Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 932: John Meadows

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

In this episode, Sal, Adam & Justin speak with John Meadows who reveals all about what it takes to be a top-level bodybuilder. Why John doesn’t have a colon. (4:30) Was there anything he did that contributed to his digestion issues? (10:35) How did he change his approach coming back? (12:10) Has going through this experience forced him to become more in tune with his body? (14:55) What are the BIGGEST mistakes he sees with people trying to build muscle? (16:38) Has he found there is a RIGHT dose of protein for his body? (24:40) What are the big missing pieces in bodybuilder’s regimens? (26:03) What kind of things does he cover in his workshops? (29:42) What made him start to compete at a young age? (30:50) When did he start to use anabolic steroids? Was he a hyper responder? (34:20) Does he believe people do not cycle out anymore? (43:19) What are the differences between taking anabolics vs growth hormones? (45:17) His take on training and why certain bodybuilder’s physiques look more ‘granite.’ (54:38) What does he think of the new culture of thought around isolation movements being the BEST movements for most muscle activation? (1:00:45) What is the ‘Mountain Dog Diet’ and does food quality matter? (1:04:10) Is the trend starting to reverse with coaching in bodybuilding? (1:09:20) What is site enhancement oil (SEO)? (1:10:15) How bodybuilding is a different level of drugs in sport. (1:15:54) What is the difference in training people that are natural vs. people on ‘gear’? (1:18:16) His theory behind metabolism in competitive sports. (1:21:52) What is his take on people not adapting their training routines? (1:26:30) How social media killed bodybuilding. What does the future of bodybuilding look like? (1:34:04) If he was to go back and whisper into 22-year-old John’s ear, what would he tell himself? (1:40:13) Featured Guest/People Mentioned John Meadows (@mountaindog1)  Instagram/Twitter Website YouTube Dr. Jordan Shallow D.C (@the_muscle_doc)  Instagram Flex Wheeler | Official (@officialflexwheeler)  Instagram Stan "Rhino" Efferding (@stanefferding)  Instagram Jon Call (@jujimufu)  Instagram Kai Greene (@kaigreene)  Instagram Ronnie Coleman (@ronniecoleman8)  Instagram Ben Pakulski ®  (@bpakfitness)  Instagram Coach Daniel Matranga  CSCS (@dynamic.danny)  Instagram Brad Schoenfeld, PhD (@bradschoenfeldphd)  Instagram Products Mentioned: December Promotion: Enroll in Any MAPS Program – 1 Year of Forum Access for FREE! Mind Pump Free Resources Mind Pump Episode 865: Stan Efferding: The World's Strongest Bodybuilder Anabolic reference guide - Book by Bill Phillips Mind Pump Episode 715: Mind Pump Goes Deep with Ben Pakulski Mind Pump Episode 548: Ben Pakulski Synthol - Wikipedia Oil Bags: Rise of the Idiots | T Nation Dinosaur Training: Lost Secrets of Strength and Development – Book by  Brooks D Kubik

If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. Who was that introduced to John Meadows? Was it shallow? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, the first time, not the first time, but one of the first times that we met, uh, shallow when we were asking him people in the space that maybe we didn't know

about that he likes or recommends and he threw out John Meadows' name out there at that time. And at that point, I didn't know who he was. And so I started following him and it was like maybe six months to a year later, do we start reaching out to coordinate him coming on the show? Because I liked the lot of the content he was putting out you know he puts out a lot of good you know it's a smart guy yeah first glance you see him and he looks massive stairroaded out bodybuilder guy and you you know if you're somebody who is not into that

space at all you probably get turned off right away but then the deeper you dive into the information that he's providing he's a really fucking cool guy and he's very intelligent, really, really smart. He's got a gnarly physique too. I mean, the guy's just grainy and shredded looking. But what I liked about him was he's candid. Yeah.

As hell. Like, we asked him anything and everything and the guy answered very honestly. So he talked about, of course, training, nutrition, and business, but then he talked about anabolic steroid use and drug drug use like growth hormone and insulin and EPO and other crazy stuff. And he was super open and candid about it. So for you hardcore bodybuilding fans,

you're gonna love this episode. It was a lot of fun recording. You know, of course I'm into it, so I had a good time with this guy. So if you want to check and he's got a great YouTube and Instagram, by the way, if you want to check him and he's got a great YouTube and Instagram, by the way. If you want to check him out on YouTube or Instagram, both of them can be found mountain dog one. Mountain dog and the number one.

Got a lot of videos, got a lot of posts, got a lot of followers. So you get some value out of following them. So you should definitely go check him out. And then his website is mountaindogdiet.com. And then how many days left until the promo is over, Doug? Five days left. So there's only five days for the one year of free access to the Mind Pump Private Forum,

if you're enrolling any maps program. So here's what you do. You're enrolling a maps program, pick the one that best suits your goals. So let's say your goal is to look like a body builder. Let's say you want to shape and sculpt your body aesthetically, well that would be maps aesthetic. Well, let's say rather than that you're more interested in performance You want to be able to move you want to be able to jump you want to be able to twist you want lateral stability

You want speed and power. Well, that'd be maps performance. Let's say you just want raw strength and size Well, that might be maps and a balluck Let's say you want to have a lot of fun in the gym But you also like raw strength and size, well that might be maps and a ball. Let's say you want to have a lot of fun in the gym, but you also like raw strength and size maps. Strong, maybe for you. We have correctional exercise programs like maps prime and mass prime pro and much more. Check out all of our programs. Find the one that's for you at maps fitness products.com and this month, five days left.

You have five days left, you have five days left, if you're enrolling any of those programs, you'll get a free year of access to our private forum. In the forum, as personal trainer, personal trainer, excuse me, fitness enthusiast, there's doctors, and then of course, the best part is just an atom, myself, and Doug are on there daily to answer questions and help people out.

Again, go check that out, mapsfitnessproducts.com, and that's it. So without any further ado, here we are interviewing John Meadows. Hello, what is that? I hear that too, it was like a holl. What is that? Was that you breathing?

No, I'm not breathing right now. All right, that's usually you. That's usually, this is Adam the whole time. Oh, I have not been like that in a long time. Yeah, I don't know. When I was competing, dude, when you're walking around with fucking, yeah, you're right. Yeah, you're like walking around like that.

It's hard not to. Look at this, you know, when I'm breathing. You're not breathing, pray to Jordan shallow every time you get it. Yeah, with Jordan shallow breathes. Yeah, with Jordan heavy breathes. He's a mouth, he does a little bit of the mouth. He's a big guy. He's a really big guy.

But John, you're jacked. I'm not breathing out crazy. Man, I'm a I'm only two 25 ice a roll around 260 Whoa, Mike. I'll tell you five seven 365 seven you were as wide as you were tall that took a lot of pop tarts man That's a lot of meat Yeah, you man you earlier we were joking around and you you were saying you had to go to the bathroom and then you made a fart joke and you said you can't fart because you don't have a colon. I just blew my mind.

Yeah, yeah, tell us that whole story about how that all happened. I read a little bit about on your biography about that whole deal. Right. What was that? What was it, what happened with that whole deal there? Yeah, so in 2005, I was preparing for the Mr. USA and about five weeks out in my cardio, I noticed that I get about 30 minutes in in my cardio and I felt like I had to use a bathroom, right? So I've run back to the house and nothing will come out.

Oh man, that's weird. And then it kind of turned into like a little bit of abdominal pain. So it got worse and worse and worse and worse. And in pretty soon, anytime I'd eat a meal meal there'd be about 10 or 15 minutes work physically hurt So I thought how this is just stress and do straight, you know most of these this the stomach issues We have a lot of it's just brought on by stress. So I figure I'll go do the contest. I'll come back I'll be fine. So I went and did the mystery USA like by that time I couldn't eat really I got home Like okay, okay cool now. It's over. I couldn't even really eat. I got home. Like, okay, cool.

Now it's over. I'm gonna be fine. And then two or three days later, I went to see my doctor and he saw me walking into his office and he called the life squad. He's like, he's known me for many, many years. He's like something bad is happening. So he could tell right away by looking at me.

And he looked at me. What was it that he saw? I don't know. Okay. This dude, I mean, he's been my doctor since 1999 at me. And he looked at me. What was it that he saw? I don't know. Okay. This dude, I mean, he's been my doctor since 1999. He knows me really well. Okay. So the ambulance comes against me.

They take me to the hospital. The hospital runs me through a whole battery of tests and they say, we know what's wrong with him. He's constipated. And I said, I don't know if I believe that because I have an aid for three or four days. Like, I don't, there's something. So then I went to saw some more specialists and they said, oh, he has all straight of colitis. And four days. I don't, there's something, so then I went to solve some more specialists

and they said, oh, he has all straight of colitis. And I said, I don't know, I've got a little bit of medical background. I'm not really showing any symptoms of colitis at all. This is something else. Now you don't know what you're talking about. Trust me, you have colitis. I said, okay, so long story short,

to paying out worse and worse and worse, another couple of days later, I was back in the emergency room. By that point I was kind of crowed up in a ball and this is where it gets real intense. So I'm in a bed laying there in a hospital bed and I said, oh I think something bad is about to happen. I stand up and a blob of coagulated blood comes out of my butt and it lands on the hospital floor.

And oh, God, it is, good, a shit, are you like literally? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm looking at that and I'm just like, I'm looking at that, like, and feel myself getting kind of light at it and I'm like, I'm done, that's it. Like, this is the end of my life.

And then I see the nurse looks at it and I just see her eyes and she takes off running out of room. I'm like, wow, this is it. I'm in my early 30s, I had a good life, but it's over. So my wife was with me and I said, you have a notebook with you so she has a notebook. I said, I want you to, I'm gonna give you some messages to give to my friends.

So I start giving her messages like, you know, make sure you tell James, I'm gonna miss him. So, I mean, my mind I'm going to give you some messages to give them my friends. So I start giving her messages like, you know, make sure you tell James, I'm going to miss him. So, I mean, my mind I'm done. Wow. So the doctors come back in, they put me on the bed, and they're running down the hall with me.

In the next channel, I wake up and I see you. And there's all these pretty nurses in there. And it's like, it was a weirdest thing in the world because I woke up and I thought I was I remember I remembered Where I had left off I'm like my life and they're like yeah, you're alive And I'm like really and I'm like yeah, you're you're alive and I was so happy because I thought I was gonna die, right? So I'm super happy and the nurtures like wow, we've never seen somebody so happy in here And I was like, no, you know, I mean, I was thought I was pretty sure I was going to die. And you know, I had tubes in me and I had an ealyostomy that they did a temporary loss,

an ealyostomy. And so they, you know, the doctor comes in and he's like, yeah, your colon was there for so much blood. Well, I discovered the whole thing. And now your early limbs connect to your anus. And I was like, okay, all right. Well, I guess I need to do some reading up and see what all this stuff means. So that was one of the things actually that drove me to really learn about digestion. You know, I'm like, I probably should know this stuff well now. Do you know, not leading up to this,

were you not using the, were you not going to the bathroom? Were there any signs besides the pain that there was something going on? Have you ever had, like, if you ever ate so much fish, you had that oily stuff come out with the bathroom. I had that happening. Okay. But as a bodybuilder, you think, well, that's just the,

I'm eating a lot of fish. Yeah, right. That's what you think. You sing a lot of fish, but it turns out as a colon trying to kind of clean itself and just trying to fix something. And, you know, a long story short, I went to a ton of tests, man, they stuck a camera down my throat and my hip. I mean, everything you can think of, so much, so many

blood tests. And they couldn't figure out what's wrong, which is kind of scary because when you don't know what's wrong, it's kind of like, well, how do I know it's not going to happen again? And so they sent some of the tissue, they sent a tissue to the Mayo Clinic, and Mayo Clinic said, yeah, we've got nine cases of this on file. So they tell me what it was. Idiopathic, my went to Moh hyperplasia, the Mesenteric vein.

I'm like, that's a lot of big words. I know clue what that means. Can you tell me what that means? That's basically saying what it is, but they don't know what causes it. Right, idiopathic. Idiopathic. No cause.

And. Which is a scientist way of saying we don't know. Exactly. Yeah, that's it. They're clueless. So, like, I'm not feeling very good about that, right? And I look up the other cases, and I see the symptoms. I'm like, that's it, that's exactly what I had.

Like, everything that these people went through is what I felt. So the good news was, out of the nine cases, only two died, seven lived, the two that died, weren't as fortunate to me to be in the hospital when they had an issue, but it was a disease that affects the sigmoid part of your colon specifically.

But at that point, you had to went so long and the kind of veins literally just like explode. Wow. That's your breath builds up in them. And in the rest of my digestive system, the veins and arteries are like, you look like you're 18 years old. It's just those specific, mesenteric veins that have this. So it was really bizarre. It was pretty intense.

Now, anytime a bodybuilder, especially a pro bodybuilder, a high level competitive bodybuilder, has some kind of a health issue, people point to the bodybuilding lifestyle, including the food, the high protein intake, the supplements, and including the anabolic steroids, was there anything that you were doing that you think could have contributed to any of this? So, were you ever at any point where you're sitting, they're going, oh, man, did I do this to myself? Oh, 100%. I've always been a big believer that you're going to use GH. You want to use pharmacate GH, right? You want to use the good stuff.

And at the time, I was using some generic GH, which is a known to have impurity. So I'm thinking that I take some GH to cause this. You know, I was experimenting with EPO at the time, Epigen. You know, that can increase your blood cell count. I'm thinking, did that have anything to do with it? So I don't know. I mean, and I was eating a lot of food, you know, I mean, that was back when I was younger and I was pounding down food because that's what we were talking about.

We were talking about that. You have to, there is no, forget about digestion. You just have to get calories down anyway and get them down. So that's how I had tried to grow through those, you know, my younger years, I just, it's a game of calories, right? You just got to eat more and more and more. So you know, not paying any attention to your digestion or anything like that. So, yeah, I mean, I thought about all those things. And, you know, it's like, do I ever want to compete again? You know, at some point I thought, and I was terrified, but I was like, let me try this again

with a little different approach. And luckily, nothing ever bad happened again. And everything was fine. But man, it was scary so yeah, absolutely. How did you change your approach coming back? Well, you know, so I looked at a lot of different ways. I looked at it from the food part and we used what I call it, I just called it the power shove method,

just power shove calories down. So I started paying attention to learning about pre-bottles and probiotics and things like that and helping your gut flora and the benefit that that has. And I didn't really care about those things before, but all of a sudden I thought, man, maybe I should look into this. If you're full, you don't need again, right? Let your food digest.

Some of it was common sense. Some of it was educating myself from a chemical perspective. It was like, you know, do I need that EPO? I probably don't need that. I'm never gonna use generic growth hormone again. Absolutely not. So honestly, the chemicals that I use in bodybuilding, I made sure they were from a doctor with prescription

and, you know, clean, not somebody making men a bathtub. And then, I had another perspective too. I was working at Chase at the time. I was running very large projects for JP Morgan Chase. And I think it was a pretty stressful position. So I'm a big believer that stress can absolutely destroy your body and destroy everything. So I had a little different perspective too.

When I woke up in ICU, what I used to consider a big deal wasn't such a big deal to me now. So I'd go to work and chase and whereas before I'm running these projects with these big teams and people have issues and problems come up and chase was a very intense atmosphere, very intense, very production oriented. The culture was very intense and so everything was a really big deal. You'd stay there, you'd work until something was done. There was really no working hours. You just worked hard nonstop. So I went back to chase at a very different perspective and it actually helped my career

because then I became the guy who was calm under fire but my perspective was very different, right? It wasn't, you know, our customers being impacted right now, no, okay, well then go home, get some rest, come back, we'll fix it tomorrow. It was a, I changed the way I, you know, my perception of things was very different. And to this day, I'm a very low-stress guy. Like things just aren't that big with the oatmeal now

that used to be, you know. So, you know, I looked at it from a bunch of different perspectives like stress. What's really a big deal? You know, losing a family member is a big deal. But trying to decide whether you're going to get, you know, tune in or tune in waters, not so much a big deal, right? And then, you know, for the chemical part and the food part, all that stuff, you know, kind of played into my thoughts moving forward. Yes. Years ago, I had my body rebelled on me a little bit and it changed my approach completely to my training and my nutrition and the side effect of that.

And not that I was even focusing on it, because at the time I was just wanting, I just wanted to get healthy, which I'm sure at some, right after that, you're like, I just wanted to get healthy. The side effect of that was, I became so much more in tune with my body that I'm able now to get better levels of just fitness and conditioning and aesthetics than I ever was before

because I'm more in tune. Are you, have you found that with yourself as well? Absolutely, a thousand percent. before because I'm more in tune. Are you, have you found that with yourself as well? Absolutely, a thousand percent. And, you know, what I can do now, you know, I probably have 150 grams of protein a day now. You have anybody built in here? They'll tell you.

Oh, got your size, it's gonna have three hundred grams, easy. Absolutely. I've lost no strength, you know, right before I could went to the airport, you know, I was haxquating rock bottom with six plates for reps. Same thing I did when I was in my 20s eating 6,000 calories a day. Yeah, I mean, you get into your body and things start working for you instead of against you.

I find the exact same thing for sure. Yeah, it's some of the stuff that bodybuilding and training teaches us that is valuable also sometimes becomes in my opinion a big problem like one of them is like you will you'll find no athlete that can be as disciplined when it comes to nutrition as a pre contest body boat. The discipline that a pre contest bodybuilder has is just it's almost not human. The problem with that then becomes the ignoring the signals of the body and just push, push, that becomes a problem. So there's that kind of that dual, you know, that duality of it, which I think is a big issue.

And then some of the other stuff is the excesses, like we just talked about protein, like what are some of the biggest mistakes you see with people trying to build muscle and get stronger and all that stuff that now you know is just bullshit? Number one thing is people want to tap it overnight. Back in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, a culture was very different. It was, I'm going to do what it takes

for as long as it takes to get there. And it might be 10 years, it might be 15 years. I did 16 pro qualifiers before I turned pro. And if you talk to people now, you know, I get the guys that come to me now like, Hey, man, I want to be a pro. I'm like, okay, I've ever competed. They're like, no, like you just you don't understand what it takes. And so what happens when you have that mindset is if you're if you want to get there that fast that becomes an extreme game, It's I'm going to pound a ton of drugs. You know, I'm going to pound a ton of food

and I'm going to make this happen overnight. And you see that happen. And you see guys that kind of, they're shooting stars. And you know, they become very well known and then they disappear. And you don't hear about these guys. I know what goes on with my peers, these are the pros, a lot of kidney problems,

people on dialysis, and you don't really hear about it, but there's a lot of kidney problems, people on dialysis, and you don't really hear about it, but there's a lot of pros that are frying their bodies, right? As opposed to taking a little more intelligent approach, it might take you a few more years, but you know what, you'll probably live an extra 15 years, you know who knows? But so I think the number one place that I always start

with when I'm talking to younger guys is trying to teach them patients in persistence. Like man, this is gonna take some time, right? It's gonna take some time. And then, and then, you know, we were always taught the power chef food and things like that. So it was, you know, I used to train in a gym, I was in college as a world gym,

as a best gym in Columbus, Ohio. I actually transferred colleges just as trained beside the train with that gym. I worked out there once when I went to go watch the Arnold Classic, that gym is amazing. That gym was awesome. It's a bingo place now. That gym was awesome.

That's where I grew up. And there was right across street, there was a buffet. So I was trained with some parallel thrs. These guys, so when I was in my early 20s, there was a hard core group of guys that were lifted. There were bodybuilders and powerlifters. There were people there that competed in a bodybuilding show and a powerlifting show on the same day,

on the same week. They were savages. These dudes were animals. And I was, 2021 years old. And they saw how hard I worked. And these were all these big black guys, right? And they all, they're a little white boy, Johnny, man. That boy can work.

So they liked me. They kind of took me under their wing. So we would train, you know, and then we would walk across street to the buffet and it was pile up as many chicken breasts as you can on the plate, you know? It's a big neck, with a 14 chicken breast, big fill, with a 16 chicken breast. Are these real numbers you just throw now?

No, no, these are real numbers. At one city. Yeah, yeah, these guys are like, how many grams of protein is that out of the city? It's a lot. It's a lot. That's, yeah, 500, 600 grams are in one city. These guys were, they were animals, man.

I mean, they were animals. And I'd be like, oh, there's four. Can I get five down, you know? So we would just eat and eat and eat. And, you know, sometimes before, let's go to Bob Evans before we train them. All right, so, you know, we're getting the biscuits and gravy and biscuits and gravy and need. And you know, sometimes before we, okay, let's go to Bob Evans before we train. I'm like, all right. So, you know, we're getting the biscuits and gravy and biscuits and gravy and more and more and just pounding down calories, you know, but it was, it was very different. We also train really, you know, people now, they're so scared

of overtraining. And I'm like, if you walk into any job, the last thing you see is overtraining. You just see people texting. Like it just cracks me up. Everybody's so scared to overtrain. I'm like you guys have no idea. First of all, overtrain doesn't happen in one workout. You know, it's period of time and people don't even really know what overtrain really is.

But the mentality is very different now too. So going back to your original question, people need, don't be so scared to just work hard. Like if you tell a guy now to take two sets of failure, they're like, are you sure, man? Are you sure my CNS can recover from two sets of failure? Oh my God, even in Christmas,

God, come on, man. I mean, what I like about going to the gym, what I've always loved is, I always, I always, I actually take a little pride in being able to do things and I don't think other human beings can do. And that may not be pushing heavyweight. It may be taking yourself past the level of pain that most people just can't handle.

And I always took a lot of pride in that. You know, I could do put 900 on leg press and find a way to do 40 reps with it. Stand up, catch my breath, and you know and I'd have 400 on a squat rack. We would actually superset leg presses and squats. Because why? Because it's retarded. Nobody else can do that. And I had very, when I was in my early 20s,

I had 30 inch legs, or very good. I mean, never at the top of the national level, even a young age. Now, it was because that's what my mentality was. It was, I was smart enough to know that I didn't have the wide clavicles and a narrow hip structure. I'm going to have to put on a lot of hard condition, gnarly muscle to ever be competitive as a pro.

I knew that from a young age. I knew I wasn't flex wheeler. But I looked up the guys like Tom Platz, the guys who really could take their training to another level, man, like they would not leave the gym until they knew they had won. And that's kind of the mentality I always had. I'm not leaving this gym until I've put everything

I had into it. And a lot of people would watch my videos and it's that you're doing too much. I'm so, okay, that's fine. I'll just keep doing too much, you know, but it's working. You know, you always try to learn, and my approach is a little different now, but I wouldn't

for one second take back the way I've trained for many, many years. Don't you think that it's, or what I've seemed to find is that, like you said, you walk in the gym, and it's very rare that you see a bunch of, especially in like a 24-hour fitness or a basic gym. You know, there's not a lot of signs of overtraining, especially in the weight room area, but in the competitive bodybuilding world, that's where I would see if something like that would be abused because of the mentality. I think the average population needs one message and then like the bodybuilding community needs another message.

I used to say this about even protein intake. Like, most of the clients that I got that was a, you know, 40-year-old soccer mom with three kids, just She was under consuming protein and so I was always trying to get her to eat more protein. But then when I was talking to my peers in the bodybuilding world, I was like, whoa, dude, that's way over what you need to. So it seems like there's this conflicting message because there's one group of people that are probably abusing protein, abusing intensity, and then there's another group of people

that need more intensity in their life and need more protein in their life. I think that's probably what makes it really difficult is you hear guys like us have a conversation like this and people are going, well fuck what is it? Do I need to push harder or do I need to back off or do I need to eat more protein or eat less protein? Yeah, right. And I find that that's what's most common. It seems to be that

You know what what we tend to gravitate towards or what we would whatever cult that would group that we fall into There's extremes and in both those whether it be the lack of intensity or too much of intensity or the lack of protein or too much protein I think people don't realize that there's a right dose You know, I mean like it's Like it's not more as better. It's not like money, you know, the more you get the better. It's there's a right dose, the right amount. So like talking about protein intake, for example, at some point your body becomes so desensitized, you're just, you might as well be in carbs and fats, you're just using it as energy, except

that proteins take a little bit more processes to go through the body and can actually be detrimental at the extremely high levels. I know most people eat high protein diets totally fine, but if you're a bodybuilder and you're consuming four and 500 grams, I remember reading articles about guys, the rest in peace, like a NASA LSAM buddy you would consume five six hundred grams of protein You know a day There's no studies to show what that can do to you long term and there's also no studies to show that that's even You know beneficial. You know, it's kind of that right dose. Are you starting to figure that out now about your body? Like okay, there's a right dose where my body just seems to do the best. I think so and the other thing is

Just because something works for you at one point in time, your own body changes too. Good point. And, you know, I feel, my typical breakfast is two eggs and two pieces of toast. And people are like, man, that's crazy. That's not enough food. I'm like, I feel great with that breakfast.

So, and you know, sometimes I'll be like, oh, I'm gonna do it like the old days. I'm gonna eat six eggs and I do that. And I feel terrible. You know, it's'll be like, oh, I'm going to do like the old days. I'm going to eat six eggs and I do that and I feel terrible. You know, it's not saying that six eggs is wrong for somebody. It's just where you're at at the time. Yeah, I think, again, and again, to my earlier point, just because something works at one point in your life doesn't mean that's what's going to be right. So to me, this is a constant game of just like, where am I at now, what's going to be right. So to me, this is a constant game of just like, where

am I at now? What's going on? And you're just always in this evaluation mode, like all the time, nonstop, even now, even now, you know, even with a workout, with diets, with stress, with sleep, I'm a big proponent in sleep. I do a lot of seminars where I talk about sleep and sleep quality, not that stuff, all these things all together, you realize as you get older, like, you know, you can't ignore, the older you get when you ignore one of these things, it has a real big snowball. It's compounding for sure. It compounds, right?

So a lot of the things now are very important to me. I didn't use to think about before. I just generally care. What do you think are some of the big missing pieces in bodybuilding, bodybuilders, I guess regimens? You think like digestion and sleep or two? Because I know a lot, a lot of bodybuilders talk about, you're hearing more and more now talk about digestive health.

I know we had Stan efforting on the show and he was talking a lot about it. Five, ten years ago, there was no talk about how to digest your food properly, taking things like probiotics and food quality. It was only about macarons, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, calories. Do you think that that's still a big missing piece? What do you think happens when bodybuilders start to figure that out for themselves? What do you think happens to them? Stan is definitely right. Things are much different now. I remember in around 2007, I was on a board. This is kind of where my name kind of started to get out there. It was professionalmuscle.com. It was the board. There were a lot of pros on it. It was a great board. I wrote this. I was sitting at Chase one day and I had been learning a lot about

learning a lot about things like farm to verses, salmon to verses, wild caught salmon and grass fed beef versus conventionally fed beef. I've been learning a lot about this. Actually thought a doctor friend of mine, a doctor, Serrano, who's teaching me this stuff in the 90s and then I didn't, I never even heard of that. Like what's on Omega 3 and Rich Day? Like how do you do that? Like are you feeding your chickens fish? You know, I didn't, I never even heard of that. Like, what's an omega-3 in rich day? Like, how do you do that? Like, are you feeding your chickens fish? You know? I didn't know, right? It was all new to me. So I started, I mean, I found a farm.

I started drinking raw milk. I found another guy who had chickens. I started in, and I've always been very religious about my labs, my blood work. And so I started watching the changes in my labs, like man, this got better, this got better, this got better. This got really, was very, very, and just from changing the quality,

not necessarily the, it was a very, very big change. Very big changes in my lipid panel in my hemoglobin A1C, fasting glucose, all that stuff. All started changing for the better. And the nurse at the doctor's office, she's sitting there looking at this stuff. And she's like, what are you doing different?

Like, I don't understand how this stuff is changing. And I said, well, I started cooking and coconut oil. And she's like, well, isn't that mostly saturated fat? And I said, yeah, but it's a little different. You can't just look at it as a bad fat. There's some very, very good qualities to it. You know, I'm getting my chickens from a farm now. She's like, you're eating all the yokes

Aren't those bad for you? I'm like That's debatable. You know, we can talk about that. I don't necessarily think they're bad for you though and the meats and her So this stuff like kind of opened my so in 2007 when I messaged board I wrote this this is the kind of diet I'm following and if you guys want to try it try it But for me, it's worked really well I feel really good. And so people gravitated toward that and my handle on the internet was mountain dog and that's because I love Bernice mountain dogs.

I've always had Bernice mountain dogs, just a dog breed I love. People started calling at mountain dog diet this and that name, people just started calling it that. And that's kind of how that whole name came to be. We'll turn that message board. So back in 2007, people were like, well, man, this is different. Like I didn't know that farm raised tilapia

might not be the healthiest fish in the world because nobody was even looking at that stuff. So it kind of started and started growing from there. And now I think people are much more aware of this stuff and But for me it was You know, I'm one of those guys. I love to learn but I want to see what I'm doing on my body And those those labs were very good indicators clear indicators that there were some positive changes taking place from this When you do these because I know you do a lot of seminars, right?

We are good friend Dr. Jordan Schallow recommended you because you guys, these are things you talk about in your summer, where are some of the things you cover? I cover everything. I do workshops, two, three day workshops, where we talk about training, we talk about sleep, we talk about stress, we talk about nutrition, I talk about drugs, I talk about everything.

Nothing's off limits, and if it's a topic I don't know something about, I just tell people, I'm not educated on that, I'm not going to give you an opinion, but you need to know I'm not educated on that. So I try to cover, and what I do when I go to seminars is like, I'm not saying I know everything and I'm right, I just share my experience. These are my experiences. Take over what it's worth. If you think some of this stuff, you might want to try it. Try it. If you don't, hey, that's cool too. Thanks for coming to my seminar. But I just tried to share a lot of the experience I've had. You know, I started competing when I was 13 years old. So I've been, you know, I'm 46 now. So I've been around this for a long time. And I think

some of the things I've learned, I mean, I think I've learned a lot, but I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. A lot of mistakes. And I think when you've made a lot of mistakes and actually learn from them, then you can build a pretty good base of knowledge to share with people. What made you want to start competing such a young age? That's most interesting. Magazine, really.

Magazine, I was in a pro wrestling, right? Remember the road warriors? Oh yeah, yeah. Dude, road warrior hawk and road warrior animal. Man, I wanted to be road warrior hawk. He was awesome. And, you know, there was, the guy's back then, you guys remember Tony Atlas?

Yeah. You know, junkyard dog. Oh, yeah. So, so you guys gotta check out my Instagram. So I'm doing some ultimate warrior chair shots. I'm hitting people in the back. I just hit my creed a couple of weeks ago. I just hit my creed, right?

I'm having, do you know, you know, you know, Jujimufu? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jujimufu came and saw me, I blasted him with a chair. So anyways, I love professional wrestling, and you know, there was Ivan Putsky, there was all kinds of big guys back then, right? And so I always went,

my grandmother took me to the store, and I would go to the magazine rack, and I would get the pro wrestling magazines. I would just sit down. I would sit there and read them while she shop. One day I saw a muscle and fitness. So I pulled it down and looked at it and boom, just like that. I was like, it was, it was Lee Haney and I was like, I want to look like that. You know, I wasn't getting picked on. I wasn't trying to impress girls. There was just something about the look of the muscle

that I've really, so what happened was I saved up and I bought one of those magazines and I took it to school with me. And I'm showing everybody in class and I'm thinking they're all gonna get excited. They're gonna be like, oh, that's awesome. And every person to the tee said that's gross. I don't wanna look like that.

Every single person. And I was like, now I wanna do it even more because I don't care what you think. Right? So I, from a very young age, I wanted to be a probiotic butter and I watched the ESPN, they had the Mr. Olympian TV that year's a 1985 Mr. Olympian

Brussels Belgium. Is that the one that drug tested? Was that the first one? No, that came later. That was later on. Okay, and later. But I used to win Lee Haney one. And of course, that's when Gospire just won the Nationals.

And he was in his early 20s. He got third place. And then you had Albert Beckles, who nobody really knew how old he was. But they suspected me. So I'm 55 at the time. He got second place. A lot of great bodybuilders in that era. And I watched that over and over.

And I can tell you the top 10 placings right off the top of my head from that show. And then also in 1986, they had a Columbus actually. And that's when Tom Platz brought the audience to this fevered pitch where they're all standing and screaming. But anyway, so right then, boom, I wanted to do this. I competed at 13 years old. I was 119 pounds. And I just loved it, man.

And I was in a lot of sports. And I really wanted to be a pro football player and then I realized I don't have the talent to go to the next level in that sport. I was also in track, wasn't talented enough in track to go to the next level, but bodybuilding was something where I thought, you know what, if I worked really hard at this, I might be able to do okay. And it seemed like a sport where I could overcome some genetic flaws and possibly be successful. I still wasn't sure, but I knew I loved the way it made me feel. I knew

I loved the work hard. By the time I went out, I left high school, I was squatting 500 pounds. And at the time I was natural. I'd never taken a drug before, I'd never seen a drug before. But I was working hard. I mean, football practice, we'd run a mile. I'd win the mile on the team, and then we'd go into the weight room, and I would out squat everybody too. And it was just that pushing myself and that muscle, like, was just, it was like a disease I caught it and I could never get rid of it again. At what, when did you start using antibiotics? As you said, you were natural throughout high school squat and 500 pounds, which is insane. At what age did you start using antibiotics? As you said, you were natural throughout high school, squat and 500 pounds, which is insane.

At what age did you start using antibiotics and how fast did you see your body change after that? Yeah, so it was in my early 20s, and I was in college. My, I was very anti-anabolic. You know, I was one of those guys that said, if you take a shot at testosterone, you're gonna die from a heart attack in a week. And I started educating myself.

You guys remember the anabolic reference guide and all those things? Oh man, are you kidding me? Yeah, absolutely. Those were like, I started reading those things and I thought, man, maybe this stuff isn't as bad as I thought it was. Cause you had a lot of the fear stuff going on too,

like Lila, Zato, you know, definitely. Definitely a locker room. You remember the book, Death of the Monk Room, the gold one right there? I think so. But you know, so I was in that camp. I was like, I was a guy, I was like, well, I'm natural, you know, I'm natural.

I was all proud of being natural. And then I started reading, I was like, hmm, maybe this stuff isn't as bad as I thought. So my way lifting partner, his dad was a veterinarian, right? So he comes at a gym one day and he's like, John, like, I know you've been reading about all this stuff and I was looking on my dad's vet truck and he has some wind straw neck up boys. And I was like, oh, that wind straw sounds good. And I was in college, right? So I didn't have a lot of money.

And he said, I'll snag a bottle, 30 CC bottle wind straw for you for 50 bucks. And I was like, cool, I'll put the gutter 50 bucks. Like, him 50 bucks. I got my 30cc bottle wind straw, was 50 milligrams per milliliter. And I was, see, 30, set up 60 shots. So what I did was I remember I took one shot every day. So 50 milligrams every other day. That was all I took and I competed and I was in my early 20s and I won the shows I did.

I was in the men's class. I was 20 years old, I was in my early 20s and I won the shows I did. I was in the men's class. I was 20 years old, I was almost 21. But I won the light heavyweight and overall perfect scores in both of the shows I did. And that's a relatively low dose of a star. I was not even that strong. That's right, that was just winched at all, that was so 50 milligrams,

so one week would be 200 milligrams and the next week it would be 150 milligrams. Did you see, now were you a hyper-responder? I know some people. Absolutely. Absolutely. We should talk about that because I know guys that will take a gram of stuff and we'll gain like five pounds.

Yeah. And I know other guys that will just look at a bottle of something and then they'll gain 15 pounds muscle. Yeah, I was very fortunate. Just to be completely candid with you guys, I always responded very well to lower doses. The first time I took testosterone, I saved up some money and I bought six ready jack. These remember the old sauce on an ampules from Mexico. Oh, yeah.

Like the ones that came in the 18 gauge needles, we call them harpoons. Canons. Or canons, yeah. So I bought six of those and I took one shot every 10 days. So that was 250 milligrams every 10 days now normal HRT dose for guys now and juice like 150 ton of milligrams. I took 250 every 10 days and I blew up. I was like this is amazing like my coach. I didn't tell him He's like, are you doing anything? I'm like, well I don't know, man. I mean, yeah, no.

I mean, he's like, are you injecting any steroids? I'm like, yeah, he's up, but then you are. Yeah. I'm like, okay, I thought maybe the dose was so low, I could technically say I'm not really. But so the idea, I took six ampules of sauce and on, man, I'm just like, wouldn't be. Now, what do you think, what do you think that is?

Do you think it's like Androgen receptor density in the body? Could you think it's, cause it's really weird. I have this theory that like, especially someone like you, I think part of it, part of it, there's a genetic component that some people are just hyper responders, but then I also think that you laid a very solid foundation before you did that.

And so the body's just primed. Yeah, it's just ready for that. And where I see the mistake I see a lot of kids do now is like you said earlier, you alluded to is just they want the results so fast. It's like they're just starting to get in the gym and like already we're taking 500 milligrams of testosterone. It's like, whoa, dude, why don't you lay a foundation, learn the principles and the big rocks in this whole journey of getting huge before you start throwing the chemicals on there.

So sometimes I wonder if it was just the path you took that it sounds like you laid a very solid foundation first and then you start, I mean, you talk about the chai greens, the Ronnie Coleman's, a lot of these guys, I mean, they went pro fucking natural and then they pulled on it and they go, what happens, right? So yeah, and resistance training has been shown in studies, if you do it consistently for a long period of time, to increase angrogen receptor density. So you are in essence priming your body

to hyper-respond, whatever your limit is, whatever your genetic limit is, you're priming it to reach that upper limit with how it responds to anabolic hormones, and then you take them, and then you get this crazy, because I literally know people, I mean, I've been in the fitness industry for over 20 years professionally,

and I knew guys that would take insane amounts of gear, and you wouldn't even be able to tell if you looked at them on the street, and I knew other guys that would, you know, the original, uh, the original mistro-elimpia competitors, like, like, uh, Larry Scott. Those guys are taking five and 10 milligram tablets of, of, of, of debaul, a day, which is like, that's nothing. It's like a tick-tack, right? Every single day. And they were, and you're obviously look at pictures

of Larry Scott. And the guy looked, uh, absolutely incredible. So it's really crazy to me that, you know, how that happens. So you responded just gangbusters right out the gates. I did, but, you know, and I had built a really good foundation, man. I was training like an animal and, so, you know, there's all kinds of theories, you know, more satellite cells, you know,

Shumfeld talks a lot about that too, with gear and all that, but I do think that foundation part is critical, man. I really do. The reason why I feel this way too is my own experience. So I was the dumb kid who took it early and too much of it, trying to be big. I started training in around 16, 17, probably around 17 years old when I got serious, real serious around 18, 19, became a trainer by the time I was 20 years old, trained for a couple years, consistently

as a personal trainer. And at that time, I was always the skinny kid trying to build muscle. I was convinced that the thing that separated me from the guys that cover the magazines was steroids. It was, oh, that must be what it is. Like, I can't, I've never gotten my body down to three or four percent body fat. I've never looked like this. I've struggled to put muscle on. I train hard. I thought I ate well. But the truth was I really, I really didn't. I had a very small

Understanding of programming at a very small understanding of nutrition yet. I thought I did and I went the anabolic route and I took a fuck ton And I actually didn't see hardly any results. I didn't see shit really. In fact, they just made me leaner. I got lean and strong. I was strong in the gym. Also, I was lifting more weights, but I didn't get the results I wanted. I didn't put on 10 pounds or 30 pounds of muscle

like I was chasing it for. And I tried it two or three times and had a terrible experience and just was very frustrated with it. Now, what fast forward, 10 years later of education and training and laying a foundation, then they're like, okay, I started a piece this together. So when I was competing and I first started, I mean, I was taken 250 milligrams of testosterone and I competed and made all the way to the professional level at that dosage.

It wasn't until I became a pro, did I sort of take 500 milligrams of testosterone. And that's all I had to take to be on stage with the best of the best. And it was like really the answer wasn't the drugs. It was, I didn't really understand nutrition. I didn't really understand programming. I didn't have a solid foundation when I was 21 years old yet. It took those years of understanding nutrition years of programming. And years of just time under the iron to lay a finesse and then my body then send seem to respond so that's I tend to lean that direction that I feel like sure there's some of a genetic component that some guys are responders but I really feel like the guys that respond very very well the ones that really laid the foundation well and the ones that don't tend to really be missing the other pieces that

are as important if not more important than the drugs. Well, when I've talked to other pros, I used to think that they were lying when they'd say, no, no, they'd say things to me like, amateurs take more than the pros do. Like, they would tell me stuff like that. We interviewed Ben Pekolsky, good friend of ours, and we had this conversation around food, and I remember we were sitting around, and I was under the impression that a probiotic builder must have this incredible digestive system where they could just eat 10,000 calories and digest it,

because if I tried to eat 10,000 calories, there's no way I would be able to do it. And he says, no, he goes, you're totally wrong. Guys at my level are able to eat less food and get more out of it, and my mind was just, it just fucking blew all of us. Yeah, all of our minds. And I'm like, of course, there's no way you can eat 10,000 calories a day every day and be able to compete. Nobody can do that. It's the ones that can do the least amount and get the

most out of it. So yeah, now I know in the in the 70s and 80s bodybuilders used to cycle their their their steroid use. And then it became popular in the 90s, especially during the Doreian area to not cycle. Is that the thing now do people just not go off anymore? Well, it used to be. So when I even when I started, my thought was this, I want to even when I made the choice to use Windstraw and go that route, I still in my mind, I said, okay, in my off seasons, I'm still going to train natural because I want to build as much naturally as I can. So the first several years I competed with the aid of gear, I only use it pre-contest.

And my thought was I'm gonna maintain muscle, I don't wanna lose it when I'm on this low calorie plant. And then it became, the school of thought became, well, you need to be off as much as you're on, so if you're on 12 weeks, and you need to be off 12 weeks, so then that's what we started doing. And then it became popular was, okay, you need a six week break after a show. And then you can kind of get back on. And then it continued to morph. And then it was well

after a show, your body's primed. Now you should keep jamming stuff, which I never did, by the way. And I think it's not probably the best approach. And then you never come off. So most of the guys now never come off. They go back to an HRT dose, which many times is go up and down. They just go off and down. Right. Yeah. And eventually, you shut your own system down. I shut mine down, probably in 2002 or three, because I used to come off, my philosophy is always, if you can recover your own body naturally through PCT, then always do that, as long as you can, try to hold onto that. So that's what I did,

and then I got to the point where even PCT didn't do anything. So that's when I had to switch to HRT, and everybody who goes there on that route, they eventually will get to that position where they shut their own body down. Even if you're using conservative doses, just over time, it just happens. It's not often that we have someone that is able to speak so candidly about this stuff, so I love asking these kinds of questions.

What do antibiotics do for you like testosterone and the derivatives versus what do things like growth hormone and insulin do for you? Because it's not just antibiotics that bodybuilders use. There's a lot of compounds. You had even mentioned EPO, which I'd like to get into as well because I did not know bodybuilders even messed with that. I knew that was like an endurance athlete, drug.

So what are the differences in what they like? What's the difference between taking an antibiotic? What is that due to your body versus taking growth hormone versus taking insulin? Well, ideally what you're looking for is this beautiful synergy, right? Of all these different things happening at once. And, you know, I'll start with growth hormone. Growth hormone was kind of a game changer for me. And you've, I know you've had some really bright people in this show and there are a lot

of people who would probably tell you growth hormone doesn't help you build muscle. And they're going to point to studies to show that. But I'm giving my experience. My experience was the first time I used growth hormone was preparing for the 1999 Mr. USA and it was crazy expensive, crazy expensive. And I was working as a project manager and entry level project manager back at that time. I didn't have a lot of money. So I had to save a lot of money. And I was able to take two I use of Humatrobe, which to this day I still say is the best growth hormone after I trained five days

a week. So I took 10 I use a week. That's not very much. Okay. That's what I took. 10 I use a week. And as I dieted for the mystery I say say the year before I was a light heavyweight I got crushed at Nationals. I didn't make the top 15. There's a light heavyweight. There was like 42 guides in class but I got my butt kicked. I came back in 1999 as a heavyweight and I was in a first callout and people didn't even know who I was and that's hard in the 90s you know from far and bottom, it was hard as a nobody to be in the first call out. And I competed at 207. So in the year before, I was a soft 196 nationals.

And I mean, just to be honest, I really think growth hormone helped do that. I maintained like all the muscle I had when I was dieting and I ended up being 10-11 pounds heavier. So for me was, okay, this stuff is pretty good at helping you maintain muscle, but what about building it? And then it's like, I got older, you know, you go to the shows and you talk to people and they're like, yeah, I take nine, I use a stair stem after I train or blah, blah, blah

before bed and more and whatever. I started realizing the guys were taking a lot more GH and I was at the national level. At the time, I didn't really talk to any pros for the most part, but the amateurs are taking a lot of stuff because they wanted to be a pro. So, you know, I experiment with higher doses for I use six I use, and I found that that's six to nine IU dose, you know, your body, the volume of the muscle, the roundness of the muscle is very different. Now, is all that water retention in the muscle? I don't know, it's debatable. Certain growth hormones tend to make you hold

a little water than other growth hormones. Humatrobe, I still don't, this day haven't met anybody who had any water retention from humatrobe. Seristam, yeah, maybe get a little bit of water. But you definitely had at a minimum a more volumous round bubbly look to the muscle with higher doses of growth hormone.

And I think I tend to think people have more muscle when they take a higher doses. So I always saw growth hormone and you got to be careful with growth hormone though because it's such a powerful fat burner, fat liberator, you have all these fatty acids in your bloodstream and actually can make you insulin resistant. That's actually the mechanism that makes people insulin resistant is because they have so much fat in their blood. If you take animals and a lab,

they're giving them a lot of, they're injecting them with a lot of, they're feeding them with a lot of fat and carbs at the same time to induce insulin resistance. So the problem with growth hormone was now your bodies, your fasting insulin levels, your fasting blood glucose, all those things start going up. And people were like, well, my insulin sensitivity is good. Look how lean I am. It may, it may not be. It's very misleading. It's such a powerful fat burner. People stay

leaner, but they don't realize they're actually getting very insulin resistant. So now you have people, I know several pros that are diabetics, and so then that's where some of the insulin can come in, can kind of give your pain, create a break, and kind of help normalize your blood sugar. So that's why they throw the insulin on top of them? Well, from a health perspective, that's why I would. They throw the insulin is also a very powerful transporter. So there's-

Because I feel like, was it the insulin and growth hormone that took the bodybuilders, like the Dorian area was when bodybuilders looked like they took like a, they jumped another category in terms of size. I think so, I think so. Like when I talk to a lot of the older bodybuilders, I couldn't even conceive of using insulin. They're like, man, that's, and I talked to several of them, right?

But yeah, that era when Dorian came along was, and I remember experimenting with it for the first time, I remember thinking, this is crazy, like this is nuts, but I like to experiment, so I've experimented with about everything. But, you know, so I research insulin, is there a way to safely do this? You know, the side effect of improper insulin uses death. That's a hell of a side effect. Whoa. It's easily one of the most dangerous drugs, bodybuilding.

I would put it second behind diuretics. Right. So, I researched insulin and their ways of using it. And I came up with an approach that I felt was pretty safe, pretty relatively safe. And it was used pre-workout. And you use it pre-workout and you put a lot of nutrients in your body while you train and pre-workout

and it shuttles those nutrients and it does it very effectively, very effectively. And you've probably read a lot of people who don't believe in nutrient timing, but this is a whole other ballgame nutrient timing. This is very effective. You know, Milos has a similar approach as his little more hardcore than mine. But, you know, so I started doing things like playing around with humologe, something that would be in and out of your body, because I still don't think having high insulin levels throughout the day

is a good thing. I still think at the end of the day, if you look at all the degenerative diseases that are out there, insulin resistance, and high fasting insulin levels are kind of at the root of all of those. But I thought, hey, human log, this stuff's in and out pretty quickly. So you can put it in before you train,

shut all those nutrients in and pretty center of that. It's out of your body, you're cool, right? I had tremendous success with that, with people. You know, so I always thought that that time around training was kind of a special time. There's a lot of cool things happening. I didn't necessarily understand them all, but I could tell that structuring your nutrition and chemicals around training, there was something to that, that it would kind of turbocharge everything you did. So an insulin was tremendous for recovery too, an growth hormone. But insulin is very, it protects against muscle protein

breakdown. And when you're talking about gaining muscle, you have to be, you know, in this net protein balance has to be positive. You have to have more synthesis than breakdown. And if you can limit breakdown, it puts you in a much easier position to recover. So, it manages cortisol, insulin manages cortisol, which has a direct translation to managing muscle protein breakdown. So that whole equation for getting muscle becomes easier. Since you're not as broken down, we'll call it, you notice recovery is totally different. You know, sometimes people train, you might need three or four days, five days, six days, even before you can train again.

With a protocol that emphasizes nutrition on training, people don't get sore. This is one of the things I've worked really hard on the last seven, eight years is getting people to understand it. You don't even technically have to get sore to grow fast. Those things kind of contribute contribute to bigger the bigger bodies you see on stage now, you know, and certain there's different levels of this. Some people, you know, I always like five, eight, I use of him, love for your train. Some guys do 20 before, 20 after, 24 to go to bed. You know, so there's

different levels of this. How hard you go, how hard, how much risk are you willing to tolerate? What is, what do you want to do? But, you go, how much risk are you willing to tolerate? What do you want to do? But those things definitely took bodybuilding to another level. I still think at the end of the day, the good old antibiotics, I tell people, like if you can't grow off a little GH and testosterone, forget it. Like those are very powerful hormones, man. And I see these guys like, wow, I'm taking DECA EQ, Trans, Master on Test and Offseason. I'm just like, what are you going to do pre-contest? You didn't leave yourself anywhere to go. You just played all your cards.

So, you know, my approach with people was always in the offseason, you know, some GH, some tests. That's really all you need. And didn't that cool stuff, the Master on, that kind of fun stuff, same it for pre-contest, man. It can change the cosmetic look of the muscle. And that's when you get this. People always ask me, how do you have such a dense look to your muscle? I think part of that's training for sure.

But also, I always thought when I use the wind straw, when I use the mastron, I want to get the maximum effect from it. So if I lay off of it and save it for when I really need it, I'll get that nice cosmetic look to my muscle, whereas other guys are trying to look like that year round, right? So then it comes contest time and there's really no added benefit to it. Let's talk about that a little bit, because this is something that we speculate on this show a lot,

because there's just not a lot of science to prove this theory that we have. I think a lot of that dense muscle look or that granite look comes from the way you train and you kind of glazed over it. You know, I noticed that when I began really strength training, a lot of five by five type of training, heavy lifting, dead lifting, squatting really heavy, it began to change the look of my body. Before that, I was, you know, I chased the hypertrophy thing all the time and I had this bubbly muscle look

and I felt that when I was all aired up in the gym, I looked great, but as soon as I walked out, I would deflate and then I looked like half the person I was before and I wasn't until I really started to run a strength protocol and did I notice that I put on this this dense muscle? Now, maybe when I was training in that that five by five type of protocol, I didn't get as aired up inside the gym, but I seem to look harder and had like, look, I had more

muscle throughout the day, no matter what. What do you think about that? Well, I agree a thousand percent. I train at Westside Barbell in the mid-90s too. So I was training with Louis Simmons and the best power lifters in the world. I didn't chuck Voguelepool. Chuck Voguelepool to this day is still the... I've never seen by a train as hard as him, ever in my life. And so I was surrounded by power lifters and we were doing a lot of very heavy stuff. And I enjoyed that, that was great. You know, I got my squad up to 785, when I was 22, 23 years old. You know, and I didn't have the kind of equipment

that they have today, and I loved it, man. But I always, that foundation was always there for me too. And you know, like my favorite exercises were always incline bench presses and squats. And I love dead lifts. I actually like rack dead lifts. Those are my three right there. You know?

Incline press, dead lift, those movements changed my body more than anything else. Exactly, man, they're phenomenal exercises. And I know the cool thing now is to say you've got to find exercises to fit your body, but I think people are too quick to dismiss those, right, the good stuff. I think they work very well. You know, I was at West Side, Mike Francois was the other bodybuilder was there. We were the only two bodybuilders that were really there.

Mike Francois, he was a big fan of him back in the day. He was a big deadlifter. Mike was a phenomenal deadlifter. He would change his pen height every week, one week he would pull from us, and sometimes he would even do it during a workout. Pull from a certain hithe, change the height of the pens, keep dialing up, and he was strong. Yeah, those crazy erector spin-A muscles up and down. Oh, his erector spine, we're insane. And Mike, when he turned pro, was actually just before he turned pro.

Mike was known for having come a long torso with a shallow back and boy did he change that. He went to a phenomenal back. I went to the Arnold Classic that he won when he beat Flex Wheeler. And I was a big Flex Wheeler fan. And I'll be honest with you, I had a little bit of jealousy with Mike.

We're from the same town and he could obviously clobber me. So I was a little bit jealous of him. So I wasn't necessarily a big fan of his. I was a huge fan of Flex Wheeler though. Well those two came out, it was clearly between those two and Mike destroyed him in every pose. And I'm sitting here like, oh, that's okay, Flexible getting in this pose. Okay, Flexible getting from the back, they turn on, no, no, Mike lit him up. And I got to know Mike and Mike is one of the most humble, phenomenal

guys. You guys probably know about his background, it's from I, well, he actually played football for Iowa State. I think it was. Mike was in the seminary to become a priest till he met Shane. And I got to be friends with Mike. And Mike was a phenomenal guy, man. Like he's one of the best guys I've literally ever met in the industry. He still has a training business there in Columbus.

But Mike took his body and through the power movements, the five by five type of stuff, Mike just transformed his body. And it was very impressive. And that stuff always worked very well for me too. I thought it was excellent. I still incorporate it. I got to be a little more careful now, because now if I get out of my execution,

the exercise even messes up a little, I can get hurt. Right, I'm a little more fragile now. You're definitely a higher risk reward there. It's definitely a higher risk. And as you get older, you've got to be wary of that. I can't put a heavy barbell on my back in squat now, but you know what I can do? I can squat in a spider bar,

which is a safety squat bar that's got a camber on it. You know, I can do things like that. So yeah, I just, I try to find ways that are a little more intelligent at my age and just, but to still keep that stuff in there. I was, you know, yesterday I'm shooting with one of the young guys that we have that are, it's working with us now. And he's, you know, yesterday I'm shooting with one of the young guys that we have that are, it's working with us now and he's, you know, 21, 22 years old, just smart as a whip. I mean, kids got 30 national certifications and he's got a CSES and a kinesiology degree.

And but not a lot of experience under the iron just because he's young and probably not trained a lot of people and he's debating me about deadlifting. I saw this man. I was cracking up. He's debating me about deadlifting. I saw this man, I was cracking up. He's debating me about deadlifting, being the best movement for your back, and I'm telling him it's hands down, the single best exercise that somebody can incorporate into their lifts is the conventional deadlift,

like nothing's gonna grow your back more than that, and he was just going back and forth with me. And I feel like this is kind of a new message. And I was teasing him that because I, you know, Ben Pekolsky, MI 40 gym, the, you know, hypertrophy coach, this guy's talked a lot about, you know, isolation training a lot. And I, and there's a lot of value to that. And I, and they referenced that as, you know, nothing activates the lats more than this. And so there's this culture now that's kind of grown around those theories. And I feel like this younger generation tends to,

because I was, and the reason why I think I felt so passionate about it, and I was arguing with them is because I was that guy too. I fell in that camp of doing the lat pull down and all these isolation movements. And I really neglected those core movements. And it wasn't until later in my career did I revisit the end client bench, the deadlift, the squad and really start

to make that staple movements and I just fucking blew up. And so that was the start of it and I know that's just my experience but then I started to apply that into my programming and all my clients and saw the same thing too. So what do you think about that? Do you notice that there's kind of this culture around the isolation stuff and finding cool movements to target areas? Yeah, I mean, so a couple things. I don't talk about the dead list first.

If you do a rack pull and you can't fill in your lats, you're not doing it right. You know, I understand what they're saying about shortening a muscle and all that. That's cool. But if you do a rack pull, let's say for midshin, you should lock your lats in and you should be generating the tension through your lats. You shouldn't be driving your feet through the floor like your pyrels are trying to get the bar from point A to point B. You can take those basic movements and you can generate a hell of a lot of tension from. And the other thing I would say is once you got that muscle locked in, like let's say on a rack, pull with your lats, you know, and you're pulling with them.

When you're lifting at a higher percentage of your one rep max, you'd by default get more activation. I mean, the heavier weight. That was my argument. It was like, when you compare dead lifting 600 pounds to a guy seated row for 200 something pounds, it's just bottom line. You're going to get so much more carry over there. You get a lot of carry over.

Fred Halffield was a brilliant guy, scientist, Dr. Squatt. He used to talk about this optimum percent of your one rep max. He used to talk about this for him like this perfect was 78 percent of your one rep max. And he used to talk about this. And for him, like this perfect was 78% of one right max. But he also talked about where you get the most muscle activation. And he was saying, if you get up to around 85 to 90% of your one or max, you will get, you will activate every high, high threshold motor. And you get everything activated. So if you can learn how to use the right muscle movement, and then you put the weight on top of it, I can do a 30 pound dumbbell row and make it squeeze and burn,

but I'm telling you my lats when I grow from that. I don't care how good it feels and how I slave my lats feels. There's a minimum level of compression that you need in the muscle with a heavy weight. And some exercises just don't lend themselves to that. And when you can really like, I always felt like a sliding climb barbell press. I just felt was phenomenal for my upper pecs and my shoulders.

And you know, and you think of that as a compound boom, and it is, but it's putting a lot of stress right where you want it. And I would tell you that as much as I love a fly, I really, in my heart, believe that an inclined barbell press on a sliding climb will probably build my pecs more than a dumbbell fly with it. That's just my opinion, I could be wrong. I learned that lesson as a kid doing,

trying to get my arms to grow, trying to get my arms to grow, trying to get my arms to grow. Finally, some guys talked to me in the gym, big dudes, and they were talking to me about doing weighted pull-ups, and I started doing weighted pull-ups for my back, and the side effect of that was my arms to grow. Yeah, bigger. And I started, oh shit, why are my biceps growing?

Oh, it's because I'm doing these heavy weighted pull ups. But, and I do think that a lot of this gets mixed up when we, because a lot of people get away with doing some of the isolated movements because they've got really, really good genetics or maybe they're on a lot of gear. But especially when you're a natural lifter and if you're the average kid

and you want to put on muscle, and you wanna put on muscle, like you gotta get strong, squat, deadlift, bench, overhead press, barbell row, like the basic movements you can't isolate your way to get that kind of muscle that you want, especially if you're just regular genetics, average Joe, all natural. 100%.

Gotta do those heavy, you know, those heavy kinds of lifts. 100%, no way around it. In my opinion, no way around it, unless you're genetic freak. Absolutely. Let's talk about your mountain dog diet. You had glazed over that a little bit and I've read a little bit about it and your emphasis on certain types of fats and whatnot.

Can we get into that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, I am. And is this an official diet that you put out or not really? Not really. It's just kind of philosophies, you know, but it's just, uh, you know, it's, it's just a way of, we always had this, uh, the way we looked at dieting was always, you are what you, you are what you eat. And I, and I just kind of took it to the next step, which was you are what you, you are what you eat has eaten. And, you know, if you look at, I'll, you know, if you look at just like, like, B, for example, you are, what you eat has eaten. And, you know, if you look at,

if you look at just like beef, for example, you know, the natural diet of cows, for example, grass, you know, get all kinds of good stuff from grass, that multiple digestive chambers they have, they have a real good ability to convert that stuff. And good stuff for them is opposed eating a bunch of corn, that produces all kinds of problems. And then they got the issues have to be corrected with antibiotics and all this stuff.

And all those antibiotics and that stuff gets trapped in fat cells and it gets into fat of the animal. Then we eat it and actually gets in our fat cells. But I wanted to experiment with eating kind of a more, we'll call it, I guess natural diet. You know, then you look at salmon, you know, the salmon that's farmed is like this weird grayish color. And they actually have this thing called a salmon wheel where they pick a collar to inject the diet with to make it look good.

You get like farm raised tilapia that sits out there. And this is, maybe things are a little different now. Maybe there's some advancements where this isn't happening as bad, but when I was really digging into this stuff, it was like, man, I don't know if I want to eat farm raised tilapia anymore. They're sitting around, they're feeding them, these pellets that are kind of nasty, or whatever.

But so I just tried to, in the scope of this diet, or way of eating, I'll call it, I just tried to in the scope of this diet or way of eating alcohol, I just tried to think about the you know the source of the food and where it came from and what it had been through. And in eggs, you know, for example, one thing I did notice before anyone ever told me this was I noticed that when I got eggs from my farmer friend, the yolks were always super orange, particularly in the summer. And I was like, why are the yolks I get from the grocery store so pale

and they literally just disintegrate when they had to skill it? Whereas the eggs I get from my farmer are super orange and they're real firm. So then I started learning about the beta carotene and the different quality of eggs that are apparent when a chicken has the ability to roam free and pack and eat insects and things like that, particularly in a summer.

So I was like, man, this egg seems like it would be better for you than this other egg. And so it was just little things like that. And all those together kind of just made the eating style what it was. So I would get grass fed beef. I would eat salmon a couple times a week while salmon. It's pretty expensive. But I would just still try to get it a couple times a week.

The eggs I ate, I always tried to make sure they were from a farmer at a minimum if they weren't, at least try to get them a mega-three enhanced Yeah, we talk about food quality all the time on our show, but I think sometimes we have a we have an audience a very strong audience of you know bodybuilder types who they don't care about the health stuff They really don't they just want to build muscle burn body fat. I don't give a shit I think that's why sometimes this message is lost on them and why you get the wellness side of fitness. Well, listen to this, but the muscle building fat loss side,

they don't give a shit. They're like, it doesn't make me more buffed. So I'm gonna ask you, you're a body builder. You work with other people interested. Do they see differences in performance? And because my argument's always been, if you're healthier, you're gonna build more muscle and you're gonna burn more body fat easier.

Do the people you work with notice a difference when they change the food quality? I know you said you did with your blood panels. Are you getting any feedback from people you're working with on that as well? I think so. I think they do better. And it's pretty wild when you, you know,

I work with some of these pros and they're like, they see the, they lay out of the diet form. And they're like, John, this is 300 calories less than what I'm used to eating, but now I'm growing again. And I, I think it has to have something to do with the food quality, their ability to use the nutrients better. And, and there is more nutrients, you know, more fat soluble items. Maybe there's more vibony, maybe there's, you know, there, there is a difference in nutrients as well. But digestion, utilization, all that stuff, yaking, you know, to your point earlier in the show, you can do more with less. And that translates into other things too. You know, I think that they feel better. They can use a little less chemicals. I get

away with less chemicals and they feel better. I've worked with a number of pros. There's one guy who's super popular now that I was started working with him with his amateur. And all I did was change his food sources and cut his drug stack in half from his previous coach. Blue up, he won his pro card. Now he's a very successful pro. Is this a trend right now?

Because the trend in bodybuilding for so long has been more is better, more is better, more is better. And you're like the third person now I've talked to you who said, no, let's cut the drugs and let's improve food quality. Is there, is there, is there trend starting to reverse? I think it is to a degree, but you also have the other side where there's people that are trying to get attention. So they say, all these guys take 10 grams of this. They all take side enhancement oil. So they're kind of trying to appeal to the shock factor. Then you have

all these other kids coming in to the sport to like, yeah, he tells the truth. Like actually, he doesn't know what pros are doing. He's just saying this so you guys will follow him. And so there's this battle, like you're trying to convince people that they don't have to do all this nonsense. And then you have these other people coming out of the woodwork saying all these guys do all of this stuff. I'm like, well, there are people who do make no mistake about it.

But to say all pro bodybuilders take SEO is ludicrous. That's ludicrous. Like, and that's site enhancement oil. Right. If you can explain that a little bit for the audience, you might not be familiar with what that is. Well, you know, so you don't have to, you can inject an oil into your body and it swells the muscle up.

And so you don't, it doesn't take any hard work. It started, you know, there used to be, it was technically a steroid, it was called a sickling, it was made in, I think it was Italy. And this is what the guys took in 80s and 90s and Laverone and all these guys and Flex Wheeler. But it was, it was an inflammatory agent.

And I used it, I actually used it at the 99 USA and my calves and biceps. And you take it the last week before show. It just swallows about. It would swell it up, you know, half inch, three quarters of an inch. But it didn't change the appearance of the muscle in terms of, you could still see the quality.

You could still see the muscle separation, the detail, the striations and all that, so it looked good. And there was a guy in the 90s named Chris Clark, who was in Germany, who made this oil that had different kinds of silicone in it, silicon in it. Is this synthol?

Yes, synthol, right. So the... Pump and pose for whatever. Right, so you remember guy named Manfred Hobel? I do, I remember that. I'm gigantic arms. I bought the magazines and the biggest arms in the world. I had no idea that he'd have,

and I just thought, oh, I'm gonna follow this guy's arm routine. Not knowing that it was just oil bags. It was a oil bag. It was straight oil bags. Manfred and there was a guy named Ernie Taylor. Ernie to this day Denyze ever using it, but he was friends with Chris Clark. So Chris Clark, this guy literally lived in a basement

and he made this stuff. And I tried it too. I was like, sweet. I'm gonna have some awesome arms. So I tried it and I put in my triceps and my triceps like in a shirt looked awesome. Like look how big and round this muscle is. But when you took your shirt off,

you didn't see the detail and I love the detail. Look to the muscle. I lost the striations, the detail. And to this day, my right triceps still doesn't look right from when I took it. My left triceps looks great, my right triceps looks like crap. And it was, I swear, I still think that was from the one time I took it, and then I got tired of that. So I took it for maybe six months and never took it again. That stuff now there's different permeations of it, there's different versions of it.

And they put different, I don't really keep up with it. The one that's probably the most popular now is called Nolatil. It's a, it uses it in surgeries to inflame tissues. So it's easy to do surgery. That one isn't, I mean, it doesn't blur the muscle as bad, but it also doesn't create the swelling either It's kind of like somewhere in the middle. I've tried that. It was okay

A lot of pros do use Nautil especially guys on the west coast. There's a trainer out there The love is putting putting it all over people's back before they compete and things like that It's okay, but the synth all and that stuff that just gives you this lumpy weird appearance Yeah, cuz you could Google you can look up, you know Pictures of dudes especially in Brazil injecting their bodies full of this stuff and they look like a bunch of bees Stung on her stomach doesn't look natural whatsoever. It's weird, you know And in the bodybuilding community you get these guys and say well, they just don't how to use it right? I'm like Not sure I agree with that. Well, you know, you got to go underneath the bicep.

You have straight in the arm going underneath, and I'm like, you can do it at all you want, but when you lose the detail of the muscle, I just don't think it's a good look. I just, and listen, a lot of people say it's just a tool, one of many tools, but the other tool, you still have to work. You still have to work and build muscle.

You might as well do implants all over your body. So, to me, it it takes the hard work and effort that I like to put into the sport, because that's what I love about it. It takes that element out of it. Now you just blow up the muscle with some silica, some oil. It just takes it to love. I mean, for me, I hate it.

I can't stand it. Takes away the, and I'd love to experiment. I mean, I don't know. Wasn't there a body builder that had like a heart issue as a result because some of the oil got into his, uh, mellows almost died. Was it mellows? Yeah, mellows almost died. From doing that.

And when you talk to mellows, mellows is a good friend of mine. He'll tell you like that there's one thing I could change would have been I wouldn't use that stuff. You'll tell you that. Well, I remember watching, uh, I was a huge fan of bodybuilding in 90s and there was a change in flex wheelers physique towards the end and his body just looked different. I still think his best physique was when he won the Arnold Classic in 1993. 93 was the best question about it.

And then all of a sudden he just got bigger and bigger and bigger and maybe not necessarily better. Bodybuilding has always been and it continues to be the kind of this cult type of sport. And to outsiders listening, it just sounds like a bunch of science experiments, right? I mean, you got to admit, right? Because you talk about insulin and growth hormone and testosterone. And it's like you're your giant lab experience. Yeah, you're just you're injecting yourself throughout the whole day. I mean, I know, but I know there's a lot more to it.

There's a lot of training, there's a lot of diet that goes into it. I don't know. I mean, has that from the inside, it doesn't sound as crazy, but... No, you were 1,000% right. I mean, there's drugs in every sport. Track and field, golf. I remember when my doctor, when Roger Clemens, I'm a baseball fan too,

when Roger Clemens all of a sudden got good again. My doctor, my doctor. My beard, yeah. My doctor was like, growth hormone. I was like, no, pictures don't take. Why would a picture do that? Yeah, he did. But bodybuilding is a whole nother level of drugs.

Even pre-contest, you know, just the things that you'll even pre-contest. Just the things that you'll do pre-contest. I mean, it's crazy. Is there like a carryover from another sport and we didn't really cover EPO yet, but like an endurance sport, you see something that they're using that, you know, oh, I wonder if that would translate well,

in my process for this. Or is there like a thought process there? Absolutely. And I try, and I loved experiment, man, particularly in our younger. I was like, I wonder if this will work. So with EPO, I experimented with EPO for a few years. And the reason why I did was, okay, so it,

the reason why people use it's the oxygen part, right? So like Lance Armstrong, you can go forever. You don't get tired. Well, that's part of me because you're red blood cell, red blood cell count increases and things like that. Well, you already get that from steroids. Like most of the anodrome deca, there were originally created to treat various forms

of anemia, things like that. But I wanted to try UPO because of the endurance part, because when I was trying to get lean I was generally doing very low carb diets and my energy levels would be very poor So you get to the gym and the last thing you want at the gym when you're trying to get ready for a show is to have a Bad workout like that sucks So I thought let me try EPO to see how my endurance is I'm gonna be honest with you. It was incredible

So I could do like I was this was when I was still strong and I was squat 500, I'd do a clean 10 reps. I'd be totally out of breath as you expect. 30, 45 seconds later, I was right to do it again. Wow. Like the recovery was insane. And this was on 50 grams of carbs a day. So it allowed me to train at a crazy high level

on very low carbs that otherwise couldn't recover from. When your calories are low, and your carbs are low, you just don't quite have the same energy. And that stuff helped. Now eventually I got to the point where I was like, okay, that's nice, but is it really changing where your body looks?

And maybe 1% or 2%, so I just thought, it's probably not worth the risk versus reward. Also thickens the blood. Thickens the blood. I guess they're very hydrated. And then if you're, what do people, what do bodybuilders do pre-contest the last day? That's right.

They dehydrate, right? So if you've got a combination. It's not a good combination. So if you've got high hematocrit, high red blood cell count, and now you get your blood nice and thick, mean you're kind of asking for trouble. And that's what happened to the guys on the tour de France that have died. Their blood got so thick, they got dehydrated, boom, done.

One of the big differences between training people who are natural versus training people who are on gear, you try to train them differently, or is it just more volume, more frequency, but the same, same stuff? Well, it's not even so much a question of natural versus enhanced. It's a question of recovery. I've worked with a lot of people who are natural who didn't recover well. I've worked with people who are natural who actually recovered awesome. Like you would think they were taking stuff, but they weren't. Same thing applies to the geared up people. The people won't gear. Some of them all of a sudden can recover very quickly.

And then some can. I was one of those guys that it took me a week before I could do my legs again. My recovery was pretty bad. So you have to look out from a non, you don't even consider drugs in the mix. You first of all, how does the person recover? Because that's going to dictate how they train. You want them to be able to stimulate them also every three, four, five days,

and that's going to dictate their frequency. So if somebody can't recover and I put them on a high frequency program, what's going to happen? Nothing good, right? Or, what if I take somebody who recovers really, really well and I only have trainer muscle group once a week? That's probably not optimal either. That has nothing to do with gear or no gear. It's just a recovery. Now, the reality is the gear will help that, right? So it's going to help them.

It'll help them recover. So if somebody normally took five days of training muscle again, now they might be able to do it in three days. So I try to look at it from that perspective. Certainly, when you have people that are using gear, their protein synthesis is ramped through the roof. So they can typically do more for them what they would be able to do. You know, you mentioned earlier, like, you know, some guys that are just taking tons of stuff and you can't tell they left. Well,

you know, for those guys that didn't, you can't all of a sudden just assume since they're taking a bunch of stuff, you can hammer them with volume. That's true. Right? So I look at the number one thing, how are they recovering? Okay, if they're not recovering, well, why is it? Is it their nutrition? Is it their nutrient timing?

Is it their lack of sleep? Is it a stressful lifestyle? You know, does the dude have four girlfriends and you stress stuff and trying to keep them all happy? Who knows what the stress is? But those are the things I look at, you know, when you from trying to keep them all happy. Who knows what the stress is. But those are the things I look at when you're trying to determine volume and frequency. And back to our earlier conversation,

just because a certain amount of volume and frequency works at one point, eventually your body will adapt to it. So then what do you do? Do you give them more frequency or do you pull back? You pull their volume down. What do you do? What are the changes that you make? And see, this is what in the coaching part of this,

this is what makes a good coach, a great coach. It's looking at what's working and then when it doesn't work anymore, then what do you do? And that applies not only to training, it's your diet too. What do you do? Do you just keep pushing calories down?

Well, how low is too low? What happens when someone's down? What happens when you have a lady down to 700 in her calories? Then what do you just keep pushing calories down? Well, how low is too low? What happens when someone's down? What happens when you have a lady down to 700 in her calories, then what do you do? What happens when you have a guy down? Then what do you do? So you still, then you still have to look at, eventually their body's going to adapt.

If it never adapted, then we could all just do the same thing over and over forever, and it would work. And this is what I see with a lot of the younger coaches down in our sport. They say just do the same stuff over and over forever and it would work. And this is what I see with a lot of younger coaches down our sport. They say just do the same stuff over and over. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, I don't disagree that it's going to work for a while, but at some point, you're not going to build an increase or bench press 10 pounds every week. At some point, you're going to have to do something else. You got to learn how to think. And so that's what, you know, when you ask your question about natural versus non-natural, I tend to look

at that more of recovery and start there. I see this a lot in coaching people too. Real common, I get somebody who wants to either do a bikini competition or get into men's physique, then they want to already pick a show. The first thing that I always want them to do is to assess their eating and training and then kind of show me where they're at right now. So I have an idea of their baseline. And probably the most common thing I see,

and it always, I know it's always tough for them to hear. And a lot of times many of them don't listen to me. They go off and go hire someone else or do something is I don't think they have built their metabolism up in a healthy place to even go into a prep. You know, you get a girl who is only eating 15 to 1800 calories and she comes up to you and she's like, Hey, I want to get ready for a bikini show and I already I'm doing the math in my head. I'm like, well, if I got to cut you for the next, you know, eight to 12 weeks,

you know, where am I going to be able to go on weeks four, five, and six? Like I just, I know I'm going to, I know I'm going to do damage to your metabolism just to try and get there. And it's, I know it's not smart. And you're probably not going to get the results that you really, really want or potentially could if we did this right. Do you see that a lot? I see it a lot.

I dealt with a man that's been going for so long. There's a, there's a gym in Columbus that is produced probably more bikini and figure pros than any plate gym in the country. And most of them don't compete anymore. You know, when they compete year-round, they depress their metabolism, low calorie dieting, when you do low calories for a long period of time, the longer that goes, the longer it takes your metabolism to return to normal. So what happens is to get people to compete in the spring shows, and they're like, well, somebody talked me

into doing the summer shows, and it's, well, I'll do the fall shows too. It turns into a year round. So they never really give their metaboc a chance to normalize. And then what do they do? They cut more, and then they all of a sudden are starving and they eat a lot. And then what happens? They blow up the rebound away. They rebound, then they get depressed and then they quit. So I've seen that for years,

years. This isn't a new phenomenon. This has been going on for years. And this is, it doesn't happen as much to men, but there's something about a female's metabolism that when you suppress it for so long, show after, show after, show after show, that, you know, they eventually will snap as anybody would, as anybody would. And then when they gain a bunch of weight, they get depressed and they quit. You know, guys don't tend to compete year round as much. So it's, but women, they like to look good all the time. You know, there's this pressure on them to look great all the time. And I think that's, I think that's the problem is that, and that's been that way for, our culture forever. I don't mean we've, we've put women on covers of magazines and

they're normally these skinny borderline, you know, bulimic looking women that, we've this image of what a woman should look like, this really skinny petite look. And it's usually photoshoots. Right, right, right, exactly. And eating salads all the time and snacking on vegetables all day long

to keep this tiny petite figure. So I think that's been a part of our culture for such a long time. And then now we have this explosion of the bikini competition. Now every girl sees that and goes like, I want to do that in this. Now we have this huge, you know, influx of Instagram models now that have came out. They didn't exist 15, 20 years. So now we have all these people that this younger generation is looking at and aspiring to look like.

And they just don't have the tools yet because they haven't put their metabolism in a healthy, safe place and then they're going out and they're getting in these shows. I think we're, I think we have no idea what we have coming. I think the way the sport is growing is growing so fast and so many people are coming in. Plus a social media just making it so popular with the average person. You know, studies, some studies will show that and these are new. We'll show that if you calorie restrict for a long period of time, and then you eat a lot of calories all at once, like a lot of competitors do post-show, that they'll actually increase the number of fat cells.

And what's funny is, again, being a kid who followed bodybuilding, when you see body builders compete over and over and over and over again, especially when they don't give their body a break, they start to lose that sharpness. Their bodies start to... It's tired. Stop responding. And I think it's because they're adding fat cells because they'll go, they'll compete and then they'll binge and then compete and binge it over and over and over again.

It's like they can't versus the bodybuilders who would, they'd gain weight, but they'd kind of stay healthy at the same time. I think that might be what's happening. The other thing I wanted to ask you too, John, was, we talk about all the variables that you can manipulate with your body that prevent this adaptation where your body just stops responding. And I feel like in modern, more recently,

training has been something that people have stopped really paying attention to, where you look at their workouts Everybody's workouts look the same and they manipulate their diet and their drugs, but nobody's really Paying attention to the workouts where I remember reading the bodybuilding magazines in the 80s and the early 90s And they were talking about which routine is the best and which one works better And I'm gonna do a double split routine and I'm gonna train super high intensity and I'm gonna do you know Train my whole body three days a week or whatever. You don't see that as much anymore. Is that, is that, am I accurate with that?

Well, you are, the cool thing is, now you got guys like Brad Schoenfeld that are actually trying to do some meaningful research on volume and adaptations and things like that. But to your point, you're right. And the my biggest frustration, like if you sit down and talk to me, you'll very quickly figure out the training part is what I'm most passionate about. The frustrating thing for me is that in bodybuilding, people take a lot of chemicals,

so whatever they're doing works. So they think, okay, what I do works. If you took that and you applied it to a natural athlete, it might not work. It might not be the best approach. Or, just because the approach that you're doing works, it doesn't mean it couldn't be a lot better. So, there is very little tension paid

to the training aspect. And, I started working with guys like Fua, and Fua D'Abiad, I started working with him. Fua, when Fua and Abiyah, I started working with him. He never won a pro show. He's in his 30s and then all of a sudden he wins. I started working with Doug Dale. He had muscle tears from doing the extreme hit training. He was going to retire.

I said, you're my training chance, man. You know, I've been up winning three, four, five shows. I've taken a lot of guys who were kind of toward into their career and changed their training and their bodies did well and they competed them well. And I think that was because I looked at training a little differently and I tried to understand what was going on as opposed to the large majority who just do anything, just go at it and just take a lot of drugs.

But there is a way to do it and have some longevity and to do well. I looked at training, you know, you had these camps, you still do to a degree, you still had kind of the Arthur Jones, the old school hit training. Right, I'm sort of... And you had kind of more of the volumous Arnold training. You know, and I feel like there's different adaptations that take place from different kinds of training. I always thought, well, as opposed to being in one camp, what is the advantage? What is it that is so good about hit training? And what is it that is so good? And what if I could build a program that would

incorporate that? Absolutely. What if I could get the advantages of both of those? And oh, by the way, what if I could exercise, sequence exercises so that I didn't get injured, so that I had some longevity? Maybe it's not the smartest thing in the world to go in and bench heavy first every week for my chest. So I tried to look at training, I tried to understand what the mechanisms were that were creating hypertrophy. How could I wrap those all into a program? And then how could I sequence exercise so that I stayed healthy? the exercise sequence and gets no attention never has, probably never will. But I would tell you, you guys know this intuitively.

Would you ever have someone walk into a gym and start doing heavy lunges or haxquats first? You probably wouldn't, right? Because you know that's not the right spot in a workout to do that. So intuitively, you know that there's a sequence that's going to, so I'm like obsessed by these sequences. What if I do this exercise after this exercise? you know that there's a sequence that's going to, so I'm like obsessed by these sequences. What if I do this exercise after this exercise? And I think there's a way to layer your training so that you can enjoy longevity and you can train for a long time. In addition to getting the hypertrophy benefits. Yeah, that's all we talk about that all the time. It just exercise programming.

I feel like it's a lost art. You know, I really do. I see a lot of these bodybuilders routines and they all look the same chest one day back one day same kind of exercise the same kind of nobody's really paying attention to all these other intricacies that I think especially if you're natural you really need to pay attention to have to make a much bigger difference. I mean, I remember, this that's been now at least 12 or 13 years ago, I picked up a book called Dinosaurs Training. It was very, very different style of workouts. It was kind of a round, strong man and odd lift type stuff.

The way that the guy trained, you trained his whole body much more frequently than the typical one-to-week, hit your body part once, it's a week type of training. Then that opened my eyes and I started to read some of the old bodybuilders routines, like Steve Reeves and, you know, Grimic and Reg Part and all those guys way back in the day. And I noticed that they hit their body parts a little bit more frequently than the, you know, what I was reading in the current magazines started applying that to my body and I had never gotten so strong and built so much muscle.

And I do, I do think it's a art that is lacking nowadays, it's really focusing on exercise programming. It's ironically probably one of the most important parts of your program is how you do your workout. Yeah, and to your example of naturals, protein synthesis isn't going to be jacked through the roof like it would with an enhanced protein synthesis isn't going to be jacked through the roof like it would with an enhanced. And it's not going to stay elevated. It's not going to stay elevated.

So you need to hit the body part more frequently. Now, they may not have the best recovery capability so you can't take as many sets to failure. Maybe you can't do quite as much volume. So absolutely, those things should all be thought about. Excellent. Looking at bodybuilding today, do you see any trends right now that you think are going to start to happen or do you see any, like what do you see for the future of the

sport? So, I'm getting, I'm next week, I'm actually doing a video and I'm going to call it something like a social media killed bodybuilding. So I'm going to give you my perspective on it. First of all, what does it mean to say killed body billionaire made it worse? What does that even mean? I look at body billion from different levels. I look at it from someone who just goes into the gym because I love training. All the way up to

people competing with Mr. Olympia. Are the people in the Mr. Olympia, are their bodies getting bad? No, there's still something nominal for Z's. They look incredible. What about at the national level? Well, at the national level, you don't have the depth that you used to have. It used to be the top 15. It was very difficult to make the top 15.

Now it's easy to make the top 15. What about the local level? The local level, the state title, is used to be phenomenal. If you want the Mr. California, if you want the Mr. Florida, the Mr. Ohio was super prestigious and super hard to win. It was a huge deal.

And actually, you would be more popular winning your state title than getting fourth or fifth in the last years. I remember that being a young kid, right? So I liked that. Mr. California. And I was the same way with the Ohio. I remember going to the Ohio, and I just wanted to be Mr. Ohio. Like that's all I cared about.

Someday I'm gonna be Mr. Ohio. The state titles now are not good. They're not good. You have shows and there's 20 bodybuilders total in the whole show. So with that level, it's depleting. Now, is that mean it's worse? From a competitive standpoint, yes. But so why is that?

So people will say, well, it's because of new classes. You have classic physique, you have the, and the other classes. Maybe it's true, maybe it's not. Maybe some guys don't like to train their legs, so they don't do the full, maybe some guys just don't want to be a mass monster. So I don't necessarily think that that's good or bad. I just think people have different avenues to go through now. Then you have people to gym, you know, who may not compete, but they

love to build their bodies. That's am easy, essence of bodybuilding. And what's what is happening on social media should not affect how I train when I go to the gym, right? If I look at it, something on social media, it should have zero impact on my ability to train and work my butt off when I go to the gym, right? If I look at something with social media, it should have zero impact on my ability to train and work my butt off when I go to the gym. So if bodybuilding to me has taken a downturn, it's not because of social media, it's not because of the new classes,

it's because people are getting solved, is what I think. I think also it's magnified with social media, it's just there's more eyes on it. You still have people to bust their butts and work hard, but then the people who are kind of just in there for whatever reasons they want to be popular, now we just happen to see it.

And I think if you took social media out of the equation, I think a lot of these people probably wouldn't even train at all. I think they probably would quit because they're not truly passionate about it, but it all comes down to, you know, it's like in business, it's a business owner. It's all about ownership. And training is the same way, man, I can't sit here and complain about, whoa, this guy on YouTube, he's a retard, he doesn't know what he's done.

Who cares, man, how does that affect me when I go to the gym? I'm going to go in there, and I'm going to work as hard as I can. So for me, social media has done nothing to run bodybuilding. It's what's in your heart, it's what you put into it. If social media is ruining bodybuilding for you, then you're probably in it for the wrong reason. If it's getting ruined for you personally, and to me, all this stuff is very personal. So is a sport taking some downturns? Yeah, probably.

I think that if I see to the 90s, look the best, but you also have some some genetic freaks too. How many flexed wheelers and Kevin LeBronies are there? Yeah. I mean, these guys are genetic freaks. You just don't see the, you know, you got to roll a roll, he's a freak, right? But so I don't know. I think there's probably some bad stuff that's happened, but there's also a lot of good things. You've got a lot of information out there. Look at the information you guys are putting out there. You know, was that kind of information out there 20 years ago? Absolutely not. It was very hard to find. Very, very good, honest fitness information. Most of it was put out by supplement companies to buy, to get you to buy more bars or protein powders or whatever. I think social media is giving a lot of people who train

different routes and avenues to make a living. In the past, you'd have to compete really to get that notoriety. Nowadays, if you look good and you post good pictures on Instagram and you're pretty fit, you can get a huge following and now you can build your business. Adam talks about all the time that the transition when he was competing where he noticed the longest lines were no longer for the Mr. Olympia. They were for the dude on know, the dude on Instagram has got the most followers, you know?

So that's true. You know, I noticed that a while back too. And rather than like being with most of the guides in my generation, they just complain. You know, I hear a lot of people banging on millennials, but I'm gonna tell you, man, I bang on the guys in my generation. Guys are lazy. These are the same guys. In my generation, I bang on the guys in my generation. You guys are lazy.

These are the same guys. In my generation, nobody would work a job in bodybuild. All that I grew up hearing, which you can't have a job and be a successful bodybuilder. Which is stupid. Yes, you can have a job. Man, I worked in a corporate world. I worked hard jobs. I did a lot of stuff.

You guys are just lazy. And, you know, so my attitude was a little different. When I saw Instagram and YouTube, I thought, shit, this is a great opportunity for me. I can't compete forever. I'm deep in my 40s now. So maybe I can't win the Mr. Olympia, but maybe now there's an avenue that I can continue to build my business and notoriety. And about a year ago, I noticed something in my personal business that was very apparent. Like when I started traveling, it used to be when I went places. People would say, all, John, hey, I hope you get your pro card or I saw you at this show

or what show are you doing next. That went away. Every single thing I heard was, I love your YouTube. I love your videos. And it didn't matter where I was. You know, I was at a Tennessee Titans game Thursday night in Tennessee. We drove down and Three people in the stadium stopped me and they not want to mass me if I was competing. They said I love your YouTube I watch your YouTube and I see this over and over. So for me it was like oh, this is a fantastic opportunity for me

Whereas the guys in my generation usually say all this is weak, you know, these guys suck, they'll know anything. I was like, no, man, I see this opportunity. I'm going to take advantage of it, right? So I work hard on my Instagram on my YouTube because it has value for me, you know, and it's also just a great platform to get your ideas out there. Think like you said, things like this show didn't exist. All I could do was get muscle and fitness and try to get the information I could out there. Think like you said, things like this show didn't exist. All I could do was get muscle and fitness

and try to get the information I could out of there. There was no real seminars. A seminar would be a guy pulling up, staining up, and there was a Q&A for about an hour. That was the equivalent of a seminar you spell to get, and those weren't good. You certainly didn't get any drug information, and you didn't even really get much information.

I only went, the seminars that I went to and I was younger, I only remember one, and it was a Tom Platz one. So only one I remember, he's talking about sarcoplasic reticulum and all this stuff, and I was like, man, this guy's smart. He's the only seminar I remember ever, and I've seen a lot of guys give seminars,

but they were just so weak. You need to eat chicken and rice. I'm like, okay, cool, I got it. I got that in my mouth, cool. I got that no no. Yeah, I got that. I'm cool with that one. Hey, you saw one of the great, some of the greatest runs on that game that game was insane. And Henry went went bananas with some of those crazy like those stiff arms. Oh my gosh, nasty. And then he, yeah, and then he busted the 50 yard round on the other side. It was awesome. And one of my friends, he placed for Tennessee, he got his ticket, so we were down the fifth row

right there by the way. Oh wow, it was awesome. Oh, what a game to be at. That's a good game to be at right there. Yeah, for sure. It was very cool. Man, it was really, really, I love the fact that, I had no idea what direction we were gonna go

on this podcast. And we haven't done a really deep dive into Anabox. It was really a treat to talk with someone who's so open about it. But before we go, I would like to hear if you were to, with all of your knowledge, with programming, nutrition, anabox, even, if you were to go back and whisper into 22-year-old John's ear, what would be a few things you'd say about each one of those things?

what would be a few things you'd say about each one of those things? Oh man, I would never change anything because as you guys know, all the mistakes you make make you a better person and get you where you are today. But if you put a gun to my head and said, damage won't change something, you have to. You can't bail out and say, you wouldn't change a thing. I would probably say that the nutrition part and getting more out of less and focusing more on efficiency and digestion actually is a pretty damn big deal. You know, I mean, as I've gotten older, and it allows a lot of kids now that don't understand it, but as they get older, they will understand. The other thing I would say is listen to your body. What I mean by that is, I've been very fortunate to have some pretty good longevity, but I listen to my body. If I'm doing an exercise and something doesn't feel right, I don't say I'm just going

to push through it. When you talk to people who have major muscle injuries, they usually, not every time, but they usually will say something didn't feel right. I did a rap, it didn't feel right, I did another rap, boom, pop, tour, tear. And I'm one of those guys that, and trust me, I've had every kind ofitis you can have.

And I have had a few muscle tears, but I listened to my body, and the reason why I would tell this to a young guy is because that stuff will accumulate. If you don't listen, the injuries will mount up. You'll be getting shoulder surgery, you might be getting hip replacements. Those things are gonna mount up,

and they don't have to. When you train, balls at a wall, you're gonna have strains, and you're gonna have ituses and you know, medial and ladder up a conglyses and stuff like that's gonna happen. But nowhere should anyone believe that muscle tears are just part of the journey. No, they're not.

They don't have to be part of the journey. So from a health perspective, from a longevity perspective, and you gotta listen to your body, something doesn't feel right, do something else. You know, and then everything I would add on to that is I spend a lot of money trying to stay in one piece as I call it.

I've done ART, MAT, Facial Stretch Technique, the deep tissue massage. I've had the same girl working on me for 14 years doing my deep tissue massage. I've got another guy that's done a lot of ART on the MAT. Right now I'm really enjoying facial stretch technique or therapy, whatever it's called. I don't know what it is, but it works awesome.

So I also have invested and put a lot into staying healthy and trying to keep my body working right. And I'm very flexible. I've got crazy flexibility in my hamstrings. I don't tell you guys a story how, this is how you get flexible hamstrings, okay? This is how I did it. This is very simple

So I was in I was in track in high school and I had a track coach The assistant coach. She was a very attractive female She was very well-endowed. This is the big gear here. Yeah Sold it right away. So she would say okay your body pick a partner and I would always make sure I didn't have a partner Because then she was rich, so she would say, okay, everybody pick a partner. And I would always make sure I didn't have a partner. Because then she would stretch you. So she would stretch you. Alright, so we do the hamstring stretch.

So we're laying on our back, she's pushing my leg back, and I'm like, closer, closer, as I still don't feel anything. Till her chest was right in my face. So I didn't care how bad my hamstrings hurt. I wanted her clothes. I wanted her to boot right in my face. Right? So I got crazy flexible ham bad my hamstrings hurt. I wanted her clothes. I wanted her to boot right in my face. Right? So I got crazy flexible hamstrings from my track coach.

Into this day they're super flexible. That's how you do it. Take notes kids. I'm gonna tell my girlfriend when I get home. Yeah. Excellent. Well cool man, it's been fun brother. Yeah.

Thanks for having me, man. Thanks for coming on me. 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 Mind Pump Media.com. The RGB Superbumble includes maps and a 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

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