The Tim Ferriss Show - #91: Charles Poliquin on Strength Training, Shredding Body Fat, and Increasing Testosterone and Sex Drive

Episode Date: July 21, 2015

Charles Poliquin (@strengthsensei) is one of the best known strength coaches in the world. He has trained elite athletes from nearly 20 different sports, including Olympic gold medalists, NFL All-Pro’s, NHL All-Stars and Stanley Cup champions, and IFBB bodybuilding champions. His clients include long-jump gold medalist Dwight Phillips, NHL MVP Chris Pronger, and MLB batting champion Edgar Martinez, among many others. Poliquin is currently teaching advanced hypertrophy, nutrition, and strength seminars alongside one of my favorite athletes, Olympic weightlifting icon and medalist Dimitry Klokov. Poliquin has authored more than 600 articles on strength training, and his work has been translated into 12 different languages. He has written 8 books, including his latest, "Arm Size and Strength: The Ultimate Guide." Find much more about Poliquin and his latest at strengthsensei.com. In this episode we cover every strength trainng and fat loss topic you've ever thought about, including... Thoughts on hormone replacement therapy (HRT) Exploring the use of Deca-Durabolin to support joint repair Thoughts on the pre-workout warmup Most common post-workout mistakes Commonly neglected ways to decrease body fat Thoughts on achieving maximal strength on a plant-based diet And much, much more Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is sponsored by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at https://www.AthleticGreens.com/Tim This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade: http://www.99designs.com/tim. Give it a test run. Enjoy!***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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Hello, ladies and germs, and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, whether they are chess prodigies, hedge fund managers, professional athletes, musicians, actors, politicians, you name it. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been on the show. We have people like Josh Waitzkin, who's been on the show, the inspiration for searching for Bobby Fisher. But this time we have one of your favorites. Categorically, you guys love these episodes and we have a strength coach, a hypertrophy coach, and a nutrition coach all in one. Charles Poliquin is his name. Charles Poliquin is one of the best known strength coaches in the world. He has trained elite athletes from nearly 20 different sports, including Olympic gold medalists, NFL All-Pros, NHL All-Stars and Stanley Cup champions, and IFBB bodybuilding champions. His clients include all sorts of folks, but in that list you would find long-jump gold medalist Dwight Phillips, NHL MVP Chris Pronger, and MLB, that's Major League Baseball

batting champion Edgar Martinez, among many others. Charles is currently teaching advanced hypertrophy nutrition and strength seminars alongside one of my favorite athletes, Olympic weightlifting icon and medalist Dmitry Klokov. You have to look this guy up. And there is a photo of Charles, who's now over 50 years old training with Dimitri. And it looks like Charles arms might be bigger. Amazingly, this guy is a specimen, both of them. In any case, Poliquin has authored more than 600 articles on strength training. He is prolific and his work has been translated into 12 different languages. He has also written eight books and his latest work is arm size and

strength, the ultimate guide. And he certainly walks the talk with that one. You have to see it to believe it. And I'll certainly put some photos and the show notes and links and everything at four hour workweek.com forward slash podcast. So you can find links to everything that, that includes our conversation on blood testing, neurotransmitter optimization, hormone replacement therapy, the good, the bad, and the ugly of that. What to do with loose skin or stretch marks. We covered just about everything. His ideal breakfast. And he is an amusing fellow. So if you've never thought of a penis skin on your abs, well, he will give you some imagery

that will help you remember all sorts of useful tidbits that among many others, you can find a lot more on Charles and his latest at strength sensei.com. But in the meantime, this conversation covers a lot. I had a blast. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. And here is Charles Poliquin. Charles, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tim. I really appreciate you asking me to be on your podcast.

I'm excited to dig into all sorts of good stuff. You and I have spent some time together and I still remember, I'm not sure if it's post-traumatic stress disorder, but the ART that you did on my shoulder at one of your seminars where I was held down. I felt like it was a scene out of Oz or something. But you have a very wide- expertise. And that goes all the way from ART, active release technique, and doing this manual therapy to the training, the nutrition, the supplementation. When someone asks you, what do you do? What is your answer? I simply say I'm a strength coach, but the tools I use, I guess, are a bit more wary than some of my colleagues. And how did you first become fascinated by strength?

And also closely related to that, is English your first language? Not at all. It's French. I didn't speak English actually until I was 17. And then I actually learned English because I wanted to be really good at strength training. So the story behind that is that, you know, as a kid, I remember looking at Tarzan comics or watching Captain America cartoons. And I always wanted a big physique. I thought I was like the ultimate hero.

But what happened is that when I was about 14, you know, I'm a recovering Catholic, so I had to go to Catholic church every Sunday. And to be frank, I'm a recovering Catholic, so I had to go to Catholic church every Sunday. And to be frank, I hated it. And I only went there to perv on this girl called Lucy Lemieux. It was very hot. And then one day she didn't show up. So the next day on Monday, I said, hey, Lucy, weren't at church yesterday? She goes, no, I'm 14 now.

My parents say you can decide whether you go or not. So I said, if it's good enough for her it's good enough for me so what happened is i um uh there was a university library the university of ottawa was right beside the church so i said instead of wasting my time listening to what i thought was bullshit i'm going to go to the university library and i was on the magazine section of periodicals and i saw a french French magazine, a periodical from Belgium called Kinesiology. And they talked about arthritis in the knee. And so I read it. It was in French, so I could understand.

And I didn't speak English at the time. So then it didn't take a long time to go through anything in French that was about strength training. So then I said, okay, I've got to learn English. And I distinctly remember having to look up what bicep peak meant, like I said. So I would use the English dictionary. I said, bicep peak. And then I remember peak as in peak of a mountain. I go, okay, it's a figure of style, blah, blah, blah.

And then so I learned everything in english uh rather quickly because i had passion and then i realized that all the best stuff was in german so i decided to learn german and that's how i started i always always wanted to be ahead of the game so i always figured out who's the best teachers and then learn from them and i remember was 21. I would save my money up and I went to Germany to meet Rolf Faser, who I took the German volume training from. And I would see all the experts. And I went to Finland to meet Paavo Komi and Dietmar Schmidt-Bleicher. So whoever was the best at the time, I went to learn from them. So that's how I started, actually. And you have just an astonishing memory, a factual recall ability. Is that something that your parents also had?

My father spoke 14 languages, so I guess he did have a great memory. I think that I basically taught myself how to read. My parents realized I myself how to read. My parents realized I knew how to read before I went to school. So the way I figured it out is that, you know, we had a lot of – I was the fifth out of eight boys. So there was a lot of books around, a lot of comic books in French. And there would be like these word illustrated dictionary books. Right.

So let's say I saw firetruck, you know, in French, and I said, okay, the code for firetruck is this. And then after that, I started to read a comic strip called Asterix. Oh, great, great comic strip. So my father came back from Paris and he told my mom, yeah, he's pretending he knows how to read. And my mom said, no, he knows how to read. He goes, that's impossible.

He has a good memory. His brothers read to him, and he just recites like a parakeet. And she goes, no. He goes, I have the ultimate test. So the French edition always came out six months before the Canadian edition. And since my father knew that all his boys like asterisks, he would always buy the latest asterisks. So he pulled it out. He says, read this. And this and i read it he was astonished i could read it and my mom said i told you he

taught himself how to read so uh apparently my oldest brother did the same thing so it's uh i just wanted to learn i was bored to death so i would pick up reading that's that's incredible i did your brothers also have an interest in strength training or were you the odd one of the group? My brothers' interests are quite different than mine. I'm the odd one in the family. ask a question, the wording of which might be a little weird, but I think you're known for quite a few different things. What do your best friends think you're world-class at that perhaps the rest of the world doesn't know? Probably people say that I'm the best friend to have, the worst enemy to have. So they'll say that I'll jump in front of a bullet for them. But before i jump in front of the bullet i'd rather kill a guy myself but uh people say that um the most the compliment i appreciate the most is when people say to me i wish i had a father like you so when they see me in track with my daughter and the way she behaves and the way she learns and they said, and I'm really well known to teach people

how to have confidence. That's what they say. I'm a world-class dad. So, for example, I had a friend of mine. She's a single mother. Her kid's dad was absent. So she left him with me for the day. And when she came back, the kid knew how to swim

and knew how to ride a bicycle without training wheels. And she goes, you did that the whole day? I said i said well teaching how to swim without fear takes five minutes she goes are you serious and i told him how i teach it and she goes wow that's very simple so uh i guess i'm world class at solving problems uh and people love my cooking anybody that's been to my house but you know i cook man food food. For example, I make a chili with yak, buffalo, an elk, an ostrich. People have six

or seven servings. They feel like a cage. I like to cook. I think that's a great way to be creative. I guess being creative is one of my biggest assets. I love to take a recipe and then improve it. I'm not one to stick to rules so much.

What is your... So your chili sounds like the Noah's Ark chili. It's got a bit of every animal imaginable. So what are the ingredients in the chili what's the key to making good chili i think the key to making good chili is actually blending the meats for example ostriches they're really high iron content but you might as well chew on a illico barbell plate when you eat the ostrich right it's it's so and then i take i use something with a higher fat content uh like the yak, and then that kind of offsets it.

And I used to use elk, but elk, for a lot of people, tends to be too gamey, right? Yeah. But when you blend it with buffalo, it kind of equals it out. And I've played with ratios over the years, but I think I've got the recipe down pat. But the secret is the yak. I think the yak makes a huge difference on the on the palatability of the meal got it and is that that's uh partially thanks to the fat content yeah and also because you know all the animals i pick tend to have um high omega-3 fat in them because of what they eat

i mean the best meat to eat in the world is YPT, which is a type of deer that lives in northeastern Canada. And you can only shoot it from an helicopter because there's no roads where the YPT lives. And that meat is chased by wolves all day. So besides the fact that it eats grass taller than the animal itself, which is really high in omega-3, the animal is chased multiple times a day by wolf packs, which makes the animal make glycogen, which makes the meat fatty and sweet at the same time.

You know, it's almost like a fudge in the meat. But the problem is you're not allowed to import it into the U.S., so I only make it when I go see my folks in Canada. Got it. Yeah, you have to do, pretty high barrier to entry if it requires a helicopter ride and sniping skills from the air. Basically. So it, you know, when I go to Montreal, I don't know where to buy it. And there's a place where my sister lives in Gatineau where they have it in stock year round. Uh,

but it is the best meat. If you ever come and see me or in Montreal area, I'll take you to eat that meat. Oh, I'd love to, love to do that. I've never been to Montreal. They have very good tango there as well from what I hear. But, um, the, um, the next, the next question is kind of a sidestep, but you, you have these, these little nuggets. And I remember one question that I get asked a lot, you had answers to, which was how to get rid of stretch marks. So what happens quite often is people will follow any given diet or maybe one of the diets in the 4-Hour Body or whatever, and they'll lose a lot of weight and then they'll have this loose skin or stretch marks to contend with. How do you recommend people mitigate or get rid of stretch marks or loose skin? What are your thoughts on that?

I mean, if you're the type of guy that's lost so much weight that you can actually windsurf with your scrotum, then here's the solution. There's an herb called gachicola. And that herb will, and I learned this from Mauro Di di pasquale who's one of my early mentors will get rid of what we call unnecessary scar tissue or unnecessary connective tissue the truth of the matter though is that you will see zero progress uh for the loose skin uh for six months so people say what it's not worth it but i tell people just keep doing it for six months and then it's almost like overnight there seems to be a saturation

point where then the body gets the message to cell signaling and then in a matter of days i've had for example people who look like they have 15 body body fat, and they're actually 6% body fat when you measure them on a DEXA scan. And then when they do this supplement for an extended period of time, which is two tablets three times a day, then overnight they tighten up. This is not an exaggeration. Everybody who's tried it said, said yeah it's exactly what it is i mean i had a one of my best students who was a former pro bodybuilder he had a client come in

and he weighed 480 pounds and he decided to lose weight because he would you know select his clothes the night before and he realized his pants covered the whole bed so so he went to this gym and after a year and a half he was down to 200 pounds so he had lost 280 pounds but i mean there's enough loose skin to bury five cadavers inside of it so we um i told my friend just give him that and a year later i met that guy he was so thankful for that trick because he finally got rid of the loose skin. So gotchicola is the herb you want to use for that. Got it. G-O-T-U-K-O-L-A. Is that how you say it?

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's two separate words. Yes. And are you using anything topically as well or is it all consumed, all consumable? There are some compounding pharmacists that will make you a gotchicola bioabsorbable cream. That works a lot faster, I would say. If you could find a pounding pharmacist that will do that,

and it's a biologically active form, you could get the same results in about two to three months. In Canada in the early 80s, you could actually buy it as a prescription. Got it. But it wasn't popular. That's what Maro used to recommend. And then when the cream fell out of the marketplace, the best alternative was to use the oral. I see.

You seem to find, because you have so many contacts and you work with so many coaches, not only coaches but also doctors in different countries, I'm constantly astonished by the, I wouldn't say shortcuts, but just very elegant approaches that you can find to all of these different problems. What are things that you believe that most other people think are crazy? I think that, well, now, okay, We all know about the Chinese five elements, correct? Right. Maybe you could give an overview for folks who aren't familiar. Okay. So in Chinese medicine, they believe there's five elements that regulate health, fire, water, earth, metal, and water. So the point is that in Chinese medicine,

they'll describe a condition as, let's say, excessive fire or not enough fire or fire deficiency or water excess. And this was very poetic, but now science has backed up what it means. So in Chinese medicine, for example, osteoporosis and adrenal fatigue are the same thing. Well, in Western medicine, it's not. So years ago, I had observed that the training of athletes has to be individualized. So for example, you know, when you talk, let's say about squat, two of my favorite people on earth are Ed C and john brose and

they know how to get a big squat but if you look at the way they get you to have a big squat it's diametrically opposed but the key is not to say well one is better than the other what the key is is what is best for you and i studied the chinese medicine approach and what i've figured out is that it's actually a neurotransmitter dominance, if you want to explain it into the modern world. So some athletes make a lot of dopamine. They need a lot of variation in their workouts. They need to go balls to walls every workout, but they need variation.

If they don't have variation every workout, they don't make progress. While some people are what I call earth-type, which don't have variation every workout, they don't make progress. While some people are what I call earth type, which don't have any dominance, and then they're more like Thomas the Tank Engine. It's slow progress. All the training methods is based on patience. They never miss a lift, you know, and that method works for them. And in bodybuilding, you've seen that. You've seen it in every sport even

look at wrestling of course three girls are on national team and one is dopamine dominant and she's like a mongoose on pcp when she fights you know she's really hard to predict what she does and And then you have, you know, acetylcholine dominant one where she has a style that confuses people. And then I have a hearth type wrestler who's number one in the world right now. And she's very patient when she fights. And, you know, she'll arm block you. And then she waits, she waits, she waits. And she tires you out.

And she's not dominant in any neurotransmitters, which would make her earth type, you know? So now people, when I start to talk about the elements, people say, oh, he's a granola head, bullshitter, blah, blah, blah. And then now my most popular course is actually advanced program design. And if you look at the reviews on my website, people say that's the fastest way to individualize the training process. I'm really big on individualization. I think that people want a cookie-cutter approach,

and they don't like the fact that when I answer a question, you know, if you ask me a question, what's the best way to screw a screw? I'll say a screwdriver, and they'll say, why didn't you say a saw? Well, I don't have time to explain to you that a screwdriver is the best tool. So I've been considered rigid in my um approach but i'm not i've done a lot of trial and error but if you're going to ask me for a solution i'll tell you the quickest way to get there i don't i don't have time to educate everybody you know so and with the neurotransmitter dominance, how do you determine or how does one determine which category they fall into? Actually, I mean, there has been a lot of efforts clinically to do, let's say, saliva work or urine work.

And even the labs who've done the research says it's kind of useless. Okay. So if you look at Catherine Wilner, who has won the crown of the Nobel prize for functional medicine, she is a big advocate of the Braverman test, which you could download for free. You just Google Eric Braverman, the Braverman test. And it's a multiple question answer type of format of format and i found she found and so did

bill bellica who's another europe transmitter expert to find it to be the actually the most accurate uh test but you can only do it once in your life and because if you redo the questionnaire you know the questions and then you'll there'll be an internal bias to the answer but if you answer truthfully um and then what you find is that this true complete dominance is rather rare but you will find that you say more firewood or what i call dopamine is still choline dependent so you need both and there's always a limiting factor when you do the test so you could have let's say be johnny dopamine but you lack gaba so your biggest limiting factor is you can't have what we call centered calmness you know which is what the gaba is the new transmitter for so or it could be dopamine dominant like uber dopamine boy but what happens is that you have no serotonin so you don't have any fun in your life

and the fact that you don't have any fun is actually a limiting factor to your progress. So I think, you know, they say know yourself. Yeah, that's the first thing you should do. So when I teach the class, I make all my students do the test. And then for three days, I explain how to individualize depending on what physical quality you want. So let's say if you want to get big and you're dopamine dependent, that's how you should do it.

And then I give the in-betweens. And then the most common comment is now the progress I achieve with my students or my clients is much faster. And, you know, for years I remember remember when I had my facility in Phoenix, I would have, let's say, 10 hockey players training at the same time, and the guys would look at each other's program, and they thought maybe I had some favorites. I did.

Everybody had their best program for them, you know. Right. So I think that's one of the keys to success. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get there, but you've got to find what's the best way for you. I mean, if you listen, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just going to say, I think you also touched on something that's very important,

which is the testing effect. So in so many different areas of life, whether it's athletics, academics, even very smart people make the mistake of looking at someone who say, or a cohort of people who take the same test multiple times. And they assume that some type of intervention, whether it's a supplement or a training program is improving their performance, but it's like, no, you have to, you have to at least ask the question, what if they're only getting better at the test, right? Yes.

And I think that probably has a lot of implications for diagnosis with athletes as well. I don't know, but... I mean, yourself, you're the epitome of self-testing, right? Yeah. So, I mean, that's one of your keys to success. You're willing to be the lab rat for all of us, right? So the advantage with me is I've had a lot of lab rats who wanted to go to the Olympics,

and I tried different things. But, you know, one of the critiques I often get is you're not scientific or you don't like science. Well, here's my answer to these detractors. factors. Clinical experience outbeats research studies. I'll give you an example. In February 2008, in the Journal of Applied Strength and Conditioning, there was a paper, Cluster Training, a Novel Approach to Strength Training or the Development of Rel relative strength. Okay, that's February 2008. I learned how to do cluster training in 1975. I was 14 years old. So I used cluster training with all the sports where I needed relative strength.

I started to be a strength coach in 78. So if you look at it, the difference between 78 and 2008 is very big, quite a few Olympics in between, right? Do you agree? So if you look at that, if I waited for research to do the right type of training that produced Olympic medalists, I would have wasted about a few dozen Olympics, right? So the thing is that if you include winter and summer. So the point is that when the article came out, I said, that's interesting. It's novel, 2008.

So I asked my coach, where did you learn about clustrid training? He says, I learned it in 68 in Paris. And I said, okay, where do you think it came from? And we did some background research, and we think it was first developed by a Bulgarian coach in 1948. Okay, so then we have about 60 years of between when the clinician developed the method and when the research was actually done, right? So, for example, I used to early on have been recommending high doses of fish oil, 30 to 45 grams. And then the biggest amount of research, fish oil use and research at the time was seven grams with med school students. And then I convinced Mark Houston,

who's an MD, to use high dosages. And then he says, wow, it's really good for dyslipidemia, high blood pressure, cardiovascular risk. And it doubled my business. I said, why did it double your business, Mark? Well, he goes, my patient's losing fat and now people are coming in for fat loss and not for treating vascular disorders. And seven years after I convinced him, there was a Kenyan research paper that came out that said to treat obesity, the best dose official was 60 grams. Wow.

And Mark sent me an email and the title was clinicians always ahead of the curve and he says i don't know if you read the study and he showed it to me and then the interesting thing was is that why did i come up with 30 to 45 grams of fish oil okay i did not have peer-reviewed studies but the human genome evolved most dramatically once we got our omega-3s to 300 to 400 grams per week you know we used to eat animal brains and we used to suck on femurs of analogs and stuff like that and when the human start to ingest a lot of omega-3s particularly dha our brains develop very fast we were able to develop tools and so on so a lot of the stuff i do may not be peer-reviewed based but in essence basic science is basic science you know and then if you

if your principles are sound then and to be frank i don't really give a shit about the detractors because you know uh research always backed me up but sometimes 20, 40 years after I'd done it. So clinical experience, you can't beat that. Yeah, and I think it's important also for people to realize that there's a value and a place for peer-reviewed placebo-controlled studies, but they're also very slow. They require funding. There are a lot of regulations in different areas related to those types of studies. And like you said, science is not a study. Scientific thinking is scientific thinking, right? I mean, you're forming a hypothesis.

You're testing that hypothesis, trying to disprove it, looking at alternative explanations for the outcome, and kind of rinsing and repeating. So I think that there's a really good book on this called Bad Science by Ben Goldacre that I think everybody should be required to read just so they can parse kind of the sensationalist bullshit that they see in, say, the newspaper from what the real science actually says. Quick question on the fish oil. Just on that, furthermore, I think it should be required reading to have a Facebook account because this way you would stop

making those dumb comments if you read that book. Because I agree 100% with you. The other thing too is that we don't know if one of the subjects did ecstasy on the weekend and stayed up you know there's a lot of shit we can't control so yes you do have to have a scientific basis to what you do and i'm in full agreement yeah well what's also kind of frustrating for me is that people give so much credence to say long longitudinal observational studies that are depending on people self-reporting when they can remember or misremember whatever they write down but they discount the sort of small sample size experimental studies that for instance you've

been doing with athletes for decades uh it's very very frustrating frustrating. But the quick question on the fish oil is, is there any risk of any type of intestinal bleeding or anything like that with extremely high, what most people would consider high dosages of fish oil? I've never seen it, but when I use fish oil in high dosages, I never use it more than six months. The reason why I found that I don't need to go longer than six months is in six months, you should have attained your body composition goal. But if you do free fatty acid profiles on a regular basis, you find that after six months, everything is pretty well set. And then you only need a maintenance.

And if the person eats a lot of wild meat, a lot of sea products, I give them no fish oil. So for example, myself, from May to October, I don't take any fish oil because I'm back home. I eat the wild meat. I like to eat the fish, blah, blah, blah. But of course, if I go to England where the concept of a steak is more like a hockey puck. You won't have a good omega-3 supply. But even, you know, I get regular blood work, and I found that for me at age 54 when I'm on a fish oil program, it's two grams a day, which is nothing, right?

But, you know, every single gene in a human genome as a receptor site for omega-3s so Marley Pasquale taught me this in 94 he says if you look at any medical scientific database it is impossible not to find a study where omega-3s LEDs symptoms of all disease known to man. And I said, that's bullshit. So he had his own database. He had 8 million scientific references. He says, punch in whatever you want. So I would punch preeclampsia.

I tried to come up with anything like ADD, ADHD, trisomic children, whatever. And then in every single ailment I punched in with the keyword omega-3, I found at least one study. But I redid the test two years ago, and the minimum amount of studies I found was the beneficial outcome with omega-3 therapy was 14. For any disease I could punch in. So, you know, D3, omega-3, and thyroid are necessary for every gene in the human genome. That's what we know so far. There's probably more.

But as far as intestinal bleeding, clinically I've used very high dosages, like 60 grams. I've never seen it, but maybe it's the, whoever you work with. I tend to work with healthier than average population. And, but then again, you know, according to Dr. Rakowski, only two to 3% of Americans would be considered healthy. Oh God. Yeah. The net, the speaking of,, you mentioned Mauro Di Pasquale. So he, I think, introduced me first to what he was calling the anabolic diet when I was in high school, which if I'm remembering correctly, it was on some level a cyclical ketogenic diet. I don't think I'm butchering that. No. diet. I don't think I'm butchering that, but I was also introduced to your writing through Muscle Media 2000, way back in the early days. What have you changed your mind about over time? What are things that you've most changed your mind about over the last decade or two?

The most important thing that I've learned about nutrition is you need to deserve your carbs. So if you look at the world average carbohydrate intake, it should be about 40%. That would be healthy carbohydrate. But it's the average. It's not the individual. So if you're dealing with an Inuit from Tuktuk Yaktuk in the Kenyan North,

healthy carbohydrate intake for him is probably 2% because he eats whale blubber, narvel, seal, and so on. So I had a guy who played in the NHL, he was fat, and I said, you know, you're a native Inuit. Why don't you eat like a native Inuit when you go back home? And he went, and he went from something like a 21% body fat to a 6% body fat, eating 70% fat and 30% protein and zero carbohydrates, right? So I find that you have to figure out what's your set point for carbohydrates.

But most people eat too many carbohydrates or actually drink too many carbohydrates. And then they eat carbohydrates, but they eat the wrong type. People perceive me as a carbohydrate Nazi. I'm not, you know, or anti-carbohydrate Nazi. The thing is that I've got some athletes who do best on 70% carbs, 20% protein, 10% fat. But they deserve their carbohydrates. They've got a great pancreas. They're insulin sensitive.

They've got a lot of muscle mass. But some athletes, you know, they are allowed 10 licks of a dry prune every six months. That's all they deserve and that's all they'll get. And after six months, they're actually allowed to look at calendar pictures of cakes, you know, once a week. But I think that the most important thing I learned from Mauro is that I remember asking Mauro this question. He's one of the best people I've ever had the chance and the honor to talk to. And he told me, he says, in nutrition, this is what we call the 70% rule. And I find that to be true in training. 70% of the advice is good for 70%.

I mean, 70%, the advice is only good for 70% of the population. And you got 15% on each side that are outliers. So the 70% rule for carbohydrates should be 40% if you are healthy. Okay. And then some of the guys do very well on 70%. Okay. So I think that you have to monitor yourself, things like your morning insulin your morning glucose your reactive insulin test your hb1ac you do those four tests and you start with a starting point and uh you do these tests for the every eight weeks would be enough and then you'll find what's

best for you that's what i tell my students to do. Could you elaborate on each of those tests just so people can, and we'll put this in the show notes as well, but I think people would love to know if you could just go through those bullets and just describe a little bit for context the purpose of each of those tests. Well, morning glucose, morning insulin are basal tests. So it gives you a reference value. But one thing you have to be wary of is what we call the norms. When you think norms, you should think of Homer Simpson. Okay. So for example, morning glucose, the norms, according to most American labs is 70 to 99 in the morning. Okay. That's after a 12-hour fast the problem is is that your risk of cardiovascular disease increases five percent after every single digit above 70 so in other words

you could have 99 and be in a normal range but your cardiovascular risk is actually 145 percent greater than if it was 70 right so so there's a difference between normal and optimal okay so uh i'd rather you have 70 than to be between 70 and 99 the the next value i'd like to check is um hb1ac which is basically measures how much your hemoglobin which is is your oxygen-carrying molecule, has been damaged by glucose. And then depending on the country, the alarm point is set differently. Some people say 5.9, some people say 6.9. But the truth of the matter is the lower your score is, the better it is. That means you have less damage done to your hemoglobin.

But what's interesting is that, you know, when you cut – it's a lie detector test for carbohydrate intake. In other words, you come to see me. Let's say you bring a friend who's obese and you say, Charles, take care of him. And I do that test and he's 5.9 and he goes on a low-carb diet and he shows up at 6.1 six weeks later. Well, he's a bullshit artist because you cannot fake that test. So one thing that I found over the years is that actually the amount of magnesium, supplemental magnesium you consume is the fastest way to drop that value. So magnesium is probably one of the best anti-aging minerals.

And they say that basically you age at the rate you produce insulin. So the HbA1ac will tell me what was the average insulin over the last three months. So that's a good key. Another test I really like is the reactive insulin test. So you submit blood for the morning draw, and then you eat two rice cakes with jam on it, let's say a tablespoon of jam. And then you wait one hour, and you measure your postprandial insulin,

so after the meal. And then that value should be about between 12 and 17. If it's above that, you could have normal morning insulin. But the problem is that normal morning insulin is like having a normal ECG. It's quite possible that you have a normal ECG at rest, but you exercise for 10 seconds and your ECG is all over the place, right? So an organ, you can only see if it's really healthy if you stress it, okay? So when you give a dose of really fast carbohydrates in the morning and your insulin goes through the roof, it means that you don't have a good pancreatic health and your insulin resistance

is horrendous. So I like that test. But we found, for example, in a lot of physique competitors, they got great morning glucose and insulin, but when you do the reactive test, they fail miserably. So, you know, so a lot of things that make them lean is not actually so healthy for them. So I think the reactive insulin test is the most underrated test

in health. And how should people select their doctor, the person that will help them administer these tests? Because you and I know there's the good, the bad, and the ugly. I remember this MD friend of mine said, P equals know, pass equals MD. And there are a lot of shitty doctors out there. There are also some great doctors, but how, how would you suggest someone find a doctor who can competently administer and interpret these tests? I think the best way to find them over the years is I go to acamp.org. So it's the American College for the Advancement of Medicine. It's the college that certifies people to do chelation therapy to treat vascular disease. What I found is that the guys who have an interest for that therapy tend to have an interest in functional medicine.

So it's a good cross-reference. It's not 100%. But when I tell my students, we're asking the exact same question as you, to do that, in more than 9 out of 10 cases, they report that they're very happy with that new doctor. The thing is that the length of time they spent with you on the first visit is probably your best indicator. I find the best doctors out there take about two hours to do a medical history. Another way to find a good one is just to ask around. I mean, when people ask me, they say, do you know somebody here?

And I say, yeah, I know a guy. So in most large American cities, I find someone. But, for example, recently I had a student of mine from Luxembourg who was an MD. And I got talking to him, and I realized how way ahead of the curve he was. So there was a lot of students in the class from 14 different European countries. I said, hey, you guys are looking for a good doctor? Go see him. And then a female doctor from the Netherlands, and she was very open-minded.

And she really was looking for a different way to treat uh her patients and then i so i found somebody in holland then so there's a lot of good people but the best is to ask around but one of the key points is that if they don't do a two-hour medical history uh you're not at the right place yeah no this is this is uh i think worth digging into a little bit because uh for instance i mean one of the red flags for me, and I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, but I've broken myself enough and done enough experiments that I've had a chance to sample a lot of doctors at the kind of medical buffet. And whenever I have someone respond very definitively to a single blood test. I always get very worried. They, if they don't ask if I had anything to drink,

if I didn't, if I did or did not do a workout before the test, if they don't ask some of those questions and they're simply trying to prescribe some type of medication, say to address a slightly depressed testosterone, well, they're, they're not doing their homework,

right? They're not really doing their detective work properly. At least that's my preference. But are there any other kind of red flags or pet peeves that you would use to disqualify doctors? Well, I would truly agree with you. Here's a classic example. There's someone that you and I both know sends me an email freaking out. He's been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, send me your blood work. So he sent it to me. And again, I'm not a doctor, but I asked him, hey, let me guess.

You ate before the test and you had a 36 set, 12 reps per workout, per exercise before you did the test. And he goes, how did you know? Well, because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, that test is not valid. Redo the test, 12-hour fast, and then send it to me, and I'll find you the right doctor. So, you know, the point is that the doctor read the test,

told me he was going to die. And I said, no, because you've biased the test by doing these two stupid things. And the doctor should have asked you, did you exercise? Did you eat before the meal was set up, whatever. So I agree with you 100%, Tim. There's some basic questions that we should ask to eliminate error. One thing that I insist on is that they always do it exactly 12 hours after the last bite. Why?

Because they want pre- and post and post measures that are valid. Because your morning glucose could be all over the place because you fasted an extra two hours and it's not valid. Yeah, totally agree. And I don't want to harp on this too much, but I think it's really important, so it's worth underscoring for people. And that is the... Well, let me bitch for a second first, in that the same people who would criticize you for not sort of walking a strict line with clinical studies are the same people who don't pay attention to any of these variables when they're dealing with their patients directly. And it's just, it makes me insane because you have to control these

variables. Like you said, it can't, you can't have one blood test six hours after you ate because you had a late night and eat a burrito after getting shit faced. And then the next time do it on a Wednesday after no drinking after 12 hour fast, you those that's apples to oranges, and you're not going to be able to get any good data out of that. But for people out there, I mean, the one thing that I've always asked friends, because people come to me just as your friends come to you, and they're like, oh, my God, I'm freaking out. My doctor wants to do A, B, C, D, and E. And like I said, everybody, just so I don't have to deal with the stupid legal issues. I'm not a doctor, but what, what, well, but I'll, what I'll ask is I'll say, well, when did you take, what day of the week did you take the last test?

And when did you take this test? And, and lo and behold, it's almost always like after a shitty three days of sleep, or it's after a binge drinking for two nights and their testosterone drops 200 points. And also the blood test was done at say like 10 AM instead of 8 AM. And I'm like, all right, well, you can't, you have to have some standardization for these numbers to be meaningful in any way. It's very true because I'll call, for example, if you know,

I used to train a lot of pro athletes, but they would, I would say, a stag party in Vegas. What goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas. But by Monday when they gave blood work, I could tell they were in Vegas. And there's things like, for example, a massage could throw your CPK through the roof if it was fairly aggressive. And then people say, well, you have a kidney issue or whatever their bias is. their bias is and for example in the liver enzymes i get this one all the time my liver enzymes are elevated so then i tell i send this study from sweden people lift weights three days a week i have chronically 20 higher than normal elevations in liver enzymes and it's non-pathological so i say show that to your

doctor before they put you on some liver drug you know so the thing though is that it's not the doctor's fault the like you say p equals md so the thing is is that they're not forced to keep up with the literature and we know that the books they study in medical school are already 90 years outdated. For example, if you look at blastocystis ominous, I'm sorry, if we look at what was that? Blastocystis ominous, one of the intestinal pathogen, according to the most recent book on parasitology, it's not bad for you, you should not be treated.

But there's good studies done on Iraq war veterans that show that that intestinal pathogen leads to degeneration of eyesight because it blocks the absorption of vitamin A. And it also leads to degeneration of joints. But there's two good papers that are published in 94 that are not in the book of parasitology but so we're looking 2015 and the research was done in 94 and it's not even in the current books that medical students read so a lot of people have you know could have bad eyesight or osteoarthritis from untreated intestinal pathogen. And then they tell me there's no research on that. There is research. I mean, one of the most common comments is, there's no research on that.

Dude, did you ever even try to look at it? So, you know, and then, for example, there was some guy harping on that my doses of leucine were too high. They were not backed up by research. Well, the two best research papers on leucine and really hard training people were done by the same group of researchers in France. They only published the results in French. So I can't blame for the guy to say he didn't read.

He could say at least I didn't read anything on it, but to say that it doesn't exist is a lie because it did exist. Where are your favorite sort of go-to sources anything on it but to say that it doesn't exist is a lie because it did exist you know where are your favorite sort of go-to sources for doing searches for research i mean there's pubmed of course uh but but um what what what are sort of your go-to top sources actually my top source is pubmed but the thing is is that you have to learn a few things about how to search. For example, shishandra berry, which is a great herb to treat too much oxidation in the liver, right? Well, there's 88 synonyms for it in the literature.

If you look at ole basil, it has so many different names. So what I use is a product called a natural database. And then they give you all the synonyms for each natural compound. And then I search under the different ones. Because, for example, for OlyBasel, you can find a lot of research. But this is the most commonly used name in English but you have to look under the different indie names for it to find all the research because a lot of research clinically on it was done in India or done in Thailand and it's peer-reviewed but they don't

use only basil as a keyword so you know, the natural medical database is a good tool for finding out the synonyms if you're looking at a nutrient, but nobody beats PubMed in my opinion. This is really excellent advice, and I just want to kind of reiterate for folks that you have to search for the synonyms. Not only that, I mean, so for instance, you can take like alpha lipoic acid and then thioctic acid or whatever. But not only that, but like you said, if you have studies being done in, say, India with Ayurvedic medicine, like what are the herbs that contain a lot of fill in the blank, right?

So you can find these natural sources, which then are also sometimes studied, even if the isolated nutrients aren't studied. And it sounds like a lot of work, but it's not that time consuming once you just have step one for the checklist. There's a great book called The Checklist Manifesto that I thought. Oh yeah, oh yeah.

That's one of my favorite books. Oh, so good by Atul Gawande, who's an MD. And so it's like, what is your checklist for doing research? It's like, okay, number one, who's an MD. And so it's like, what is your checklist for doing research? It's like, okay, number one, go to natural database, find some synonyms, right? Then go to PubMed and do this following search. And then if you've read, say, bad medicine, it's like, okay, what filters do I run this through? What are the five to 10 questions that I ask myself to make sure I don't fool myself, right? You know, is this intravenous? How is it delivered, right? You can't just take oral dosages or intravenous dosages

and assume that you're going to get the same effect from oral consumption, right? Exactly. Question for you on hormone replacement therapy. So a lot of people are fascinated by hormone replacement therapy. How have your thoughts on hormone replacement therapy changed or evolved? And we could make it specific to guys, but we don't have to.

Well, I think that there's a stronger place for it than ever before because, you know, people ask me, well, it's not natural, blah, blah, blah. Okay. All right. Let's go back a second here. One thing that distinguishes humans from animals is goal setting and progress. So I don't think eagles gather up together in January and say, okay, this year let's eat 78% more rats and I want to expand. Right? 28% more rats, and I want to expand, right?

So, I mean, animals are animals. They do what they do. But we, whoever you want to blame for, we're blessed with a brain that can learn and evolve. And then the reality is, and this is the World Health Organization statistics, the average testosterone level has decreased 1% per year since 1950. So what was considered good testosterone levels. And then the norms tend to change per country. So for example, DHA sulfate in the UK, if you have between 1.6 to 1.8, it's good.

If you have 1.9, you're considered to have elevated androgens. But in Canada, the norms are 3 to 10 so if you're a british male at 1.9 you don't exist in the medical norms in canada okay so you don't qualify as a male uh you may be a male in the uk but you're not a male in canada so so the reality is that okay we we've softened up on the norms, but we should look at optimal versus normal, right? So with hormone therapy, one thing we'll also know is we'll have 100 times more stress than our grandparents. Our grandparents didn't have iPhones. They didn't have to answer 70 emails an hour, blah, blah, blah, blah. And there's also the radiation, which is now more and more well

documented and all these things uh suppress testosterone so hrt i think is viable but yeah it's like your carbohydrates you need to deserve it so for example i see a lot of kids who go on growth hormone and they're still making plenty and by doing growth hormone too early they're actually shutting down their production. Same thing with testosterone. But the attitude varies a lot from country to country. For example, there used to be a drug in France called Parabolin, which is Tremblone. I forget the exact extract. But if you look in the compendium in the 80s, they would encourage doctors to give it to kids

who were bullied at school. Tremblone. Oh my God. So basically they said, it was different. Like, okay, the kid has low muscle mass, low self-esteem, put him on Tremblone. But, you know, an American doctor that would do that

would get, you know, castrated and sent to jail for 40 years. Just to put this in perspective for people. So Tremblone, correct me if I'm wrong. It's hard for a lot of people to come by who are, say, world-class powerlifters. So they'll take capsules that are intended to be injected into cattle and basically dissolve them into a liquid so they can inject them. And this was prescribed to children who were getting bullied. Yeah.

So, you know, in a bodybuilding world, the profiting world is one of the most potent drugs, right? But the attitude was very different. There's a friend of mine who's a pharmacist who has actually studied that concept. And he said, like, attitude towards drugs is very different. For example, in a lot of South American countries, they think that putting stenozole and multivitamins for kids is good so they can gain weight.

But the thing with HRT, what I see is that a lot of people jump on a bandwagon because they can make money and charge, you know, a horrendous price for testosterone. And then, which is next cost $2 a cc to make and they charge you $150 a cc. But the therapies that I would say in the US, there's probably only three guys that know how to do it properly.

So if I have an executive that says to me, you know, my testosterone is the same as a Catholic church mouse, what could I do? Well, I send them to these three docs and they do a good job, but it takes monitoring. You have to monitor your estrogens. You have to monitor your cardiovascular factors and so on. But if it's done properly, it's very good. I think the more exciting realm now is actually the use of peptides. But the peptides, it's the frontier right now. But I've met a guy in Australia recently who probably has done the most clinical research on it and when he explained

to me how to use them his view on how to use them and time them was diametrically opposite to what the cowboys on internet recommend but but when i was in the waiting room, it was who's who of the strength world was waiting for an appointment. So obviously his clinical experience was very good. But he was really, really far ahead. But, for example, for repairing joints, you know, there's two peptides are getting a lot of – and they work very well. Now they're just for research purposes, but I think that HRT, if it's done properly, it's quite validated. As long as you're not in a drug-tested sport. If you're a 40-year-old stockbroker and you have zero sex drive and you're shaped like a Peri water bottle then yeah go get some testosterone therapy

because but you know another thing is that i think is underestimated is the balance between dha sulfate and the testosterone and that has to be kept in balance because dha sulfate is the mother of all androgens and if you don't take care of that at the same time you can get into a lot of trouble so what could you elaborate on uh what because what type of trouble well for example you know every molecule can be linked to an emotion and you really think about and you can't just put an old book on that but dha sulfate is the molecule i think for me of motivation or one of them. Okay. And if you take so much tests that you don't have enough DHA sulfate, you can do just a big lug with no drive. So you have to keep the DHA sulfate.

And also you have to balance that with how much celery cortisol you make. It's not, when you look at hormone therapy, you can't look at the world through a straw. In other words, taking a shitload of testosterone is not going to solve your problems. The best guy,

the best educator on HRT is Thierry Ertog from Belgium. He lectures all over the world. How do you spell his name, Charles? Thierry is T-H-I-E-R-R-Y. And his family name is H-E-R-T-O-G-U-E or T-H-O-G-U-E.

Thierry Ertug. I'm glad I asked. I never would have got it. Yeah, but he's easily found on – he teaches all over the world. He's probably teaching three weekends out of four, always to endocrinologists or the anti-aging circle. But he'll talk about, for example, balancing things like oxytocin with your testosterone. So he has a very good approach

and he's big on monitoring where you store your body fat as it relates to hormones. He has, I mean his books are very expensive but they're really worth the investment but he'll explain how hormone deficiencies

manifest in physically outward symptoms. Like what happens when you're G8, this is what happens to you. If you have too much G8, this is what happens to you. If you don't have T3, too much T3. So he has made a lot of links between physical medicine and endocrinology, and that's why he's very well respected and i find the best endocrinologist i've studied under him because he has a very

um eagle's view of the hormonal system it's not like looking in the world through a straw oh yeah you're low in test air take a gram of test a week like you take a gram of test a week and you don't control your estrogens. You'll have bigger tits than Pamela Anderson within a month. Well, not to mention, I mean, your lipid profile is going to – I mean, yeah, your lipids are not going to look so impressive. And you have nipples the size of Frisbees. So, you know, and maybe that's one of your goals in life. I don't know. But the point is, is that hrt is a viable tool it has to be done properly and it's if the guy just comes in and tests your

test and he wants to give you a prescription run out of there because he needs to look a lot of things yeah yeah no completely let me ask you just a random question i mean i talked about this very openly in the four-hour body this is something that bugs me. We can bitch and moan about the internet another time. But the fact that I wrote an entire, I wrote an entire, I think four or five pages on like anabolics 101 and on Wikipedia, it says Tim Ferriss admits to have used anabolic agents. And I'm like, admits is such a weaselly word. I wrote a fucking chapter about it. So I've used different anabolics, uh, with medical supervision after surgeries. And, um, one of the, uh, I don't know if it's an urban myth or just one of the common beliefs among athletes is that decadrablin helps with joint repair, but I've never been able to come up with a plausible explanation for why nandrolone versus other things would have that effect. And I'm just curious if you think that has any validity and if so, what the plausible explanation might be. five years old um i i dug it on actually pub med that the

after we do the call i i'm pretty sure i got in my um an email because a medical doctor asked me a question and out of interest i did find the paper this according to urban legend you know you have more fluid in a joint which decoh the joint, which allows the cartilage to regenerate, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But this particular study was on the regeneration of connective tissue, and they did find a positive influence from, I think in this study was nandrolone phenylpropionate, if my memory serves me right. But the, I mean, okay, again, you have clinical versus anecdotal evidence. But many old-time powerlifters will tell you that when they self-administered nandrolone drugs, they did see a decrease in joint pain. But I do know there's at least one Swedish study on the benefits of nandrolone in joint health. Cool. I'll check it out. Yeah, nandrolone is

just also, I mean, I've always, I guess it's probably a legal issue. And just for those people listening who are like, let me run out and buy some nandrolone. The legal side effects of trying to do this stuff on the black market can be just as harsh as the physical side effects of using them improperly. So caveat on emptor. Don't go find your local meathead and just inject whatever cooking oil he happens to sell you. But, you know, Nandrolone I find really interesting just from the standpoint of aromatization and dealing with some of these other issues that you mentioned. But anyway, that's a whole separate conversation. But on the kind of non-drug standpoint

or from that perspective, what are approaches that you take? What are things that you eliminate from your household or try that perspective, what are approaches that you take? What are things that you eliminate from your household or try to avoid, whether that's due to environmental estrogens or phytoestrogens or whatever the hell, synthetic estrogens or otherwise? What are things that you try to keep out of your house or away from your body? Well, the thing is that there's quite a few estrogens that come in form of cosmetics, shampoos, and so on. So a very simple tool is to go to ewg.org and they rank in quality

all the common household products, shampoos, moisturizers, or whatever. So for example, there's one that comes to mind that is given for free in Canada's biggest health chain. It has five types of parabens, and parabens is linked to all forms of cancer, but it got five isomers of parabens in it. I'm not going to name the company, but it's a very well-known company. So people go get buffed at the gym in Toronto. They take a shower, and winter is dry, so we've got dry skin. They put that thing in and they're basically lathering on crushed forms of oral contraceptives. So I only buy certified organic products for body care. Actually, my maid at the house is very conscious of that stuff. certified organic products for body care. My, actually,

my maid at the house is very conscious of that stuff. So she only uses the best products and everything is verified with EW.org and it's free. So, and it's high quality. I've donated it to them in the past. I think it's a great organization. The thing is,

is that I've learned this from you actually is the concept of batching. So I batch my email work, I batch my cell phone work. So I try to minimize all radiation forms as much as possible. Over the last three years, I always take the month of July off. And that's when I have time to read stuff from my upcoming classes. And three years ago, I started to look at the research, peer-reviewed research on electromagnetic pollution. And it was quite a bit staggering. A lot of the leading work has been done in France, but it's not encouraging by any means. Things like dopamine, you know what I call phantom message watching.

So a lot of people will look at their iPhone, for example, to see if they've got a message. They don't batch it, so they're obsessed with or they want to see who posted what on Facebook. They found in Korea that it actually messes up with dopamine receptor site location and it puts people into a state of hyper-vagiantism, you know. So they always, they're basically like a Navy SEAL in the middle of Iraq, hanging by their toes on a clothesline with an American flag on their back, you know, so they're always ready for battle and there's no need for it so uh i found one of the best ways to actually manage stress which i learned from the four hour a week was to batch my emails batch my cell phone work and i found it's a great stress reducer and of course biggest benefit is you're far more productive you know

the food the quality of the food you could say i'm quite uh uh enthusiastic about uh so what i you know what you put in your mouth is a stressor and what you say that comes out of your mouth is also a stressor. So at least you have control on both. So when I'm here in the U.S., it's very easy for me to have the best food. But when I travel overseas, actually where I teach is dictated by the quality of the food. So, for example, I partnered up with Nick Mitchell for his ultimate performance gym in Marbella. He goes, hey, I don't mind sunshine. I'd rather teach in sunshine. So I do

most of my European seminars now in Spain. But in Spain, I found this guy, Michael Antonio, who finds me boar and deer and the quality of fish is very good so if i teach six weeks in spain i got the best food uh if i teach in northern europe i'll either go to denmark or sweden the same thing because it's very good quality but in england it is a challenge but still feasible i've educated enough students that they've dug out the best places you know even when i was in manchester uh two weeks ago i could find some good food so it's um the europeans are catching on quicker to this and the southwest of the u.s so for example if you go to phoenix it's pretty easy to eat organic you go to rhode island or b, you should look.

When you think of the typical gym in the US, let's just say, what drives you nuts about warmups? What are people doing incorrectly for warmups, for weight training? The foam roller. That is such a waste of time. And plus, it leads to more scar tissue. So I only like the foam roller to distract vertebrae. That's about it. The warm-ups, okay, it's very good evidence by Magda Addis,

but warming up on a treadmill or using a treadmill precipitates insulin resistance by 46 so all electronic cardio equipment in my opinion should be banned so let's say tomorrow you name me emperor of all galaxies and i've got all power i would take all that cardio stuff and throw out of gyms uh i would just replace it with strongman equipment. Also, the concept of training your core using unstable surfaces, if you look at the actual research, it will find it helps for about six weeks. But after that, there's no added benefit. And the best way to strengthen your core is to count on exercise like squats deadlift chin-ups dips and so on so uh what drives me crazy is the gyms where i go and everything is done like you'll see a a woman do a on a bosu ball on one leg doing

a contralateral dumbbell curl and switch legs and arms you know what does that do fuck all uh you know it should be better learning how to squat properly and do a set of 20 to exhaustion that'll bring it you know more heat shot proteins which are been associated with fat loss and muscle building. So there's actually a trend now. There's two gym chains around the world that have hired me to develop educational seminars to get rid of all those balance exercises. One of them that leads to education is a student of mine and he just won a bodybuilding contest and his physics changed completely and even now the owners of the chain are going wow

you know what changes you make so i start to do real strength training and um so and then one of the biggest chains in england was also asking me to revamp uh that system because the rule is it's like the basics are the basics and you can't beat the basics and uh that's my first mentor told me there's three rules of success in strength training one is hard work two is hard work three is hard work so you can't replace quality hard work you know and if so if you were designing the perfect warmup routine, so you were able to throw the Bosu balls in the dumpster, you're able to get rid of all of the cardio equipment.

And let's just, for the sake of simplicity, say someone, and you can tear this apart, but just because people have heard of it, I'll say somebody's getting ready for like a five-five squat workout, let's just say, would you have them do any particular type of warm-up, the perfect warm-up? Yes, of course, because there's two rules about warming up. The brain should know what the range of motion is, and two, that the weight's going to get

heavier. So for example, you want to do five- 5x5 at 100 kilos at 220 pounds. So you go to the gym. If it's squats, well, there's a lot of research that shows that mobility in the ankle is what decreases the probability of any lower extremity injuries, whether it's ACL tear or hamstring pull or groin tear, whatever. So the first thing I would do is I would go on a calf machine and stretch the calves and then go down all the statically the stretch for eight seconds.

Then I finish off with a voluntary contraction because it resets the pattern for strength. Research is clear. If you do static stretching, you don't finish with a contraction, you're more likely to get injured. So you do the eight second stretch, let's just say at the bottom of the calf machine, and then you would go up to sort of a peak hold or is it just one? Yeah. You concentrate on lifting the weight, actively contracting the calf. So the weight should be enough to stretch you. If it's heavy enough to stretch you, you won't be able to lift it. But you should do a voluntary contraction for two seconds at the end of the stretch to reactivate the power in your muscle.

So I would make my ankles flexible. Then I would take the bar and depending on which muscles are tight, let's say if it's quad or hamstrings or whatever, I would do the same principle, get into a position where I basically do PNF stretching, right? And then do those exercises. Then I'm mobile for the range of motion. Then if the goal is a hundred kilos for five sets of five, then the first warm-up set would be the bar.

There's the bar. Four reps. Then I would go to 60 kilos, which is 60%. So my body knows what the range of motion is. Then I put 60 kilos, which is 60%. I would only do about three reps. Then I would go to 75 kilos. I would do two reps.

I'd go to 85 kilos, do one rep. 90 kilos to 85 kilos do one rep 90 kilos do one rep 95 kilos do one rep so all those weights just tell me the weight is going to be coming soon and then squad 100 kilos for facets of five so i've accomplished my goal i know what the range of motion is which allows me to have great mechanics and then i um i warmed up psychologically and physiologically speaking to handle the weight some people do what they call over warm-up so if they want to train at 100 they'll do a set let's say 95 then they go to 110 to activate the nervous system but they only do one. So they don't really go to failure. They just tell the body, hey, 100 kilos is going to feel lighter. Paul Carter is a big advocate of this, but the first time I read it was from a

weightlifting coach in 1973. I mean, that's when the article was published, but it was from Finland. And they have a name in Finnish, which has about 96 letters, but it means proprioception set. Yeah, proprioception set, okay. So to make it show it's P-set. But that's a way to warm up where you go over the set. I mean, and that's the only thing.

Paul Carter figured it out by himself. But there's such a thing as universal intelligence. There's nothing new, really. So, you know, I could find it in 73, and that's all the research I did on it. But maybe somebody figured it out in 1908 by himself. I mean, in my house here, I've got everything that's ever been weighting on weight training since 1896. Multiple languages.

For example, Frédéric Delavier's anatomy books, I've got them in 15 different languages. I find it's a good way. I love learning languages, but you should learn things you're passionate about. I think that you can learn a lot're passionate about so you know i think that

you can learn a lot of grammar on like playing out somebody out of squat right like you learned directions and whatever so i um i've used that as a tool for learning languages but the point is is that when people say oh i've invented this i said bullshit like it was invented in Egypt in 1923 or 1908 by Bob Peoples or whatever it is. What's new is combinations or applications, but fat grip dumbbells is not new. I mean, that's 1896. So what I did with the fat grip dumbbells, I made them revolve so they're easier on their joints. So I designed them for Watson gym equipment. They're calibrated.

They're nuclear attack resistant, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But all I did is made some ameliorations. Right. A new application of an old idea. Yes, yes. But there's nothing new in weight training. So speaking of the, the squat routine that you sort of led up to,

what are the most common mistakes that people make after they've finished their work sets or, or after a workout for that matter? I am a really, really big believer, Tim, in immediate recovery. That's from personal experience. Okay. I mean, there's some research from Australia and South Africa to back

me up, but over the years is cortisol used to be considered the enemy. Now, in the last four years, we figured out that the more cortisol you make during training, the greater training response. So people used to take cortisol blockers before training. That's stupid. It leads to no gains. But I think that the effect of the cortisol is transitory. So you induce the message, then you got to get rid of the message. so uh you know um as uh what's that guy uh charlie sheen i don't pay women to have sex i pay them to leave after sex so of course it's like that it's like the prostitute you got to get rid of the of the prostitutes you got to get rid of the cortisol. So I know my analogy is a bit up there, but people like graphic stuff.

So they remember far better. So you want to get rid of cortisol. So in my opinion is you got to suppress cortisol immediately after exercise. Of course, you know, people say, why don't you have an idea on that? Hey,

Olympic medalist in 17 different sports. That's my data. So I've tried not to do it, and I've gone away from it. I've tried different ways. But I really believe you've got to bring that cortisol down. The best way to do that is to make yourself more insulin sensitive. So you go through steps to make yourself insulin sensitive. But if somebody trains really hard, let's say he weighs 200 pounds i really like to have 200 grams of a carbohydrate

blend right after exercise with about 50 grams of a high quality protein a lot of people are intolerant to weigh and they don't even know i I really like essential amino acid blends. So if you're a 200-pound man, I developed a product for ATP Lab at the Canada, it's called Pentacarb. It has cyclic dextrins, some dextrose, and three forms of non-GMO maltodextrin. I give that to people with about 50 grams of essential aminos in most cases.

If they can handle the whey protein, I give them the whey protein because it's way cheaper. Or sometimes I give them goat whey because they're not intolerant to goat whey, but they may be intolerant to cow's whey. Where does someone find goat whey, just out of curiosity? I mean, I make no money telling you this, but my favorite brand is Tierra's Whey.

T-I-E-R-R-A. Apostrophe S, way. You can find it at Whole Foods, but on Amazon, they'll split your ass to 50 within 24 hours. That's where I get mine. And I find it personally to be more anabolic than cow's way. That's my personal preference. But I use, for my amino acids, one of my students out of Germany makes amino acids slash electrolyte complex.

And I use that. I mean, it's something I never ran out. I come back from a trip, I put two canisters back into my luggage. I don't want to forget it. And with, say, the Pentacarb, just so people don't take the wrong or interpret it the wrong way, at what point have you earned that, say, 200 grams of carbohydrates, 50 grams of protein, for instance,

if you're a larger athlete, because I know that you, I'm sure you've seen it. I've seen it. I go to the gym. I see somebody do 10 minutes on an elliptical while watching, you know, part of a game of Thrones, they get off and they, they drink 500 calories of carbohydrates. Um, when, when does it make sense to consume this post, uh,-workout and when does it not make sense? You have to deserve your carbs. And I'll repeat myself on that. And to deserve that many carbs post-exercise, you need to be sub 10% body fat. And the quickest way to know if you have sub 10% body fat as a male is can I see the lineal elbow on your abs in other words can i see all ab rows one ab row doesn't count you gotta see them all okay so in other

words you have to have penis skin on your abs uh you know if you could pitch an inch you certainly don't deserve carbohydrates so you know if you if you could see visibly your abs, then that's when you deserve it. Until then, I think you should stick to either whey or essential amino acids and more branched chains and some glutamine because you don't deserve it. But one of the things that increases anabolism is to be insulin sensitive. What makes you insulin sensitive? Losing body fat i mean nick mitchell sent me some pictures yesterday of this uh journalist that he's training and this guy looked at a human foie gras and in nine weeks the guy's got abs right i mean he was considering

calling his book author paul shaturd but uh no kidding but the thing is is that he took this guy who looks horrendous and it's all documented so there's no like photoshop and bullshit and he took him from a I would estimate a 23% body fat to a 9% body fat in nine weeks what do you do you restrict his carbs but now that he's lean he's jacked up his carbs. So you got to deserve your carbs. But if you don't deserve it, don't have them. You just get fatter. What are some commonly neglected ways

to decrease body fat aside from restricting carbohydrates? I think that the biggest mistake is to do steady state cardio. You want to get fatter, go right ahead. The second biggest mistake is to use the low-fat approach. So some people will restrict their carbohydrates, but they restrict their fats too. So that's a big mistake.

If you're going to go high-protein, low-carb, you need to have high fat. So you cook your meats in olive oil and butter you put butter on your vegetables and so on and you take coconut oil and that would help you get more sensitive the thing to is decreasing cortisol cortisol is a great enemy when we're talking about developing insulin resistance. How do you decrease cortisol? Well, you manage your stress.

How do you manage your stress? Well, you get effective work habits. You eliminate distractions. When you're at work, turn off your email. Only answer your email right before lunch and right before you leave work. I mean, there's a lot of ways to manage your stress. One of the books I really like and I recommend to all my students is 59 Seconds from Richard Wiseman. Oh, I've never heard of it.

Okay, Tim, you've got to read that book. I would say it's one of the best books you could ever read because what he does, he takes a critical look at the self-help industry. And one of the tests he makes you do, he describes 10 self-help techniques that are repeated over and over in the self-help literature. And he asks you to identify which ones work. I won't tell you the answer, but I 100% on the test because I was that I identify the ones that don't work

and the ones that do work. So, for example, one of the common ones that you read in every book, imagine the body that you want, blah, blah, blah. Well, all it does is it encourages you to be delusional. What works is a plan with an action step. You want to get lean, you need a plan. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. And in the book, what he does, he answered a challenge from his friend, Sophie. Sophie said, I'm busy.

I want to help myself, but I want stuff that is science-based, and I want to not take a lot of time. So he says, so I could give you an answer under one minute? She goes, that's right. So that's why the book is called 59 seconds. And in the book, he'll go over anything from building relationships to, uh, goal setting.

And he destroys a lot of myths about goal setting and his bullshit studies that were never actually done. And, but he does everything. Uh, so you would love it and he'll talk about anything from increasing your height your odds to getting picked up when you hitchhike to whatever it's a very he's a very funny guy and he's written a lot of very good books uh he's the one who wrote

quirkology uh he's a magician besides being a ph PhD in psychology. And you can see his magic tricks on YouTube. He's a pretty interesting guy. So that's probably the best self-help book. But I tell people, if you really want to change, read that book. 59 Seconds. Yeah, by Richard Wiseman. Very cool. What other books do you gift the most to other people or recommend the most? I get that one often. The other one I really like to give is The One Thing.

I'm actually lecturing with one of the authors in Texas in November. So if you want to join up, just go look at thepowerfulexecutive.com. There will be a page with how to register. But Jay Papasan wrote the one thing with Gary Keller. It's very similar actually to 4-Hour Workweek in a lot of points. I mean, success rules are success rules, right? But when I read your book and I tell my students to buy your book, what I learned from you was I work way too hard and had no fun in my life.

So after reading your book and Jay Papasan and Gary Keller recommend the first thing you should plan in a year is your vacation. So after reading both of these books, I mean, when I'm at home, I work two and a half to four hours max. I take the month of July off. I take the first two weeks of August off. I don't work the month of December until about the end of January. And a week a month, I take off. Okay. I've never done that in my life until the last four years. But what I learned with the one thing is that you have to pick one activity per day

that will change the rest of your life. So, for example, doing a podcast with you is my one thing today because you're a very popular author. I mean, Schwarzenegger, who's another one of my heroes, was on your podcast recently. Actually, Arnold Schwarzenegger is probably the most inspiring man you could listen to. I was very fortunate to be invited by Tony Doherty to teach at the Arnold Classic last March in Australia.

And on Sunday morning, there was a small group of us who were invited to listen to Arnold Schwarzenegger. And coming out of that lecture, I don't think in my life I've ever been that fired up. What I like about Schwarzenegger, he's very honest, and the thing he talked the most about was actually his mistakes. And, you know, it takes balls to do that, and how you learn from them and so on.

But the one thing is one of my favorite books, I tell them all students because it gets you organized and makes you focused. Um, it, uh, success rules are universal, you know? No, it's just like strength training. Like you said, I think there, there are old ideas and new applications. And, uh, I remember I was on the BBC once and it was, it was kind of funny because I knew that they were going to set me up. It was a segment on self-help. And I was like, okay, well, if they're calling it self-help, this is going to be an attack piece.

And I knew it was coming. So I sat down, and they were like, so Mr. Ferris, and they said this in the most British way imaginable. I mean, it was very polite, but very condescending. Not all British people are like that, but it is a superpower in the UK. And they said, so how would you defend people in the self-help genre who this, this, and this? And I said, I wouldn't. I think they're full of shit.

And I said, I think that for the most part, you should only take advice from people who have a track record of implementing that same advice. And I identify more with – or if you ask me who my favorite self-help author is, I'd probably say Ben Franklin, right? That's right. I'm looking back, or Seneca maybe. Really rewind the clock. And I think that the one thing is, is just the title itself after you've read the book, I think is very helpful because whether you look at Seneca,

you look at some of the top performing CEOs in Silicon Valley who actually have lives outside of the businesses they're building, they're constantly asking a question that is some variant of like, what is the one thing on this list that really matters, right? What is the one thing on this list that will make all the other things easier or unimportant or whatever, right? There's always some variation to that question. Correct. And it's, but I think it's so valuable for people to hear you say what you did, which is you're planning vacation first, right? You're blocking out times for the fun things, because if you don't do that,

then work will simply swell to fill those times and fill those voids. What do you do with your, when you take say the month off, what are the, what are the things that you now do? Well, I'll give you an example. My daughter loves martial arts. And the last two summers, we went to Sweden, Stockholm, and she trained with this sensei in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And so she trained three times a day, twice in jiu-jitsu, once in lifting. But in between, we would do things like visit biking museums. We would do some type of touristic learning experience, right?

And we'd go off, visit the islands off Stockholm for one day, whatever that is. I think that, you know, when I'm raising her, I try to make her visit as many countries as possible every year so that she doesn't, you know, 80% of 15-year-old Americans can't put the U.S. on the world map. That's a big issue. So, you know, by going here, there, and then every day, ask her three questions. And, you know, I always ask her, and I've been in that since she's a toddler, since she could speak, is one is, what have you done today to help someone? And then she'll say whatever. And then the second question is always, what has someone done nice for you today or to help you out?

And then the third question is always, what did you learn? And then, you know, so one time we went to visit a lady while we were in London who was an expert on mammals. She wrote a book on mammals that my daughter read when she was five or six years old. And so I booked a brain picking fee with a lady. She was kind of puzzled why I wanted to do that. And I asked my daughter, you could ask her whatever uh you want about animals and then she no and the lady was surprised how much my daughter knew about things and how smart the questions were but you know a life not examined it's not a work a life worth living so i think it's really important that you pause at the end of the day to see what have you done.

I religiously donate 10% of what I make to different causes. For example, on the weekend I adopted another tiger. This afternoon I'm making a donation to the Navy Seal Foundation. It's really important that

one of the principles in life if you want to be successful is to give what you want. So if you give away money, you'll receive money. I like that. Yeah. So, you know, if you're not willing to give it away, you won't attract it. I know that sounds a bit ok, but it's very true. And my father taught me that a long time ago.

He had the same practice but i remember in university having zero money i mean i was so poor the furniture was painted on the walls you know so i uh i donated 150 bucks at 50 bucks left on my account after that to a homeless people's shelter and the next, I sold one of my university papers to two different federations, and each paid me, one paid me $600, and the other one paid me $1,200 for the same chapter. It was a chapter on training for vertical jump and volleyball. So the return on investment was immediate. But I'm a big believer, if you want more

money, give more away. And, you know, we, for example, why the Navy SEAL Foundation? Well, those guys take care that we can live the way we want to live. But our government doesn't support them very well once they've used them, right? So I leave clear instructions that I want them to use, the money to be used for REAP. A lot of guys get injuries and no one takes care of them, right? So I leave clear instructions that I want them to use the money to be used for rehab. A lot of guys get injuries and no one takes care of them. Right.

But it doesn't matter if you give to doctors without borders or, or whatever else. I mean, the thing is that if you leave this plant without making it better than when you were born, you didn't live a good life. Yeah. What's the point?

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. Uh, the, um Yeah. Yeah, agreed. What are questions that you ask yourself at the end of the day or the end of the week, just like you had the questions that your daughter asks or that you ask your daughter, rather? Are there questions that you revisit on a regular basis? Well, it's always, how can I make this better? Or how can I make the teaching more effective?

I realized over the years that you have to simplify more and more and more and more. So one thing I've learned in these 54 years on earth is that, as Einstein said, there's genius in simplicity. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. And one thing I've always admired about the way you teach also, well, there are two things really that I've observed. Number one is you use metaphor and analogy in a very memorable way. And I mean, people, if I asked them what the Charlie Sheen point was,

they're going to remember cortisol. But it's funny, yes. And it's very Charles, yes. But it's also memorable. And I think that simplifying and pegging these concepts to memorable imagery is something you're very gifted at. And you're not overly easy on your students, which I appreciate because, for instance, I'm training with this older Polish trainer in his 60s. And I've generally not worked with trainers on a regular basis. I've worked with coaches, but now I suppose he could be considered a coach and we're working on, uh, he has four world records in Olympic weightlifting. And, um, he, the first time I met him, he, he's like, take off your shirt. And he walked over and just kind of pinched my left tit and said, you're too fat. And that was the first thing he said to me. And it was really refreshing because in the US, we have adopted and developed

this, you get a gold ribbon for 18th place type of culture, which is ultimately, I think, a disservice to the students we're trying to help. So it was very refreshing. And he's, I mean, he's not always belligerent just for the sake of being belligerent, but he's very brusque when it serves a purpose. And I'd love to just hear from you what you think, what are common mistakes that teachers make aside from not simplifying something enough? I think the whole purpose beyond what I do is based on a Japanese concept. You're only a good teacher if you leave a student that's better than yours.

So I always try to make somebody better than me, you know, and I've had many students over the years and I get a few out there now that I could say I'm starting to get happy with. But one thing with people who are successful, you're never happy. So that's what this thing is between the eagles, right? The eagle won't fix new goals every year. And what makes me really happy, Tim, is when I see somebody who developed this day his first world champion in jiu-jitsu or Olympic medalist in kayak. Or the other day, I was in Stuttgart and some Dutch student brought the equivalent, the Dutch edition of men's health or men's fitness.

And they were talking about one of my Dutch students who trained an Olympic medalist in rings. And the guy gave me credit for that, which was nice to see in a foreign language, you know, that my name gets out there. But, you know, my,

my ultimate goal is to have one of my students beat my records of Olympians and world record holders. I mean, next year we have the Olympics in Rio and I'm training girls in wrestling and I've never had Olympic medalists in wrestling so there would be 18 sports so that's I found that you even though I teach on strength training almost every day I think you still have to keep your finger in the pie because you know so with the the three girls I coach I'm really applying that newer transmitter theory and all of them but here again what about mindset we're in Cuba each one of

my girls won the gold medal okay and very definite wins but the interesting thing Tim is that they as soon as they get off the mat, within two minutes, they were sitting beside me, asking me to evaluate what I thought they did right or wrong. And what could I infer from their fighting into their strength training program design? So there was, for example, Yelena Pilarskova. And I said, you know what? Your wrists are way too weak. I said, so we're? Your wrists are way too weak. I said, so we're going to work on your wrists. And then Hélène Meroulis, I said, your lower back is too weak. She was like, you say that, I said, when you move up and down, it's way too slow. Your

lower back is weak. And then with this other girl, with Vicky, I said, you need to do more slow strength. Your power is very good, but you need more slow strength, which is – I rarely have to say that, but in your case, yes. That's the one that's a mongoose on PCP. So the point was that people who are winners always have a growth mindset. And I remember in 88, my first day with national ski team, and I said, after one workout, I pointed out to one girl and I said, you know, she'll be really good one day. And they all looked at me like, what the hell do you know about alpine skiing?

They said, she won't make it more than one year. She was 15 at the time. She was very young to make national team. And in 1994, she was – in 1993, she was world champion. What did you see in her? What did you notice? What I call the growth mindset. In a sense that she would come after a workout, you know, can I do this? What can I do?

So I find that my best athletes, nothing that I see, and it's hard to measure or hard to explain. Reg Park talked about, he called it the intangible, is that it's the attitude while they're doing a set. One of my all-time favorites was a girl named Karen Percy. She won a bronze at the Olympics and two silvers at the Worlds, or a silver and a bronze, something like that. But she could be friendly with her teammates in between sets,

but when she picked up the bar, she was in some other galaxy. You could tell by her eyes that she was just doing the set but there was nothing. You could have let off a hand grenade beside her, she wouldn't have even jumped. And I look at all the guys I've coached or ladies I've coached who've won Olympic medals.

They all have that fifth dimension look. Teleportation ability. Yes, because they live in the moment and they you know, fifth dimension look teleportation ability. Yes. Because they, they live in a moment and they are absorbed in what they do and there's nothing that will disturb them. I was just going to say, you mentioned these female wrestlers.

And a couple of questions came from fans of mine about training female clients. And so I'd be curious to hear what you think the perhaps biggest mistakes that are made by trainers who train women or, uh, just the, the biggest mistakes that say women make if they're training, not necessarily to win an Olympic gold medal, but just for,

for the usual set of goals, right. To, to lose fat, to look a bit better, to be a bit stronger. And I'll follow up with some other questions related to athletic goals. But what are some of the mistakes in your mind that you see most frequently with trainers, with female clients? I would say the biggest mistake is not wanting to get strong. You know, the getting strong doesn't make you a bad person.

So the, I would say from the outside, if I were to criticize the industry or give a fair evaluation, there's not enough time spent on overload with women, you know, in the sense that they don't have goals for strength. So, you know, they should have shorter goals to comply to because, you know, whether it's a deadlift or you look at one of my top students, her name is Kelly Martinovich. She's out of perth australia you go to her gym and be really impressed with the quality of physics of

people that work in opal mines or dental assistants whatever all the females she trains are in great shape and it could be like 70 years old uh but uh one of my students jess and sydney she has a lady that's over 80, and this woman is deadlifting some pretty big weights, but good form, and there's no excuses. So I find that where women lack the most is guidance to how to get strong or being soul and ability to get strong. Because in body composition, you need to build lean

tissue when you be the link tissue you're more insulin sensitive the more insulin sensitive they are the easier it is to burn fat blah blah blah blah so what I don't like is what I call enter training so they keep the people happy and busy but busy doesn't mean productive. So I like people to have productive outcome. One thing that has helped the industry tremendously actually is CrossFit. That was actually the next question was sort of what you take from CrossFit that's good, bad, or in between. Okay.

People think I'm anti-CrossFit for some unjust reason, but I think CrossFit, I'll tell you what I like about it. One, they work hard. Do they work got one ass, you can't sit on two horses. So the problem in most CrossFit boxes is they're trying to accomplish too many things. Like I said, simple is better. And those guys are with the CrossFit Games, and I know for a fact they're trained by good strength coaches. But to comply with politics, they say they do the wod to work out a day which is complete bullshit because i've done consulting for those coaches on how to train for crossfit events so for example cloak off uh my co-lecturer in series he does very well at crossfit games but he certainly doesn't do the workout of the day to get there so the so the intention is good they use basic simple

result producing exercise that that i like what i don't like is that there's no screening before people come in so what they don't do is that they don't look at people's orthopedic issues so what if i were again emperor of all galaxies and you wanted a CrossFit license, people should be screened orthopedically. And then usually within eight to 12 weeks, you could strain out somebody. And then they can do CrossFit. But I find the best CrossFit boxes are all in Scandinavia. They tend to do a more intelligent approach to that.

And then Dimitri and I have been all over the world teaching, and he's been in a lot of CrossFit boxes. And I asked him the same question. He says, yeah, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, they tend to do a better job. Why do you think that is? I think that it just has to do with education the trainers over there are better educated and the third thing i like about crossfit is that there's they're big onto the paleo eating uh so they're more conscious about the nutrition

you go to planet fitness there's chocolate milk and pizza night on friday right like what the fuck's the point why do you want to eat pro inflammatory foods so um so so the way to make crossfit better is actually for example there's an accident where a guy severe this is fine yeah that was uh with us it was i think he was performing snatch right yeah well when the first thing diet was learned that was taught was how to get out of trouble. So they say the bar, if you feel it goes like this, get rid of it by dumping it backwards or forwards, and you jump accordingly depending on the direction of the bar. Well, obviously, someone didn't teach him that because he made a rookie mistake by dropping it improperly.

So, you know, the Olympic lifts are complicated things and to do Olympic lifts for repetitions is utterly stupid. So I don't believe in that. My colleague Klokoff is a bit less

diplomatic than me, if you can believe that. What is Klokoff's... Is that his last name or his first name? Last name, Dmitry Klokoff. Oh, Dmitry Klokoff. We're talking about the guy with the thunder thighs. I mean, an incredible actor. Oh yeah, Dmitry's amazing. Okay, I didn't realize you were co-lecturing with him. That's incredible.

Yeah, I did. I'm doing another tour with him. We're going to Toronto, Las Vegas, and four places in Australia. But I teach with him. We split the days, but he'll say something like, this is typical American CrossFit bullshit. And then, you know, he educates.

But all the CrossFit attendees love him because he's got solutions to CrossFit problems. And the thing with Dimitri, I love lecturing with him because he will make sure that 100 of the students learn they'll go to every single person and i've been in this business 38 years and never at some of the stuff he's shown how to learn an exercise i've never seen so the soviet approach they don't like to teach you by talking they teach you by what in french we call it gets if so educational exercise so you won't say put your hips forward and make you do an exercise to make your hips go forward or if you uh so all corrections are done to a specific exercise which corrects the technical mistake. So there's very little

talking. And a lot of it is about kinesthetic learning. I really like that. No, just to add to that, and I haven't had a lot of experience with the Eastern European strength coaches, but the Polish gent that I'm working with right now is exactly the same way. I asked him his opinion, I won't mention names, but of a very famous woman who teaches posture, improving posture. And he said, well, I think it's bullshit because you can't just tell someone to improve their posture. You have to take them through movements that force them to improve their posture. And it's been really fascinating to work with him because, like you said, it's very light on words, but, um, high on sort of progressive exercises. Um, what are some of the CrossFit problems that to be tree has helped athletes, uh, fix for themselves? Well, when you take a seminar,

the first thing he, what, the way he does it is that I teach in morning, right? Some stuff. And I'll tell you what he does. He shows up and he works out. He does one or two exercises in front of everybody. This guy is amazing. I was in Montreal. It was the day after he landed from Moscow. It was supposed to be a jet lag. He slept in the van, 20 minutes of the 40-minute ride. He didn't drink water, didn't drink coffee, didn't have breakfast. He shows up, six warm-up sets. He takes 180 kilos, 396 pounds. Power cleans it and push presses twice. And just so people can imagine this, Dimitri does not look like, he's not a big fat power lifter. This guy looks like Hercules. He is not remotely.

I mean, what do you think his body fat has to be? I mean, it's about 6%. But right now, he weighs 118 kilos, and he's about 6 feet tall. So he's about 260. That's 6 feet. I mean, you can see his pancreas make insulin when he has a pizza. But I mean, there's a lot of funny stuff. Like, we were in a restaurant in Montreal, and a girl goes, sir, what would you like to drink? He goes, I want cock.

And the cook goes, what? So I said, in French, no, he wants a Coca-Cola. And, of course, Paul Carter was there. He didn't want to be left out. So when the girl asked him, what would you like to drink? So he says, a diet cock but but you know so we have to correct his english a bit but it's a lot better now but i've never seen a freak uh every day that he teaches he does 95 200 of the world record as like the first demonstration. Then we break for lunch. Then I teach mobility for the Olympic lifts.

And then Dimitri will say, for example, the first day will be snatch. And he'll go all these progressions. So the CrossFitter will know on Friday how to snatch properly. And he says, if you don't do PB no dinner for you so that's just work line said everybody has to do a PB then it makes it yeah the next day you know this summer freak left then you'll teach clean jerk so all so I teach how to get flexible for the clean jerk because a lot of people do exercise but they shouldn but they don't deserve to do it.

So I show them about an hour and a half how to deserve to clean and jerk. And on Sundays, he teaches them how to squat. He teaches a bunch of different corrective lifts. And they work their butts off uh with them but the big what the crossfitters get out of it is actually how to do the lifts but also how to teach them you know yeah and very important i think you could seriously teach somebody how to snatch in 20 minutes but uh and the technique would be perfect but it's not what you see in cross-lift boxes by any means. So speaking of, say, the snatch, technically it can be a pretty subtle, nuanced movement.

What are your favorite mobility exercises? You mentioned the mobility exercises for preparing someone for a movement like the snatch. The biggest problem in the snatch usually is how to activate the external rotators of the shoulder and how to make the internal rotators loose. So I spend a lot of time on different flexibility exercises. Sometimes i teach them acupuncture points that instantly correct the the issue i mean you took that class in new york so they're a lot of time savers and um the the biggest issue in a snatch is actually how good your rotator cuff is and uh we spend an hour and a half on that. Obviously, it's hard to do by podcast to demonstrate them,

but we go through sequences. And I also show them how to identify why the bar is not going into what we call the slot. And then we also show them corrective exercises they could do on their own to strengthen those muscles so they can put the bar into the slot and um is there maybe we can we could approach this from a different angle are there mobility exercises for the shoulder let's just say it's in the context of olympic lifting or overhead lifting that you think should be thrown out or that, uh, that you would not recommend people do? Actually, I can't answer that. I, I like to teach the correct way. So I'm not, got it. And you know, I'm not over-focused on the bad way.

Yeah. I just know so many people who have injured shoulders. Um, what are exercises just, I'll try this one more time. If you don't want to answer, it's fine. But are there any exercises that you would, aside from the balancing sort of contralateral stuff and the cardio machines, are there other free weight exercises that you think you would remove for novice and intermediate trainees? There's some that I would remove for all cases. One, the goblet squat. That is such a moronic exercise.

Basically, you're limited by the strength of your rhomboids, your anterior deltoids, and your elbow flexors. So if you can do a goblet squat and overhaul your legs, that means you've got really, really weak legs. You should be in a wheelchair. So that's a moronic exercise. A lot of the kettlebell stuff, like the kettlebell swings, if you ask any chiropractor, they'll tell you their business went up for disc injuries when they had a CrossFit box opening up next door that did a lot of kettlebell swings. I think the kettlebell swings is very harmful to the disc structure.

But the thing is, the way it arms you, it's like a dental cavity. It doesn't happen overnight. So you don't brush your teeth on a regular basis. One day you'll have the cavity, but people don't make, you know, so they don't make the link between the kettlebell swing and their back problems. That's an exercise I really hate. One exercise I find overrated is the plank. Another one I find utterly moronic is glute bridges.

Like the kind of supine glute bridges? Yeah. There's so many exercises that recruit the glutes more effectively than that. And if it was that great, all Olympic lifters and power lifters would do it because success in Olympic lifting and high jump, long jump is

glute strength dependent and no one does that exercise because it's a moronic exercise. The thing, the load, if you're in any strong the load first of all when does it ever happen that the load is on the anterior pelvis area in real life only if you dismount an obese sexual partner I mean that movement pattern with an overload never happens in life so i mean unless you'd like to date obese women but uh it's it's a non-functional pattern and and again for cervical health i'm not convinced it's the greatest thing for you but because it's like

cavities the damage is done over time people don't associate the problems uh what are good exercises for glute activation or engaging the glutes you can't beat deadlifts and squats and any type of split squats i mean those will transfer to ordinary activities you know everyday life activities they'll improve your vertical jump. They'll improve your horizontal jumping ability and so on. But the thing is that you look at the guys who advocate those exercises, look at their track record. It doesn't exist. They've never produced anybody. But what I see in this industry is, you know,

it's a very normal human nature to figure out where you are in the food chain. And these guys want to move up the food chain by saying something different. And I always use your analogy of if you go to something different, it has to be an improvement or has to be more fun. And I use the analogy you give about wearing your underwear over your jeans. So I thought that's a good example. But a lot of the new stuff is like wearing your underwear over your jeans. It's no improvement, and it's the only thing that's fun for some people watching you, you know,

because they make fun of you wearing your underwear over your jeans. So like I said, there's nothing new since 1896, in my opinion. So there's better ways to do the stuff from 1896, but the concepts were there a long time ago. Now, do you think, there's a question about swings, with the kettlebell swing. Do you think that kettlebell swings are harmful? I guess I'm curious, are they harmful given any technique for the swing or is part of the harm from, say, a crossfit box in the way that they perform the kettlebell swing? There's no safe way to do the kettlebell swing.

There's an exercise called a lumberjack where you use basically a loaded post, but in the lumberjack, the bars move vertically, not into a swing process. So people say, well, you recommend the lumberjack. Yeah, but the lumberjack is like a different load pattern for the power snatch. If you look at, you know, Klokoff and I were talking about this when they asked us about the kettlebell swing. The goal in weightlifting is to lift the most weight in the most vertical way.

So the best way to lift a lot of weight is to actually keep the weight in a straight line. The more horizontal displacement there is to the bar, there's more wasted effort and less weight is lifted. So that has been studied in biomechanics for years. There's no two ways about it. So what I don't like about the kettlebell swing is that the weight displaces away from the dish. In squatting or snatches or clean jerk, the bar always stays close to the center of gravity.

Got it. So I have a couple of questions from fans of the podcast who have put things out on Twitter and Facebook. So you've answered quite a few of them already. But this one is from Mia, health urbanista. What are your thoughts on achieving maximal strength on a plant-based diet, only plant-based diet? Never seen it. I mean, my answer is quite, because you need meat to get strong.

I mean, I eat my vegetables through the animals I eat. I mean, they did the vegetable eating for me. So to be serious, I've never seen a world-class strength athlete that was only on a plant-based diet. I've seen octo-lacto-vegetarians. I've seen one who you could call a vegetarian, but he still had egg products and dairy products. But a vegan, super strong athlete, never seen it.

Got it. Next is from Emily House. High bar versus low bar squat, sumo versus conventional deadlift, pros and cons. They all have pros and cons. In regarding to deadlift, they're both good. I would say, okay, the question is, what is the goal? You want to move a lot of weight for short distance so you can win a powerlifting competition well most world record holders do it in the sumo

because you got better mechanics but for training purposes i think you should change both for power lifting the goal is can i displace the highest amount of weight for a given range of motion? So the low bar squat will allow you to do that. Now, if you think about long-term health, you look at high bar squats. The reason why I say that is that you look at the incidence of hip replacement in powerlifters versus weightlifters. It's much greater than powerlifters. Yeah, really high. Because of my good friend Ed Cohn at the hip replacement. So the fact that you restrict the range of motion doesn't allow the performance,

for example, in all the rotators of the hip to gain optimal range. So if you are, again, it goes back to the goal. Do you want to compete in powerlifting and you want to be world champion? Well, you got a much harder squat, the low bar squat.

But if you're looking at squatting with a lot of carry over to a lot of different activities, I would say the high bar squat, if you're going to pick one is your best investment. If you, if you had to pick the high bar back squat, if you're going to pick one, is your best investment. If you had to pick the high bar back squat, front squat, or overhead squat as the only squat you could use for athletes you work with, which one would you use? The front squat. And this, I have a lot of statistical data on that because it is impossible to cheat on the front squat. But I'm talking ass to the grass front squat,

meaning you leave a stain in the carpet in the bottom position. In my opinion, for athletic purposes, all squats should be done that way. The overhead squat is a screening exercise. So it's very good to assess just with an empty bar or even a broomstick the potential for lower extremity injuries. But as far as a training exercise, you're going to be limited by your shoulder girdle strength. So I think that you could do it as a, you know, what I call a change of pace workout, but I wouldn't use it as a training exercise. That's for sure.

And with the front squat, from a technical standpoint, do you have any particular, assuming people aren't competing in Olympic lifting, do you have any preference in terms of arm placement? Do you have the arms kind of folded back with the elbows elevated? Do you have them crossed over? No, they should use it the way the Olympic lifters do it. So slightly wider in shoulder width, elbows up as high as you can,

and actually the elbows in. That locks the bar right in front of your throat. If you find the exercise comfortable in the front squat, you're not doing it correctly. You should feel some restriction in the neck when you front squat properly. Of course, after a few weeks, you won't feel the – it's like if you wear a wet T-shirt. It's uncomfortable for the first five minutes.

Then after that, you get used to it. So people will tolerate the stress of not breathing properly within a few workouts. But, for example, in sports, in a lot of sports, I've developed formulas where if I know your front squat, let's say your incline press and your power snatch, I can tell how fast you can speed skate or how fast you can push a bobsleigh or whatever else. I call them predictive formulas. But when I use a squat for prediction purposes, I only use a front squat. Got it. This next question is from John Fox, who's apparently a very big fan of your blog. Literally check it every day for new articles.

And that's Strength sensei yeah yeah strength sensei.com uh his question is he had quite a few questions but i'm selecting a few here one is what are the most bang for your buck things that people can do to improve testosterone and sex drive some people won't be happy with the answers change sexual partners but i mean as a rule for testosterone actually the the best thing to increase testosterone is to lower cortisol because the same raw material that makes testosterone and cortisol is called pregnenolone. Right. And under conditions of stress, your body is wired to preferentially go towards the cortisol pathway.

So anything that lowers cortisol will increase testosterone. For example, diminishing the amount of radiation exposure like cell phones, computers, use blah, blah, blah, get off the fucking Facebook. That would be one of them. High zinc, high protein containing foods, i.e. meat. There's a lot of research that backs up meat consumption for improving testosterone. So eating more meat, more red meat, but of course, you know, the quality of the meat makes a big difference. Cold exposure to cold baths will increase testosterone. What type of duration or frequency or protocol would you suggest?

I'm not up to date on the literature. I mean, you know more about this topic than I do. But that's one thing that I've seen some papers on, but I didn't really expand on it. But I think reducing stress and the quality of sleep, quality of sleep is underrated for producing testosterone. So you need to do what you need to do. So one of the things I recommend to people is to sleep in a bad cave. So the room you sleep in should be as dark as possible.

It's one of the things I talk a lot about seminars. I can add powerful executive seminar. One of the topics is the importance of sleep on regeneration, but I think it's the most underrated one. It's not a question I can answer in five minutes, but sleep, meat, cold baths,

and decreasing stress are the four, four most, uh, bang for your buck. Uh, and, and failing all that, a new sexual partner, it sounds like.

That's right. That's right. Because the, the, the thing is, is that, you know, it,

this is a reality, whether it's animal or, or, uh, human evidence, the, uh, changing sexual partners increases testosterone, but you may not,

you know, it's not for everybody, but the point is, is that, you know, yes, that question I'll answer you truthfully. So this question,

I could add a lot of caveats to this question, but this is John's question. I think it's a very common one. What supplements should everyone take? Whether men, women, or all people in a broad age range? I think the most underrated supplement, if you have a perfect diet, which is rare, is magnesium. Even with a perfect diet, you can't get enough magnesium. I don't care what you say. I've measured people's red blood cell magnesium for years. If there's one thing I consistently see low, it's that one.

And when you consistently improve it, you see changes all across blood work, right? So how much magnesium? I think males should take four grams a day, females 2.4. The second one. What type of magnesium? Sorry to interrupt. Magnesium, I think the best magnesium out there is magnesium 308, if I were to pick one. But I prefer the different chelates.

So I use glycinate, I use Orotate. If you look at the physiology behind it, and there's a lot of good research that's easily found, is that every form of magnesium tends to go to a specific tissue. So for example, magnesium glycinate as a preference for liver and muscle tissue. Magnesium Orotate tends to work more in the vascular system. Magnesium 308 is more of a GABA inducer, therefore it improves sleep. So personally, I take two grams of magnesium 308 at the last meal before going to bed, and I use various forms of chelates, like magnesium glycerophosphate from GABA mag. I use that. I use magnesium lysinate, glycinate.

I use, and it's good to vary the forms because as the research shows, it tends to go to different tissues. Got it. The second most important supplement, in my opinion, for the average person would be a good fish oil. And you should vary the fish oil. But when they add fish oil, I prefer the brands like the Omega Vale from Design avail from designs for health which has can you say that name one more time please omega avail from yeah from uh designs for health so this where do you have added d3 k1 and k2 when you add d3 k1 k2 the cardiovascular benefits of that fish oil go exponentially. Number three, it depends where you live around the world, but if you certainly live in the UK, Ireland, or Australia, you are zinc deficient.

So again, I prefer to use multiple forms of zinc, chelates, glycinate, orotate, blah, blah, blah. So broad-based zinc intake. Zinc chelates, like glycinate, orotate, blah, blah, blah. So broad-based zinc intake. In testosterone levels, zinc is underestimated. You will find, for example, when I worked a lot with hockey players, guys were trying to add, let's say, by the time they came to see me they usually were in their 30s they had usually two kids but they're always trying for a third or fourth child and they

became fertile after about four months of uh sorry zinc use so fertility is highly associated with zinc status but if you look at the, zinc status is one of the best predictors of quote unquote maleness. So the more androgenic you want to be, the more zinc you need. But to detoxify foreign estrogens, the enzymes that do that are also zinc based. So it works in multiple patterns. Zinc is known as a great organizer in human tissues so you you can't organize chemistry properly if you don't have enough zinc what what type of dosages do you typically recommend first-time clients you'll be surprised i use about 180 milligrams a day for about six months and if you ask Mark Houston or Esther Bloom,

anybody who does clinical nutrition on a regular basis, they will agree with that value because 30 milligrams. And the thing is, is that in the late 70s, you could change a guy's testosterone fairly rapidly with only 30 milligrams of supplements a day. But I don't see that anymore. The doses you need are about six times greater in the last 30 years. Is that just due to ground soil depletion or what is the cause? Multiple factors. I think there's ground depletion, the type of fertilizers we use, but also the stress of the toxic load from the environment. So if you're, let's say,

putting a shampoo that has a lot of estrogenic properties, you'll need to detoxify those molecules, and those molecules in hepatic detoxification processes almost always use zinc as one of the cofactors to detoxify those xenoestrogens. That makes perfect sense. All right. Let's shift gears just a little bit. I have just a couple more questions, and then I'd love to hear, of course, where everyone can find more information on everything you're up to.

Before we get to that, when you think of the word successful, who is the first person who comes to mind? Actually, Winston Churchill. Why is that? Well, this guy had balls. I mean, he stood up to Hitler. He rallied the United Kingdom. He refused to surrender. He's a Nobel Prize winner in literature.

Very few people know that. He was named Britain, most valuable Britain in 2002. I mean, he's the one who contributed to the defeat of the Nazi empire. I think that his attitude and his, he applied a lot of success principles too, like napping and so on. And he, he predicted a lot of things that the Americans did not listen to. For example, he predicted the iron curtain.

He told Roosevelt that he was getting screwed at Yalta by Stalin. You know, Roosevelt can see way too many things to the Russians. And we've had many problems since then, but he was a visionary. And he took a lot of decisions that were unpopular at the time because they required balls. And he was later found through history to have been right in the first place. So I think that if you want to study success, you should study Churchill.

Yeah, Churchill's a fascinating, fascinating character and also a great example of how incredibly productive you can be with some very widely perceived weaknesses as well. I mean, definitely a whole character and I think a good exemplar of how to focus on your strengths. Exactly. What is your favorite documentary or movie? You know what? As far as movies, I tend to have laser-like focus all day. So for me, a good movie involves 60 people getting killed in a gruesome way in the first

30 minutes. Like something like John wick. I mean, I watch movies to distract me. So if you ask me movies, I like it like the last samurai, like gladiator. I like movies where the hero has to struggle and overcome difficulty.

But, you know, there's a movie called The Imitation Game, which has none of these descriptions, and I really liked it. I'm a big movie buff, but for me, movies is to take my mind away from what I do every day. You know, obviously I run high on dopamine and acetylcholine, so action movies are a far better choice for me than Sleepless in Seattle. But, you know, I really like National Geographic, the documentaries they have. I really like learning about animal life.

My daughter and I share that stuff. I really like to learn about ecosystems. So those channels, you know, I like the History Channel. I'm not a big movie TV watcher. If I'm going to watch something, it's usually a movie that I rent. When I'm overseas and I'm sick and tired of teaching, I'll go watch a movie to take my mind off. I like Quentin Tarantino movies.

I like usually action-based stuff. I have a movie recommendation that you might enjoy. There's a movie called, and I'm going to butcher this, but Un Prophète. A prophet about this young Middle Eastern kid who gets thrown into a French prison and gets adopted by the

Corsican Mafia and it tracks his growth from the lowest on the totem pole to the highest on the totem pole. It's an amazing action movie. Really, really good. Did you see 22 Bullets? No, I haven't seen 22 Bullets. That's another French movie with Javert,

which is a great movie about a guy that tries to retire from the mafia and they don't let him. If you like action, that's a great movie. 22 Bullets, I'll check it out. In the last, say, 6 to 12 months, what $100 or less purchase has most positively impacted your life? Actually, it was a gift. So I'm not sure what the price was, but it can't be that high.

It's called the Bamboo Bench. I featured it on my website. All it is, it's a sliced foam roller inside a leather condom with velcro straps and you put it over a regular bench and it has this half moon shape where your spine rests so when you do pressing movements you can drop the elbows much further than with a regular bench. It allows for a more free scapular movement, and it allows for a greater range of motion when you lift, but it allows you for pain-free upper body pressing.

It's called the bamboo bench. Yeah, all it is, it's like a condom that you put on a bench that has a half moon um a spine roller inside of it and it if you go to my website and you search under bamboo bench there's a video that i shot in stuttgart explaining how to use it but for you know for what it costs or what you have to invest it's a great uh investment on the health and strength of your shoulders. Very cool. That sounds like my next purchase. Yes.

What does the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like? People are fascinated by morning rituals. So just in your ideal sort of, let's just say it's a work day. What is your ideal 60 of, let's just say it's a work day. What is your, what is your ideal 60 to 90 minutes look like? It depends if I'm on the road or not, but let's say you're not on the road. Okay. Like today. So I wake up early at 10, I wake up at four. Why do I wake up at four? Well, nobody's going to bother me. So I've got two hours to myself. So if that week I have my daughter, I can do whatever I want

to do for two hours before I wake her up, make her breakfast and drive to school. So I wake up with a ravishing appetite. So every day I start when I'm at home with some type of wild meat, some type of nuts and sometimes berries or avocados so i eat that then i make coffee and i'm quite fanatical about the way i make coffee how do you make your coffee well for example the water has to be near freezing point the reason why i do that is that it takes longer to warm up the water because it takes longer to warm up then there's more time for the steam to diffuse through the coffee beans therefore the coffee has more caffeine more of all the antioxidants when you drink that coffee if I make you a cup of coffee

Tim today you may fall asleep Valentine's Day so so so people who've been to my house and drink my coffee, they start having convulsions in their faces after two sips. But I really like very cold coffee. And one thing that is high in pesticides is actually coffee. It's one of the most sprayed plants on the planet. So I get my beans either from the Dominican Republic. I've got a client who owns their own plantation and when i go to dr i stock up or uh one of my assistant teachers carlos castro is from

the columbia and he brings me in uh organic coffee from columbia or i buy the one from kona Island in Hawaii. So I really like the coffee beans to be of choice. So I drink a cup of coffee and then typically... Just black or how do you take your coffee? Like my soul, black. And sometimes I put actually coconut oil in it if I need to get a bit more wired. Sometimes I use very, very heavy cream, like about 3%, 5%. It's funny because I was in London at the Marriott, and there's a Polish waiter, and I asked for coffee,

and the guy comes in with already what the British call double cream in it. And I go, how did you know I like my coffee like that? And the kid says, I read your post every day. So, but I, sometimes I scream, but probably 70% of the time I drink it black, like my soul. But the,

um, and then I read, I like to read one hour on, uh, non specific to my job stuff. So I may read, let's say a biography on Churchill, or I may read, uh, say, a biography on Churchill or I may read a book like 59 Seconds. They're more what you would call self-improvement books.

I read recently a book. I probably read a book a day. So I'm a very good speed reader. So I read a book on resilience or this morning at breakfast, I was reading a French book on German grammar because, you know. It sounds like a page turner. I was in Germany last month and I realized I'd lost a lot of my German.

So I said, okay, I've got to catch up my German. Or sometimes what I do is I'll type in sentences on Bing, translate, and I look at the German equivalent or the Swedish equivalent, whatever language I want to learn. Just the sentences I use all the time in my practice. So like keep your back straight, go lower in a squat, blah, blah, blah. So I do that. And then, yeah, they're not page turners, but it's stuff i like to read or even when i'm overseas i buy classic comic books like asterix in let's say in swedish or lukiluk in swedish or whatever and i read those because it's a fun way to learn a foreign language without really uh stressing myself that's exactly the same

thing that i do also uh by because it's also heavy on dialogue. Yes. So you get conversation. I know that I say you're under arrest in 76 languages. But the thing is that – and then after that, I read one hour specific to my job. And I like to read a lot of my colleague's stuff. So one guy I really like is Josh Bryant. So he just wrote a really good book on interval training. So that's what I'm going to read tomorrow. And then I don't read much on the internet because I find there's too much bullshit.

So I use a Kindle a lot because it allows me to flip the pages faster. And what I like about the Kindle is I can actually highlight what I find interesting. And then at the end of my reading, I reread what I highlighted, which increases your retention by another 70%. And then on Sundays, I tend to reread the highlights of all the books I read. So that goes up to 95%. People always wonder how come I got a good memory. Well, there's some tricks to it,

you know, so repetition is important. And then, um, after that, then I start my day at work. So I'll write, I'll coach or whatever I need to do on the road oh i usually

if i drive my daughter as soon as i get back i train i've got a very good gym in my house if i'm on the road i wake up i eat breakfast i do some reading it depends on the distance of the gym what is your go-to breakfast at home? It's always a wild meat. Always. How do you prepare that typically? I typically fry it in goat butter. Got it. So it could be... This morning was chicken breast.

I rarely eat chicken for breakfast. It's always a red meat. But I'm showing you something different today. And then I always have a nut, whether it's walnut. I really like macadamia nuts, but I vary that so I don't give up intolerances. And then in Colorado, you can

get very good berries year-round, so I eat sometimes berries or I eat avocados. And then, like I said, the coffee. On the road, it's one of the reasons why I stay at the Marriott worldwide is it's the only

place I'll serve steak and eggs. you know, it's really hot. When you ask for steak in Italy, you might as well ask the question in the aquarium on top of your head. They're like, well, steak? You eat meat for breakfast? So, in Italy, you might as well ask the question in the aquarium on top of your head. They're like, well, steak? You eat meat for breakfast? In Sweden,

they have these ethnic shrimp that I like. They're very small shrimp. I'll buy it at the supermarket, keep it in my mini bar. In the morning, I may have shrimp and cashews for breakfast. One thing that i don't

negotiate on ever is breakfast i'm a maniac about breakfast i don't want to eat croissant or like prison eggs as my friends would call them for breakfast and the salmon is always farm salmon it tastes disgusting so uh in manchester there was no way i could get steak and egg for breakfast so my sister and i we bought sardines so add sardines and brisbane nuts for breakfast the next day so i i don't negotiate on that for me i need to have meat fish or seafood and some nuts that i find for me it's been one of the secrets of my success because when you teach, you've got to pay attention. You've got to remember what you've got to say.

You've got to be enthusiastic. And if I were to eat what hotels typically give, I wouldn't do so well. Even when I fly, if I go to Europe, I only fly Swiss Air or Air France because if I land, I always have a connection. Air France has the best business or first-class lounge in the world. Second is Swiss Air.

And when I fly west, if I go to Australia, I always fly with Air New Zealand because, again, the quality of the lounge is important to me for the food and you know can you take a shower

American based airlines are useless United, Delta American you may fly with Air Botswana you probably get better service and And fuck, you may fly with Air Botswana. You'll probably get better service. And, you know, I found with these airlines I named,

they actually believe in quality service, you know. And, for example, I think Air France is great. Like I landed from Dusseldorf in Paris. Somebody was there to pick me up, put my name, drove me to the first-class lounge. I didn't have to call your customers. They take your passport for you. They go do it for you.

Lufthansa does the same thing, so does Swiss Air. And people say, well, you waste money traveling first-class. I don't believe that because I give a much better seminar if I fly first-class than if I fly economy. One of my unique abilities is i can fall asleep in the shooting yard i can sleep anywhere anytime but i need to sleep when i fly over and when you fly first class you're guaranteed quality sleep because there's no one-year-old kid crying you know uh some guy opening up this Tupperware with fucking microwave broccoli.

You know, so you can say I'm a snob. Yes, I am. But I've been over the years, even as early as 1982, when I was paying for my own flights, I've always flown business or first because the quality of your teaching will dictate your success or the quality of your coaching will dictate your success and that will pay way enough your first class tickets out you know i've had discussions with people about that but i still believe and also it's a mindset you know you want a first class life fly first class yeah yeah i've um i've found for myself you, it took me a long time. My family didn't grow up with a lot of money. It took me a long time to make the transition from economy to business. And the only reason that I made that jump was because I tried to save money on an international flight specifically and had to do a speaking engagement the next day. And it was a disaster because I couldn't sleep. And it was,

it all came down to preserving the ability to sleep if there's some type of business engagement on the other end. If you could have one billboard anywhere, what would it say and where would it be? That's an interesting question. Probably it would say, know yourself. Where would you put it? Times Square. Times Square. I mean, population density. Because I look at, you know, in my industry, but I take shooting lessons, right? I love to shoot.

I think it's a great relaxation exercise. And I said to him, and my shooting instructor follows a lot of the strength industry. And he said they have the same issues in the shooting industry with people wanting the attention of the consumer, right? And I think that the key to success in anything is know yourself first. And then, you know, Kolkhoff, he was telling his students that there's one thing that he keeps constant is his weightlifting prep. He's learned over the years not to mess with that. But he says the other 45 weeks or so left out of the year, he goes on a day-to-day basis.

And he says, training is like food. Sometimes you eat more. Sometimes you eat less. Sometimes you eat less. You have to eat when you're hungry. So, you know, if you look at it, it's a very simplistic way to explain training,

but it's very true. So, you know, he explains why he only squats twice a week. A lot of guys in this field will squat nine times a week. But if you look at his longevity, it's really high.

He's remained pretty much injury free um and the thing is is that you know for example ed conan he has a way to train it's very different than what kolkoff would do but i respect ed a lot but i found over the years all these successful people figured out what worked best for them. And it's correct to ask guys like me, you know, the so-called gurus or the senseis for advice. But at the end of the day, you have to make the decision. I mean, I can make you make a more enlightened decision because I've made a lot of mistakes. I mean, the only guy I know who's never, never, never made a mistake in his life pumps gas in a gas station in British Columbia, in Kelowna.

You know, he's my age. He never made a mistake. He still makes $8 an hour. So you learn by making mistakes. And, you know, there's a saying, good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment. I tell that in my seminars. I often tell stories of how I screwed up medals at the Olympics, but I didn't make that same mistake twice.

That's why in speed skating, it's probably the sport I'm most successful in because early on, I made quite a few mistakes and I learned how to do them again. What advice would you give to your 30-year-old self? Stop working so much.

I used to work 20 hours a day, Tim. That's a lot of hours. Plus, I would train an hour. So I thought that sleep was for wimps. Well, it's not true. I mean, you know, I think there's another book that I read in 91, which changed my outlook. It was called Life 101.

And it depends. It's an old book. Sometimes you'll find there's two authors. Sometimes there's one author. But there was actually only one real author to the book. So eventually it was Peter McDowell. But he taught me how to distinguish the difference between a fantasy and a goal. And I won't give you the punchline, but it has to do a lot with – you have to do the exercise in the book.

So in the book, you'll say – you'll give some theory, always in a funny way. Then you'll say, do you have to do the exercise in the book so in the book you'll say you'll give some theory always in a funny way then you'll say you have 20 minutes yes or no if it's yes well do the exercise you don't have 20 minutes don't keep on reading and the people who keep on reading never get the full essence of the book if he if he asks you do you have 20 minutes yes or no you don't have 20 minutes put the book down next time you have 20 minutes, put the book down. Next time when you have 20 minutes, do the exercise. But that was a life-changing book for me. And after that, my success at the international level skyrocketed when I applied those principles. But if I were to think back on my life, I should have had more fun

and I should have worked a lot less. And then actually when I read your book, I was always starting to evolve towards more free time and better organization. And you recommended to me in personal conversation more books like the one by your friend, I think it's Edward Beruda. It's about simplify your life I forget the author anyway I read him I decided to have less goals

and the more I evolve it's again simplify simplify simplify simplify and I tell that to some of my best students like say go on vacation it's not so hard with my non-British, non-American students,

but Canadians, Americans, and British tend to way overwork. Yeah, I agree. It's blocking it out ahead of time. Really, really, really critical. Putting those things on the calendar so that work doesn't swell to fill all of the voids. Well, Charles, this is,

this has been a lot of fun. I always love chatting and catching up. Where can people find everything about you and what would you like them to check out? The best place to find my stuff is a strength sensei.com. And then if people want to attend seminars there's an anglic called a calendar of events and it's probably the most simplistic way to it's a world map and there's like arrows so if you don't want to travel so much and let's say you live in australia and you see i'm coming to perth and click the perth flag and then it'll

tell you which seminars there are but also there's different ways to search based on topic, what type of class you want. And my next project is I'm working on a membership-only site. The reason is because of social media, people ask these questions. I don't have any time on social media to explain them. But on the membership side, people will be able to say, I'll say, for example, this month, and we're going to really go into detail on choosing the right set, choosing the right rep range, right? And I'll talk to it for, let's say, 90 minutes. So people will be able to watch that, and I'll give routines and recipes and tips

and anticipate it to be a very successful site because there's a demand for it and people are willing to pay a nominal fee which is less than 20 bucks a month to get top level information because you know facebook is nice i leave tips there and i leave links to my website but it never allows for and i got this advice from you actually for videos on me explaining something. The written word never really catches everything. And there's a lot to be learned from body language. And if I explain a technique, I can explain in writing, but you can tell that the questions that people didn't understand at all.

So most people are visual learners. So the membership site, which should be out within the next three months, will be up soon. And of course, we'll broadcast that. And you'll announce that on strengthsensei.com. Where can people find you on social media if they want to just receive those updates as you publish them? Strengthsensei on Facebook. Got it. All right. right go ahead i'm sorry go ahead and i've got a strength sensei equivalent in german spanish russian and french so if you go strength sensei

deutsch it'll be the german version in french sensei de la force and sensei de la forza in spanish so so depending on your native tongue the same information is there and i've got about a dozen translation in different languages to my site so english is not your first language and you're more comfortable let's say with german or dutch or french uh the most popular articles get translated and even in Russian. So it's picking up. I mean, my website, I think it's 83,000 on Alexa. So for being in that new business for a year and a half, it's a pretty good score. Yeah.

And I will obviously, everybody listening, link to all of the sites and to Charles on social media in the show notes. So you guys can find the links and resources and so on at 4hourworkweek.com forward slash podcast, all spelled out. Any parting comments or parting words, Charles? Well, the parting words is thank you. It's a great honor for me to be in the same list of invitees as Schwarzenegger and Anthony Robbins. Those are big names. You're a big name too. Yeah, but you know what?

It's a big pleasure for me and I really appreciate your time and the ability to be reaching your audience I think that what I want to be most grateful for is that I think that people who have a ill-perceived notion of me will know more of my human side and I think that's a big factor in life and I'm forever grateful for that opportunity, Tim. Oh, my pleasure. I really wanted people to have the chance to kind of sit down with us at the table and really dig deep and get to know you a bit. So I really appreciate it. I'm sure people

will let us know if they want a round two, which I'm sure will be the case. And until next time, everybody, thank you for listening. Thank you, Tim. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in the 4-Hour Body. Did not get paid for that. And I travel with it to avoid getting sick.

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