Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 563: Nourish Balance Thrive Podcast on Optimizing Performance & Preventing Disease

Episode Date: July 31, 2017

In this episode Sal and Adam speak with Christopher Kelly and Dr. Tommy Wood, the CEO and Chief Scientific Officer, respectively, of Nourish Balance Thrive, an online-based company using advanced biochemical testing to prevent and reverse chronic disease, as well as optimize performance in athletes. Learn more at www.nourishbalancethrive.com Guys intro their conversation with the guys of Nourish Balance Thrive podcast (1:30) Food Quality vs. Quantity (4:15) A signal of taste/palatability Regulate calorie intake Elimination diet “Bliss Point” How do you deal with clients wanting/needing to take supplements? (17:45) Testing Blood chemistry/stool testing Creator tells his origin story Diet, activity and stress levels “Angry Birds” analogy Start playing the game They ask Adam about his clients that have hired him (36:20) Aesthetic focused Locked into contract 3 months Use wearables Resistance Training Body fat test They ask the guys how they created their programs. (49:35) Sal tells the story of training Doug MAPS Anabolic (Red) Trigger sessions Frequency Follow formula Phase workouts Teach proper recruitment patterns Before/after photos Transformation stories The guys talk about the business and attracting new fans (1:12:15) Transparency “Idiot savants” Raw and true Entertaining How did the guys make the decision to take on sponsors? (1:17:45) Kimera Koffee Nootropics Performance Analysis test How long should endurance athletes wait to eat food? (1:43:00) What diet is better for endurance athletes? (1:45:40) Food processing Cannabinoids Elimination diet Get our newest program, MAPS Prime Pro, which shows you how to self assess and correct muscle recruitment patterns that cause pain and impede performance and gains. Get it at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Got a beard? Condition your beard with Big Top Beard Company’s natural oils and organic essential oil blends to make it not only feel great but smell amazing! Get Big Top Beard Company products at www.bigtopbeardcompany.com, code "mindpump" for 33% off. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts!

Holy moly, what is today, Sal? I think it's the final day. It's the final final. Not again. Yes, again, again, again. It's the final day for the Maps Prime Bundle, which includes Maps Prime, which is our program designed to help you figure out

how to prime your individual body for your workouts and believe us, it makes a tremendous difference in your progress if you prime properly. That's right, believe us. It also includes Maps Prime Pro, which is correctional in nature. It comes with seven self-assessment tools. So you can assess things like how your scapula functions, your shoulder blade, your shoulder,

your hips, your ankles, your toes, your wrists, your neck, your lumbar spine. Based on those tasks, it helps direct you to correctional movements and exercises that are unique to this program that will get you moving better, alleviating pain, and of course, working out better. Both programs are put together in this bundle, and they're discounted tremendously. And today's the final day for this discounted bundle program. You can find this at minepumpmedia.com. If you wanna pump your body and expand your mind,

there's only one place to go. Mind up, mind up with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So something we did a little bit different. This is kind of cool. We were interviewed by a couple guys, very, very cool characters. Man, Christopher, Kelly, and Dr. Tommy Wood

are both the CEOs and the chief scientific officer for NERSH Bounce and Thrive. They interviewed Sal and I on Saturday, and it was a really good conversation and we decided that we would throw this up on the Mind Pump podcast also for you guys because we went back and forth even though they were interviewing us, we got a chance to actually dive into their business and some of the things they were going on. Great conversation man.

Excellent conversation to very, very intelligent gentleman who are what we believe to be working on really the cutting edge of analysis for performance. I mean, I called it the Holy Grail of what they're working on is potentially the Holy Grail. Really keeping eye out for these guys. They've got an excellent podcast, too, called Nurse Balance Thrive. Well, what you see they're doing is it reminds me of like Uber and Netflix and these businesses in the future that are cutting out the middle man. Nowadays, what happens? You feel your sex drive is down, you don't have energy, your grouchy, whatever, and you start to notice

that for a long period of time. So what do you end up doing? You go see your doctor because you're not sure what's going on where they have actually been working on this for the last three years of gathering all this data from people and testing blood and urine tests to go with to correlate with a series of questions to help predict what you may be lacking in. Yeah. So literally, I mean, I call it the Holy Grail because it's like a, it's a questionnaire that then is been pretty accurately predicted predicting in terms of where they would want to go now. High 90s, I believe he said like 98, he says it in this episode. So you'll see it.

I believe it was 98% or something. He talks about it and we get into a lot of different things. We talk about gut health and the science of exercise. And they interview us about why we started the podcast and what went behind the creation of our programs. Had a lot of great conversation with these two gentlemen. Two of my favorite podcast hosts that I've met so far, and the cool thing is they're in our backyard. They're based out of Santa Cruz.

So we're going to be posting in the show notes a link to their seven minute performance analysis, which is free, and there's gonna be also a link to a video that explains how it works in the show notes. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Christopher Kelly and Dr. Tommy Wood. Food quality versus quantity. I wanna go straight for the frickin' controversial shit. I Wood. Food quality versus quantity. I want to go straight for the freaking controversial shit.

I want to start with something like that. What's more important? Food quality? Why? No, you say that so sure, but there are people in the fitness industry who will say, no, the most important thing is calories and then macros. And then food quality is somewhat important, but it's not nearly as important as the quantity just don't overeat. Why do you say quality? Because it makes doing the quantity

bit that much easier. If you start with the fact that the food that we're eating today so if you do like an if it fits your macro style approach the food that you're eating say you're eating a lot of junk food, processed food. The hormonal effect that that food has is completely disconnected from the macronutrient content. So you can process a food and it will have a much greater effect on your physiology without changing the macros. So you're doing something, you're manipulating the food, you're telling your body that there's something in that food that isn't there. So you have a much higher say glucose spike, insulin spike, with completely the same macro content.

And so you're telling your body to try and adjust based on that when it doesn't know how to do that. So the problem that we're seeing is that people are putting their body in a scenario where it doesn't know how to control its calorie intake. And yes, the important thing is to have a net calorie balance. It's impossible, literally impossible to figure out exactly how many calories there are in a piece of food. Like, you can't do it.

That's such a great point because people like, oh, no, I know exactly how many calories I'm eating. Which, I tell people this, you go to, let's give an example of a popular place like Chipotle, right? So you can go on to Chipotle's website or you can go onto your fat secret my fitness pal Chipotle pops right up. They have the serving size. What is anybody who's ever ate there more than once knows that there's always the chick

that hooks you up. There's always the guy that doesn't hook you so much up and how much of a difference. So each one of those, right? It's first the white rice, then the black beans, then comes this chicken serving. Each one of those easily can be off anywhere from 80 to 300 calories, each one of those cubes, which can now be a net difference of like a thousand.

That's a huge difference. Even if you go back to the actual calculation, they did in the first place, you've taken the food and you have like a standard portion size, right? And you do some chemistry to figure out how much, how many amino acids there are, how much glucose there is, how much fat there is, then you can set fire to it essentially and that tells you how many calories there are. I do. It's just complete nonsense because that's not how the body actually processes anything. But then, so you can do that with a food, right? But if

you're actually calculating how much energy your body gets out of something, so you can do that with a food, right? But if you're actually calculating how much energy your body gets out of something, so say, like I said, it's been ground down compared to how it was as a whole food, if it's raw or cooked, compared to what the calorimeter says when you've set fire to that food and it tells you how much energy is in it, that can vary by almost up to 50%. So your, the error compared to what the back of the packet says versus what your body actually absorbs is so large that when you're stuck just trying to calculate calories macros from what's on the back of a packet,

it's literally impossible. And this is why, because let's be honest here, for the last, I don't know what, four decades we've been told, we've been told this model, eat less, move more. It's all about calories in versus calories out I don't know what, four decades we've been told this model. Eat less, move more. It's all about calories and versus calories out

and calories are all that matters. And what's been happening is the opposite in terms of the results that we're getting. People are heavier, people are sicker, and it doesn't seem to work that way. And in fact, when people are told to make general healthy decisions versus just cutting calories on a long term, the ones that make the healthier decisions have longer term success.

And there's something else that we don't talk about a lot, mainly because we don't understand well enough, and maybe you do, because I know you have a background in neurobiology, but the palliability of food, the signal of taste, even if it doesn't have a calorie attached to it or a macronutri attached to it, that is another signal that is telling your body different things, and it is a driver in the sense that it does drive behavior. So if you're constantly just counting macros and calories, and it's consisting of these super engineered highly palatable foods that you would never find in nature. And let's be honest, the body did not evolve.

There's not a pop tart tree. Yeah, exactly. The body did not evolve, even understanding what these combinations of flavors can do to the body or what they mean, because your body translate taste from an evolutionary standpoint to nutrients, right? Like sweet means this and salty means this and bitter means that and the combination of these things being this

doesn't mean that anymore. We don't even talk about the taste, which may be why lots of studies are showing things like calorie-free sweeteners actually have a negative effect on you know, weight and metabolic function and it may be separate from the fact that it affects things like your gut microbiome. And maybe it's just that you're sending this sweet signal that's not accompanied by sugar or other types of things that you normally get from those things.

So all of this stuff is very important to take into account. And you'll find, again, working with clients like we have, I've worked with probably thousands of clients and hundreds of trainers of trained clients. And every time we change our message to focus on food quality, it seems like the rest of it falls along. Whereas the other way around doesn't always work that way. And there's a simple reason for that.

And it's because, so like you say, there's a whole, there's a huge industry and science behind making food hyper-parad Manual, so you want to eat more of it. So you could, if you have the patients of a saint, you could manipulate the calories in that food so that you eat less of it. You could do it. It's just super fucking hard because that food is telling you I want to eat more of it. And so when you focus on food quality, like you say so,

what happens is your brain is actually finally allowed to regulate its calorie intake. It's supposed to. It's supposed to. So if you put the body in an environment where it actually understands, then if you eat 5,000 calories one day, you're just less hungry the next day and you eat less food and it all evens out.

But you have to put the body in a scenario where it can do that. And when you're under artificial lighting all day, you're inside, staring at your computer, you're not moving, you're eating processed food. That is not an environment where you can regulate calorie intake. And so it's just, you can do it, you can,

cut calories if you really want to and do it long term. And that works for some people, but it is just really hard. Well, here's the challenge is, and I know this is anecdotally speaking, but I know we've also had tons. You guys too have worked with lots of people. When you grew up like myself, like I grew up allowed to eat all the sugar,

candy, cereals, ice cream, all these things, all these palatable foods that we're talking about. So as an adult, I didn't want fruit and vegetables. They tasted bland, just fuck. I would eat a strawberry and a strawberry doesn't taste like anything to me. I'd eat vegetables and it would be like,

bleh, it just tastes like I'm eating grass. Like this is awful. And I remember as a trainer, I would start to get these clients and they would express the same thing back to me. And I'm like, inside I'm trying to, as a trainer, tell them what to do, but I also understand I'm going like, I know I hate that food too. It took me a long time before, and this is why too,

I always recommend like an elimination diet to people at first if you've been somebody who's been poorly eating for a very long time and you know that, and then to slowly reintroduce foods back. It's amazing what happens when you clean your system out, you get rid of all that shit, and then you actually start to reintroduce things like fruit. Now, after I've done this, and I go,

whoa, an apple, a strawberry is so powerful, and so sweet and taste amazing, then go try and have a sour patch, can't, or go ahead and see how crazy strong that I was just sharing with you guys at breakfast, why I can't eat at this breakfast spot next to me, because I bite into it, and I could taste the sugar that they're pouring inside of it.

And I think wow, a lot of people love this because they're, but they're used to that. So now there's this, what's happening with all these foods that are being processed and made is it's like, it keeps coming. A competition man. It reminds me of the pre workout game right now, right? When pre-verk house first entered the market like 10 years market like ten years ago was like hey throw a little bit of caffeine

in there people are going to feel that well now it's like 300 grams now 400 grams well now that's nice now some of them are getting banned because people are dying from taking right and the food industry is the same thing it's like who can make it sweeter who can make it stronger because we're getting so adapted to this is a there's a balance there they have something called the bliss point uh... that's that's the technical term. And it's basically, if it's too sweet or too salty or too much, you'll stop eating it because your brain is thinking,

okay, I've had enough of this. You get flavor fatigue. So they get to a point where they have the right mix of salty and sweet and umami and they sort of manipulate it. So that your brain never gets tired and then you eat more and more and more. That's right. That's right. That's right.

One of the best ways to do that is to get send your body your brain different signals of taste. So if you're eating something that's really sweet and you're eating a lot of it, and let's say you're in a food competition and you need to eat more, but you just can't stomach eating more of it. One of the most effective things you can do

and professional food eaters will actually do this is they'll introduce something. Have you seen the show? guys in the show man versus food Yeah, so Robo if did he told that story on your podcast, and yeah, and actually I've done the same thing So I did the hundred nugget challenge I had a vanilla milkshake with me because I know that I got but I would get bored of eating chicken nuggets This was not recently, but I was And then and then you get like through your 20 chicken nuggets and you have a sip of vanilla milkshake,

you're like, yes, I'm ready for some more chicken nuggets. Isn't that crazy? I mean, I find that so fascinating to me. It's what an interesting paradigm to think of that. The human body has got such an effective, inefficient regulatory system when it comes to food. Actually, your body systems are all very, they're all very effective and efficient when they're healthy

and when they're in an environment that they kind of evolved to be in. But because we've changed our environment so drastically, it throws those things off and the side effect of that is chronic illness or obesity. When we allow them to work the way they're supposed to, then we find that food regulation isn't that much of a problem, just like other types of regulatory systems. Rob Wolf talks about he's the example of pornography and how that literally rewires the brain to be so responsive to extreme novelty that you've got 20-year-old men suffering from

erectile dysfunction because their brains have now been wired to respond to a situation that would never have existed. Because that girlfriend doesn't want to be tied up bent over the table. Because she's 17 years old. And videoed from some gynecological standpoint. Or just having access to a million different women and pictures and all these different things. And so rewires the brain. Well, that's what's happened with food. That's what's happened to us with food.

We're in an environment where I can literally have any flavor I want within five minutes. And this has never existed ever in human history. And because of that, we know that's the driver behind the market that the market responds by feeding just that. So when you look at the foods that you buy at the grocery store, especially the processed ones or in particular the processed ones, the vast majority of R&D, you know, research and development money goes into two places, how the palatability and the marketing behind it.

Very, very little goes into nutrition. It's literally, this is how much goes into nutrition. Okay, cool, everything's done. Throw in some vitamins, so we could say it's vitamin four to five, and there we go. But it's not even vitamins, it's, I'm thinking of iron, particularly. They throw in iron filings, you know, so you,

you know, there's like, I know this one. You know, those magnetic things, you know, those little iron filings used to play with them with magnets when you're a kid, because they were like stick, so you know, you know, those, I know this one. You know those magnetic things, you know those little iron filings used to play with them with magnets when you're a kid, because they were like stick, those little, like the dudes face and you make a must have. That's what it is.

And then it's iron fortified, because they've thrown in iron filings. And you can actually do this and video there. There's some awesome YouTube videos. You can watch people extract iron filings out of cornflakes. So they like blend it up and create the sort of mush of cornflakes, and then you can use a Mac.

Shut the fuck up. No, you should watch. I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Because you know, then you say, well, there's iodine in these cornflakes and it's, yeah, it's like eating some of your cast iron cooking pot. Like, did you know that? I had no idea. I did not know that.

Wow. That's terrible. Wow. I'm gonna do that. No, no. I have to do that. I feel like I have to go test that out. That's crazy to me. That's terrible.

So we've talked about protein spiking and stuff, right? We've talked about that. Oh yeah, protein powders. There's independent laboratories have gone in and tested some of these protein powders and found what's called protein spiking where they will add individual amino acids because of the way the testing, right?

So when you test the protein powder, see how many grams of protein are per serving, you're testing individual amino acids and based on those, that'll tell you, or nitrogen, whatever, we'll tell you how many grams of protein. So what these companies were doing was just putting those in their powder so they could say,

45 grams of protein per serving, when in reality it's 25 grams of protein per serving with like extra, you know, whatever amino acids just to show up on the test. And so it's a problem that we're running to, especially in the cosmetic fitness industry, because so much of it is driven by supplements. How do you guys deal with that working with,

I know you guys do online coaching quite a bit. How do you deal with people who come to you and ask you like, I wanna take all these supplements, I wanna, these are the things I know to work, like, what are some of the things you talk to them about in that regard? Oh, we talk about the testing, right? So, I mean, I think everyone that's been through

a bad health experience has tried taking a whole bunch of supplements to see if they help. And you realize that you just can't guess. It's like a shoot and a shotgun from the hip, you just can't do that. You've really got to do some testing and find out which things you need and which things you don't. And so that's our approach is we use urinary organic acids and we use blood chemistry

and we use stool tests. Oh, very individualized. Yeah, so it's totally every single plan is bespoke. We're only going to give you something if we think you're going to benefit because we've done a test. Now you said you had a personal story for how you got into all this. Did it start that way or is that where you just kind of came to after? Yeah, I would, if I sometimes wonder about that, where I would be now, if none of this had happened, whether I'd still be sat in the back office of a hedge fund somewhere,

as programming computers, which would be quite sort of awful and brilliant at the same time. So yeah, I'm British, obviously. I came to the West Coast in 2001 and I had a fantastic opportunity with Yahoo, the local tech company we're here in San Jose. And so I'm seeing again, all some of the, I used to live in Parlor Auto, so it's kind of cool to see people with the word Nvidia on their license plate.

And that's like, kind of gets me quite excited my undergraduate degrees in computer science. But I'm really active, fell in love with the West Coast lifestyle surfing, mountain biking, kiteboarding, snowboarding. It's an incredible place. You can do all these things right here within a very short distance. And so fell in love with a lifestyle, got competitive on the bike, did some mountain bike races, started winning, upgraded, started winning some more, got a coach, started eating more food because I was doing more cycling and you can guess the food I was eating was the stuff

that was getting me into trouble and eventually the wheels came off the wagon, a lot of fatigue but not related to exercise, you know, just normal fatigue during the day, like falling asleep under my desk and stuff like that. And then not being able to sleep at night, absolutely the worst thing in the world in Somnia, one of the worst things I've ever experienced. And then just terrible sex drive and erectile dysfunction and bloating and all these terrible problems. And I went to my local medical doctor

because we had fantastic health insurance, obviously, with the big tech companies. And he was worse than useless. He said, okay, so here's some viagraph for the erectile dysfunction. And then you should probably go and see a gastroenterologist, so which I did. And the gastroenterologist was worse than useless.

They said, oh, here's some steroid anti-inflammatory drugs. Oh gosh. And when those stop working, and they will stop working, then we can start cutting bits out. And... Always treating the symptom. Yeah. And so I kind of knew as an engineer,

you're like, this guy doesn't really seem like he understands what it might be causing these problems. You know, as any engineer will tell you, if you want to solve a problem, you have to understand what caused it. And even as a mountain bike, there's a really good analogy that I think that every cyclist will understand that when you get a flat tire,

you get a thorn or something stuck in your tire and the tire goes flat and you pull it all to bits and you pull out the tube and maybe there was no tube in there to begin with, you've got tubeless but what are you putting in a new tube? You have to understand what it was that made that tire go flat because if you just put in a new tube, it's going to happen again. So why do doctors do something completely different from everyone else on the planet? It's really strange but I got really lucky. So I had this suspicion, but I got really lucky that I met my wife.

And it's funny, you've just been talking about food quality. And so she just finished her master's degree in food science. And then you've got two options really. You can either become an nutritionist or a dietician, or you can become a flavor chemist, which is one of these people that creates hyper-pality in foods and makes them into a good business model.

And she decided that both of those things were not for her, for obvious reasons, right? Like, I don't really want to be evil in this world. And so she chose a different, she was actually working for a local company here selling school lunches, but that wasn't really much fun either and she ended up at McKinsey. But yeah, that was where she was working when I met her. And she said, oh, you should really try an elimination diet before you go under the knife or take any of these drugs. And so that's what met her. And she said, oh, you should really try an elimination diet before you go under the knife or take any of these drugs. And so that's what I did.

And of course, it got fantastic results. It was absolutely amazing, like the transformation. And I measured some stuff in blood. High sensitivity seriative protein was one of the blood markers that I saw go from seven, so less than 0.5 in just a couple of weeks in changing my diet. So I was eating cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch,

pasta for dinner, baking my own bread, you know, eating low fat yogurt with a ton of sugar in it, thinking I was doing the right thing, you know, what the cardiologist told me to eat turned out it was like a lot of nonsense. And then I went over to the diet that Rob Wolf described, you know, the, the paleo solution, that original diet. And that was fantastic. And I chose a more refined version of that the autoimmune Paleo diet that was even better for me. And that got me fantastic results.

And then later on, I started thinking, oh, what else is possible? What else could I be doing here? Got into some of the advanced testing. And that was through podcasts. My entire reinvention is because of podcasting, listening to podcasts, doing podcasts, talking to people,

heard about these advanced tests that you could do. Excuse me. And yeah, it just got fantastic results, fixing the types of problems that I found on those tests. So. Isn't it fascinating that it still fascinates me, mainly because I try not to get pissed off about it, so I let it fascinate me.

But you go to a doctor with a health problem, an issue, a chronic problem. Western medicine is brilliant at treating acute issues. Yes, so you really have to understand what medicine does well. And that's in fact, so I'm a mountain biker, and I feel like I throw medicine under the bus on a weekly basis on my podcast, but I really don't want to do that because as a mountain biker, the next time I crash and collapse my life. Right, if you break it, yeah, if you break it, break a leg, you will.

I want someone to call an ambulance, still, please. They do a fantastic job on that. But if it's been something that's been going on for a while, it's chronic, it's terrible. It's terrible, it's very good for acute issues, infection, cut something out, remove something, prevent me from dying this second. Western medicine is second to none, it's the best.

Absolute best in the world. It's a God-send-a-man kind. But it is absolutely because of its strength in that particular area, where they see the problem or the symptom, treat the symptom right away, which makes it really good for acute issues, also makes it terrible for chronic issues. And if you go to the doctor and you talk about having,

if you go to the doctor right now and you say, listen, I am exhausted all day long. I'm just tired all day. They will run a battery of blood tests. If those blood tests come back and show nothing's wrong with you according to the blood tests. In other words, you don't have any major nutrient efficiencies. And we can talk about the ranges, by the way, that they don't blood test. Yeah, you fit within 95% confidence, full of the mean of the average person that does the blood test. We could talk about that, but let's just say everything's within those ranges,

but you're still really tired. They're literally gonna tell you you're crazy or no, you're fine. I think you're absolutely healthy. And it's like, I'm telling you, I feel like shit and you're telling me I'm healthy. And at no point during our conversation, have you asked me, my diet, my activity level, my sleep, my stress level,

at no point have you ever asked me those things, which are by far the most important things. Literally, you are putting things in your mouth every single day that become a part of you. The first and most important thing you should look at when you have a chronic issue is, are these things I'm putting in my mouth affecting my chronic health?

And none of them will even ask that. Here's what I have a cousin who, young cousin, teenager who had really bad acne, went to a dermatologist and was getting treatment for acne. And I don't, I don't see the side of my family that often, but then I saw them for a family function and we were talking about this. And she's like, oh, I heard you have a fitness podcast,

whatever, mind if I ask your opinion, I said, absolutely. And so she asked me about her skin. I said, look, I'm not a dermatologist, I'm not an expert in skin. I said, but nutrition can play a very large role in what happens to your skin. And she's like, she laughs.

And she goes, no, it doesn't. She goes, I already asked a dermatologist. And they said, my nutrition has nothing to do with my skin. And I couldn't believe that they still will say something like that. And what's funny is people will say there's no science of support that that's also bullshit. Some of them, there's 70 year old studies that talk about the acne gut access

they actually referred to it as is how what you weak can affect your skin, but what you weak can affect everything and your thoughts can affect them as well. Here's another one that's great. Doctors don't ask you about your thought process and your mindset, except when we do scientific studies, what's the thing that we control for every single time?

The placebo effect. The placebo effect in fact is so powerful, we have to make sure we control for it, but they will not acknowledge the fact that your thoughts may in fact affect your fatigue or your clothing or anything. This is why we speak to the cycle. It took a long time for me as a trainer.

It must have taken close to 10 years before I really, you know, it took me not helping thousands before I started to help thousands. You know, when you start to do these things that you've been told by the industry, like, oh, this is the way to help them. And you realize, man, I'm not helping any of these people. And it's because you're not addressing those.

You're not addressing the relationship with food, the relationship with himself, and the relationship with exercise. It has to start there. If not, even if they see the results they're looking for right now, it'll be short-term. It won't be long-lasting. And I think that's such an important topic. And from an exercise standpoint,

we talk about relationship with exercise. We've also been fed, it's the same message, right? Calories burned versus calories taken in. And so what people have deduced from that, from an exercise standpoint, is I just need to burn more calories. Not about changing the way my body uses calories, but just about burning calories. So it becomes this very manual approach to calorie burn

in which the more I move, the more calories I burn. Therefore, I'm just gonna keep moving more and more. Not realizing that the body is very, very effective and efficient at adapting. And it will adapt and it will slow down its calorie burn. If you're just manually burning calories all the time. In fact, there was some interesting studies done recently, not relatively recently, last couple of years, where there was some interesting studies done recently, not relatively recently,

last couple years, where there were some scientists that went to study some modern hunter gatherer societies. And I forgot the method that they used, but it was a pretty accurate method as the way that they talked about in the article, where they were measuring the metabolic rate of these hunter-gatherers. And they figured of these hunter-gatherers, and they figured that these hunter-gatherers were going to burn like three times as many calories as the average person, because their days were so active. I mean, they didn't sit at desk, they didn't work at computers,

they were moving all day long throughout the day, so like, oh, we're going to see these guys burning like 4,000 calories. And the reason why they went to test them is because they knew how they ate, and they didn't eat 4,000 calories, like, how are these people not disappearing? They're not eating 4,000 calories probably because they're hunter-gatherers and it's hard to eat that many calories and yet they're super active and what they found was their metabolism's adapted so well to where they were burning not that many more calories in the average person and it was because the body adapts to that all that manual activity. And so when you talk to people about this and I talk about resistance training, the importance of resistance training to modern humans, mainly because, not just because of strength

in your body improves mobility and all that stuff, but because one of the main problems we're suffering from in modern societies is over consumption of food. And it's probably going to benefit you to have a fashion metabolism. Nothing does that like resistance training. If we can turn the adaptation and switch it so that your body becomes less efficient and it's probably going to benefit you to have a faster metabolism. Nothing does that like resistance training. If we can turn the adaptation and switch it so that your body becomes less efficient with calories, it's going to benefit you more in modern societies. It doesn't even better modeling recently, looking at what they call the constrained versus

the additive models of physical activity. So what the traditional person, Dr. Personal Trainer, will think is that every calorie that your treadmill tells you, you've burned, you can eat on top of what you would eat normally, because that's a calorie that you've burned. But if you actually look at what truly happens, it hits like a point where you only, with through physical activity or exercise, you can only maybe increase the amount of calories,

extra calories you burn in a day by about 200. So even if you keep exercising more and more and more, what your body will then do the less the time as you'll sit more still, or everybody sort of fidgets, does these sort of small movements, maybe they get up and go and do something they feel motivated to do, something the body just stops doing that naturally,

because you don't want to burn as extra calories, you can't do it. Actually, you can burn about 200 extra calories. If you're looking at these studies and we're believing in calories in, calories out purely, that's about all you can add. Beyond that, your body will either reduce the amount that you move the rest of the time to adapt, and you don't even know you're doing it. It's completely subconscious or you will produce less thorough tourmone, so you'll turn down your metabolism. So none of that, you know, anybody who thinks that they can burn a thousand calories on the treadmill, you know, you, like, 800 of those calories, you're gonna, you're gonna make

up for them somewhere else. And that's not gonna make it. I, I, it's so fascinating. I mean, I fucking love it, but it makes perfect sense because the most complex thing that we have found in the observable universe is the human brain. The second most complex thing is the metabolism. And it's extremely complex, and we think we understand all of it, but we understand very little of it.

There's so much we don't understand. I mean, 20 years ago, who was talking about the microbiome and its effect on metabolism? Nobody. Nobody was really talking who was talking about the microbiome and its effect on metabolism? Nobody. Nobody was really talking about the effect of the microbiome. We have animal studies now where they'll take mice and they'll do a fecal transplant from one mouse to the other, from an obese mouse to a skinny mouse or vice versa, and then all of a sudden, this skinny mouse gets fat and this one gets skinny.

You got to be, I mean, it's way more complex than we so there's this huge hubris in so whenever we talk about Doctors and scientists. I feel like well first of all I kind of like I want to I want to say it you know We want to help right so I'm a traditionally trained medical doctor You know They're in a system that prevents them from being able to give the help that they want to give like if they had an hour to teach you about nutrition and prevents them from being able to give the help that they want to give. Like, if they had an hour to teach you about nutrition and like lifestyle and they've been taught that in medical school in the first place, they'd love to do that.

They'd love nothing more than to do that, but they have seven minutes and they have literally no way to be able to help you do that. But now I have completely forgotten the point that I was going to make, but I was going to say this story. So we have this friend who he's a neurologist. He's a board certified neurologist. He's a real medical doctor. He's leaving traditional neurology to sort of go out

into the world and help people improve their brain function, improve their brain health. And he has this great story about Angry Birds. And this is his analogy for modern medicine and modern science. And it's, so imagine these aliens come down to earth. And they see that they find the game Angry Birds. It could be any game, right? And, you know, they decide, okay, we're going to see who can be the best at Angry Birds.

We're going to have a month, right? And we're going to split into two groups, we're going to have a competition, and we're going to play against each other and whoever wins is obviously the best. There's two groups. One group is like, we are going to dig against each other and whoever wins is obviously the best. There's two groups. One group is like, we are going to dig down into the code of this game and understand it as well as we possibly can.

And then when it comes to the competition, we're going to manipulate the code in real time and then we're going to be able to win the game that way. And then the other group says, we're just going to play the game a lot and then we're going to win it that way. And anybody who thinks that they can manipulate game code in real time and understand it so they could win a game is completely fucking bonkers, right?

And it's exactly the same with pretending that you understand the level of biochemistry or physiology and we pretend that we do, but we really, really don't. So a lot of the time that we say is just play the fucking game. What makes you healthy? Eating real food, moving, getting outside, having a connection with your family, and do I know the exact biochemical pathway of everything that happens when you do other things?

Actually, no, I don't, but I know that it's gonna help because you're playing the game. And even if you did, that's so uniquely different to each individual. So that's where that's the great, that's such a great point, that's a great idea. I love that saying, I'm gonna use that for you.

No, I still, I love that analogy and so like when I when I start like coaching or helping So what this is what I used to do is I say okay? Because right away the assumption when you hire a personal trainer is okay Where's my diet? Where's my workout routine? Right? That's what I'm supposed to do you pay me for that I tell you how to eat I tell you how to exercise and I learned later on to flip that shit on its head because I realized I wasn't really helping anybody that direction. So they hire me and I say, okay, this is what I want you to do. Don't do anything special and new for me. Don't try and eat any different than what you do. Don't try and exercise any more just because now you have a trainer. Just I want you to pay attention. We're just

going to track it for a week or two and then we're going to come back sit down together and we're going to discuss it. And then I pick one or two things that's happening either nutritionally or in their lack of activity and exercise and I prove I approve upon it. And most of the time it looks something like this because as Americans there's some things that we tend to do. One, I see a lot of over consumption of sugar and carbohydrates. We just don't need it that much and we eat a ton of it.

And then the lack of movement and exercise or the lack of fiber. There's a bunch of little things that people tend to do and I'll pick one or two things and they're normally very basic and clients at first they always would push back like that's all I'm doing. I'm like absolutely for a very long time now. You've been eating 70 to 90 grams of sugar. I'm not going to cut it all the way out from you. We're going get us cut it back by about 30 grams every day. Let's see how your body responds. You're only stepping about 3,000 steps every single day

because you get in your car, you drive to work, you sit at your desk, you come home. All I want you to do is to walk for a half hour every day. That's it, that's all we're doing. Nothing else for right now. And then we're gonna build upon that. And when you start to set these realistic goals for people and you start to help them

connect those dots, it becomes a lot easier. And I think a mistake that a lot of professionals make is we get so caught up in which program is better and this diet is better for this and getting it all these, you know, which one, which one is the science shows that there's a little bit better if we do it this way. It's a little bit better if we do it that way. And it's like, Jesus, that's way over a comp getting, let's play the fucking game. Let's start playing the game. And let's, you know what, when you die,

when you die the first, on the first level, we're gonna learn from that mistake. And then the next time, we're gonna get past that. And then you're gonna hit another little row bump. And then we're gonna talk about that, and then we're gonna get past that. And it's amazing. You just slowly build on that.

Adam, can you talk about some of the clients that you work with? And I don't want you to use the word client. Adam, can you talk about some of the clients that you work with? And I don't want you to use the word clients. I want you to talk about a specific person that came to MindPump and what were their specific goals. Well, you know who you should talk about? You should talk about one of our OGs. Talk about Rochelle.

I mean, there's so many people. First of all, I'm not so many people, but you can't talk in the general terms. I was people. You talk to no one, right? You have to talk to someone specifically. I'll say something to you. I will give you an example of something

that just happened literally like what three, four days ago. So I had a client. Now we don't just so you guys know, so in the audience understands, Sal, myself and Justin, we don't train clients anymore. So we don't handle one-on-one cases. That's okay. So you can talk about the programs.

So I had somebody about a year and a half ago and it was a friend of a friend, real smart girl, hired me to help her coaching. And just like I just explained the process, her name was Jessica. And she probably needed to lose about 25 to 30 pounds right in that range. And when she hired me, I had to have this long conversation of, I'm not going to put you on this extreme diet, I'm not gonna start making you exercise like crazy,

because this was her pattern in the past, gave her the same exact advice that I'm giving right now. Now, what did she want more than anything else? She, like most people, when they hire you, everyone is very aesthetic focus. Right, most people wanna look better. That's fine. It's fine. It's okay, and it's okay,

but what I like to do with someone like that is I like to help them make that connection with themselves, too, like Sal said earlier at breakfast, that I want you to train because you love yourself, not because you don't love yourself right now, so helping them make that connection, because otherwise what happens, and this has happened many times where you get a client in great shape

And they it hasn't changed for them right so that thinking I'll be happy when exactly and then they have to be happy now Exactly and this is so this part is important and then also teaching her so I remember telling and I said okay Jessica this is what we're gonna do and by the way what I used to do as a trainer was it was mandatory that you had a minimum of three months with me, because I learned really quick that I wasn't gonna be able doing it the right way. I wasn't gonna give people that 30 day change turn around that they wanted, which would normally

convince the average person to re-sign and keep training with you. So you had to get locked in in a contract with me. And I knew that because I needed time to show you how this is going to work. And so that's what I would do. So she's locked in three months with me and I knew that because I needed time to show you how this is going to work. And so that's what I would do. So she's locked in three months with me. First month goes by and mind you, she wants to lose 25 to 35 pounds. And I'm telling her when I first assess her diet because she's only eating about 1500 calories. 1500 calories, she's about

160 pounds at the 160, 163 pounds at this time. And she's only eating about 1,500 calories. And she's only moving, I think, a four to 6,000 steps a day is what she was because I have all clients use wearables to track. So I have some sort of a feedback on their movement. So this is where she's at. Month goes by and we haven't lost a single pound. But I have her eating 1 eating 1900 something calories. And I

tell and I explain to her, I said, I know that you your ultimate goal is for us to drop you down 25 plus pounds, but I need to explain to you what's going on and what we're doing and why we're doing this. And that's I could have lost you 10 pounds this month. I could have reduced your calories from your 15, 16 hundred down to 1100. I'm have, how much can you go? Right. But I mean, this is what happens though. This is what people that become so hung up on the calories

in versus calories out mentality. This is what they end up doing. This is what she would do. Or she, this is what like most yo-yo diners do. They, they're either on the wagon, they're off the wagon. When they're on the wagon, they're restricting calories. They're exercising like crazy and they lose their weight. Then they realize they can't maintain that. Then they balloon back up and they're off the wagon. When they're on the wagon, they're restricting calories, they're exercising like crazy, and they lose their weight,

then they realize they can't maintain that, then they balloon back up, and it's this vicious cycle. And what I'm trying to do is break the cycle from her and explain to her that this is what we have to do. Now, I'm gonna fast forward this story, because what ended up happening was, she was with me for about five months. I eventually got her all the way up to her,

she was consuming about 2600 calories a day not putting on any weight We're introducing these gradually you're not saying an overnight change. Yeah, gradual reintroduction real it took a it took a long with good resistance training Yeah, of course she's I've I've introduced her into maps which the foundation of maps I'll tell you what's so special about our programming is we learned really quick Especially in talking about a female right now, most women gravitate towards, you know, high repetitions, isolation type exercises, target my booty, target my arm fat, my belly fat, and that's their kind of man-towety training.

Well, maps, the foundation of it is strength-based, compound movements, deadlifting, squatting, overhead pressing, the big, the big movers that give you the big bang for your buck. And we know that when we introduce those to this type of a client, their body responds. Cause it's never moved like this. And because they've stayed away from it because they don't want to get big bulky muscle.

You know, like, oh, I don't want to lift those exercises. That's going to make me big and bulky. So you got to dispel all that, right? So we've done this, right? So she's at 2600 calories. I think at that time, we'd only lost about five or eight pounds. So we're nowhere near yet her ultimate goal. We end up having to go different directions.

She ends up moving across the country and we go separate ways for about a year and a half. Now, her ultimate goal, why she originally hired me, was to get her ready to compete for a bikini show. That was her goal. She wanted to lose this, these 35 pounds, and then she wanted to get ready for a show, and I refused to train her for a show

until I fixed her metabolism. That's what I told her. I said, listen, I'm not gonna throw you in a show in 12 weeks when your metabolism is like this. I will just destroy you, you know, and so she trusted me and she allowed me to do all this with her, but eventually what she did was she wouldn't hire to coach that would. So she hired a coach about this is just just as a recent story, right? This just happened three months ago that she hired a coach. She just competed two weekends ago and she did a show

and she got all the way down to 120 was her weight right and she was the smallest she's ever been people complimenting her like crazy. Now meanwhile she's close she's connected to my girlfriend Katrina and they they've communicating they talk and she would share with her the things that she was doing to get ready for her show. Two hours plus of cardio every single day eating eating 1300 calories, no fruit in her diet, just whatever it took to get her down. And she got down to this goal. She's never seen her body like this, not since she was a kid. So she was excited. She did something that I was very proud of her. And then I thought it was really smart,

though. She actually took her body fat test. So she went and got a hydrostatic way, which is what I made her do when she was with me. So I wanted her to test so we could look at her lean body mass and could show her what her fat mass was. And that way over time, even though she might not see the scale move down, I could show her that we've changed her body composition. So she knew what where she was with me. And I had gotten her down to about, I think 15.8% body fat was where she at. So mind you, she's down 25, something pounds or whatever. She's hit stage. She's a small, she's ever been. She takes her body fat test, but at so mind you she's down 25 something pounds or whatever she's hit stage She's a small she's ever been she takes her body fat test But she doesn't want to see the results. She doesn't want it to mess with her getting up on stage later that night

So and she emails me and says hey, I really want to open up my body fat test And I want to look at it with you and I want to talk about it But I don't want to look at it until after my show So I go to her show and I watch her and I see her and we stand there and we open it up and we open up the email and she's all excited to see how low she's gotten because she's down to this small as she's ever been. And I see it right away because I've looked

at these tests a million times so I see the number and I'm waiting for her to see it and she looks and she looks the number and it's 17.9% body fat. And she's like, is this right? This can't be right. How am I, when I was with you, and we weren't doing any cardio, and I was 20 pounds heavier,

I was at 15 something percent body fat. How am I, I just got off stage? How am I at 17.9% body fat? This doesn't make sense to me. Said, yeah, because what we, what ended up happening was you were doing so much cardio and you're eating so little that you were telling your body, it doesn't want any of that weight. So it was losing muscle and it was losing fat.

It was dropping everything like crazy. And she had absolutely, and I said, now this is where this is really important. So I'm helping her right now as a friend, like she's not, she's somebody who's a close friend of mine. And I'm really nervous for her because she is now let her body get adapted to two to three hours of cardio every day and consuming 1300 calories to have this body. And I said, you know, more than ever,

what you do now is extremely important because I know you hit a goal of yours which was really important of you to get on this stage, but you have absolutely just killed your metabolism. And if you don't maintain this activity level in this low of calorie, you're going to see your body just balloon up really quick. So there's a point there, which is that 17.7% of 120 is less than 15% of 160. Right.

So she has lost fat, but she's also lost lean mass, right? She's lost a lot to try and get down to that weight. So a great percentage of her weight is body fat. And talk about a mind fuck for the and this is what happens. Now this is I wanted to use chair this story with you because I think it's a great extreme analogy what happens to everybody. I really believe this happens to a majority of people that exercise is, but she's just an extreme example, is we come into it with this idea of you're either on or off. I was eating all this bad food, I wasn't paying attention, I wasn't exercising, now I'm going to go after my goals and I'm going to hammer the foods,

no days off, beast mode, get after it as hard as you possibly can, restrict calories, and what people don't realize is how much damage they're really doing to their body by approaching it this way. And then you actually lose weight, because you'll lose weight that way. Take somebody, cut their calories in half, increase your exercise by two times of what you're doing. Yes, you'll get smaller. 100% you'll get smaller.

She did, she lost body fat. You know, she has less fat on her than she did when she was at 15% and heavier weight with me But the ratio of muscle to fat and a lot of people don't understand her metabolism is well Yeah, cuz people don't understand that okay So for muscle and for fat to be on our body They're both tissue and they both require calories to stay on there and muscle requires a lot more calories than fat Does this in our body so now that she's dropped that 20 something pounds

than fat does the center body. So now that she's dropped that 20 something pounds, she's lost a ton of expensive tissue that requires a ton of calories to sustain on her body in turn doing what Sal said, slowing your metabolism down. So this is, it's all about the signals you send, you know, when you're when you're training and eating, it's what type of adaptation are you asking for of your body? If you're asking for your body to become more efficient with calories, well, that's the adaptation that's gonna go towards, and it's gonna slow itself down. This is why if you train for endurance, lots of endurance athletes, their metabolic rates

tend to slow down, they tend to lose, but it's not, you're not burning muscle. I wanna be clear too, because sometimes people be like, don't burn muscle, it's like, you're not burning muscle. Your body's just adapting in a more efficient way. It's doing what you're telling it to do. Exactly. Exactly.

And to bring it back to our programming and how we've designed things, this is, we've been playing the game of Angry Birds for 20 years. We've been playing. So we fucking know how to play this game. I might not be able to write the code for it. That's for sure.

But I've played a lot of levels. And so is Sal, so is an and so when we created maps the real magic and so we've got all these crazy reviews and results like oh my god just mind blowing everything's were like this magician we've figured out the perfect program no it's not the perfect program we just understand we understand the average american and the average american especially somebody who's trying to lose Body fat reduce weight which we know is the majority of our audience

So that's that's who you're programming for in general Right because yes, I wish it was the target Yes, so who so if I'm Jessica now listening to this which program would I if I go to mind put media calm What program would I sign up for if I had this aesthetic goal to fix her metabolism map? Santa Monica would be the program okay, because it's more we consider our foundational program because it's Strength and muscle-based maps aesthetic is your we have a more of a competitor program for when you hit stage But it's much higher volume of training requires it's much more taxing on the body and for someone whose metabolism is Been damaged through competing, they

are better off taking a step back, focusing on those kind of roots. Our programs are designed to work. So we've maps in a ballack. So that's a tough answer which you're asking right now. So you're asking me to give you a generic answer or something that we... Well, we can be specific in psychiatric. Well, the same. The same.

The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. The same. So Jessica listening right now, what would she say? So Jessica now, you know, could handle maps, maps black, the maps aesthetic program, but it just because, guess who can start it with me, I had our maps at a ball like, and that's because all the programs,

we slowly increase the volume, and it's designed to go over an entire year. So we try and take people, we reduce the amount, so the maps at a ball program is either two or three days a week of lifting. That's it. Two to three days a week of lifting. That's it. Two to three days a week, full body routines, and the big compound lifts. And we know that most people are one missing those lifts, two, don't train for strength

because people attach strength training to power lifters or Olympic lifters. So if I had an Olympic lifter, I wouldn't start them on Maps Red. Because he's been training that way for such a long time. He might benefit more from our Maps Performance program. Which is, do you figure this out though? That's why I've been listening to the podcast probably 20 hours last month. And I'm like, what the, you know, so I'm a mountain bike. This is a great question.

And this is actually something that we're in the process of improving because what we did, we spent so much time on creating this great content, this information, all the podcasts, that we have a horrible sales funnel. Like we're not big marketers. We did not, we weren't marketers and built it like most businesses like us that are our size, built a great marketing tool or system and then they came out with all this stuff later. We're the opposite. We're just now starting to build,

we don't capture people just diet dropping in on us. You have to be a listener for a long time, do I have put together all this information that you're asking me right now, because we've prided ourselves on trying to individualize it for people, and we don't want to just offer generic programs and say, hey, this is for everybody. So, you must have had somebody in mind when you were designing

the programs, right? Yes. So, you know who you designed the programs for. Well, the avatars for the program. Yeah, you know who the avatars, but then you getting those avatars out in the world to come in and then recognize which. So it's really the best way to do it is to come out with a specific type of adaptation or avatar that the program is designed for. But that doesn't mean if you want that goal that that's necessarily the best program because it depends also where you're starting from. So if we take it all the way back to the first maps program and I have a I can tell you a client story and actually he's sitting in here right now It's Doug or producer. It's how the dog story. That's interesting. So Doug the way I met Doug Doug came to me through a chiropractor

That he saw because he had back pain and the chiropractor told him you got to see Sal He can help you with fixing that pain now when I met, Doug already had lots of experience with resistance training. He'd been working out since he was a teenager lifting weights. He'd followed all the bodybuilding routines. I always wanted to look muscular and be strong, followed body for life. I don't know if you guys remember body for life by Bill Phillips. Followed that to a tee, took all the supplements. And so when I sat down with Doug and we talked about this, first he said I have back pain, but then we talked about his other goals, which were I want to build muscle. I want to have a six pack,

I've never looked like that before, and I've been working on my entire life. I just think I have bad genetics. And so I asked him, well, what do your routines look like? Well, I do body parts splits, I work out four or five days a week in the gym, and so he said, okay, you're gonna see me twice a week, and I don't want you to go to the gym after that.

And I almost had, I really had to sell that to him because he was in such disbelief when I said that to him. I was gonna say so, and you did it as well. I mean, there's this woman Jessica, who thinks she needs to restrict calories and work on specific body parts. And then somehow magically, you got her to stop thinking that and do what you said.

And you just said to say, how do you do that? How you've got someone that's got it fixed in their mind that they've got to do one thing and then you're telling them to be up. I'm a very, very good salesman. Oh, really? Yeah, so We so we set well. I mean we sat down and I explained it to them and at the end we played this game a lot We didn't come out being great at the game

At the end of the day, you know, I'll sometimes have to tell people like I'm gonna ask you to trust me one time But I promise if you trust me right now, okay, I'm not gonna have to have to ask for your trust again And so luckily Doug trusted me. We did two days a week full body focused on compound movements and little by little progress into three days a week of full body type routines. We phased this workout. So Adam talked about the programming of maps and a ball. But it is more complex than just full body workouts two or three days a week.

There's also phasing of the workouts where you focus on different types of adaptation, where one phase is we're training in the center nervous system adaptation phase where we're in the one or five rep range, for example, or we're training a phase for hypertrophy, more of your classic eight to 12 reps, or more of your sarcoplasmic hypertrophy, where we're trying to build more of the non muscle fiber structures within muscle, you know,

increase its ability to store things like glycogen and blood flow so you're getting more of the pump. And then there's what are called trigger sessions, which are unique to maps, programs. All of our maps programs have some kind of a frequency builder in them. And the maps and a ballic program was the first one, and I injected what are called trigger sessions.

And trigger sessions really take advantage of the fact that you can send a small muscle building signal to your body without having to cause muscle damage. And a lot of people believe that the only way that you tell the body to build muscle is by causing muscle damage. That's one way and that's also one of the biggest ways you can do it. But there's lots of little ways, right? We can change a hormonal signal. That's an easy one. I can give you testosterone, change nothing else about your routine and you're gonna build muscle.

But there's also other signals that you can manipulate. And one of them is simple mechanical signaling through these low intensity kind of frequent type of movements. And we see this, we observe this in every day, every single day. When you see people who, for example, you look at mechanics or plumbers who don't lift any weights, but take a look at their hands and forearms, very, very developed. And they're not breaking muscle down, they're not getting sore, it's that frequent signal

of stimulation. So I figured that out and I said, okay, how can I add that to some of these other things that I've learned about resistance training? And we came up with the trigger session concept, which in a nutshell, on your days off, you do these very light pumping sets with maybe resistance bands that you can do anywhere. And there's a specific way you do them that we found that works real effective, but you do these on the days in between. And what ends up happening, and we know there's a little bit of this now through science is that

when you send a really loud muscle building signal, like let's say today, I work out really hard and I lift weights and I do everything right. I'm going to elevate the muscle protein synthesis signal for about studies will show 48 to 72 hours is the general range and then it starts to decline after that. If we add trigger sessions to that, the theory is, I'm gonna keep that signal elevated for a little bit longer and in practice, that's exactly what trigger sessions

seem to be not to mention you're also increasing blood flow, you're increasing oxygen, movement, nutrients to the muscles because you're moving them. All of those things. And so injecting this simple technique, which by the way, if you're listening and you don't want to change your routine, you don't have to just throw this in there, just on your days off or whatever, do some pumping sets for target muscle groups. So it's five to ten minutes

I know what you mean by pumping sets. I'll be lifting weights at 17. I've no idea Have you read many like buddy building? Short like real short you're talking five to ten minutes, you know with rubber bands Pice and curls you're aiming for a little bit of a burn get a little bit of a Not trying to do damage. You're not trying to get sore. You want to feel it, but you're not trying to work out. And what you're doing is you're keeping that muscle building signal elevated, and you're also sending other signals, and you're also facilitating recovery.

Because what I found with trigger sessions through lots of experience now through clients, for example, one of the things, first things that Doug noticed when I had him apply trigger sessions was holy cow, like I'm recovering faster from my hard workouts and he's able to increase his intensity and volume even further. And so these are some of the core concepts of our maps programs. If you look at our maps programs, the workouts at least, the workout ones, because we also have maps prime and maps prime pro, which are more of your assessment model type programs. But the actual workout based ones, they all follow this formula, this concept of you have your main muscle building

signals, your frequency building signals that you inject in between whether it's your trigger sessions or focus sessions or mobility sessions. And you phase your workouts so that you can focus on a particular type of adaptation for a particular period of time. It's usually two to four weeks before moving to one that that is complimentary to the previous one. And so when you plug that all in, what you get is you get maximized programming and it's a lost art unfortunately with working. Well, that's the reason why it works so well and why my pump has been so successful is because we know there's a huge issue There's an over application of intensity and a under use of frequency and in our opinion

It's one muscle building. Yeah, when it comes to building muscle when people want to build muscle burn fat There is the over application of into intensity the under application of frequency and simply teaching people the way to do that correctly is a major game changer. For about 80% we would say people. There's always gonna be an exception to the rule, right? If you have a guy like I gave that example, if you were a power lifter and you all of a sudden just purchased our maps and a ball program

and you did phase one, you're not gonna see that they're those first three weeks, you're not gonna see the same change as the average person. The average person doesn't lift and train that way. It'll be such a different adaptation for them. Their body will respond. That's what happens. We knew that.

We knew that when we created it and we phased it that way. We knew that a majority of people, as soon as they started that program, instantly they would see a change in their body. Never done trigger sessions before. Never trained. Heavy compound type lifting. instantly they would see a change in their body. Never done trigger sessions before, never trained, heavy compound type lifting. I mean, and then people are just getting a response like crazy.

Then now we've built that trust. Now we can teach you all the other programs, the other phases, what they're for. And I think, in my opinion, the most revolutionary thing that we've done is Maps Prime Pro and Maps Prime, which that was the biggest piece for us was creating an assessment to make it more individualized.

You know, hard that was, by the way. Did you imagine trying to create a self-assessment tool for the average person, where they have to be able to assess themselves, following kind of instructions? Very, very difficult thing to do. So tell us about the types of assessment that they do. So with Maps Prime, what we did,

so Maps Prime, the first, not prime pro, but prime, we were, we came together and when we, when we put programs together, we never know what we're going to do until it starts to come out of us. And so we start to put things down. And with Maps Prime, we've really realized that people, when you think of warming up, for example, what do you, what do you think you're doing when you're warming up? Why am I warming up? Why am I warming up? Because the dog needs to go out and take a pee. That's my warm up. So it's literally as I hype warming up.

So people feel prevent injury, right? That's it. Prevent injury, get the blood flowing, get the heart rate going. But that's the rest out of my eyes, right? That's what most of us think of a warm up is. That's what we're taught. We're taught like, okay, it helps prevent injury. At the absolute least, a warmup should do that.

But what it can do at its most is groundbreaking. When you properly prime the body, now when you do your very effective exercises like a squat or a deadlift or a power clean or an overhead press or whatever, you're going to maximize the signal you get from that by priming your body properly. The problem that we encountered with... Priving it neurologically. Yeah, so that's what we're doing.

We're teaching, we're trying to teach people the proper recruitment patterns. And we have known, again, from playing the game for so long, that most people that come in and hire you have poor recruitment patterns because they've sat at a desk for many years or they've played a sport a lot and they so they have these issues,

they have this chronic pain going on and they don't have a bad back, they don't have bad knees, they have poor recruitment patterns and so now they're joints or- It's just a function, right? And their body's not moving properly. If you take somebody who has got a really bad recruitment patterning and they're not getting good hip extension for example

And you just say oh good, okay, and they come to you and they say I want to work on my butt I want to build my glutes and you just have them squat and deadlift because those are traditional You know butt building exercises, but they don't have a good recruitment pattern They don't have a good connection to their glutes. They're gonna find very poor results from those exercises They're gonna get lots of quad. Bigger legs. Just bigger quads. And so a thing that we would do as trainers is I would prime them before squats

and depending on the individual, but generally I do something like a hip thrust or something that I'm gonna get them to fire the glutes and squeeze them and maybe kind of take hip flexors out of the movement and change their posture a little bit. Then we do the squats and deadlifts and now they feel them more. So that, but the challenge we encountered with prime

was priming is so different from person to person. Like, I can't prime a bench press the same for everybody because this guy might have, you know, tight pecs and overactive lats and this person might have an issue with shrugging their shoulders and they have a poor recruitment pattern in their shoulders and how do we prime each person individually?

And so what we did is we broke the body down into three zones, three movements that kind of generally cover everything. You do these three tests, which we call the compass, based on whether or not you pass or fail. So it's very easy. So rather than saying this little part right here is not working whatever, pass or fail, if you fail, it points you in this direction,

and then this is what you do to prime your workouts. Because regardless of the movement you're doing, this is the recruitment pattern that you're demonstrating, so your priming should look like this. So that's what prime was. Now with prime pro, prime pro was correctional, is correctional in nature. So rather than teaching at a prime your workouts, what prime pro is doing is we're examining areas of the body you may have pain and dysfunction in and we're trying to correct those problems as separate from your workouts. And the reason why it's separate from your workouts is when you're trying to correct a true

issue with let's say at my hips I have dysfunction my hips and it's causing me pain. The best way to alleviate that or not to alleviate to excuse me to correct that is through lots and lots of frequency. It is not through intensity. So if I'm trying to correct an imbalance in my show, I need to practice that all day long, because that signal needs to win out the other signal that I send all day long, which is sitting, or whatever.

And so Prime Pro is designed differently in that particular. If you look at each one of our programs, they, each of them from maps anywhere, prime, prime pro, the aesthetic, each one of them was an answer to what we thought was a problem in the industry. I'll give you an example. One of the first episodes that we came out and said was, why we don't crossfit.

So we created a bunch of shit because we said, we don't crossfit, here are the reasons why we don't crossfit. So then we got a lot of people saying, back to us, well,, what if I like that way of training? I like the way it's designed, I like those exercises, I like, well, how would you guys put it together? So we created maps performance.

And that really was the answer for someone who likes those type of movements, but it's programmed in a much smarter way than just doing the water the day. And so maps aesthetic was inspired by when I got ready for a show and I competed and I saw all this pro this poor programming on all these professional athletes all these bodybuild. These coaches would just over apply intensity, train the shit out of them, starve them to death, get them in shape. And I'm like, no, there's a smart way to progressively overload the body to get it ready for a show. And so that's what inspired that program.

When you look at maps anywhere, you look at one of the most popular programs at home. Are these insanity and P90 X and plyometric, like get the fuck out of here. Not everybody should be doing that. So our answer with maps anywhere was the answer to how you should program and at home program. Our maps prime and prime pro really was the answer

to all the poor chiropractors I feel like. Because how many people get stuck in that go see a chiropractor, he adjusts me two to three times a week. I feel better. I go back to see him next week, adjust me, feel better when they're not, again, we talked about this earlier, addressing the root cause of something. They find the pain, they adjust them for a little bit,

they feel better for a couple of days, and then they go back to their poor recruitment patterns, and again, this happens again. So we are trying to help people and tell them, listen, it's not just an adjustment that you need, you need to move better. And if these are the areas that you're having joint pain, here are some movements that are going to help you move better.

And we teach that through the program. So if you were to kind of give a generic, because I know I was dodging you a lot on giving you like this. Yeah, I know you want to speak to everyone, but by speaking to everyone in a way, you're speaking to no one. Yeah, it's a very good point. And I get really terrified by the complexity of it all. You know, I've been, we were talking about it because I've mentioned that I've been

working with Mike T Nelson and his initial, great guy by the way. He is fantastic. He got great. I'll tell you this story. At the beginning of this year, my back was hurting, my lower back was hurting quite a bit. It seemed to be getting worse. My ankles were hurting.

And so I went to, I'd interviewed Mike a couple of times, and I was like, this is a really great guy, he's got an MSN by mechanics, and we spent a bunch of time on the phone, and I sent him some videos, and he put together a program. And I didn't get a lot of it done because it was so complicated, I was terrified by the complexity. And I'm one of those all of nothing people where I'd like, oh, shit, if I can't do all of this, then I'm not going to do any of it. And so I worry about these online programs, I'm like, oh my of nothing people where I'd like oh shit if I can't do all of this And I'm not gonna do any of it and so I worry about these online programs I'm like oh my god, is this gonna be really complicated? I'm not gonna go to I won't have half the equipment No, that's what we that's what we pride. Exactly. This is why you would love and this is what we tried to do

We're trying to bridge that gap because of the brilliant minds like like who we're talking about and others out there We we do I mean we partnered with Dr. Brink to create these programs and what we are good at is disseminating information. That's because we've been playing the game so well, I don't know the code that I can't break the science and the code down really well, but I can play the game. And so if I've got somebody who's explaining it to me, I can take that information and go like,

oh, you know what, I know how to help this apply to the average person because otherwise, you can lose them in all of this overwhelming bits of information, which is why I just gave you that analogy of, our programs are far more in depth than just it's the answer to this and it's the answer to that. But I think that's an easy way for people to think about that. Like, hey, these are how bodybuilders train.

A lot of them train the wrong way. If you wanted to look like that, this is a better way to program ch that, like, you know, hey, these are how bodybuilders train. A lot of them train the wrong way. If you wanted to look like that, this is a better way to program chiropractors, you know, crossfit mentality. Like, these are better ways to program it. There's a lot of science that goes into it, which Sal was starting to get to, but sometimes I stop him when he goes that far in depth, because I feel like some people get lost. Like, people don't understand. They appreciate it.

Well, that's the beauty of the show is the dynamic of us going back and forth from the community. I should finish that story actually because Mike responded beautifully to my objection to his complexity and he greatly simplified the program and he did a really good job of working with the weights, the equipment that I got off Craigslist, right, just like one bar and a chin up bar and that was it. And you've got fantastic results to me. And I've done a bunch of bike races this year where my lower back didn't hurt. That's fantastic.

And that's what I really care about. And I wanted to hear you, you know, listening to the MindPock podcast, I wanted to hear you talk more about that, like, and because that's what people really care about, like what I really cared about was completing this 133 mile bike race with my lower back not hurting.

That's like worth any amount of money to me. What's tough too in fitness in particular, because we were born in the fitness industry and one of the motivations behind Mind Pump was some of our anger towards how the fitness industry tends to market and do things that we are very, it's very difficult for us to do, because we know, I know for a fact,

the most effective way to sell anything in fitness is to show before and after and show personal story. We have done none of that. If I speak well and let you do that, if you notice that, you can't even show it to anyone. Yes, if you can post something that's not actually a before and after, it's just two pictures of the same person and an algorithm will say, hey, that's a before and after and they won't let you. Wow, I didn't know that. Oh, wow. But that's a very and after and they won't let you Wow, I didn't know that. Oh, wow.

But that's a very effective way of selling. Yeah, cool. This is a show before an after-and-same. And it's a telepersonal story. Right. And it's tough for us to do that specifically because we hate it so much because it's been manipulated for so long. Like you don't realize people.

Just why we dance around stuff like that. We do. People don't realize this, but like when they take, when you do a before and I know this, because I know people in the industry, when they take a before and after, usually what they'll do is I'll go to someone like Adam, he's a professional IFB physique competitor, and he just finished a contest,

and I'm gonna take his pictures. Well, that's his after, people don't realize this. That's his after. Then I'm gonna sell Adam, we're gonna pay you X amount of dollars, and I want you to get really fat, gain like 30 pounds so I can take you before picture. And there's your performance after. A lot of the photos, a lot of the photos are done that way.

Not to mention the, you know, you know, make up, 10, four programs, four supplements, four whatever they all do that. Photoshop, Photoshop, they all do that. However, human nature, people, I could talk about science all day long, I could talk about how things work all day long, but people like testimonial. That's just what registers in our brain is like, you know, I can hear a thousand random people tell me how awesome

a restaurant is, but if my good friend tells me that restaurant's awesome, I'm probably gonna go there, you know, and so it's just, it's very difficult for us because we want to do things differently, but we also know that this over here is the most effective way to do it. I would encourage you to get over that because, you know, if you're sitting on something that's powerful and has the ability to help a lot of people, then you should be using those. Whatever means you need to.

We're getting there. We're just, we just hire. It's funny you talk about that. This is what we're in the process of doing right now. We hired, uh, but it was very, very important to us when we started this that we weren't, we'd all, we'd all had, we're all serial entrepreneurs. We've all had businesses doing other things. We started this not because we needed to make an income

off of it. So we all agreed that we were going to keep our integrity through it. And yes, it has fucked us financially for quite some time. Yes, it has. And we are very, very aware that that's okay though. And we were okay with that because we knew that, and that's right now the people that buy so,

give people that understand and pay attention to numbers and some of that. We do somewhere between 75 to 100,000 unique impressions on our website every month. The people that purchase, 100% all of them are people that have listened to the podcast for a long time. And we're okay with that.

We're okay with that right now. We're on website shit right now. It's not designed to catch to someone to land on it and go like, oh my God, this is for me. Yeah, it's not called traffic. It's hot coming from the podcast. Right, and we're working it, but we waited until one, we had the revenue tour, we could hire a team.

And let me tell you, we've gone through three already and fired all of them right away. We've hired them, paid them, fired them right out because if you don't understand our message and you don't see what we're, because we're trying to change this, we're trying to be different. We're trying, if we want to just do what everybody else is doing, absolutely, we can make, we can increase our income easily by 30 to 40% more revenue just by playing that game. Clickbait, shit, use and transformation, giving you generic answers for what, what the, this program is for you.

You got back pain. You want to lose weight. This is for you. We could do that. And we could make a lot of money, but none of us want to make money that one. You can't make money to it before, Pity, with back pain. Just got to take the bus. I was wondering about this because we were talking about fighting fire with fire, right?

Because there were people out there and they're doing exactly that. So at what point do you realize you have to use the same tactics that the shisters are using to try and muscle out their mess? Well, so what here's what we also have noticed is that the trends are starting to change a little bit. You're starting to see now because of social media, because remember, now all of us are not kids, right? We all grew up in an era where we didn't have

social media and the internet. And we're lucky enough to grow up to where we're not so old that we don't understand it, but we're not so young that that's all we know. And things are starting to change in the sense that what's starting to be more effective now is what we're really good at, which is transparency. You're starting to see companies try and be more and more transparent, and people become more and more connected to their consumer because consumers are demanding it.

So although we're doing things differently now, I think the way we're doing them is the way that they're going to be done. The average consumer is also far smarter than they were before. As dumb as, or as ignorant as the average person is when it comes to fitness and health, trust me, they know a lot more now than 20 years ago. When I was in gyms 20 years ago, man, it was like the people really were clueless.

Now people are starting to question things. Like that whole debacle that came out where they said, oh, coconut oil is always unhealthy and blah, blah, blah. And you had a lot of everyday people going, actually, I don't think that's correct. You guys have actually been selling some bullshit for a long time now and getting people. And these are everyday people.

I was getting messages for people who were like, Sal, I think that they're wrong. And I'm like, well, how do you know this? Well, I've read this and there's a lot more information that's out there that's better and transparency starting to win. And I think the value, Tom Bill you said this really well. You know, he said, we've all been shot. And we're all bleeding out.

And just some of us know it and some of us don't. And you will have to get on board with that. We, the power of social media and digital streaming media right now is anyone could almost appear, almost all your celebrities now started off a YouTube or some social media platform first. And so the ability to peer into someone's life and find out if you're full of shit or not

is becoming easier and easier. So we would much rather lean on this message, keep our integrity, no, we're going to make a little less money right now because we know in the future, you'll have to play by it. You'll have to play by these rules because it'll be too easy to expose people in the bullshit. And we're watching it happen. It depends on swinging back. We've had the same thing on our podcast too. And Chris has always been very open about the process, what he does, what goes on behind the scenes,

the struggles, and I've had some people who sort of like traditionally trained in marketing who are like, you're showing weakness, that's gonna make people not wanting, and that's just not fucking true, like, people like, I know you, I know what you've done, I know how you've learned, how you've grown, like, I've really connected with you

in your business model, and then that creates, not only does it create a much better connection to the person when you then work with them They also like want to work through it with you this like you create this relationship But that makes it and they're also more likely so you're gonna ask them to do something that maybe they don't want to do to create trust You're much more likely to get and then they're also gonna get better results right because they are more invested in the process They're more invested in you as a coach that a person you're working with. So, I mean, I completely agree with you.

It's just that, you know, it's a challenge on that typical point of the moment. Here's how we do it. You know, our, our, we're, first off, we're lucky in the sense that, you know, Adam calls us idiots, idiots of ons all the time because, you know, when we first started the podcast, we were very raw, we would

just go, we still do it this way, we just go, we just start talking, a lot of bullshit and goes on in the beginning, which turns out to be quite entertaining for some people. People like that part of our show and luckily that's been part of the formula of success. We've got the entertainment factor there on accident, so that works for us. And again, we can take complicated information and kind of communicate it to the average person. So that kind of works for us. And again, because of the way technology works nowadays,

we didn't need massive corporate sponsors to deliver information. You just don't need that anymore. It's the great, what we're witnessing right now is the greatest decentralizing of power that we've ever seen in mankind. Ever, music, TV, media, look at media, look at news media, the distrust in news media today

is greater than it's ever been, and people don't even get their news anymore from news networks because of social media and the ability to share information. And the funny part is people think Donald Trump was the one who started that. Donald Trump was just smart enough to see that and campaign on it.

I mean, that was just, when you dissected it, that was just brilliant campaign. That was, and so now you're sitting, so when it, so transparency, if people aren't getting it now, they're gonna have to get it later on because the consumer's starting to demand like a realism. In fact, when we first started the podcast two and a half years ago, most of the fitness pictures I saw online were, and you still see a lot of them, but there

were more before highly doctor up, highly, highly photoshop pictures. I'm seeing people now who've been around for a little while, who've been on Instagram for a little while, are now posting pictures of themselves. This is what I look like in perfect lighting flex and this is what I look like relaxed. And this is how real I am and whatever. And it's like, those fuckers, you're trying hard now to get jump on the transparency train because they see that the consumer is starting to demand it. So part of it's a gamble. That's where we think it's going. A lot of the signs are showing that it's going in that direction. But we think we're right and we'll find out. So you mentioned something about sponsorship, right?

And Chris is the main guy of the No Espans 5 Podcast and there's no sponsors. And I know that you guys, for a long time, you didn't have any sponsors. And one of the most boring things of podcasts is having to skip through the first 10 minutes while the person proletizes about their sponsors. And I mean, I truly hate it, I can't.

So there's some great information that's coming up, but then you just have to sift through that nonsense first. So how did you guys make that decision to accept a sponsor so like somebody who's then taking some of your airways? There's a couple ways. There's not just like a single formula. We have to really like the people behind the product.

You have to like the product and you have to really like the people. And then they also have to be okay with how we decided to deliver that message to because and we we decided early on the exact same thing you just said we all said like I hate when I listen to a podcast and the first eight I mean I love Joe Rogan but the first eight minutes of his every podcast it is pretty funny that isn't he when he does like that yeah this is pretty funny he is and he does it mark that's how he gets people listen yeah exactly he does a great so I think he gets people to listen. Yeah, exactly. He does it. I think Fightin' the Kid do an incredible job

of healing their commercials also, and we did a little bit of that also. Like we do a little bit of humor in this and that when trying to make commercials not sound so, all the time. But it had to be a partnership and a relationship that we saw more than just a supplement, just like the person, had to be something else

that we see them. So, like for example, Chi-A-Mera has been with us for a very long time. saw more than just a supplement just like the person had to be something else that we see them. So like, for example, Chymera has been with us for a very long time. We are, we talk about supplements on our show a lot and we talk about them as splitting hairs as far as the difference in your overall physique or your goals. Very, very small and we talk of that. There's much bigger rocks to focus on before you're looking for that. In fact, we give the analogy of it's, it's like putting high octane gas in a pinto, you

know, in your drag racing, like the difference that you're going to get at performance from that high octane gas in that car, build a better engine first, you know, build a Ferrari engine, you're going to get down that track a lot faster. So, you know, when it comes to supplements, we got nobody who wanted to connect to us, but Kaimera is a coffee company. We all drink coffee, we all love coffee, and all the science that's coming out on Neutropics is very fascinating.

We dabbled in that a little bit. This was before Kymara. I didn't like any of the synthetic stuff. Same thing for Doug. Doug got headaches. I didn't like it at all, so I was super anti-familist. Sal loved him. Justin was neutral on them.

So we agreed back then that, okay, we like new tropics, we like, well, everything that's coming out with that, but I'm not a fan of the synthetic stuff. So when Chi-American came around and they had a coffee that had the natural new tropics infused in it, it was like, oh, this is cool. And then we're like, let's call and let's see

what these guys are all about, met with them, hit it off instantly. Like just really good guys, really good message. And so that's how we made that decision. And almost every single thing that we've done as far as sponsorships has been the same way. Do you guys use Nutriopics? But I know you're a background is in.

Yeah, so I've tried quite a few things, just out of interest. And in general, I went through a period where, so I tried like a full month of qualia because that was the one that was really out there, all the different, they've sort of taken a shotgun approach or just throw everything in there and hope something sticks.

And some of the stuff, I think, is good and well-backed. Some of the stuff, actually, if you look at the research, suggested probably won't do anything at all. It has DHA, so if you're a tested athlete, you can't take it. But anyway, so I tried that for a month. I did some organic acids before and after to look at mine. You're a transmitter's before and after, so I wanted're a tested athlete, you can't take it. But anyway, so I tried that for a month, I did some organic acids before and after to look at mine.

You're a transmitter, it's before and after, so I wanted like a metric that I got actually measured. Oh, actually, right. And you better explain more organic acids. Oh, okay. So if you want to know. Yeah, so I do those reflect things like dopamine, so you're okay.

Yeah, absolutely. So, turnover, not the actual... The turnover itself, and there are some tests where they look at the actual neurotransmitters in your urine, and then not very well validated at all. But particularly the turnover, the metabolic breakdown products of dopamine and the catecholamine, so norapynephrine, epinephrine, and then serotonin and it's breakdown marker, 5 hydroxyintelucetac acid, and also the other side of that pathway, which is, it's sort of like a

can-be-prone inflammatory, it's sort of. A metabolic pathway that gets, you sort of get stuck in if you've got some information going on, quinolineac acid, and you can look at the balance of those things. And that's fairly well-battered. And there are some other things. In an organic acid test, you can look at intermediates in the Krebs cycle, you can look at markers of overgrowth of certain yeast and bacteria. Some of, so this is what we use for a lot of nutrient deficiencies. If you imagine there's a pathway that requires a certain bevitamin, right? And if you don't have enough of that

bevitamin, then one particular intermediate builds up. And so you measure that intermediate in the urine, then you know that you probably need more of that bevitamin. So that gives us a better idea of how, so we're talking about targeted supplements. Again, we work with a lot of people who are on low carbohydrate diets, I want to try keys to genoc diet. We often see raised requirements for something like carnitins, so they need better, they need to get that fat into the most. But we'd rather measure it in the urine rather than just telling you to take carnitins

because we don't know it's going to work. Well, you're almost good at this point, right? Yeah. You tested so many if you're on a key to genoc diet. You should be taking carnitins. Yeah, I'm pretty much. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, definitely. so many if you're on a key to genit diet. You should be taking kind of tea. Yeah, I did not know that. Yeah, definitely.

And you know it works to boost performance. So if you look at the guys talking about IVs in professional sports, so Mo Farah, who's a UK distanced runner, multiple time world and Olympic champion, he uses kind of tea and IV infusions. We a lot of the Tour de France cyclists do it too. And because they're going to rely on a lot of fat metabolism, they need to make sure that fat's getting into the bunch.

Connids, perfect. Caratine is like magic. So sometimes if somebody's struggling on a heat unit diet, you tell them to take a few grams of caratine, like it's like something's switched the lights on. Wow. So I did some of this stuff quietly before and after, and I've tried some of the other stuff,

and a lot of it feels very artificial to me. And like, I know I'm more focused, I know my brain is working better, maybe, but I also know from just playing the game for a long time that there's no such thing as a biological freelance. So something you're asking your brain to do now, which you wouldn't want to do normally, you're going to pay for that later. So if you're not sleeping properly, recovering properly, you know, doing all this other stuff, then I think you're going to see negative downstream side effects, and that's a big part of it too. Did you notice a change in your when you did the testing before and after, what did you see? Tell them what you were doing while taking.

It was an interesting time to take it, because it was super high risk, but also super high reward. I don't believe you do. I like the story already. So I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I tops in the field that I did my PhD and who were basically gonna grill me on my PhD. For three hours publicly in front of all my friends and family. So you basically spend a month and you go back over all the research that you did. So you really remember,

one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not reading your thesis before you get grilled. I'm like, oh shit, did I write that? Oh, so you need to read all of that, but then you also need to read all the research around it and then also the more up-to-date research, because it had been like six months or something since I submitted my thesis.

So, you know, it's gonna be a long story. Yeah, so I did all of this stuff in that month, and then also, and I was sleeping terribly because I was terrified of this thing, and then I also had to fly, I was in Seattle at this point, I had to fly to Norway, and I arrived literally the day before my defense,

like the night before my defense, so like a hand slept, I was jet lagged, and so I was taking quality this whole time, and I do think that it helped because I mean, I did really well in the defense, despite being completely sleep deprived, but I was pretty trashed for like a month or two afterwards, and I think I just asked so much of my body,

including pushing it cognitively for that long period of time. So I think it helped me in the short term, but maybe I did pay for it again later on. And I did notice the thing, so when I took it, it was like taking MDMA. It felt exactly the same. I had that same, I had that same, theoretically,

if I had taken MDMA, I think it felt very similar. And then I would also have a come down, like a crash later in the afternoon. And that that kind of left like towards the end of the month That kind of disappeared and so that was so then I feel like I maybe wasn't getting as much out of it They'll tell you that it changes over time because you're building these things up and you know It's difficult to tell whether that's true or not so so this kind of benefits and downsides But I've after playing with most of the ones on the market and trying them out I've kind of decided I've kind of stopped using them.

I agree. I've done a lot of personal experimentation with the race attempts in particular, Pericetam and Arisatam, Oxy-Racetam and the new pet. No, Pepsi. And all of those and what turns me off of the synthetic Neutropics is and what turns me off anything that I take, that's synthetic, is I notice a tolerance building effect and then I notice increased side effects as I, you know, continue to take it. Yeah. Which tells me that my body's adapting in some way, which usually means there's some kind

of negative feedback. And then it's not a true natropic, because if it's a true natropic, you shouldn't become resistant to the effects. You should get the same effect every day every time you take it. Right. It's an acute, it's more of an acute. And here's the thing, is it really an utropic or is it perceived, are you perceiving that you're better off? Like caffeine for example, people will say it's an utropic but not. It's really not. It's a stimulant. But people will perceive that they're smarter or you know riddle in or medallion, which are more just kind of stimulants, right? So that's why I'll mess with them here and there when I, when I'm going to have some fun or if we're going to go to an event, I'll take a few of them,

but I notice this tolerance building and then I get this kind of these side effects that start to build. And I don't really like them. I also notice a little bit of neurology from some of the race of times, which is I don't, I'm completely connected them notice a little bit of neurology from some of the race attempts, which is I don't I'm Completely connected them to that, but I did read some some I have read other users say the same thing Which you don't want to necessarily fuck with So do you guys do this testing for clients? I mean, yeah So everybody comes in the door gets one of these wow

We're gonna have to do some stuff together. Oh, you definitely should, booze. Because you know, just so you guys know, a big reason why we have been so anti-sub was not because there's not, there's research for lots of things that work. You know, and- You just don't know if you're taking what you need. Right, like I just, we've never felt comfortable. I'm not gonna tell the masses, even something that as research and we all, we do talk positively about something like creativity,

but you might not need it. Right. You know, you've- So have 30% and non-responders is something like that. So you know that if you give that general recommendation, most people are gonna benefit from it, but you know, not necessarily. Or if you probably have some clues with that, right,

with the methylation. Yeah, so if you have methylation difficulties, then I'm almost certain that creating is we beneficial because creating is one of the major, creating production is one of the major things you use methylation pathways for. So if you're not doing well in that department, then creating is just going to offload some of those. So let's walk through this right now. I know this is something that we probably would normally talk

off, but I love letting our listeners in on the behind the business stuff. How would we work this out? Like how does it walk me through the process of somebody coming? Like let's say, for example, we wanted to say, I say, okay, let's take, let's agree on some supplements that, especially with your guys' experience that you tend to recommend a lot, we decided we're going to take them on as a sponsor now because now we actually have a resource that can test them and say, these could be potentially good for you. How does that work? I call you, I email you, and then I, how much do I pay? Did you get a test? Like, how does this all work?

So I backed up and gave them and there was a story from last week that just totally blew me away. So I did an interview with Rob Wolfe on his podcast, and I talked about some of the machine learning experiments that we've been doing with our data. So most people won't know what that term is, and maybe I won't go into it too deep. But just know that we've been collecting an awful lot

of data over the last three or four years from 1,000 athletes. And I found a way using an algorithm But just know that we've been collecting an awful lot of data over the last three or four years from a thousand athletes And I found a way using an algorithm to predict the results of a blood chemistry or a urinary organic acid test or a stool test or a urinary hormone test Using dust health assessment Questionnaire data so I can get you to answer 51 questions Close ending questions with radio buttons, and then I can use that data to predict what we're going to see with dopamine turnover say. And so I talked about this on the Rob Wolf podcast last week, and somebody heard me on that

podcast, they talked about, they heard me talk about my health journey, and they're like, holy shit, that happened to me, what did you do? And then he came and did the seven minute analysis, which I'll give you a custom link that you can put in the show notes It's important that I understand where everyone is coming from because my algorithms may not work as well on People who come from a different audience you have to understand that all of our clients They came mostly from Rob Wolfenbengreenfield I don't know and they tend to be endurance athletes a little bit of a self-selection Exactly, so it's I don't know how the important this is so I'll give you a custom link to put in the show notes if people want to do this analysis

But anyway, this guy did the analysis and he knew his main complaint I know this because he wrote in there's like a text area His main complaint was elevated sex hormone binding globulon and low testosterone and then my algorithms predicted perfectly low Testosterone and then on the next page after we finished the analysis I showed him a whiteboarded explainer video on the effects of cortisol and testosterone that Tommy and I put together. And he's like, holy f**king shit. I need to talk to this guy like yesterday. That's awesome. And that's the process. He can't go on. I mean, I was just going to say, so this is based on, so it's 50th question is, 50th question, but it's like talking about sleep talking about sex drive talking about

mood and digestion and so And we focused on five different things. So hema globin sex hormones gut dysbiosis circadian rhythm And what was the fifth one? I can't remember anyway, so it's like five broad categories that we know are probably going to be reducing performance in an athlete because that's those of the guys from our experience. From our experience. From our experience.

These are the things that, for the most part, kill the performance in the athletes that we've been working on. And then, so everybody who's come in has done this assessment questionnaire and it allows us to better understand what's going on in them. It's like, you know, you're a doctor, you take a history, right? So this is part of us taking a history. And then they also did most of these tests. And then if you train the algorithm

and you give them the initial questions and you give them the test results, then the algorithm can predict what you're gonna see on the test results. And most of the people that we work with will still get these tests because we wanna nail down certain stuff. I can't predict everything.

You can't predict everything. Exactly. So we're collecting hundreds of biomarkers. Some things are very predictable. Other things, not so much. I'll give you an example. The PCR DNA stool testing that we do, it finds a multitude of different parasitic infections.

So G.R.D.A. crypto, Entomoeba, Hissolytica, so you use cyclospora, yeast, and C.D.F.O. There's so many different things. And when I say machine learning specifically what that means is I'm training the algorithm by example, I'm actually showing here's an example of somebody with a enter me for his solitica infection. Here's an example of somebody with a cryptosporidium infection. Well, I don't have that many examples, even though we've worked with a thousand athletes, I think I've only seen enter me for his sol the histolytica, maybe two or three times.

That's not enough training data for the algorithm. So there's only certain things that we can predict, but still. But with enough data, you should be able to. Yeah, so this is the thing, if we were to get together, if I was to start, say a data co-op, and so you've interviewed Michael Roushio, maybe we could get together with him,

maybe there's some other guy over here that's collected a lot of data, and we put all these data together into a co-op, like maybe we could protect it. Fuck, fuck, yeah. Well, that'd be pretty good. That'd be pretty good. You could hear me right now that's like the main reason why we are so anti-sublimates is for that exact reason because it's just, it's small but it could be big for somebody.

Right. Right. I mean, I mean, if you have a basic deficiency in a nutrient, it's like life changing to supplement Right, that could be a game changer now I we believe that that's a minority that most people if you're eating good well whole food balance diet exercise and properly You should be okay and these little supplements that everyone's pitching as the next best thing to get you leaner or build muscles a crop Is shit, but if you got something where we could test and be very individualized. Well, even more than that.

That's freaking awesome. One of the problems with testing in the past is it requires so much collect, lots of blood urine school. Yeah, it's not today. Like if you can narrow that down to a questionnaire, holy shit, that's like the Holy Grail, right? Fricking it.

Yeah, it's, that's like a billion dollar idea. So it could be quite interesting. It could be so. You know, we came up with this idea. So we were going to, first it was going to be, we were going to try and predict. So people don't like doing stool tests, urine tests are easier, blood tests. I mean, blood tests are like the gold standard because they've been used for the longest time.

We understand them the best. So we were going to try and predict, say stool and urine from the blood, and then we sort of like move further and further away So like we have all this questionnaire data like could we Could we did could we predict that somebody has a lower than optimal hemoglobin level or lower than optimal testosterone level Because you know the certain things are saying on a questionnaire and like when Chris was sending me back the results We'd like the sensitivity and specificity so the likelihood that a positive result is positive is truly positive And I likely likely heard that a negative result is truly negative,

like, I was like, this just can't be true. I don't believe that it's actually that good, but it's at sort of, it's almost a gold standard level, like 90, so if anybody understands this, it's a 60% yeah, so 90 plus percent sensitivity and specificity in general, not for everything, but for most of the things, and you're like, if you can just do that

from a questionnaire, and yeah, so we'll maybe... Fuck me, that's money right there. Hell yeah, says it. Maybe we'll say that somebody has a gut dysbiosis, but yeah, then maybe we need to do some stool testing to truly figure out what the problem is. But if we know where to start, right? Already you've reduced the cost and the entry point.

And because some of these tests, some people like the living in other countries don't have access to them. So we're going to, we're trying now with people abroad just working from the algorithm. You've done two things in, when you look at economics and market, two things that are, and you've done them both, that are huge, and usually people will do one or the other, which is increased accessibility and increased efficiency. And you've done both there, right? If that, if that works out the way you're saying it is,

now you've made it very accessible to people and it's very efficient so it's become less expensive. Pretty exciting, I mean, okay, so now you got me more excited about this, right? I was just thinking about this when you were talking about neutrophics, like how can I artificially hack my ability to concentrate? Well, holy shit, when I first started doing those experiments on my laptop with that algorithm XG boost

and those success rates are coming back, the sensitivity and the specificity. I was like, my eyes are popping out of my head. Talk about, that's my new trophic, is. Keeping the fuck about what you're working. Right, balancing your body the way it should be. So can you tell me like some, what are some of the most common ones

that you guys tell people are people major deficient in iron, what do you guys see a lot of? What do you see a lot of? It's the opposite with iron. Talk about iron. Yes, I heard too much. You see that too high?

Yes, so we, well now that we know that it's all in captain crutch. Yeah, I get it now. This is actually, yes, so we went on the Ben Greenefield podcast and we talked about iron overload. We did like a mini sort of program. People come to us get a blood test

and we sort of look over things. And what we really found was that most, and it tends to be, also masters age athletes. So, you know, maybe 30, 35 plus males. And they almost all have some degree of iron overload. It's something, you know, especially if you're a successful athlete,

there's definitely a trend towards, you know, if you have a tendency towards iron overload, you also have a tendency towards hymnoglobin levels and, you know, higher performance. So you kind of like, you're self-selecting into that population because you're already somebody who's going to be performing better, but in the long term, it's potentially going to cause issues. So we actually see... You guys advocate like blood-blooding? Yeah, absolutely. It's true. Yeah, blood is one of the best of you. Yeah, it's true. And we recommend it to loads of people.

Go, go to your Ray Cross and donate blood. The problem is that both Chris and I are Brits. And in the US, if you're British or you grew up in the UK, you're not allowed to donate blood because they think we all have BSE, both, you know, mad cow dices. So my ferritate, I know, is a little bit high. I'd really love to donate blood, but I can't.

You just played, dude, you just, you just, so I've got the equipment at work. I think I might be just awesome. Yeah, and I've, I've gone for like a vampire in a cabbage full of blood. I've gone for circles. So when I was sick, I was in the hospital having iron infused into me because I was in so, adorbing it so badly from my food. And now I've got to the point like Tommy where my ferritin's starting to creep up, and there's no other signs of inflammation. So interpreting the blood chemistry is a little bit tricky, but ferritin generally is the most stable storage form of iron right. That's your question. Yeah, ferritin and

transfer end between them so you can have a good idea. So what do you guys see the most? What's the most common you see right now? I'm on my curiosity. I got dysbiosis. So I mean, if you're an FD. That's so common nowadays. So especially the endurance athletes, right, they're really, and this includes me by the way, I'm still going out and doing it, and that's exactly what I would be doing right now if I wasn't recording this podcast, is I'd be out in my mountain bike thrashing the hell out of my gut. And what I mean by that is when you exercise, it's normal exercise physiology for the blood to be diverted away from the gut towards the exercising muscles, and think about it from

an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. You've been chased by a tiger. What's the point in investing in digestion? That's a long-term building project. Let's just get those muscles going, get the fuck out of here. And then- In fact, if you get scared,

hard enough, you literally shit yourself up for one. Yeah, like everything just gets out because you don't, yeah, you got, you're not good. Nothing to do with it. Yeah. But yeah, so what happens is you divert blood away from the gut. And then when you stop, the blood comes rushing back in quite quickly, and you can see a reprefusion injury.

Maybe you should talk about that time. I think we're talking about that. Yeah, so the research I did part of my PhD was in stroke models. So particularly pediatric newborn babies was actually my, they're in my PhD. And so any time you have the blood cut off to an organ, say it could be the brain, it could be the heart and heart attack, then when you get a build up of metabolites, so it's actually, you benefit from this when you do blood flow restriction training, right? You get a build, an increase in metabolites,

and then when you remove the cuff, say, you get a rush of blood back, and that's sort of part of the adaptation too. But it causes part of the injury process in a stroke or a heart attack or and when you look at particularly long-term endurance exercise, if you're going, say, 80 plus a VO2 max or so very intense for a long period of time or just going for a long period of time. If you look at ultra-injurance marathon races, they've done studies, and like most of them have blood in their stool afterwards, right?

So you've had this injury to the gut that's so severe that you're actually bleeding into your gut. And it's on a small level you have to see on a stool test, but having that continuous, you know, that long period of time where you're not allowing blood to go to the gut and then the blood suddenly comes back. And then usually you throw a bunch of crap food down the hatch afterwards because you need to recover in your feeding window. And then you're actually probably just adding insult to injury right?

The gut's not ready and then you're throwing loads of food down. So if this is happening continuously, then you're absolutely in the right stage to build up some of the responses. Holy cow, because now my mind is getting blown because in our industry of muscle building and fat loss, one of the most lucrative aspects of the supplement industry is taking advantage of the invented post-anabolic window. The 28 nanosecond metabolic weight.

Like 30 minutes after your workout, you have to consume something because of course that sells their their process Mind you are training them to that beast mo too And so here you got someone busing their ass really really hard probably on stimulants Which is already fucking with blood flow anyway, because they're all vasoconstrictive right they're diverting blood from the gut They stop the workout blood is going back to the gut and the what they're putting in their in their gut is highly processed Artificially flavored garbage.

No wonder you're seeing so many problems. Yeah, and the perfect workout is, and we love to wear it on CrossFit, I used to do CrossFit a lot, but it's that kind of, when you're crushing yourself, like for like 30 plus minutes or an hour, yeah, in that kind of, in that kind of range, or so we work with a lot of obstacle course races,

and they have like two hour sessions where they're basically like doing burpees and then CrossFit style workouts for like two hours, right? And then you finish that and the first thing you do is you throw back a large meal of just like all this nonsense or shake whatever, like, that's the last thing you've got needs at that point. Wow, wow, wow.

No, and so you're like, it's crazy. It's like, it's like this perfect storm. You're kind of creating, you're in this environment where you're much more sensitive to things that are probably are not good for you It's like it's like this perfect storm. You're kind of creating. You're in this environment where You're much more sensitive to things that are probably are not good for you and on top of it You throw things that are not good for it. It does play into what you said earlier about frequency, right? You're tapping into that frequency thing if you could go less hard maybe shorter but more often That might be an advantage in this situation So I don't think how hard and how long do you think you have to go

before this becomes a problem? So I don't think anybody's listed that directly, but if you're going for multiple, I start more than two or three hours, it's a definite, but it's also the blood flow of strics is a certain amount, once you're above a certain amount of intensity. So once you're out of that sort of like 80 plus 85% plus a VO2 max, if you're an endurance athlete,

that's kind of like what you spend a lot of time looking at. And so like if you're really around, say, you're lactate threshold, anabolic threshold, sorry, anaerobic threshold for really long periods of time, that's exactly when it is. So it's that very high intensity for a long period of time where you're really gonna be getting those problems. And that's gotta be very individual, right?

So we have a lot of OCR listeners too. So what do you typically recommend then? Do you tell them to wait an hour or two before they actually consume food or what yeah and I think that's you know if you can you know wait half an hour an hour and then have like a real real food meal that's going to be digested more slowly it's not going to sort of lead to a huge rush of you know hormones because it gets into the gut but you know because of the processing and all that stuff then it's going to give you more time for it to move through all the various stages.

And I think that that's definitely going to give you the most bang for your buck. I mean, the other problem is we see a lot of people who are under eat, right? So they're really worried about calorie intake and they're doing this stuff. So then you do have to balance the two. So you may have to find a way to get more calories in

the rest of the day. And we definitely talk more about eating more food, rather than eating less food, because that's what we see. See the hearts of balance all these things. Yeah, no, so I mean, it's not always easy. And but one of the benefits of, and often we see people go low carb, or keto, and then try and do cross-fier or obstacle course

raising, and that's just like a recipe for disaster. Never seen it work. Never seen it work. But if you do, if you get better, having periods of time where you don't need to eat, so say you do like some sleep low, so you know, you deplete glycogen stores, and the next point you just do something light and aerobic, and so you increase your ability to metabolize fat,

you're also then gonna increase your tolerance to longer periods without food, right? And so then I think one of the benefits that you have of being somebody who's metabolically flexible, if you wanna call it that, or if you wanna call it fat adapted, or whatever your terminology is, if you can go longer periods without eating,

then you're actually gonna give your gut a rest some of the time too. And not only that, but you increase your sensitivity to some of the things you're eating, which for example, protein is another one. Like constantly consuming high amounts of protein all the time, there's actually some studies that are suggesting that every once in a while restricting protein

and then reintroducing it, increases protein synthesis. Your body becomes more, are you familiar with some of that? Yeah, yeah, and I think that's the same. I mean, you can come back to any basic physiological principle is of homeostasis, right? So you try, you're trying to get to some kind of balance point. And if you

constantly stimulate, the body turns down the message, right? And so you could, you can say that about almost everything, right? So if you take, if you take heroin, you need more and more heroin to get the same effect, if you, if you take protein, you know, there's certainly a point where if you're continuously stimulating that, it's just going to say, okay, well, the stimulus is coming all the time, I'm just going to turn down the message slightly because I don't want to be constantly forced to do something that I want to do. So there's always going to be this balance of, so if you're talking about protein, you could also talk about carbohydrate, you know, feast and fast, right? You want to give the stimulus occasionally, but also you need to take it away to get the best benefit from it.

Wow, fascinating. What do you think about in terms of to prevent gut disposes in athletes comparing things like a ketogenic diet versus... I know for a long distance endurance, ketogenic diet being seems to be okay for a lot of them, right? What's better for... Or is it entirely individual? I mean, my experience is it can be very, very individual. Yeah, I think it's going to be...

It is going to be really individual. And so you're always going to come back to it depends. And if you try it and you feel like shit, then you're probably not doing the right thing. That's tricky there because you might feel like shit in the beginning. In the short term. And there's definitely some studies. So my background, when I first got into some of this more kind of holistic type health approaches, health engineering, we like to call it, rather than medicine, it was through multiple sclerosis, so multiple sclerosis research. And my stepfather has multiple sclerosis and we kind of tried to deconstruct the disease to

figure out all the kind of things that could be happening. And in some of the MS research, they've kind of shown that in the short term, if you go on a keystionic diet, the diversity in certain, you know, so diversity isn't always good, but in general, it tends to be better. But the, you know, some of the beneficial species, the ones that we think are almost certainly beneficial, they tend to decrease in the short term, but then they increase again in the long term. So, what, early on, maybe you don't feel so good, maybe you're not getting quite the same performance, been the long term you might see a benefit, and it's always used the analogy of heart surgery, right?

So, if you look at heart surgery in the middle of it, it looks like a murder. But if you went to the end, actually you used to own the guy up and he walks out the door. So some things will take some adaptation. But in terms of preventing that kind of dispire, as we know, so treating what you use to treat and what you use to prevent are going to be slightly different rights.

So we know that if you're reducing symptoms, something like a low-fob-bapt diet could be really beneficial, you know, could even go as far as an elemental type diet. I know Michael Rucho talked a little bit about this stuff on your show too. But, you know, one of the big problems is going to be that food processing. So the food is coming into the gut in a state that the body isn't used to, and then you're going to drive a certain bacterial population in a part of the gut where you don't want it. So that's a big part of the problem too. So if you're just eating actual real food, that's going to be that's going to be really beneficial to start with, and that's going to prevent you causing those

problems down the line. And then also just that not like you said, that continual stimulus, like you get come straight off, you come straight off the track or straight off the training session, and you just suddenly throw a bunch of food down the hatch. You know, I think, you know, if you could come straight off, you come straight off the track or straight off the training session and then you just suddenly throw a bunch of food down the hatch. You know, I think, you know, if you can wait a bit, then you're going to give the cut. If the bodybuilding world, it's normally a protein shake or a bar, you know, some process bar or process shake that I don't know how many times I've played with a sucralose. Right.

I don't know how many times I've seen the, especially at the competitive level, guys, they carry their drinks and shakes and they literally go to the bathroom. They don't even wait till they try to catch that anabolic window so quick that they go to the restroom when they're done and so they still have this, then they're thinking, oh, I got this big pump. I've got to get the nutrients in there right away and they shut all this liquid sugar drink down or shove this bar. Yeah, you've got, because it's,

because of the way it's processed, you've got these, you've got the macabre dishes or the building blocks, you've got like glucose, you've got amino acids in a part of the gut where they shouldn't be because they take time to be digested and then absorbed through the gut if they're ending up somewhere where they're fine. And they sell that by the way.

They sell that. Yeah, yeah, so if you pass through their chest, yeah, if you take the targo then it runs straight through your gut and then it's gonna be you know you're gonna get that glucose spike even even faster you know I'm gonna say that is that actually a good idea. It's probably not.

That's shit you're blowing my mind right now. That's crazy. Well it's more I learn about the stuff the more I realize why I have so many gut problems is that there was years of me. And I'm doing all these things. Did it too. yeah, absolutely. And we've both done it. And that's just part of what you become this broken athlete

because you train the way you're told to train. And you're more of the same food that was causing you trouble in the first place. Yeah, I think everything that happened to me was entirely preventable. I just not eat and wheat in particular, and probably dairy too, then I would have been fine. It's not necessarily

the amount of exercise I was doing. I was doing 20 hours a week of exercise, which is too much. Well, what I found that worked for me is I had to do an elimination. I did a food intolerance test, which isn't 100% accurate, but it's a great starting point. I did food intolerance test, elimination diet, and I had to avoid completely avoid. And why do I even buy avoid is like, it couldn't even, I couldn't even have a single bread crumb on my food. I had to avoid completely avoid. And what anybody by avoid is like, it couldn't even, I couldn't even have a single bread crumb on my food. I had to avoid gluten. I had to avoid egg whites.

I had to avoid peanuts and dairy. I had, and then I used probiotics. And I had, there was certain kinds of probiotics that seemed to help. And I also used, this is when I started using medicinal cannabis. Cannabis also had a profound effect on my gut health. So was that as like a THC CBD mixture or just like the plant itself? So I had never gotten, I had never really gotten the results. I later on gotten from cannabis until I went down to Belize with a friend of mine on vacation.

And I'm down there and I had made the decision that I'm like, you know what, I'm on vacation, like I've been dealing with these gut problems, I'm just gonna fucking enjoy myself, I'm gonna eat whatever I want. We also had bought a bunch of shit dirt weed off of the cab driver. And when I say dirt weed, it's like, like when you know this, if you smoke weed,

it's like a bag of like, looks like, you know, crappy weed. Like hey. And you gotta smoke like two joints to feel like you're getting anything. So I'm smoking the hell out of it with the sky because we have so much of it in this cheap. And I'm eating whatever I want and my gut is like, fine, there's not a problem at all. So I get back to the States and I'm not doing that anymore because I'd never really used cannabis before. I'd used it occasionally but wasn't a thing. I got back to the States and within two weeks, my gut problems came back in a hurry.

And I started thinking, like, is it because I was relaxed on vacation? Is it because of this? Like, what was it? And then I read some articles on cannabinoids and their effect on the gut and on the immune system and how they have immunomodulating effects. And so I tried cannabis again.

However, the cannabis that you find normally, especially here in California, which is like the mecca of marijuana, the cannabis that I found was this super high THC strain. And it didn't really do it for me. And so I did more research and I found that really what I needed was a predominantly CBD strain with a little bit of THC, a little bit of THC's got benefit too.

But I need to have a be able to have a high cannabinoid load, and I can do that with THC because the psychoactive effects just get unbearable for me. I don't like getting super blazed, at least not on a regular basis. No, on the fuck us. Yeah, so occasionally. Actually, we're sober on this one, actually. But I started using high CBD cannabis along with eating a certain way using probiotics

and man, it was like a godsend. And now I use cannabis, not super regularly, but on a medicinal basis because I do find that it makes a big difference when it comes to my gut inflammation. So now I use it more, you know, as a like after I notice a little bit of a gut inflammation or whatever I So now I use it more, you know, as a, like, after I noticed a little bit of a, you know, gut inflammation, whatever, I'll start to use it.

Whereas before, during that whole heyday, I had to use it pretty, it was like every single night, I had to use it. So in the endurance world, I know athletes are starting to use cannabinoids now as performance enhancing substances, which I found absolutely, I find absolutely fascinating. Are you guys running into that at all, working with?

We don't get, no, we don't get a lot of that actually. So sometimes we've talked about it with people because of... Yeah, so it often comes back to the gut, so it can both animal models and some human studies... So if you get the right ratio of CBD and THC and you need the THC because the CBD sort of potentially... They sort of potentially each other's effects, they can definitely improve gut inflammation and things like that. you'd need the THC because the CBD sort of potentially they sort of potentially each other's effects.

They can definitely improve like gut inflammation and things like that. So we see it occasionally, but it's not something that we come up very regularly. But I do wanna go back, you mentioned that the food sensitive food sensitivity testing and the elimination diet, and we very regularly use the elimination diet.

It's something that almost everybody gets on some version of that depending on where they are. And we don't actually do food sensitivity testing because it's really expensive. And the elimination diet, if you look at, even you could go to traditional medicine, traditional rheumatology, and they'll tell you that to figure out what food, intolerance, or allergies you have,

the elimination diet is the gold standard. But it's period. And so that's, but it's time consuming, but what it also does is it makes you be mindful about how the food affects you. So you remove food. And then when you add it back in, you have to think, oh, hang on a second, how do I feel after I eat this? Oh, I feel like shit. So I shouldn't eat that anymore. Teaches you so much more. And so, yeah, the process of being mindful, and this is something that Chris talks about. Yeah. So it was my wife. So my wife had done, spent quite a lot of time

in the lab studying dairy allergies and she was like, yeah, no, you don't need to do a food sensitivity test. This is bullshit. And in fact, if anyone listening, if you wanna pay power me $400, I will use my algorithm. I won't even use an algorithm. I'll just send you the list of foods.

Because what it's gonna be is it's gonna be sensitive if your gut is messed up and inflamed. You'll be sensitive to what you're gonna be sensitive to whatever you're using a lot. Exactly, yeah, exactly. And then there's definitely some regular offenders, so gluten, dairy, nuts, seeds, nightshades. And by the way, if you just started eating a paleo diet,

you may still be eating some of these things, right? So what I did was I eliminated wheat and dairy, but then I started eating tons of nuts and eggs and seeds. And my wife is like, look at my diet going, you just kind of got out of the frying pan and into the fire, like, why don't you just try eating this? And it's like, okay, yeah, and that worked really, really well.

Well, I love what you said about the elimination and then going through that process, so you can start to connect those dots because we talk a lot about it. People don't think they don't even they don't you know It's amazing to me and I know this from my own experience like growing up as a teenager You know some days you have really gnarly shits some days your gut fills all bubbly some days you have random headaches Some days you don't sleep very well, but you don't connect anything

It's just you think there's like this this fairy that just gives you a headache or a bad shit every once in a while, instead of actually starting to analyze what you're consuming. And so when you do an elimination die, this is why I highly recommend it to people too, especially if you're somebody who's battling a lot of issues and you can't quite figure it out. And you're right, it does take a little bit of a process,

it is a little bit of discipline, it is a little bit of work, but it is one of the best things that someone can do to start to make those connections. And it's funny, once you start to realize that every time you have that pizza, you shit your brains out, you sleep like crap and you gotta headache the next day, it's amazing how much easier it is to skip out on it. It's not as hard versus when you look at it like, oh, this pizza's gonna make me fat.

No, don't look at it like that. Don't look at it like this pizza's gonna make me fat. No, don't look at it like that. Don't look at it like this food is gonna make me fat. How does that food nourish your body and how does your body respond to it once it gets converted in there? Think of it like that. And when you start to learn to do that, dieting becomes, it's no longer dieting anymore.

It's learning to start to feed the body with what it wants and what it needs and how you respond to that. And I think Weight loss Muscle building all these things become so much easier when you start to connect those dots such a great point Absolutely, well gentlemen. It's been great. Yeah, man. What a fun time. It's been fucking awesome I'm fine. Yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah, you guys are so close. We should do this again Yeah, definitely. Yeah, right check this out go to YouTube subscribe to mind pump TV

We post a new video every single day. Also, you can find us on Instagram, Mind Pump Media, my personal page is Mind Pump Sal, Adam is Mind Pump Adam, Justin who was not here today. Mind Pump Justin and Doug is Mind Pump Doug. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance. Check out our discounted RGB Superbumble at MindPumpMedia.com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps on the ballad, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically

transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout nutrients in over 200 videos, the RGB Superbumb is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbumb has a 430-day money-back guarantee and And you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at MindPumpedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a fine-star rating and review on iTunes

and by introducing MindPump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support. And until next time, this is MindPump. Until next time, this is Mindbomb.