Weights and Plates Podcast - #54 - All About Abs, and Why You Don't Have Them

Episode Date: June 2, 2023

There's nothing more elusive and coveted in modern fitness and aesthetics than visible abs, the "six pack." For many, it's the holy grail of aesthetics. Many people, however, fail to achieve a six pack even after shedding a lot of body fat. How do you get them, then? Is it even possible for most people?   Dr. Robert Santana and Coach Trent break down the mystery of "abs," discuss the relevant anatomy, anatomical variation in the population, and why most people need to worry about building muscle mass, not losing body fat.   Tendinous Inscriptions of the Rectus Abdominis (check out the cool pics!): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6173272/     Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream https://www.jonesbarbellclub.com

Welcome to the Waste and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trenton Jones, my co-host. Just call me Robert. Welcome back, man. Cyberspace, last time you were next to me. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So we are both, I don't know if I've ever mentioned this in the podcast, we are both Roberts. That's right. Yeah. I forgot about this. I have never in my life gone by Robert, but I am Robert Trent Jones.

I'm going to start introducing you like that. Yeah. No relation to the golf course designer, unfortunately. Is this Robert Trent Jones? Yeah. There's a famous golf course designer, unfortunately. Is there Robert Trent Jones? Yeah. There's a famous golf course designer. He's got a bunch of courses in Alabama and I think maybe elsewhere in the South and his name is Robert Trent Jones. But yeah, unfortunately, I don't think my golf game would live up to his namesake, if that was the case. Do you have any share of those royalties?

I wish, man. It's hard to Google my name, though, which is, I don't mind. I don't mind. Not a problem to have today. Well, yeah. So, you know, yeah, last time we talked, we were at the Mecca, Wichita Falls Athletic Club, and we were talking with Rip. I did want to quickly, I wanted to address something really quick that came up in that conversation. Oh, yeah. So Rip said something, and I know somebody out there is asking this question or has asked themselves this question. Rip said, dietary fat wasn't the problem. He said, dietary fat

doesn't make you fat. And we've talked about on the show how one of the things, you know, when you're trying to lean out and improve your body composition, dietary fat is one of the things you need to look out for in your diet, right? Because of its caloric density, blah, blah, blah. And I wanted to kind of clarify what Rip was talking about there, because I know somebody has that question. I know somebody has that question. Sure. I think that he was making a broad statement, as he does, and I tried to get him to elaborate on as much as I could, but I guess I missed that one. I know what he means, and what he means is that in today's food environment, let's put lifters aside and just talk about just your average person that's going out and eating food, they're probably getting a lot of sugar calories just by the nature of how most of our convenience foods are formulated, right? So, you know, we kept talking about Coke, which if you don't specify, it's Dr. Pepper, so you have learned some things. That's right. You know, if you're 400 pounds,

you probably didn't do that eating jars of peanuts or jars of peanut butter, although I know people that have eaten jars of peanut butter, but they probably paired it with a case of Coke, right? Yes. lifters, you know, I shouldn't say lifters, but like a bodybuilding or, you know, physique type diet that's, you know, lower in fat, higher in protein and carbs, you find that fat isn't everything. And that hasn't changed, you know, like it's in a lot of snack food, certainly. So like Cheetos are high in fat, but they have a shitload of carbs too, you know? Right. And, but if you go back like a hundred years, like most meats, you know, you have to go through extra processing to get the extremely lean cuts, especially in red meat. You know, if you go back like 100 years, like most meats, you know, you have to go through extra processing to get the extremely lean cuts, especially in red meat.

You know, if you're talking about ground beef, the 96% tends to be more money. And when I go to the butcher, I don't understand how that stuff works. Rick could probably explain it, but I have to pay more to get it leaner, right? Right, yeah. And I'm guessing there's more labor involved right so it's not like people are just grabbing you know cuts of boneless skinless chicken breasts back when uh you know food technology and agricultural processing wasn't as advanced as it is today you know you got what you can get you were probably getting skin on it skin and bone on it and getting more fat like fat was much more in the natural diet throughout the

course of history carbs were not carbs were added to the diet. And fat was added to things from the standpoint of, I wouldn't say fat was added to things. I'm saying that they started manufacturing foods that were high in both because both enhanced the flavor profile. Fat makes it more savory, gives you good mouthfeel. And sugar makes it sweeter, right? And salt makes it saltier, so that makes you want to eat more. So when you're talking about snack foods, like Rip mentioned snack well is the original snack food in in his uh

yeah his own words but uh you know things like that you know crackers chips cookies things like that they're going to be high in fat they're going to be high in sugar and they're you know they might even be high in sodium too and all of that is just designed to enhance flavor but when you're talking about just natural whole foods yeah you're going to get fat, but you're not going to get nearly as much sugar unless you eat a lot of food, right? Like think about like just single ingredient foods, you know, that are grown and, you know, remove all the snack foods, all the, you know, liquid calories with the exception of things like milk, right? Once you remove all that, the amount of food you have to eat to accumulate a lot of carbs is a very high volume, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. And it comes alongside with, and you might be getting to this point, but it comes alongside with a lot of fiber or if it's in the case of like you have animal fats that are included in the cut of meat that you're eating, or maybe you cooked with some animal fats, you cook the vegetables and the starches in animal fats, they tend to be more satiating than snack foods, right? It fills you up as opposed to the snack food that is designed to be hyperpalatable and make you want to just eat more and more and more and more. and make you want to just eat more and more and more and more. I'll tell you this.

If I eat quote-unquote clean and just, you know, if I try to eat 3,000 to 4,000 calories quote-unquote clean, I'm probably going to get pretty full before I get anywhere near 4,000. Oh, yeah. And by clean, I mean single-ingredient stuff, no snack foods, no diet quote-unquote diet foods, you know, like Quest chips, protein bars, quote unquote, diet foods, you know, like, you know, Quest chips, protein bars, protein shakes, like, just, you know, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, you know, cereals, potatoes, rice, pasta, you know, the things that people think are getting them fat, you know, I eat too much rice. I used to hear that when I lived in LA. I eat too much

grain, I eat too much bread. You know, if I ate that stuff on a regular basis and had no liquid calories, no diet foods, no snacks, no fast food, no restaurants, I'd probably be a little bit heavier, but not a lot heavier. I don't think I'd get up to like 250 pounds or anything like that, but I'd probably gain 10 to 15 pounds if I just kept going until I'm full every meal. Yeah, right. Because that stuff's going to fill you up. because that stuff's going to fill you up. So what Rip was saying was that sugar has made it easier for people to get fat, much more than fat has. And there's a valid argument to be made there because if you're eating a high-fat type of diet without eating a ton of sugar, which the keto people love,

it's hard to eat a lot of calories. Sure, yeah. It's hard to eat a lot of calories, you know? Sure, yeah. It's hard both ways. It's hard to get 4,000 calories from just, you know, carbs and protein and eating a very low-fat diet. Try to do it. It's a lot of volume. But it's also hard to do that on a high-fat diet because you're going to get full, especially

if you're pairing that with protein like the carnivore people do, right? Yeah, yeah. People run into trouble when you're in a three-dimensional diet, as I said in my Instagram post yesterday. Three-dimensional diet, meaning you're trying to balance all the macros, right? Well, when you do that and you start allowing for things like, you know, chips and cookies and things like that, even if they're, you know, quote-unquote diet chips or diet cookies, right? Those foods are just designed to give you pleasure, you know? They're not really, they're not foods that are grown and necessary for our survival. They're designed for pleasure.

Let's just call it what it is. People eat cookies because they feel good. They taste good, you know? And even if you get diet cookies, it's just supposed to be, you know, a lesser version of the original, right? But the whole idea of a cookie is to give you pleasure. But once you start eating stuff like that, you can keep going, right? And I definitely see it with the sugar, but if you pair the sugar with fat, it's even more extreme. And Christy told me once that it's an easy way to override our satiety signals. It's a survival mechanism. If you eat something sweet after eating something salty, you can keep eating and override those satiety signals. Yeah, my wife just made chocolate chip cookies.

And yeah, it's perfect. It's just like the perfect dessert because it's got the mouthfeel. It's crunchy and it's smooth inside. So you get both textures. You get the bitterness of the chocolate with the sweetness of the sugar in the chocolate. You get the salt on top. It's perfect. And it's kind of salty. Yeah. It's just, it's got everything. It's all, it's all there. It's so good.

So then you're going to hear guys saying that, oh, pastries are part of history. Yeah. But you used to have to bake them and you wouldn't make like thousands of them and you could buy them on the shelf, you know? Well, that's the thing. And you know, when we make these, it makes 12, the recipe makes 12 cookie balls and they're actually, they're supposed to be aged, interestingly, this is a sourdough recipe. Interesting.

And so they need to sit in the fridge overnight, at least one night, but we make six at a time. So it's three each for us. So, you know, and I'm glad we do because yeah, I would eat all of them. I cannot, they can't go a whole day. There's just no way. Um, but yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. Yeah. I wanted to, uh, I wanted to address that because I know, um, I know some people out there were probably thinking about that. Like, wait, wait, I thought like fat was bad though. Um,

and it's not, but yeah, it has everything to do with the food environment. Most people are not eating meat and potatoes three times a day. They're sneaking other shit in there too. Right, exactly. And I think Rip did say that. He's like, I'm not talking about complex carbs. I'm not talking about starches here. We highlighted that.

Yeah. Well, yeah, so that's kind of apropos to today's topic. So we want to do a quick episode today talking about abs. And I say abs with a Z. This is a good segue, actually. It is. It's a great segue. Because some of what we just talked about is relevant here. It is.

So why, hey, Dr. Santana, why don't i have abs what's going on well i mean you can stand and you know sit upright can't you well yeah i guess i'm sitting upright right now i mean what do you think is doing that you have abs right okay okay i do well why can't i see my abs what's going on with that well they're covering a layer of body fat, Trent. And, you know, probably some other things too. Like, you know, your skin might be real thick. You know, you might have, it might be very elastic too. You know, it might not be tight to the fat and muscle, you know. Well, this is bullshit.

It's summer. I've been training for seven years. I've been lifting heavy barbells and I can't see my abs. What's going on? You're also not starving enough, but you know. Ah, damn it. It's the chocolate chip cookies. So yeah, let's talk about that. So abs, everybody's obsessed with abs because, you know, people in our generation saw Fight Club and then, you know, the fitness magazine industry made that the sinquanon, and now you've got 155 to 175-pound guys all over magazines, movies, TV shows, everywhere you look that have abs. You know, a lot of these guys were born that way. We've talked about that.

You know, they're naturally lean or maybe a few pounds over that. Camera, you know, has a lot to do with that. Lighting, airbrushing. But let's talk about the biological factors. You know, number one, body fat. Everybody knows that body fat covers abs. Everybody knows that because they grab it and say, I just need to lose this. Right. Yeah, exactly. I want to lose the tire, the spare tire, the muffin top. And we know abs are a muscle, so we know that some sort of exercise is required. In the 90s, it was, you know, do a thousand crunches like Jean-Claude Van Damme and you'll have abs, you know?

Do you remember eight-minute abs? Do you remember that video? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We did that in college. Me and my buddies would do that in college every night. We'd be like, eight-minute abs. We're like, okay, we got a month till summer starts.

Let's just hit this every day. It didn't work. I'm'm sorry remember the ab belt oh like like the thing that like shakes your stomach yeah like yes stem that just like whatever yeah oh yeah that oh i'm sure those those things are still going on so let's talk about some of the factors that we've discussed with bodybuilding. So number one, body fat, that's the easy one. Everybody thinks that, you know, if they lose enough weight, they're going to show their abs. And that's largely true. You know, occasionally you get some people that are real stubborn losers and it's just not going to happen, you know? So you're not, you're not a big loser you know celebrate that right so yeah then

and specifically right it's like fat distribution is governed by genetics right primarily is that the primary driver of fat distribution like where you're going to put your fat uh yes yeah so that's the next thing i was going to go after right yeah um so fat distribution right so men tend to put it right in the midsection and women tend to put it right in the midsection, and women tend to put it down in the hips and thighs. Occasionally, you get the inverse, you know. And the struggle I get with women is you'll get women that are very lean. And, you know, they respond well to training and, you know, look more defined within a few months of training, but they store body fat right in the middle.

And they get hyper-focused on this. I mean, everybody does, not even a sex-specific thing at this point. Anybody who puts fat on their stomach and is a consumer of fitness information or fitness-related services cares about this, unfortunately. And this has been the case for the last couple decades. But I've had women that respond while the training and just ignore all of it because they have the quote unquote muffin top. And, you know, it's that's genetics, you know, you really can't do much there. Or you really can't do anything there you want to get so skinny, you're starving, you know, you have that option. And let's see if your body lets you take it off. Or, you know, you could, I don't know if I should want to say this on here, but you can decide if you want to cut it or not. Or you could enhance other parts of your body through surgical procedures to change the ratios.

I think you ladies know what I'm talking about. Yeah. And some, you know, a lot of women, you know, in all seriousness there, you know, I'm not sitting here trying to feed into body dysmorphia. I'm speaking from experience in the physique realm. A lot of those women get breast implants to offset that, to offset that ratio. Yeah. I, I've noticed that about women's bodybuilding or, you know, I forget what the, what the, the different categories are called. And then there's like fitness, physique, bikini. I'm going to call that all bodybuilding. That might be the wrong term, but, uh, but yeah, I've noticed that, um, especially among the lighter competitors, the smaller, is it the bikini that's I've noticed breast implants are very common. Yeah. And it's because physique

sports are all about ratios. Um, even when you're at the bodybuilding stage it doesn't seem that way there is some attention to that at some level i think in the females um divisions it's much more than the males um so a lot of those women get breast implants to enhance the proportion so you know if i just want to get this out of the way because i get clients like this that are in very good shape female clients specifically and they just have quote-unquote muffin top. That's what they call it. Body fat on the stomach despite everything else being lean, despite the quads fill out, become more defined, the deltoids start showing more. They look very lean in tank tops and leggings, et cetera.

You can tell that they work out but they have a little bit little layer of fat in the stomach. You know, you have you really don't you have a few options here. You could starve it off and try that route. You're probably going to gain it back and then some because the hunger will trigger your body to overwhelm the system and start eating. That's usually what happens, right? Yeah, absolutely. That you know, that's, you know, by time a woman's in her 50s and hires me for this, that approach has been done. It's not going to work, right? You know, option B, you could get

breast implants. Then it doesn't look as bad. You know, it changes the perception of it. It will change your perception of it most likely. You know, body dysmorphia, the body dysmorphia can be really bad, so it may not. Also, you may do that and be like, should I still see the pouch? You know, right. Yeah. I can't tell you how to feel about something. I'm just giving practical options here. You know, that's, that is an option that women take. I am not recommending it. I'm just telling you what the options are. If this is a problem that you have, I want to be very clear on this because I'm not the kind of guy that feeds into this shit. I'm almost 40. I was into this stuff 20 years ago. I think it's silly. I'm much

more comfortable with more body fat than I used to be. And I understand the psychological component from firsthand experience with it. But I have to work with people that talk about this a lot, and I know some of them might be listening. And I'm not sitting here trying to say that you're wrong or this or that, but what I am saying is you're stressed out about this. I know you are because people like you have hired me, and I've read the emails. I've discussed this at length. It's a very emotionally exhausting thing to worry about for a lot of these women. And a lot of guys, too.

Let's be real. Oh, we're coming back to the men. I'm going to be much harder on the men. Yeah, sure. But, yeah, no, I can feel the pain through some of these messages, that this really bothers them, that they have this muffin top. So option A is you starve it off. Option B is you try to get breast implants to change the ratios, make it less noticeable.

But it might still be noticeable to you depending on where your psychology is with it. Right. So, you know, there's tradeoffs there. You know, I'm not saying to go do it. I'm not saying to go do it. I'm saying it is an option, not one that you necessarily need to take. It's one that others have taken. Yeah.

Option three is you could get liposuction, but then, you know, there's other factors that I'm going to talk about in this episode. And one of them is skin elasticity. So you could suck it out, but then you might have loose skin, right? Right. Are you going to get another procedure to try to fix that? Then it might look weird, right? So it's an option. It's not one that I recommend.

You know, if you want my personal preference on that, I don't notice it. As a man, I don't notice it. As a man, I don't notice it. A layer of body fat on a woman's stomach is irrelevant to me, but I'm not the one living in it. I'm not the one bothered by it, so I'm not going to sit here and invalidate that. But I'm sitting here presenting these options. I also want to tell you my opinion on it. It's just something that's not relevant to me. I don't see that as, man, she's a fat cow. No, I don't see it that way. I see that as when a woman starts training and she's, you know, tends to be on the slender side, but just stores fat there. I don't notice it. You know, I see all the other stuff,

you know, like, oh, look, shoulders are filling out. She's got traps. When I, when I see, when I see, especially when I see a woman that has, um, you know, visible traps, developed traps, um, like, oh wow wow she trains because women most most women just don't have well-developed traps without training it's it's you know it's one of those tells and you know and i respect that i'm just like wow that's somebody that trains and and you know has has clearly put some work into that and you know rips talked about it you know with the with men he said the magazine industry has been know, brainwashing women for decades with, you know, what a desirable appearance is. And it's transferred over to men starting in the 80s with the weeder magazines. Yeah.

You know, these slimmer guys that some of you people want to look like, those are weeder magazines too. Men's Health, Men's Fitness, those are weeder magazines. Those are also weeder publications. I don't know if everybody knows that, but I know that because I used to read all of them. And anyhow, yeah, there's just this false perception. You know, most of us had, you know, most people have and have always had a layer of body fat over their stomach. That's probably more normal than not normal. And I just don't know how noticeable it was. I mean, we need to get some old timers in here, like people in their 70s and 80s, you know, to talk about this. Because I suspect that this was just not a thing, you know, 60 plus years ago, you know. I think that the fitness and fashion magazine industry, and now it's all social media. I don't know if people pick up magazines as much anymore, but fitness and fashion and things like that, they have made visible musculature the aesthetic and desirable thing. And somebody's going to argue, because I used to be in that camp.

I cared about all that. Somebody's going to argue, well, these Greek statues, those guys had abs. Those guys also probably weighed close to 200 pounds and were naturally like that. You know, we talk about these guys all the time. My brother's one of these guys, you know, tight skin, defined muscles, low body fat. Sure, it looks cool, but it's a completely different situation if you're born like that and have all those factors there and are highly responsive to weightlifting versus somebody who, you know, even body fat distribution, you know, normal skin elasticity, normal muscle insertions or long muscle, you know, very athletic guys tend to have long muscle. They don't look poppy like bodybuilders, you know?

Right. You know, you're just, it's not going to look the same when you get down there, you know? And, you know, I'm all for, let's see how lean I can get, you know, for a few minutes, you know, or, you know, maybe a month or two, however long it lasts. You know, I do it. I do it every few years. I do that. And it's cool. You know, you feel a sense of accomplishment. There's something about restraint that kind of helps recharge your brain too, you know, especially if you're coming off of a situation where eating lots and lots of calories and getting burnt out with food. You know, I find that, you know, going on a diet for a little bit, you know, people have been doing variations of this for centuries, fasts and things like that. You just feel kind of refreshed afterwards. But, you know, I'm not

under any impression that I'm going to maintain single-digit body fat. I'm not born that way, you know? Like, I'm a mid-teens kind of guy, and lifting has made me look better in the mid-teens. You know, people, they say, oh, you're so lean, and I'm like 16% right now. But again, it's like teens kind of guy and lifting has made me look better in the mid-teens you know people they say oh you're so lean and i'm like 16 right now but again it's like what i said about the you know my female clients that have the muffin top problem earlier like for me it's like okay i have a layer over my stomach and then everything else looks like i trained so what do i hear yeah i just i don't care it's not that important but sometimes i care enough where I'm like, well, let's get abs. I think it'll be cool. I'm kind of burnt out. The lifting is heavy. I'm not hitting any more PRs. I've run up my singles. I feel beat up and trashed.

Let's just go on a diet. Then I just kind of slim down, work back up. Sure. I've talked about some physiological benefits of that too. Your insulin sensitivity goes through the roof when you're super lean. And then when you start eating again, I feel like there's a rebound effect that kind of gives you a quasi-novice effect when you're coming off that diet. Yeah, sure. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense.

So let's talk about body fat percentage a little bit. Because you have a lot of experience with body fat percentages and a wide variety of people. And this is just not, you know, I used to tape people at the gym. Uh, when I worked at a, at a starting strength affiliate gym, we had body fat calipers and tape. And so I would do like basic skin fold tests on people. I think I did the, uh, the Jackson Pollock three. Oh man. That's what it's called. The Jackson Pollock Skinfold Test. You can do like a three-site, five-site, seven-site, blah, blah, blah test. I would do a basic three-site test on members. And, you know, I don't know how accurate it is.

Probably not very. But it does, because I was the same guy doing it every time, at least there's some consistency. So we could see trends, right? Well, that's the name of the game. But so when do you see most guys well that's the name of the game but uh so when do you see most guys let's talk about men first what kind of body fat range do you see most guys starting to show vision visible abs and i don't mean like a totally ripped like perfectly defined

six-pack i just mean like you can see in the outline of the abs and you know maybe you can basically you can see the rectus abdominis and some of the outline of it. When can you start to see the abs? So this depends on how muscular the guy is, you know? That's the number one answer. Everybody's thinking about body fat when they think about body composition. Yeah. When typically the guys thinking about body fat are guys that don't have enough lean mass so you know if i'm taking let's use average height male right if a guy's five foot eight five foot nine and you know he's i don't know 165 and he's 15 18 body fat you know somewhere in that range he's not going to look very defined and he's probably gonna have to get down to single digits to, to really start seeing abs. Whereas, you know, you take the same

guy and he's 175 at 15 to 18% body fat, you might start seeing some ab outlines at like 14, 13%, you know? Yeah, sure. And it's like, what are you defining as abs too? Are you talking about a stage bodybuilder? Because you need to get down to five percent body fat right right but like i was showing abs at like 12 you know at 165 um but uh and now last time i did this i was showing abs at oh i mean i'm 16 now probably 14 15 i started seeing abs you know and and by that i mean like under the right lighting you can make yourself look leaner, you know, like right now, I can't do that. I'm just flat stomach right now. But under, you know, when I was like 13, 14%, I can look pretty lean under the right lighting. I never got below that. I don't have any interest in doing that. But I've noticed as I get heavier and as I build more lean mass, I look leaner at higher fat percentages because the muscle spreads out the fat.

It doesn't burn the fat like people used to tell us in the 90s. You know, the muscle spreads out the fat. It's like a pillow versus a sack of potatoes, you know. Right. For the same weight, you know, it'd be a pretty heavy pillow. But, you know, like if you had five pounds of feathers versus five pounds of potatoes, right, one of them is going to look more shapely than the other, you know, for lack of a better word. Yeah, absolutely. I like that. I like that analogy.

That's good. And it's the same thing with fat, you know, with the body fat percentage. If you build more muscle, it spreads out that fat. You're adding more potatoes into the bag and spreading out the feathers. The feathers become less noticeable. The potatoes become more noticeable. I mean you can tell you can say better than I can but I would venture to guess the average guy the middle of the bell curve dude that Starts training and has lifted heavy and done all this work and eats pretty well is He's gonna have a real tough time getting below 15% body fat Like that's probably as lean as he's going to get and I'm talking ballpark numbers

You know, I'm not talking real specifically 15, but just mid teens Let's say and if heteens, let's say. And if he's skinny, it's going to be even harder to even get to 15. Yeah, sure, sure, absolutely. But I just run into a lot of guys who train hard. They're muscular. They do conditioning, so they're in decent shape. They lift heavy.

And they're sitting somewhere between 15 and 25 percent body fat and there's nothing wrong with that these guys are healthy guys they're in shape and they're very strong and functional guys they're very useful in real life but you know the guys that really try to dial things down it seems like they they mid-teens is kind of about where they where it stops without a significant amount of calorie restriction and in subsequent loss of, of strength and fitness. And, uh, I mean, that's where I settle. And, you know, I started out as I started out at baseline. I was one of those guys. I was okay. Yeah. At 17 in high school, we did an underwater weighing test. So fairly, fairly

accurate, you know, for what it's for what it is. And it put me at 17% body fat in the 160s. You know, I wish I knew the exact weight that I was, but I was under 170. I was above 160. And I was about 17% body fat. If I go down to 165. Now I'll be like seven or 8%. Yeah, yeah. And what I'll tell you is, at 17% body fat body fat now i look like a train back then i looked skinny in clothes and chubby uh without a shirt you know yeah yeah same here i was probably trended a little bit higher i would guess i was probably 20 closer to 20 at that same body weight um and yeah yeah super interesting so a lot of this is illusion, right? It's just the illusion of creating shape with muscles. And I think that's really interesting. And it's so overlooked. We've talked about it before on the show, but it's worth mentioning over and over because the focus is all wrong, as you say. you know, the focus is all wrong, as you say.

And this is where I like to use BMI, especially untrained BMI. You know, we give BMI so much shit. And, you know, BMI is bullshit for a trained lifter, for sure. Yeah. But for an untrained person, it's pretty accurate. And for, you know, a lightly trained average gym goer, it's probably pretty accurate too. You know, like most guys just go in and do, you know. Yeah, if you're an exerciser.

Yeah, if you're an exerciser and you're, you know, benching 135 every time, you know, like most guys just go in and do, you know, if you're an exerciser, yeah, if you're an exerciser and you're, you know, you know, benching 135 every time, you know, squatting quarter squatting 185 every time, et cetera, you know, whatever, either way, the BMI tends to be pretty useful. And I think it's useful when you're talking about skinny fat people, because it gives you a way to kind of address this, right? So if you're somebody who has a normal to low normal BMI and a high fat percentage, quote unquote, because I don't believe in these fat percentage ranges. I think they ignore a lot of things. But let's say you're 20% body fat and you're 160 pounds at 5'9". Your BMI is normal, so you're a normal body weight, but then your fat percentage is considered high. So your normal body weight, but then your fat percentage is considered high.

So typically, this guy who's not lifting or training says, well, fat percentage is high. That means I got to lose body fat to lower the fat percentage. And it's like, no, you need to lift, dude. You need to start lifting. So, you know, I can't stress this enough. Being someone who's had to overcome this, I wasn't the worst offender. You know, I've learned over the years, like I didn't have, I mean, I got to find that picture of when I was at my eighth grade birthday party, I had some pretty fluffy man boobs back then, but you know, as a teenager swimming, I earned a lot of that out. I just, you know, I had the body dysmorphia from when I was a kid,

I was just very chubby up top, you know, and a very dense, you know, very dense lower body because I did a lot of rollerblading, cycling, you know, um, was on my feet a lot, you know? Yeah. And very dense, you know, very dense lower body because I did a lot of rollerblading, cycling, you know, was on my feet a lot, you know? So my legs developed from a young age. And I would take these like trick bikes and ride long distances with them because I just wanted the bikes everybody else had. But then, you know, I was ADD, so I would just go further and further with them. So my knees got a lot more range of motion than somebody on a road bike, you know? Right, right. So, you know, I think it helped. And I think that's why my quads have always been kind of

developed. But up top, I was just, you know, I had a little bit of a, you know, I was chubby, you know, I had like a, I wouldn't say a huge belly, like basically I looked like a little guy in clothes. And then without clothes, I looked soft, you know, soft and pudgy, you know? Yeah. And swimming helped with a lot of it because, you know, it's a full body workout, you know? And, uh, swimming helped with a lot of it because, you know, you know, it's a full body workout, you know, I'm doing a lot of shoulder work. Your pecs are getting worked. I've lost body fat from it. You know, my lats got a little bit bigger and, uh, you know, but still like, I look pretty thin and close, even at the end of season when I was on the lighter end of my

weight range, you know, cause I'd lose weight just from doing that, you know? Um, I, uh, there's no definition up top, you know, no definition up top and, you know, pretty thick legs doing that you know um i uh there's no definition up top you know no definition up top and you know pretty thick legs and you know by those standards those guys man like i felt like i had huge legs we've been hanging out with a bunch of swimmers because they had these really skinny legs skinny long legs you know right yeah actually no skinny short legs it was interesting because swimmers have long torsos long arms and then short legs but everybody had pretty thin legs and i just had these beefy legs, you know, compared to them. But now that I'm around weightlifters and powerlifters, I'm like, you know, they're not that big, you know?

It's just, you know, who you're around and who you're seeing and what you're looking at can influence how you think about these things. I think that's what we're really hitting on today. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, so we were, you know, just in Wichita Falls and we were there to handle, uh, our lifters for a strength lifting competition. And so, you know, here's a bunch of people who are there to lift heavy ass weights. And that's the kind of body that they bring to the competition is a body prepared to do that, to lift maximum weights. And, uh, I leave there feeling like a skinny kid in a third world country every time. Same here. Well, and me, for me, it was kind of a double whammy cause

it, you know, it's been a while since I've been there and you saw me, I'm, I'm, I'm as light as I have ever been since I started training. And I first ran the novice linear progression. I was 185 pounds maybe. Yeah. It felt like a shrimp. Um, you know, I don't fill out a t-shirt like I used to. Uh, so yeah, that's the, the rips rips point about looking good in a shirt. Um, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm feeling that right now. Cause I'm, I'm pretty lean, you know, my body fat percentage is low, but you know, in terms of the way that I view myself hanging out with a bunch of, you know, essentially power lifters, strength lifters, and, you know, serious strength enthusiasts, well, you know, I don't look that good.

You'd probably still be too heavy in California. Yeah, well, yeah, of course, of course. So I witnessed that. So my brother, I always talk about him. The baseline is he's 5'11", he'll settle in the 180s, visible abs, veins. But, you know, when I was younger, I didn't understand a lot of what I'm talking about now. And I moved out there and I lived with him for like about a year. Then I got my own apartment.

We were down the street from each other. And man, he just never thought he was lean enough. And I'm like, bro, a fake tan and airbrush, you look like those fucking assholes in the magazines, you know? Right, right. I mean, the guy was very white. He's Polish, you's polish you know so very light light skin and you could still see his fucking abs and he had veins down his biceps veins across his forearms good you know muscle insertions and he would always say i just need to lose a little bit more you know and you know i didn't understand what was happening and then he would also so he'd say that then on the other end he'd

say oh i'm too big and like you put him Rip, and fucking Rip would lose his shit if he heard that. 5'11", 185? Right. Are you eating? When was the last time you ate, son? Right, right. 5'11", 185 is not enough density per height. You know, you need to be 265.

Yeah, of course. You got two extreme ends of the spectrum there. You got, you know, a strength coach, powerlifting coach. You know, he's coached both, you know, and they're different things as we've talked about, but Rip has coached powerlifting. He's coached, you know, general strength trainees for the most part.

I think that's what most of his coaching is because he runs a commercial gym. And, you know, he's coached Olympic weightlifters and those people tend to trend heavier you know yeah yeah my brother 511 185 you know he accidentally deadlifted 405 just by doing 275 every week and then I'm like oh let's load some plates on dude he literally would go in do 275 every single week at his work gym and never add weight to it then he'd come with me to Arizona when I was living out there and visiting here. And I think one month we put 365 on, he got it. And then eight months later, we come back and then he did 405. Mind you, he only would do 275 every single

time. But the guy, even when he doesn't train, he's got the fricking thick trap insertions that go up towards his ears, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, he's a skinny version of that. Like, you of that like you know don't imagine the big linebacker guy when i'm talking about this i'm just saying like he is a mini version of that like if he trained hard for strength he would look like that you know he'd have those big giant traps so he's got really good trap insertions he's got a well-developed back despite the fact that like i said he doesn't deadlift over 275 now he doesn't even lift at all but he's always had a well-defined back and I had a deadlift to develop that. He just had it, right? You know? Right, right. And he was sitting there saying he's too big at 185. And now I don't even want to say what his body weight is. My other brother told me, I think he's under 160 now.

And, you know, but when you're living in Hollywood, California, which I lived there for two years and some change. I was in Los Feliz the year before. Long enough to leave a mark. I was in Los Angeles for four and a half years, but I lived in downtown Hollywood for two and a half years. And I will tell you, I could see how he would arrive at that because he is surrounded by men that are six foot, 140 pounds. My fucking wrist is thicker than their thigh you know yeah and then although we're fucking skinny jeans and then he'll see them with you know the supermodel girlfriend and he'll somehow make the connection that she's with him

because he's six foot 150 which means if he's 5 11 he probably needs to be 145 because he's an inch shorter you know right i don't think he actually believes that but man he's gotten so fucking light and i'm telling you i but man he's gotten so fucking light and i'm telling you i understand where he's coming from because i live there the majority of the people in that part of town and lots of parts let me be real lots of parts of la you know there's lots of pockets of la especially the trendier areas the men are very skinny yeah and if you're if you're a mesomorph you stick out like a sore thumb you know yeah yeah um and uh that's you know he's a mesomorph he just looks at a fucking

dumbbell and his bicep grows you know right but he's never he's never leveraged it in his life like there are brief periods where he would go heavy then he would complain that he's too big because what he really means is i'm bigger than everybody around me you know and he's got the name to be like a strength god mariusz mariusz for mariusz like do you know how many like awesome polish like strongmen and weightlifters are named like mariusz i mean the world's strongest man mariusz yeah puginowski he's the only guy with five titles he was 5 5'11", like my stepbrother, Mariusz, but he was 3'18". Yeah, exactly. And he was so ripped. He's the most ripped strongman of all time. But I guarantee you, it was like my brother. He looked that way, 100 pounds lighter before he did all the gear and trained, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, for sure. For sure. I mean, I've met a few

of these guys myself and, you know, and I remember in high school seeing some of these guys and not understanding, but yeah. So, I mean, you know, that's a, that's a huge thing. It's like you're who you hang out with has a big impact on your psychology and the way that you see yourself. Um, you know, one of the things that I always walk away from when I go to a powerlifting or strength lifting meet is, um, so you're seeing all these people and they're, and they're big, right? They're, they're, there are large people who excel at the sport because it does select for people who are dense and large, but there are also people that are normal framed that are heavy for their frame because that's because they've prepared themselves for the sport, right? Which, you know, you want to fill out your weight class. Um, you want to, you want to push your weight. You want to, you want to start to try

to sit in the heaviest weight class you can for your height. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so basically, you know, what I think is really interesting is I watch these people and I'm around all these people and I'm like, you know what? These people look good. Like they would stand out next to, you know, if they're all in LA, these people would just stand out like sore thumbs. Everybody'd be like, man, look at these fat blobs walking around, which is not true at all. But, but, you know, by comparison, that's what they would say, or that's what they might think. But you you're around all these people and you're like, they look healthy. They look strong. They look, they're visibly muscular. They have good shape to the body. Their body habitus

is good and their skin looks good. You know, their skin is, and that's another thing that I notice with people who are very underweight or very lean is a lot of times their skin starts to look, you know, just sallow, looks kind of a little rough, looks like it's not well hydrated. These people, like, their skin looks good, right? So there's a lot of, you know, what goes into how you look besides just your body fat percentage and your visible, you know, your vascularity and leanness. If your body fat percentage is high and your BMI is low, muscle's the problem. If your body fat percentage is high and your BMI is high, body fat's the problem. This is a simple way to look at it, right?

Yep, yep. And I always ask, because I know how to probe these guys. I'll be like, okay, so you're 160 and you're 23% body fat. Do you want to get down to 133 to be single digits or whatever the hell you're going to end up having to weigh? It's going to be somewhere in the 130s. I think I had one guy, I'm like, you want to be 128? And when they hear that number, they're like, Oh, God, no, you know, right? Yeah. So let's do the math. But if I have to gain fat to gain muscle, I'm like, you know, no, at your state, at your stage,

the muscle gain is going to outpace the fat gain if you do what you need to do. Yeah. But don't worry, don't think about getting more defined, because it will be a period where you just put on size. Then there will be a period where you just look more muscular. But again, let me repeat this. If your BMI is normal or even in the low end of overweight and your fat percentage is high, muscle is the problem. And how do you build muscle? You lift heavier and heavier weights. Yep. Yep. That's right. I talked to a guy. Yeah, I talked to a guy yesterday, we're going to do some episodes on this topic of fatness, and the positives of it. And I was telling him there's a U shaped curve here. If you're too lean, you can't lift very heavy, you can't progress very efficiently. You know, shit starts to hurt

joint starts to hurt. Because remember, you got fat in your joints, too. If you get too lean, you lose that. Then you start getting tendonitis and all sorts of fucking problems there, back tweaks, et cetera. But either way, you lack the leverage. You know, in the simplest terms, mass moves mass. We all understand this. Big fat guy is going to have an easier time moving something than a real skinny guy. So if you're too lean, you're not going to have that leverage to move the weight. And that is an important component of this.

You know, it's like, oh, that's leverage. It's not muscle mass. Well, leverage helps you lift more. Lifting more builds muscle. It's all related, you know. But then on the other end of the spectrum, if you're too fat, you can't get into positions, right? Like I get guys that can't deadlift because they're too obese. They have to rack pull or do something else.

Or they can't get to the bottom of the squat without their heels coming up because they got too much fat in the midsection. They got a leg press for a while, you know? Right, right. So there is a sweet spot, but at the end of the day, you have to, you know, you have to decide. And I think most of our audience, you know, they want to balance aesthetics with performance and it's understandable in health as well. But if you're competing in a strength sport, like powerlifting or strongman, you're going to probably be over 20% body fat, you know, or somewhere between 15 and 25, depending on the person. And you're not going to look defined like a bodybuilder.

You're not going to look defined like a fitness model. You're not going to look defined like just the average Joe on the beach with, you know, washboard abs. That's not going to happen if your goal is to lift as much weight as possible, because you're not going to have optimal leverage to do that. And gaining the fat to help with that is not necessarily a bad thing, but at that point, you're also a competitor. So the sport and the extreme nature of the training and what you're putting your body through, that's not healthy either. So, you know, once you start getting

into sport like that and you're like, I want to lift the most weight I can possibly ever lift, you know, health kind of becomes secondary. You want to stay healthy enough to keep playing the sport, obviously, but you're not trying to, at that point, you're not going to have the most optimal health. You're beating the shit out of yourself. You know, you're carrying more weight. You're doing things, right? You're an athlete now. muscle through the course of a lifetime, look reasonable, you know, in and out of clothing, and, you know, feel good about things, then, you know, you're going to probably have to carry some body fat to do that. And you may not be defined all the time, you know, it just also depends on

the baseline. And, you know, let's be real, like, you know, ask yourself, like, how often are you walking around shirtless? Like in, in, in a place where people, well, okay. First of all, nobody cares. Nobody's looking at you. If they do, they just look at you like, oh, there's a person they don't care. But, but how many times are you really taking your shirt off and walking around in public? You project a lot of your own shit, too. A couple times a year, maybe, you know, when you go on vacation or whatever. Probably not that often. Like, when I'm shirtless around here, I'm in my backyard. Nobody can see me.

My neighbors, maybe. I've got, like, four neighbors that could possibly see me. They don't care. I'm, like, hiking or I'm at the swimming hole, you know, down, down the way there's like, you know, 10 people maybe. Okay. Nobody cares. But, but now let's compare that to the number of times that I'm wearing a shirt, like a dress shirt or a t-shirt or whatever. And I'm, I'm out walking around. That's like 99% of the time versus the 1% of the time I've got my shirt off, right? Which would you rather

look good in? And I think, you know, Rip's points, Rip said this a million times. He said this, I think on our, on the show that we did, uh, you know, for the, for the average middle of the bell curve, dude, you can train, you can get big and muscular, you can lift heavy weights and you can look great in that t-shirt. You take it off and you're gonna be a little fluffy, maybe a little fluffier than you want to be, but you look great in that shirt. Uh, if you want to look great in that t-shirt. You take it off and you're gonna be a little fluffy, maybe a little fluffier than you want to be, but you look great in that shirt. If you want to look great with the shirt off, you're going to look like shit with the shirt on because you're just not going to fill it out. You're just not going to look like you lift when you put a shirt on. I've run into that same problem right now. I just, I don't really look,

I mean, I still look like a lift. I've got some, you know, traps and, you know, some vascular, a little bit of vascularity and stuff. Of course. But I don't fill out my clothes like I used to. I look a lot less like a lifter than I did. Absolutely. And that's just really a 10, 15-pound body weight swing. So anyway, that's...

No, I was talking to a guy the other day, and this guy was more of like ectomorph build, you know, a little slender. You know, he basically stopped, you know, pushing weight like we do. And, you know, dialed, you know, said he diluted his workouts, more bodybuilding style. And it's like saying he's getting more attention from women because he's leaner, right? And I, you know, when he was coming into the gym, I didn't, I thought he was lean then right and uh i you know when he was coming into the gym i didn't i thought he was lean then you know so i'm thinking about this and it's something i just know you gotta get pewter on again um it's something i just mentioned quickly while you were talking i think it's

your you project what you feel man if you feel like you're fat you're gonna project that and people are gonna pick up on that you know right right so if if you've lost weight and you're leaner and you think you look better you're going to project that you know so yeah if in fact he is getting more attention from the opposite sex it probably has to do with his attitude i would have to guess more than how he looks because like confidence when he was coming in he looked like you know look like an ectomorph that lifted you know yeah yeah like i didn't think he was pudgy or too big. And I'm like, if he lost weight, he's thinner now.

So I don't think that had anything to do with it, you know? And if you're listening, dude, I would say the same thing to you on the phone. You know, I had some time to think about it now. But you need to get back in the gym. We miss having you if you're listening. Yeah. But yeah, I think that, you know, for some people, so here's the thing with me, right? I've never gotten super fat. Like, the heaviest I got was 205. And these days, if I let myself go up,

you know, I'll probably stay in the low 190s, you know? So, you know, I've been told that I don't lift as much because I haven't gotten fat enough. And there's probably an argument to be made there. If I got to 220, I'd probably squat more, you know? I think I'd have a hard time deadlifting, but I'd probably squat more. And I'd probably press more, and I definitely would bench more. But I noticed that once I get past 185, the heavier I get beyond 185, the shittier I feel about everything. Yeah, right. But it's not like I think, oh, I'm ugly and I'm fat. No, I don't think like that.

Like even back in the day when I was skinny, fat, and totally dysmorphic, I saw fat as a means to an end. And I'm like, well, if I have to gain fat to gain muscle, then I'm just going to gain fat to gain muscle. And I get up to 200, train. My problem was the way I was training was bullshit. Like, I really wish I had more productive training methods to leverage that. But, you know, I did that several times. I never resisted fluffing up. But I noticed once I get closer to 200 pounds, the shittier I feel.

Whereas you, you know, you feel great there. I don't feel good once I pass 185. And that might change this time because I have more muscle mass. And that's something that happens. I think that's what happened to this guy. You know, he just put on enough weight to where, you know, he felt sluggish, felt shitty. You know, I felt that. And then I'm looking at myself in pictures and I'm like, I'm not that fat.

You know, I got a little bit of a fucking belly, but not much more than the average guy, you know? Right. Yep. And, you know, I just looked like a big, thick dude. That's what people told me. Like, I remember one member, she told me, she's like, you look like you could survive a polar apocalypse, you know, or something like that. And then when I finished my cut, she's like, you look like you couldn't survive that.

Now you look like you could survive it again, you know, because I'm almost 180. But, you know, by guys like Rip Standards, I'm too fucking skinny. But, man, I don't feel good when I'm that fucking fat. And I'm not a competitive power lifter, so I'm not willing to ignore that to lift more. It's just, that's not my priority. Right. So for me, yeah. So I listened to that and I think, I think it's important to listen to that and know your priorities. If your goal is biggest PR you could ever get, guess what? You're going to fat fuck yourself. You're going to feel like hell and you're going to get it done. You're going to squat more. You're going to deadlift

more. You're going to bench more. You're going to press more, but you're gonna get it done you're gonna squat more you're gonna deadlift more you're gonna bench more you're gonna press more but you're a competitor now so if that person is listening to this they understand that they're not gonna argue with me yeah but you know if you're somebody who cares about how you look and you care about your health and competing isn't on the agenda like you know this is probably most of you listening then uh no you don't need to fat fuck yourself but you're gonna have to gain some body fat You can't sit there at like single digit body fat and expect to keep building muscle. It's just not a very good anabolic environment. And it changes over the time, right?

You know, your first couple of years, you're probably going to be heavier to gain that strength and to put those, you know, to build those numbers, to work through the programming. Then you are five, six years down the road, you know, you probably can be training at the same level of intensity. Um, but you know, but five, 10 pounds lighter, 20 pounds lighter, even, you know, it depends on how big you are. Um, and that happens a lot.

That's happened to you and me, right? You know, I've mentioned that before, you know, I had to run it up, run my body weight up to about two 10 in order to really maximize my gains. And then I found a couple years after that, two, three years after that, I was making the same kind of, I was, I was lifting as well as I did at 210 at 200. Right. And that, and then I settled into that. So it's, you know, it's a multi-year process to settle into it. So, um, there's a couple of things that I, I looked up for this show. We didn't get into it. Um, but I just want to throw out there just kind of apropos of nothing, um, that I actually did not know. So I started looking at the anatomy of the abs, right? What we call the abs, which is

primarily the rectus abdominis, right? You know, there are a few other muscles that make up the whole like trunk musculature. Like we've got the transverse abdominis. So, you know, you've got the rectus abdominis that runs vertically. That's what allows you to do like a sit-up, you know, spinal flexion. You've got the transverse abdominis

and then you've got the internal and external obliques that all form like the trunk musculature. But the rectus abdominis, that's the thing we think of when it comes to abs, right? But I'd always wondered, why do some guys have a six pack and other guys have like an eight pack and some guys just look like they have like a four pack or something? Like, you know, Schwarzenegger is a good example of this, right? You know, there's a guy who's very muscular, very lean, but he kind of has like a four pack. He doesn't really have a six pack. I mean, sometimes when he's really, really lean, you can kind of maybe

make out, you know, some extra separations there. So I went and did a little research. And so the rectus abdominis in most people is two sheets of muscle. So it's like two muscle bellies that run vertically down the abdomen. And they're separated by the linea alba in the middle. That's the vertical separation that separates into two pieces. But it's two muscle bellies. And those muscle bellies are laterally, so across or horizontally, separated by these bands of tendon. We call these tendinous intersections. And there's some anatomical variation in the

population. So most people, the majority of the population, in studies where they've, they've studied cadavers, roughly 60% of, um, of people of those cadavers would have three visible separations to the rectus abdominis muscle, right? So they'd be, they'd have two tendinous or three inscriptions, I should say, right. To separate the abs into a six pack. Right. And, uh, but, but not everybody, right. There's a small percentage of people that only have two, which would give them the four pack. right there's a small percentage of people that only have two which would give them the four pack and there's a small percentage of people that have uh more than that um i think up to they found up to five um inscriptions there's a 10 pack so there's there's eight pack and 10 pack guys out there now it's a small percentage like so in the in in one study

58 had three inscriptions so six pack 35 had four inscriptions, so six-pack. 35% had four inscriptions, so possibly an eight-pack there. And 6% had two inscriptions. Oh, interestingly, 1.2% had one inscription, so they had the mono-ab. Whoa. And then... I think I've seen that. I don't, you know, I'd have to do the math, top, but you know, some tiny amount of people might have more than that. They did show an example in this study and I'll link it. It's free to view with someone with that. They found five

intersections in a muscle belly. So that's another thing too. When you do get lean, your individual anatomy will determine what's actually visible right it you know so the number of inscriptions you have whether they go all the way across the muscle belly you know some people don't have them that they don't actually cross the entire muscle belly just a portion of it uh sometimes they're not aligned they're not they're not all in this you know perfectly um laterally oriented they're kind of like offset um and sometimes're deeper. Sometimes the linea alba that separates the two muscle bellies, um, is, is, you know, shallower or deeper. So I thought that was kind of interesting that there's all this anatomical variation in people. Well, yeah, that's, that's, so I never got to it cause we kind of, you know,

I kind of went on a side tangent as we tend to to do here on the Weights and Plates podcast. But I wanted to talk about anatomical factors, and I just learned a few things there. I didn't know that it was, what did you say, it was tendon? Yeah, they call it a tendinous inscription. So basically, you've got this sheet of fascia that encases the rectus abdominis. Yeah. And it protects the muscle belly and and it also helps in its function But that fascia we typically think about it with the linea alba. That's the that's the midline line of

Fascia that we have and you know women sometimes deal with this with diastasis recti from multiple pregnancies The the ABS will spread apart and that's the linea alba or that's just that fascia pulling apart just from having been stretched by multiple pregnancies but um but you know but but that's the point there's there is this fascia that encases the abs and it crosses the abs in multiple ways it crosses those rectus abdominis muscle bellies in multiple ways and causes this appearance of a six-pack at low body fat. Yeah. So if you don't have that, you're not going to, you know, you're not going to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club if you don't have the same number that he has. That's right. That's right. But interesting. The other thing too that I thought was cool about this is, you know,

like why, why do we have these in the first place? Like, well, why, why do we even have a six-pack? And it's kind of like a ratchet strap, right? So like the reason you need these tendinous inscriptions is if you think about how the rectus abdominis would contract, would concentrically contract in order to help you do like a sit up to produce spinal flexion. If you didn't have any cross hatches from the tendon, then the muscle could only contract to a certain amount, and that's as much flexion as you would get. But we can actually flex ourselves to a very, very—we can produce a lot of spinal flexion if you watch people doing yoga. Well, that's because you essentially are taking one muscle belly, or two rather, two muscle bellies, and you're dividing them into multiple muscle bellies

if you will they're all the same muscle but you're subdividing them so that you can produce more flexion than you could if you only had one undivided muscle belly it's pretty cool yeah no that makes sense um so what i wanted to kind of piggyback that on was things that i mentioned in other episodes so insertions matter here so the muscle inserts, somebody may have a longer rectus abdominis than somebody else. That also depends on torso length. Somebody with a short torso ain't going to have the long Brad Pitt rectus abdominis, right? So body dimensions plays a role here. And this, I talk about it with biceps all the time. You know, if you have these big poppy bodybuilder biceps chances are that the number of muscle fibers is also probably very high but that the muscles inserting further away from the elbow now if the if the bicep

inserts on the forearm it's going to fill that entire humerus so that you don't have a gap between your forearm or your elbow and your bicep. It goes all the way across. We've seen Larry Scott. If you Google Larry Scott, he's a bodybuilder from the classic era, the 50s. His went all the way across, right? Whereas some guys might just have a tall bicep that peaks. So, you know, you have to consider these things too. Number of muscle fibers. If you have more muscle fibers, you're going to have a larger muscle at baseline. It's going to be able to grow larger when you hypertrophy it through training. Where the muscle inserts on the joint is going to play a role. The length of the joint, length of the segments, as they call it. So, you know, a longer torso, your abs are going to look different than if you have a shorter torso. Longer arm versus

shorter arm. Then there's angle of penation. If you ever looked at the anatomy of a muscle, some of those muscle fibers fan out, right? Some of them run parallel. Parallel is good if you're an athlete because it can contract faster. If they fan out, it's good if you're a bodybuilder because they look bigger, they produce more force, right? So, pennated muscle tends to be bigger and stronger. That's not trainable. You can't train a muscle, become more pennated. You can't train a muscle to insert somewhere other than where it inserts, right? Those things are genetically determined. You can't make your hum to insert somewhere other than where it inserts, right? Those things are genetically determined. You can't make your humerus or your femur or your torso longer, right?

Like these are things that are just built into the system. And then lastly, you know, I mentioned skin throughout this podcast episode, skin elasticity. You know, if it's real tight to the muscle, if it's not very elastic and it holds tight to the muscle and fat, you're going to look more defined than somebody who has looser skin, you know, that's more elastic. And then skin thickness. Thick skin is going to cover things more than thin skin. Bodybuilders have very thin skin, so you can see right through it, right? Skin tone, you know, bodybuilders with darker skin are going to look more defined than bodybuilders with lighter skin. That's why they tan, right?

So all of those things are baked into the system. You can't change these things. These things are not trainable. So if you're wondering why you've starved yourself to, you know, a very low level of leanness and you don't look like that person on Instagram, you know, these are the factors that are non-modifiable. You know, in cardiovascular disease prevention, we have what's called modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors, right? And we talk about family history as a non-modifiable risk factor, right? A modifiable risk factor would be smoking cessation. So, smoking status, you can stop smoking, you can eat better, you can exercise. When it comes to training, there are things that are non-modifiable. Your skin thickness, your skin tone, your

receptiveness to, I mean, now they have spray tanning tanning so i you know it's a moot point about suntan but um skin tone skin thickness uh skin elasticity muscle insertions you know the those what the tendinous shit that you were talking about a tendinous inscription tendinous inscription see that they don't teach us that in anatomy class, or they did. I slept through that. It's one of those random OCD terms that I probably got marked off on my lab exam. But tendinous inscription, you know, length of your bones and length of your torso, all those things are non-modifiable. Number of muscle fibers is also non-modifiable. You can't add new muscle fibers. You can grow the ones you have. Guys with more muscle fibers start out bigger to begin with

and can grow larger over the course of training than people with fewer, typically. You know, there's exceptions, I'm sure. But at the end of the day, what you can modify is you can make what you have bigger. You can get leaner than you are to a point. You can modify your diet to a point, but we all have limits, right? Like I said, there's a U-shaped curve. You know you are to a point. You can modify your diet to a point, but we all have limits, right? Like I said, there's a U-shaped curve. You know, there's a point where too much leanness is counterproductive, too much fatness is counterproductive. You got to find your sweet spot and you got to understand the trade-offs. You know, if you want to look fairly defined, you're not going to get as strong as you possibly can, most likely. You're not going to be a

competitive lifter. Most of you don't want to be, so that's fine. Those of you that do, well, you better accept some fatness in your life, you know? Yep. And, you know, you could eat better always. You can always eat better, and you could always be more active. Like, those are things you can modify. You can't modify all the other stuff that's baked into the cake. So just remember, even if you chase this extreme leanness and do the stupid thing of getting down to 130 pounds at 5'9", you're probably not going to look like the guy you're trying to look like because he's 30 pounds heavier than you already. And you're going to be disappointed with the result. You're going to feel like shit.

So, again, normal BMI, high fat percentage, build muscle. High BMI, high fat percentage, lose fat. That's the way I like to approach it. Simplifies things, doesn't it? Yep. I like it. I like fat. That's the way I like to approach it. Simplifies things, doesn't it? Yep. I like it. I like it. I like simple. I'm a simple man. Well, bam, there you go. Abs and why you don't have them. Next time we're going to talk about fat more. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. We're going to talk about getting fat. Do you need to get fat to get strong? Maybe, maybe. It depends on what you're talking about. What do you mean by fat?

Just like, what do you mean by lean? I mean, people, a lot of you own animals. A lot of you have, some of you have bought multiple types of animals. I've had three different dog breeds. They grow differently. They look different. You know, they respond to food different. They have different fur, different skin, et cetera, right?

have different fur, different skin, et cetera, right? Like, you're not going to take a pit bull and make it look like a freaking, what's a tall dog? Like a greyhound. Yeah, like a greyhound. You're not going to starve that pit bull to make him look slender and lean. You're not. Yeah. You're not going to take a whippet and do the opposite, right? No. So if we're going to be this forgiving towards animal genetics, we need to be more forgiving towards our own. Yeah. Speaking of animals, can you believe this?

An 11-week-old puppy just laid on me while I did this whole episode. Oh, yeah. She's so good. I'm just watching her. Yeah, she's just looking at you, licking you. I struggle. 11-week-old puppy.

It just laid here quietly, didn't jump around, didn't get into shit. And I did the whole episode. What a good girl. So I checked my Instagram out. I think she deserves a little treat for that. She does. I'm going to feed her right after we get off, but you got to go. I got to go. So let's sign off. Uh, thank you for tuning in to the weights and plates podcast. Uh, you can find me at weights and plates.com. My gym is in Phoenix and the website's weights and plates, gym.com. My gym is in Phoenix. And the website is weightsandplatesgym.com.

I finally split it off. We're working on that. And I post most of my content these days on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. That's also where you can find my little dog Maggie, my little Boston Terrier, and my German shorter pointer Lucy. Occasionally my pit bull. I have three, but the third one got stolen. She was my first. My pit got stolen by my girlfriend. So she's June the gym dog. If you want to look at her

beautiful pictures, but yeah, you can find me there. And yeah. Very good. You know where to find me on Instagram. I am marmalade underscore cream. I think I got a couple of dog pics on there. Go check out our spotty dogs here at the Jones household. And if you have any questions about training, jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right, we'll talk to you all again in a couple weeks. Bye.