Weights and Plates Podcast - #1 - Bodybuilding Idols, Lifting Gurus, and Misinformation: Robert Santana Cuts Through the Fitness Jungle

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Starting Strength Coach and Registered Dietitian Robert Santana kicks off the Weights and Plates Podcast with an episode charting his journey through the jungle of fitness and nutrition information. Though he's taken a number of wrong turns along the way, Robert's journey has taught him the value of some basic principles for fitness and body composition. Robert is joined on the podcast by Starting Strength Coach Trent Jones.   First, those guys and girls on the fitness magazine covers that look "ripped" and "toned" have more muscle mass than you do, and they're probably stronger too. So, if you want to look better -- leaner and more muscular -- then you need to get stronger, and heavy barbell training is the answer.   Second, you can't ignore the influence of genetics and steroids on the looks that bodybuilders, fitness models, and today's celebrities achieve. Genetics play a big role in how a person looks, from their bone structure to their muscle insertions to their natural propensity to store body fat and where that fat is distributed. In other words, if you're a hard gaining, skinny ectomorph, don't expect to look like The Rock after training for a year. You can look good, but you can't fundamentally change your genetics.   Stay tuned for more episodes of Weights & Plates. In the meantime you can find Robert at the links below:   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert's Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.marmaladecream.com

Welcome to the first ever Weights and Plates podcast. My name is Robert Santana and joining me today is Trent Jones. Howdy folks. And today we're going to introduce you to the podcast and kind of go over what I'm going to ramble about for these weeks, hopefully months, maybe years to come, right? That's right. Well, yeah, we've got a thousand episodes mapped out here. We'll get to all of those in time. So, we got about the next 10 years of episodes mapped out, I'd say. mapped out, I'd say. Very cool. Very cool. So I guess maybe I should probably start with the name. Weights and Plates. So that's the name of my gym. That's the name of my website. Now it's the name of the podcast. That's probably a good place to start, wouldn't you think? Yeah, absolutely. I guess it kind of goes back to when I was in college, I wanted to, I guess, started reading

fitness magazines like a lot of guys in my generation that go to the gym have, and got really into nutrition. I was studying pre-pharmacy at the time, taking a lot of science classes. I found that I was more interested in diet and exercise. So I came up with this idea that, well, I was a college kid. I'm like, maybe I should major in these two things. And I could talk about that in a later podcast. But long story short, I'm a dietician now. I have a master's in kinesiology. And I'm a starting strength coach. I have an NSCA certified strength and conditioning specialist for our listeners that know what that is or know what the starting strength coach is. I think we have a lot of those since I kind of moderate the boards on that

website. But for those of you who are not familiar, you should go to that website because there's a lot of good information there as well. Um, yeah, so that's startingstrength.com. Startingstrength.com. I think you've written, gosh, you've written, do you know how many articles you've written for starting strength at this point? Oh, hell, I guess I can pull it up since we can, we have time, right? It's a bunch. yeah. I think if you go look up any of Robert's articles he's written, you can search for other stuff by this author. And there's a bunch. Some good content there. Let's see.

Oh, I have a lot. I have eight articles. And I have actually more videos than articles. I didn't realize that. 13 videos and four small articles. So I have eight articles, 14 videos, and four little short articles that they call their training log. Those are those thousand word or less articles or maybe slightly over, but everything I post there gets posted to my website as well. But that's kind of

where I spent a lot of my time. And at my gym, we're teaching a lot of the methods outlined in the book. And I've basically been contributing a lot on the diet front to it because, you know, they specialize in barbell training. And I'm one of their barbell coaches, but I'm also a dietitian. So back to that, that's how I kind of came up with the name weights. You know, you lift weights, plates. That's what you eat off of, you know. So I'm a dietitian that can teach you how to weight lift. I'd say that I'm equally competent at both skills, although I get a lot of attention for the diet because of my circle, there's a lot more strength coaches and diet coaches.

Right. A lot that are bigger and stronger than me. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I'm glad. I'm glad. Hopefully, we can just talk about the weights today because I just ate fried chicken. The plates. I think I'm killing my credibility here for talking about plates.

Yeah. That's okay. I talking about plates. Yeah. That's okay. I have you here. Yeah. So, yeah. So, my name is Trent Jones, if you're wondering who this is speaking. And I am a starting strength coach as well. And I work with our good friend, Darren Deaton, who is a physical therapist over on the 40 Fit Radio podcast.

We have a starting strength gym as well. And so I am joining Robert here today just to kind of be your foil, right? And ask you some questions and talk about the training side of nutrition as well, because we know those two things go hand in hand. But I wanted to ask you, talking about your background here, when did you get interested in strength training and fitness? Do you remember the first time that you really got interested in this? Was it in high school or before then? Well, I am a child of the late 80s, early 90s. And I was a big WWF, now WWE fan. Right.

But, you know, I'm dating myself here. So I was a WWF fan and everybody was big, jacked and strong. And my father was big and strong, you know. He was a big, strong dude and he lived, he actually lived at a YMCA in one of the residences. But the one in, where is it? It's in Niles, Illinois. If you drive past, they have a replica of the Leaning Tower sitting outside of it.

Oh, yeah. So they call it the Leaning Tower YMCA. Anyway, so like my dad exposed me to wrestling because he was a big Hulk Hogan fan. He was a big Arnold Schwarzenegger fan. So I watched all the action movies growing up. I was a big into the Rocky movies and Stallone's bad action movies. I love bad action movies. I can still watch them today. Oh, yeah. Well, of course, yeah. Because, well, bad is good Stallone's bad action movies. I love bad action movies. I can still watch them today.

Oh yeah. Well, of course. Yeah. Cause it will, bad is good. Yeah. Exactly.

It was so good. It's bad. That genre has died because now, you know, everything has to be so, I don't know. They just, yeah,

we don't, we don't need another mission impossible. What we need, we need another Schwarzenegger. Like we need another Terminator. Yeah. And, and the rock doesn't quite cut it because he speaks good English.

Right, yeah. He's way too articulate for a good action hero. You have to have bad English to do this. I mean, listen to Stallone, listen to Arnold, you have two completely different accents. Jean-Claude Van Damme, Bruce Lee, that's like, yeah, that's a good point. Think about it. The foreign accents made it even much better.

It was like the picture of American action, but everybody had an accent. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But anyways, like just being around that, like, you know, just being big and jacked was cool, you know, at the time. And, you know, blowing shit up was cool, you know, on the screen. So my first time in a weight room was probably 92, 93, I want to say.

My dad took me to the weight room in this Y, and it was like the weight room in many of the Ys. It looked like a dungeon. Black, you know, white walls, black rubber floors, white equipment that you kind of see in old weight rooms now. Right, right. And I just remember he benched a whole lot, and I couldn't do anything because I would have been, what, 11, I think, 10 or 11. I was under 12, so I remember he had to be 12 to be able to do anything in there with supervision.

Yeah, yeah. So I had to be like, I don't know, somewhere between 8 and 10, I started going in there and just watching him. I couldn't do anything. But he showed me a dip, and then he put me on the parallel bars, and then I just sank. Right. I was a little kid. And he's like, well, just hold yourself up there for a few seconds, you know? And I just would follow him to all the machines, and he'd get his workout done,

and then he'd get done, and we'd just hang out. So it's kind of like image was planted in my head. So I've had a soft spot for these run-down, dungy-type gyms because of that. So I could not wait to lift after this, and I couldn't because I was too young, and I was not independent. I couldn't obviously take myself to a gym. I didn't have one at home. That wasn't a thing. Right, yeah.

And then the myths were circulating. So my dad, so I have two stepbrothers. I'm the only child of both of my parents. So my dad remarried and she had two children from a previous marriage. All of us are men now. And they were my stepbrothers and they are Eastern European. So they have these great Eastern European genetics and they look like bodybuilders without touching weight. I mean, now they have a fake belly with the ab outline, you know, because they're almost 40, you know.

But, you know, you look at them and you think they're doing something even now. They're still like sub 15% body fat, you know. And then my brother, because he doesn't know any different. He's lived in that, you know, physique his whole life. He's like, what are you talking about? I'm like skinny now. I don't even lift man. Right. I'm like, you live in Los Angeles. You're still, you know, way more than everybody there, but you're in better shape than everybody everywhere else, you know? So my dad told all of us that if we lifted weights too young, it would stunt our growth because that was the common myth of the time.

Right. Yes. I heard that growing up. Yeah. And it didn't bother me much. I wanted to get into a weight room. And then some of the guys that were already in sports and junior high were taller than me. So I didn't see the correlation. Right. Right. Yeah. I'm like, this guy's 6'2". What are you talking about, man? Right. Yeah. I'm like, this guy's six, two. What are you talking about, man? Yeah. It's interesting. Right. Cause, um, you know, I, I, I think I was really exposed to lifting weights in the weight room in football. So our junior high weight room, I believe that was the first time we ever got to actually see a weight room. It was tiny, you know, I can't remember what we had, probably some dumbbells. It might've been one barbell in there.

Rusty plates. Rusty plates. Oh yeah. All the whole, the whole works. And then of course, high school, you know, you're a freshman and you see all these like huge, like enormous looking seniors and juniors on the varsity team. And you're like, you see those guys pumping iron and out there and getting the same image in my head, man. I remember. Yeah. And that was a great, yeah, that was, that was a much bigger weight room. Also rusty, dingy, hadn't been, you know, mopped in at least a couple decades and it was great. But yeah, it's interesting. There's somewhere, I don't know when that happened, but at some point, like we all knew, and I knew that if you wanted to get big and strong,

like you went and you lifted weights and you trained hard, easy, scientific, like, you know, getting fancy with the programming, none of that really entered the equation. And that's, that wasn't my image of training. But at the same time, I also remember that narrative of, of things like, well, you know, you shouldn't lift weights too young because it'll stunt your growth. Or, you know, if you you want to do if you want to get big you got to do low reps if you want to get cut you got to do high reps you know all the crazy myths right i remember hearing that it was kind of like at some point there is this different angle that entered into the the mythology of training which was more prescriptive like you know x y and z creates this adaptation and and you Y, and Z creates this adaptation and, and, you know,

a different approach creates this adaptation. And yeah, that's true to an extent, but all the mythology was wrong. Right. Yeah. Oh yeah. But yeah, it's, it's kind of funny. I'm not sure when exactly that cultural shift happened, but it, this is what I seem to learn talking to guys who are older than me is that they all knew like for a long time, we've all known, like, you want to get strong and be a good athlete. It's like you're going to lift some heavy stuff and you're going to do some basic, really hard conditioning. And your whole training program might consist of, like, eight exercises. And then somehow in the 90s, somewhere that all kind of fell apart and it got really complicated. I don't know.

I mean, I think Yates was Mr. O for the first part of the 90s and Ronnie took over later. Yeah, yeah. I know Yates changed the way, I don't want to really go into bodybuilding too much, it's not really a bodybuilding podcast, but I know that bodybuilding of the 70s and that era, 60s, 70s, 80s, or even before then when it was even more niche uh really changed in the 90s and it became about getting as big as humanly possible and these guys were you know probably taking more drugs in the previous generation and doing more exercises and one of the things and you know i'll reference steroids periodically because i have my problems with how information

has been based upon what the drugs do versus what, you know, your diet and your exercise can do. But, you know, they allow you to do more. That's why people take them. You know, I think Jose Canseco once said he would not have been a major league player without steroids. He's like, he was a painfully mediocre ball player. When somebody was asking him, you know, like some of these guys like, you know, Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds were gifted ball players and the Roids allowed them to do even better, you know, you couldn't fake the technical proficiency of these guys, but some of the guys made it just because they were on drugs, too, and some of them have admitted it. But the reason I bring that up early on is because a lot of what we know, or what we think we know

today, a lot of what's being promoted today, and what's been promoted since probably, like you said, the mid to late 90s, early 2000s is extrapolation from training on steroids, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point, right? Yeah. So you bring up a memory and this is relevant. So I remember in high school, I knew I needed to get bigger because I was a smaller guy. I was 160 pounds, 162 pounds, maybe. And I was trying to, trying to gain some weight and I'm not a big framed guy. I'm about five foot eight. So I wasn't starting with a big frame anyway. And so I remember going to the, the GNC store and talking to the guy behind the counter and like, I need to gain some weight. I want to get, I want, I need to bulk. Right. And he's like, he's like, well, how much are you

looking to put on? What, like what time? And you know, I was like, well, I got two months experience. Yeah. I was like, well, I got two months left of off season. Uh, you know, can I put on 15 pounds? He's like lean muscle. He's like, you better take steroids, brother. He was joking. And he's like, and I was like, uh, he's like, or do you just want to bulk up? And I'm like, well, I don't know what the difference is. Of course I went lean muscle, but I was like, well, what about just bulking? He's like, okay, well you can do that here. Take this stuff. And I remember it was just some like generic mass gainer, 9,000. And they all had it's like thousand number. Yeah. No, it 9000 yeah and uh i remember that thing was bundled with a dvd and the dvd was a bunch of bodybuilders of

the era it was like branch warren uh ronnie coleman might have been in it but he says a bunch of these body jay cutler a bunch of these bodybuilding guys were in it and i remember they had like a program in there that's like how to put one inch on your arms in 24 hours and i've seen that yeah oh i think i did something like this once yeah and so it basically it was it was all about like it required they're like all right you can only do this like once a year at max you know and it's going to take all this training so we recommend like this six weeks of preparation before you're ready to put put the inch on your arms which right there right. So we recommend like this six weeks of preparation before you're ready to put it, put the inch on your arms, which right there, right? So you're going to do six weeks of training before you do the workout. And on the day of,

on the day of, it basically consisted of like, just like ridiculously long supersets of all these different curls and tricep extensions and, um, separated by like between every session. There were like three or four sessions throughout the whole day that you're going to do all these crazy supersets. And they were all separated by you need to drink a glass. It's like wake up in the morning, 8 a.m. Drink a glass of cell tech protein. Do like, you know, eight sets of these curls.

Yeah. And then it's like, all right, drink a glass of Celltech, rest for three hours, come back to the gym. So basically, if you do the whole thing, you've gone through like half of a tub of Celltech. And yeah, and I had no idea at the time. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. Like, I'm going to try this. I got to put an inch on my arms.

I'm going to try this. I got to put an inch on my arms. But yeah, I suppose that's to say that, A, you know, these guys that are selling this product, A, they're selling a product. B, these guys that are selling the product are very chemically assisted. That's been a lot of products in our business. when I, when I finally reached the weight room, I was 15 and I joined the swim team. And, uh, then that's when I first got exposed to the weight room and the coach had us doing the pyramid, you know, um, Rip talks about the pyramid. Rip is Mark Ripoteau, the author of starting strength. So, you know, might throw that name out there periodically. And he referenced the pyramid in the starting strength textbook. And I actually was subjected to that every single swim season. And I got a little bit stronger because I was aging and my testosterone was going up as a function of puberty.

But you basically did a set of 10, a set of eight, set of six, set of four, and a set of two. And then by the time you got to the set of two, the weight's ascending, the reps are descending, and then you feel like you're strong. And then you see the guy who's a senior, and he's benching two plates, you know, and you're like, oh, I want to be as strong as that guy. Anyways, at 15, I started with the bar, and I think my senior year, I was close to 200-pound bench. But that was the only lift that we did with a barbell, thinking back on it now. Just the bench press. Just the bench press.

We did the bench press, and chin-ups were encouraged, but most of the guys are too weak to do them. At least the younger guys. I was a sophomore. I was 15. It was my first year in the sport. By my second year, I was able to crank out some chin-ups. And then by, I think, my senior year, I could do like 10 in a row and do them wide grip. And it was just a non-issue. Your lats get really, really strong from swimming. And we could do an episode on that another time. But basically, you know, I developed these swimming muscles. My back got wider. My triceps were more developed.

You know, my pecs got bigger. And part of that's genetic, too. My dad has well-developed pecs at baseline, whether he trains or not. I'm the same way. So, you know, swimming filled them out more, which was nice. I'm the same way. So, you know, swimming filled them out more, which was nice. But, you know, I was looking at the guys that were going to state. And I know now that these guys were the more gifted athletes. They were very lean. You can see all their muscles. They were very thin. To me, they looked big because all I saw was muscle mass versus myself. I was 160 to 165 pound. I guess I consider myself chubby. I don't now know that I was just, you know, under muscled. Some people might call that skinny fat, you know? Sure.

And that's, you know, what I would define that as now is, you know, you have a normal level of body fat, but you don't have a lot of muscle mass, you know? But I consider that fat because I didn't look like that guy with the six pack who was winning the state meet, you know? Yes, right. Yep. And that's another thing that kind of evolved in the early nineties. So my dad was one of these big construction worker type guys, you know, he didn't, he didn't have abs, but he didn't have a belly, you know, his chest led his stomach. That's how I describe this. Now, if your chest leads your stomach, you're probably in good shape, you know? Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's just kind of look thick. Yeah. And I think still like, you know, you're out in the world, that's acceptable. People just

say, oh, you look, you look strong, you know? Yeah. In the, you know, you're out in the world, that's acceptable. People just say, oh, you look strong, you know? Yeah. In the, you know, pop culture, that's fat, I guess, especially if you're in, like, the bodybuilding circles or on YouTube. Stay the hell off there if you haven't already. YouTube, Instagram, you know, everybody looks like an anatomy chart, right? But out in the world, if somebody sees you and you look like, you know, a guy who has a chest that's bigger than your stomach, irrespective of muscle definition, they think you're just strong, you know? Yeah, sure, sure. You look good in a t-shirt. Yeah, and that's how my dad was, you know? He, you know, he had some arm definition because he did lift. He was in the weight room, but for the most part, he's just a big, strong guy, you know? And I didn't get the, you know, I'm not as thick as he is. He's got the, you know, one of the somatotypes. He'd be like an endomorph, I guess not as thick as he is. He's got the, you know, one of the somatotypes. He'd be like an endomorph, I guess.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's got bigger bone structure and all that stuff. Yeah. The guy has a big, he has big, thick wrists that are probably as thick as my arm, you know? Yeah. Big ankles, you know, and he's just a bigger dude and he's taller.

And at the time he was like six foot 205 and, you know, you know, pretty good shape. He looked like a big muscular guy if i had to put a body fat percentage on him i'd say he's probably 20 22 something like that but uh you know he lifted a lot i think he spent time to leg press he leg pressed like 800 or 900 or something like that and you know bench three and this is just a guy jerking around in the gym and you know lifting a decent amount of weight um so at some point in the late 90s, this fixation with looking like an anatomy chart started, having visible abs, you know, at all costs. And, you know, in bodybuilding, that was always desired, that you just had these ripped

abs. But I feel like, you know, the mainstream movie or TV industry or other areas of pop culture, it wasn't as pushed you know even you could watch some old 80s movies like lethal weapon you know mel gibson's pretty lean there but i guess like growing up i didn't like obsess over that didn't become a thing that i paid attention to until probably when i was in high school yeah right like late 90s early 2000s it seemed to be this fixation like you have magazines in the supermarket. Now it's not even like muscular development where the guys are like 260 and rip those already existed. I'm talking about your basic health magazine would have a guy who's pretty

lean, not as lean as a bodybuilder and of normal size. And that, that became the standard. Okay. This is a healthy male right here. I mean, it was called men's health,

right? Right. Right. And then all the guys in the movies look like fitness models. You know, that's what we would refer to them as now. You know, you got these actors now that are, you know, probably a buck 50 to a buck 70, depending on height. And they're very lean. You can see all their muscles. Yeah, that's, this is another cultural shift that happened that, yeah, you're right. So like in the 80s and early 90s, I think about the image that pops in my head is that the American gladiator type. Or WWF, yeah.

WWF, right? And some of those guys were like super lean, but generally they were big and strong and jacked looking. Not necessarily anatomy charts, right? Yeah. some people trace this change back to the movie fight club with Brad Pitt. Yeah. Where he was super lean and you know, it's the fame, you know, it's just some famous scenes where he takes his shirt off and you know, it's a guy just beat up.

Yeah. Bloody, but then he has ripped abs. Yeah. His abs are just popping out everywhere. And yeah, you're right. There,

there was, there was some changeover where like you remember the big jacked guys from the nineties and the eightiess but now all of a sudden everyone's getting super lean and yeah it's it's so strange nowadays yeah we look at we look at our pop culture nowadays and it's just kind of a given like you can't get a role in a leading movie you know you can't be a superhero unless you're you know eight percent body fat yeah and uh or as before you just had to be at least 250. Yeah, right. Yeah. It was more like 200 because the camera adds the other 50 pounds. I learned,

I learned that from Schwarzenegger's biography. They made him lose muscle and get down to 209 because at 240, they thought it was too much. Oh yeah. Oh, sure. Sure. They wanted to look 240, not look 300. Yeah. Yeah. But no no you're right the wwf body was basically you know big barrel chest you know big arms and you know just whole kogan right big muscular guy but he's not he's not super ripped no no you know a little bit of a i wouldn't even call it a gut he just didn't have abs you know yeah big barrel chest. Scott Hall was the one that I think of because I'm Cuban. So he played Razor Ramon. He's not even Cuban in real life, but his character was Cuban.

So he was one of my favorites. And, you know, he had the big barrel chest, big traps, big back, you know, and then just no definition in his stomach. And it didn't matter. You know, that was like the norm. And that's how American Gladiator was too. Yeah. And then at some point, Fight Club would probably be it because my brother was obsessed with trying to achieve that Brad Pitt physique.

And my brother has more muscle mass than Brad Pitt for one, and he's still pretty lean, but he's not that lean. Brad Pitt's one of those really lean dudes just naturally. We didn't understand that. We thought all this was achieved through training. So this is where it gets kind of – this is kind of like where the we're one of the it's kind of my motivation for the podcast yeah it's a perfect segue like we used to we grew up seeing these bodies and somehow in the messaging we were all convinced that hard work can allow us to turn into one of them right yeah and just work hard enough just work hard enough be an nfl player you can be an NFL player, you can be Brad Pitt, you can, yeah.

I didn't get it so much with professional sports, although maybe you have experience with that. Like with sports, it was pretty well established that these guys were gifted freaks, you know? Yeah, you figure that out by your senior year. You're like, ah, okay, those people are just a different breed than I am. And, you know, technology too, because, you know, that was the tech boom. So you had all these, you know, 22 year old billionaires popping up, you know, which was unheard of before then, you know? Sure. Yeah. Typically you picture the old rich billionaire that started his company 50 years ago, but then in the nineties, you got somebody like Bill Gates who's in his thirties at the time, I think. And, you know, he was a

billionaire by the late eighties or multimillionaire at And, you know, he was a billionaire by the late 80s, or a multimillionaire at least. You know, he was the richest man in the world when I was in high school. So you had two things going on. You know, you had the tech thing, like, okay, if you want to be a billionaire in your 20s, that's genetics. These guys are just very gifted, you know. And they certainly do have their gifts, and they got into a a you know flourishing uh sector of the economy at the right time a lot of factors there but you know you just thought you're like oh you know i can't do that unless you're obviously one of them doing it but that was acknowledged right same

thing with uh professional sports like there's only one michael jordan you know i can't work hard on the basketball court and be michael jordan you know like that is a freak athlete or even like certain musicians you know they had these they can hit these high notes you know, like that is a freak athlete or even like certain musicians, you know, they had these, they can hit these high notes, you know, you just acknowledge that that was genetics. Right. But when it came to bodybuilding or yeah, let's just call it bodybuilding. When it came to building muscle, losing fat, building a physique, somehow the messaging was that, oh, you can work hard and do this. Right. Yeah. You can be, you can be anything.

I don't get it. I see it in power lifting too now it wasn't really that i didn't know what that sport was at the time you know i learned about it through lifting but you know when i got involved in power lifting you know that was kind of the messaging there too oh you know you know 500 you can get to 600 you get to 700 you know just keep working hard you know right yeah just do this program and uh download my six-week course and uh yeah i think this, and this is important to know. So if you're wondering why we're kind of talking about this stuff, like this is, it's important to set the stage of where fitness has come from, because if you just drop, you know,

if we would have dropped our 15-year-old selves right into today and skipping all that time period, there's, it's such a different landscape than what we experienced. Yeah. Powerlifting is big. I'd never really heard of powerlifting even back in high school. Like, you know, I knew one guy who maybe was involved in like, he knew somebody that did powerlifting, but I didn't really know what it was. I knew it was a high school sport, isn't it? Oh yeah. It, well, in some places and not, not in the school I went to. Okay. There's like a couple of guys who went to a separate gym that I didn't even know. I'd never been there, but they, they did powerlifting. But, you know, bodybuilding was, was out front because we all knew the big guys in the movies. We knew Arnold and we had seen bodybuilders in popular culture. But it's important to know this because this is where I think the, this is where the division started, where people started to believe what you're talking about, that they can make their body into anything they want and that certain people held the key to doing that. Right.

And we know that's happened that in the meantime is that we've just tried to make things more and more complicated and more elaborate in our approaches to try to make these adaptations happen. When we really need to kind of just pull it all back, simplify things, and get back to the, pardon the pun, the meat and potatoes of training, right? Which is what you need to fucking eat, too. That's right. Yeah. You got to eat, right? Which is what you need to fucking eat too. That's right. Yeah. You got to eat, right? And it's, and it doesn't have to be that, that simple. And in fact, the interesting thing is if you go and you study a little bit of strength culture and physical culture, this is the way it was for a long time before this entertainment side of the business started happening. That's a very good way to put it. It's the entertainment side of the business started happening. That's a very good way to put it.

It's the entertainment side of the business. I think what really got me wrapped up in the hard work messaging was when I read Arnold's Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding. And he started showing different body types before and afters. And he was like, okay, this guy. So for those of you who don't know what somatotyping is, you have your ectomorph, typically the guy you hate. He's like 140 pounds, and you can see every muscle in his body, and he can eat all day long and not gain weight. And that's an extreme. The extremes are outliers, first of all, because most people are a mix of all of them.

But that's your pure ectomorph. Then your mesomorph is like a guy like my brother who looks like, you know, he's a little amateur bodybuilder without touching a weight. You can see every muscle on his body and he's a pretty decent size, you know? Yeah. And then you have your endomorph, who's your round, you know, pear-shaped guy who's just fat everywhere. You know, that's the guy that can get up to 300 pounds just looking at food. It's the big barrel-chested, you know, lineman. Yeah. Then you have like mixes of them, you know, like, so, you know, I put on some body fat, I have a hard time building muscle. So that makes me a little bit of an ectomorph. I can get strong, you know, and I can build muscle, but I can put on fat. So there's elements of all three in my body type. And I find that most,

most males that I work with, most people that I work with females too, are probably in that category where, you know, you can gain a little bit of fat I work with, females too, are probably in that category where, you know, you can gain a little bit of fat, you have, you know, muscle comes harder and, you know, you're tend to be of, you know, small to medium size frame, you know? Yeah. And then I've worked with the extremes as well. So we're not leaving you out either, but I'm just saying, when you're looking at it like a normal distribution, a bell curve, you know, most people in the middle show elements of all of them. That's been my experience training people. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So then Arnold was showing, okay, this guy was an endomorph and look at him when he bodybuilded. This guy was an ectomorph and look at him when he bodybuilded. So

anybody can be a bodybuilder, you know, like that's what he was kind of, it's in the book there, you know? And, you know, for all the hell we like to give Arnold and those guys, you know, that was probably one of the better books out there in terms of the general training principles because he was very clear. If you want mass, muscle mass, you've got to do the barbell, as he put it. You have to lift with barbells. Barbells put on mass. And he said all the quote-unquote toning or refining. I don't know what word he used, but basically to bring out more definition, he used dumbbells.

But he said the mass comes from the barbell, that's your foundation, you know, so I soaked that in like a sponge. I'm like, okay, that makes sense, you know, I was already benching. And the second thing that Arnold debunked, Young, which other people learned later, I felt like I was fortunate enough to pick that up and read the damn thing. I don't know if most people read the damn thing. It's a long, big, thick book. But I sat down and read the damn thing. And the second thing he said was that he squatted deep when he started out. And I'm like, oh yeah, I thought that's bad for your knees. And I'm 19 at the time, so I'm getting in the game early here. No powerlifting background, never squatted in swimming. And I'm like, oh, so I can squat deep

and not hurt my knees? Okay. So I knew to squat deep at a young age. What I didn't know was that I'm not, number one, I'm not doing what the guy in the picture is doing, but I think I am. Right. And number two, what the guy in the picture is doing is just as wrong as what I'm doing. It's just another form of wrong, but we'll get to that. So I knew I had to squat deep and I knew I had to lift barbells. By the age of 19, I figured that out. I was already able to do chin-ups because I was a swimmer, and I was already bench pressing. I didn't know how to

train the rest of my body. And even at that age, that's when I kind of decided, I'm like, I want to figure out how to, you know, look better and do this without taking steroids or being unhealthy about it and following a reasonable diet. And the health aspect has to be there, you know, it has to be there. And, you know, I just kind of carried on from to be there, you know, it has to be there. And, you know, I just kind of carried on from there. And, you know, just, you know, I would squat, I would do chin-ups, and I would bench. And then there was another shift that happened in that business. So, it was the evolution of the lifting guru, too. So, in the past, it had been the bodybuilder, you know, that's on muscle and fitness with veins popping out of his freaking fingers, you know. Right, right. And, you know, looking's on muscle and fitness with veins popping out of his freaking fingers, you know?

Right, right. And, you know, looking all freaking leather-skinded and tan and all those other things. That's your guru, right? And then it turned into the fitness model, became your guru and the Hollywood actor. But then at some point, the exercise scientist entered the mix. Ah, yes. Now you have people with credentials. And I remember the first time I heard the word PhD was my first year at the university, my second year in college, and one year at the community college.

So I went away to school for the first time. I had my own weight room. I was maxing out my meal plan and having to put more money on it. I was just eating a bunch of food at the dorms because I was told, oh, you got to bulk to gain muscle. So this is kind of an important aspect of this. And, you know, we're going to talk about weight loss too. I know a lot of consumers of fitness are interested in weight loss. So we're not, you know, a podcast on getting big and strong and fat, but, you know, that's where I was. I wanted to look better. And they

kept telling me, you don't have enough muscle. This was correct. How do you, I fixed that, you know, I got a lot of pieces of it, but not all of it. So like, oh, you got to eat a bunch of food and lift. So I'm like, okay. And this one guy's like, I'm like, well, eat 3000 calories, right? And this guy's like one of those short stocky power lifter looking guys, you know, and he's probably on stuff at the time, I didn't know. And then he's like, he looks at me, he works at the vitamin shop. So you were at GNC, I went to the vitamin shop. It just opened in 2002. It was a brand new type store. I'd been to GNC before that, but the vitamin shop was new and cool, you know? So I go in there and

I'm talking to the guy and he looks around and make sure his manager's not looking. He's like, you know what? Fuck 3,000, eat 4,000. He's like, you got to weigh out the consequences. No, he said, yeah, you're going to gain fat, but you got to weigh out the consequences, kid. And he was probably a few years older than me, you know? He had to be like 20 maybe, and I'm like 17, 18. And I'm like, all right. So I did my first bulk, right? And I followed a program from men's fitness, and that was the first time I saw the word periodization. And it seemed rather logical.

It's like, okay, so you start with high reps, work to low reps. You do a hypertrophy phase, strength phase, power phase. So hypertrophy means enlargement of muscle fibers. As humans, as far as we know, our muscle fibers get bigger. We don't add new muscle fibers. That's what the science says right now. So you had phases for this. And I'm going to have a lot of rants about quote unquote hypertrophy training to come. But for the sake of this discussion, the magazine I was reading, the publication I'd read, it was you do 8 to 12 reps. Then you go from 6 to 8 for strength.

And then you go from 4 to 6 for power, which is kind of laughable because now that we know what power means, power is strength displayed quickly. You know, that's what you see in Olympic lifting. But, you know, I followed it and I ate a bunch of food and I saw myself growing and then I had a big gut. So I'm like, I don't look like I lift though, you know? Right, right. I mean, I did. I was wide, but like I was – at that point, I was definitely fat at that point. The strength wasn't there.

I was probably squatting for a single like, I don't know, 275, 315, something like that. And I was benching like 205 and, you know, I could still do pull-ups at that weight and I could still do dips at that weight, but I was not strong. And then I thought deadlift was a lower back exercise because I was doing it wrong and my lower back would get sore. Yeah. Every lift is a lower back exercise if you do it wrong enough. So, you know, I got out of that that I, you know, was like, okay, I need to cut. So I had to do high reps, like you said earlier. Okay, so then I did a keto diet.

But then I'm like, well, zero carbs is better than 20 carbs. So I'm trying to go to zero. So you kind of, you were a trendsetter back then. You went straight to keto. Yeah, well, back then it was called, yeah, no, it was called keto. So what I followed was called the cyclical ketogenic diet, the CKD. And I followed Lyle McDonald's book called The Ultimate Diet 2.0. Okay.

Yeah. And I still agree with it in theory. I like the content, the way he wrote it. Lyle's kind of out there, but his content's pretty good. And I totally fucked it up. So the way – I don't advocate for this diet, first of all. But the first sentence on there is like, if you're not under 15% body fat, don't do this diet. And I'm like, probably 25% at the time.

You're like, all right, cool. I'm in. If a little bit's good, more is better. That's the whole mentality. 20-year-old kid, I'm like, oh, and I'm just going to go right into it. I got this. And he's telling me, and he's telling you to eat, okay, during the week, eat 20 carbs or less. So I'm like, oh, first of all, I have to get to zero, you know?

Yeah, zero. Because zero is better than 20. Yeah. It's impossible, first of all. So I'm trying to get to zero, and then you're supposed to refuel your muscle glycogen on the weekend. So it's a cyclical ketogenic diet. So on the weekend, you're supposed to go 70% fat, I think, you know, or no, no, no, 70% carb, and then the rest is fat and protein, right? Yeah.

Well, we would go to buffets and do all-you eat shit. So I'm like, just getting all three of the Mac. I'm like going over my calories, you know, like, and I got to the point where I had all the symptoms of over dieting, like, you know, libido went out the window. I just had no energy. I could barely train. I'm doing 15s at the time because high reps is better for fat loss. I lost all my strength, lost all my muscle mass. It burnt me out to the point where I didn't want to train for about a year. And, you know, that was my early exposure to this shit as an adult living independently. And from that point, I just read various things and would just keep doing, I'd recycle that periodized workout. You know, I kind of like plan my training for lack of a better word. I'd plan my training in this way where I go from high reps to low reps,

recycle, high reps to low reps, recycle. Then fast forward, I'm getting my kinesiology degree. At that point, I graduated from the nutrition program. And I meet a guy who, you know, comes from Rip's school of thinking. You know, he has a power lifting and weight lifting background. And he tells me, you don't have to curl to get arms because, you know, like yourself, I was obsessed with, you know, getting bigger curl to get arms because, you know, like yourself, I was obsessed with, you know, getting bigger arms. It was my weak point, Trent. I had disproportionately smaller arms. I believed all this bullshit. Yeah. I could, you know, I could

hardly tell you how to squat, but I could tell you how to do like eight different types of curls. Oh yeah, me too. Yeah. And I hated doing them because one of the things that I realized early on, in addition to Arnold saying that barbells were better for your foundation, I only saw results from the barbell exercises, the chin-ups and the dips. And I do all this other assistance stuff like curls and extensions, and I'd be like, my biceps aren't growing, my traps aren't growing, my side delt isn't growing because I wasn't pressing. Who pressed? Arnold had clean and press in the book, which was great. Now looking back on it, it was great to have that in there because back then they had to clean their presses. They didn't walk it

out of the uprights. I don't understand. So I'm like, well, I can't curl that much weight, so I'm never going to curl enough weight to press it because I didn't know that a clean had to be cleaned. I thought it was an arm exercise. So I'm like, I'm going to waste all my work cleaning it up and the weight's going to be too light to press anything. So I just – I dropped that, never really spent – yeah, never spent time overhead. And then this guy tells me, you don't have to curl. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, just do chin-ups and squat and deadlift and bench press.

And they didn't press it. This was 2008. Press wasn't cool yet. The starting strength had been out for three years at that time, and it was even more underground than it is now. Yep. So I didn't know what any of that was. So that's the first time I heard that. And then when I was training with him, we were in this little dungeon gym in the Salvation Army. He taught me how to hold the bar on my back the same way we teach it.

The rest of his coaching, I can't really recall. He put me into a pretty good low bar squat, better than I've seen in other gyms, because when I had to go through the starting strength seminar, I already knew how to hold the bar. Like that, I was able to self-teach that because I was coached on that, you know? Okay. Yeah, right. That method has circulated to Western Illinois. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, so I would just squat low bar and I was able to get deeper that way without

as much of a problem. My hip flexors would get tight because I was getting knee slide, but I didn't know what that was, you know? And, you know, I did that, but then I still wasn't satisfied. And then at some point when I was finishing up that master's program, I read an article on bodybuilding.com that made me laugh. And it kind of was written in a way that, you know, something from the 1980s would have been written. This had to be 2009- ish and the guy's like you know back before the bench press how much you could put overhead was a measure of a man of masculinity or some macho shit like that the article's still up on bodybuilding.com somewhere but i just started cracking up and i'm like you know most of this is bullshit but i love these articles you know

but i'm like he has a very good point though i'm like i can't put shit overhead because i don't train that damn lift so i started doing overhead overhead. I started pressing. And later on, I found this other book and started push pressing and alternating that with strict press, strict press, push press. And long story short, I threw out my neck with dumbbell press. And then I periodically threw it out trying to barbell press. And then in 2013, I found a video of this guy with a thick texas drawl in a crossfit gym i didn't know it was a crossfit gym i'm looking at this and i'm like oh that looks like a legit strength training facility you know yeah but it was just a crossfit box but i never crossfitted so like i looked at that like oh this guy's legit you know and uh i hope you want your forearms

vertical the bar over your wrist your wrist over your elbows'm like, wow, this guy explains it really good. You know, this is rip I'm talking about, obviously. Yeah, right, right. And I'm like, I want to watch every video on this stuff. And then, you know, me, I'm thinking I'm doing exactly what he's showing, right? Because I don't realize that I move different than I think I'm moving at the time, you know? Then I go to the gym, and at the same time I had been reading about sets of five, I remember my brother, when I was into men's fitness when I was 18, my other brother, who tended to be more ecto-meso build, he was thin but muscular, you know?

Right. He got really lean at one point because he dieted and did a bunch of volume, training volume, and just doing a lot of cardio mostly. And he was already lean to begin with, so getting him from lean to ripped was not hard, you know, at the time. Didn't take a whole lot. But I remember him telling me at that age that one guy told him, yeah, you want to get big, do five sets of five. And I just remembered that. It kind of lingered in the back of my head, but I never did it, you know. Yeah, it's a nice, like, you can remember that, right?

Five by five. Yeah, I just remembered that. I never, ever did it. So at this point, 10 years had passed and I still had never done it. I just remember that I never, ever did it. So at this point, 10 years had passed, and I still had never done it. And my friend, I'd been putting my friend through these bullshit training programs that I'd been following, and he yells at me one day. He's like, this shit doesn't fucking work.

Give me something that works. Fast forward, he's a typical personal training client that can't stick to anything. But I didn't know of it at the time, so he's blaming me. His concerns were legitimate, but when I actually trained him, he did starting strength for nine months and then he just was back to non-compliant compliant non-compliant compliant right right his baseline strength is better now than it would have been if he didn't do that though so he got the benefit um anyways i'm like well what does work so i'm thinking what you're saying earlier it kind of comes back here i'm like who was big in high school i'm like guys who played football and wrestled what did they do oh they well they squatted and did like curls and chin-ups and you know deadlifts and shit you know yeah so i called my brother who had played football because at this point i'm still

naive and i don't understand the genetic uh correlation here i'm like mario what'd you do his name is marius but we call him mario because he picked the super mario name i guess oh yeah he's polish his name is marius mariusz, but I'll call him Mario, except sometimes I'll call him Mariusz when I'm fucking with him. Yeah. My dad calls him Mariusz. Anyway, so I asked him, I'm like, hey, what did you do in high school when you lifted? And he's like, oh, you know, he's like, I purposely lifted light

because I was worried about stunting my growth. But, you know, we do squats and, you know, curls and, you know, deadlifts and chin-ups and all that stuff. And I'm like, interesting. Then I remembered another piece of Arnold's book. Again, Arnold doesn't get enough credit from starting strength because Arnold led me to starting strength. I don't know if anybody else got there through that route, but I got there through that route because in the beginning of the book, when he's talking about his history, when he was a teenager, he's like, yeah, I did full body workouts with barbell exercises three times a week. I think he, in fact, when he was a teenager, he's like, yeah, I did full body workouts with barbell exercises, you know, three times a week. I think he, in fact, won when he was a teenager,

won some junior weightlifting competitions in Austria. Yeah. So. Well, back then you had to do the weightlifting competition to compete in bodybuilding. That's yeah. Yeah, that's right. It was part of the, it was part of the sport. Yeah. So I didn't know that, but what I did remember was he said that he started out Yeah. So I didn't know that. But what I did remember was he said that he started out doing barbell exercises mostly, you know, three times a week. But then he needed to break his muscle groups apart, or so he thought, you know. And that required more time. And he couldn't do that in a full body fashion. So that's when he went to split routine workouts. That's how he was telling the story. You know, like, this is how we got to split routine. Yeah. So I'm thinking in my head, I'm like, well, if that's what you started with, why is your novice program a six-day split, you know, where you're dividing the muscle groups up? Right, right. So I'm like, where's the fucking program you followed?

So I Google it, and then, you know, somebody had an article up. It's still up. It's Reg Park. It was Arnold's mentor at one point. And they had similar body structure, so Arnold tried to strive to be like him, look like him, you know? Right. And I looked up the Reg Park beginner,

or Arnold beginner programs. And this one thread on bodybuilding.com, the real Arnold Schwarzenegger beginner programs. And it was basically, all right, you do five sets of five squats, but the first two sets are warmups. So you're doing three sets of five, right? Three sets of five.

And then you're pressing one day, you're benching one day, then you uh dead lifting one set of five but you'll do five singles if you're advanced you know five sets of one if you're advanced so and then they had like arm curls and a couple other things and you know i did the first thing that most people who look at starting strength do they're like well this isn't enough so i started doing rows you know yeah you gotta add yeah adding other shit and then i'm at the gym one day and this dude next to me at 24-Hour Fitness is like, you're doing 5x5, man? I'm like, yeah. Well, which one are you doing?

I'm like, which one? I'm doing the Reg Park 5x5, and that's the least popular one. Because it's like a small website and the bodybuilding, you know, hollows of the internet. Right. And he's like, well, I'm doing Mad Cow. You should try Mad Cow. So I look up Mad Cow, and then I find StrongLifts. And then I'm doing mad cow. You should try mad cow. So I look up mad cow and then I find strong lifts. And then I start looking at that and it's okay.

Three by five squat, three by five press alternated with, or five by five squat, five by five press alternated with the bench press and barbell rows alternated with the deadlift, deadlifts one by five. And I was about to start doing this. And then I'm reading up, when I'm looking up Mad Cow and StrongLifts, I see some little thing in the Google description of one of the websites I'm looking at. And it's like, StrongLifts is a rip off of Mark Ripito's Starting Strength. And I'm like, that's the dude in the fucking video that fixed my damn press, you know? Yeah, there you go.

So I'm like, no, fuck, I'm like, I'm following his program. So then I went to the website and then there was like websites dedicated to rip at the time. And I'm sure they're still up. Like one of them had like all these rip quotes on the board just on one website. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I liked his humor, his dry humor. He reminded me a lot of people I knew growing up. And I started getting on the boards and reading the boards. And I, you know, followed the program, didn't buy the book,

didn't even know there was a textbook. I thought it was just another lifting template. You know, I didn't even, I called it a program. I didn't know what templates were at the time. Right, right. So I just follow it, tear my adductor, you know, three months in, because of course, oh, I know how to squat press and deadlift and bench press. Oh, three weeks in. That's pretty good. That's impressive.

I started in May and I tore it in August. No, three months. June, July, three months. Sorry, if I said weeks, I was wrong. It's three months. So I'm like, shit. I'm like, how did I hurt myself? So I go on the boards and I'm like, well, let me just ask him. I'll put a video up on his Q&A and see if he even responds. I'm thinking he's like this huge celebrity guy. Right, right. So I put the video up and he says, all this shit's fucked up, essentially. And somehow I figured out there was a coach in town and then then he, you know, Paul Horn, the legendary Paul Horn.

He's a Boise guy now. And he fixed me real fast, and it felt like he really didn't do a whole lot, but did a whole lot, if you know what I mean. He told me to do a couple things, but it was dramatically different. Then I ran it myself again, didn't go back, and then tore the other adductor three months later. Oh, wow. But long story short, I started training that way. I started focusing on barbell training, which the average person, some of which are listening to this, associate that with the big fat guy who's squatting a bunch of weight. And that's not true.

The reason that I even was drawn to the sport of powerlifting was because another thing, I'm telling you, that freaking Arnold book was on the money. He had mentioned that a lot of bodybuilders powerlifted in the off season, including Columbo, who won when Arnold retired, you know? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And Columbo even competed in some world's strongest man competitions at one point. Yeah. Famously strong guy. There's an undeniable correlation between strength and muscle mass. Yeah. And I thought that I just wasn't fucking strong enough. And the other reality that I came to when my buddy called me out about my programs being bullshit was that the guys in the gym that looked the way that I wanted to look were lifting more than I was lifting.

They're like repping out 225 on the bench because they bench every day, you know? Right, right. Which that actually works, by the way. That's another thing I discovered through my own training history. Sure, yeah. The bros figure that out. You bench and curl every day, you know? Right, right. Which that actually works, by the way. That's another thing I discovered through my own training history. Sure, yeah. The bros figure that out. You bench and curl every day,

you'll have nice pecs and arms. So that does work. Exactly. Yeah, but there's this threshold, right? You know, it's like these are the guys, it's because they're doing 225, right? They're not doing 135, right? No, they're doing two plates.

It's two plates, not one plate. And I can barely do it once. Yes, exactly. That's the key. So what I was trying to get to earlier was that these exercise scientists started surfacing. And then later on, you had exercise scientists. So the first batch of exercise scientists were unknown in the industry. They didn't compete in anything.

They weren't in any magazines. They were publishing in peer-reviewed articles, and they worked at universities. And you would have only where it's went. So it's went from the bodybuilder to the exercise scientist or the actor. So the bodybuilder to the actor slash entertainer to the exercise scientist to now the exercise scientist lifter. Yes. Yeah. And now we have the, we had the exercise scientist bodybuilder. Now we have the exercise scientist power lifters. Oh yeah. Now that's happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of a more recent development. The weightlifters were actually doing it before any of the other ones, but nobody cares about that. That's right. They were doing it, you know, 70 years ago, but.

Yeah. The original pioneers of, you know, quote unquote, exercise science research were weightlifters. A lot of them. Yes. Yeah. Mike, Mike Stone, you know, he was publishing the 70s and 80s. He's a weightlifter. That's where a lot of the NSCA stuff comes from. But yeah, I know the bodybuilder exercise scientist, then powerlifter that's where a lot of the nsca stuff comes from but yeah i know the bodybuilder exercise scientist then powerlifter exercise scientist but i just had this in my head like i had to do eight to ten reps and then i one day i just saw the guy doing 225 in the gym for like 10 reps and i'm like i can't do anywhere near that why the fuck would i look like him you know yeah it's finally clicked yeah it just finally clicked so i'm like i need to get stronger i have to get stronger so i just was obsessed with that and you know i Yeah, it finally clicked. Yeah, it just finally clicked. So I'm like, I need to get stronger. I have to get stronger. So I just was obsessed with that. And, you know, I haven't stopped training for strength. So I guess I've been training for strength for 10 years, although

my training now is kind of BS, but I happen to be putting a few pounds on the damn bar somehow. Right, right. But the coolest thing that I did was, you know, from that point, three years, I got stronger. And there were a few key lessons I learned. Number one, deadlifting and pressing brought up every one of those weak points I bitched about. Let me repeat that. I hated that my arms wouldn't grow. I hated that I didn't have visible deltoids, deltoid caps, right? Some of that's genetic.

My brother has really good insertion, so his pop out naturally more. But I could not see my lateral deltoids, and I did not have, and my biceps wouldn't grow. And my lats would grow wider, but I wouldn't have any evidence of traps. So the middle of my back was just completely flat. I would just get this wide back, you know, for this rumor. And, you know, I thought maybe it was all body fat, which is why I tried to diet down when I was younger and that didn't work. And then I thought maybe I just can't grow these muscles. Well, you know what? When you can keep your back straight and you have four to 500 pounds pulling the other way, those muscles grow really fast. So it was just a misunderstanding of the deadlift

and how it works. But the deadlift brought up all those trap muscles and like that, right? Right. Right. And then the deltoid situation that pretty much improved with a 200 pound press. There you go. And like, even now, like I'm sitting at like, I don't know, I'm probably 20% body fat and I can still see my damn deltoid caps, which I'm, you know, it's funny. Cause when I was younger, I'm like, man, if I could just have decent shoulder definition, I wouldn't care that I'm a little bit fatter, you know? Right. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So I think what you're describing here is that, so first of all, this is, this is good, right? This is part of the reason why you listen to a coach like yourself is that you've, you've done everything, right? All, everything that you can possibly do,

every approach you can take, you've pretty much done it and you've been there. So that's like, so you come from a place of experience in addition to having a good theoretical understanding of, of how this stuff works. But I think the other thing that, that you're showing us here is that the, the misunderstandings that we have now. So this is what I think is interesting. Like you, I had not been exposed to these big barbell lifts before I, you know, actually ran into some serious power lifters, weightlifters. But not only that, like, so I think nowadays people are much more likely to have attempted a squat or a deadlift in a regular public gym. But what people misunderstand is the

magnitude of this stuff. They might say like, oh, well, I tried deadlifting and it didn't do it for me. It's like, but they don't understand what the magnitude of a strong deadlift is. You know, if you're, you know, if you're a lady and you're not deadlifting in the 200s, like that's, I mean, you haven't really gotten to a baseline level of strength. If you're, you know, if you're a guy and you're not, you're not deadlifting in the 300s, like you're really not getting to like a basic baseline of strength. really not getting to like a basic baseline of strength. And then of course, like you get into the four or five hundreds, um, as a guy and, and the, all of a sudden this stuff, these body parts that you've been wanting to develop finally fall into place. Um, and so there, there's, there's both a misunderstanding and what it takes, like the actual types of movements you need to do to build the body you want. And then there's the magnitude of, of what it looks like,

how, what is strong really look like in practical real life terms. Yeah. And that's essentially what I ended up learning over the long haul. The coolest thing was when I was, this was kind of when it all like came together when I was, this was 2016, you know, I had worked with a coach who fit all those criteria we talked about and i hired him because i thought he was you know had nutrition expertise that i had missed out on you know because i was more academically trained so yeah uh i hired this guy and at the time i'd finished my novice program, and I was heavier, and I did it on purpose. I drank the gallon of milk a day, which not everybody needs to drink a gallon of milk a day.

But somehow in Rip's messaging in the book and on the various publications he's put up, he got all these people, myself included, that interpreted this as, well, you need to drink a gallon of milk a day. You're just too damn skinny. If you're 18 to 25 and you're underweight, you need to drink a gallon of milk a day. Otherwise, you don't. I probably didn't. I can gain weight without it. But anyways, I did it. I didn't care. I wasn't like butt hurt by the fact that I put on some extra weight. I knew that it might happen, but I was my own guinea pig. Anyways, I hired this guy. We took the weight off. That part was great. Then when it came to putting the weight back on, this is where I had some real learning experiences because this is what I was paying for. I'm like, every time I put the weight on, I gained a bunch of body fat, right?

Well, long story short, the same thing happened. I gained a bunch of fucking body fat. I barely got stronger than I was before i'd put the weight on so i'm one of these guys that can lift a decent amount and not have to be really heavy to do it with the exception of the bench press some of the people who have followed me before have seen that demonstrated and uh you know i put on i went from 168 back up to like 205 and then i was not squat i was barely I was missing a 400 squat and I couldn't deadlift more than 455, which, you know, for people in the lifting circle, it's not impressive.

And, you know, I'm like, I got to lose this weight. And I wanted to overcorrect it. I'm like, I just want to get ripped. You know, I want to see what the hell it looks like, how light I am, you know? And I predicted that I'd be closer to 160 pounds to accomplish this. And sure enough, I got, you know, I lost the first 20 with this guy. I swapped him out, went to another guy, and then he hired a RP to do my diet. And that's how I ended up working with them. And I learned some key things there. So when I was working with my diet coach, I got to a point where I was starving, and this is usually where I would stop dieting. was working with my diet coach, I got to a point where I was starving. And this is usually where I would stop dieting. And I was probably like 170 to 175, you know, at the time. And I'm like,

dude, I'm like freaking starving. I'm like, this can't be right. Then he's like, dude, no, you're going to be hungry. He's like, if it was freaking easy, then everybody would be walking around jacked, you know? And I'm like, oh, no shit. I'm like, this really isn't that healthy to do, you know? And it's like anything else, you know, you compete in a sport, it's not healthy. Competitive sports are not healthy from a musculoskeletal standpoint. Getting ripped is not healthy. So I don't recommend that people try to walk around ripped, but if you do it once in a while, it's probably not as bad as, you know, having a drink once in a while. So, you know, I pushed my body and then I'm like, okay, I know what I got to do. I just got to sustain this insane hunger. So I did it. And then I got down to about, I think 11.9% body fat was the lowest I clocked on a DEXA. And I could see everything. So that

debunked a few things. So number one, I wasn't 10% body fat and I can see all my muscles. Why? Because I've been training heavy for years at that point, you know? Right. So I mean, I think I finished, I finished that cut with, you know, a deadlift in the mid 400s, a squat in the high 300s, a bench in the high 200s, and a press in the high 100s. When I was heavier, before I lost the last 20 pounds, I was lifting more than that, obviously, and I eventually lifted more than that, a few pounds heavier. So I went down to 162, and then I went up to 175, and I got to a 500 deadlift, 405 squat, and 210 press, and 290 bench at that weight. Now I'm lifting more than that, but I weigh more. Anyways, it was kind of cool because I'm like, okay, I'm not 10% body fat, but I thought you had to be 10% body fat to see abs. Well, I wasn't, and I saw abs because I had muscle mass.

So that was the other thing that I learned was, you know, the way that I explained it to people in simple terms is a fat guy that trains looks better than a fat guy that doesn't train. So then you extrapolate that and you know that, go to a construction yard or any type of manual labor type job. And you're going to see these guys don't look like the fat couch potato or the fat accountant. The fat construction worker looks different than the same, than the guy at the same weight who's sitting there, know programming or doing accounting or some other sedentary job you know yeah these these guys that look like all look like popeye you know rolling around the job site and yeah i'm not saying be a fat strong guy but i'm saying that body fat gets distributed and appears differently

on your body when you lift weights and that was apparent at a lower body fat so So, okay, why can I see all this at 11%? Well, number one, I have an even body fat distribution, but more importantly, I trained. So, before I got down to like 155 pounds, 150 pounds at 13%, but I wasn't training the way I was now. So, I try to really hammer this to people because all I was doing to lose that weight were those five fucking exercises. I wasn't doing curls and like 10 sets of 10 and all this other bullshit. I was squatting. I was dead lifting. I was doing a ton of sets. I was in the gym a long time. So if I were to cut now, I would do high reps. I'd do eight to 10 reps. I wouldn't do 15, but I'd do eight to 10 because it's lighter and more manageable when you're on a diet. But back then I was like,

well, I want to stay strong. So I'm going to do seven sets of five. And, you know, I did it and it was miserable. And I only lost 5% of my strength when I did the math on it. But the point that I'm trying to hammer to here, to, you know, my listeners that have followed my material before and also new people that are completely naive to this is you really only need a handful of fucking exercises to look good and be strong and useful. It's the bottom line. That's what I did. I was,

I looked like a fitness model, but I was training like a power lifter, you know? Right, right. Yeah. And it's, and now- It's the stereotypes, you know, that we need to clarify here. That's right. And what's interesting that I've learned in my own journey as a coach is that we've come from a physical culture standpoint, we've finally come full circle. And what you just said, if you go back to some of the very early weightlifters, like pre-bodybuilding years, back in the 40s, John Grimmick was a competitive weightlifter at the time who in his later years became an early bodybuilder. The guy has some famous poses of him with like a spear, you know, he looks like Mars or, you know,

like the Roman God. And John Grimmick was big and jacked and muscular and not crazy lean, but, you know, he, you know, had great muscle definition. Well, the thing was, John Grimmick trained his entire career in probably five or six exercises. He was squatting. He was deadlifting. He was cleaning. He was pressing. And it's kind of funny to me that these guys, that was just self-evident to them back then. They're like, well, yeah, of course.

What else would I do to look like this? They had limitations, too. They didn't have upright support benches back then. They're like, well, yeah, of course. Like what else would I do to get it to look like this? Well, they have limitations too. They didn't have upright support benches back. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. There's no machine press maybe. Yeah. There were no machines, but, uh, so yeah, it's, it's kind of funny that we've come back, you know, full circle, but I think along the way, we've also, we've learned some things we've been able to, you know, validate some of the early kind of revelations that these physical culturists and these lifters and early bodybuilders had, where they sort of figured things out intuitively of like, hey, man, when I do this, this happens, and this works, this doesn't work. And I think

over the years, we've been able to validate some of those things with the science and as it catches up to what we've known just from, from experience. And let's be clear here. This doesn't just apply to the bodybuilder or the power lifter. You know, like, like I said, I achieved the physique of a fitness model and, you know, you can go to my Instagram and go back 2016, you'll see the fucking photos. And I was training like a damn power lifter. So this kind of goes back to what you have to work with, right? First of all, if you're built small like I am, you're only going to get so far. I'm not going to make myself look like a thick-boned guy, first of all. Yeah, you're not going to be the rock.

No. So I get a lot of clients that are like, they fall in the skinny fat category. You know, you'll get a guy who's 6'2", and he's 205, but he has no definition. And he thinks he needs to lose fat and be 175. Or you'll get a guy who's 5'9 and thinks he needs to be 140. You know, I had a guy get down to 139 once for this because they want muscle definition. But you look at their lifts and, you know, okay, you're squatting 95 pounds, 8 inches high, you know, which means shallow for, you know, those of you not familiar with the terminology.

Right, right. You're squatting shallow, not going deep. You're not deadlifting at all. You're not pressing at all. I mean, what you're doing a bunch of conditioning. I mean, if you want to do a bunch of cardio and be skinny, I mean, yeah, that's what happens when you train for endurance. You're very skinny, you know, you're very skinny. You might be defined.

You might not, but you don't look muscular. And by muscular, I don't mean a bodybuilder or a power lifter. I could be talking about the guy on the cover of Fitness Magazine, you know, or these Instagram guys, you know. So it still comes back to you have to push your muscles beyond their limit in order to develop them to appear that way, you know. Again, I want to repeat this again. This is important for those listeners because that's who I'm really trying to reach here. If, you know, if you're one of these guys that wants to be long and lean or tone or whatever the, whatever you call it these days, right? You don't want to be big, right? But you want to look like you're doing something.

You still have to overload those muscles. It still has to get heavy, you know, and heavy for you might be different than heavy for me, but you can't go in there and lift light weights and make it feel like cardio because it's a completely different stimulus. You know, like, and I find that that's the trend now. When I get gen pop individuals that are, you know, you might find in an LA fitness or an anytime fitness or, you know, maybe they do the CrossFit WODs for 50 minutes every day. You know, they have this idea that all forms of exercise need to feel like a heart attack, you know, like you're running a marathon. And when you're in the weight room, the purpose of the, I mean, if you want to use weightlifting for bootcamp style workouts because they're fun, that's one thing. But if you're lifting weights

because you want your muscles to look better, that really means you want them to get bigger, whether you know it or not. You know, you have to stress that muscle with heavier and heavier weight. And any way you kind of spin it, it's going to end up defaulting to that. So even if you're doing quote unquote volume, which really means high reps, eight to 10 reps, and more sets, I guess. So you might, instead of doing five by five, you might do four sets of 10 or five sets of 10, or if you're doing German volume training, 10 sets of 10, right? And this is like probably the most popular way to train overall. Like, you know, we're still a niche, unfortunately, you know, if you go into a commercial gym or you get a starting strength, naive person off the

street, they're going to tell you, you know, I do a bunch of, you know, I just do reps with lighter weight. I don't want to go heavy because I'm going to try to get big, you know, that's still the dominant belief in most gyms or even most people that may watch TV and don't go to the gym or go sometimes. They might just think, I need to do like 10 reps with a decent amount of weight. I don't need to really go heavy though. I don't have to go heavy because I want to get big. It's like, you're skinny. To get bigger than where you are now, the same rule applies. You have to lift more than you can lift now. So even if that means getting yourself to a 300 deadlift or a 200 deadlift because it's 95 today, it has to get heavier.

If you're doing 10 sets of 10, the weight that you're lifting for 10 sets of 10 also has to get heavier because what are you going to do, 20 sets of 10? I mean, and then at what point do you run out of time, you know? Exactly, yeah. Then it becomes another marathon, right? It's a weight lifting now it's an endurance workout endurance workouts don't build muscle it's not their point you know with few exceptions in general if you're looking at a magazine you see a guy with muscles popping out that means he's probably stronger than you are and that means you need to get

stronger than you are today if you want to get closer to that. Yes, absolutely. So, yeah, there's the groundwork. You got to get stronger. It's the basis for all physical adaptations that you want, you know, including if you're that person right now and you're like, well, I don't know. I mean, I kind of am that marathon guy. Well, guess what? Getting stronger is going to help you too. And we're going to talk about that as we go into more episodes on the show. So, but yeah, I think this is interesting. You know, not a lot of people in our world and our strength and conditioning world have talked a lot about the physical culture aspect of, you know, how do we get here and how do we get to the point where all of the, you know, I think there's always been some amount of misinformation and mythology out there about how training works.

But, you know, how do we get to where we are here today in 2021 and the misconceptions that continue to float around and that we run into every day when we're coaching clients? So that's, you know, I hope you found that interesting. And I encourage you, you know, if you like this kind of stuff, go pick up Arnold's Encyclopedia. It's entertaining. You can get a little snapshot of what people were thinking. That was revolutionary at the time, so you can get a snapshot of what was revolutionary for its time and see how people's thought process about fitness has evolved over the years. Go back and look at some of the old weightlifters, the Eugene Sandows, the Paul Andersons, the John Grimmocks of the world, and you can kind of trace this evolution of physical culture through the years. Yeah, no, it's great. Arnold book's a great history book. And like I said, the general principles were always there.

That's why I have a hard time making fun of it, but God, they didn't know how to lift and you can't expect them to. They weren't technique coaches, you know, they were genetically, they were genetic freaks that were gifted to build muscle and get strong. So, you know, they showed the, they were right about the exercises. They were wrong about how to execute them. They were wrong about how to program them in the absence of steroid use, but it led me to RIP. That's right. They still got some of the basics right, for sure. It's great to read the Arnold book and then read Starting Strength, because you'll see some of the overlap and then you'll see where they're wrong too, obviously. Right. Yes, absolutely. RIP does a good job of going through that historical account as well,

which I appreciated. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think sometimes, you know, again, here in 2021 now, we may not appreciate starting strength has enjoyed some public notoriety. And a lot of people have heard of starting strength, even if they don't know what it's about. They've heard that name and maybe even seen the book floating around, which was not the case just 10 years ago. So it um, it's, it's hard for if, you know, if you've already heard starting strength before you just, you've actually read the book, it's hard to imagine what, how different it was when it came out in 2005, you know, it's, it's just like a complete shift in the way that you think and about barbells and strength training.

And, um, one of the, one of the few books to really lay out these first principles, these just basically basic ground principles that you can build an entire training program off of. So I think that's what we're going to do in the following episodes is go through some more principles and talk about training, talk about kind of where this stuff, where the rubber meets the road and solving like practical issues, right? So if you're that person that you described that's skinny fat and you're not a big guy, you're not a big girl, you're not

a little girl, you're somewhere in between and you're in the bell curve and you're like, what do I do? Like I've, you know, it hasn't worked doing X, Y, and Z. Where am I missing the mark? We're going to talk about that. And part of the thing, one of the things you're going to have to learn is the basic principles of fitness. And once you learn those, then, you know, you can start to build a practical program and you'll know what to do when you go in the gym and you'll have an idea of where to go. Yeah. I like that. I think that's a good stopping point, huh? Yeah, I think that's good. All right, guys. Well, you know, if, if people want to find you, Roberts, where do they go? If they want to get in touch with you, if they want to find you,

we know you're on starting strength.com. You can read some of your articles there. Where else should they go to follow you? I'm going to weights and plates.com. That is my website. I am on Instagram, although I might take a while to answer there because i hate instagram but people tend to reach out to me there so i check the messages the underscore robert underscore santana and uh you can also find me on renaissance periodization.com i coach for them and have content on their website as well excellent yeah yeah renaissance period. That's a very cool software programs for managing your diet and nutrition. It's a great coaching. It's an app that acts as a coach. It's pretty neat. I recommend it. I don't have one of my own. I've walked people

through it. It's great. And I'm actually trying to use it right now to clean my stuff up. But basically, it's like MyFitnessPal, except it tells you, okay, you got to cut here, cut here, add here, add there, you know? Yeah. It's great. Well, my name is Trent Jones again, and you can find me at marmalade underscore cream. If you stick around long enough in this podcast, maybe I'll reveal the secret of where that name comes from. It's what everyone asks me. It's like, what the heck? Marmalade cream?

What? But you can find me there. See, it's memorable. You remember now. Marmalade cream. That's where you can find me. Well, thanks guys for listening to the show. Tune in next time.

And we're going to talk some more fitness and training and nutrition. you