Weights and Plates Podcast - #101 - LIFTING FAQ: COMMON F*CK UPS & HOW TO FIX THEM

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

In this episode of the Weights & Plates Podcast, Robert Santana takes a Q&A-style approach to tackle some of the most common training and nutrition challenges. He explains why hydration is more than just drinking water, breaking down the role of electrolytes, sugar, and sodium in performance—especially in extreme heat or for early morning lifters. Robert also covers why training fasted can hurt your lifts, how to fuel properly before a workout, and why post-meal blood sugar spikes are normal for healthy people despite what continuous glucose monitors might suggest. He also dives into the truth about carbs, keto, and fueling for high-intensity strength work, clears up myths about protein intake and kidney health, and emphasizes the importance of proper technique to prevent injury. Whether you’re a competitive lifter or just looking to get stronger and perform better in the gym, this episode is packed with straightforward, actionable advice you can put into practice immediately. If you're ready to build muscle, build status, and build options — this episode is for you. https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/ Follow Weights & Plates YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf- Instagram: @the_robert_santana Rumble: https://rumble.com/user/weightsandplates Web: https://weightsandplates.com

Welcome to the Waits and Plates Podcast. I'm Robert Santana, and I am your host. Welcome back. It's been a couple weeks since our last episode. So today I want to do a Q&A episode because I'm seeing a lot of themes in terms of the questions I'm getting. So I'm just going to talk about some of them and see where things go. A lot's been happening here in sunny Arizona, such as we got up to 118 last week, and it was really fucking hot. For those of you over the pond, it's about 47 Celsius. And I decided to move.

And every time I've moved since I lived here, and it doesn't just happen to be summer. It happens to be those days that are over 115. You know, I've moved in July, I've moved in August, and it doesn't seem to matter. So I was reminded about the importance of hydration. As you know, when it gets hot, you lose fluid and electrolytes. Everyone knows when it gets that hot, you need to drink water, like especially if you're exercising in the heat or doing vigorous physical activity. However, you also need your electrolytes, your sodium, your potassium, your chloride, and you also need sugar. Because sugar or glucose shares a transporter with sodium that allows you to pull the water

into the intravascular space rapidly. That is why these sport drinks like Gatorade happen to have sugar, some sort of simple. sugar, either it's maltodextrin or some variation of dextrose, sodium, and potassium. Typically, the sodium's in the form of sodium chloride. So you're getting both of those because they typically add salt to these drinks. But that's why they do that. You know, in the weight room, we're not sweating a ton, but we could get dehydrated outside of the weight room, especially if you are in a warm climate, like Arizona, or especially in a humid climate, where you're not evaporative cooling as well. So make sure if you are listening and you are in a

very hot, weathered area that you're not just thinking about water. You're also thinking about sodium, potassium, chloride, and sugar. If you're not consuming sport drinks, you can certainly get this from food. Bananas will give you potassium, beans, nuts, seeds, dairy products. Bananas will give you potassium, seeds, nuts, beans, dairy products. So cheese, milk, yogurt, all those foods are high in potassium. They're going to also have a little bit of salt in them too. especially if you get salted variations of some of these items, like canned beans, salted nuts. I mean, it's not ideal to get things canned, but things to think about when you're dealing with a lot of heat and you need to grab something quick. Pickles are a good source of sodium.

If you need to get some quick sodium and you get pickles and a banana, weird combination, but just a way you can kind of program your brain like, hey, you know, I'm starting to feel symptomatic. I need something quick. And you want to down that with plenty of liquid as well. Obviously, sugar is pretty self-explanatory. You know, I think we all know where to get sugar from. If you want it quick, you can get it from candy or something like that. But I found myself in a situation where I was mildly dehydrated. I was moving and just sweating, and I wasn't even working that vigorously.

And all of a sudden I felt myself shaking. My blood sugar was getting low. You know, now I've been cutting too, so I thought it was mostly blood sugar and that eating would fix this. And I started eating an omelet, which is high in protein. It does have some sodium in it. And I did put cheese on it, so it has some potato. a minute, but I found out really quick that I wasn't hungry and it wasn't just low blood sugar. I was, in fact, starting to get dehydrated.

My legs were shaking. And I reacted quickly. I went in my pantry. I had a packet of liquid IV left. I just ate that and pounded it with sparkling water. Then I had another piece of cheese, drank some milk, and grabbed a chicken sausage. I think I forgot which brand I used. It was one of those organic ones that was And Dooley flavor.

It was pretty lean, but it had 500 milligrams of sodium per sausage. And these sausages were really glorified hot dogs, but they were made out of chicken. And within, you know, a few minutes, I started feeling better. So that was my dietitian brain kicking in and I reacted quickly to the situation. I was good to go after that. Ended up deadlifting heavy that night. So all was well. So just, you know, a little public service announcement about training in the summer.

even though you may not be outside performing the lifts, you are being exposed to that weather throughout the day. If you already aren't a heavy water drinker, or worse, if you're my case, if you're cutting, if you're not already a regular water drinker, then it's something to think about, or if you're like me and you have it to be cutting in the summer, cutting means that you are eating less food,

eating less carb, which also means you're going to consume less fluid from the solid food you're eating. Remember, foods contain fluid, they account for a lot of the fluid, consume. So even if you're not drinking, you're still getting fluid from food. So if you find yourself cutting weight in the summer, then you may accidentally start to dehydrate yourself or at least be under hydrated and it may impact your performance. I found that every year, for a few years

there, I was seeing a dip in lifting performance in those summer months. And I didn't make the connection until about year three. Then I started looking back. I realized that I did not adjust my fluid and electrolyte consumption for those summer months, especially in years. where I happen to be cutting weight through the summer. So definitely something that you want to think about. What are some other situations where this is important? I mean, I didn't plan on doing a hydration episode, but it is relevant to our show.

So I think I'm just going to start by talking about it and see where it takes us. Another situation is if you're waking up early in the morning, you know, I get a lot of people, God bless her souls, they train at 3, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning. Never going to happen with me. and all you motherfuckers out there that say, oh, you got to be up at five to get ahead of everybody. Well, guess what? I'm ahead of everybody if I'm still working till one. So you can kiss my ass with that shit.

I think I've done just fine. I may not be a multi-millionaire, but there are a lot of broke motherfuckers out there that wake up at three in the morning. So I don't think that that one single variable is going to be predictive of success. Rant over. Anyhow, if you wake up early in the morning and you are fasted, your blood glucose is going to be low. the sugar circulating in your blood. And by low, I mean within normal limits for fasting values. It's 70 to 99 last time it looked.

So lower than 70 is considered hypoglycemic. Over 99 gets into that pre-diabetic category. And 126 or greater is the criteria for diagnosing diabetes. That doesn't mean that I'm diagnosing your ass if you have a blood sugar of 127. You know, go talk to your doctor. When you wake up in the morning, you're fasted. Your liver stores sugar as glycogen. That gets depleted overnight.

And your liver also regulates your blood sugar. Most of the sugar that you store in the human body goes into your muscles. The liver's the second storage site. And then you store some in the kidneys, some in the fat cells. When you wake up and go lift and you have blood sugar that's in those fasting ranges, it could get low very easily if you start performing strenuous activity. especially if you're lifting heavy like we do. The other thing about that is that, like I said earlier,

glucose shares a transporter with sodium, which means that glucose plays a role in hydration. That's why when you consume a bunch of carbohydrates or sugar in one sitting, you get that bloated feeling. I just put air quotes on the video if you're listening to audio. You start bringing a bunch of water into the human body. Much of that goes into the muscles, but if you overdo it, yeah, you're going to be a little bit bloated.

But much of that goes into the muscles as glycogen, some into the liver, to replenish that, then the kidneys, the fat cells, and also the bloodstream. If you have a normal functioning pancreas, you will release insulin to lower that back down normal. Let's go back to the 5 a.m. workout. You're up, you're dizzy, you're having trouble lifting. It probably wasn't a good idea to fast like you did. Because back in the day when you did cardio fasted because you were trying to lose fat and

get abs, you know who you are listening to this. It's not all of you, but it's some of you. muscle magazine or fitness guru or health specialist on the TV or social media told you that fasted cardio is going to get more fat off your body or you just like to feel hungry because it makes you feel like you're losing fat if you're hungry all those things that caused you to think waking up fasted and exercising was a good idea is now fucking you in the weight room Because when you do that in the weight room, you are trying to perform high-intensity muscle contractions, which are controlled by the central nervous system, which prefers glucose.

It's not going to work out well. You're also not getting enough fluid into the body in a fasted state. So you might get dizzy. This used to happen to me on the press. I didn't realize it was happening, and I wasn't fasted. I just wasn't getting enough electrolytes in the morning. I was eating an omelet. I don't even remember what carb source I was having.

a bagel or something, and then going to work out at six in the morning, and then when I would press, I would get dizzy and see floaters, and when it was really heavy, I'd drop the bar. Well, once I opened my gym and became an evening lifter, like most gym owners, and inevitably become, I didn't have this problem anymore. I maxed out my press just fine and didn't get dizzy, maybe slightly, but not really. And it dawned on me that by the end of the day, I'm nice and bloated. My belt is one hole tighter, and I probably have enough sugar. and water circulating through my body.

So I didn't have that problem. So for morning lifters who are waking up and going straight to the weight room without consuming anything and then wondering why your lifts are shit and you're getting dizzy, you're probably not getting enough fluid electrolytes and sugar before that workout, which depend on all of these. Remember, for those of you who don't know, the nervous system prefers glucose. Yes, you can function off ketones, functioning and performing a high-intensity muscle contraction are two entirely different situations.

So I'm not here to go into a rant about keto. You can throw that in the comments or send me a message, but I'm not going into that in this episode. I may do it in another episode, but right now I'm just talking about basic human function and the importance of hydration. So the central nervous system and the nerves like glucose. So if you are lifting heavy weights with low blood glucose, or let's say normal fasting values, you could get low pretty easy and that's going to interfere with your ability to work out. So many of these exercise physiology researchers will say, well, lifting weights is not glycogen depleting. So you don't need sugar to lift weights. They're correct. You're not going to deplete your muscle glycogen in a weightlifting workout. Typically, you're going to need to run

a high number of miles for that to happen, and that will typically happen at the end of the race when you are sprinting after having run several miles. You can deplete all of your muscle glycogen like that, and that could take hours. A weightlifting workout won't do that, but here's the thing about muscle glycogen. The muscles are very selfish, so all the glucose that you store in your muscles as glycogen gets used for energy when the muscles contract. It doesn't get released into the bloodstream. It's solely used to feed the muscle. They're selfish motherfuckers. So if your liver is completely depleted in the morning, which is easy to do because you only store about 75 grams of glucose in the liver versus about 400 grams in the muscles. So eight hour fast, 10 hour fast,

12 hour fast, whenever your last meal was the day before can get you there. Your liver can be quite depleted when you wake up, which results in a blood sugar that's typically 70 to 99. Now you start lifting heavy, you can potentially bring that down even more. Here's the other thing. You're losing liquid while you sleep. So you're not as well hydrated when you wake up. Your blood pressure is low when you wake up. It starts to climb throughout the morning.

But guess what? Blood pressure is also sensitive to hydration. If you're not getting enough fluid and electrolytes, you could also get hypotensive. So some of these symptoms are the same. When your blood sugar gets low or your blood pressure gets low, you could get dizzy and it can interfere with your ability to lift in addition to the nervous system not functioning at its full capacity.

So consider this when you are planning your morning workouts and you think that you're not going to eat anything and go lift. So the next thing that I typically hear from people is, well, I'm just not hungry when I wake up. Well, are you binging before bed? That is the most common reason that I have found that people wake up full is because they are binging before bed. They're eating massive meals and then going to sleep. So let's try to shift that around. I know that there are a lot of people out there that are refuting the whole breakfast is the most important meal thing.

And it may or may not be. How do you even measure that? Like, I'm not going to make that claim. What I'm going to say is that that claim and the not eating carbs before bed claim originate from some research that was done in the 90s that found that glucose in this sample of people has a diurnal variation. You tend to be most insulin sensitive in the morning. You tend to be the most insulin resistant in the evening.

So this is where the recommendation to eat fairly equal amounts of carbs, spread out every few hours, to optimize your blood sugar and reduce the risk of insulin resistance comes from. This is where the whole don't eat carbs at night comes from. And, you know, there's some merit to it. Is every human the same? Not exactly, but I'm sure that if you put this on a bell curve, Most people in the middle would have a variation like this, and you'd have very few people on the left end or the right end.

So, you know, it's a good rule of thumb to follow. You know, if you train at night, obviously, you're going to want to take some sugar in after your workout to replenish the little bit of glycogen that you knocked out. Also to stimulate insulin release, which will help with indirectly help with enhancing protein synthesis by reducing muscle damage. You don't need to binge on a bunch of carbs, but carbs after an evening workout, out aren't such a bad thing because you are moving the blood sugar through the system independent of insulin by virtue of exercising or lifting weights. So do I think that it's important to eat in the morning across the board? I think so. I think people who tend to eat within an hour of waking up, tend to do well with weight management, tend to perform better in the

weight room, et cetera. That has been my experience. You know, to each his own, I can't make you do anything. But I noticed that when I get new clients and we're talking about diet, this is one of those areas where I get a lot of pushback in the beginning. And the people that stick around, work through it, try it out, and then find that they feel a lot better, shifting more of their food in the morning and cooling off in the evening. Now, I've got a little sidetrack there,

but it's important information for you to know because this is a show about nutrition, and I haven't really talked about just nutrition in a very long time, probably since the day's a trend. And so today we're talking about it. So when you wake up in the morning, if you're just a lazy eater, you're full, you can't chew, you don't feel like chewing, you know, the thought of eating makes you

nauseous, you know, have a Gatorade, you know, maybe two. Maybe have two to four servings a Gatorade if the workout's real heavy and you're a strong lifter. That'll give you plenty of sugar, plenty of electrolytes, and it'll get you nice and hydrated with a reasonable blood sugar level as you go into the workout. A protein shake with that would be good too, but the protein is most critical after the workout. I would say if you're coming off a fast, the carbohydrates and the liquid are going to be the most

important thing. And the evening, as long as you've eaten within three hours of that workout, three to five hours, you're probably going to be fine. I mean, I've went hours without eating and lifted just fine. Now, I'm an individual, so I'm not going to say that that's a population-wide recommendation, but it worked well for me because I find that later in the day, it's just not as much of an issue. It's not something I have to think about too much, but I do eat afterwards. I make a habit of that. Keep that stuff in mind. When you wake up, your body is not in a state to perform high intensity activity to lift heavy weights to grind out three sets of five squats or a heavy set of five deadlifts. So that's my two cents on hydration and morning workouts. You know, we talked

about sugar a lot and sugar comes up in a lot of discussions because keto is popular, has been for 25 years. It's kind of repackaged itself. You know, when I was young, it was Atkins. You know, when I first got into this, it was Atkins. Then at some point, it was paleo and then at some point it was carnivore and then at some point it was just keto and i don't know what the fuck it is now but everybody is swearing by a keto diet no not everybody because obviously some of you are not my take on it is not changed if you aren't performing extremely vigorous activity that's pushing the limits of your body then you're probably fine but if you are and you're not a genetic outlier that's doing that in spite of following a keto diet then you need to eat some carbs and some varies you know

some guys need, you know, 400, 500 carbohydrate. Some guys need 400, 500 carbs to perform well. Some do it fine on 200, 250. But this 100 grams of carbs or less doesn't work very often unless you are a very small fucking person, right? Like I know people that have performed well on 80 carbs, but they're 4 foot 10. You know, I know someone who's performed well on 80 carbs a day, but she's 4 foot 10. She's an explosive athlete, very gifted.

and she's a woman. So if you're a 250-pound guy who's 5-10 to 6-2 or worse, 6-5, that's not going to be enough. You're not going to perform on that. So keep the context in mind. If you are performing five reps or less, that is a high enough intensity to where you're not likely to be able to perform at a high level on very low carbohydrates. You know, very low fat. Same thing. You're going to get sore.

You know, it has different effects. You know, low carb, you typically can't train. Your performance goes down. Low fat, things tend to hurt when it's that heavy. Or you tend to miss reps. Same thing happens. So, you know, your diet needs to be reasonably balanced. And by that, you know, a mixed diet that's moderate in carbs, moderate in fat, and high in protein.

That typically works well for most people. We can spin this many different ways. You know, we can hop on a gimmick and have this one-dimensional diet where I say cut every single thing out that has this one thing in it and everything's going to be great or we can do the hard thing and try to maintain balance. When you maintain balance, you find that you're eating more food in terms of overall volume than when you try to follow something that's one dimensional. What about blood sugar? Because I've just recently learned in the last few years, physicians, nurse practitioners, health coaches are now having healthy people where continuous glucose

monitors. And it has been my observation that many of these healthy people have no idea how to interpret what it is their reading. And a tutorial on this is probably in order. So let's review what happens when you eat. When you eat something, let's limit this discussion to carbohydrates. And I'll touch on fats and proteins too because it applies there as well. But primarily this physiological response I'm about to describe applies to carbohydrates. When you eat a carbohydrate rich meal, let's first establish that all carbohydrates are sugars. You have simple carbohydrates, you have complex carbohydrates, you have monosaccharides, disaccharides, polysaccharides, oligalaccharides. All of that means is that some of these carbohydrate molecules have multiple sugars linked

together or individual sugars that are not linked to anything. So glucose is an individual sugar that is not linked to anything. Lactose has one glucose molecule. and one galactose molecule sucrose which is table sugar has glucose and fructose which is fruit sugar so at the end of the day every carbohydrate is some form so the takeaway point is that all carbohydrates are sugar you know when we say complex carbohydrates we're really talking about polysaccharides and the way you want to think about this is you have lots of sugar molecules linked together so think about a leaf versus a bush right a leaf would be you'll For fructose, a bush would be a polysaccharide, but all of them are sugars.

Now, some of these simple sugars get digested differently. So glucose is what circulates in your blood, but when you eat something that's pure fructose, that gets digested at the level of the liver. So that's not going to affect your blood glucose because it's not glucose, right? Fruits also have some glucose in them, but they're primarily fructose. So just, you know, we're not going to go into a big biochemistry lesson here, but The takeaway point here is any time you eat something that has carbohydrates in it, those carbohydrates are either single sugars or lots of sugars that need to be broken apart.

So when you eat carbohydrates, you start digesting the glucose. Your body releases insulin so that it gets sent through the human body to go to the appropriate places. And the net result is that blood glucose gets lowered. So it increases because you just ate. And then it gets lowered because it goes everywhere it needs to go. and whatever's left in the bloodstream circulates until you have enough time without food to which it goes back down.

Now, the key thing to note here is, it being higher than fasted is not abnormal. Let me repeat that. If your blood glucose is above 99 during the day after you have eaten, that is not abnormal. That is not unhealthy. Now, if it is above 140, two hours after eating, That's cause for concern. That's something worth bringing up to a doctor. But if it's 125 and you ate two hours ago, you're fine.

If you're checking it right after a meal and it's higher than that, I would give it more time. The way that they have established these ranges is they've looked at populations of people, looked at the means and the medians, and have come up with ranges of what's normal and what's not normal. And you know, you can dispute that, but that's a whole separate argument. But you have normal fasting values that assume you haven't eaten. in 12 hours, and that's 70 to 99. That's assuming you have not eaten in 12 hours. And then you have what's called post-pranile non-fasting values. And those values are based on consuming a meal and waiting two hours. So if you consume a meal and check it right away, you're going to see exactly what we'd

expect to see, high glucose levels. You know, we saw something similar with fat when we were watching this documentary called The Game Changers. If you want a good laugh, you can watch it. It's total propaganda film demonizing meat, but I did a whole takedown of it with Mark Ripito and Steph Bradford back in 2020. And you can find that episode of Starting Strength Radio if you are interested in listening to us rant about this. But they had people eat a meal that was rich in meat, which is also going to be typically higher than fat than something that's super lean. And they tested their triglycerides after they ate. And lo and behold, the Blood was cloudy. Why? Because they just ate. So they have a lot of circulating triglycerides.

When you test triglycerides for your lab values, you are instructed to fast so that it can circulate through the system and you could get effective cholesterol transport. Same thing with HDL. You want to do that fasted. So when you get blood work done, always make sure you fast 12 hours unless you are intentionally getting something checked in the afternoon to see what it is in the afternoon, something that varies like test. testosterone or insulin or glucose. But if you're just doing routine blood work, make sure you fast for 12 hours. Also make sure you don't lift for 48 to 72 hours because lifting can alter several labs such as creatine and BUN and kidney function, right? Notify your doctor if you're taking creatine because creatine can also affect your lab values. But back to sugar. So you are wearing a continuous glucose monitor. And you eat some yogurt and some fruit, some oatmeal, something like that. And then your blood sugar spikes. It spikes. This is what I hear all the time,

that it spikes. And then you see that it's 125 and it's been two hours. No, that's not a spike. That's a normal response to eating. Okay. Insulin is doing its job. And if you continue to wait more hours, it's going to get even lower, right? The expectation is not that you have, fasting glucose values all day. That's not what you want. There are fasting ranges or non-fasting ranges. And we've talked about that. Typically, you want a non-fasting range, and that is two hours after a meal, to be less than 140. You want fasting to be 70 to 99. That's your first thing in the morning blood glucose level. So if you are wearing a continuous glucose monitor, I wouldn't worry about the fact that your blood sugar goes up after you eat. It's supposed to. I feel like some

of these devices they've fucking put out lately have just made people neurotic and some of them aren't even very accurate at measuring things so finger sticks are pretty far off from a blood draw so you got to keep that in mind too there's going to be variation there you might get a normal a1c and then see weird blood values when you're doing finger sticks at home so you know some are better than others you know doctors have brands that they recommend so i'm not going to say they're complete trash, but understand it's not the same thing as getting an intravenous blood draw. There is a difference. So to bring that point home, you need glucose to train hard. Is it going to raise your blood glucose? Absolutely. And then it's going to come back down

if you are a healthy adult. If you are diabetic, that is another conversation and you can buy a consult or hire me for coaching and we can talk about that in depth. But that is an entirely different conversation. Diabetics have abnormal physiology. And if they want to train hard. There's going to be some tradeoffs that are going to be made in the way of medication and lifestyle management. There's a right and wrong way to do this, but diabetes is well beyond the scope of basic nutrition advice. And, you know, it's something I can talk about in another episode that maybe I can bring a doctor on so we can go into the pathophysiology as well. But if you are a healthy adult, keep your non-fasting sugar under 140 and your fasting

under 99 above 70. If you're kind of, if you're in those ranges, you're fine. You probably don't need to wear a continuous glucose monitor. All that's doing is making you more neurotic. So, you know, cut that shit out. You know, there's more important things you need to put your brain on. But if you insist on torturing yourself and going crazy over more metrics, then by all means, don't let me stop you.

So that is, you know, my rant on glucose, hydration, and glucose management. If you're going to train hard, you need carbs. You just need them. What else do you need? You need protein. We've talked about that at length. Typically, it's better to overshoot than undershoot.

Many people undershoot and you feel it. You start missing reps. You get sore. I haven't gotten this question in a while because I think that enough time has passed to where people aren't as worried about it. But I used to get questions about protein and kidney disease. First, I remind people, there is no tolerable upper limit for protein intake. which means that there is not a number by which if you exceed it, you are going to have

harmful effects. So that's number one. Number two, if you have healthy kidneys, you're going to be fine. You can eat as much protein as you need to and you're not going to develop kidney disease. Now, if your kidneys are not functioning, there's two schools of thought here. There are doctors that say follow a low protein diet because your kidneys can't filter it out. You know, there's merit to that because non-functioning kidneys can't do a lot of things. Eventually, you have to restrict potassium too and phosphorus and sodium because the kidneys are not functioning. But did potassium, phosphorus, and sodium cause the kidneys to stop functioning? No, so neither did protein. If you're a healthy adult, you're taking care of business. You can eat your potassium, you can eat your

phosphorus, you can eat your protein, and you can drink plenty of water. When you have abnormal physiology shit changes, but it doesn't mean that those changes that you have to make with a non-functioning kidney apply to a functioning kidney. So it's two different situations. I got to really emphasize this. Some considerations to be made are you want to drink plenty of water. If you're eating a lot of protein, same with fiber. You want to drink plenty of water so that fiber does its job of moving things through the intestines. So, you know, we'll keep coming back to hydration here. You know, you need to drink plenty of water. Water's a good thing. You can't live without. it. But the more years that pass, the more we kind of arrive at the same place when we start

deconstructing diet and high intensity performance. I got to really emphasize high intensity performance. Most people aren't performing high intensity muscle contractions. A typical workout for the naive gym goer who's just in the weight room is going to consist of eight reps to 30 reps, maybe more, depending on who influenced them. And they're typically going to be on machines. or with dumbbells or something like that, and the weights are going to be light. That is not high intensity. That is high volume.

You know, high volume is hard. It hurts. You know, I'm not going to say that it's easy if you push yourself with it. Those aren't high intensity contractions. When I cut body weight,

I typically do tens and eights on my lifts, on my squat deadlift, especially. I can tolerate them. I can get through the workout, even though I'm hungry, tired, maybe mildly dehydrated.

And I can get through the, workout and I've even set PRs in those higher rep ranges. Do I recommend that for the average person? Probably not because most people can't reproduce eight to ten reps in a row on a complex lift like a squad or a deadlift. That could work on something like a pull down, a bicep curl. You know, 15s can work well on a preacher curl or a cable curl. You know, the more isolated the movement, the more reps you want to do, the more compound the movement, the fewer the reps you want to do. But I have found that because the weights are lighter and a set of eight is limited. by endurance and not strength, I'm able to power through that on low calories.

Now, if I want to go back to fives, I have to eat more. And then I end up gaining weight and I get stronger and I get fatter. And then I lose weight and guess what? I end up heavier and leaner than I was the time before. It's only taken me about 25 years to figure this out. But, hey, you know, better late than never, right? You know, it's one of those things. When I first got into this, they made it seem like you could transfer.

your body into a beach body. You know, that's what most of the lay public aspires to. But even, like, they would show fitness models and bodybuilders and they make it seem like you can accomplish this in three months, 12 weeks to, you know, add two inches to your arms, you know, or whatever, whatever the fuck they were advertising. And, you know, for one, they didn't emphasize load very much. You know, they emphasized every variable except load because load's scary. And load gets people hurt, you know, if you're not, if you don't know what you're doing and

you're lifting weights unsupervised like most people are and doing the fuckery that we see in these commercial gyms, you know, you're probably going to see some injuries there. You know, an unsupervised squat by the average gym goer. We've seen it, you know, they're about an eighth to depth, maybe a quarter squat with way more weight that can be handled or they're really light done for lots and lots of sets. And, you know, lots and lots of sets and lots of volume eventually could cause Rabdo. Rabdo's probably been caused by thousands of air squats. So, you know, these things are technical.

They can be risky. And, you know, getting some instruction, you know, you don't need a one-on-one trainer three times a week. Not everybody can afford that. But, you know, getting some instruction and some eyes on your lifts is probably a good idea. You know, I recently took a client on who was hurting his back every month. And, you know, we just started working together so the verdict is not out.

But I'm pretty confident we're going to get him to a good place. But he tweaked his back right before we started. And he said that, you know, he basically the number of times he tweaked it and the number of months he's been training were about the same. So he was getting a back tweak once a month. As soon as I watched his videos, without fail, every video, the guy did not have good control of his back. Now, did he know that? No, of course he didn't know. They can't watch himself. You know, it's hard for me to talk shit about a lot of these gymgoers, you know, at the commercial gyms, because they have no idea what the fuck they're doing. They don't, they can't

watch themselves. They think they're working hard and they think they're doing it right. And the culture in those places is that this stuff is so easy, you know, a caveman can do it. Remember the Geico commercials? It's so easy a caveman can do it. And no, it's not that simple for a lot of people. Some people accidentally get it right, but we've all, people that listen to this show, you've been to a commercial gym, are most people getting it right? No, they're in there fucking it up, doing weird shit, quarter squats, roundback deadlifts, if they're even deadlifting, tap dancing while they bench, not pressing at all, or doing them with dumbbells with the arms out to the side,

basically a glorified tricep extension, and swinging like crazy on the pull-downs. So, you know, there's a lot of fuckery going on there, and it's easy to get hurt if you haven't learned to stabilize yourself. It's also easy to get hurt, like I said earlier, if you're not following a proper diet. So it's important to gain access to good information and to train intelligently, but, you know, seek help from a professional from time to time.

Get some eyes on your lifts, you know, get some eyes on your lifts, talk to somebody about your diet, you know, doesn't necessarily need to be a recurring thing. But, you know, we're real good at bullshitting ourselves, and we're not very good at watching ourselves do things either because we kind of only have two eyes and they look straight ahead. So, you know, expertise is key. you know, I originally intended to go into a long episode about one topic, but I think I like this Q&A that I've went into because these are common things that are coming up in a lot of my threads lately, whether it be somebody on social media asking me questions or a client,

you know, I work with a lot of different people and, you know, I'm starting to see themes here. You know, the blood sugar thing seems to come up a lot. The morning workout thing seems to come up a lot. And technique, you know, I talk about that in a lot of episodes since the beginning of this show. You know, most people think they're moving in a way that's just fine. And then they're actually moving in a way that's quite the opposite. So the takeaway from this episode, you know, try to surround yourself by people that know a lot about what you're trying to do that have been in the trenches and have had to troubleshoot things. And, you know, don't, make the assumption that you are pushing yourself in the right direction because it's very easy

to not be working smarter, be working dumber, not smarter, but still working hard, right? You know, the whole work smarter, not harder. You can work hard, but be working dumb, right? So the best way to work smarter is to seek out good information from, you know, I hate saying reputable sources because a lot of reputable sources, there's air quotes, are full of shit. credentials aren't enough. You really want somebody who at some point sucked at this or has coached a lot of people that suck at this and have gotten them to a good place. And that could be with diet or training, right? You don't want the guy who was fat because he was depressed and

then just lost a bunch of weight because his body responds well, the weight loss. Or the guy whose first deadlift was 485. You know, there's value there. Of course, these people aren't completely incompetent and some of them are actually really good. But typically the guy who had to bust his ass for the mediocre result is going to have the best solutions for you because he had to troubleshoot the most to get to where he got. So that's, you know, I think I beat some of these topics to hell and maybe I'll keep doing episodes like this. You know, I'm trying different things out this year. Next time I'm hopefully going to have another guest. I have a few in mind.

I've had a lot of things going on, a lot of things shifting, but I want to hit this show a little bit harder, make it more interesting. I've already brought a few interesting guests on, so I would like to bring on more, and hopefully I'll get to do that. So with that said, let me close out. Thank you for tuning in to the Waits and Plates Podcast. You can find me at Waits and Plates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. If you're a Metro Phoenix, you can come by Waits and Plates, Jim. We're just south of the airport between 32nd and 40th straight and Broadway. I have a nice gym here.

We've got some Olympic weight lifters here that, you know, train as a team in the back. So we're, you know, half strength training, half Olympic lifting. You know, you can see a little bit of everything. And the gym also has an Instagram page. It's lightly active. We're basically sharing each other's things. It's weights double underscore and double underscore plates. And you can find us on YouTube if you want to watch the video version at YouTube.com

slash at weights underscore and underscore plates. and if you liked this episode and we're watching or plan to watch, please smash that subscribe button and support the YouTube channel. We just started really building it last year. It's been up for almost three years now, but we really started pushing it last year. So tune in, if you like it again, smash it, smash that subscribe button. So that about wraps it up, and I will see you next time.

Thank you.