Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Bret Contreras on Understanding Nutrition & Exercise Science

Episode Date: March 3, 2017

In this podcast I interview Bret Contreras, who’s a scientist, author, coach, and one of the leaders of the evidence-based fitness movement AND an all-around cool dude to boot. If you’ve heard of him already, you probably know him as the “glute guy” that can teach you everything you need to know about building a great butt, and while that’s true, that’s not what I wanted to talk to him about because, well, I figured he might enjoy a change of pace. So, in this interview, I chat with Bret about nutrition and exercise science and get his thoughts on all kinds of things ranging from what makes for good and bad science, how to become more scientific in your thinking, his favorite researchers and labs, how to reconcile conflicting studies, and more. I wanted to do this interview because more and more fitness “gurus” are appealing to science to sell their ideas and wares these days, and it’s getting harder and harder for everyday people to distinguish the hucksters from the genuine articles. So, I hope you find Bret’s thoughts insightful. Here’s the interview... 5:01 - What science is good and what is bad? How do we improve scientific literacy? 17:39 - What is the process of trying to become more scientific? 27:17 - What have you learned over the years about getting in shape? What have you been wrong about? 32:44 - How do you become more scientific? 36:29 - Who are the best researchers, the best labs, and the best journals? 43:57 - What do you do when studies are conflicting? What's involved in study design? 49:44 - Where does knowledge in strength and conditioning come from? 1:00:52 - Where can we find your work? Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

Hey, it's Mike, and this podcast is brought to you by my books. Seriously, though, it actually is. I make my living as a writer, so as long as I keep selling books, I can keep writing articles over at Muscle for Life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is Bigger Leaner Stronger if you're a guy and Thinner Leaner Stronger if you're a girl. Now, these books, they basically teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training, and supplementation to build

muscle, lose fat, and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or grind away in the gym every day doing workouts that you hate. Now you can find my books everywhere. You can buy books online like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and so forth. And if you're into audiobooks like me, you can actually get one of my books for free, one of my audiobooks for free with a 30-day free trial of Audible. To do that, go to muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks. That's www.muscleforlife.com forward slash audiobooks. And you can see how to do this. Now also, if you like my work in general, then I really think you're going to like what I'm doing with my supplement company, Legion.

Now, as you probably know, I'm not a fan of the supplement industry. I mean, I've wasted who knows how many thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that really do nothing. And I've always had trouble finding products that I actually thought were worth buying and recommending. And well, basically I had been complaining about this for years and I decided to finally do something about it and start making my own products. And not just any products, but really the exact products that I myself have always wanted. So a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they're a hundred percent naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer-reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because

on our website, we explain why we've chosen each ingredient and we also cite all supporting studies so you can go dive in and check it out for yourself. Three, all ingredients are also included at clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness. This is important, of course, because while something like creatine is proven to help improve strength and help you build muscle faster, if you don't take enough, then you're not going to see the benefits that are seen in scientific research. And four, there are no proprietary blends, which means that you know exactly what you're buying. All our formulations are 100% transparent, both with the ingredients and the dosages. So you can learn more

about my supplements at www.legionathletics.com. And if you like what you see and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast, P O D C A S T, and you'll save 10% on your order. All right. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get to the show. Hey, everyone, this is Mike and I'm back with another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. And in this episode, I interview Brett Contreras, who's a scientist, author, coach, and really one of the leaders of the evidence-based fitness movement and an all-around pretty cool dude to boot. Now, if you've heard of Brett already, you probably know him as the glute guy that can teach you everything you need to know about building a great butt.

And while that's true, that's not what I wanted to talk to him about because, well, I figured he might enjoy a change of pace. So that's why this interview is about something else all together. In it, I chat with Brett about nutrition and exercise science and get his thoughts on all kinds of things ranging from what makes for good and bad science to how to become more scientific in your own thinking to his favorite researchers and labs and how to reconcile conflicting studies and more. interview because these days there are more and more fitness quote unquote gurus that are appealing to science to sell their ideas and sell their products and services and so forth. And it's just getting harder and harder for everyday people to distinguish the hucksters from the genuine articles. So I hope you find Brett's thoughts on these subjects insightful. And here's the interview. Brett, thanks for coming on the show. I'm excited to have you. Thanks, Mike. I'm excited as well.

Yeah, no, it was great talking before. It's fun to meet people that are like-minded. And like we were saying, it's kind of hard to come across sometimes in this space. So I'm looking forward to our conversation here. Me too. I think we could have spoken for three hours. That could have been another podcast. It would have been like random thoughts on random things, but somebody would have found it. At least somebody would have laughed a few times. We may have had to censor out a few things. Nah, who cares? Whatever. Just put the explicit label on it and move on. All right. So let's get into this talk, which is going to be on the subject of, I mean, we don't have to say necessarily exercise science because even nutrition science can be confusing to people.

But if we look at the health and fitness space on the whole, we're seeing more and more people that are appealing to science to sell their ideas and their methodologies. And I think this is good on the whole. I think it's a, this is a good trend, but it also is, is creating a lot of confusion for just, you know, everyday people that are looking to get into shape because on the surface, when, if you're just like somebody who doesn't really know that much and you're trying to educate yourself, it might seem that science supports all kinds of conflicting opinions and methodologies and ideas about how to eat and train and supplement. And the average person is not, they're not able, they don't know much about scientific research. So it's not like they can just dive in and form their own judgments on, you know, what's right and wrong. And it's easy then just to get lost and like, who do I listen to?

What, you know, who's, what science is good and what science is bad. And so I get, I get asked about this fairly often so much so that I actually, um, later in the year, I would like to, excuse me, something I would love to talk to you about actually, um, produce a simple kind of course to just increase people's scientific literacy a little bit and help them understand a bit more about how research is conducted and designed and conducted. And just for the people that really want to be able to go to the next step of educating themselves. But anyways, this is our initial foray into it. So I was going to kind of pass it over to you. So why is it?

Why is this? I wouldn't say it's just exercise too. I'd say nutrition as well. Because you have guys like Gary Taubes out there who says now that like anyone that talks about calories in calories out is basically a quack. And this is like, you know, these are the relics of, uh, our scientists are the ignorant past. And now we know it's all about insulin or this, that, or whatever. And so that confuses people. And then, you know, it just kind of goes on from there, right? Like if we're still arguing about energy balance, then we can argue about everything. So there's so many aspects to this question.

Yeah. And we can talk the whole time on this. It's so important. Yeah. And it's something I think there's nothing out there. So I agree. There does need to be a product. there's nothing out there. So I agree. There does need to be a product. I've, I've put together an outline already on how to become more scientific. And so the one thing I

want to say right off the bat is think about when you first started lifting weights, we sucked, our form sucked and nothing felt right. I was uncoordinated. Um, I'm sure most people can relate. You didn't just start especially compound movements you can start doing squats and going god this feels so smooth yeah i wanted to round back my deadlifts i wanted to shoot my hips up in the squat the bench felt so wobbly i couldn't stabilize the number the shaking bench days over Yeah. Over time, you get coordinated and you get used to it. It's just like anything. When you start anything, you're not public speaking.

You're not great at it. It's uncomfortable. You get better at things. And that's the same way science works. You get better at it. But you have to start somewhere. So how do you start out as a scientist? And like what you said, there's so many conflicting things. How do you start out as a scientist and like what you said there's so

many conflicting things how do you make your own how do you make your own decision come to your own yeah as a layman too where like you know they're never if they're not going to have a phd like you they never will that fortunately they don't nest they don't need to at least to navigate i think to learn to navigate the space and avoid you know coming to the conclusion that eating 15 avocados a day is the secret to everything or something you know what i mean so i think the the you want the goal should be for everyone to become their own authority become your own guru like don't don't listen to the don't you don't you like but i shouldn't say that because um knowledge is so specified now like so niched it's i can't i i have a research review and i did this on purpose

and i remember telling my my partner chris beardsley who i do the co-founder chris beardsley who i do it with i said no matter how popular I ever get or if I start making way more money, I never want to outsource this because doing this each month, I go through 92 journals every month. These are journals in strength and conditioning, biomechanics, physiology, anatomy, motor control. Yeah, so that's how you keep yourself sharp. Physical therapy, nutrition, sports medicine. So it's all aspects of health and fitness. And even then, the guys who I speak with around the world, Brad Schoenfeld knows more than I do about hypertrophy physiology.

I know more about biomechanics, but that's why we get along because our stuff jives with one another Alan Aragon is my go to guy with the nutrition stuff but even we have researchers we look up to and they know more about certain things but they might not know how it applies to bodybuilders or something

so there's guys who will know more practical things, there's guys who know more scientific things, there's guys who are know more practical things. There's guys who know more scientific things. There's guys who are better communicators of the science. And so you have to have people who you trust. I have my trusted team. But even then, I've caught them. We're all wrong about things.

Brad's one of my best buddies. And I don't agree with everything he says. I just know his intentions are true. He's a good scientist and he would change his mind given enough evidence. You mentioned Gary Tobbs earlier. I was there when Alan Aragon debated Gary Tobbs and Alan said, just out of curiosity, Gary, if enough evidence came out against this, you know, sugar being the root of all evils, would you change your mind? And he said you so that that they're like end of story he said that in front of a big crowd of people and it's like okay what is that that's just like uh uh wait a minute like did you just say

that on live tv kind of thing just say that right so it was like when you hear that that person's no longer a scientist they are a fan fanatic. They are a whatever. You're a charlatan. You're a guru. You're a – well, guru is actually a good meaning. I've turned it into being a negative thing. Right. But like I –

No, I mean at that point, it's more about selling an ideology than it's just doing science. You're looking to defend your – to confirm your bias. You're not looking to uncover the truth. But anyway – I mean there's a funny – I don you know, to confirm your bias. You're not looking to, to, to uncover the truth. But anyway, I mean, there's a, there's a funny quote. I don't know who I got from, but basically like it's, if it's in someone's, if someone's like livelihood depends on not understanding something, don't expect them to ever understand it. It's just like, so when you build your, you know, as a personal, as a person, especially

if you're out making money and your whole brand revolves around something, that person is never abandoning that ever, right? Well, it's funny because I'm popular in the industry for my glute stuff and my hip thrust exercises, and I publish research on it. But I've been asked to peer review two papers on hip thrust now and i have to be very impartial and i have to say oh god am i yeah am i being uh am i seeing what i want to see partial right so i work very hard to be impartial and it's hard because yeah my popularity is based on this what if you know there's there's a uh some colleagues i heard of a study showing that they did heavy barbell hip thrust for eight weeks and it didn't improve speed development. And I've been coming out with this, so I haven't seen the paper yet, but if it gets published, I have to say, okay, why is this? First of all, I did a study for my PhD thesis that showed that it did improve sprint speed so what's

the how do we reconcile these but ultimately if i'm if i'm a scientist then there's no emotions it's just logic it's just science it's no there's no how dare you researchers come across like publish this it can't be true it's thank you guys for conducting this study. Adding to the collective understanding. Yep. You add it to the collective understanding and hopefully a couple more studies come out and then we can figure out maybe it works well for a certain population or a stage of development. Maybe it works well when you combine it with this um you know we we have there's so much more research that needs to be done just in that area but anyway so you want to have your

trusted people but even then even with like alan aragon i might go to him for like you know nutrition related stuff like meal timing and everything and um but if I really want to form my own opinion, I have to pull up all the research and read the studies myself and scrutinize their methodology. And then, you know, read the discussions, read what the authors had to say, talk to Alan about it. And then, you know, you might, cause you might find something unique in that, in those studies where you're like, Hmm, every time they did this, this happened. So you might come to a slightly different conclusion. That happens a lot. And let me tell you about just the guys in strength and conditioning, just the guys who study hypertrophy science. There's myself, there's Brad Schoenfeld, there's Stu Phillips, there's Greg Knuckles, Andrew Vygotsky, Eric Helms, Greg Knuckles, Andrew Vygotsky, Eric Helms, James Krieger, who else?

We all disagree with each other, all of us. Yeah, on different things, sure. Menno, Hanselman, we all disagree with each other on certain things. And we've all read the same studies. But we all have different practical experiences. We have different genetics. We have different experiences training ourselves, training others, different interpretations of the same data. You know, Eno and Eric argue about protein. They know these studies like the back of their hand, and they just interpret it differently.

But they're both scientists. I trust them both. I know they're not lying about it. I mean, also, what we are looking at, like, they're not arguing that you need to eat – they're not saying that like, no, you don't need proteins. You just need Brazil nuts. Right, right. They're arguing about whether it's like 0.7 grams per pound of body versus – Or a gram, which is kind of funny because people email me on that in particular because I generally – I tell people, if you're around 0.8 to 1 gram per pound, you're good.

There's maybe a little bit of evidence if you're somebody that's muscular and you're lean and you want to get really lean that eating a bit more might be beneficial. But so I'll get people that will email me, not to challenge me, to be like, well, what about this 0.7 or whatever? I'm like, honestly, okay. I mean mean fine if you want but like if you is it really that big of a do you really care you know the grand scheme of things that's not right and and i think there we talk about flexible dieting and it's like your protein should be flexible a little bit you don't need to be so hardcore that every day i get one gram per pound people get so caught up with their macros that they, you can be flexible with your macros.

Yeah. So that's why I'm like, I tell people like, how about this? Just be around a gram per pound per day and give or take some. And I think you're going to be fine. It's like a three day rolling average. If one day you're at 0.7,

one day you're at 1.2 and it's fine, but that's a whole other topic. So about this science thing. So, yeah. So like, just for example, I just know even from someone years ago when I first kind of got into the more of the evidence-based and away from, I decided to really educate myself on really is, so if you're looking at the landscape out there, one of the things that, you know, I first had to get a sense of is a bit of the basics of scientific research. And, you know, we'll talk about, for example, like, because at first,

when I was kind of from a newbie, basically outside looking in, or I'd be like, so how exactly does that work? We're like, you have, you know, this study is going to conclude one thing, and this study is going to conclude the exact opposite. So like, you know, there's some, sometimes people I'll even get emailed with people sending email, some study and they'll be like, see, look, you can't build muscle on low reps. This showed that, uh, and then on the other hand, you can't build muscle on high reps, see this. And then, and then, so that's confusing for people.

Maybe you can lend a little bit of insight in terms of what's going on behind the scenes with, you know, study design and execution. And then there's... Well, even before we get into the study design stuff, let's talk about the process of trying to become more scientific because that's hard. So you follow my evolution in the fitness industry. I was a personal trainer on the side. I was a high school math teacher. And eventually I realized I want to do this full time. But I was mainly a personal trainer. I did not have higher, I had a master's degree in education, curriculum instruction. I had no experience with reading scientific literature, but I was always a scientifically minded person. My grandpa was an engineer. He

gave me like, you know, I'd always loved science, but he gave, he gave me like you know i always loved science but he gave he got me a subscription to discover magazine and books by like einstein and richard feinman or feinman so i was scientifically minded but even then and i can tell you're the same way mike you're very scientifically minded but we had to go through that whole you first start searching online and you come you for the first people you're going to come across are the more markety types who know the right search terms and stuff yep and stumble on their blogs and their writings and then you you take it as gospel because they're very convincing and also they might also look the look like you look you're

like hey i don't know i mean it'd be like if you're trying to get into golf and you someone's really good at golf you're gonna be like yo so it'd be like, if you're trying to get into golf and you've, someone's really good at golf, you're going to be like, yo, so like teach me something. Right. Cause you're obviously good at this. That's so true. If they look the part, if they're shredded or they, females want to do the program of the pro, whoever has the body they like most, they want to be doing her program. Men do that too, but even more so so with females and there's such a genetic component to things that person made well i always do this in my seminars i show them jen selter she's popular for her butt uh her belt it's probably fake though right i mean come on i think it's it's real but you just have such good yeah i do it's she has such good glute genetics i always show her program

which is on bodybuilding.com it has her workout and i could tell it's like her real workout i don't think it's her workout i don't know but it's it's like it would not even be a good warm-up for mike i mean it's like it wouldn't even be a good warm-up but that's all she has to do and if she did my, maybe she'd look too – I don't know. I always – maybe I'd make her look – you can't say how someone should look. But for her liking, it might be too muscular. For her liking, she might get too muscular all over and not have as much of a feminine look as she likes. But for the average person with regular glute genetics, you have to do everything possible to, uh, to get into work, to get to glute shape. But so let's say you're, you're looking at how much

protein should I eat? And you start typing in search terms into Google. That's how we all start out. And you get on these blogs, blog posts, and it might be someone legit. It might not be, but you just start reading blogs for the most part because that's all you know and then as you keep progressing you stumble upon more experts and more experts and you realize well they disagree with one another this guy thinks this this guy thinks this and then if you keep and but they might be citing scientific research too which makes it even more confusing because you're like, I don't know. I mean, right. And I remember, um, Mike, we talked about this before we started the podcast about kind of intermittent fasting and how you're going to see a little bit better. Yeah. Maybe you get

to see 85% of your muscle gain through that, but you have 15% left on the table. If you spread your protein out more frequently. And I remember talking to Alan Aragon about that. And I just brought it up to him. And he's like, okay, so this was like five years ago. And he says, okay, so there's three studies on the topic right now. The first study says this. And he summarized it for me. The second study says this.

And yet the third study says this. So here's what the intermittent fasting community clings to this study and then these people the you know higher frequency people cling to this study but really they should be considering all three studies and so here's the problem the average person first of all they don't even access have access to studies you can't read them unless you the reason why i can access studies is i still have my aut login for my phd so i can log into my university library online library and download the studies if you can't do that they're so ridiculously priced they're like 30 to buy the study Who the hell is going to do that? No one. Yep. Do you know Deep Dive?

It's Deep D-Y-V-E. Oh, does that help you get studies for free? Yeah, yeah. Not for free. No, no. You pay. It's a legit service. You pay.

I think they switched to a monthly model actually now, but it's affordable. So I've liked Deep Dive. Yeah, I'm not for – Well, now there's like, there's research gate, but this is expensive though. I just like deep dive because it's a, it's a, it's actually affordable and it, it, you know, you are paying and the money is going to where it needs to go. Like it's a legit service.

Okay. Um, you know, so just throwing that out there. That's a good solution because otherwise you're going to be paying an arm and a leg and no one will do it. You just won't even do it. So you got to figure out a way to access the studies but then even if you can access them you you don't have the skills to scrutinize those studies and this is where i said it takes time yeah i'm really good at scrutinizing strength and conditioning training studies because i've been a personal trainer for so many years so if i see a study that's using one training intervention versus another and i can say well

okay that group's actually doing more volume than the other that right more this isn't this isn't set up fairly or maybe it's yeah that's perfect that's a perfect study design i'm not so good at critiquing you know studies out of my interest and i'm not so good at critiquing you know studies out of my interest and i'm not that good at statistics so first of all just to read the you read the methods and then you read the you know the how they are how they're going to conduct their stats and then you read the results and then and that's another thing even the best status statistics people they all disagree with one another and so the statistics in and of itself is this daunting field where you have so much to learn. And I've learned enough about certain things to form my opinion about post hoc corrections and things like that.

And I'm going, this is so stupid. Why would I do a comprehensive study measuring 10 different variables if I have to then divide alpha by 10? And now my p-value isn't.05, it's.005. then divide alpha by 10 and now my p-value isn't 0.05 it's 0.005 it discourages good research and you just trade the likelihood of committing a type uh a type one error with a type two error but i don't but that's all stuff that you learn as a researcher as a pn that probably didn't make sense to anyone listening this exactly that's that's what they run into where they're like right say that stuff and they're like, okay. Okay.

Yeah, great. And it made them feel horrible. But what I can tell you is in eight years of being in fitness, right? I think I started blogging eight years ago, but I started personal training when I was 20. So I started lifting when I was 15. So I've been lifting for 25 years. I've been personal training for 20 years. I've been becoming more scientific for eight years and you can we're gonna this is our field we're gonna be in it for a long time the cool thing is

it's just like with your physique yeah you might not reach your dream physique ever but you might not reach it for five years but each year you look better yeah and each year as a scientist, you get better. And I don't post a lot of my older blogs on – I'm embarrassed by them because I learn so much every year that it's like embarrassing to me. Yeah, I've gone through stuff I've written previously and just rewritten it honestly. Yeah. that they weren't, it's not like they were terrible, but there was just things where either I now have learned new things that basically like this needs to be updated, or I just think it needs more context or something. I do that with my books as well. I've gone through and revised and I'm fine with that. Like I'm fine to say, I've absolutely been wrong on things in the past and I'm probably wrong on things right now, but at least I'm, I'm, I'm more right than wrong. So that's good. I think at least with the things that matter the most in terms of getting the results I want to get with people.

I'm more right than wrong, and I'm continually striving to get more right. And you're open-minded to the fact that you're wrong about things. That's what's huge. So that's what I tell people in my seminars. I always say, like, I guarantee you I'm wrong about several things I'll tell you today. You know, five years from now, I'll look back and go, oh, God, that was wrong. That was wrong. We were wrong about a lot of things.

And that's what the term bro science has become popular. Oh, that's bro science. Well, you can, okay, so picture this. I want to get jacked. Picture this. I want to get jacked. And I can either, and my two options of getting jacked are go to the gym and talk to 10 or like talk to five jacked dudes and just kind of follow what they tell me to do. Or start reading about hypertrophy and like fat loss on PubMed and researching it. I will see so much better results if I just listen to the five jacked because you can tell me all sorts of good advice the problem is they're not scientists and so

some of the stuff they tell you will be complete wrong yeah completely wrong and so this is what i like about like what i've learned along the way about getting in shape it doesn't have to be as hard as we thought like certain things we've been wrong about i can think of a bunch of things hormones we used to say and i was the king of this i told every client you got to do squat you want big arms squat and deadlift because squats and deadlifts jack up your testosterone levels and that courses through your bloodstream and attaches to the receptors everything grows every muscle cell and everything grows that's why big dudes who squat and deadlift, they're always jacked. That's not true at all.

It gets the muscles that are worked more muscular and it doesn't have an effect on your biceps or the muscles that are not activated during the squat. Right. We were wrong about that. We were wrong about if you want to lift, you want to get jacked, you have to lift heavy. We were wrong about if you want to lift, you want to get jacked, you have to lift heavy. There are now about 20 studies that show whenever it's light loads versus heavy loads, as long as they're close to failure, you see the same exact amount of muscle growth. There's about 22 studies on the topic now. We've been wrong about fasted cardio is not more beneficial than non-fasted cardio. Meal timing.

We used to think you need to eat six to eight meals a day to stoke the fire. We were wrong about that. And so you can eat three times a day if you want or eight times a day if you want. You can – I remember reading all the bodybuilders and it was like – I'm like, God, they all eat chicken and like lean beef and tuna and like boiled uh steamed broccoli and right the steamed broccoli and the the veggies there was a bodybuilder and a jimmy's go to his thing was tilapia and asparagus as you tell everybody that's what all you need to eat tilapia and asparagus. And he was actually kind of insane.

They don't season their foods and they just – and all the carb sources were always like brown rice or oats or whole wheat pasta or like whole wheat or something. And it's like, God, what if you wanted like yogurt? What if you wanted some orange juice? Like what if you wanted – I was like couldn't I just, I remember thinking this way back in the day going, why can't I just have, why couldn't I just substitute? Like, I don't always crave potatoes. I don't always crave like, you know, sweet potatoes or whatever. I don't, sometimes I just want to have like, I crave like sweet things. Sometimes I want fruit. Sometimes I want, you know, what if you like to drink a lot of milk? Does that, you know, can you just decrease some of your meats and some of your carbs and substitute the milk in? And the bodybuilders back in the day when I was like 15 would say like, no, you have to eat these foods.

You have to eat clean. and then like it's interesting to see this flexible dieting thing get more popular because you know you see like ronnie coleman video dvds back in the day and it's like he's put putting barbecue sauce on things and he's uh eating his french fries and he yeah he's doing flexible dieting whether he knows it or not and same same with some of these other bodybuilders and then you realize that it doesn't make a big difference if you substitute. As long as most of your foods are – because most people are like, okay, I have to get – I can get 300 grams of carbs a day. I'm going to get them all from Pop-Tarts. Most people don't – most people – but the reason why it's important is because it increases adherence.

You stick to the plan. I used to be a terrible trainer. I thought I was amazing. But when I had my personal training studio, they all stuck to the BC diet. That's what I called it, my initials. It was like a palm-sized portion of meat and then fill the rest of the plate with salad or veggies and eat that like six times a day. And people would get shredded and it's so irresponsible of me because they get shredded and then they're like binge time right and then

you know month one they lose 25 pounds and they're so psyched well if they're overweight obviously some people need to gain weight and if they need to gain weight i I'd have them have a bunch of cars. But like I gave them this rigid system that was, they'd be on the system, they'd see great results. They'd get off the system and they'd blow up. I did not teach them a sustainable system. So my dumb ego at the time, I thought, God, these people need me to see results. It's pretty pathetic.

But when they're with me, they see great results. When they're not, they're not. Right, that's my dumb ass fault for teaching them for not teaching them a flexible system. I was feeding them a fish, not teaching them how to fish. And so I've learned a lot from those days, you know, what, 10, whatever, 10, you know, 12 years ago. But this is how we all evolve. We all start, if you don't look back at the stuff you were saying five years ago and cringe a little bit, then you're not learning enough. You're not studying enough. And so how –

I think that applies to any area of life. I mean I think like if you look back at your worldview and the ideas you have about pretty much everything and if not much has changed in five years or if you're not looking back going like that that was pretty dumb uh then you're not growing as an individual i mean sure there are some principles and values and things that we should probably just kind of stick to and shouldn't change all that much but you know maybe how we manifest them or embody them can change but i think that applies to a lot more than just what we're talking about but so so how can someone know, how do you become more scientific? How do you, so, all right. You've got to learn how to use Google PubMed and Google Scholar to search for things and try to find the studies. If someone's mentioning a study in a blog post, type in the title that, highlight the title and hit search. Search on Google for it. And also, if you add file type colon PDF and then put the title into Google,

just throwing that out there, if it is just out there somewhere, Google will pull it up. Right, because a lot of times someone uploaded this to a forum or a server somewhere, and you can actually get the full paper. Yep. So it's nice. So then you can peruse it. You won't understand everything.

But like I said, becoming a good scientist takes time. If you do this for a couple of years, you'll start to figure it out. You'll start to become a lot better at it. I would also say, I don't know if you agree, I would interject and say that what really helped me is diving into the terminology and the jargon and understanding the words. Like I just kind of started there. What are the words these people are using and what do they mean? So I was kind of sensitive to that. So look up words. Don't just skim over. If you're studying biomechanics

and it's, let's start with biomechanics. Make sure you understand what that word means. A lot of like things have acronyms, RFD. What don't just skim over that go back and find what does rfd mean rate of force bump what does that mean yeah okay it's the slope of the you know so like but i okay in a perfect world we would have like there'd be 30 studies on every single thing we wondered about yeah and enough to have a meta analysis and review papers where you're like okay what you know think it's all just tied up with a nice little bow and right and we can read and go okay this is pretty obvious it's pretty clear that this is superior to this this is what i need to be doing but the a research, a lot of it's what gets funded because follow the money. People need money to conduct research. Universities need money and things like that. So the things that get funded the most are like cancer research and obesity, problems in the world that are crises.

And a lot of our stuff- And not having big biceps unfortunately big biceps doesn't rank very highly it's not the highest list of the priorities so you're not i don't know if that's on the cdc anywhere we have a small biceps it's a good predictor of like you know all uh all cause mortality or something and you know you but anyway not getting late enough right right right so there's not there's not always a lot of studies sometimes there are no studies and that's what's frustrating for me sometimes i'll be like okay there has to be a study on this topic and i search for it and i can't find it so sometimes it's because you don't know the right terms to search for yeah and that's a whole skill in and of itself is what the hell terms do i use so like if you're thinking of like

the pump is the pump is getting a good pump good for hypertrophy so what the hell do you type in so i'd start it with google and go like you know is the pump good for – Yeah, maybe even like study muscle pump or something and then see if you can just get lucky basically. But the studies use the term self-swelling and that's what Brad Schoenfeld linked. So this self-swelling research – so it's not – but Brad and I have a paper called The Muscle Pump that's published in SCJ. But I actually don't think that's linked to PubMed. So you'd find it on Google but not necessarily PubMed, but you have to learn the terminology and that takes time. So over time you want to learn the best researchers on the topic. You want to learn the best labs. You want to learn the best journals and you can even subscribe. Do you want to drop any names

just in your, like, you know, people are wondering, I'm sure. Yeah. So for hypertrophy, it's Brad Schoenfeld and Stu Phillips. Okay. But the best journals, if you're studying, want to study hypertrophy, there's Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. There's EJAP, European Journal of Applied Physiology. There's Scandinavian Journal of Sports Medicine. There's Journal of Science and Sports Medicine. What else? I know I'm missing some. But anyway, you got to learn these.

Oh, Medicine and Science and Exercise. I always just know the acronyms. I remember SCC, JSCR. But anyway, I go through all these journals every single month, month in and month out. As I say, you should tell people about it because this is, I go through all these journals every single month, month in and month out. You should tell people about it because I've found your work in this regard very helpful and Aragon's review helpful. First of all, there's good people to follow online like my colleague Chris Beardsley. He makes infographics every day of these studies it

helps make sense of them he also has an awesome blog if you're into strength and conditioning and biomechanics but you should be following these people on social media because they'll and twitter twitter is actually really good for following scientists i follow so many of them and they whenever they publish a new study they link it. And so that's important. So I mean I think a good takeaway here is immersion. You have to immerse yourself in it. You don't want to – it's not enough to – even I would say if just reading some of my stuff, like if that's all you're doing, if you're a person listening, that's not enough if you really want to get to the level where like Brett was, where you're kind of becoming your own guru. You have to really fully immerse yourself. I don't pretend I'm a scientist. I just am

trying to disseminate good facts and serve a certain marketplace and help people get into shape and so forth. And I do what Brett is talking about, where I read a lot of stuff and I follow people who I trust and that helps a lot. And I'll throw one other thing out that helped me along the way is looking for media analyses and review papers on things that like, if I want to know about something, I'll start there because if there is something I found those are, I mean, they just helped me a lot, just kind of get my feet wet and get an understanding of, you know, where we're at. Not all, of course, some are better than others, but it just definitely helped me because they're also written, I found, like a bit more conversationally.

And you don't need to have tremendous technical knowledge necessarily to at least understand what you're reading about. Yeah, there are some words you're going to have to clarify, but it did that, that, that, you know, still helps me today. I still do. I still do that. Well, so this is where it gets a little intimidating and daunting, but it is important to know this. Okay. So let's say I wanted to, let's say I wanted to say what's better for my quads, the leg press or the squat? Okay, how would I answer that question as a researcher? Well, I could have them, I could use a force plate and show that, oh, they're pressing more, they're utilizing more force with the leg press than the squat, so that's better. I could utilize EMG and put electrodes on them and say, well, actually, their vastus lateralis and medialis activity is actually higher in the squat than the leg press, so that's better.

I could use all sorts of tools that we have in sports science. We utilize force plates, EMG, ultrasound, isokinetic dynamometers, motion capture. We utilize – we have our tools of the trade, and we have our ways of answering things. But these are all mechanisms we're studying. Really, you need a training study because we can come up with all sorts of cool, nifty theories. But Richard – Does it translate? If theory does not match experiments that it's

wrong no matter how eloquent or how logical it seems it it's wrong so that the experiments have to match so you have to have training studies we call them so mechanistic studies which are cross-sectional they these are good for like researchers because they usually can you can collect all the data a couple weeks but when you do a training study which is longitudinal now you have to have an intervention and it's a pain in the ass because you got to train just to define that meaning it just it's over time it's going to take huh yeah just so people know what you're talking about yeah so you have to take like however long you make the training study maybe it's eight weeks long yeah you got to pre-test them train them for for eight weeks, and then post-test them.

And there's so much involved in these studies, but everything has an inherent flaw with it. EMG measures the electrical activity of muscles. It doesn't exactly predict the growth. There's more things to muscle growth than just the electrical signal. And there's things that can impact the electrical signal too especially with fatigue force plates cool that shows you ground reaction force but it doesn't show you the muscle for the individual muscle forces yeah even with things like muscle modeling

where you use these complex models to determine things well that relies on assumptions made by the author to model things you have to make assumptions when you do review papers that's these authors interpretation of the research you might have a different your they might have biases yeah even in review papers even in meta-analysis you have to set the the guidelines as yeah the parameters yeah yeah the parameters of what you'll accept and it might you be 100% bias, like you're saying. That could be the research. There's an agenda here, and they are going to be pre-selecting for what they want type of thing. Now, the good thing is most researchers are in it for the right reasons.

Right. Especially, I mean, I would say, I think, I don't know if you'd agree, but in the strength and conditioning space, it seems like if we were talking something with a ton of money involved, like pharmaceutical, then, then maybe it's harder to know really what's going down in some cases when you have billions of dollars floating around. Absolutely. And so, um, you do have, you know, rumors come out of this person's a bad egg and, you know, but there really are not most of us. i think the guys i mentioned earlier all the guys who i follow and they follow me we give each other better for the doubt we don't always agree with each other but we know that you know that like we we talk a lot and we'll you wouldn't do that if you weren't trying to uncover the truth. We're all like in the matrix trying to figure out what the hell the answer is.

And we're trying to figure out. We all know we don't have all the answers, but we – it's good to have colleagues. Trying to get that red pill. Yeah. It's good to have colleagues. And that's something that took me a lot of time is when I started out, I had no friends in the industry. And now I'm friends with all the top people. And I'm,

I do not take that for granted. It's, I'm so lucky to have a phone call away, all these people. But anyway, what do you do when you want to, when there's, when there's conflicting studies,

which you mentioned earlier, one study shows this, one study shows this. And the average person is not skilled enough to say, okay, this study had only 12 subjects. This study had – Well, I think that's a good segue into do you want to give a couple examples of what poor design or poor execution might look like? And if you have any examples that come off the top of your head, sure. I think of one classic one that I always talk about. This one made me so mad because it got all the Olympic

weightlifter types posted on Facebook and social media to say, look, Olympic weightlifting is superior to kettlebells. And what made me mad is that the study design looked at an Olympic weightlifting protocol versus a kettlebell training protocol on functional performance, like vertical jump and things like that. Okay. Okay. If you were going to do that, you would say, all right, you have to equate, like, load and effort as much as you can. Right.

The problem is there aren't kettlebells that go up and up. But in this study, I think the heaviest kettlebells they used were like 16 kgs or something. That's like 35 pounds. So here you have one group doing like front squats and like hang cleans and stuff with like a shit ton of weight. And then the other group using these light ass kettlebells. Doing like goblet squats or something. Little goblet squats and swings. And that would be all fine and dandy if they didn't make heavy kettlebells but

they do i have a i have a 203 pounder i have 106 pounder i have 157 pounder so you could have just used heavier dumbbells or heavier kettlebells make them work and then it would be more my guess is that you'd see very similar results but then then so the question then is like in a person, I'm sure people listening be like, so why does that happen? Like isn't that pretty obvious? That's just simple and logical. You don't need to have a PhD to be like, yo, so like does that make sense that they're using 30-pound kettlebells and then lifting heavy-ass weight? So you expect – so because of humans – so science is perfect. Science is the study of the way stuff works in the universe.

But humans are flawed. Our brains are flawed. We have biases. We have bank accounts. We have bank accounts. We have the Dunning-Kruger effect. We have – we think we're a lot smarter than we are. We don't know.

We're unaware of what we're naive about. And so is peer-reviewed research better than blogs? Hell yeah. Is it perfect? Hell no. And so you just need to understand that and know that, like, you know, so to get published, you've got to conduct, you know, you've got to get ethics approval. You conduct the study. Then you submit it for publication. You go through rounds of peer review, they come back to you,

they almost never say, yep, we accept this, that's never happened to me, it's always either minor revisions, major revisions, or rejected, and, you know, you work with the peer reviewers, and then hopefully you can satisfy them, and then gets accepted but the peer reviewers might be in that case they were lax yep or maybe they just maybe that wasn't their their thing like they would they don't know enough about training to really know why that's so important so ideally you can get peer reviewers um that know the subject matter well but that that's peer reviewing is free it's not i get asked to peer review all the time and i always accept i always have like one article on peer reviewing but i have to reject a lot because i don't have time sure so there are flaws with research because of

humans and it's good you know but like i said you might if if early on in your career you read that study you'd be like oh olympic lifting is way better than kettlebells. And then as you become more advanced, you could see the flaws in the study design. And that's one good thing about forums. You know, forums, they can be good and they can be really bad. But sometimes in forums, you can have a smart guy that just likes to show off his knowledge and he can help point out but you know any forums that you personally participate in or that you like no and i've never been highly involved in any forum but either um i don't i can't even recommend any because but

anyway i think that that's where you can have someone who's because it's like you ideally we all have someone to teach us like okay here's the problem with this study it does show this it doesn't show you know brad just posted just published a paper last year or the year before on rest time in between sets and showed that three minutes was better than one minute okay for both strength and hypertrophy well he didn't look at two minutes maybe two minutes was ideal he didn't look at two minutes. Maybe two minutes was ideal. He didn't look at that.

And the other thing is, so the three minutes, good. It's better for hypertrophy, but it takes longer. Yeah. So they equated volume or they equated like number of sets. But what if you instead took a different look at it and said, I've got 30 minutes to work out. Should I be resting three minutes? They didn't equate like I have a 30 minute window. Yeah.

They're saying you haven't, you have infinite time. Who cares? Right. So that's a whole different design and questions. So it takes so long to get to that point, but you get better every month. And that's where you can learn to make educated guesses yourself. And at least you're coming from a place of some understanding. So, you know.

And which, by the way, that's a perfect way to wrap this part up is to say, look, you're never. I like the term science based or evidence based because evidence is evidence is comes in all forms. It's not just published research. I always say this your knowledge comes in well your knowledge and strength and conditioning and fitness and nutrition all that comes in three parts it's like a a pie chart you know one third one third of your knowledge is from what you've learned working with yourself and training yourself going to the gym lifting weights yeah we're people there's things that no one can tell you

that didn't work or you know what i mean right you're just trying different diets trying supplements and you realize that didn't work that did nothing i just wasted my money um and and that's a third of your knowledge but we're very unique. And actually, when you publish research, this is what you learn. Okay, this is a whole different topic. I don't want to get too so. So I'll address this in a minute. The other third comes from what you learn working with other people. If all you've done is work by yourself, then you just tell,

this is my problem with people who go to non-coaches on Instagram and stuff. Will you write me a program? That person will just give you the exact program he does, and it may or may not work well for you or he or she. And they haven't worked with enough people to individualize it towards you. And I can't tell you how much different we all are and how much I've learned just from working with so many different people. You learn so much.

And when you study the research on genetics and individuality it's crazy i'll elaborate on a minute then the final third is what you learn through reading research attending seminars and conferences reading blogs reading articles education exactly so it's one third one third one third so any if you don't train people you can't yeah you're missing out if you don't train people, you can't – You're missing out on – Yeah, you're missing out. If you don't lift weights yourself, I look at some strength coaches who don't lift weights,

and I'm like, how can you evaluate a new exercise or protocol if you don't try it out yourself? Yeah. And then if you just learn through training yourself and training others and never read anything or try to learn, then you're missing out. So it's all three. And so you never want to ignore your personal experiences. others and never read anything or try to learn then you're missing out so it's all three and so you never want to ignore your personal experiences you just have to know that you know that's an n equals one or that's a yeah that n equals one means one person yeah it's not a it's it can it

can be i mean at least it gives context but it isn't necessarily you could have a lot like i mean yeah you could have had an outlier who would respond really well to anything or who wouldn't respond to anything that's why you need ample sample size to wash out the effects of you know of individuality but speaking of individuality when you actually publish data when you actually conduct experiments it's really cool because you can see like i've conducted so many EMG experiments on my clients, probably 30 different clients at least. And I can tell you that, you know, some people, their glutes activate more when they go heavier and heavier in the hip thrust. Some people do not. Some people top out at

50% of one rep max and their glutes don't activate more, but they can do way more reps with lighter loads. So I'd be stupid to give those people heavy hip thrusts. Some people use their glutes well during the, the, the, some people get more glute activation in a light goblet squat compared to heavy back squat. Same with kettlebell deadlifts versus conventional deadlifts. Other people not. Um, some people don't use their glutes to lock out the deadlift very much. Some people do. And you look at their form and it looks pretty good. Some people get a lot of glute activity versus abduction exercises. And other people not.

And so what I do is I'll test these people with their muscle activity. And then I'll write them a program based on what works best for them. And then I see amazing results with my clients this way. But the problem is there's no place giving, you know, extensive EMG testing where you can go in, hook your muscles up to electrodes and do a bunch of different exercises and say, this is what works best for me. So how do you, so how do you, how do you make judgments? Well, you use the research, but you also just pay attention while you're lifting. People are usually right when they say, I feel my muscles working more when I do it this way compared to this way. I like this technique.

And I've read all the bodybuilders back in the day. I would read – I loved reading what they – because it gave me new things to try. But it didn't – I didn't always like it more it's just you try enough things and you learn i like this technique you know i never liked wide grip seated rows i don't feel this at all some people love them yeah but it's very arrogant to think oh because i don't like them no one else will that's why you you work with people and you get this large toolbox as a personal trainer when you work with a ton of people. And I can always find a great program for someone. I can help them arrive at it because of my toolbox.

Because you've been there. When they say, yeah, that doesn't work for me, you understand that. And you're like, yeah, okay, if that one doesn't work for you, especially if you understand biomechanics like you do, you can be like, all right, cool. Then why don't we try this and see if that makes sense. But we're talking strength and conditioning. It's the same way with nutrition. It's the same way with, so my buddy James Krieger and I wrote an article on individual differences and it's crazy, things you don't think about. But, oh, real quick, when you publish the data,

you see this whole range of responses. And if you plot them, you see this guy, And if you plot them, you see this guy, whether it's EMG or strength gains or muscle size gains, this person gained 20% increased hypertrophy. This person lost 3%. He worked out for eight weeks and lost 3% of his muscle mass. How did that happen? And everything in the middle. It's like mysteries. You have the mean, but then you have the range,

the max and the minimum, the extremes. And so you see, like, if I would have given this person this, and so then you can think of your clients and go, okay, like I know that I've looked at Brad Schoenfeld and James Krieger's meta-analyses on volume, on frequency, on all these things. But I have my client that seems to get a lot of muscle damage. She doesn't recover fast. If I give her too much, I run her into the ground. I have to train her with less volume and less frequency. I've come across a lot of people like that, probably honestly because a lot of my crowd are, I would say, mid-20s, 30s, and above. So I've seen that with people, not so much in their 20s,

but definitely with people even my age, I'm 32, and then people in their 40s that, yeah, theoretically, it might be better if they were to get a bit more weekly volume or even up the intensity, but the recovery is just not there. So research gives you a good starting point, but only you can determine what works best for you things that people don't think about okay you want to start doing HIIT training high intensity interval training does it make you hungrier does it affect your sleep yeah does it then make you less motivated during your strength workout how do they you know um does it affect your neat are you sluggish the rest of the day?

All these things matter. It's not just this black or white. Well, the research says this. I want to know what happens when you start doing high-intensity animal training. If it doesn't impact your sleep and it blunts your appetite and it tends to get you supercharged the next day. Yeah, and you don't mind it. You're willing to do it. Yeah, and it's not that grueling for you then great but if it for me it interferes with my sleep it it just puts too much stress on your body i get hungry as hell and it's hard because i'm going you can give me a macro

plan and i won't stick to it because i wake i have trouble sleeping and then finally i'm like my stomach's growling in the middle of the night what are you gonna do like sleep is actually more important than hitting my macros i'm gonna eat i'm gonna raid the fridge so i can freaking sleep yeah and so you have to consider all these different things and everyone's different and that's science is science is perfect it's the study of the universe and the way things work this is published research is one component to science the scientific method is a component of science it's so don't never blame science itself you can blame humans and you can you can blame but it's an it's an evolving process and we all should get we all should very much care

about science we all should strive to be scientific because not only will you see better results you'll also save a lot of money not falling for gimmicks. Yep. And that's a big part of what I just – that's part of my story essentially is – and what I was – what I even got to this was when I originally wrote the first book that I wrote was basically that. Like, God, I could have saved so much time and money and just frustration if I would have just known like 10 things. And so I'm going to put those 10 things in a book and try to make them really easy to understand. And, and that's there. That was the beginning was like, here, here's a tears. Here's me writing a book for old, you know, past me at, you know, whatever it's eight years ago. This

is what I wish I would have been. Well, I wish someone would have given me this book because shit, it would have been much, uh, I would, i would be much further ahead than i than i am now you know what i mean so anyway i think this i think this is a good ending point for we've we've hit up this we've hit this topic really well and then maybe down the road you can have me on we can discuss other topics but i'm really glad we we address this because it's such a critical topic and uh and no one talks about enough you know yeah absolutely you know what also will make uh topics, but I'm really glad we, we address this because it's such a critical topic and, uh, and no one talks about it enough, you know? Yeah, absolutely. You know what also will make a, what might make an interesting follow-up discussion is just because you stay on top

of the research in the way that you do. Uh, it might be cool if, if there were enough material to fill a podcast of, so, you know, we have the basics of fat loss and muscle and strength building, you know, at least we, we have those puzzle pieces on the board and we see how they kind of fit together, what the variables are. It's taped to one degree or another. I think that if we're using the puzzle analogy, it's probably this puzzle. We just don't know how far it goes and we don't know what the whole picture is and it's going to continue for the rest of our lives. rest of our lives, but at least we've come to, I think, a good basic understanding. And now we're looking at as things, just like you were saying earlier with the protein, like, okay, we can all agree that eating a relatively high protein diet is conducive to muscle building and strength gain. Cool. And now we're talking about optimizing. So how, okay, so how frequently, how much, what types of protein and so forth. So maybe we could have a discussion on some of the more interesting research that has come out recently and what's on the horizon. And kind of like it's almost just what's got your attention.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Some things right away come to mind. Cool. Then we should line it up. It would be fun. Like I'm interested. I think a lot of listeners would be interested as well.

Yeah. A lot of listeners would be interested as well. Yeah. A lot of people aren't aware. There's some interesting controversies right now in the field. And a couple of researchers out there mixing it up. And we need to get to the bottom of it. But, yeah, that would make for a good follow-up. So, Mike, this has been great. I very much enjoyed talking to you before the podcast and talking shop and then having you on.

You asked really good questions. So I appreciate you having appreciate you having me on absolutely i'd love to come on whenever you want yeah let's do it again and let's before we end here let's just let everybody know where they can find you um and if you have any particular products or services that you think they should know about in particular so the name is brett contrast if you don't remember my name brett contrast you can type in the glute guy. I'm big on glutes. And this is actually why I didn't want to have you on to talk glutes because I was like, dude, he's – I want him to like – I want to do just for his sake. Let's talk about something else.

Thank you. Yeah, every podcast is just all glutes. Yeah. I actually thought that would get your attention like, oh, someone that actually wants to talk about something other than glutes. Yeah, this was good. And I love talking about other things. But if you type in the glute guy or Brett Contreras, you get my blog. And from my blog, you can find all my social media channels.

I'm on Twitter. I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. I'm on YouTube. And I have a blog. And I have a newsletter. And I never spam people. I don't do affiliate stuff. It's just, here's my articles that I came out with and here's the stuff I'm

working on. And you know, so I saw, I only send out like one newsletter a month, but it's all this stuff that I've been doing. And so you can subscribe to that. And then the research review again, I mean, it's topical, obviously. This is what we're talking about. Yep. I've got the research review, which I do with Chris Beardsley. That's called Strength and Conditioning Research. And that's a good blog. You want to be reading that blog because Chris puts out really good material on that blog.

Yeah, I like it. And I like how much you guys do a good job explaining things in a way that anyone can understand them, which is, is helpful and appreciated. Thank you. It's not always easy with biomechanics. Yeah, I understand. Okay, awesome. So I think that's everything. Thanks again, Brett.

Great conversation. I know everyone's going to like it. I think we kept this under an hour, which is a miracle with me. Same, actually. Like that, that's, that's probably one of the most common YouTube comments I get is like, yo, these are cool, but they're like really long. And I'm just like, whatever. It's a podcast. So I started doing shorter videos to appease, you know.

I think it was a good strategy. We talked ourselves out a little bit before we recorded. Yeah, true. We've got some fatigue going on. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, awesome. Well, thanks again. And we'll, we'll, we'll line up the next one. And, uh, yeah, I appreciate you taking the time. Thanks Mike. Yep. Hey, it's Mike again. Hope you liked the podcast. If you did go ahead and subscribe. I put out new episodes every week or two, um, where I talk about all kinds of things related to health and fitness and general wellness. Also head over to my website at www.muscleforlife.com where you'll find not only past episodes of the podcast, but you'll also find a bunch of different articles

that I've written. Um, I release a new one almost every day. Actually, I release kind of like four to six new articles a week. Um, and you can also find my books and everything else that I'm involved in over at muscleforlife.com. All right. Thanks again. Bye.