The Tim Ferriss Show - #235: Dorian Yates on High Intensity Training, Injury Prevention, and Building Maximum Muscle

Episode Date: April 21, 2017

Dorian Yates (@dorian_yates) is a six-time Mr. Olympia who has taken the already extreme sport of bodybuilding to a new level. He's one of my adolescent heroes whose innovations in training (e.g., Occam's protocol) influenced what I later put into The 4-Hour Body. In this particular conversation, we dig into all sorts of topics that I've been dying to ask Dorian since I was a teenager. We discuss his relationship to pain, specific workouts, how he warms up, common mistakes and misconceptions, self-talk, his favorite books, and much more. I sincerely hope you enjoy this conversation with Dorian Yates as much as I did! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Soothe.com, the world's largest on-demand massage service. Because I've been broken so many times, I have body work done at least twice a week -- so I have a high bar for this stuff. I do not accept mediocrity, and I wouldn't expect you to, either. After much personal testing, I can affirm that Soothe delivers a hand-selected, licensed, and experienced massage therapist to you in the comfort of your own home, hotel, or office in as little as an hour. I was amazed at the quality of service and convenience. Think of it as Uber for massages, available in fifty†cities worldwide. Download the app at Soothe.com and use code TITAN20 to get $20 off your first massage. This podcast is also brought to you by WordPress, my go-to platform for 24/7-supported, zero downtime blogging, writing online, creating websites -- everything! I love it to bits, and the lead developer, Matt Mullenweg, has appeared on this podcast many times. Whether for personal use or business, you're in good company with WordPress -- used by The New Yorker, Jay Z, FiveThirtyEight, TechCrunch, TED, CNN, and Time, just to name a few. A source at Google told me that WordPress offers "the best out-of-the-box SEO imaginable," which is probably why it runs nearly 30% of the Internet. Go to WordPress.com/Tim to get 15% off your website today!***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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That's Abu from Aladdin. And this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to, every episode, deconstruct a world-class performer of some type. They could be from chess, they could be from entertainment, sports, business, etc. In this episode, we have a very special guest because he is one of my childhood slash adolescent icons, heroes, role models, Dorian Yates. Dorian Yates took the already extremely, extreme sport of bodybuilding and took it to a new level. He's a six time Mr. Olympia. And a lot of what he did in terms of innovating and training influenced what I later put into say the four hour body in terms of Occam's protocol and many other things. You can say hello to him on Twitter at Dorian underscore Yates or on the Facebook. He is facebook.com forward slash Dorian Yates

D Y. And he, along with, I would say coach Dan Gable of Iowa, who is coming, I promise you that had a huge influence on a lot of my thinking and a lot of my physical training. In this particular conversation, we dig into all sorts of topics that I've been dying to ask Dorian since I was 14 or 15 years old. We talk about his relationship to pain. We talk about specific workouts like his leg workout. How does he warm up? Common mistakes, misconceptions about him. When has he surpassed limits? What is his self-talk when he's going for a PR, a personal record? We talk about his favorite books. It goes on and on and on, including why he views freedom as not giving a fuck. He is a fascinating guy to speak with, came from nothing, built himself up into a hero in his chosen sport, and has since reinvented and redefined himself in Spain, of all places. So we cover it all. And I sincerely hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. There are many cases when you meet your heroes and they have clay feet. You're disappointed.

But in this case, I came away having much more respect for Dorian, and I already had a lot, and much more fascination with this character is truly multifaceted. So without further ado, please enjoy this conversation with Dorian Yates. Dorian, welcome to the show. Okay, Tim, thanks for having me on. I am so excited to have you on the show. And I would like to start with thanking you on behalf of a young lad. This was probably somewhere between 17 and 20 years ago, who emailed you out of the blue because he had a sports nutrition company and you got on the phone with him and you're very, very gracious. Ultimately, he couldn't make it worth your time to become any type of sponsored

athlete or affiliated with the company, but you really took the time and it was very memorable. And that person was me. So I did not know that. And the company was first brain quick and then body quick and then body quick. And it moved around and ended up just fine. It had taken me on my own journey. But I have followed you and your career from as early as I can really remember gathering a handful of icons in my youth. And we had Dorian Yates. And then we had Dan Gable, legendary wrestling coach. And I was very much impacted in terms of how you think and approach training to start with. And

there's a lot more to that. But what I was not familiar with at the time, and I'm sure a lot of people listening have no context on, is a bit of your background and childhood. Could you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what your childhood was like? Yeah, well, initially, I guess it was quite idyllic because I was brought up on a little, what we call in England, a small holding. So it's kind of like a very small farm. And we had horses there and dogs and chickens and all kinds of animals and stuff like that. So that was pretty cool. Um, but everything changed when I was 13 and my father died from a heart attack. Um, and then my mom was going to get remarried. We moved to Birmingham, uh, which is a second biggest city in UK. So I went from a rural, you know,

kind of a more rural existence to, you know, my father dying and moving to the city. And when I was 16, I left home. My mom wanted to go live back in the, you know, back in the countryside and so on. And I decided to stay on in the city. So I was 16 years old, no qualifications from school and nowhere to live really. I was just living at a friend's place and stuff like that. And when I was 18, I got arrested and it was really just a stupid thing me and some friends were drunk and uh in the wrong place at the wrong time but anyway um I got sent to a detention center when I was 18 uh which is like a youth jail facility I guess um the idea is to put the you know young guys that are getting in trouble put them in there for a short period of time and it's very

kind of yeah military the discipline you're marching everywhere you do a lot of sports and you like try to learn uh some kind of skill or you know job or something like that while you're in there um in any case uh they had weights in there which i'd done a little bit of previously and you know saw the magazines and everything and I think I've trained for about six months when I was at school I was doing karate first and then started doing a bit of weight training so I had an interest in a little background in there and in the facility they had weights in there and I got you know you had to do this I remember the first one of the first times we're in there in the sports hall you know they give us this like circuit training to do you know squats um pull-ups push-ups all kind of like

in a circuit and you had to go around the circuit three times and do so many reps and you know when you finish sit down so i went around around that thing three times and sat down and the prison officer was like you know thought I was making fun or something it's like you gotta go you gotta go around three times although I did go around three times so you know and uh he didn't believe me so he made me do it again um so I was stronger than there's a few hundred guys in there I was stronger than most of them and had you know the best physique and i was good with the weights and uh i you know at that point i think i found something that was you know stop

screwing around there's something here you can be you could do something with i think at that point was as far as i went you know when you left home at 16 or separated from a separate path from your mother. What was that conversation like? I mean, was there a particular dinner? Did she see it coming? Was it a total surprise? No. Well, the story is my mother moved to Birmingham after my father died to remarry another gentleman and then quite tragically had a heart attack as

well within i think was in within two years so um my mom had no reason then to to stay in the city i guess so she wanted to move back and she discussed with me whether i'd want to do that or not and i said i didn't want to do that so i I just decided to go my own way, you know. And so I was watching a documentary about you recently, which was at least co-produced by the person who introduced us. Well, introduced us, I should say, the second time, 17 years later, Brian Rose of London Real. And there was the observation that there are very few pics. It's hard to find a picture of you smiling before 1997. No, that's something I didn't really realize myself, I guess.

But I think it was a case of me being so tunnel-visioned in the pursuit of what I was doing. It's almost like it's not that I wanted to do it so I had to do it you know and um there wasn't much time for fun you know really you know people used to say to me why why don't you smile on stage because previous to me most of the girls you know they would pose on stage and smile and try to look happy. And I just couldn't fake it. I mean, by the time I got to a contest, you're totally exhausted and tired and you're dehydrated and your body fat's low and you've been on a diet for three months. And for me, it was a competition. It was a war.

I was going there to win. So I was not really in a, you know, smiling kind of mood. So I think I brought a new, a whole new kind of persona to the sport that wasn't there before, not purposely, but just by being myself, I think, but just being genuine. Why did you, or how did you get the nickname, the shadow? I got the nickname, a shadow from, um, uh from a good friend of mine and probably the most respected writer in bodybuilding. His name is Peter McGough. And it's a funny story because Peter McGough was a reporter for a small British magazine when I did my first competition and eventually peter would become the editor of flex magazine which was joe weeders you know famous bodybuilding magazine uh in the states anyway um peter was

the one that came up with that nickname because i was kind of the opposite to uh what bodybuilders generally were at that time you know quite extrovert and wanted to bring attention to themselves. And I was opposite. And my policy was to go to a contest, like my first contest turned up and people, you know, never heard of me and they were quite shocked at how good my development was. And then I would, you know, disappear and keep covered up and keep in my gym. And, you know, there's no internet, no social media or anything like that. So the only exposure you get through was through the magazines. And so I'd go to a contest, win the contest and disappear and just go back to my gym and concentrate on my training.

So I was somewhat elusive, I guess, compared to the other characters in the sport. So that's where the name The Shadow came from. And what was the gym like where you built your physique when you would vanish and go back across the pond to the UK? Could you describe the gym where you were building your physique? Yeah, the gym was right in the center uh city center of birmingham um and the building is probably one of the oldest buildings in the center you know very few hundred years old i guess um and it was in the basement of this old building where the gym was and i think it was something like

including the changing room and everything is less's less than 2,000 square feet. So very small. You go down some narrow stairs into this basement. So it's very much like a dungeon. It reminds me of some of the dungeons I've seen in old castles. I mean, they're always in the, you know, you go down. There's no windows down there. So you kind of get down there, you're totally isolated.

And I remember people used to be nervous to come through the door and go down the stairs because, you know, it's like the steps into descending into hell or something. You don't know what's down there. And you can hear all these weights clanking and smell, you know, smell all the sweat and hear people grunting and groaning. And so people were actually kind of real scared to go down there well it was a good thing it wasn't a commercial venture uh at that point actually it was my gym and i opened it in the 80s when gyms were far and few between at least in the

uk so we're doing good business but in thes, it really became my base for training. And we didn't care too much whether, you know, trying to get the members in and so on. So it's kind of like if you like it, you can come down and train here and pay your fees. If you don't, we don't really care, you know. So it was not a commercial venture at all. It's a workshop. It comes to mind that a lot of people listening are perhaps not familiar with bodybuilding or have done some training, don't know much about your career. When you were at, say, your peak in terms of training, whenever you felt like it was most dialed in, what did your workout split look like over the span of a week or two weeks? Is there perhaps an example of what that might've looked like? Yeah. I mean, it was kind of evolving over the time, but what I settled down to, um, when I was professional and let's be clear, if you're a professional bodybuilder, then

this is your profession so you can dedicate all your time to doing this but even having said that there's a limit to how much you can train if you want it to be productive um so i'd split my body into four different workouts it would be um chest and biceps, one workout. Legs would be a separate workout, and I would include hamstrings and calves in there. I really had pretty strong calves from the time I started, so they weren't a priority. So other people might want to do things differently. You know, you've got to design everything tailored to the individual.

So that was two workouts back to back. Then I'd take a day off and then have a back workout. And the next day after that, it was shoulders and triceps and another day off. So that's a six-day cycle. And that was flexible as well, depending on how I felt. So very often after a leg day, it was so exhausting and so depleting, not just on the legs, but on the whole, you know, your whole system and nervous system and so on. Um, so very often it would be a two day break after that. So that meant that I was getting around to training everything just once a week or once every six days, seven days ended on how I was feeling. So I've seen footage of people vomiting after your leg workouts,

and you mentioned people would be intimidated or afraid when they went down into the dungeon, and it seems like that was particularly common with those people you invited to do leg day with you. What did your leg day, what might a leg day workout look like? Well, you know work if you write it down on a piece of paper it doesn't mean much it doesn't look like much it's nothing special so let's let's um let's say how it would look on a piece of paper it would be three sets of leg

extensions three sets of leg press and two sets of squats on a hack squat machine or a smith machine earlier in my career i did do free squats but i stopped doing them as i felt they weren't that productive and the injury risk was was too great for me um so that would be quads and after that would be two sets of leg curls two sets of stethalgged deadlifts, two sets of standing calf raises, and two sets of seated calf raises. So hey, that looks like a breeze, right? That's not much written down on a piece of paper. But the point is, is what you put into it. It's the intensity that you put into those sets. And even, let me take you through the first exercise leg extensions the first set would be quite light and quite easy so the goal there is to get in touch with the muscle you know feel the

muscle contract and stretch and get the blood in there so it's warming up the second set would be more difficult but not to absolute maximum and then the third set is the one that i call the working set or the one that really really counts because the other two they're within your capacity so they're not going to do anything quite frankly apart from warming you up because your body has no reason to change if it's working within its capacity well you know why would it um you have to overload it have to give it something that it's not used to that's going to be a shock. Basically, muscle growth is an adaptation to stress. So you've got to give your muscles more stress than they're accustomed to. Otherwise, they won't change quite basically.

That's it. So that last set, you just got to put everything into it and it's not about throwing weights around and screaming and shouting it's about concentrating is about doing the movement correctly is about moving the weights slowly under under control even when it gets absolutely torturously hard and impossible to do those last reps at the end that's where we have a training partner to come and help you squeeze out those last couple of reps and when you do go to what's true muscular failure uh with a large muscle group like the legs and glutes and so on i mean it's absolutely exhausting because you use so much oxygen so after that that set, you'll be breathing like a train. You'll probably start to feel very nauseous and so on. So if you're not used to that kind of work, then very often people do vomit.

It's not my goal. It's not my goal particularly to get them to do that, but sometimes it's a bit of a shock. But most people don't train with me all the time so i'm trying to like part of my job as i see it as a trainer is to take them to show them where they can go um so which i'm very good at because i can observe people and i know exactly what they can do where their limit is and they don't know that yet so it's like me taking them by the hand and then like taking them out there and like, you know, this is where you got to be. And the third set is to true muscular failure.

True muscular failure. And then, in my opinion, you don't need to do another set on that particular exercise. So we move on to another exercise, for argument's sake could could be leg press um now we're involving the glutes and maybe a little bit around the lower back that we didn't hit on the leg extensions so we're going to warm up again one or two sets depends what you need and again then absolute failure you're going to have one guy either side of the leg press machine to make sure you know you're safe while you go to absolute failure and perhaps they're going to help you a little bit on the last uh last two reps um so it's

all about the intensity probably get through this um workout in around 40 45 minutes um so very intense uh to to stress the muscles give them something they're not used to. And then the rest of your job as a bodybuilder is really recovering from that stress and repairing your body. You've got to recover first, and then you can repair and hopefully overcompensate a little bit. And if we were looking at, say, the leg extension exercise, and hypothetically, let's say your working set weight is a hundred pounds how what is the repetition range or the time under tension range that is your target for failure if

you have one and then if it if a hundred pounds is your working set what might your first and second set use well actually we've got this all documented because now i am i have a my certification program dy hit so during the high intensity training so we got this all documented and the guideline would be if your maximum set so tim you you know you reckon you can do 100 pounds on the leg extension for for 10 reps that that'll be a max so we'd probably start with half of that like 50 percent uh for your first set nice and light uh second set probably 70 so 70 pounds in this case um and then you know you're ready to rock and roll on on the 100 pounds and you thought you could do 10 but we will probably get like 13 or 14 out of you

but we'll get you beyond what you thought and then that's the lesson in itself to say hey you know you can go a little bit more and these are the ones that count the last one or two reps at the end of the set that's the magic but that's where the magic happens you know definitely and if you and if you can do 100 pounds on a leg extension for 10 reps last week if you did that last week you can do that for next the rest of your life man and nothing's going to happen that i'll guarantee you and i see it happen all the time um people will get some progress first year maybe 18 months uh but then the body becomes accustomed, becomes smart. You know, I don't want to keep adapting to this stress.

So it just, you know, you've got to really push it to get results beyond that point. And I won't spend this entire time in the weeds, but I'm so curious just to whet people's appetite for the documentation that you mentioned. Between the, say, first first light set the second heavier set and the third work set how much rest do you take between those sets or how do you how do you know when you're ready to go i don't like to work with uh too much with you know a stopwatch uh i kind of observe somebody if i'm training them or I teach them to observe themselves and basically the guideline is you rest in between the sets as long as as long as you need so that you will be

able to do the following set um to muscular failure so let's say we did you know we did a set leg press and you're breathing like a steam train and we jump on and try and do another set after 30 seconds. You're going to fail due to cardiovascular failure rather than real muscular failure. And on the other hand, if we rest way too long between the sets, we're going to lose some of the intensity of the workout. So it's kind of a balancing thing. You've got to rest long enough so your breathing is somewhat normal so that you're not going to run out of gas on your next set. And so it would depend on the size of the muscle groups being trained.

If you're doing a squat, leg press, deadlift, exercises like that, multi-joint exercises that are using the largest muscles in your body, there's going to be a huge oxygen debt if you go to failure. So you're going to need to rest longer between those sets as opposed to, hey, we've just done a bicep curl. you know um so i think if it's really heavy leg training it could be three or four minutes between the sets easily whereas you know bicep curl or deltoid raise you could be a minute or less got it and what there's one back well it's not limited to back but one exercise i would love to talk about and that's the bent row so i remember way back in the early 90s i saw a lot of photographs of you performing bent rows with a palms up supinated grip and so for for people listening who may not be able to easily distinguish i had a lot of trouble remembering supinated and pronated and so if you want to have drink soup out of your hand then you have to turn it up so if with the palms up and do you uh could you describe how you uh performed the bent row

it doesn't have to be that variation but uh yeah and or how you teach people to do it like what what is the right way to do a bent row in your mind? Well, you know, first of all, I should say I'm, you know, I'm very studious. I like to study things. I've studied nutrition right from, you know, from day one, I bought books on nutrition and studied nutrition. I bought, you know, I must've had every book that's been published, every magazine from the early eighties until the day I retired so um I've read everybody else's training articles and books and everything so gleaned a lot of information from here and there and the bent over row I came up with that position lifting my body up above parallel the old traditional way to do bent over rows was with the body parallel to the floor, fairly wide grip and pulling the bar into the chest,

which is fine if you want to work the upper back rhomboids and lower trapezius and so on. But the area that I saw that was lacking in most bodybuilders was the middle to low lats. And when that's fully developed and it's thick and you get that Christmas tree separation, it looks really dramatic, you know? And just to pause there, for people who don't know what that might mean, I was going to bring this up later, but just Google Dorian Yates Christmas tree back

to see what this looks like. Well, you get the Christmas tree kind of shape, the separation between where the lats attach and the spiny erector so obviously you got to be in very lean condition literally no body fat there so you can see all the separation fine separation of the those muscles so what i was trying to do was to thicken my mid and lower lats. Naturally, my lats are very wide. I always had a good back. Well, I got beaten twice in professional bodybuilding. The first was my debut in the professional ranks.

And I was beaten by a guy called Mohamed Benaziza in my first show, which was called Knights of Champions in New York, 1990. If anyone wants to go and look, Mohamed Benaziza was an incredible bodybuilder. Very short, I think it was only like 5'4", or something like that. But anyway, he beat me, and his back was like 3D thickness, you know?

And mine wasn't quite there yet. So I got inspired by that, and started working on my lower lats, mid-back, and I realized with the reverse grip, I could really kind of pull the elbows further back at the top and squeeze and really contract the lower lats. So that's why I started working with the reverse grip. And between Mohamed Benaziza, who beat me on my first contest,

and Lee Haney, who beat me in my first contest and Lee Haney who beat me in my first Mr. Olympia where I got second and Lee Haney again had that super three dimensional thickness on the lower lats he wasn't quite as lean with the separation but he had very impressive thickness so those two guys pushed me

to further concentrate on that area and thicken it up and actually i became really well known for that in the end probably more than those two guys i would i mean certainly based on my obsessive reading of all the magazines at the time i think that's that's certainly true and when you're performing an exercise like that form of row do you you think much about tempo in terms of the speed of lifting? Are there any pauses? How do you think about that? Absolutely. Well, first of all, you need to understand the function of the muscle and the exercise and how that's performing the function. You need to kind

of get your head inside the muscle. you feel it stretch you feel it contract you almost become like part of the fibers and i often say bodybuilding is really the opposite of weight lifting or power lifting where their job is to get the weight from point a to point b however you know the easiest or best way to do that is. So they use momentum, they use mechanics, they use as many muscle groups to lift the weight, whereas a bodybuilder is using the weight as a tool, so to speak, in order to put maximum stress on the particular muscle group they're trying to isolate and work so it's very important um to move the weights in a controlled manner and not to create any kind of swing or momentum to to move the weights and the most

important thing that people don't realize is that you have different phases of the rep you have the positive which is the lifting which everybody kind of concentrates on and then you've got the lowering of the weight or the negative phase which people kind of just tend to rush through um but i think a lot of the muscle damages occurs on the negative part of the rep so you know we could argue which one's more important the positive the negative i say i don't know so let's do both of them to the absolute maximum you know um and you're always stronger in the negative phase of an exercise so unless you're slowing down the negative unless you're consciously slowing down the negative part of the movement you're never going to fully tax that part because you might

fail on the lifting you know say you're doing bench press and you're pushing it up right and you can't push any more in a positive you know way of pushing the weight up but if somebody lifted the weight to the top to you you could probably lower two or three more because the negative uh phase of the muscle is not exhausted so in order to get somewhere near exhaustion of the negative phase you need to slow that down. So, I tell people, you know, do the positive quite explosively, but not swinging, and then consciously slow down the negative, although I don't like to, you know, count seconds and so on. How did you connect with Mike Menser, and who is Mike for people who don't know? Well, as I said, I did a lot of studying and I think I'm quite a logical thinker. And Mike Menser was a Mr. Universe, professional bodybuilder and top competitor in Mr. Olympia. And Mike was around and in the magazines when I started reading magazines. And he had a kind of unique training system, I guess, called heavy duty. And this was short relatively compared to how the other guys were training anyway, short, intense workouts. Mike would be the first one to say that he got pretty much all his principles from a guy called Arthur Jones,

who made a line of exercise machines called Nautilus machines way back in the 70s. Arthur Jones was, I guess, a pretty brilliant guy. He was a self-made billionaire with no financial interest in the bodybuilding world really he just made these nautilus machines because he felt they were the best way to build muscle and it was something was very interested in he used to have arnold schwarzenegger mike mensa kcbh all these guys go out to his place in florida to train anyway arthur was the first guy to say you know what's the science behind muscle growth and to point out that the intensity is really the key factor intensity and recovery and so on so all the

the principles of heavy high intensity training weight training come originally from Arthur Jones got refined by Mike Mensah and Mike Mensah was somebody that I admired very much and uh you know so I guess I took those methods maybe refined them more uh over the years um but the guy that deserves the credit for originally pointing out um a lot of facts uh is the first guy to talk about genetics you know about previously to that you know it'd been sold the story that you know everybody could be mr universe or mr olympia if you train like arnold and eat like arnold and so on uh arthur jones is a first guy to point out scientifically that's you know it's not possible um people have different genetic uh abilities to to muscle, just like they have for running or jumping

and singing or whatever else it is, you know? Right. Yeah. I mean, it's the raw materials that you begin with, whether it's you have better myostatin inhibition than someone else or fill in the blank. There's so many variables, known and unknown. And for people who have only now heard the name arthur jones for the first time i highly recommend he's a very colorful character and a good writer also

checking out some of his earlier his bulletins that he would put out and some of his writing he had a crocodile farm he was he was a very very odd yeah and eccentric but smart guy yeah he had um you know he had gorillas as well one time there's a picture of one of the gorillas in the nautilus pullover machine you know i think they had to must have had to put the gorilla on some heavy sedatives or something to that picture in the nautilus pullover machine, but that's a pretty famous picture. Yeah. He's a colorful guy and obviously a very, very smart guy and a thinker. And, uh,

you know, uh, I, I read all this stuff. I read my Mensa stuff. And then that was kind of coupled with my own observations in the gym. That if I did more than a certain amount, or if I trained more often,

my progress would just come to a halt. And then I would, you know, get run down, get tired, take a week off. And guess what would happen after I had a week off from the gym? I'd go back and boom, I was stronger. Why was that? It was because my body was exhausted and depleted and it wasn't recovered. I took a week off and it recovered and rebuilt itself and I was stronger. So there was a lesson there.

You've got to train. You've got to put stress on the muscles. You've got to break them down. And then you must let your body recover. And, you know, that takes time and it takes good nutrition as well. Do you observe people who are attempting or hear from people who are attempting some form of high intensity training or some type of rational limited volume to failure training? What are the most common mistakes that you see or some of the most common misconceptions either? I think the most common misconceptions is that you've got to use a ton of weight. You know, if you look at my training videos of blood and guts that were filmed,

yes, I'm using what can be considered very heavy weights in there. But I'm using them in the correct way. So if I wanted to lift more weights in those particular exercises, I probably could have done, but I would have to do it in a form that was not, you know, was not putting the maximum on the muscles that I'm trying to train. So the first misconception is that you're going to be throwing around tons of weight. You're going to be using the weight as a tool.

I think that's the main mistake that people make. And also because they've read about beyond failure training techniques. So for people that are not familiar, if you're lifting a weight and it gets to a point where you're stuck, you can't complete the rep, then that's failure. You can go beyond that point if you've got a training partner there to slightly assist you just to get one or two more reps right at the end of the set. That's the correct way to do force reps. But people get carried away with it, and they're in the gym,

they've got too much weight on there, and they're doing like one rep correctly, and then the training partner's helping them on the second and third rep, and that's not going to get you anywhere apart from injured so i'd love to talk uh a little bit about the mental and self-talk uh so in 1990 i want to talk about that loss but could you place for us, in 1990, where were you living? What were you doing when you were not on stage competing? Okay. In 1990, I was living with my first wife, or I don't think we were married at that time. We were living together with my son.

And we were living in a two-bedroom council estate estate mason it so i don't know people in the states wouldn't know what a council estate is i guess it's like i don't know what you call it in the states but government housing you know affordable housing affordable government housing whatever it's not not the best place to live probably um you know you still have noisy neighbors always stuff like this problems going on um so i was living there um i was making a living from the gym which i had had um for about three years at that point and there were not a lot of gyms around so that you know i was making okay living from the gym and supporting my wife and child and you know the expenses that i incurred in bodybuilding with the diet and the supplements

and all that kind of stuff um so that's where i was at and um i was the best you know i'd won 1988 i'd won the the brit British Championship heavyweight and overall. And that qualified me to be a professional. And I chose the show Night of the Champions, as it was called at the time, which was kind of a very prestigious show to, like, try and do a debut at and quite well respected. And if you go in the top five of that show, you could go on to

compete in the mr olympia um so it's quite an attractive show to do um so at this point you know um i've been doing this thing for five years now competing and training and really absolutely putting everything into it and you you know, sacrifice social life, sacrifice friends, time with the family. And, you know, if you've got a family, then that means they're sacrificing as well. So I observed a lot of people around me, a lot of people following this bodybuilding dream, you know, and they weren't getting anywhere and they weren't going to get anywhere because they didn't have what it took. But, you know, they were still making all these sacrifices and, you know, damaging relationships and business and money and lots of things, you know, that you're totally focused on this thing.

So I said, I don't want to be one of those guys. And I've observed the way things work. If you're going to be a top professional and you're going to make it in the sport of bodybuilding as a professional, then you're pretty much going to make a mark from your first contest. You don't go into a pro contest and get 15th place and then next year win Mr. Olympia because it doesn't work like that. So if you've got what it takes, it's going to be apparent. You have all of these sacrifices that you're making. You are living in a place with its own problems or challenges, certainly.

When you found out that you did not win, and after that, maybe it's the night after or the day after, what was your self-talk like? What were you saying to yourself, if you remember? I'll tell you what the self-talk was before I got there, because that's pretty relevant. So I saw everything that was going on around me and I said, right, I'm going to do this. I'm going to take 18 months off after my British Championship win. I'm going to take 18 months off. I'm going to give 100% focus to this contest.

Absolutely everything I've got. And if I don't place in the top five of this contest, then I won't compete again, you know, because I haven't got retaked, basically. So I'll concentrate on the gym maybe open another gym something like that but as for you know being a competitive professional bodybuilder um that would be the end for me if i don't place in the top five so i put myself under a bit of pressure um so in the end i got second, I mean, it was a great lineup. And some people in there, like Robbie Robinson, I mean, this guy was a hero of mine when I started, you know.

And before I went to America, I was pretty much told by everybody that I didn't have much of a chance because I didn't have any name recognition. I wasn't known by any of the judges or the promoters had no publicity in the magazines and plus your english and they're going to favor the american athletes and you know all this um negative stuff which i didn't really listen to i just thought if i'm good enough i'm good enough and that's it um so i made a huge impact to the show um the crowd is very vocal and i was their favorite um and from that showing i got invited to to california to go to gold's gym and do a photo shoot for the weeder magazines and all this stuff so although i didn't win the contest um i probably got more out of it than the guy that did win it

right because because I was brand new and such a different look and a persona and everything and the crowd was going crazy um so I was not disappointed at all in getting second it was like a vindication for me it was like wow I am good enough then because I got second in this first pro contest with no publicity, no nothing. And it was a close second as well. And I beat a lot of really good seasoned bodybuilders and professionals. So maybe I do have what it takes. What would you say from, so we're looking at 1990,

was that a similar experience to your first Mr. Olympia competition? Was the self-talk before and after the same or did it change at all? It was different because at this point my confidence was building because the following year, 1991, when I did my first Mr. Olympia, earlier in the year to qualify for the Mr. Olympia, I did this same contest again, Night of Champions, and this time won it. And, you know, I was improved from the previous year.

Physique was better. I was feeling more confident, more comfortable with being on stage and doing that part of it. So the one hurdle really was that Lee Haney was Mr. Olympia when I started training. And, you know, so he's the guy that I've been looking up to all these years, you know, as Mr. Olympia. And now I realize I've got to change my mindset because this is no longer,

you know, the hero, the guy. I've got to go there and try and beat this guy. So if I have this, you know, this approach to it, wow, it's Lee Haney, it's Mr. Olympian, wow, yeah. You know, of course, great respect, but I had to go as a competitor. So I had to say, you know, now the guy's a competitor. And you know what, he's a man. He's got two arms, two legs.

He lifts weights. And I think maybe I can beat him because nobody lifts weight harder than me so that made me you know gives me a lot of confidence going into it um so it didn't happen but once again it was a very close second and it's the first time they don't want to got second on their debut event at Mr. Olympia. So there was a couple of firsts there, and I was happy with the placing. Some people at the contest said, oh, you should have won and what have you, but I think at the time it was a fair result.

So the next question is going to be about 92 to 97, and obviously feel free to take this off track somewhere else. But I've always, in watching videos of you, looking at photographs of you training, wondered about your relationship to pain. So let's say during that 92 to 97, how did you think about pain or relate to it? And I don't know if that's a good question or not, but I've always wanted to ask it. I don't know. I think you become accustomed to pain, you know, and make friends with it and even look for it. I mean, I was, I was talking to, I was talking to somebody and I was explaining, look, my legs were sore, like can't sit down on the toilet sore for three or four days of every week of my life for like more than 10 years.

So if I was not hobbling around for a few days of every week in pain, uncomfortable to sit down, uncomfortable to sleep, I wasn't happy. I wasn't doing my job properly. So, you know, with me it almost became like I had no fear, and it made me maybe a little reckless at times, and perhaps that's why I got injured going ready for a contest, because I was doing stuff before contests that probably wasn't necessary i realize now um and you know your your intake of nutrients is less you're more dehydrated you're tired so

the injury risk uh gets greater going to a contest and the two serious injuries i had would have been in the last six weeks before a contest. So, but, you know, I literally used to go and attack the weights and, you know, I felt I was indestructible. You often do when you're young, you know. Yeah. So I had a, certainly not to that extreme necessarily, but well, let me just ask, I mean, how much, how much weight in terms of water and dehydration would you lose in the last 24 to 36 hours or 48 hours prior to a competition? Um, probably not a lot, hopefully. I mean, um, some people used to do extreme things, but because I was very calculated, I'll probably be

within, uh, within five or six pounds of my contest weight from like a couple of weeks out. Oh, that's fantastic. So, yeah. And then the last week I would just manipulate, um, carbohydrates and water and so on to try and get, uh, a little drier, uh, between the skin and so on. try and get a little drier between the skin and so on. So you get the separation of muscles coming out, but I'll probably lose a couple of pounds the last two days. It wasn't very drastic, but it, you know, is the end of, usually I take 12 weeks to specifically dial in for a contest.

I was, uh, when I had a number of my most serious injuries and needed reconstructive shoulder surgery and had a number of different tendon and ligament issues, it was always, uh, while I was dehydrating for making weight for competitive wrestling, uh, that I wrestled for more than a decade. And I almost all of the major injuries and chronic injuries and issues that I have now, I can trace back to a period of extreme dehydration. Well, that could have been the case with me. I don't know if it was extreme dehydration or a combination of slight dehydration, extremely

low body fat, um, uh, tiredness. Right. You know, it could, it could be all combination of all those factors, but dehydration absolutely is going to increase your risk. I want to come back, and hopefully I'm not beating a dead horse here, but I think it's really valuable for people to hear, and I'm fascinated by it, how you utilize self-talk. Because in this conversation with you in conversations that I've heard of yours, you seem very good at speaking to yourself. Well, giving yourself instructions and feedback. Well, and I, I, what, what brought this to mind was watching footage of you looking at old training

journals. And, uh, in the journal, not only did you have the specifics of a given workout but you there was one line and as i'm not going to be getting this perfectly right but it was something like i am ashamed of this workout from from this point on it's all guns blazing or something stop screwing around you know could could you could you describe how you used that type of written feedback and so on? It's just notes and motivation. And, uh, what I would do as well is like set goals.

And, um, whenever, whenever I advise people, I tell them this, it's just, instead of saying something, get a pen, get a piece of paper

and write it down. It just makes it a hundred times more powerful. You know, I'm going to do this. I want to lose this amount of weight. I'm going to do this and I'm going to do, you know, but you got to be realistic. I'm going to do this in four weeks. I'm going to lose, no, no, no. I'm going to lose four pounds in four weeks. And write it down. And then how are you going to do that? Write it down. You know, everything I wrote, everything down.

So I had a plan and I'd even rehearse. It's funny. It's almost like instinctively. I think some of it is instinct and some of it was studying. The whole sports psychology, I pretty much got it down very quickly. I didn't need anyone to coach me on it. I kind of found out myself. And plus, reading all the stuff I did and other people,

I think Mike Mensah used to advocate keeping a training diary. So I probably picked that up from there. And even before going to work out, I would sit down with the training diary. So I probably picked that up from there. And even before going to work out, I would sit down with the training diary and I'd look at what I did last week. So this is what I did last week. These are all the exercises, all the sets, these are all the reps. Okay. So this is what I want to do today. I want to do, I did 250 pounds for six reps last week. I want to do seven or eight this week. Right. So I was seven or eight on that bench press.

And when I get down on that bench press, the weight's going to feel like this and I'm going to bring it down. It's going to feel like this. And I'm going to be wearing this shirt. It's like literally used to visualize the whole workout before I even went to the gym. So I knew exactly what I was doing and what order and, and everything.

And that was just dialed in. So I wouldn't even talk to anybody when I went to the gym, you know, I would just do my workout. So you've got to have a plan. You know, if you just wonder in the gym and think, Oh, what should I do today? You're not going to get anywhere. So when you walked in with a plan and let's say you get to a particular exercise where your work set is going to be a new PR for you, a new personal record. What is going on in your head between either like when you walk in the gym or in the minutes prior to that, uh, that set? Well, it's just really confirming, um, what are you going to do and you know why you're doing it

you got you got to have motivation man you're not going to put yourself through pain and discomfort unless there's some kind of motivation there so what's your motivation for doing this and how bad do you want it and for me it was like life or death really you know that's that's how it felt anyway life or death i gotta do this i gotta change my life and got to change my life, and this is what I've got to do, and this is the road I'm going to take, and nothing's going to stop me. But that was my personal motivation. Everyone's got to find their own. But you're only going to push as hard as you're motivated, basically.

So let's dig into that a little bit because I – so after one of the Mr.lympias maybe multiple you were asked when you're going to start training again and then you would say very straight face next week and it sort of boggled boggled people's minds because they were like why don't you take a few months off and you're like why don't you take a few months off of sex in other words if you enjoy it i like training so i'm going to take, you know, maybe it would have been good sometimes like a couple of weeks off, probably give my joints a rest and so on. But I was a man with a mission and, you know,

it's hard to like control that fire sometimes. When you say life or death, what was feeding that fire? Was there anything else that was driving you or was it just a, I mean, who knows deep psychological reasons, perhaps, uh, who knows? Um, I'm sure that, um, because I didn't have an easy childhood and then, you know, particularly close and loving family and all these kinds of things that other people might have. I think if I had a really comfortable upbringing like that, I probably wouldn't be the driven person I was, you know. So I'm sure there's something there in that, in wanting to achieve

or wanting to be recognized or something. But in any case, in some ways it felt like I already knew that I was going to do this or I had to do this. Um, I don't know if that's, if that's easy to understand, but it's, yeah, it's almost like I had to, I knew I was going to do this. What are certain beliefs that you had then that you think were unhelpful now? If you look back at your competitive career or the period of time after that, after you were sidelined, taken out by injuries, uh, what, what are, what are,

what are beliefs that you had that were unhelpful or things that you've really changed your mind about a lot in, uh, in the last, say decade or two or since competing? I think what I struggled with, and I think this is very common with athletes that have had tunnel vision, is like, who are you? Who are you now that that goal has been, it's not there or it's been taken away

or however you want to put it. With me, it was injury. So, um, all throughout my career, I was very controlled, you know, controlled everything.

And when I competed and all this kind of stuff, and this, I didn't have control of because it was like, you're injured and you can't compete anymore. And, and that's it. So, um,

I didn't have control over that and these were this was bicep and tricep yeah it was bicep was the original injury um which people can see photographs of it's basically from your tips your fingers to your armpit is just black on one arm that was six weeks before the contest in 1994 and again you know six weeks out maybe maybe a little dehydrated tired body fats low and i was training too heavy uh for that phase of my training i was doing 440 pounds bent over rows and um yeah the bicep Um, so it wasn't indestructible, you know? And what did you find helpful or unhelpful for finding peace with yourself after losing that singular goal? I think it takes time, you know, it takes time because

you've been doing this one thing for so long and, you know, it takes time because you've been doing this one thing for so long and you know, it's kind of like, that's all, you know, so it takes some time to readjust and rebalance and, um, come to the realization of like, okay, that's over. But you know, there's a, you can do anything you want you know anything you want and you have more time now you have more freedom to pursue things and interests and that wouldn't be possible before because i was on such a strict uh regime so in the end i came to appreciate that but it did definitely take time you've uh undergone a transformation uh i think many people would say or certainly the people who've had close exposure to you uh among other

things you know now practice yoga uh you instead of wearing only black and gray shirts you wear white and colored shirts which oddly enough is something that I've started doing in the last two years. And you've changed locations, you know, you've, you've made a lot of, of changes to your life in the, in the last, say five years. Are there any particular experiences or teachers who have helped you to undergo that transformation? Because you seem like a far happier human being or at peace human being uh now than certainly in in anything that i've uh seen of you during competition or shortly thereafter yeah i think it's a case of constantly adjusting and, I don't know, at some point I felt, wow, I'm just kind of, you know,

doing the same things. Um, maybe I need some more variety. So I just, I started doing some different things and I was looking at my body, you know, uh, got quite a few injuries. I got the bicep, the tricep and the supraspinatus torn on the left side. So me pursuing what I was doing before, you know, trying to push the weights in the gym, was starting to be kind of in some ways could be detrimental and lead to more injuries. So I don't know. I kind of had a message internally that i need to do something different and i wasn't sure if it was yoga or tai chi or something along those lines

but i started doing yoga and um i found it amazing for the the physical side a lot more mobility i didn't realize because i always did some stretching when i was training so quads and hamstrings and you know basic basic stretches. I was pretty good on for, especially for a bodybuilder, I guess. But a lot of the mobility and twisting and things like that was quite limited. I remember I was talking to a chiropractor friend of mine and it was like, you know, people didn't used to get back problems, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years ago because they used to sit so much

around the campfire in that squat position and you know they sit like that for hours and if you can sit like that and you're comfortable you probably won't have any back problems so i thought that's interesting let me sit in a squat and it was like kind of uncomfortable and tight and didn't feel right you know um so yeah i was i was led to do the yoga and i enjoy the physical side of it the mobility the stretching and also the kind of spiritual side as well and i do meditation as well as the yoga and uh but i you know i still like to push physically i do cycling over here in spain i've got some good steep hills so i do cycling up the hills and you know people can hear me shouting and screaming at myself going up the hills

there so i still like to push myself i do some functional training in the gym with ropes and pushing sleds and stuff like that um so i you know i still love to to challenge myself i'm going to do it you know i'm going to still go pretty hard. And I'm very interested now in just keeping cardiovascular fitness, mobility, flexibility, all the things that are relevant to me as I'm getting older. This vehicle that we have, that we live in, this machine, the body, is the only thing you've got to function in this, you know, in this reality. So if it's not working very well, you're not going to have such a fun time, you know. So really that's, you know, my training is all geared to that now, to keep it efficient.

The same as a diet. And, you know, I honestly feel great, tremendous. I'm 55 next month and I feel great. I feel better than when i was 35 well happy early birthday number one and number two do you remember what your first yoga class was like or do you have any notable yoga early yoga experiences that you could describe yeah i have a funny story um so i got this thing you know i wanted to do yoga but I didn't want to just go to a yoga class or I said you know what if I concentrate on this if I think about it enough the person will come along

kind of thing so you know I put it out there I want a yoga teacher on it and ask around and through a friend of mine he said yeah I know and she's good, and I think you'll like her. So me and Gal, we went along, and the first class with this lady we did. And I thought this yoga stuff, you know, it looks like a piece of cake, right? So you just stand there and do this, and some of the stuff I'm not going to be able to do because I'm physically too big, but, you know, I should be all right. I didn't realize how difficult some of the poses are and how long you hold them. And, you know, your body's not used to that. It's not accustomed to that.

If you're used to just powerful, you know, powerful stuff, it's a different kind. So I was holding a pose and like a a lunging pose and my legs just gave away and i fell on the floor you know so this is like this is like a warrior pose one of those yeah that's exactly what it was it was like warrior two i think and i just my legs just buckled i couldn't stand up i fell on the floor and the yoga teacher looked at me and wrote you know lifted her eyebrows up and kind of went, ah, Dorian. You know, like, that's so easy, is it? You know?

So, you know, it got easier now. So I think this is actually a good point to ask that there are many different listener and fan questions that came in. You have a lot of fans in my audience. But one of them is, I think, closely related to what we're talking about. This is from Nicholas Meyer, knowing what you know now, what do you wish you could change about your training program back when you were competing? If anything like diet, uh, high intensity training versus volume, anything. Yeah, I've had this question before. So it's something I've, uh, pondered on, you know, right. The only thing that I think would be, well, two things that would be beneficial to me if I could go back and change them would be not training with super intensity to the absolute maximum

the last two months before a contest where your calorie intake and so on is restricted and you're doing more cardio and you may be dehydrated and avoid those injuries. That would be great. The other thing is I don't believe I ever really presented the best physique I could on stage because I generally looked better, in my opinion, and I can confirm this now by looking at photos and, you know, from a different perspective now because I'm not quite so involved. The best physiques I present would probably be like two or three weeks before a contest.

So I always overdid a little bit, you know. Dorian Yates would never underdo anything there was always a tendency to overdo and that's the thing that needed to be controlled a little bit perhaps so those two things are the only things that i would have changed um but would i change them? Because those events led me to where I am now. So if we went back in time and stopped me from getting injured, this whole story would be different. Maybe I would have competed longer and maybe that wouldn't be good. Who knows?

So I don't live with any regrets, you know. So in fact, I probably wouldn't change it. So if you were, though, tasked with going back in time and trying to convince younger Dorian to leave a little bit of slack in the system for the weeks leading up to competition, to underdo that a little bit, because you look back at the photos and you're a better three weeks out.

What would you have said to that young, younger Dorian? Well, I was kind of conscious of that the last couple of years and I was trying not to do it, but it's still a tendency to overdo it. And, you know,

I had a good friends who, when I won in Mr. Olympia in 93, and it was probably the most devastating win in the history of the contest that it was just outright first place and it was a physique um size and condition uh that had never been seen before so everyone was saying to me then well you know you've got to stop that crazy heavy training you're doing because there's risk involved with that. You can't do that forever.

And maybe just kind of cruise now and, you know, hold your position and earn your money. And, uh, that probably would be wise advice, but, uh, it wasn't exciting for me. You know, I wanted to, I still wanted to try to push the envelope to see how far we could go did you ever have this is this came up a number of times from different people and i'm curious as well what was your plan b if bodybuilding didn't pan out if you if you had one well um i didn't have a plan b really um i i knew that bodybuilding was going to do something good for me. And in a very short time, I won the British Championships and got a financial backup because of that

because I didn't have two pennies to rub together. I didn't have a car. I didn't have anything. Somebody backed me and financed me with the gym because I was British champion. So very quickly, you know, I was already earning a living now from this thing that I love doing. I've got my own gym. We're doing my own equipment that I chose and everything. I'm making a nice living.

So that was already happening. I think the question was whether I would be a successful professional bodybuilder or not. If I wasn't, then I probably would open some more gyms. And who knows? I was never the guy that was going to be working for somebody else or doing nine to five. That was never going to happen. So this next question is from Tierney Eaton. And she asks a question that also came up a number of times and comes up a lot.

So I'm sure you've heard some variation of this. What is the best way for women to build beautiful lean muscle, higher reps with light weights or lower reps with heavy weights? I'm reading books on both, but would love to hear his opinion. It's exactly the same that would build big muscles on a male. It's absolutely no difference. In my opinion, there's a lot of hype and a lot of marketing around women's training. Um,

if women want to, uh, change their appearance, so we say change their appearance. There's only a couple of ways you can do that. Uh build muscle and or you can lose fat that's the only way i mean you can't change your bone structure so what makes your shape apart from your bone structures and muscles and and body fat so uh you need high intensity training uh training, rep range, you know, eight to 12 reps in a set, going to failure, and the rest is diet, you know,

to make sure you're getting sufficient protein and eating regular small meals and keeping control on your calories so it's not too much but it's enough. So there's a lot involved but it's you know i don't see anything different from a lady training to a guy training they got the same muscles in the same places and they respond to stress in the same way i would like to just underscore that because i get this type of question a lot and i don't have an opportunity to answer it publicly or i haven't taken the opportunity much so a few things just because i think what you said is so important to

underscore there's a lot of sales and marketing to women that is very uh i think insulting frankly because they use words like toning and lengthening when you can't. Oh, man. Son, don't start with the toning, man. That's my pet hate. Oh. What the fuck does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. Well, I'll tell you what it means. Actually, what a lady means when she says toning, she means that she's going to look leaner and tighter, right? So her tone is going to look, her muscular tone is going to look better.

Although it's a nonsense word, I know where you're coming from. And how do you get that look? Easily. Well, not easily, but how do you get it is you build your muscle and decrease the body fat. So the ratio of muscle to fat is higher, and then you're going to look leaner, and you're going to have that look that you call toned. But there's no magic exercise that can do it for you, no magic diet.

It's consistent weight training in the gym and good diet. It's not that much of a difference in a woman's program to a man's program. It's just, uh, you know, if I'm dealing with a client, I just deal with that client on an individual basis, whether a man or a woman, it doesn't matter to me. I just, you know, I figure everything out depending on the individual. Right. And also just for, for women who might be listening and are concerned about getting too bulky or whatever it might be, number one, I would say you have, and I'm estimating here, but let's just say one-tenth to one-twentieth the free testosterone of a male. And a lot of men have difficulty adding mass, so you're not going to become Mrs. Olympia overnight as a surprise. So you can very much notice the changes.

Yeah. You're not going to build muscles by mistake. You know, it takes a lot of work to build muscles, but I know where the lady's coming from. Maybe they start lifting and, you know, first few weeks of jeans get a bit tighter or something like that. Cause just, you start to build muscle, but you, as long as you control your diet, you'll be losing the body fat at the same time. So you'll get this look that you're looking for. It's called less body fat and more muscle. Yeah. And that's what you're looking for.

And that's why you're called toned and all these kind of nonsense terms. But that's what it is. So if a lady wants to change her her body she's got to do weight training she's got to do resistance training and she's got to be conscious about her diet and that's it same as a guy is it more difficult for a woman to build muscle lose body fat yes probably generally speaking yes but it's the same process even if you look back at some of the physiques that i think uh have been iconic female physiques and i'm not saying they were physique competitors in the modern sense at all but even marilyn monroe actually did resistance training there are photographs of her doing dumbbell work absolutely we we had a big black and white poster

of marilyn monroe in the uh ladies changing room at Temple gym down in the dungeon. We say it's a ladies changing room. It was just like a little cupboard in the wall, really. Anyway, room for one lady to get changed in there. And we had a big black and white of Marilyn Monroe doing bench press with dumbbells. And you've spent, I mean, you've spent a good amount of time also just so people have context of time around uh female competitors and uh who are testing all these different protocols and regimens right alongside the men so i i don't want them to get the impression that you haven't had a lot of direct experience both coaching and interacting with absolutely and you know my wife is a world champion figure champion and brazilian champion south american champion so um you know i

live with somebody that uh that trains as well so we talked a little bit about uh gender differences or lack of of differences in terms of training protocol. Here's a question from, I really prefer personal names, but this is from a Facebook page, I guess. Perfect Body Quest. Okay, fine. That tells you. But in any case, the question is, please ask him about the differences in training and nutrition for enhanced versus natural lifters. And we can define some terms here. And I'd like to actually clarify something because it's just a personal note. And so the first is enhanced.

It can go by a number of different terms. Could be using gear. Could be using anabolics. Could be using PEDs. There are many different ways to phrase it. But also, this is just something that drives me nuts, so I'm going to point it out for people. If you look at my Wikipedia page right now, there is, at least there has been a line that says something along the lines of, Tim Ferriss has admitted to using, uh, like sustenon

250 HGH, et cetera, after surgery. And that drives me nuts because it's, it's what they would call on Wikipedia, weasel word. I wrote an entire chapter in my second book about the sort of benefits and risks of, uh, a very methodical anabolic use say after reconstructive surgery, which I used after my shoulder was reconstructed. So that's something I just want to clear the air on. I didn't admit it. It makes it sound very shifty wrote an entire chapter on it, folks. So, uh, so that all having been said, uh, what are your thoughts on training and nutrition differences for enhanced

versus natural lifters? Well, the thing with anabolics and I mean, how they work is they enhance your body's ability to recover from the stress. At some point, your body is not going to be able to recover from the amount of stress you're putting on it. And then you're going to reach a plateau um so athletes use uh mainly anabolic steroids which are derivatives of testosterone male hormone and um also to some degree growth hormone um to recover and repair from the workouts. So if somebody is using enhancement or anabolic steroids, let's call it enhancement for argument's sake, if someone is using enhancement, they're going to be able to recover more efficiently than somebody that's not, and they're going to be able to take're going to take things to a higher plateau

um before again they plateau you know um so if you're not using anabolics you're not going to be able to train like a lot of the guys you read about in the magazines they might be training five or six days a week and two hours a day and it's not something i recommend but you know some guys do some professionals do train that much um if you try to do that uh without enhancing your hormone level um you know you're going to get over trained very quickly and you're not going to get the results you're looking for so i mean whether you're using anabolics or not the process is this you go in the gym and you put stress on the muscles and then they have to recover if after they've recovered there was sufficient stress then they overcompensate so you need to allow

enough time for that to happen so i use this analogy at seminars sometimes, very simple analogy, but it gets the point across. If I was to take a piece of sandpaper and rub it across the palm of my hand until it's kind of bleeding a bit and damaged, if I was to leave that for a few days, it would heal up and the skin would be marginally stronger and thicker than it was before because it wants to protect itself from that stress um and that's basically you know what happens with muscle growth so let's say we take that situation again i get the sandpaper rub it

across the palm of my hands it's all red and bloody and you know i leave it for a day or two it's not quite healed yet. It's still a bit red. And I go and do it again. We're not getting anywhere, right? We've just got bloody hands. So it's the same thing with training in the gym. You've got to apply stress and then you've got to recover.

If you're using steroids, you'll be able to recover more quickly and train more frequently. So it's all about the recovery. Whether you're using using or not, you have to be aware of recovery. Um, so it's, it's going to enhance your, uh, your ability to recover from that stress and you're going to be able to go further than if you didn't use it. That's, you know, very basically how they work. And, and I should also say, obviously I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, but there are, uh, there are potential risks associated with use and abuse of any of these things for people listening. And if you're two months into your training protocol or a year or whatever and you're not a professional, there are very few circumstances in which I would recommend certainly any cavalier use but medically supervised use of a lot of these compounds.

It's not something to be taken lightly as a decision, but it is a reality of almost every competitive sport that has endurance, power output, oxygen carrying capacity as primary determinants of placement and whether it's cyclists or sprinters or otherwise uh even in something like the biathlon people are would potentially use something like beta blockers to calm their nerves so they can take more effective shots after elevating their heart rate so we got a couple of things in england at least when i was a kid they used to call sports i don't know why they're called sports, but you've got one called darts where the guys throw the darts in the board, right? And the other one, snooker, which is a bit like pool. And, you know, even these guys, they're using beta blockers

and drinking beer to help calm their nerves and enhance their game. You know, if it's competitive, people are going to do whatever they can to get the edge. And I don't recommend them to anybody. I don't tell people what they should do. I just kind of be frank about my experiences and leave it to other people. But to be honest, if I was not a competitive bodybuilder i wouldn't uh i don't see the point in using steroids and perhaps opening yourself up to potential uh health risks which which you know which are there over the long period and then you have the other subject of um

you know using it therapeutically for uh older guys um that their testosterone levels declining and this causes age-related illnesses and diseases uh which can be um stemmed by putting your testosterone back to normal hormone replacement so to speak or recovering from surgery and other applications so you know they they have uses uh outside of the sports yeah yeah there are definitely legitimate applications even in wasting diseases uh where you have uh say decreased t-cell count uh so a lot of there are some hiv positive patients who will use oxandrolone and things of that type. So for folks interested, I'd suggest educating yourself. And it's a fascinating subject. There's some documentaries out there. I think it's Bigger, Faster, Stronger, which was done by Chris Bell, features his brother Mark Bell, who has become a friend. Fascinating documentary and people can do more homework on their own. So the next question is from Mohamed Samar Gulzar. At the peak of your career, were there any days you felt stuck

when things weren't moving? What did you do then? Well, you know, when you get to the level of um top competitive level mr olympia and so on um uh the more developed you get and higher up you get the the actual changes and the gains are very very small you know if uh if you put a you know three or four pounds of muscle on over the year when you're a professional level it'd be considered a pretty good gain. So things really do slow down and you're not going to get the kind of progress you got when you first started out. So it's more of a, you kind of cycle the training. You train hard for five or six weeks and then you back down a little bit. You train lighter and then you go up again.

So you're looking for small gains over the course of a year at that point. So you're not getting the feedback you used to get where, you know, you go in the gym and wow, look, look, the progress I made since last month or something. It's more or less like maintaining it and trying to improve on certain areas and things like that. So Dorian, one question that I would love to ask that's maybe related is if you look back at the period of time between the end of your competitive career and now, what have been one of your darkest periods or a dark period for you and how did you find your way out of it? What were the things that helped? Uh, the darkest period would probably be kind of the couple of years, the first couple of years after I, uh, retired. Um,

you know, there was, uh, I was, uh, I didn't even know what was going on. I was waking up at night, I couldn't sleep, feeling nervous. And I was diagnosed with clinical depression. You know, I'd just been forced retired from this thing I've been doing for so long. And a lot of things kind of came to the surface that maybe because you've got such tunnel vision while you're doing it, I realized there was problems in my marriage that maybe I hadn't really looked at because, you know, you're just in this tunnel and keep going and keep going. So all these kind of things, you may be swept under the carpet, to speak they all you know they all start popping out um so you know I had been retired from this thing uh that I was doing which is you know can be quite traumatic for people retiring from their

profession in any case um my marriage was breaking up uh somebody very close to me passed away so all these things like you know perfect storm of of stress all at the same time for me to to deal with and you know the one thing that kind of got me through it was going to the gym although I didn't have that goal of training for a Mr. Olympia. Just to go to the gym and train was like a form of meditation for me where I would forget about the outside world and problems and so on. So even now, I just love to train. I'm not doing weight training as I used to now, but whether I'm riding my bike or swimming or doing yoga

or functional training, whatever it is, I really love to exercise. And I think that helped me get through that period. And it took quite a few years before I started balancing out. And maybe now it's 20 years since I was competing. And I feel like I'm in a, you know, really good place now, but that's a lot of time, man. 20 years. What helped you to find meaning, uh, in the sense that, I mean, was there just a day when you surprised yourself and you're like, Oh, the clouds are not hanging over my head. Or did you

sit down and journal or have a, some type of friend or mentor who helped you to find, uh, a direction or a purpose after being a competitor, competitor? I think, uh, I think a lot of people kind of, you know, and, um, a lot of reading and stuff I did, it's kind of, you kind of got to figure it out for yourself. And, uh, at one point, uh, you know, I say,

Hey, I've been doing this thing for 12, 15 years and I haven't been able to do this and do that. So let me, you know, go out and party and be crazy and go to nightclubs and let me travel and go here and go on safari and things that I couldn't do before. So I started to realize instead of like looking at what you lost,

look at what you gained. Right. You know, I couldn't imagine living that lifestyle that I was living as a professional bodybuilder. Now, you know, it's, it's, it's just, you know, uh, be way too restrictive now. I couldn't do it, you know? Um, so yeah, it took me some time to find a balance but uh the benefits are i feel much more a free person now not you know i don't have to eat six times a day i don't have to you know be at the gym at this time or yeah you know i maintain some discipline on you know because that's my nature but then i've had to learn to sometimes

not have discipline you know that makes to get balance no it does make sense and you mentioned books i'd love to uh i love to read i mean that's uh i always love to read and i think that was a huge advantage for me when i did bodybuilding I just consumed books on training and nutrition and kind of worked it all out for myself. And that was half of the fun of it. You know, now guys have got nutritionists and trainers and managers and God knows what else. For me, the whole, this bodybuilding was an individual pursuit, an individual test of character and everything.

It wasn't a team, team sport, you know, are there any particular books that you've reread, uh, or gifted to other people? Well, I'm reading a lot of stuff at the moment. I've read quite a lot of books from, from one guy, uh, um, on a spiritual level, which has helped helped me so i'll just say his name his name is eric pepin that's p p i m uh if you guys want to check him out uh i think he's a great uh spiritual teacher and techniques and meditation and things like that i find

interesting at the moment so is there a book of his that you would suggest people start with um the one to start with would probably be handbook of the navigator or meditation into eternity that'd probably be the best one either of those two the meditation book is more on you know teach you um and eric pepin is very much like uh ar or, you know, Bruce Lee. I call him Bruce Lee of spirituality because it's kind of like spirituality slash science. And now science and spirituality are now pretty much coming together to be the same thing with, you know, quantum physics and stuff like that. So I find this stuff very logical. So anyway, if people are interested in the spiritual side of life, I would recommend going and reading some of his stuff.

So this is going to seem like a left turn, but I don't think it totally is. So you mentioned to our mutual friend Brian once, and I'm simplifying here, but freedom is not giving a fuck. And I, maybe I'm misquoting you, but I would love to hear you elaborate on that. And maybe you can give context as well. Yeah. I was, I think I was talking to myself at first, you know, because, um, you know, there's still that thing. You're Mr. Olympia, right? Six times Mr. Olympia, legend in the sport.

So I guess you feel like you have to maintain some kind of image or whatever it is, you know? And I thought, you know, am I doing this now? Am I trying to maintain some kind of, you know, am I doing this now? Am I trying to maintain some kind of, you know, am I doing this training, maintaining this level of physique for myself, or am I doing it for, you know, for other people or other outside forces? So I think it was a question for myself at first. Like, do you, are you going to live your life or make decisions or in any way be controlled

by the opinions of other people or what you perceive to be the other opinions of other people, which might not even be their opinion anyway. Uh, in any case, in the end, uh, you got to live your life the way um that you think you should live it at

that time and not uh be controlled and we all are you know we're controlled all the time from the day we're born we're controlled by by our parents opinion by the school's opinion by the government's opinion by the media's opinion and so on. And I want to be free of that. So basically, the greater is suspect, I'm going to do what I need to do, taking care not to hurt anyone else. And that's it. I don't really give a fuck what anyone else thinks about that. And I've heard you also say that, and there are a few different metaphors,

but that life is like a movie and i i enjoyed hearing you talk about that i don't know if you could maybe elaborate on that as well because it seems like it's pretty closely related you know we can go into quantum physics and stuff uh on this but i mean what quantum physicists have discovered is that the reality we live in is not what we think it is and it's made of uh computer code and it's kind of our thoughts interact with this code so therefore your thoughts can help create your reality. So, you know, you're on the Truman Show, man. What do you want it to be? You know, what do you want to do? What do you want to play in this movie?

You know, create that story with your mind, you know, and take steps to make it make it happen and it can happen. So that's what I mean by it being a movie or a video game or something like that, you know, being the director in your own movie, uh, you're in a holographic movie, man, check it out. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of other subject matter that we could discuss that would definitely veer into that territory very quickly. At some point, we could talk about that. We just whet people's appetite for next time. and, uh, psychedelic and research in my name. And you'll, you'll see a number of things pop up, but the, uh, one of the last questions, just, just one or two more is if you had a gigantic billboard and you could get a message out to millions of people, what might you put on that billboard? Does anything come to mind? We are one. We are one. We are one. We are we are one well i think that's it we're all part of one thing man

we're all connected just just like cells in a human body they're all separate cells but they make up the body so they're part of one thing right we are one we are i think i think that's a good place to wrap up dorian i i thank you so much for your time and it's been fun so you know maybe we'll be back again people want me back again they want to ask more stuff let me know where it is and we'll we'll get get chatting you know i will let you know and i'm sure plenty of questions uh where can people best find you online say hello see what you're up to learn more about the certification we mentioned yeah there's well there's various places instagram is the dorian yates facebook we've got dy nutrition a dy nutrition website and dy hit website uh so if you search dorian yates nutrition

dorian yates high intensity training you know in various ways you can get in touch with me well once again this has been I feel like a conversation 20 plus years in the making so I'm really thrilled to be able to connect via and I didn't remember that phone call

it was a long time ago you've had a lot of phone calls but the point being that you at the time were I don't remember that phone call we did 20 years ago. It was a long time ago. You've had a lot of phone calls. But the point being that you at the time were the equivalent of, say, reaching out to Bruce Lee for me. And you were very gracious in that phone call. And that stuck with me. It really stuck with me that you made the time. Even though it was a polite decline, you were very, very gracious in seeds man look where that will happen to the seed now here we are so uh so i want to number one thank you for the time and for everybody listening you can find

links to everything we've talked about all the books the certifications the websites where you can learn more about dorian his instagram in the show notes for this episode. You can find the show notes for this episode and every other episode at tim.blog forward slash podcast, or just search Tim Ferriss show and show notes, and it'll pop right up. And that is all. So everyone listening, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did. And until next time, keep experimenting, be safe and question your assumptions. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short

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