Weights and Plates Podcast - #44 - Get Rid of "Man Boobs" Forever: Advice for the Skinny Fat Male

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

It's the new year, and a time when many people resolve to work eat, eat better, and improve their body composition. Some guys aim to lose weight, others to gain it, but what about the in-betweener, the guy who is of normal bodyweight, normal BMI, but still appears unathletic -- low muscle tone, no visible definition, and maybe even excess fat around the pectorals (man boobs) and waist line. This condition is often referred to as "skinny-fat," and skinny fat people often mistakenly think that they need to lose fat to look leaner and more muscular   Coach Santana and Coach Trent explain, however, that the skinny-fat person's problem is they are undertrained and undermuscled. And the answer to the skinny-fat dilemma is to get strong and gain muscular bodyweight in the process. That's right, gain weight! It may seem counter-intuitive at first, but gaining muscle results in more visible defintion by spreading existing fat mass over a larger surface area. It's just arithmetic too. If you gain weight that is mostly muscle, then the ratio of your muscle to body fat will go down, and therefore your body fat percentage will go down. In other words, gaining muscle makes you leaner!   Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Wait a minute. You're not just Robert Santana, Dr. Robert Santana. That's right. I actually am now, apparently. Nice. Yeah, man, you got to sell that. You got to write doctor, put it on your cards. After all, I'm a doctor.

You are a doctor. You should, you know, your friends would be like, hey, listen, I'm doctor now. It's Dr. Santana. I don't know if I could do that shit. Don't know about that. Well, what's going on, man? How you doing? I'm good. I think I'm congested. Well, that makes two of us.

Yeah, my right ear's blocked. That's new. Just had the new year. So, you know, getting a little bit busier again. You know, typically slows down at the end of the year. Now it's starting to pick up again, you know, during COVID there just seemed like it was busy all the time. So kind of going back to that old cycle. Yeah. The mad January rush. See, that's the interesting thing, you know, like we're not, we're not personal trainers, although I don't mind it. If people call me a personal trainer, it's fine. But, uh, we're not really really personal trainers like the guy at the gold's gym so we don't really have the like crazy january rush on you know what

was it the january 2nd this year like uh like the bro gyms do but um i mean you know i'm still usually pretty busy in january though i get lots of one-on-ones and and startups happening yeah i think we it's similar but it's different. Like, we're not getting a ton of, you know, I want abs in six months type people that, you know, kind of rush into the Globo gyms or, you know, Orange Theory or whatever commercial fitness type business you could think of. But I think in general, at the beginning of the year,

people tend to want to try new shit you know yep because you know feels like a fresh start clean slate whatever you want to call it so as a result i think we do generally see some sort of an uptick um but i know with when it comes to general fitness clients it tends to be more for sure because, oh my God, I need to lose weight, you know? Right. It's, hey, I think we did a podcast about that. Yeah, we sure did. Well, I have a short little story here and we get to our episode. This is unrelated to the episode, but I thought it was worth sharing here. So, you know, you said you've got congestion. I do too. Sorry, folks. You got to listen to me hack my way through

this today. Last week, the cold hit me full scale. It was Thursday. I felt like I got hit by a Mack truck. My energy was just in the dumps. My body didn't actually feel that bad. I didn't have body aches and stuff like you get with the flu, but I didn't feel good. And I had planned last week to be my week of singles, to do some heavy singles at the end of the year, just for fun. And because I was already there in my program, I had been tapering off from sets of eight to fives to threes to doubles to some singles. And I also kind of have this thing every year where I got to squat four plates at least once a year. And unfortunately I lost my, my notebook from the first half of the year. So I couldn't remember if I had squatted four plates or not in 2022. So I'm like, well, shit, I've got to squat it this year. I've got to squat it this week to be sure, you know, that I squatted four plates this year. And so I had a problem. I felt horrible.

And, uh, so I'm like, all right, let's make a deal with myself. I got to at least squat some heavy doubles. So I'm like, let's do something moderately heavy. So I put 365 on the bar and I squatted it for a double and I rested for a couple minutes. And the whole time I'm just thinking to myself, I'm like, man, I'm going to feel like a bitch if I don't put four plates on there and squat it. So that's what I did. I'm like, fuck it, four plates. I'm going to hit this for a single. And it happened. And it actually moved pretty well. It wasn't the greatest four plate single I'd ever squatted, but it actually moved better than I expected it would. And so anyway, I just wanted to share that because, um, it's funny what happens when you

ignore what's going on with your body and you follow through with the plan anyway. Right. Sometimes you do it and it's true. Your body is performing like as your body performs as bad as you feel. Sometimes that happens and it's just not there that day. But a lot of times, more often than you might think, you actually do a lot better than you think you would. And I've been doing this for a while. I know that, but I'm still, you know, I'm still subject to want to kind of sandbag things sometimes. And so, uh, that was a good lesson for me to relearn again, is that you're often capable of more than you think. So all you resolutioners out there, there's a day coming not that far from

now when all the fun and the excitement of starting a new program wears off and it's going to suck and you're going to feel like shit and you're going to be have a cold and you'd be like well not today i'll go to the gym next tomorrow or the day after that nope nope get up go to the gym just do the work if it sucks take 10 off the bar but it's probably not going to suck you're probably going to get through it and you'll be fine showing up is uh 90 of the battle you know i'd say even more. Yeah. We've talked about this at length. You know, if you just plan to show up over a long enough timeline, you're going to improve. That said, once you reach a certain point, baseline sucks. I was telling somebody this earlier. Right. Yeah. You know, there's there's no, there's no more light sets of anything, you know, your baseline sucks, you know? Yeah. Right. Whatever, whatever you

think is a lightweight sucks, you know? Yeah. I remember the first time I squatted 315, that was a real big deal. And then like, I couldn't, like, I almost had to like, double check the numbers in my log book when 315 was a light day. I was like, this is my light back off day. 315 is not light still. It's still not light. I fucking hate it. Yeah. Yeah. When I'm warming up and I hit that last 315 for a single, you know, it was my last little warmup. Uh, yep. It's always heavy. It's always heavy, but, um, well today we want to kind of go back to a topic we've hit before but we wanted to talk about this from kind of a ground up level and that topic is the skinny fat novice male and i think for short we can say the man boobs guy. Yeah, I'd say that that's fair. I got man boobs. What do I do?

I know you're listening. Dr. Santana, what do I do? Well, I was a man boobs guy back in the day, or at least I thought I was. I've seen cases far more severe than mine over the years, some of which they just needed surgery. It was gynecomastia, not from steroid use. Some guys just have it, you know. So there's a difference between regional body fat deposition and gynecomastia, which is deposits of breast tissue. In the first situation, with a combination of muscle gain and fat loss, you could spread out the fat stores over a larger mass of muscle, or you could lose the fat stores through diet.

Um, those are the two ways that you address, um, regional fat storage in the pecs. Cause that's what we're talking about here with quote unquote man boobs. Yeah. And wait, I want to go back for a second though. Like when you talk about gynecomastia because you know because i think i think every dude that's that's been skinny fat at some point probably is like googled that and be like is that what i have no gynecomastia is a very um specific problem it's an actual like growth of like female breast tissue on a male and it's due to hormonal imbalances you

know you produce a lot of estrogen right and uh that can happen you know it's why steroid users tend to have that side effect if they uh take steroids in certain doses right yeah and yeah mismanage things and um yeah i remember uh in 90s, there were all these like weird sort of like precursors to various anabolic steroids that were illegal to sell these things actually get metabolized in the body. So God knows what people, what doses people were actually taking. And there were, there was kind of a little rash of gynecomastia cases from teenagers abusing this stuff, but that is a very specific medical condition. That's probably not what you have. It does happen. Some people, you know, develop this, but that's probably not the case. And that's not what we're talking about. Yeah. Oftentimes it's lack of muscle mass and excess body fat or a combination of the two. Right. And some guys are more predisposed to put on body fat in that area than others, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

Genetic predisposition to put it on the chest. And the spare tire, do you notice that? That kind of goes hand in hand. Like guys that are genetically predispositioned to put on like love handles and fat around the waist are also putting it on the chest. Yeah, I've seen that. I've seen that. The common male fat storage pattern is just the big belly with not a whole lot of fat elsewhere. That's probably the most common male fat storage pattern is just the big belly with not a whole lot of fat elsewhere that's probably the most common male fat storage pattern yeah but then you get the skinny fat guy uh with you know the spare tire and the man boobs quote unquote okay um then you get some guys that are pear

shaped they just put in their lower body it's very odd i've seen it though yeah sure yeah absolutely which is the most common female fat storage pattern. But you see both. When we refer to these as male, female, we're talking about the most common, right? What's in the middle of the bell curve. Yeah. But certainly you see the opposing pattern in the opposite sex. What does skinny fat mean? Let's kind of underline that point because we've talked about it a lot, and I think a lot of people have an idea of what be bullshit when you deal with a naturally muscular person or someone who's gained muscle through training. A skinny, fat person is usually not in that category. Skinny, fat person is untrained or undertrained in most cases. So let's get to definitions here.

For those of you who have been up and up on your BMI in a while, let's go through the ranges. So less than 18.5 is considered underweight. 18.5 kilograms per meter squared, by the way. And this is a measure of density per height. So they look at your weight in relation to height. And the higher the number, the more you're assumed to be storing more body fat. And the lower the number, the quote-unquote skinnier you are, the less body fat, the less muscle mass you tend to have. It's kind of funny. So as I'm explaining this, I haven't had a defined BMI in a while, BMI is body mass index. But as I'm saying this, it's making me realize when you have a low BMI, the assumption is you have no muscle.

But when you have a high BMI, the assumption is that fat is driving that. That it's all fat, right? Yeah, it's all fat. It's all fat if your BMI is high. It's no muscle if your BMI is low. Which to be fair, if you're looking at... So you can only lose muscle according to BMI. Yeah, right. It's a nihilistic calculation. Yeah, well, you know, to be fair, if you're looking at the population at large, especially in the Western world, that's probably an accurate assessment that the people who are high BMI are obese. I always thought it was funny. So I'm five foot eight. And when I hit 200 pounds body weight which is the proper uh minimum body weight for male according to mark ripito uh i also hit a 30 bmi that's the 200 pounds is the the point at which my bmi went up to

30.4 according to the calculator which is bmi of 30 and above is considered obese so that was a point of pride when i first hit 200 pounds that I became obese. I'm still not fucking obese. Now I'm not obese anymore. I think I'm like at 28 point something. So I'm like, I'm only overweight according to the VMI. Same here. I'm like 26 or 27. It's ridiculous.

But, you know, it's a measure of, it's supposed to be a, oh, it's supposed to be some sort of proxy for body composition. With the higher the number, the assumption is your body fat is high. With the lower the number, the assumption is that your body fat and body weight, because usually when you're looking at the lower numbers, they don't really care if it's low body fat. They're more concerned about muscle mass when you go to the lower extreme. Or just overall body weight, because the underweight person is at higher risk than the overweight person in some ways. Because let's say you get

an infection, the overweight obese person is more likely to survive it because typically when you get an infection, you lose a ton of weight. Your body starts eating itself. If you don't have a whole lot to lose, that malnutrition can kill you pretty easily. But I'm getting off on a tangent here. So when I look at BMI, I view it as weight per height, you know. One could argue that, well, it could be measuring density, but you could be fat, so you're not going to be very dense, right? Yeah. So that's the problem with that.

But it's, you know, when I'm a vet, when I'm defining what a skinny fat person is, I look at their BMI. So let's say that you have a BMI that is, let's call it normal weight. Usually you don't see this with underweight, although I have, I have seen this with underweight, believe it or not. But you might have a person with a BMI, underweight, believe it or not. But you might have a person with a BMI, a body mass index, of 20 to 24.9, right? So it's, yeah, actually, it's like 18.6 to 24.9. But, you know, once you start getting under 20, you're pretty thin, you know, in most cases. Right. But let's just say, for the sake of illustration, 20 to 24.9, right? So that might be a guy who's 5'9", 155 pounds, right?

Right. Yep. That's a normal BMI for a guy who's 5'9". And never trained before, because again, you don't see this problem with trained people. If you're 5'9", 155 and trained, you probably haven't trained. Or you're very, very dense and one of these, you know, really lean. Yes, but so you probably look like a rock climber if you're actually trained. If you're 5'9", yeah. Super lean and like stringy and yeah.

Yeah, or I'm thinking of a boxer or some sort of a fighter, you know. Wrestler or something. You're a lightweight athlete, you know, if you're 5'9 155 and trained you know but you know i'm talking about the sedentary 5'9 155 not very lean and not uh muscular at all this guy will typically complain that he has no muscle definition despite you know having a normal too low you know low end of normal uh b right? So if this person were to hop into a DEXA, dual x-ray absorptiometry, it's an instrument used to assess and evaluate body composition. It was originally designed for bone density, but it's a popular method of estimating fat and fat

free mass. By the way, no body composition instrument can actually measure muscle mass. You're always estimating it. I mean, all of it's an estimate. But muscle mass is the hardest compartment to measure with body composition testing, regardless of which method you're using, because it typically will separate the compartments into fat, fat-free mass, and possibly water, right? Yeah.

And fat-free mass is anything that is not body fat. So it could be muscle, organ, et cetera. The theory is that muscle and water are the two that can be altered pretty easily. I mean, that's a whole other episode. But the skinny fat guy may have a normal BMI, let's say he has a BMI of 20, right? Let's say he's 5'9", 150 to 155. But then he hops in a DEXA and his fat percentage is 25%. Right. Yeah. So the objective way that I like to define skinny fat is normal BMI, high fat percentage. Yeah. Yeah. So you, it, would you say that like over 20% is kind of the range of like,

that's what makes you skinny fat. If you're like over about 20% or 20, is it more like 25%? A lot of this varies depend on regional distribution patterns. Yeah. Sure. In general, an untrained,

uh, normal BMI guy with 20 plus percent body fat isn't going to be defined. Typically, the guys who are defined at 20 percent body fat are very dense, heavy people. Yeah, they're big dudes. Yeah, for sure. Like Dr. Israetel. He's, what is he, 240 right now? And he is vascular. He has large muscle bellies, but he says he's 20 percent body fat. Wow. Yeah, I would never guess that.

But yeah, there you go, right? It's extremely muscular. Exactly. If you look at him, you can see muscle definition all around. But that's because he's 5'5", and he's, you know, 240 pounds, you know? Right. Think about that for a second. At 20% body fat, that's what, 48 pounds, like a little under 50

pounds of fat on that 240-pound body. That means that he has like 190, 200 pounds of muscle on a five-foot, five-inch body. That's crazy. Yeah, that's a lot of lean mass. Yeah. So, okay, yeah, that seems to ring true. You know, when I coached at a starting strength affiliate gym, I coached there for about three years, and we had just regular body fat calipers. And I would use the, I always think it was funny, they call it the Jackson Pollock three-sight test. There's a bunch of different sights you can measure. We would do a basic three-sight test. We would measure it for males. We'd measure the chest, a pinch at the, uh, uh, navel near

the navel and on the thigh. And, um, you know, these are much more, much less accurate than a DEXA scan, of course. Right. And there's, there's a lot of variation that can happen just in the way that you measure. Um, so it's very finger to the wind, but that was kind of my experience is a lot of the guys that came in would be, I would call them skinny fat. Some guys had more of kind of a dad bod, which we can talk about as an analog to this. But that was kind of my experience. Same concept. I'd say the dad bod is like guys that are maybe a little bit heavier. They're not what we would call fat, certainly not obese, but they're definitely bigger than the skinny fat person. Like they look kind of chubby in a t-shirt. That's my opinion. Yeah, their BMI is probably overweight, possibly obese.

Right. But they don't look like fat fat. But anyway, same kind of deal though. It's like a lot of guys would come in that were skinny fat. And I'd say on average, I would caliper them about 25 to 28, 30% body fat. And again, that's a very inaccurate test, but sort of ballpark, it makes sense. Like they were definitely over 20. That was for sure. Yeah. I doubt the DEXA is going to be half of that, you know? Yeah, right. Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, that rings true. So, okay. So we got a guy who's, who's a quote unquote normal BMI. Well, it is normal BMI, you know, quote unquote normal body weight is what most people would consider that on the scale but high body fat percentage that's right okay yeah and i what

do these people normally look like low definition real smooth looking pretty much uh so a lot of this is related to where you distribute body fat. So you could be skinny fat and have a large gut. You see this with drunks. Yeah, true. And I'm not talking about ascites. That's a different situation. Ascites is a liver condition that gives you a more distended belly.

And typically heavy alcoholics will have that if they are older and have been doing it a long time um but you know i've seen guys i always think of like uh job sites construction workers you'll see the real skinny guys with the belly you know because they work all they just work yeah they work all day and drink and you know and eat shit you know right diets and i'm not picking on construction workers a lot of day day laborers tend to have this frame. Or if you just go into a dive bar, you'll see guys like that walking around. It's a phenotype that exists. You have the guy who's skinny and otherwise lean,

but with a big, giant belly. All their fat's right in the middle. And I trained a guy like this. He actually worked. He's a general contractor. That's why it jumps in my head. So I'm not picking on you guys for no reason, if you're listening. He came into my gym, and he actually gained 40 pounds, and his gut got smaller.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. But he was skinny. What would I say he was? He was – we've got to come up with a name for these guys.

So we got, man, I used to have a word for it. I forgot what I said to him when he came in, but he was skinny with a gut, you know? The skinny gut. Yeah, the skinny gut. Yeah. I know what you're talking about though. Right.

Yeah. Like you look at these guys and like, if they're in like a pair of short shorts, they probably got some definition in their legs like you can see some striation calves veiny calves maybe even on their arms you know they got you can see a little bit of separation between the bicep and the deltoid yeah uh but yeah but but but they have the pot belly yeah for sure um i i see a lot of guys that sort of look normal. I think about this, this is a big thing. Um, they look normal in a t-shirt. Like you just be like, oh, that's just a normal looking dude. Not skinny, not big for sure. Not muscular, but they just sort of look average. But then when they take the t-shirt off, there's very little definition. They, they look very smooth in the chest and the stomach, smooth arms. You don't see any definition in the shoulders at all. No traps. They tend to be like very flat across the shoulders.

And, you know, so why do we bring all this up? Like, what's the point of knowing this? Well, if that's you, right, if you're starting from this position of being skinny fat, then one of the things that I think is the most underrated part of body composition is the effect of the look of muscle mass on your frame. And you've talked about it already on this show, and you've talked about it many times before, is that by simply adding a bunch of muscle mass to your frame, even if your body fat percentage did not change whatsoever, right? Which it will, it'll go down. But even if it didn't, and you just put a bunch of muscle on your frame, this kind of guy is going to look

more athletic. He's going to look more masculine because he's going to get some shape to the body. Like his traps are going to like slope upwards towards his, you know, towards the head. You know, he's going to have more of a V shape when he's wearing a t-shirt. Um, you know, the chest is going to stick out more. He's going to get more bulge in the muscle bellies. And again, like maybe not that much definition, but certainly the shape. He's's gonna look better in clothes it's gonna look way better yeah yeah yeah so that's it's a you know point our good friend uncle rip made a long time ago pretty sure he was making fun of me but he said a guy who's 165 and trains looks no different than a guy who's 165 and doesn't train yeah and uh that's a that's kind of a separate topic, but his because that he followed that up with was because we spend 90% of our day wearing clothes.

So unless you're walking around outside naked, nobody's going to know that you're either skinny fat or that you have abs. Right, yeah. Unless you're wearing super tight clothes. Unless you're the liver king and you never put a shirt on. Yeah. I just never, never put it on. So there's that little clickbait drop. Yeah.

You got to slip that in there somewhere awkwardly. But, uh, you know, I always, I definitely, so that, so I want to kind of go back to my phenotype. So we know what we're talking to here. So, you know, the first guy is, um, first skinny fat guy just has a gut, you know, he's, he's skinny, he's's fat but he's otherwise defined except in the midsection and uh you know that's that's one guy the the second guy you know has what i call an even fat distribution and that was me when i was younger i stored fat

everywhere i still do and you know i'll come back to that. Except my calves, my calves stay lean when I'm fat. That's about it. You know, but other than that, you know, I know arm, forearm, back, pack, stomach, you know, now I keep my quads and my hamstrings, even when I'm fatter because of all the squatting and deadlifting, obviously. Yeah. But I will store fat across my entire body. And it's deceptive because i remember rip when i first met him 10 years ago i was about a buck 90 and he didn't believe that i weighed that because i spread the fat out everywhere i still looked generally on this like i was on the smaller side you know right um and remember you're wearing clothes 90% of the time. So in clothing, you know, I didn't look like I was close to 200 pounds because I stored fat everywhere.

So typically the skinny fat guy that comes to me and calls himself skinny fat has an even fat distribution, a normal BMI, and a high fat percentage. So this person might be 5'9", 155 pounds and has body fat pretty much everywhere with no visible definition. And, you know, there's a third guy and this is the guy, the skinny fat guy hates and tries to compare himself to. That's the skinny lean guy. You know, we all hate this motherfucker. Uh, and this guy's probably five, nine, 155 pounds and 9% body fat. Right. Right. He's still not in any better health than the skinny fat guy, by the way. He just has eight pack abs. Yeah. They both have a BMI of 20. They're thin guys, but one guy has eight pack abs. The other guy might need a bra. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So this

was totally like one of my good friends growing up, he was like that just like skinny, super lean, like just like muscles everywhere. Um, now, you know, he just looked like a rail when he put a t-shirt on, but yeah, he takes his t-shirt off and he just had abs popping out everywhere. Um, and then there was me who is definitely on the skinny fat, like the second guy, you know, I had an even fat distribution, although I had a little bit, a little bit more like tire around the midsection. I still do. I still have the love handles, even though I'm leaner than I was then. So, all right, cool. So, so hopefully that gives you a little bit of picture of what we're talking about when we're talking about the skinny fat guy. And like I said, you know, this is, it's important to know this

because the answer is, you know, the answer that most people that come to me that are skinny fat, they, they think they know what they need. They're like, I need to lose this fat. I need to get leaner. And, um, what, what they just said, right. They will often say those two things to me. And what I have to point out to him is I'm like, look, um, you're me, you're giving me the problem and you're also giving me a solution that's wrong, right? That's not necessarily the only way to lose, to get leaner, right? So they're right in the sense that, hey, I need to get leaner. They need to lower their body fat percentage, but they assume that the only way to do that is to lose fat, right? And that's not the case. Remember, body fat percentage has two variables, right? You have the numerator and you have the denominator, right? So you can also, to lower your body fat percentage, you can also just add more muscle mass. If you add a whole lot more muscle mass, guess what happens? And you keep your existing body fat roughly the same, maybe it goes up a little bit, but you add a whole lot more muscle mass. Well, guess what happened? Your body fat percentage went down. Yeah. So, you know, I was guilty of this myself when I first, that's what got me to start training. You know, I joined swimming at 15. I was guilty of this myself. That's what got me to start training.

I joined swimming at 15. I was already thinking about this because man boobs are annoying, especially I grew up in the 90s. WWE guys had huge pecs. Right. And these bodybuilders had huge freaking jacked pecs with veins across them. Some of the WWE guys only had pecs. Oh, yeah. They didn't have abs. They were just kind of the WWE guys like only had pecs. Oh, yeah.

Like they didn't have abs. They were just kind of smooth, but they had big pecs though. They had big pecs and traps. Yeah. But, you know. They just did shrugs and bench all day. Yeah.

I don't understand what the hype was with Hogan and Flair. I mean, Hogan had, he had the gyno and Flair had the worst gyno I've ever seen in a human. And yet these guys

were the superstars. Hey, you know what though? You know who has more titles than Tom Brady? Ric Flair? I know I've ever seen in a human. And yet these guys were the superstars. Hey, you know what, though? You know who has more titles than Tom Brady? Ric Flair. Ric Flair. Anyway, yeah, it's so true. Yeah, these guys are like all pecs and traps.

Yeah, pecs and traps. Upper back, no lower back. Me and my friend used to laugh about this when we got into lifting. We were like, these guys have traps, arms, pecs, upper back, no lower back, and no legs. And that's probably pretty accurate. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they didn't have like bird legs, but it didn't look like they were competing in Olympic weightlifting weight lifting either but they weren't so they didn't need to um these guys were super athletes first of all you know they're the degenerates that you know couldn't behave themselves in professional

sports but still had all the physical characteristics necessary you know oh yeah right right um but uh you know back to the topic so uh yeah no i you know i, okay, I got a bench because I got man boobs, and I think lifting plays a role in this. The 90 spot reduction was popular still. It had been debunked by people in circles, but we didn't have the internet, so things didn't spread as fast. A large chunk of the population probably still believed that you can do abs, ab exercises to spot reduce body fat off the stomach. And I believe that benching would spot reduce fat off the pecs. That's just a logical conclusion. If I do pec exercises, that will change the way that looks.

And there's a truth to that, right? Especially with pecs, with abs, less true. Well, there's truth to it, but you're not going to do it with sit-ups. If you get your deadlift and squat up, your abs do hypertrophy, and you tend to have an ab gut when you get fat. Right. Not like the bodybuilders. We're not talking about the insulin-induced or growth hormone-induced ab gut, but I'm saying that when you store fat in your stomach and you're a trained lifter, you can see your ab outlines much better. When I was not squatting and deadlifting heavy, I just had a gut, you know, which is kind of interesting. So, you know, it's not, but I guess what the argument really is,

is are you losing fat off that area by doing an exercise or are you doing something else? And that's what I'm going to talk about next. You're actually doing something else. So back to what Trent talked about. There are two components to body composition. One is the fat mass, which is what we visually see, you know, on our bodies. And we get pissed off and say, hey, man, I need to lose fat because I have man boobs and I have the spirit higher. And I just want to lose this. And they grab it, you know, and you're like, all right, dude, you know. Right. But then there's the muscle mass component. And the first thing they say when you say, well, you need to build muscle, man, is, well, you have to gain weight to gain muscle. And I'm going to gain more fat.

And I already have a lot of fat. Yes, you need to gain body weight typically. If you're a normal BMI person who's never trained, normal BMI male, we're talking about males today. So normal BMI male who's not trained before, yes, you're going to gain weight, but your body's going to change the way it looks too. And that is because when you put on muscle mass, you spread the body fat out over that surface. So if you have a small pec with a couple layers of fat on it, and then you make that pec larger. Those layers of fat have to go somewhere, right? You're not burning them. You're not getting rid of fat by enlarging the pec. But that pec stretches all that stuff out. It spreads over a larger surface,

and you look more muscular and less fat. And this does happen with additional weight gain. I know this seems foreign to some of the guys that are on this boat, but it does happen. It happened for me. And it was funny, you know, the whole man boot thing, it used to bother me, you know. And like I said, I'm not the worst case is what I've realized as I've gotten older. But when I swam, swimming itself worked the pecs. You know, when you're rotating the shoulders, you're engaging your pecs when you're swimming. That's why our coach made us bench press, because obviously the pecs participate in the freestyle, in the butterfly, especially in the breaststroke, which was when I sucked it the most because I was weak.

Right. Nobody understood that. It's all technique, you know, typical sport coaches. Love you, coach, but you were wrong on that. Um, so, uh, if you enlarge the pec or enlarge the rectus abdominis, the fat layer or layers over that muscle belly have to spread out. Those fat cells spread out. So you look more muscular and less fat. So when the reason I brought up swimming was, I remember there was a guy on my team that

had really good insertions. He was Eastern European, of course. So, you know, good deltoid insertions, good bicep insertions, good pec insertions he was eastern european of course so you know good deltoid insertions good bicep insertions good pec insertions but uh you know he was on the smaller side so he was skinny lean like he was a um probably an ecto mesomorph if i wanted to use somatotyping yeah but uh you know he had tight skin thick skin so you know not he wouldn't have made a great bodybuilder but he had thick tight skin so the muscles looked full and tight. And I thought he had like perfect pecs, right?

Compared to me, at least, right? And I started bench pressing when I was 15. You know, I got to be his friend my second year. My first year, I didn't know anybody. So when I was 16, him and I became friends. And, you know, my pecs responded to training. My father had large pecs, and I'm a smaller miniature version of him. I have my mother's family's frame and bone structure, but I have my father's muscle belly appearance. My muscles appear the same as my father's, just on a smaller frame.

So he has big quads, big thighs, big traps, big pecs, but then he has thick wrists, much broader shoulders than I do, and big arms. So my pecs responded to training, and that's part genetic. So my pecs filled out. I certainly wasn't satisfied, of course, because I'm like, oh, anything soft is bad. This is how this bodybuilding shit gets in your head you know um and i was about 16 at the time and that that guy that i just told you about you know uh he comes up to me what he's like man your pecs look jacked you look way bigger than me so to this guy you know somebody completely on the outside who you know arguably had probably better genetics for this than i did yeah you know he

wasn't noticing the fat he was noticing the muscle mass change, right? Right, exactly. And I never forgot that. You know, I remember I wore this one sweater in particular that was just, you know, a little bit more fitted on the shoulders. And especially once I started lifting, you know, things started to fit differently and I was going through puberty. So I spread out the top of the shirt, mostly in the pecs because I didn't train my arms and shoulders as effectively as I do now. And that's why he brought it up. I was walking down the hallway. He's like, your pecs look i didn't train my arms and shoulders as uh effectively as i do now and uh that's what that's how i why he brought it up i was walking down the hallway he's like your pecs look huge dude and i'm like oh cool then i'm like they don't look like yours what the fuck you know right stupid teenager shit well but you know you know what though it's it's funny it often that

same kind of line of thinking follows us into adulthood that That's the other thing about this that I think is underrated is that when you look in the mirror, more often than not, you're not actually seeing your body. Like your eyeballs don't see the whole you in the mirror. They're seeing little tiny pieces of you that you don't like. And I guess it depends on the day, right? If you're having a really good day, you're in a good mood, you look at, you're like, yeah, my traps look pretty good. Yeah. You know, I'm feeling good today. But if you're in a bad mood or you're feeling down about yourself, then you're like, you're going to look at the, all the little fat depots that you have that you perceive as problem areas. And you're not seeing the whole effect of

yourself. Well, guess what? That's not what people see when they look at you. That's not what other people, you don't do that to other people, right? You don't go looking around and be like, look at that guy's like right oblique. He's got like a weird, like misshapen. Yeah. The world is not full of bodybuilding judges. Right. Exactly. That's not what we do. So that's the way. So when you, if you really want to think about like, if one of your goals is improving your appearance, right? You have to, don't just think about improving your appearance to yourself. Think about improving your appearance to the rest of the world. I have a similar story that I think highlights this. This is a short one. Um, I remember I was working in Dallas downtown and, uh, I, I was, you know, I wore like, you know, typical business clothes, button down shirt slacks.

And there was a time period where I was taking the train in to the office. And so I remember I'd started training and I had joined a new gym and I had kind of made a couple of aborted attempts at LP. But this time I actually had a coach and I was training under her and I was doing LP, doing it right finally. And this was maybe six or seven months in and I had gained like 30 pounds in that process. And so I had been 150 something and I was now like 190, bigger than I had ever been. 90, bigger than I had ever been. And I'm walking around in this busy train coming back from the gym and I got my clothes on and I got my bag and stuff. And I'm just looking for like a place to, you know, see if there's any seats open. And I remember like, I'm like walking down the row of people and some guy, and there's like a guy standing in the middle of the row and he like turns around and looks at me and he like sees me and he like gets out of the way for me to pass. Okay. Now, if you're, if you, you motherfuckers that are like six foot four that just heard that, they're like, yeah, isn't that what always happens? No, it's not. Okay. When you're five foot eight and you're

155 pounds, that never happens, right? You are always like squeezing your way around everyone else, right? Nobody gets out of the way. But that was the first time that happened to me. And I remember that because I was like, whoa, this guy turned around and saw me. I was like, whoa, this dude's big. Let me get out of the way. That literally had never happened to me. that it was a powerful reminder of like the the my physical presence improved after gaining 35 pounds i believe that you know i've experienced that when i was on the heavier side as well um i never that's funny you said that these fucking assholes were six four they could be six four 180 and people will get out of the fucking way.

Yeah, exactly. It's bullshit. It's fucking bullshit, the shit we have to make up for. Yeah. So back to that. So I was talking about how the skinny fat guy, myself included when I went about this, can afford to gain weight. And it's going to be fine because he's under-muscled more than he's over fat. And he's going to gain muscle at the fastest rate he's ever going to gain it

in his life. And the muscle will outpace the fat. It will, as long as you're getting stronger and you're eating right. A lot of the time, these guys are afraid to eat because they don't want to get more skinny fat. They envision their man boobs getting bigger, their spare tire getting bigger. And what, in fact, ends up happening is everything fills out. You may not get visible abs. You may not get veins across your pecs or the horizontal line that goes across between the major and the minor. You may not get that.

By the way, now I tend to have that when I'm high body fat too. That doesn't seem to go away. I didn't have that at all back in the day. But yeah, I take guys that are 165, 20s for body fat percentage, and then they get up to 185, and they're probably about the same fat percentage wise. They might gain fat and muscle, but the ratio of muscle to fat is higher in terms of how much they're gaining. The muscle outpaces the fat. Yes.

If you're training correctly, if the thing was, I wasn't training correctly. I didn't have access to this shit back then. I didn't know what, deadlift was a low back exercise. That's what I thought because I was doing it wrong

and fucking wearing out my low back. It's a miracle I didn't get hurt. squat was legs you know bench was packs and you had to curl to build arms but curls didn't work for me for some fucking reason uh i think a lot of that has to do with just having a weak back you know yeah you couldn't do them heavy you couldn't really do them heavy enough yeah i couldn't i couldn't do them heavy enough. Yeah. I couldn't do them heavy enough. And, you know, some guys, you know, like my stepbrother, I bring him up a lot. He has all the best genetics for this shit. You know, his skin's probably too thick for bodybuilding. But, you know, he would place probably in the top ten in the show if he did all the drugs and trained like they did.

He has all the insertions, that's for damn sure. Yeah. But, you know, he just starts curling and he gets to you know heavy numbers pretty effortlessly and that's what i always bring up to people when they say oh it's not about strength it's like yeah for some guys it's not these guys that promote hypertrophy they tend to get to these guys that promote hypertrophy as a style of training different different from strength uh often get to pretty reasonable numbers in their first few months. They have a pretty nice LP.

It's equivalent to Mike Wolfe getting his squat up into the 500s on his linear progression, right? He got over 500, right? It's equivalent to that. They might be curling over 100 pounds for sets of 10 in the first few months because they're just built for it. So then, of course, they'll promote 10s and 8s and things like that. All that stuff works, by the way.

It works, by the way it works by the way but uh for the skinny fat guy like me 30 pound dumbbells were heavy my first five to ten years even of training and you know a lot of that has to do with what i was doing is what i'm saying right yeah like i thought a 30 pound dumbbell was hard right the guys with big arms were curling 50s and i'd read about you know guys like sylvester stallone when he trained with franco colombo for rambo 2 he was curling 70s by the end of it, right? Yeah, right. And, you know, granted, there's drugs there, you know, there's no, it's no secret that he, you know, he takes hormones, and that he probably took stuff then. I think at the time he was denying it, I don't know that he'd deny it now if they asked him, but, you know, I understand all those things, but the whole

point is, okay, he's taking drugs and he's curling 70s. So obviously strength matters in this shit, right? What frustrated me about curls was that my baseline was just so shitty. And I couldn't move it accidentally like these other guys. Now, knowing what I know, I needed to microload that very early on. Whereas these motherfuckers, they don't think about microloading because they get to reasonably impressive numbers just going in there and fucking around. Like me getting to 30 is like them getting to 50 or 60, you know? Yeah. I've had, I've, I've, I've run into that too, even in the barbell world where people will be like, you know, like, come on guys. Like, why are you micro loading? Like, you're just fucking around with it. Like, seriously,

are you adding one or two and a half pounds or less? You think that's really going to do anything? I'm like, all the guys making that argument are like the guys who squatted, you know, four Oh five for three sets of five. And they're like, yeah. Okay. If you're doing that, yeah. Adding two and a half pounds of the lift, you know, to four Oh five is not much, but okay. When you're squatting, when you're trying to take your squat or, you know, from, from 225 to 250, then it makes a big deal or your curl or your press or whatever. Um, yeah. So now I love that. That's, that is the number one thing. I guess that's the number, the two things that we need to highlight probably the most this episode is number one, you got to lift heavy. You got to lift heavy. You have to get stronger. And you have to, that's

how you get stronger. You have to lift heavy weights to get stronger. And you've got to do movements that are going to train your entire body to build the muscle mass. That means you've got to do the squat, the press, the bench press, the deadlift. These are the movements and starting strength we've identified as training the most muscle mass possible. It's the biggest bang for your buck you're going to get, and you've got to get those up heavy. So for a lot of guys, this is like, you know, you've got to get that squat from 185, 225, wherever it is that you had gotten it in the past, if you've trained before, or if you haven't trained, you've got to take that to 315, right? You know, you've got to take that deadlift from 225 to 350.

And you can do that. You know, this is, this is a very, very achievable numbers in the first year or two of training for just about everybody, right? For a lot of, for a lot of you guys, it's going to happen way sooner than that, right? It might happen in six months, but for, you know, if you're pretty average or maybe even below average individual might take you a year to do that. That's okay. Um, but that's what you got to do to make the body composition change. And then the second thing that you hit on earlier is that if you're going to get the weights up there, you have to eat. And this is where I see the biggest breakdown is guys will, like you said, they will, they will do the training. They'll commit to like, yeah, I'll train heavy. And then they stall out on that 225 squat because they're not eating. They won't eat enough food to move the needle. And you have to eat through that sticking point.

You know, it makes me think about something here as we're talking about this. You know, these guys that are well-suited for bodybuilding or strength sports, they aren't limited by strength in a lot of cases. In a lot of cases, they're so fucking strong that they can't do a ton of volume with barbell lifts without hurting themselves. Sure. They run into the same problem that you or I would run into. You know, I've been training a long time now. I don't know where the hell my squat is. It's probably somewhere in the upper fours if I were to, you know, peak it and max it out, you know, I'm getting, I'm probably going

to hit a 500 squat at some point. My deadlift is probably in the mid fives right now, you know, based on where it was and the progress I've made, you know, I'm probably good for somewhere between 530 and 550. And those heavy loads prohibit me from accumulating a lot of work with those movements. So I have to spread out those high-intensity grinder-type sets on those movements, and I do other stuff. So when you look at the classic bodybuilder-type physique person, they're not limited by strength. physique person, right? They're not limited by strength. They're limited by their ability to accumulate work with those heavy types of exercises. So they do things like curls, extensions, rows, one-arm rows, dumbbells, cables, things like that. And even then, they're limited by their ability to recover from that because they're strong at those movements too. They're not limited

by strength. They're often limited by recovery and trying to manipulate those things so they can keep going. This is why a lot of them get on drugs, especially if they get competitive. But what I want to highlight now, and I'm going to repeat this because this is very important, people. You may see a Lamar Gant out there, a small guy who's strong. Everybody loves to point that out when making this argument that it's not about strength. And if you don't know who Lamar Gant is, look him up. Impressive motherfucker. Maybe the greatest powerlifter of all time. He might be.

I know a lot of people like to say that's Ed Cohn, and he's definitely in the conversation. But I think Lamar Gant might be the best. You know what's impressive about Ed Cohn? He's a pretty good coach. Yeah, he's a good coach, cool guy. Yeah, I just met him. What a great ambassador of lifting. I've never met him, but I'd love to.

I just met him in Vegas, and he's just as they describe. And it was funny. I shook his hand. He's like, that's a firm handshake. And then he's like, you've got to work these two fingers. These are the weak ones. And I'm like, have you ever used grippers or something? He's like, that's a firm handshake. And then he's like, you got to work these two fingers. These are the weak ones. And I'm like, have you ever used grippers or something? He's like, no, I don't use that shit.

I did fucking shrugs with no straps, 765. Anyways, we were just joking around. And, you know, then I kind of bonded with him a little bit because, you know, I'm from Chicago. He's from Chicago. I asked him where his gym was. I was like, come down, text me when you're coming down. I'll meet you up there. And like, I just met him, man, you know?

You're right. And then he says, send him videos. He'll watch them. And I'm like, you actually checked that? He's like, I check everything, man. Awesome. So, you know, once I start barbell benching again, I want to look at it because what got the conversation started was, and I know we're kind of going off topic here, was that I forgot. I think Angie Bryant posted something, and she doesn't post very often.

So I'm like, what the hell has she been up to? You know, she's great. She's a friend of mine. She's a fellow starting strength coach at, in Maryland. I'm going to plug her gym or Bo's gym, her husband's, Westminster strength conditioning up in Westminster, Maryland. Check it out if you're in that area. But, you know, I love those two. They're great. And I noticed that she posted something and she never posts anything. So I'm like, I just went, I crept on your Instagram, Angie, if you're listening. Sorry. Anyways, and one of the first few posts was Ed Cohen.

It was from 2020. So it goes to show how little she posts, right? Yeah. And he was talking about bench press and he was given a, or not bench press. He was talking about the cue to raise the sternum. given a, or not bench press, he was talking about the cue to raise the sternum. And he was saying that it applies to all lifts because you're having to, basically the rip calls it lifting the chest, but you're having to extend your spinal erectors pretty much on every lift. You know, you have to, I tell people barbell training is lifting with good posture. And that's what he was communicating

with a cue, a coaching cue, raise the sternum. Then he's like, you know, most people think about pushing the, pulling the shoulder blades back and down, which you also have to do, but you have to do both. You have to raise the sternum. So I'm like, I'm going to try that on my bench. And it like was night and day difference. Now I'm like feeling where my leak is on the bench. And I was just talking to you before the show about this. I was thinking about it. So I brought that up. You know, at first I tagged him, you know, when I posted something, he responded. He's like, or I commented on that post that was two years old. I'm like, dude, you just fixed my bench over the internet. So I brought that up when I met him in person.

He's like, yeah, man, people just don't think about it. We got into this conversation about it. He's like, send me videos. So I'm like, once I start barbell benching again, I'll send it to him. But that is an example of a phenomenal athlete who's also a pretty damn good coach. Yeah, yeah. Ed Cohn, gosh, he's a small-statured guy. Not a small guy, small stature uh he's what five foot five maybe

five six five five yeah five four five five and i believe he he spent most of his career competing in the uh 90 and 100 kilo weight classes so 198 to 220 pounds um and i think he's squatted over a thousand right at at a body weight of like 220 220 yeah so like almost a five times body weight squat it's ridiculous for something total i mean he's an impressive dude insane got huge fucking hands and long arms yeah which is crazy so you know he has a great deadlift great squat but he also benched in the mid fives. But if you look at him from the side, his torso is like this thick, dude. Yeah, just a slab.

So he offsets the arm length with this thick fucking torso and barrel chest, you know? He's just like, yeah. I mean, he's basically like the perfectly, if you had to draw up like the perfect anthropometry for powerlifting, it's Ed Cohen. It's Ed Cohen, yeah, absolutely. Lamar Gant is not far off. Go look this guy. If you've never seen Lamar G anthropometry for powerlifting, it's Ed Cohen. That's Ed Cohen. Yeah, absolutely. Lamar Gant is not far off. Go look at this guy.

If you've never seen Lamar Gant, you've got to look at him. So the thing about Lamar Gant is he was a small guy, too. He was probably 5'2 or 3", maybe. I think 5'2", 123 or 132. Yeah, he competed at 123 and 132 in different points in his career. And he had severe scoliosis, like this back looked like the question mark. Um, but he was super jacked and he had insanely long arms. Like he locked out his deadlift like at the kneecaps. Yeah. So, so he pulled, I think he deadlifted

like 600, uh, six something like it was a 300 kilos, 660. Yes, it was 300 kilos. That's right. Yeah, I just looked it up. So 661 at a body weight of 132 at the time. So it was a five times body weight deadlift. Ridiculous. So I bring him up because, you know, if you see him out in public with clothes on, you probably don't think that's a world-class power lifter, you know? Right, yeah. No way. And it's funny. That's the funny thing, too, the way people perceive other humans based on their size.

So you see a big guy, you assume he's strong. You see a small guy, you assume he's not strong, right? But then it's not about strength, right? So the things that's coming out of people's mouth is inconsistent with, you know, deeply embedded perceptions of our fellow humans. Yeah. But this all comes back to my point, right? Very rarely, if at all, unless the fucker is rehabbing, are you going to see a 250-pound lean animal?

And by animal, I mean just a giant fucking human, a bodybuilder, right? You're not going to see a pro bodybuilder struggling to squat 135 or bench 95. Yep. I'm going to repeat this. You are not going to see a large, muscular man struggle with the light weights you're struggling with. Okay? Yep. And if you talk to these people and you have a conversation about this and you communicate in a way that they understand,

they're going to tell you it has to get fucking heavier. It has to get heavier. So, you know, they may sit there and say you don't have to lift heavy, but then if you start asking the right questions, they will agree with us that it has to get heavier. If you are curling 70 pounds for 10 sets of 10, at some point, you got to curl 75 pounds for 10 sets of 10 or 80 pounds or 90 or a hundred or wherever the fuck it may be. It has to get heavier. So again, you're all going to point out the small guy who can lift a lot. Yes, we know he exists, right? Point out the big guy who can't lift a lot. And by a lot, I don't mean, you know, I'm not saying that, okay, Ronnie Coleman can't lift as

much as Ed Cohen. That's not what we're fucking talking about. We're not talking about world-class power lifter versus world-class bodybuilder, because I've seen that bullshit argument thrown out there too. We're talking about big guys lifting unimpressive weights. You just don't see it, but you do see small guys lifting impressive weights. Yes, we acknowledge that. I remember in football, I played football in high school. And so we were in the weight room, you know, doing not much of anything correctly, but we were there and we were trying to move some weight. And there's a lot of ego in high school football. So, of course, we're all pushing hard. We at least we put high effort into it, if nothing else. and uh yeah i remember i was a small guy you know i was five foot eight 165 pounds in football i think i maybe got up to 170 at some point but yeah i was like i remember i i worked hard to squat 315 to like half squat it i squatted it like four or five inches high i know i did right okay but i put 315 on the bar which means i could actually squat like 225 that's what i

could actually you know some other asshole on your team is benching it. Yeah, exactly. And you know what? We had a guy who was an offensive guard. He was 6'2", probably, and he was 350, 370, somewhere in that range. Big, big dude. He was really fat, but he was

big. Was he that strong or well developed? No, he was 16. He hadn't had the training time to develop like that. He was still in puberty, right? But he was a big, big guy. Well, guess what? That guy put four plates on each side of the bar and squatted it. This is to prove your point, right? Okay. This is not a well-developed athlete. Nobody's well-developed at 16. And he certainly wasn't a genetic phenom. He was just really big. That was really the long and the short of it. He squatted 405 for some reps, you know? So yeah, there you go. And the big thing here is that if you're going to make that happen, just to state it again, you have to eat. You're going to have

to eat a lot of protein. Protein needs to stay high the whole time. You're probably going to need to eat 200 grams of protein a day. Because again, remember, you're a novice lifter and you need more protein to build that muscle mass than somebody who has already built the muscle, right? So 200 grams of protein is a good target for you. And that takes work to get. So you need 200 grams of protein is a good target for you, and that takes work to get. You need 200 grams of protein, and you need lots of carbs too. I see a lot of guys trying to cut their carbs because they're like, well, I'll eat the protein, but I'm not going to eat the carbs because I'm afraid of getting fat. Keto. Right. Yeah, because right now in the common vernacular, carbs make you fat, right? No, they don't. We'll talk about that more on another episode. Keto. Keto, God. I can't wait to do the keto episode. I'm just going to,

I'm going to combust over here. That'll be the next one. I'm going to go redder than my shirt right now. You know, keto people are pretty much the same as the vegans in my book. are pretty much the same as the vegans in my book. The vegans. Yeah, it's true. Oh yeah, it's a cult. It's a cult, man. But yeah, so I'll see a lot of guys that will like,

they won't eat the carbs and then they have no energy to lift. And you got to have a lot of energy on hand in order to squat and deadlift heavy. So you got to eat lots of potatoes, lots of rice, starchy vegetables, lots of rice, you know, starchy vegetables, lots of meat. Just remember, these guys that you're following, they are not limited by strength, and they probably never have been other than the first month of training in many cases. They are not limited by strength. They didn't have to claw for slightly above average strength levels. They exceeded those.

They had impressive strength levels right away. You are limited by strength. I came to this conclusion after years of recycling magazine and internet programs that were more on the hypertrophy side and not really going anywhere. And a lot of that was methodology too. You know, I wasn't microloading and not keeping a training log. There were things, you know, I take responsibility for things I fucked up because anything that gets heavier is going to work. But it dawned on me one day, I started looking around the gym. And, you know, since we're talking about aesthetics, typically we have an aesthetic in mind, right?

There's a way we want to look. So the guys that looked closer to what I was chasing after were also, wait for it, lifting more weight than I was. They just didn't have, they just didn't train that way. They accidentally got there because they had the raw materials to do so, right? So that is the difference between you and the bodybuilder or quasi-bodybuilder that's telling you you don't have to lift heavy. He didn't have to because he was already strong. His first squat was probably 225, you know? I know guys that their first deadlift was in the high 400s. I know a guy that reported that. And guess what? He was a minor league catcher.

And, you know, as it happens sometimes, bad joints prohibited him going from the minors to the majors. But he was a minor league catcher. Yeah, right. And he had a.485 deadlift out the gate when he was a teenager, you know? Yeah, the talent was there. That guy, I mean, he enjoyed strength. He ended up competing in powerlifting, but he didn't have to chase strength in terms of powerlifting strength, I should say. He didn't have to chase five reps or less, you know, the main barbell lifts to achieve that. He just had it, right? Many of the guys that are telling you that it's not about the weight are correct. It's not for them.

I mean, it is, but it's less about that. And so let me rephrase. It's less about the weight for that person than it is for you. For you, it's very much about the weight. You got to get stronger one way or another. Yeah, I remember. So earlier in 2022, this, you know, March or April, I had to go train at a Globo gym for a couple of sessions. That would be fun. And it's the first time I'd been in a Globo gym for a couple of sessions. And it's the first time I'd been in a Globo gym, probably a year at that point. You know, I go about once a year at this point, which is more than enough. But you know, I always think it's interesting to see like, what are people out there lifting? What's your average gym bro lifting? And this was a pretty

good cross section. You know, this was a part of town, a lot of 20 and 30 somethings out there. And I noticed, cause I went over to the squat racks. Of course, I noticed that there were probably four or five guys that squatted around me while I was there. And, um, I saw one 85, one 85. I think I saw one guy put two plates on, um, all of these people were squatting six inches high, all of them. Um, but, but they, you know, but that's the, those are the numbers that I saw. I saw one guy maybe put like, I think he did some reps at 225 and maybe put like a 10 on. So he was, I think it was 245, but that was it. That was the cap, right? That's as much as I saw it. And again, all very high, so not valid squats, but that's what they're putting on. Okay. I walk over to, uh, when I did my bench press and I remember I was looking. I was watching the dumbbells, and I was watching the bench press,

and a bunch of these gym bros with big arms, they're benching two plates. Of course they are. What did they put on the bench? They're doing a bunch of reps, and they put 225 on there, okay? So shit hasn't changed in 20 years. Yeah, exactly, right? So there you go. These guys had small legs, big arms. Well,

guess what? They're benching two plates. So if you can't bench two plates for three sets of five, okay, well, there you go. There's your target, right? If you want, if you want to have a good looking upper body, why don't you start there? Get your bench up to two plates for three sets, five. Okay. And in the process of doing that, you're going to build that upper body that you want. And then, and only then, once you get to these sort of baseline markers of strength, then you can think about cutting or trying to trim off the fat. Okay. But that's way down the road. That might be a couple years down the road for you, right? It takes everyone different. Yeah, exactly. It takes everyone different amounts of time to hit these, right? And if you are skinny fat, chances are that you're probably of pretty average, you know, pretty average athletic ability, right? So you're probably not going to respond to training super fast. So I think that's a good place to close out is just remember, this is not a week's game. This is not a month's game.

It's a year's game, right? And if you just show up for two years and put the work in, I guarantee you, if you do that, you're going to look way better on the other end, right? And you're going to get close to these numbers on the lifts and in the process of doing that, that's, you're going to be a completely different looking person. Absolutely. And we're going to hammer on this a lot more this year, because I think that it's an important topic. And I remember when I was going through this myself, the resources available just weren't helpful for me because it was either you know everything was

pretty rigid like okay if you want to build muscle you got to gain weight you got to gain fat and then i'd do it and then i lose the weight and i'd you know be skinny fat again or right or skinny or less skinny fat i should say but not more defined you know and a lot of that had to do with the lifting you know there was not good lifting advice out there back then. So, you know, I have photos, I need to start posting these damn photos up more so I can educate. But the last time I got very thin before starting strength, I got down to 154 to 156, depending on the day, because you know, when you when you get to a bottom of a cut, your weight fluctuates, you know, nothing static. And I have a picture.

I see a little bit of shoulder because I think I did some pressing back then, you know, push, press, or unnecessarily strict barbell press that wasn't as good as now. But I just, I remember thinking, I'm like, man, I don't have abs at this, you know, I don't have visible abs. I have abs. I didn't have visible abs. I have abs. I didn't have visible abs. I was leaner than I was in the past, but no abs and my arms were not defined. And it's funny because now 20 pounds heavier than that, I can see my deltoids, my biceps, my triceps, my forearm muscles, my veins, you know, that I didn't have in that picture.

So a lot of it had to do with training, and that's what we're really trying to hammer here, is you're not fat, you're under-muscled. You're not skinny fat, you're under-muscled. The guy who is the same height and weight as you at 9% body fat just has more muscle mass than you do, but you're both skinny fucks, you know? Right, yeah. So it's just different problems, right? You still have to go about this the same way.

You have to get stronger. And everything I've done to address this issue over the last 25 or so years has revolved around some form of getting stronger, and it's fixed all of it. I have no complaints about my body right now. my body right now uh i want to keep getting bigger obviously because you know for a skinny fat guy or guy who you know this doesn't come natural too there's never big enough right it just isn't right you're gonna bust your ass for mediocre results so yeah no sense in thinking you're big enough you're not gonna get to that point yeah um or the words of ct fletcher ain't no such thing it's too motherfucking big and you know he was doing a video with Kali Muscle, if you want to go laugh. Oh my gosh, yes. I got to go to CT's gym. I think I'd have a blaster. I met him too. He was a super nice guy too. Super nice guy. But in the video, he's like, ain't no such thing as too motherfucking big. If there was such a thing as too motherfucking big, and there isn't,

but if there was, it'd be this motherfucker right here. But there is no a thing as too motherfucking big, and there isn't, but if there was, it'd be this motherfucker right here. But there is no such thing as too motherfucking big. Preach it. Yeah. So long story short, what we're trying to tell you is you got to train. You got to eat. You got to gain weight. You can lose some of that weight.

You know, I got a guy right now who willingly gained the weight, did not care about getting fat. He was on the thinner side and not very muscular, but then he also was not very strong. You know, he just squatted 290 for three sets of five. He just pressed 135 for five triples. And he's dead lifting in the mid 300s right now. And his body has changed. He has a trap silhouette now that was not there before. His shoulders look rounder. He looks like he does something now in clothing. I'd like to push him up a little higher. He's 179. I think he's about my height, but he's a novice, you know.

And I'd like to get him in the mid-180s before we trim back down. Am I going to trim him down to 155? Absolutely not. And I don't think he wants to do that. He understands what needs to be done. He's somebody who's been receptive to this. And, you know, he's overcome a lot of frustration. I'm proud of the fucker.

If he's listening, he knows who he is. And you get that sometimes. But at the end of the day, you're in this for the long haul. We talked about this in our last episode of 2022. The harder this is for you, the longer you're going to be doing it. So either abandon the goal and understand that you have more important things to do if that's the case. No judgment here. Just show up and do something, but no judgment here. If you just decide I'm not putting five to 10 years of my life into weightlifting, that's just stupid. That's fine. But at least do some

weightlifting. That's a different topic for a different episode. Or if you are serious and you want to have the best physique possible and you want you are serious and you want to have the best physique possible and you want to get strong and you want to be healthy, you're looking at, you know, probably five to 10 years, you know? Yeah. But yeah, and you'll get some pretty good progress in the first two to four. Yeah, right. And yeah, and most of that, yeah, the biggest changes happen really in those first couple of years for sure. And then, yeah, absolutely. Like everything, it falls off. And each year after that, it's just little incremental progress i want to do an episode

called arms and chest arms and chest er day yeah yeah and when i think about ct these other topics just come up i'm such a fan you know so there's a good chunk of it is bullshit but the general theme of it is correct you have to work your ass off off and show up and put in the work and it's not going to be easy. This shit ain't easy, you know? Yeah, it's not. Well, I think that's a good place to leave off for now. We're going to hit this topic some more. I think we want to talk about this specifically, the same topic, specifically for women and some of the different considerations we might have in um you know this process that we just outlined and uh you know maybe we talk about

this process for the old guys out there right so if you're over 40 over 50 over 60 well old and untrained is basically skinny fat that's baseline that's right yeah exactly right there's no skinny jacked old guys they're just not you know the There's no skinny jacked old guys. They're just not, you know, the help on train skinnies, jacked old guys. I don't, I've not seen that. I have not seen them out there. Yeah, exactly. Testosterone starts to fall off. You get older in that, yeah, the muscle mass goes down, the body fat goes up. So, um, but you know, there might be some slightly different considerations here, but you know, for the most part, it's pretty much the same, same, uh, process for these folks. but we're going to talk about that in more depth with some other populations. And then, um, you know, and, and talk a little bit more about like what your programming is going to

look like, you know, as a novice, it's pretty simple. It's do starting strength, right? Do the novice linear progression. But as you get to be getting to intermediate territory, things might look a little bit different for you versus someone who has different goals. But we'll leave that for another episode. Let's just close it out. Sure. Thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at weightsandplates.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana.

If you are local to the Phoenix area or visiting, you can find my gym either on the website it's going to have its own soon but stay tuned for that or you can go to instagram at weights double underscore and double underscore plates excellent you can find me at marmaladecream.com that's my audio company or if you're interested in coaching you can contact me jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com all right we'll catch you again in a couple weeks if you're interested in coaching, you can contact me jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right, we'll catch you again in a couple weeks. you