way to train strength.

No, no, no. So it's really hard. So sometimes we would just throw in fake stuff like wrist curl grippers or something, just to let him rest his legs a little longer. So all we were really worried about was the belt squat. That's old trainer wisdom right there. So the superset would be a bunch of shit, like pinky curls. Keeping busy so they'll... These are shit, you know, like pinky curls. Keep him busy somehow. These are great coach. I like these. Yeah, you know, okay. We've got our three minutes. Let's go do another belt squat.

Talk of that was such great wisdom there, right? Like an area where you know, it's best but you also know like I can't This is such a habit for this guy. Yeah, how do I meet him somewhere in the middle where I make him feel like he's still Staying busy. Yeah, but what I'm really doing is I'm making him rest. We'll lay on the side of a bench and do the rotator cup exercise. Yeah. And it's so smart. It's not for anything, but to give us some rest time

so we can smash him on the next hard thing. I became an expert conversationalist with my client, with some of these clients, because let me just make this a great conversation that lasts for three minutes so they forget that we're resting. You brought up mechanical tension. I observed something as a kid over the years that then resulted in me,

you know, including a type of training in some of the programs that I wrote. Now we hear people talk about it. Like they'll call them like exercise snacks. I call them trigger sessions or whatever. But I had family members that didn't lift weights. I had male carriers in my family. They don't lift weights, had male carriers in my family, they didn't lift weights, they didn't have protein diets, had really muscular calves,

had mechanics in my family, nobody worked out. I'm sure that at that point, after six months of doing what they did, and they did for 30 years of cranking on wrenches, they weren't getting a workout, these guys had crazy looking forearms, I thought how are they building these body parts when they're not like working out? They're not getting damaged.

They're not creating lots of waste. They're just moving these muscle groups. It was the tension. It was the mechanical tension. And so how do you feel about including sessions throughout the day? You'll see this with arm wrestlers. Well, they'll practice a gripper or practice a, do you think that there's some value in that for the traditional lifter who can add a few, you know, minor

things in the middle, maybe maintain a muscle protein synthesis signal? Like, what do you think about that? I said that frequency after consistency was probably the second most important thing on this hierarchy of things. Frequency that you can recover from. So I think as often as you can train, and we talked about the Chinese weightlifters and things, as often as you can train, so long as you've recovered from the previous session, I'm all for it. Yeah.

Okay. And that's using all the methods that we just discussed in terms of less fatigue. That's the biggest key is the over-application of intensity on something like that. I mean, we see this with our own programs where we've included what Sal was talking about where we have these trigger sessions that are designed to be, you know, take you

five, eight minutes to do. You're just supposed to get a really light pump, you know, and then you get feedback from how the people are doing it and they're going to failure and they're... The industry refers to intensity as load. That's why I always say effort and load. I never use the word intensity because it confuses my client and it confuses me to be honest with you because intensity to me, it seems like how hard you train, but intensity is, is defines the load that you're using.

Yeah. Uh, it's my understanding in the scientific literature. And so I always use effort that's to, with interrupt to a failure. That makes sense. Load is the amount of weight. Yeah. So I just don't want our viewers to get confused when we're using all three words.

Intensity gets confused, but yeah, load and effort. You know, one of the biggest changes I've seen in perception around nutrients is around sodium. Now, I know, we all, we're in fitness in the 90s, and you know, in the 80s and 90s, and sodium was like a bad thing, avoided at all costs, terrible for blood pressure, whatever. Years ago, our friend Rob Wolf sent us Element,

which is a company we work with. And it's electrolyte. He sends me Element too, thank you Rob. Yeah, and I remember he sent it, and my assistant's like, hey are you interested? Sat in the back for like months. And electrolyte, I'm like no, I'm not interested in that electrolyte powder, who cares?

Nobody cares about electrolytes. And it sat there forever. And electrolyte, you know, I'm like, no, I'm not interested in that electrolyte powder, who cares, nobody cares about electrolytes. And it sat there forever. And then one day I was walking around the back and I looked at it and I'm like, a thousand milligrams of sodium? Like, finally somebody figured it out. So, and now the attitudes around sodium are starting to change.

Let's talk about that a little bit. Is it scary? Should you avoid sodium at all costs? Is it valuable? You know, there's a lot of nuance here. And so bear with me, okay? I put out a video some years back, this sucks, but, or creatine sucks, but this works. This is the video.

And it wasn't really a knock on creatine. I've always said that it gives you a little result. And after a year, it seems like it's somewhat equivocal, but now we've got some of the cognitive benefits, et cetera. Take creatine. Creatine's great. It's cheap.

Give you a little boost to performance, but people kind of overlooked the necessity of salt for performance. Yeah. And in that video, I talked about the importance of salt for performance. And in that video, I talked about the importance of salt for performance. A lot of the academic or the medical community conflated my recommendations with sedentary, hypertensive people. And I got attacked from all sides. But in the video, I very much spelled out that if you're eating a lot of ultra processed foods

or packaged foods, you probably don't need salt. And the vast majority of the country, 70% being overweight or obese, probably don't need to add salt to their diet because 70% of the- They've already got plenty of it in their food. It's already in your food, okay. So I wasn't talking about those folks. We know that about 25 to 30% of the population

is hypertensive, salt sensitive, and they should minimize their salt. They should exercise and lose weight, but they should also minimize their salt. But even in the salt studies, the DASH diet, the ones that reduce sodium to reduce hypertension, they had less of a decline in blood pressure from the sodium restriction than they had from adding in more potassium, magnesium, and calcium. Right.

That was the bigger variable. So don't cut the sodium, increase the other electrolytes. For hypertensives who are eating a lot of processed foods and cut the sodium. But add in potassium, magnesium, and calcium, you'll get a much bigger effect. But we also now have five to 15% of the population we know suffers from reverse salt sensitivity, where if they lower their sodium, they have an

increase in blood pressure. One of the things that has changed since I did that video, I had talked about the research on the J-shaped curve, where when you had lower sodium intakes, you would see an increase in poor health outcomes, cardiovascular disease risk. And that was from the PURE study, which was the largest international multi-country study. One of the authors on that was Dr. Salim Youssef, head of the World Heart Federation, a cardiologist. Unfortunately, what we found out now, they would do one 24-hour urine test for salt. But when you do multiple tests, because the body's salt is constantly, the sodium level and the kidneys are constantly adjusting, when you do multiple tests, you'd flatten out the J curve. You don't see poor health outcomes from low sodium,

but for the five to 15% that are salt sensitive. And so that JK shape curve kind of washed away with the new research. Now, with respect to the general population, those who are not salt sensitive, you do not see a significant, maybe 0.3%, maybe one millimeter of systolic blood pressure reduction for sodium reduction. But you have other problems that occur. You start to get some insulin resistance,

potentially with a lack of sodium, or maybe some water retention even. So for the general population, I think what we're, the current average consumption is somewhere between three and five grams a day. That seems to be okay for the general population, not for the salt-sensitive people, of course. Then for active individuals, now we're in a different realm in terms of performance. If you're a salty sweater, and that's genetically predetermined, we use Dr. Sandra Godek, president of the Heat Institute. She's a PhD in thermoregulation and hydration.

She sends sweat tests. She has a website called levellyn.com. Oh, interesting. L-E-V-E-L-Y-N. You can order a sweat test. They send it to you in the mail. You put a patch on your athlete and let them wear it for an hour during their training,

and then you send it back, and they'll tell you how much salt does your athlete sweat out every hour. That's cool. We did that with Hofthor. We did that with John Jones. We did that with... You see a big we did that with John Jones, we did that with... You see a big variance? Yes, it's genetically predetermined.

Lane Johnson from Pilledale for Eagles sweats out five grams of sodium an hour. Five grams? Isn't there a new, I think Gatorade is doing this right now where there's like a patch that you can wear and actually you can watch it in real time. I'm not sure if it's similar or not. Yeah, Google it, I'm pretty sure it's Gatorade does it.

I don't know how accurate it is. Yeah. I just saw it recently though. Well, that's crazy. You guys five grams per hour. So now you have to drink five packets of element per hour to make up for that. You'd have to design a rehydration program that accounted for his daily needs. We don't do it. The only acute, uh, intervention that we do is probably post-workout, but it helps also to be you hydrated or to have some hydration prior to training. Sure. So that you kind of stave off a little bit of that. And so, you know, with Lane, we had to design a program for him that included, you know,

over the 24 hours. But if you've got two training sessions a day, now there's a shorter window. So salt sweat rate is genetically predetermined. And then if you're in a hot climate or a humid climate or hockey players, if you're wearing clothing while you're training, then you have to take a good look at how much sodium you're sweating out. One of the things we do in sports is we weigh athletes

before and after. There's an, I think the ISSN suggests that for every kilogram of weight that you lose during training, you wanna get about 1.5 liters of water with about 500 milligrams of sodium. Now for consuming salt with water for say pre-workout, which seems to be one of the better times to consume it, you don't want to guzzle it because your body only absorbs it at a limited rate. So you kind of want to sip the whole hour prior to training and then maybe throughout training.

There's a lot of peri-workout drinks that have a little bit of salt in them and then post-training. It's not a more is better scenario. If you take in too much sodium, you could end up with diarrhea. But one of the things with athletes, we want to make sure that the titration matters. I mentioned blood pressure is important, right, in terms of how much sodium you take in. There's a second concern that the concentration of salt can potentially be bad for the endothelial lining of the blood vessels if you're eating a whole thing of potato chips, let's say. So like all at once? All at once. Yeah. The concentration of sodium in your bloodstream, you should have sufficient water to dilute it so it's not damaging the endothelial lining. So that becomes important, consuming enough water with the salt. The other factor is what's the concentration, what's the optimal concentration so that you're absorbing, getting the water

into the bloodstream from the small intestine through what's a sodium glucose transporter that kind of determines the gradient as to how well the water is absorbed. And it kind of gets us back to Gatorade. So a little bit of sugar, good idea. A little bit of sugar, good idea. A little bit of sugar, good idea. Too much sugar, bad idea. Bad idea. Can do just the opposite problem.

One of the things I talked about in this video was when I was doing a power lifting meet with Mark Bell in Sacramento, it was over a hundred degrees and we were in a warehouse and I was wearing a beanie and I was just sweating like crazy. And after weigh-ins, I started downing just tons and tons and tons of Gatorade. And I'd never historically done that. Well, that actually increased my urination and I ended up dehydrating myself and I got done squatting and I started cramping up.

Too much too fast. Too much too fast. The sugar did just the opposite. All the sugar started to get me to expel, to urinate and so I would grab the bar and my fingers actually were cramping onto the bar. I had to actually pry my fingers off the bar. And so it was really, because that's the sodium potassium pump has a great deal to do with muscular contraction and relaxation. Everything

that's affected by the nervous system is affected by salt. The heart for arrhythmias, your digestion, you get constipation, everything that's affected by the nervous system is affected by salt. So I started cramping up really bad and I was actually told my wife to get the keys and go to the hospital. We had to go to the hospital and Mark came out with Jesse Burdick and they were like, what's wrong? And I said, I'm cramping up to go to the hospital. Like, no, no, no, here, drink some. You're not done with the meat. Yeah, you can't leave. So they fed me a whole bunch of nun tablets at the time, which is just salt tablets. And I sat there for 20 or 30 minutes and I just drank salt, salt, salt, salt,

salt, salt, because the Gatorade was high in sugar, but low in salt. It's not enough salt. And the, the, the, the ratio is like six to one. And at most maybe a three to one works. Better to one, two to one. Closer to one to one, And at most, maybe a three to one works. But it should be closer to one to one, two to one, right in there. So long story short, I was able to get rehydrated, I was able to finish my bench, and that was the 23.03 world record total

that I set that day. So it was a salt. Almost didn't happen. Couple years later, Larry Wills had the same problem at a meet in Sacramento or in Oakland and I was there with him and we did the same thing. We had to rehydrate him because he had... So let's be specific, since people...

We talked a lot of numbers here about percentages, usually about 2% sodium, 2% glucose for the drink. So let's make it easy for people. Let's just use a gallon of water. I'm not suggesting you drink the whole gallon, but take a gallon of water, put in 500 to a thousand milligrams of sodium and about 80 grams of sugar. A fructose glucose blend is a little easier

to digest on the stomach. So that could be your water bottle that's mixed correctly. It could be an LMNT with a gallon of water, and I usually use dextrose, but you could use table sugar. What do you think about waxing maize? That's fine too. Okay.

Yep, and put that all in your water and shake it up, and now you sip that. That's your whole gallon. Yeah, and you don't drink the whole gallon, that's an easy way to mix it, so everybody can mix it the same. That would be the concentration, the titration, that I think would be most effective for performance.

You know what I found? By the way, it's another bodybuilder bro thing to sip on the electrolytes all day long too. I just want to point that out. I don't think it's an all day thing, and I do think it's wrong. And again, dependent upon your sweat rate and the amount of sweat that you,

the temperature, the humidity, and again, dependent upon your sweat rate and the amount of sweat that you, the temperature, the humidity, and are you sweating during your workout? You know what I found to be a great natural, and I'll just add sodium to this, and it's just a great natural example of what you said is coconut water. You ever look at the amount of potassium to sugar in natural coconut water,

and then just add some salt to that, and it seems to be like a great ratio. It does. I will say this with respect to potassium because people look past the sodium into magnesium and potassium. I think there's some extra benefit to that. It seems like the sodium is the primary driver.

One thing that Dr. Godic did tell me when I was asking her about potassium, she says the muscles release potassium into the bloodstream while you're working out. She said, so we don't put it in our drink for that reason, eat it with your food. And we know how important potassium is. And we're talking about salt. You can't not talk about potassium. That definitely should be in your diet as well. Yeah. Yeah. Coconut water is interesting. Coconut water, a little salt to it. It's like this nice ratio of all these different things. And you'd want a little salt to it. It's like this nice ratio of all these

different things. And you'd want a little sugar in there too. I don't know how many calories are in coconut water. Not enough, but it's got some sugar in it. Yeah. Just natural sugar. Get your 2%.

Yeah, yeah. 80 grams per gallon. Yeah. So I want to ask you, we're going to take a left turn here and ask you about a topic that, you know, we've talked about on the podcast many times. I've said that I believe we are in a culture

shifting moment in regards to medical intervention for weight loss. And akin to like birth control, birth control changed the world. I think GLP-1s are doing the same thing. How do you feel about them? Do you work with people? Are you using them? Like what's your opinion on this revolution of peptide intervention? Yeah, peptides in general. I mean, back in 2006, I was using melanotan to get ready for bodybuilding shows. There's a peptide.

To get tanned? Yeah, to get tanned for the show. I'm Irish, so I just turn red and back to white. And you gotta be be tan on stage, and those tanning guys just burn me up. So, yeah, peptides have been around for a long time, and they're supposed to, you know, they're short-chain amino acids. There's probably over 60 legal FDA-approved peptides. People aren't aware of many of those, but the most popular ones are insulin, of course. And they're supposed to have more targeted action with fewer side effects.

DGLP-1, glucagon-like peptide is the family that you're talking about for semiglutide and Wigovia and Ozempic and now the new terzepotide is hugely successful for weight loss. is hugely successful for weight loss. And they've been used in, I think, diabetes control for nearly 20 years, best of my knowledge. So we have a lot of research on them going back a long way. I used Melanotan back as long as 2006. It had some interesting side effects to it. So other than the tanning, Melanotan was combined

with what is PT-141. Is that the libido boost from that? You get a little libido boost from that. They're not predictable. You just walk into the grocery store, next thing you know, you're like, yeah. Some melatonin. That's the worst thing ever. Yeah. What do they say about Cialis? Something about if your erection lasts longer than four hours, call the doctor. I'd be calling the-

The wife. Yeah, I'd be calling the wife. So I used those back then and then early on there was some appetite benefits from things like the ghrelin agonist, GHRP6, hypermurelin. We would use those to improve our appetite so we could eat more at the time. GH does that too. GH can give you an appetite. The problem with too much of that stuff is it can cause insulin resistance. It was one of the problems with too much GH or those. And the GHRH, the growth hormone releasing hormones, the tessamerelin, sermorelin, those-

And pexorelin, I think is another one. Yeah. Those all, they help your own endogenous production max out and release at a greater rate. And those can have some benefits as well. And some drawbacks. There's a side effects to everything. And that kind of brings us to where we're at today with these GLP-1 agonists, which have been revolutionary. Yeah.

You know, for the longest time, personal trainer for 35 years, as mentioned, since college, we've been getting our asses handed to us in this industry with the obesity epidemic. It's just a losing battle with 50% weight regain after the first year, 90 plus percent after year three. Most people regain the weight. I think in most of the research comparing

people who diet to people who diet on GLP-1 agonists, dietary adherence after two years with just dieting was 2% weight loss. It's not even necessarily clinically significant. You need 5% or 7% to resolve some fatty liver or maybe even 15% to reverse type 2 diabetes. So it's 2% weight loss. So on the GLP-1 agonist, we saw 17-18% and now tersepidide 23% sustained weight loss over two years. Crazy. So they're hugely effective. They do have some side effects and a lot of it seemed kind of interesting to me. People who use these products and have used these peptides for years, back when I was using melanotan in 2006, I found out really quickly that

you don't take the whole milligram on day one. Oh no. You know, the daily dose, you take a small fraction of that and your body will adapt to it because it causes nausea, which is the same thing with the GLP-1 agonists, cause nausea at full dose. But if you take a smaller dose and slowly titrate it up over time, which

is what they're finally doing now after a couple years of making people puke. The same thing happened. There was a, the side effect of the melanotan that caused the libido was from PT-141. Yeah. Which you can buy by itself now. You can buy by itself now. For that, it's for libido. Yeah, and it was, it was, it was FDA approved for a women's libido because it works on the brain rather than the organs. And, but they were charging like $900 a month for it. And you would hear all these stories about women would take their milligram of, of whatever the name of the drug was, I forget,

and they would get violently sick and start puking. Yeah. I'm not horny. Yeah, they were taking it an hour before they anticipate. Kind of like now, instead of taking 30 milligrams of Cialis, now the generic form is Tadalafil. You take five milligrams a day. And it can provide you an increase in libido

without the side effects. Some people would get headaches, or they would get blurred vision just because of the microvasculature, the vasodilation. But to dalafil now is utilized for libido, but also for blood pressure. There's a lot of health benefits. A lot of health benefits. And the thial lining of the blood vessels improvement

because of the, you know, kind of like beets, the nitric oxide, BPH, that's the increased, the benign prosthetic hyperplasia, you know, increased sense of urgency and complete evacuation, waking up numerous times throughout the night to pee. Tadalafield helps with that. And what's interesting and you probably, I don't know if you've interviewed him yet, but a great person in this longevity field is Dr. Matt Kaberline. He's an MIT grad who's head of the Longevity Institute, a professor at University of Washington. And he's done the bulk of the, not the bulk, but he's done, he's well regarded and well funded by the NIH for studying different things that affect longevity. He's done

all the NMN research and all that other stuff. And with, what's his name from Harvard? There's a lot of NMN research and stuff. Anyhow, Matt Caberline did a, recently talked about like the top 10 things that actually probably will help with longevity. And one of them was Tadalafel. And he said that it seems to have pretty good benefits. And he was actually going to incorporate,

and he's not even a weightlifter, he doesn't have high blood pressure, but he's going to incorporate it into his regular supplement program along with like Omega-3s and because that class of medications, you know, like it's beets, you know, people take beet juice for the same reason, the nitric oxide. But Tadalafil obviously has a longer half-life and it's a much, it's easier to meter. Much stronger. And whatever the dose is, at least it's consistent

because it's pharmaceutically produced. But like that, you discover how to use these products. And back to the GLP-1 agonists, they're incredibly effective. There's been a lot of people making some really big claims about the side effects that are now unsupported by the long-term studies. Obviously, the nausea can be greatly reduced with

titrating the dose, but people were concerned primarily about muscle loss, and people were making extraordinary claims about muscle loss. And as it turns out now, our long-term research suggests that when you compare a similar weight loss, it's actually can be muscle preserving. And of course, if you eat enough protein and work out, then it's a non-issue.

One of the concerns I think people had was that you had to stay on it or the results would go away. Right. Well, the same would be true if you had diabetes and your insulin intake. Same thing would be true if you had high blood pressure and you're taking medication for that or if you had... I argue against that. I think that these peptides are getting abused for some people. I won't lose 10 pounds for summer. That's true.

Yeah, like you're not the right person. For the right people. But I will argue... You just had a 600 pound guy yesterday. Yeah. I will argue that for the right person using a GLP-1, that they will have better results coming off of it than they would had they not used it and lost the same weight because of how it allows you to train and develop different behaviors.

I do think that a lot of overeating, it's very complex, but part of it is behavior-based. And I think if you stop engaging those behaviors, those neural networks start to weaken, you develop other behaviors. If you do it right over time, you can come off and yeah, the appetite signal will go up, but you're not going to have the same pull towards that behavior that you engaged in

when you were stressed or bored or whatever. And that's how we're coaching our trainers and coaches that listen to podcasts to use them. It's like use them as a training wheels to get that person. Tighten them down to a much smaller dose so you can wean them off. That's a key component. That's the biggest, I think the biggest qualm

that we have with it is the name brand stuff like Wigovia and some of that work. Preset pens. Yeah, the preset pens. It's like, but so many people. So we did a thing last year where we took, uh, we took a group of 50 people all that were already taking GLP once. And we took them through.

It was, we kind of wanted to do it just to see and learn. Right. And we met with them every week and wanted to see it. And almost all of them that had any of the nausea problems, it was all because they had the preloaded doses. Almost everybody also at one point hits a plateau where they have to reverse die, where they need to come back on the dose a little bit

so they can increase some of the calories, build some muscle. And so that was the most common things that we found. Have you personally experimented with it at all? I haven't used it myself. So I took it last year. Did you really? I did, and I wanted to take it so I could speak firsthand.

We understand the science, we've read on it, but I also wanted to feel, I didn't need to take it to lose weight, but I wanted to see what would happen, how I would react. It was mind-blowing, the disassociation that I had with behaviors around snacking and stuff that I would crave and habits.

Obviously, I've been a bodybuilder before so I could discipline myself for periods of time of eating only this. But how much I had none of that noise. None, I mean it was so strong. Two things you said there. One, addictive behavior in general. We see a reduction in alcoholism.

That's weird, yes. Cigarette smoking. Just gambling. Yes, gambling, we see reduction. Stan, it was wild. Gambling with C redux. Stan, it was wild. Nothing I've experimented. Like the food noise is incredible. And that's, that's the, I was just watching a video, uh, BD Carpenter.

I've never met him. He does a great job on Instagram. It's a fantastic job. Um, he and, uh, uh, so he fit his wife. He did a fantastic video and I had told this story myself many years ago, not as well as he told it, but I talked about the fact that one of the reasons I have some empathy with respect to people's appetite signaling is because I used to body build.

And when you diet for a body building show, food would just preoccupy your brain. I think I told this story. You dream about it. You dream about it. And in 3D dream of the pizza going across the conveyor belt and the pepperoni curling around the edges, the cheese bubbling. You would just dream about food.

You would have no interest in sex. You would just 24-7 food. And he was telling the story about how he was prepping for a bodybuilding show and he was telling his sister about this and she looked at him and she suffered from obesity for her whole life. She said, you just described every day of my life. And people understand that bodybuilders diet down

sure to single digit body fat and have enormous hunger signaling, like we'd mentioned. But if you diet down from 40% body fat to 37% body fat, you have the same, the same feedback. Just because you don't have a six pack doesn't mean you don't have the same hunger. So food noise was huge. Two things with that, one thing I heard Mike Israel tell us one time, but I hadn't even considered, he said, imagine the productivity loss. And I thought that was incredible because she's constantly thinking about food. That's a huge one. And then also as a trainer, you have to find a way to get your

client to eat enough. Because they end up getting too low a protein and they just aren't eating. They don't think about food. When I have clients that take it, sometimes they're like, have you eaten today? They're like, I don't think so. They haven't thought about it. They might eat one meal a day. And that's a problem, I think, that a good trainer and a good supervision, that's what it needs. It needs a good coach and trainer with it.

I think you're gonna see some people fix one problem and trade it for another. Overweight problems, then under muscle problems, which, look at the data. Undermuscled and being weak is as bad or maybe worse for you than even obesity in some cases. So I think good coaching is really important with that. But we interviewed Dr. Seeds,

he's one of the world leading researchers and doctors on this, and he speculates that it acts on the hedonistic reward systems of the brain, which is why you see some people suddenly like, I don't wanna smoke, I don't wanna smoke cigarettes all of a sudden, or I don't even want alcohol, or I'm not gambling. So, and I think what we've done in our

have everything you want, society, food, engineered to be like drugs, like effects, I think what we've done is we've messed up our hedonistic signaling. I really do. And so I think in some cases, because we've trained lots of people, what happens when you train lots of people

is you might be a fitness fanatic, you might think you have it figured out, you train enough people and you're like, wait a minute, this is very different for this person. You have empathy. Whereas I think some fitness fanatics look at people who struggle with obesity and just think you're lazy

and you don't have enough discipline. And it's like, no, I've trained enough high-powered executives who have incredible accomplishments who struggle with obesity to know it's not just discipline. They're very disciplined in other areas. It is appetite dysregulation. It's growing, leptin resistance. There's something else going on.

There's plenty of hormonal challenges there. I'm gonna say the same thing about discontinuing GLP-1s. Would you say somebody that was hypogonadal or somebody that was hypothyroidism, would you tell them to discontinue their medication as hormonal problems? So it's all. That's another theory is that there may be a GLP-1 deficiency in some people. That might be a result of lifestyle or who knows. So I do think it's an interesting topic.

Yeah, I'm fully for it with further right people and managed correctly like yourself. And you guys have done as much as anybody to see how that works. Very cool. Stan, always a pleasure having you on, man. Thank you. Sorry it took so long to get you back on the show. That's fine. Another, always a pleasure having you on, man. Thank you. Sorry it took so long to get you back on the show. No, that's fine. Another six months, I'll probably leave the island. Yeah.

Anytime you come over here, you just have to hit us up. That's what I do. I couldn't believe how cold I was when I got here. Yeah, it's cold. It is cold here. I've been in shorts and a tank top for nine months straight. Always good to see you. Thanks, guys.

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