Weights and Plates Podcast - #83 - The Risks of Weight Gain for Strength Training

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

It's almost a cliche now, that a novice trainee running the novice linear progression should "do GOMAD" (drink a gallon of milk a day). This advice is one of the most misunderstood bits of nutrition in the Starting Strength method, but it highlights an important fact -- to gain muscle, most people will need to put on bodyweight while increasing their lifts (a small percentage of very overweight or obese people already have enough excess energy on hand in the form of fat stores to run the program without gaining weight). Muscle doesn't just grow from nothing, their needs to be surplus calories on hand to build new muscle mass and connective tissue while the weight on the bar goes up.    Like anything in life, however, gaining weight is not without risk. For the most part it's very safe, especially since you will be building strength and adding muscle mass which will improve your both your health metrics, function, and your quality of life. There are a few potential problems some people will encounter with increasing body weight that need to be addressed, however. In today's episode Dr. Santana and Coach Trent discuss those problems, including cardiometabolic health and blood glucose levels, and how to mitigate them during your training journey.   Hint: stop skipping your conditioning!     Online Diet Coaching and Strength Training with Dr. Robert Santana https://weightsandplates.com/online-coaching/     Weights & Plates on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@weights_and_plates?si=ebAS8sRtzsPmFQf- Weights & Plates: https://weightsandplates.com Robert Santana on Instagram: @the_robert_santana   Trent Jones: @marmalade_cream Email: [e-mail]  

Welcome to the Weights and Plates podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host along with Trent Jones, my co-host. Hola. Hola, senor. What's up, man? Oh, well, I'm going to try not to just be an absolute coughing mess today. I caught something, gosh, almost three weeks ago now, and I'm over that. I'm over it. I had some nasty cold things. It was probably COVID. I didn't get a test because that's pointless. But, yeah, now I'm just coughing like crazy for like three weeks on.

I think we'll get an email about that. Oh, send it on. Go ahead and hit that send button. And I will hit the delete button. So, yeah, so you were sick, huh? Yeah, so I've been fighting off sickness. Basically, since I went to Wichita Falls. Every time I come back from Wichita Falls,

you know, there's always something, you know, like digestive distress, sinus infection, whatever. there's always something, you know, like digestive distress, uh, sinus infection, whatever. It's like the place just like it leaves them. It leaves a mark when you, when you leave. But, uh, yeah, I was there a few weeks ago for a, uh, a starting strength seminar. We have to audit a seminar to keep our starting strength coaching credential. Uh, we have to do every two years, once every two years. So I was there to do my audit and see some friends, see some folks that are trying to become coaches. And yeah, it was all good, but I came back with a nasty cold and finally kicked that. But now I'm just, you know,

hacking it up all over the place. I had an interesting experience there, by the way. I had an interesting experience there, by the way. Yeah, what's that? So, you know, I flew in a day early to go see my folks that are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And, you know, so I spent a night there. And then I drove, I picked up some people from the airport. They were going to the seminar on Friday and drove them up to Wichita Falls. And then we stayed there for the weekend.

And basically, I had like, you know, three days where I slept really well. Um, I ate well and I really didn't have anything to do literally except think about training and then go train. And my training went exceptionally well. Uh, I was supposed to, I remember I was supposed to press 190 for a set of five as my intensity press That was like the first workout that I did there at uh at wichita falls athletic club and I hit the first set and i'm like Did I did I load the weights right? You know, so I went and counted again. It's not hard You know, there's a 45 plate a 25 plate and a two and a half plate. It's like no that's 190 And i'm like, dude, I think these plates are light. Like, I think, I think I must've grabbed

like the 42 pound plates or something. Cause this thing, it was way too easy. This is a Wichita Falls. Yeah. So I did another set of five and I'm like, well, shit, I could do three sets of five here, but I'm going to stick to the plan, you know? Um, and I'm going to save the rest of my energy for rack pulls and a same thing with squats. You know, I just smoked my squats the next day and I'm like, man, what is, what's going on here? And I realized finally, I'm like, Oh, like Trent, it's because you slept well. So, uh, the, the lesson here is that if you aren't sleeping and by sleeping, I mean like, if you aren't sleeping seven or eight hours a night, like good quality sleep, like you're not getting interrupted, you know, you don't have the freaking TV on like a boomer. You know, if you're not getting that kind of sleep, then do everything you can to get that kind of sleep. Because if you do, it's like taking steroids, man. It's better than steroids.

it's like taking steroids, man. It's better than steroids. It's like, it's just a world of recovery because I, you know, I've, I'm operating in this mode where some nights I get good sleep. Some nights I get three hours of sleep. Um, some nights I get a decent number of hours of sleep, but they're interrupted a lot. So I'm, I'm woken up a couple of times during the night. That's my general parent mode. Right. Um, so having like three solid nights of deep sleep, there was, you know, eight hours sleeping all the way through, eating plenty. It was amazing. My recovery just went through the roof. Sleep is like a hell of a drug and people don't appreciate it enough. The other thing too, I don't know if you've noticed this, but circadian rhythm. Yeah. Like if I go to bed at three in the morning, wake up at 11, I do not feel as good as if I go to bed at 10 and wake up at six. meaning my son. And that's tough because that means that I'm the point guy for that because,

you know, he's used to having mama there to help him go to sleep if he wakes up during the night. Nope, that's me now. And I don't have boobs, so I can't satisfy that. But he doesn't need to nurse. It's just a psychological association that he needs to nurse to feel comfortable to go to sleep. So it's better now after about a week and a half of that, but, uh, like two nights in, I think I slept maybe three hours that night. It was, it was awful. It was, it was real bad. And so, but I've learned that the temptation would be, okay, mama gets up, she takes them and I go back to sleep for like three or four hours. Mama gets up. She takes them and I go back to sleep for like three or four hours, right? And I wake up at like 1030 or whatever. No, you just got to get up at your normal wake up time. If it's, you know, for us, it's usually about seven o'clock. Nope, I just get up at seven. I only slept two and a half hours, you know, too bad. Drink a cup of coffee and just go about your day and then try to fall asleep like normal the next night. Um, yeah, it's a mistake to

try to sleep in because then you fuck everything else up because then you're going to be up, up late weirdly the next night and you're still on low sleep. And that's weird. Yeah. Very, very important to, uh, keep that rhythm big time, man. But anyway, um, yeah. So, so you had a topic for us today. You were talking about people gaining weight to facilitate their strength training, to facilitate gaining muscle, and running into potentially some blood sugar issues, right? So the topic I wanted to hit on today pertains to the extremes of eating. And notice I don't use the word dieting because I want to talk about weight gain as well as weight loss. You know, we've talked about weight loss a lot. We've talked about weight gain a lot too. And the hazards of both are often discussed by different people,

you know? Typically when you hire a diet coach, they're an expert in all things weight loss and how bad weight gain is, you know? Larg largely because we have a larger population of people that are heavy that want to lose weight than people that are lighter and want to gain weight. But both have their downfalls, but I wanted to hit on weight gain. And one of the things that we typically say is that if you are a young man, underweightweight man that you should eat a massive surplus of calories let the weight come on you'll gain fat and muscle and it will all even out in the end and if you need to lose the body fat you can and that's usually fine because a young man can tolerate this surplus of calories right so we think right but that's not always the case

you know sometimes you get young men that start running into problems with eating all that food, with digestive problems obviously being the most common, but also cardiometabolic problems. An example that comes to mind is I had a young man. He's a graduate student, and he's in his 20s. And he was a skinny guy, about a buck 30, I think 5'8". And he pushed his weight up to 210, right? That's impressive. And he's run the NLP. But, you know, one of the things that I always like to tell people is individual results vary. And he understands this. I mean, he's a graduate student, so he can think about things in these terms to an extent, you know? Right.

He's getting a doctorate. And, you know, I was a graduate student once, too, and I can't speak for all of them as being as sharp as this guy, but he knows what's up. Let's just put it that way. But he thinks critically. Anyways, he's like, I don't care if I get fat. I need to get strong. I hate being skinny, this, that, and the other. Let's do it.

So we pushed him up, and his numbers are modest for how big he is, but he's done the work. He shows up. He does the work doesn't always recover the best because he's he needs to eat that much food to perform decently you know he's eating like 4 000 calories and uh you know he's squatting in the mid twos he's dead lifting in the mid threes which is really impressive and he's pressing almost 135 for three to five reps you know closer and closer to that one plate press. But dude, this guy put on all this weight and he's still struggling to bench in the mid hundreds. And, you know, I just had to explain to him, like, and, you know, he's cool. You know,

he totally gets it and he might be listening, you know, I hope he is. Yeah. Yeah. If he is listening, first of all, Hey, nice work, man. That's, that's impressive. That's, um, I know how much hard work that is. Yeah. Yeah. He's one of my favorite people. He's cool as fuck, and he handles it like a champ. Misses his 150-pound bench and then is like, dude, is this happening to everybody? I'm like, well, you're almost at a one-plate press. Bench just sucks for you right now. We're going to get it done. But I always say that.

I'm like, for some people, weight gain takes you to levels you never thought you'd get to. And then for other people, that weight gain takes you to a level that's pretty modest, but better than where it'd be if you didn't do that, you know? Right. Yep. Yep. Like, so, you know, there's a lot of factors there, but, you know, like I've noticed before, his deadlift has gotten substantially up there and his press seems to be following because remember the press involves a lot of upper back strength too you know so yeah i think the press follows a deadlift you know so if you develop a big deadlift your press should follow up to a point um but you know squat

and bench he's struggling you know and he's struggling with the pull downs you know getting them to a chin up is gonna has been a project but we're gonna get them there and it just takes time so there's a couple a couple big um big nuggets of information there that we want to hit on. Number one is, yeah, individual results vary. You might gain a bunch of weight and put yourself in know for some people it's just hard to get fucking strong you know right yeah not not everybody uh yeah not everybody's gonna gonna turn that into more strength um no not everybody's gonna you know gain 70 pounds and run an obvious one-year progression to a 405 for five deadlift yeah and remember you know because i know some women listen to us not many because we tend to talk about stuff that pertains to men a lot but you know females, the amount of weight gain is much more modest. You know, we don't, I've never had a woman gain 70 pounds. You know, we're typically talking about men,

and we're talking about this problem. And it doesn't necessarily help either. You see, the spread with female strength isn't quite as wide as it is with male strength, from what I've seen. Obviously, there are weight classes in powerlifting, and the bigger weight classes tend to have larger amounts of weight lifted, right? But, you know, I'm not seeing like, you know, 400-pound women deadlifting 1,100, you know? Right, yes. At 6'3", you know? So, you know, it works a little bit differently.

But for dudes, when they eat all that food, gain all that weight, assuming that the macronutrient composition is good, the protein is high, the carbs are high, that's usually where I start with people and that kind of segues into the next topic. You see some rapid linear progress for a while. Sometimes it's very impressive and you might get a guy that's squatting into the fours or squatting well into the threes. It tends to be more common you know and you see a guy that'll climb into the fours and the deadlift for sets of five you know and you'll see that you know uh just had a guy now he was six four he was a buck 90 before when i first got him pushed up to 210 had the conversation with me about how he wanted to cut you know right right Right, right. And I mean, I don't know what I did, but I talked him into, you know, hey, man, come on. Let's go up. You need to get to 230, 240 is preferable, you know, to do what you're trying to do.

And what he's trying to do is he's just trying to look reasonably athletic and muscular, you know? So in my mind, that's, you know, a four-plate deadlift for a set of five, three-plate squat for a set of five, two-plate bench for a set of five, and a one-plate press for a set of five with about 10 chin-ups. And he's willing to work for that, not the squat. As many taller guys tend to deal with, he gets back pain pretty easy, and the squat aggravates it the most. So he's an online client, by the way. If he was in my gym, maybe we wouldn't have to resort to this, but he's belt squatting, and he's pushing it, and he's adding weight to it.

So his thighs are getting bigger, his deadlifts going up. But I told him, I'm like, there will be a sweet spot somewhere between 220 and 240, where when you cross that threshold, the lifts are just going to go up, dude. And sure enough, this was a guy who was like deadlifting in the low to mid twos, you know, before he heard his back squat, he was in the upper ones, I think. And I'm just talking off the top of my head. And was benching in the mid mid ones i want to say mid to high ones yeah yeah bro as soon as that guy got over 220 i think yeah from 220 to 230 and he bet he just benched 220 2.5 for three sets of five yes i think or one set of five so he's gonna hit the two plate bench for a set of five yeah it's six 6'4". So guys, picture this.

He's 6'4". Lanky guy. Yeah, lanky guy. His baseline phenotype was long, tall, lanky. Yeah, yeah. Now he's filled out. What's crazy is before all this, before he gained the weight, his bicep strength was through the roof, man,

because I had him doing curls. He was curling like 115, 120 pounds for like sets of six, which I can't fucking do. It seems like weight gain is not necessary for that if you have good insertions. That's what I'm assuming the thing is. But his arms grew pretty fast with minimal direct arm work. He was having them bench press and do some curls, and his arms filled out. Then when he gained the body weight and the big lifts went up, back widened.

He's doing a chin-up now. I think he can do more than one, I'm pretty sure. He deadlifted 325 for five, had a little back tweak, bounced back from it quicker than previous back tweaks. And now we're rack pulling one week, deadlifting one week. I'm just assuming that he might get hurt at this point, and we're just kind of stretching out those high-intensity lifts. It's really funny you're saying all this, because I have a client who's 6'4". And very similar profile. Now, how old is your client here?

I think he's under 30 still. I have to double check. But he's a young guy. He's not super young. But what I want to say before you go there is I had to explain to him. I'm like, dude, without lifting any weights or stepping in the weight room, just being over 6'0", you're at higher risk of back pain. And that's well documented. Yeah. That's, that's funny. I'm glad you mentioned that because, um, that's certainly been my experience and nobody ever like told me that before that, you know, tall people have more back pain. It certainly, it makes sense once you think

about it, but, uh, yeah, that's been my experience. So the client that I'm thinking of very similar profile, he's in his forties. So there's a little bit older and, you know, so there's always going to be a recovery, you know, issue there. Right. But, uh, he did had a very similar experience. Um, he's not a particularly great responder to training, but there was an inflection point when he got up to, I think, two 30 at his highest. And, um, yeah, there was definitely an inflection point somewhere between two 15 and two 30, where the, the lower body lifts in particular really kind of shot up. Now he struggled, he struggled with the squat and back tweaks, but, um, yeah, he's a great deadlifter. He's turned into a pretty good bencher, um, press and squat have been the tough ones for him, but yeah, it's true. You know, those, those, um, it's not fair.

Those big, tall, lanky guys, when they squat, they got to go like twice the distance I have to go. You know, they're doing a lot more work against gravity than I am. Oh yeah. It's a longer range of motion. And they're leaned over a lot more. So they got a lot more moment force on their back, you know, just because they're, it doesn't even – they don't even need to have long femurs. They just have long segments, right? Rarely do you see one with a giant long torso that, you know, gets them real vertical. Yeah, exactly.

I have one, but he's 6'8", and I think you do tend to see that when you get to those extreme heights. Okay, yeah. I know you see it more, but, like, the low six-footers, I don't see it as often. I have seen it with guys over six, five. They're pretty bent over and they have these long segments and yeah. So there's a lot of moment force on the back when they squat and deadlift. So yeah. But yeah, so, so it's interesting. I think this is relevant, right? So this, this client of mine, he's had some recovery issues recently and we've been you know kind of trying to figure out hone in on what what those are and like what's really causing this but he got some blood work just to

see if there were any hormonal issues at play doesn't seem like there are but in the blood work it did come up that his a1c level is kind of high like he was kind of knocking on the door of pre-diabetic level and i don't have prior blood work before we started training and before he started gaining weight to know if it's moved. It might have come down for all I know, but I wouldn't be surprised that it had gone up in the process of him gaining weight. and I think that's one of the things that you wanted to address today is, you know, there are risks to gaining weight, right? Yes, absolutely. Just like there are risks to losing weight. So let's talk about some of the risks. I mean, we know what the benefits are.

We've talked about them a lot on this show. But, yeah, what are the potential risks of putting on all this weight? So first thing I want to touch on is we're not nihilists here, but there are no absolutes, okay? And I'm not going to confuse you with that and sit here and say, well, it's like this, but it's also like this, and it's also like this. What I will start out by saying is that most of the time, most of the time, if you're a young man under 30, especially under 25, and you're gaining weight and you gain a large amount of weight and eat a large amount of food and train heavy you're probably going to be fine blood sugars will probably be normal blood pressure will probably be normal usually it improves for a lot of people yeah or you'll see an improvement yeah right but some of the time see how i see what i did there most

of the time and some of the time. Not a million different scenarios. Okay? There are a lot of different scenarios, but we don't need to approach it that way. Most of the time, it's okay. Some of the time, it's not okay. And you get guys that, you know, probably due to genetic factors, the guy that I'm talking about, not the guy I just talked about with the back. The guy with the back, his only issue is he's 6'4 and his back tweaks. And that's extremely common with guys that are 6'4.

I was talking to another one earlier on the phone today. I think he was 6'2 or 6'3. Also, I didn't even train him. He was calling me for diet consult. We somehow got on that topic, and he was like, yeah, my back tweaks, but I recover faster now, and it doesn't feel as bad because I'm 275. These are two very different guys. The guy on the phone wants to get as strong as he possibly can.

The guy that I've been training, he wants to get reasonably strong. He has modest goals. And I just told him, let's get that deadlift up to 405, and you're probably good to go, man. To do that, I want to finish my thought from earlier. I'm trying to stay ahead of that by spreading out those heavy pulls from the floor so that he stays in the game longer and doesn't you know i don't want somebody tweaking their back you know right yes but but you can never predict if somebody's going to tweak their back or not some people never tweak their fucking back you know rip never had back tweaks until he was in his mid-60s you know so it's not that the exercise is guaranteed to tweak your back

but it's also not guaranteed not to either you know? It can go either way. So it does depend. Most of the time, you could deadlift just fine, not have any serious back tweaks. But I've noticed when you get into extreme height, you see it more. We're on a totally different topic here now. But, you know, again, that plays into this, though. That's a genetic variable, you know? Right. He's tall.

There's advantages. There's a lot of advantages. There are a lot of advantages to being tall, but one of them is not having a fabulous spine, you know? Right. But the guy I was talking about before him, he doesn't have the greatest muscle building genetics, not very athletics, you know? Very strong between the ears, though. Smart guy. Very smart guy, you know?

But, you know, he's going to have to scrape every last inch to squat 315 for five, and he's going to do it. And he's going to have to scrape his ass off to deadlift 405 for five. Now, part of that's mental. I think his pull right now is probably 25 pounds depressed because he thinks it's not moving when it's moving. You know? Right, yeah. That's a separate topic that we've hit on. Now, one day he goes to the doctor to get some blood work done.

And he's like, hey, my blood sugars are high dude and you know my a1c was high in this and that right and he's like is this legit and i'm like do you fast you know i asked all the basic questions yeah yeah okay they're legit labs i'm like well all right well you're not you know we have to address this because uh the only thing you've changed is you've gained a bunch of weight right in your mid-20s, so this is unusual. And so the first thing I told him to do, and I think he's fairly good with this now. If he's listening, he's going to tell me, no, I've been slacking. I told him to do conditioning, and I'd been telling him that for a while.

I'm like, the best thing you can do when you're gaining that much weight and becoming a big person when you're not used to being a small person is to do conditioning so that you can keep up with carrying the extra weight. Right. And we've talked about it on the show many times, but that also has cardiometabolic benefits, lowers your blood pressure, lowers your blood sugar, and allows you to fucking recover between sets better. You're not winded when you're squatting and deadlifting, you know? Right. So, you know, he's trying to do that.

I'll say he's trying to do that. So it's not like he's doing zero, but he's trying to do that. So then, you know, I had to address the diet. So at this point, I think his carbs are somewhere in the mid 500s. I don't think we quite got to do that. So it's not like he's doing zero, but he's trying to do that. So then, you know, I had to address the diet. So at this point, I think his carbs are somewhere in the mid 500s. I don't think we quite got to 600 carbs, but they were somewhere in the mid fives. I think his fat grams are the low ones and his proteins over 200. So I'm like, well, you know, normally I started thinking about it, you know, started going back to my nutritional biochemistry and looking at the basics there. I'm like, okay, if he has a lot of sugar in his blood, that means

he's not using it all to train. So theoretically, if I lower his carb intake, that should lower the amount of sugar that's dumping into his blood. And he should still be able to train because what he's using is going where it needs to go, you know? Right, right. It's all the muscle glycogen, the tissues, et cetera, right? And he's producing more than enough insulin, certainly, to get the anabolic effects of that, right? So I lowered his carbs by like 50. I told him to get a glucose meter. I'm like, dude, I hate to tell you to stick yourself, but you need to stick yourself because we got to keep an eye on the things we can look at acutely, right? So he starts sticking himself in the morning and then two hours after meals so we can look at

his glucose curves and they started trending down but i still wasn't satisfied because he had a few that were still over 100 you know but they were starting to stay under 100 and i'm like all right let's go down another 50 so he dropped his carbs about a hundred by a hundred so that's what 400 and then we upped his fat by, what's the equivalent there? I don't have his numbers right in front of me. Oh, like the caloric equivalent? Because my theory was if we keep the calories the same first and just reduce the carb intake and flip the ratio, he might be able to train, have normal blood sugars, and not have all these problems, you know?

Yeah, so roughly if you drop 100 grams, you said 100 grams of carbs? Yeah, I did like 40 grams of fat. Okay, Yeah. 40 to 45 grams of fat. Right. And, uh, his numbers started coming back down and I started looking more normal. So I'm like, okay. And his performance has been more or less the same. He's an intermediate now. So he has to scrape and he's also juggling grad school with this. But, uh, you know, it got me to thinking, you know, a colleague of ours hired me a few years back and he was pretty fucking strong. So this guy was an advanced lifter with high absolute numbers, even high relative numbers. And he was just carrying extra weight because he went on the weight gain train, you know? And I got him down lean enough to show abs. And the dude

was fucking brick wall, man, because he put on all that strength over the years and he's naturally thick to begin with. But all that shit normalized as soon as he lost the body weight. I didn't try to do it this way because he wanted to get lean too. So that was part of the goal. With this guy, he's gained all this weight and he's still having trouble getting strong. So the last thing he wants to do is lose weight if he can avoid it. So we're trying to get this blood glucose down through conditioning and through macronutrient manipulation. And if I have to lower calories,

I'll lower calories. He can afford to lose some weight too. It probably wouldn't totally kill him. Right. But the point is, I've had many other guys do the exact same thing he's doing. No problems. My cousin did it when he was like 20, so a little bit younger. And he went up to 217 at six foot. Man, we wanted 220 so bad. But he got to that point, I don't know if you ever reached this, Trent, where you keep eating and it just doesn't move. Yes. Yeah.

The amount of food you need to get that next bit of weight gain is insane. It was, yeah. And then if you back off that food even just a little bit, your weight drops like a rock. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that was the same, same level for me. It was about 215 is where I topped out.

I just couldn't push past that. My cousin could not do more than 217. He tapped out. He did what he wanted to do. You know, he did all those numbers we just talked about. Yeah. And then,

you know, he got them down to like 168. Then he got as low as he was willing to deal with too. And he just threw in the towel. But now it's cool because he's been a casual lifter for the last 10 years. And he walks in the gym and guys stare at him because he looks more like a basketball player, but he's like deadlifting over 400, you know? Right, yeah. Well, and, you know, yeah, that's a good example because –

And he actually just benched, what was it, 225 for five recently. And he's – I think he's – I think now he's – I think he's 200 now. Yeah, he grew into 200. Okay. But he's i think he's 200 now yeah he grew into 200 okay but he no longer looks fat at 200 like yeah 10 years ago you know right exactly well yeah that's the thing that changes like you just the look you have at higher body weights changes so much over oh it just takes a long period of time well but that example right there of your cousin that's a good one because um um, you know, I, some people just get really caught up on this when they're first, when they're, they're, you know, first approaching

the idea of gaining a bunch of weight to get strong. You don't have to stay there, you know, you can do it. And then if you don't like it, you can always lose. And especially if you're one of these phenotypes that is, know like just a hard gainer right if you have to really work to gain all that weight it ain't going to be hard to pull it off no it's not my cousin lost it pretty easy yeah for for if you really have to work to gain weight you just it's not hard to uh to go in the opposite if you if you get to the point where you're like oh no i'm too big i don't like this or or if you're in that point where you're like, Oh, no, I'm too big. I don't like this. Or, or if you're in that situation where you're like, you gained a bunch of weight to facilitate strength gains, you exceeded the strength gains, like you gain strength up to a point and then you

gained a bunch of weight after that and it didn't do anything. You can always drop back down. You know, there's, it's a temporary thing. I think some people think that it's like, Oh, if I gain 50 pounds, it's 50 pounds forever for the rest of my life. It'll never come off. No, you're not meant to stay there. No, no, it's not. It's not. And then on the flip side too,

if you cut, right, you can get down to a low number and be like, oh shit, this sucks. And you can go back up and you find your sweet spot over time. Everybody's going to have to do this to some extent, right? Everybody's going to kind of have a,

have some ups and downs in their body weight over their training career. And you'll eventually find a spot that you like, but yeah, that's interesting. You mentioned that because I have not, you know, I, I just, I have less of a nutritional focus with the people I coach because I have less nutritional expertise, but I have run into this as well, where, um, some people, whether it's genetic or what i'm assuming it's mostly genetic that they gain they gain the weight and their body composition is fine when i'm not talking about people that are very obese or you know have a lot have a lot of excess body fat but their but their insulin sensitivity clearly is not trending in the right direction

as they gain the weight, you know, they're having trouble clearing that, that, um, that glucose. And, um, I think that the mistake that I've made in the past as a, as a raw coach, uh, was underplaying the conditioning part. Oh yeah. I think, and I, and I think, you know, talking to other people that have been, been down this road, and I think, you know, talking to other people that have been down this road, most people, when you talk to them that are dealing with this problem, are not doing much conditioning. Especially in our demographic, we get a lot of information workers that are sitting at desks all day, you know? Yeah, sit on your ass all day, and then, yeah, you go lift weights three times a week. That's great, but it's not going to make

up for general activity. The thing is, we've talked about this before, you know, the guys that we followed that are a generation or two behind us were more active than our generation onward, you know? And I think the assumption behind their advice when you hear these old school lifters saying, don't do cardio, is that you're moving around as much as they did at that age, you know? And a lot of us aren't, you know? A lot of us aren't. And yeah. You got to do conditioning just to make up for all the ass sitting you're doing, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You know, so just about everyone at this point in time has a app on your phone that comes with your phone where you can track your steps and, um, you know, it's not a, it's not perfect, but, um, you ought to take a

look at your step count, you know, and just see where you're at. I think that's a decent proxy for general activity. And if you're walking, you know, less than eight to 10,000 steps a day, then you're pretty sedentary. You know, I would consider eight to 10,000 steps a day. That, that would be a, you know, moderately active lifestyle. I wouldn't call it super active, but it's active. And there's a lot of folks who are, who are less than that. You know, they're walking four or five, 6,000 a day. So that, that just tells you right there that you're not being very active. So that's an easy win right there is just to walk more and just become more generally active. But, um, but what do you do for conditioning? Cause that's, you know, I, I separate

that in my mind where you've got, there's general activity, which is good and you should do it and you should get those steps in. But that's not conditioning either. In my mind, it's not. No, conditioning is dedicated work. Yeah. Yeah. The rule of conditioning is the same as lifting. You know, it's, there's an inverse relationship between the amount of conditioning you do and the intensity. So if you're doing more and in the conditioning world, they measure that as duration or if you're outside cycling or running, it'd be mileage. But typically duration is how people measure that the longer, the longer you're able to sustain it, the lighter it's going to be right. And that goes the other way, right?

If you're going to do light work like walking, that means you have to do hours of it to get a good conditioning effect. That's why long, slow distance was popular. You know, run for an hour, run for 40 minutes, maintain a heart rate between, what, zone 2 and zone 3 or whatever. And then later on, hit, replace that because it's the same thing you go at that high intensity it's like squat instead of five you know if you're you know making an analogy to lifting weights if you do a high intensity interval training then you're getting the same cardio metabolic effects in a

shorter amount of time right so the reason that you do high intensity is that you know basically save on time it's the less is more deal? And you get the chronic adaptations a little faster too. We end up in the same place long-term. But yeah, no, the point is walking is not enough unless you're walking for many hours. You know what I mean? Like you can get the same effect from walking and running, except you're going to run a fraction of the time you're going to walk to get that effect, right? And that's not just calorie expenditure, that's blood pressure, glucose, insulin sensitivity, et cetera. There are data out there, you know, that kind of makes sense to me that you kind of get there a little bit quicker when you do HIIT. You might get there in a month instead of three months, but then over the long run, they probably level off. But yeah, you need to actually push yourself

if you're going to only dedicate an hour or less to it. And, you know, you just got to pick an activity you like. I personally like hiking because you get a lot of, or uphill walking as well, because you get a lot of range of motion on the hips and knees. I don't like seated cardio because you're sitting all day. I don't want you on a bike or a rower because now it's more sitting. I'd rather you climb stairs or walk up a treadmill on an incline if you don't live anywhere with mountains, you know? Hiking is so good too, because it just, it requires you to, you know, it requires your ankles and your knees to articulate, you know, you have to go walk over rocks and stumps and stuff.

And I think all this stuff matters, you know, I noticed like people who, and I've experienced this because I grew up in a concrete jungle, you know, the Dallas Fort Worth area, everything's flat. It's all concrete. There's no natural surfaces, hardly anywhere. You know, you, you don't develop the healthiest joints that way. But you know, if you're, yeah, if you're walking uphill and you've got to go over rocks and it's good for your balance, it's good for your joints. Yeah. I really like that. If you can, you know, unfortunately not everybody is in that situation, but. The Phoenix is a concrete jungle of mountains yeah there you go it could be worse it could be worse

fucking hot here you could drive within 20 minutes of one area and see a 10 degree drop in temperature yeah just because you're going from concrete to dirt concrete yeah yeah man it's fucking nuts man it never rains downtown it's kind of funny yeah, yeah, man. It's fucking nuts, man. It never rains downtown. It's kind of funny. Yeah, it just evaporates before it hits the ground. That's right. It's just fucking hot, dude. Well, yeah, I think ideally, in an ideal situation, I like to mix a little bit of low-intensity steady state. I call that LIS.

I think that's a common name for it. Long, slow distance, low intensity, steady state, whatever you want to call it. I like to mix a little bit of LIS cardio and some HIIT. So in an ideal situation, you do a little bit of both. If you're going to do it two or three times a week, you do maybe two sessions of long, slow, and you do one session of high intensity and high intensity could be a lot of things i like the prowler you know that one's easy it's it's fun for some people especially if you have like uh you know i played football in high school so it's like pushing the sled it's like the tackling sled you know i like the echo bike too it's it is seated but you know you

can get on there and do a tabata and just blast your ass off for four minutes. And that's all it takes four minutes and you're done. It sucks really bad, but you're done fast too. And that, that, that doesn't require much out of your time either, which is nice. So if you, if you're already struggling to carve out enough time to get through your workouts, then HIIT is nice because you can get a good cardio stimulus in at the end of your lifting in four or five minutes, you know, 10 minutes max. Long, slow distance is going to take you more time, obviously. But the thing I do like about the long, slow distance, if you are at a gym that has, you know, like a treadmill or whatever, or elliptical or something, is you can just hop

on there and hit the go button and then just go you know there's really no barrier to it it's easy you don't have to think about it i like it because you know hit is close to lifting and that's one of the arguments for it is that it's a similar activity right but you know i like moderate or long slow distance because when you do hit or when you lift, it makes everything tighter. That's just one of the mechanisms by which you're able to produce more force. It's a high force production event. Yeah. I like the low and moderate intensity steady state because it's less force production.

You're getting the conditioning effect, and it loosens up all those muscles, joints, and connective tissue. So it kind of helps counterbalance the lifting. That's a good point. Now, you've got to draw the line somewhere. those muscles joints and connective tissue so it kind of helps counterbalance the lifting now yeah you got to draw the line somewhere and most of you aren't going to get to a point where that line is at a place where you're hurting your gains right um you're not going to get close to that point if you're spending an hour or less doing lists or miss uh that's not going to up your gains if you're eating enough and sleeping enough it's just not not. But if you start training for an endurance event, endurance training will fuck up your lifting. You will prioritize the endurance training.

I've said this many times. But if you're sitting on your ass all day and you do an hour of lower moderate intensity steady state cardio, it's only going to be a net positive. You're going to feel better in the weight room, and you're not going to be as creaky and stiff. Remember, lifting makes you stiffer. That's one of the ways that, you know, you produce more force and you balance that by moving around,

you know? Yes. You know, think about some of the strongest athletes in the world and some of these, you know, legacy sports, right? They have to run too. They have to run fast. They have to run steady, you know? It depends, you know, they're changing directions a lot. So it's not like they're just lifting and doing explosive activities all the time. They also have to do conditioning and they fucking hate it, but they have to do it, you know? like the lifting is it's enough mental overhead just to handle the lifting, you know, to squat heavy and deadlift heavy. And you get through all that and you're like, fuck, I got to do like, I got to go push the prowler now, or I got to do a Tabata. Like it can be brutal. Um, whereas, yeah, I mean, you know, if you just got to hop on, hop on the treadmill and do 25 minutes, it, you know, it's not mentally taxing to do that. You just got to do it. So yeah, that's, that's a good point. That's a good point. Yeah, man. I'll make a controversial statement here. This is unrelated to our topic, but this might be, might be controversial to some, some folks.

I actually like yoga for some people for the same reason you mentioned, right? It's what I just said. All that stuff is fine. You know, once you start pushing it to the extreme to get maximum adaptations, it will fuck up your lifting. That's it. Yeah, well, of course. Yeah, of course.

But yeah, casually doing that shit, it's good for you. Yeah, absolutely. But anyway, okay. So have you noticed, so conditioning I think is pretty well understood that that's going to improve your insulin sensitivity and improve your ability to metabolize carbs. Have you noticed really any difference between modes of cardio?

We just talked about like reasons why you might choose one or the other from a programming standpoint, from a psychological standpoint. Does it really matter in terms of your… I don't think so. I really don't think so. In terms of your... I don't think so. I really don't think so. But, yeah, what I wanted to kind of come back to was what I said about the diet. You know, I am a carboholic, and that's what I typically start with.

And this guy by no means is on low carb right now. But to get his calories to 4,000 and, you know, get his blood sugars to a decent place, I had to go lower than I would have went in the past. So sometimes to get that last boost of calories, you just have to eat fat versus pushing the carbs up to an abnormal level because if you're not going to use them, they're just going to end up getting dumped in there if you are of a certain phenotype. Now, some people, I think my cousin got to 600 carbs and he was fine. I did 550, I was fine. Yeah, sure. people i think my cousin got to 600 carbs and he was fine i did 550 i was fine you know yeah sure and i was in my late 20s at the time and i did 550 i was fine my cousin did 650 but uh that's a

lot of fucking food i mean that's a lot of volume of food it's hard to eat but for some people they can't you know they start getting high blood sugar start starts getting dumped dumped into their bloodstream and for that person pushing the fat up to keep the calories high is completely appropriate, you know? You're not extracting a lot of glucose from fat molecules. It's the glycerol molecule and the triglyceride that gets used to be converted into glucose if that needs to happen, you know? And that's a very long process and the human body's lazy and doesn't like to do that. So it's not a very good source of sugar. That's one of the reasons keto doesn't work so well with explosive types of activities. Right. But, you know, like

we've been trying to say, there's, you know, risks with weight gain, there's risks with weight loss in terms of the dieting, the eating. But remember, when people come to us, this is quasi-sport. They might not be competing, but people in that situation where they need to gain a bunch of weight or on the opposite, we don't get too many of these, but people that want to get extreme leanness, you're competitive now. You may not be getting on a platform or bodybuilding stage, but you're competitive now. You may not be getting on a platform or a bodybuilding stage, but you're competitive now. You're competing against yourself. You're competing against something you put up against the wall. You are now accepting a higher level of risk than the old guy who wants his back to stop hurting and is willing to gain a few pounds, but isn't going to do anything crazy because he needs to stay healthy. He doesn't want to get on more drugs and he wants

to play with his grandkids. That's a different situation than the 20-something-year-old man who's skinny, weak, and has his whole life ahead of him. You know, that guy is now accepting a higher level of risk to get stronger. And that's, you know, it's not just what we just talked about. I mean, that's, like we said, most of the time it doesn't happen, but it can happen to some of you. But also, you know, if you're trying to push to, you know, a 400 plus deadlift, you know, a 300 plus squat, you know, we sit here and say it's not that heavy. We see it happen often, you know, a good chunk of the time, not all of the time. Sometimes it's psychologically blocked, but sometimes it's physically blocked. I remember our colleague, Wolf, telling me once that it took this guy five years to, you know,

I think, deadlift in the mid 300s, you know? Yep, sure. Just physical idiot, motor moron, whatever you want to call him, you know? But, you know, if you're going to lift hundreds of pounds over your body weight, there's a level of risk involved above baseline for some of you, especially if you're on the smaller side, right? Or if you're on the taller side and you're trying to squat 315 and you're six foot five, you know, there are things you can do to mitigate that risk. You know, we teach things with good technique. We try to minimize the risk of injury through that. You know, we try to recommend appropriate body weights to minimize the injury risk with that. And some people never get hurt. You know, we try to recommend appropriate body weights to minimize the injury risk with that.

And some people never get hurt. You know, they just go through it, they get as strong as they want to, and then they're done. You know, that happens. Yeah, right. Again, most of the time, things go pretty well. You don't get seriously hurt, you put the weight on, you get stronger. But some of you are going to run into problems you got to work through if you really, really want this. But the point that I'm hitting here is is when you decide that you want to either get 5% body fat or you're going to gain 80 pounds to squat and deadlift a lot, you've accepted a level of risks that places you into a competitive category, whether you ever compete against others or not. Right, right. Yeah. And to say that another way, you know, your goals and your performance goals in terms of lifting should consider that how, how competitive you want to be with yourself. So, you know,

if you're sitting there and you're like, you know, and you've, you've worked your ass off for a three 15 deadlift. Um, and you're like, I want to pour pull 500. Great. But you have to realize what you're saying there, which is that I want to train like a competitive lifter for the next several years to make that happen. Because that's what it is, right? And if you're not willing to do that, then you need to revisit your goals, your performance goals. All to get the result of the bottom 50%. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so this is the thing. I say this all the time and I'm talking about people who follow the main site for starting strength and they follow RIP's podcast. You got to understand when you're, when you're, when RIP's talking, you said it the best

that RIP's a football coach, right? He's talking you said it the best that rip's a football coach right he's just a really intelligent football coach yeah he's just a really abnormally intelligent high school football coach because most of them are not very smart yeah rip tell me rip told me once high school football coach is a sentient being right yeah but you know rip rip there's a couple things with rip number one he's always talking to novices unless he specifies otherwise you just have to assume he's talking to novices and pretty and we're not i'm not talking about you know uh novices that are like developed athletes that just haven't you know touched a barbell in the way that we do it i'm talking about rank novices that's generally who he's talking about and And for these people, they have no idea what they're capable of yet because they haven't

done the process or they're just at the very beginning of the process. So part of what he says when he's like, you know, well, three 50 is not very heavy. Four 50 is not particularly heavy. Now five 50 might be, well, that's kind of heavy, right? When he says stuff like that, it's because there's guys out there that need to hear that because they would never push themselves to do that. And they need that sort of, you know, that's what they call in like negotiations, anchor. They need like an anchor, right? You know, when you come out with a price, you're like, well, how about a thousand? Now we're negotiating off of a thousand because I said a thousand. If I said 1500, we'd be negotiating off of 1500, right? Like somebody's got to set an anchor point. So that's what he's doing. He's

setting an anchor point for people. And he's saying like, you know, Hey, three 50 is not that heavy. And you're sitting there and some guys are sitting there. They're like, well, I haven't squatted two 25. Holy shit. He's saying three 50 is not heavy. Like, what am I doing here? And some people need to hear that because they have the potential to squat well beyond three 50 and they ought to train and do it. Um, but that's not everybody. And I think there's a lot of folks who, who absorb a lot of the, the starting strength, you know, content and, um, and they've worked their ass off and they have a two 75 squat and they're, you know, they just think they're just complete dog shit because they can't squat 350. Look, I got a guy who's six foot five and he's 320. And when that squat gets over 300, he just has a hard fucking time. Yeah. He has a hard

fucking time. I mean, I got him to the upper 300s one time. Right. And that was early on when he was highly motivated. And that's just probably not happening again. You know, he's just... Right. But, you know, he has the body weight, you know, he has the body weight, 6'5", 300. He's got his highest... He's 6'5", 320. He's gotten his highest 330. But it doesn't make his squat easier, you know, despite all that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I believe it. He can't recover like shit and work a busy IT job despite the fact that he's eating all these calories and just squat over 300 without any effort. So you see that too, you know? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

So I just want to say that because I think a lot of people get confused by that. Look, you can only run your race. But you do need to hear that shit. But you do need to hear that. Right. I needed to hear that. I needed to fucking hear that. The one that got to hear that. I needed to fucking hear that. Yeah.

The one that got me was I wish I could find this board post. There was a board post when I was deep into this stuff where Rip said, you don't see too many 400s and 500s in the gym anymore. And I can never find this board post. It had to be between 2007 and 2013. I don't remember when. Okay, yeah, early one. But he said that, and I was like, it dawned on me, because I had been lifting for 15 years at that point. I'd been in the weight room, and I was pretty consistent, you know, and I thought I was pushing myself,

right? And it threw me back, because I'm like, the fuck? I'm like, I can't do 400 or 500 on anything, you know? Right, yes. So I'm like, well, that's the baseline. I'm like, I want to pull 500 and squat four. Yeah, and there's something to be said about like in your head, you know, this has happened to me because I've, you know, the last two, three years of my training have been just trying to claw back to where I've used to be. And yeah, I mean, I remember the first time I squatted 365 and that was just like insanely heavy. I mean, it was just absolutely brutally crushingly heavy. And now, you know, I squatted 360 last week and, you know, it was fine.

It was kind of heavy, but whatever. I'm going to squat 365 next week. And it's like, whatever, set a five. It might be a little hard, but that's, you know, it's just, so, so psychologically I'm approaching that set now because the bar has been set higher where I'm like, this is not,

this does not scare me. I'm not, I'm not getting any performance anxiety. I get a little bit of butterflies cause it's heavy. And I know I'm just, I'm, I'm, I'm,

I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, my brain is used to psyching myself up. It's like, okay, like you can't,

you can't half-ass this. You can't go into this half-ass. You need to be alert and ready. But at the same time, it's like, I'm not, it's not like daunting or anything anymore. Um, but that's because the bar got raised. Now you put 450 on there and, uh, that would be daunting to me, but I think the guys who squat 550, 650 feel the same way about 450 as I do about 365. So, yeah, there's a reason for it. You know, I'm not saying Rip's wrong because he's not, but you just have to understand how to interpret the message. And, yeah.

Well, it's what we've been saying. It's what happens most of the time, right? What's the average vertical jump, Trent, 20? 20 for guys, it's like 22, I think. 20, 22, you know, it's decent, you know? So if most of the time men can jump 22 inches straight up, then it's plausible to say that a lot of guys can squat over 300, you know?

Yeah, yeah. But then if you're not one of these guys, if you're one of these guys that has a standing vertical jump below 22, you know, a good chunk of the time, you're probably not going to be that strong. Although we have a colleague that has a 20-inch vertical, and he's, you know, deadlifted six, you know? Sorry, squatted six, deadlifted just under six. Yeah, right. Pitched a whole bunch, too.

So sometimes you get these unathletic strong people. But, you know, athleticism is a decent predictor you know but think about it right if you have you know you have averages right we don't have averages for this shit so we can't give you exact numbers and even the averages we have for other things aren't exact either you know they're kind of pulled out of a sample of people and extrapolated right but uh yeah most of the time we see guys get to some fairly decent numbers if they're very committed they eat a lot get to a proper body weight sleep and focus you know mostly on this to the extent that they can obviously the 18 to 25 year old with no responsibilities is going to fare better than the 30 to 40 year old with a lot of

responsibilities right but you know if you control for effort and control for recovery most people can get to some some decent numbers and what rip's saying tends to hold true. But you get people on that left side of the bell curve, man, where they have to bust their ass to get to somebody else's baseline, to an average person's baseline, you know? Yeah. Right. Like, you know, when I came into starting strength, I'd fucked around for 15 years. I was squatting 315 below parallel. Not the best technique, but I was below parallel. I would have passed in a meet, so it counts. I was deadlifting about that, you know, because I didn't understand the deadlift and I was benching 215 for three sets of five. Uh, I think my press was around 115 ish for a set of five, something like that. And I could do 12 chin ups. Those are, then those are pretty strong numbers for an average

gym goer. Like if you walk into the LA fitness and do that, not a lot of people are doing that. into the la fitness and do that not a lot of people are doing that no right but uh yeah but in in the world of starting strength and strength training in general those are not those are not good numbers those are not good average numbers no the best raw bench is just under 800 yeah we're hopefully going to see 800 pretty soon yeah we should have seen it already but yeah they misloaded the fucking bar man man. What the hell? Can you believe that? And that was an exhibition just for that guy to bench 800. Bench 800, yeah.

It wasn't a powerlifting meet where there was like 50 other guys competing. Yeah, it was ridiculous. They misloaded it, and then, yeah, he's gonna get it. So, you know, that's the best raw bench, right? And, you know, there's drugs involved, too, and all these other things, okay think about that for like in the best raw bench is about 800 we've had guys squat over a thousand raw close to 1100 did i don't think ray got 1100

did he uh no but he was close yeah he was close yeah yeah just under yeah 1060 1070 something like that and we know we've had thousand pound raw deadlifts i think yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah thousand power raw deadlifts and then you know in strongman 1100 you know over 1100 so yeah sure okay you know 300 is not that heavy on a squat you know 400 is not that heavy in a deadlift if you're comparing to what the elite, the absolute elite person can do. Of course, you know, that's one way to look at it. You know, I think that anybody who needs motivation or wants to understand this even better needs to go onto startingstrength.com or you should probably Google this because it's old

and watch the Marty Gallagher interview, part three of three with Rip. Yeah. old and watched the marty gallagher interview part three of three with rip yeah and uh you know rip says you know you know my sorry ass squatted 622 uh deadlifted 633 and you know a bench i had 407 if i had another attempt i would had it but you know i think 396 is what he ended up benching legally right i think he said his foot slipped or something on 407. But, you know, he's asking me, he's like, what is different between me and the guys you trained up in the, you know, suburban Baltimore, Washington, D.C. area, you know, the Kirk Karwaskis and all those big guys, you know,

that were really strong in the 80s and 90s. And, you know, they go into this long conversation, obviously. I want you to listen to this if you're interested in this sort of thing. And he basically tells Rip, when you're in a gym and you're squatting 600 and everyone else around you is squatting 315, he's like, that's a whole lot less incentive than you can't go on the big man platform unless you have at least a seven squat because it doesn't even make sense. Right. Yeah. And it's like if you had a 200-pound clean and jerk, you had to go to this platform. But you better believe everybody's watching over on the number one platform where so-and-so is doing a 400-pound clean and jerk at 198.

I think it was Lancaster, I forgot the first name, old-school Olympic lifter. But he's right. And I listened to that interview every fucking day for a while when I was running my linear progression because they would talk about that, and they'd talk about the eating. He's like, in the politically incorrect 1960s, we sought to become gargantuan.

He's like, we ate food all day long. We drank milk. We slept. We rested, et cetera. You know, everything was about being anabolic, lifting more, getting bigger. You know, that's what I needed. I needed to hear this at the time. Like, I was never going to move the kind of weights these guys were talking about, but

I got the point. So the first thing I did was I found the lone powerlifting gym in Los Angeles at the time. Now there's more, but at the time there was only one. And it was a small hole in the wall in El Segundo. It was called Four Star Gym. My friend Jason owns it now. It still has the same feel to it. And I used to train there, and there were old school powerlifters, some 90s powerlifters that were wearing gear, you know, the suits and whatnot.

Yep. some 90s power lifters that were wearing gear, you know, the suits and whatnot. Yep. And, you know, these guys were, you know, squatting in the 400s for reps, you know, benching 300 for reps. You know, I would see this right, and I see a lot of 600-plus deadlifts. The one guy, my buddy Jason, I think he pulled over seven. Yep. You know, and I'd make fun of some of these guys that are doing sumo, but still, like, you're seeing all this fucking weight being lifted, right?

And then even from there, then they opened up a bigger gym that was closer to my apartment. It was in downtown LA called Barbell Brigade. They had a big YouTube following too, and they sold merchandise. And that's where it really did it for me because I remember loading up 405 the first time and I was facing out of the rack and there was a rig on the other side. And the owner of the gym, Bart Kwan, was warming up for his squat and he just did an easy triple like right in front of me and I'm facing him as I'm like getting ready to get under this fucking bar, you know? Yeah. And I'm like, I got it. You know, I got questioned on depth. You know, now that I've looked back on it after all these years, I'm like, those are my fucking shorts. I think that was clean. Yeah. But I didn't count that for years, but that's not the point. It's a different conversation. The point is I'm sitting there, I'm facing out of the rack.

My nerves are going through the roof because I'm about to try and squat 405. Right. And I look across and I see Bart Kwan. He's like 165. I think he competed at 165 at the time. He's like 55, 56. I don't know exactly how tall he is. And he just, you know, he does his next warmup. He triples 405 and it's moving like he could do 10 of them if he wanted to, you know, that's what it looked like. Like, you know, the first and last one looked identical. Could have kept going, dude. He's like throwing it up like 135. And I'm like, yeah, I can't be afraid of this. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's huge. And the thing, yeah. So it's funny funny because that brings me back to the rip interview rips telling marty he's like see i was scared of 600 and then he's like well you wouldn't have been

if you've seen guys benching it on a regular basis like oh it's no big deal it's just 600 yeah yeah exactly and that you know that yeah i think a lot of times our brain shuts us down before our body's really ready you know yeah And well before our body's willing to give up. Look, guys, a little hazing is not a bad thing. I've found it to be quite productive. Absolutely. I think if you want to be good at something, you want to be around people that are really good at it, even if you may not ever beat them. Just being around that, I like the phrase Marty uses, it takes the magic away from it. You know, you see somebody squatting and deadlifting 800 on a regular basis, you know, it just takes the magic away from it. You see somebody squatting and deadlifting 800 on a regular basis.

It just takes the magic away. You may never get there, but it's going to drag your game up. That's the best way to put it. And you see those, when you're around those kind of guys, you see how they train too, which is everything from how they walk in the door and approach their training session, the intention that they bring to it, the focus that they have, the door and approach their training session it you know the intention that they bring to it the focus that they have the it's contagious yeah it's it makes a lot there's a big difference between that and sitting there surfing on instagram in between sets and you know

like hoping that the timer is not going to go off because i don't really want to do another set you know it's fucking contagious the last powerlifting gym I trained at for open mind, the guys were all benching over four for reps. It was insane. Yeah. I saw, I saw 165 pound, 17 year old bench 405 right before my eyes. Wow. And he was my height. He was like five, nine, right. 65 growing fucking boy, you know, 405. I'm like, that just fucking happened. Right. You know, I'll, yeah, I'll never forget, uh, when I trained at Doug's gym in Dallas, um, Doug was an interesting guy, you know, so he was 85 or 86 at the time when I was there and he, he shut it down a couple of years later.

Um, you know, he's finally ready to hang it up at 88 or whatever. Finally. And, uh, man, he was a smart guy. He was really interesting to talk to. He just, you know, you never knew what you're going to get. You know, he could talk to you about, you know, golden era bodybuilding legends

and all the ones he had met that had come through the doors. And he could talk to you about Schopenhauer all in the same conversation. But one of the things I remember him saying once is one of the hardest parts about getting old, especially to the degree that he did. He's still alive, way he's in his 90s i looked him up the other day yeah um he buried a son a couple years ago and who was who was in his 70s and he's still here you

know um but doug said he's like one of the hardest things about getting old especially to that age you know when you're in your late 80s is then He's like growing up. I always had people that were wiser than me like mentors I could talk to or just people that I respected. Yeah, and There was a comfort in knowing that there were people who experienced more who you know He had been through situations that I could always talk to if I really needed some help and he's like I Don't have that anymore. It's like, I am that guy. There's nobody out there more experienced than me, more wise than me. And he wasn't saying that he

was like, you know, exceptional in that compartment. He's just saying that when you get to that age, there's no one else to look up to. So, but it's kind of what I'm saying. Like, you know, if you're the strongest guy in your gym, it's really hard. That's, that's, it's not the position you want to be in. That's the problem. Yeah. Or at least, you know, I train at home. So yeah, I am the strongest guy in my gym, but, but I've spent time around and I regularly, you know, you know, once a year, at least I get out and I spend some time at another gym where there's people who are stronger than me and it lights a fire and that's, that's useful to have. And if I never had that, you know, I wouldn't even, I would be looking at 365 and it'd be like, Oh no, I don't know. 365. It's kind of heavy. It's getting heavy again. So.

Yeah, no, I mean, environment's huge. We've talked about that in other episodes but yeah to kind of bring this one full circle you know there are inherent risks with going from point A to point B in anything you do you know if you're trying to push your limit

and raise the bar and raise your baseline to a level that requires more than a year of hard work and effort, you're taking a higher level of risk than somebody who's just doing it for their health. And that has to be worth it for you, right? I'm not saying that everybody who does this is going to get hurt. We're not sitting there, you know, we're not being like your doctor and saying squats and deadlifts are bad for your back and knees, you know. We're not saying you're going

to get diabetes from eating 4,000 calories. But what we are saying is that individual results vary. There are risks associated with trying to push your body to adapt. And you just got to be, you know, you got to be okay with that if you're going to go down that rabbit hole, you know. There are risks associated with whatever else you're doing too if you're trying to push that, you know, like trying to make a lot of money has risks and trade-offs, you know? Yeah. You know, trying to run marathons has risks and trade-offs, you know, like there's trade-offs to everything, you know, working a lot of hours, you know, that's probably worse than what we do in here. If you think about it. Absolutely. Working a hundred hour weeks, you know, you're going to sit here and lecture me about squatting and deadlifting and eating 4,000 calories? You're working 100-hour weeks, not sleeping? I mean, come on, let's wake

up here, people. There's a level of risk that you accept, and that level changes the longer you do something and the further you try to push it. Not necessarily the longer you do something, the further you try to push something is a better way to put it. And we've talked about this at length about weight loss, so we wouldn't spend much time with it here. But generally, if you get super lean, it's the same shit. It disrupts your sleep, disrupts your sex drive, your performance goes in the toilet, you get injured easier. I mean, these are things we've covered before, so I don't think I need to dive into that. But if you are trying to achieve something that doesn't come easy to you, you're going to spend some time with it and you're going to run into some problems.

And those problems will vary from one individual to the next. But most of the time, most of you doing this are going to do fairly well if you're good, committed, and put in the effort. But if you run into some of these things, we hope we've given you some tips on how to approach that. We're not giving medical advice here. I'm not performing medical nutrition therapy here. I'm telling you a story about what I did for one person, right? If you're in that situation, you need to get a consult. Don't, you know, if you want my advice on what you should do, you know, what I did for my one client is not what I'm saying every client that runs into that problem should do. You know, now we're getting into medical shit medical shit you know and that's why I have an RD and that's why I offer

these services you know so yeah so you know if you have questions about this you can reach out you can get a consult you can hire me whatever you want to do and we can go that route but this is not meant to be taken as medical advice or medical nutrition therapy we're simply just telling you some of the things we've seen and some of the things I've done for certain people. What I do for you may not be the exact same thing. But yeah, again, you may not be competing and getting on a powerlifting platform or bodybuilding stage, but if you are trying to raise your limits year after year, you're a competitor. Plain and simple. You've now accepted a higher level of risk. So it's no longer about health for you.

And it's important to understand that. You're closer to an athlete than you are the old guy who's just trying to stave off death and not get hurt. Yep. Yep. I agree with that. And you know, uh, I'm just a knucklehead strength coach, so I'm definitely not offering medical advice. There's no, there's no risk of that here. Perfect ending. I don't have any, I don't, I don't have nearly enough letters after my name to, uh, to claim any sort of medical expertise. So, right. All right, man. Well, with that, let's, uh, let's sign it out. Well, thank you for tuning in to the Weights and Plates podcast. You can find me at WeightsAndPlates.com where you can hire me for nutrition, strength, or combo coaching of both. My gym is here in Metro Phoenix, Weights and Plates Gym. We're just south of the airport off 32nd Street and Broadway.

Come visit. We have personal training and gym memberships. Most of my content drops on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. We are also on YouTube at youtube.com slash weights underscore and underscore plates. And we have a gym page, weights double underscore and double underscore plates. And I think that's all the millions of places that you can find my shit at. There you go. You need to create one of those link trees, right, where it has all of your links.

We're on YouTube, so we got to say subscribe now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so go ahead and hit the button. Hit the bell, subscribe. Smash that like button. You also got to say like, you also got to say like, yo, it's your boy,

it's your boy Santana back with another video. Don't forget to hit subscribe down on my YouTube page. Oh, don't bring out that Chicago around me here. I thought we put it, I thought we put that one back in the bag. All right. Well, uh, you know where to find me. I'm on Instagram too. At marmalade underscore cream. That's the name of my audio production company, marmalade cream media. But you know, I my audio production company, Marmalade Cream Media. But you know, I also do coaching. That's why I'm here. And if you have questions about that, you can email me jonesbarbellclub at gmail.com. All right, talk to you all again in a couple weeks. Thank you.