Weights and Plates Podcast - Ep. 118 - Stop Majoring in the Minors: Master the Basics, Get the Results

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Getting stronger, leaner, and healthier doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, all those supplements, specialty exercises, fitness hacks, and tiny details you’re obsessing over might actually be distracting you from what matters most.This week on Strong & Sleek, Robert breaks down the power of fitness minimalism—and why most of your results come from doing a handful of important things consistently and doing them well. From progressive strength training and protein to sleep, recovery, stress, hydration, genetics, and even your social life, Robert explains why progress is simple…but the human body is anything but.He also gets into biological variability, why some people respond faster than others, how outside stress can sabotage even a great program, and why hitting a plateau doesn’t necessarily mean you need a new workout or diet.Plus, Robert turns the lesson on himself, sharing how returning to the podcast every week has become his own exercise in stress, adaptation, consistency, and mastering a new skill.The takeaway? Stop chasing the minutiae. Show up. Lift the big lifts. Eat enough protein. Sleep. Recover. Stay consistent. Master the basics first—then earn the right to worry about the details.

Welcome back to the strong and sleek podcast. I am Robert Santana and I am your host for today and every day because it's my show. So I've been on here for several weeks in a row now. This has been a big deal for me because when we started the show, I was every other week. And in large part because I wasn't sure that I can commit to a weekly deal. I was much busier back then and I had a co-host. So we had to coordinate schedules and watch. not. And recently I just decided I want to be on more. So here I am. Five weeks in a row. This is

accountability, something we talk about in the wait room a lot. You know, the act of going to a gym can motivate you, especially if there's other people there that are doing the same thing as I said last week or, no, two weeks ago. Two episodes ago, we talked about that. So I like coming in the studio because then I know I have a place to be. You know, I have to drag my ass here. But yeah, Five weeks, man. We're going to keep this thing running. Not bad after four months off. I got some time to make up.

But today, I want to elaborate some more on minimalism. And oftentimes on this show, we talk about how you only need a handful of exercises to get strong. You know, handful of exercises that get heavier. That's how I explain it to people. And when you're eating, you know, I might dive into that, too. you know, when you're eating and you're trying to have your nutrition facilitate your strength training goals or your health goals. You know, some people don't lift weights and follow an extremely healthy diet to keep excess body weight off to be healthier. It's kind of the same thing. We live in a

world of excess, excessive options. And the longer I do this, the more people I work with, and the more I study nutrition and strength training, the Pareto principle tends to apply. So for those of you who have never heard that term, it dictates that 80% of your results come from 20% of the causes. In the weight room, I would say that 90% of your results come from 10% of your options. There's not a whole lot of things that you need to do to get stronger, to build muscle, to build denser bones, to become a more functional human being that looks better, right? The same thing in nutrition. You know, there's only a handful of things you really need to eat to be healthy, stay in good shape.

But then there's a lot of stuff we like to eat. There's a lot of exercises we like to do. A lot of guys like to do bicep curls. A lot of the gals like to do hip thrusts, right? Lungees maybe. I think we all universally hate squats. Even those that say they like them, you know, if you've gotten them heavy enough, it becomes a love-hate relationship. you start approaching the lift masochistically.

You know, I go in, I'm like, well, I have to squat. Because I know after I squat, I'm going to feel better. You know, similar things apply everywhere. You don't need to do a whole lot to make a ton of progress. Now, sure, at the elite level or at the extremes, every little bit counts. So if you're looking at athletic performance and you're an elite level athlete, most of us are not. and you need to beat somebody else who's an elite level athlete. The difference between the two of you is quite narrow.

So all the finer idiosyncrasies of what you're doing for that sport start to matter. Your diet matters, you know, the composition of it specifically, the types of food you eat, the amount of sleep you get needs to become more precise, more consistent. The way you lift, of course, you know, strength matters. but to an elite athlete, not as much as to a mediocre or below average one. An elite athlete is going to improve it as sport by practicing his sport. And good coaches will determine whether he can beat another elite athlete. The coaching does play a role there because, again, the gap between the two are narrow.

And you can say the same thing in pageantry. You know, all the bodybuilders are lean. They're all muscular. They're all strong. They're fighting over narrow, narrow gaps, right? So why am I leading in with all this shit? Well, because a lot of you are guilty of majoring in the minors. You know what I'm talking about.

When you're very focused on the finer details of your training or the finer details of your diet or supplementation or medicine in some cases. You know, there's a lot of pharmaceuticals that people take to enhance. their health, longevity, or even just to perform or look better. You know, we talk about steroids a lot on this show. Because the people taking, lots of them, don't talk about it enough. I've spent most of my life not on them. You know, recent shows, you know, some of you may be just listening again because it was off the air.

I started on a low dose of testosterone in February. So I am not a drug-free holier than thou, Natty, but I'm also not on what people would consider a steroid cycle. right but uh all these things uh all these things play a role right and i've had a lot of clients over the years that i've coached through diet and exercise i am not a doctor or a pharmacist i don't coach people on drug use i talk about supplements over-the-counter supplements and which ones are effective which ones aren't you know i'm a big creatine fan i like magnesium fish oil you know all those things and again those things are important but you're really really

really trimming around the edges. And I find that many people in the general public, many of you even, are very focused on these things. And your goal depends on something far simpler. You know, for those of you that want to look better, what you're really talking about is growing muscle. You know, for some of you, if you're really fat, you know, if you're obese, you know, if you are visibly fat, whether you're wearing clothes or not, that's what I would consider a large person, right? The guy who's skinny fat still looks decent in clothing, right? Same with the gal who's skinny fat. But if, yeah, sure, if you're legitimately very overweight, losing body fat is going to make you look better. But for the most part, we're in the weight room to build muscle mass.

You know, you can use word toning. You know, a muscle that's more developed is more toned. You know, it looks denser and harder at rest because you're training it. And we accomplished that through a minimalistic approach. We do a handful of exercises that get heavier over a period of time. A novice may make the weight heavier every couple days. An intermediate may make the weight heavier every week. And an advanced person might be every two, three, four, six weeks a year. But the process is still the same.

We're focused on getting these key lifts. heavier because they work most of the muscles of your body. The entire body is encompassed by a program that hits everything with very little. You're doing very little and gaining a lot. On the diet side, it's the same thing. We're eating a lot of protein to enhance recovery because your muscles are getting broken down. Whether you're lifting heavy weights or doing high volume, you know, bodybuilding workout, power lifting workout, general strength training workout, you are pushing your muscles with

resistance that requires them to recover from that. You know, the muscles are 30% protein, so you have to eat more protein than a couch potato. That's pretty universally understood. A lot of people won't debate that. You might get these strange calorie restriction people saying, oh, you know, it's going to, you know, hurt my longevity because I read some obscure paper that saw something in rats. Last I checked, we don't have tails, and, you know, we weigh anywhere from, you know, 90 pounds to several hundred pounds.

So I don't think we're rats. We're not rodents. We're human beings. You know, human physiology is not the same as rat physiology. And when you adjust those dosages down to a human, things look materially different. and when you introduce training into the equation, things look materially different, which kind of leads into the fact that this is a three-dimensional situation that people tend to view one-dimensionally. And I'm not a complex person. I don't like to complicate matters, but you have to consider variables, right? Right now I just spent the last, I don't know, 10 minutes talking about training and diet.

well you know you lift weights to build muscle you eat to lose body fat or to facilitate that muscle growth depending on what the goal is but is that where it starts and ends and how important is eating by the way you know that's another question you know i get some people that are solely fixated on training and anything that goes wrong in training must be related to training you know that's person a and then i get person b who manipulates diet takes a lot of supplements and tries the latest buzz thing, you know, whether it's a buzz food,

a buzz supplement, maybe even goes to pharmaceuticals, but then it's training like garbage. You know, you got to think three-dimensionally people. Yes, this is a minimalistic approach, but there are several pieces to the system.

You have training. Are you doing your main lifts? Are you making them heavier? Are you showing up to 90% of your workouts or more? If the answer is yes to all those questions, and your program makes sense for where you're at. You're not progressing too fast. If you've been doing this for a while,

you're not progressing too slow if you just started, right? The new person's going to go fast. The person who's been doing it's going to go slow, right? Then you look at diet. Are you eating enough calories? Number one. Are those calories coming from the right places? Are you eating enough protein?

Are you eating enough carbohydrates? Are you keeping your fat intake? at a level that doesn't cause too much weight gain. Are you getting enough fiber, right? And I know some of you people are on this anti-fiber shit, you know, just saying, oh, it's shit, you don't need it. Another episode, people who aren't talking about that. But those are your basics, right?

So you're doing all those things, right? Let's say you are eating a diet that's well composed, that's calorically dense enough, and that you're training at an appropriate pace for where you're at and not doing anything stupid. Your technique is good. All the training variables are optimized. Your technique's good.

Proper number of sets, reps, and load. But then you're still not making progress. You still don't look the way you want to look. You don't lift what you want to lift. You're missing lifts. You feel like shit. Things are hurting. You've got little tweaks, right?

What else can we look at? Well, there's sleep. Are you sleeping enough? You know, most people need six to eight hours of sleep. You know, this eight hour number, tends to be the number of people fixate on and that's about what I need about seven I do pretty well with seven right you know I've heard people say oh I sleep six and I'm fine uh which is another point we're all different right the amount of sleep I need is different than the amount of sleep

you need uh there's a spread right when you're reading research papers are giving you averages or medians you know the there's different measures of central tendency and without going into a statistics lesson you have your mean your average they use of the term mean for those of you aren't familiar with statistical terms i think most of this audience is but i make no assumptions i want new people on here so respect them more people need to listen to this shit so you have your mean that's your average you have your median that is the number that falls in the middle of a big set of numbers so if you measure 100 people and map those numbers out chronologically the one in the middle is your median and then you have your mode which never gets

reported but it's probably the most relevant number at least to me the mode is which number pops up the most frequent, which to me that means what's happening most of the time, not what's happening on average, not the median, what's happening most of the time, the mode, right? And that's something that you pay attention to when you're observing patterns and you're working with lots of humans. You know, what do I tend to see? What kind of numbers do most men hit?

Because you can have somebody who's really strong in your group that pushes the average up, right? Or you can have someone who's really weak in your group that pushes the average down. Or somebody that's really fat that pushes the average down. or somebody that's really fat that pushes the average up. Right? So you have to understand that. This concept of biological variability.

For every treatment that you give a person, in this case, it will be a nutrition plan or a strength training program. Those are treatments. For every treatment you give a person, you're going to have people that respond extremely well. Typically, your natural athletes in the weight room or people that are naturally lean on the diet side. if the goal is weight loss, if the goal is weight gain, you know, people that are naturally heavier tend to gain it easier. People that are naturally leaner tend to have a harder time. So there's a spread, right?

You know, looking, it's good to look at what's possible, but then it's also good to look at what's possible most of the time. And that's where I like to focus a lot of my teaching. There are things that have happened, and then there are things that often happen. And then there are things that don't happen that often. And that's where you start scratching your head and asking yourself, well, shit, this typically happens. What do I do about it? Right?

And that's where critical thinking becomes important. I know it's a lost art. And it has been my observation that in a lot of industries where people are coaching people, and I talked about this with George last week when we discussed dogs. You know, the selection process is what determines. determines the level of talent that you're going to have in front of you. You know, at this point, you are selecting for talent. You're not taking volunteers. A sports recruiter does this job.

In George's case, he's a dog trainer who trains high-level police dogs. He has to select dogs that are bred with innate skill or talent, I should say. Skill is developed, talent you're born with. He has to select dogs with innate talent that he develops. He builds their skill and gets them to their potential. So this is an important thing to understand because you're only going to go so far for a given foundation, right? So if you genetically suck, you should still train because you're going to suck less, right? It's the same thing with anything, you know?

In this case, we train for lots of reasons. Obviously, if you're one of these people, that is probably better suited for running you should still lift but don't plan on trying to win in power lifting you know just as a matter of practical advice i have had the luxury it's a luxury by the way of training people that struggle with this because it makes me scratch my head and figure things out at the same time it is amazing to see people that are very talented and then teach them skills to bring that talent to a level they would otherwise not get to. But I'm not under any impression that the absolute result is completely due to my influence.

Obviously, I'm participating, so I am influencing that result. But I got a baseline that's so high and a responsiveness that's so good, and a responsiveness that's so good that I was able to see things like big lifts, for instance. I'm able to see these big giant lifts, you know, because the person's built for it. Now I haven't had an 800 pound, 900 pounds, squatter. But I've had people pull over six, you know, under my watch. And that's, you know, it's not very common, you know. I've had people get very lean, you know, get visible abs.

And they're not competing for a bodybuilding show. they have a high capacity to restrict their diet and they're able to lose body fat at a good rate. You know, some people are built for that. Some people have to work 10 times harder. You know, we all know that guy that says, hey, man, I cut cream and sugar out of my coffee and switch to black and lost five pounds, you know. We hate that motherfucker. I do, you know, like I'm not a big fat guy.

You know, I have to work a little bit hard to get really fat. But I also have to work hard to get abs. I'm kind of stuck in the middle, you know, in this purgatory area. where it's hard either way, you know, but I think that's taught me some of the challenges. So we have to understand that genetic baseline is probably your best predictor of how far you will absolutely go. But the delta is possible for each and every one of you. So you got to understand that first.

Then you start doing the work. So you're eating, you're training, you're sleeping. But there's other shit, right? Do you have medical considerations? You know, do you have a chronic disease? that, you know, like a lot of people have autoimmune disease or gut problems, you know, that's going to interfere with your recovery. You know, it's inflammation.

You're inflamed, you know. You have to manage that as best you could. Some of these things you can't erase, you just have to manage them, right? You might be old and you're starting late because you didn't train young, you know, and shit's hurting, but you're skinny, right? So you've got to put on some weight as an old man or an old lady. Sometimes that has to happen. Or taking some testosterone. be helpful beyond a certain age. You know, if you're, like, I've had guys that are very weak and they're

old and they're starting to get frail. They start lifting. They start eating. The training's a little bit stressful for them. And they're not lifting that much, absolutely. They get on testosterone and they're able to go a little bit further. And then they also feel better outside the gym. You know, you could have amazing training and feel like dog shit outside the gym, by the way. You know, I've seen that happen too. So the process is simple. But there's a lot of things that are going on outside of the thing we're working on, which is diet and exercise. And you can't minimize that and ignore it. And you have to be honest with yourself about it.

Now you don't need to be an accountant and have a big spreadsheet of every single thing in your life, but just notate things, right? Like, hmm, was I sick this week? Or, oh, wait, I have diabetes, you know. My blood sugar's getting low and I keep missing workouts. You know, I have type 1 diabetes, you know. That's something that some people have to manage. or I have an autoimmune disease. Some weeks are good, some weeks are bad.

I have people like that, all right? Or I'm in a toxic relationship, either with an employer or a partner, right? A romantic partner. And I'm constantly having friction with this person and is stressing me out. I sleep good, but I'm stressed when I'm awake. Can't lift for shit. That happens. Like all these things matter, you know, the effort you put in physically on the physical task that you have to do,

lifting weights and making it heavier. There is only one part of it. The diet you eat is another part of it. Everything else going on throughout the day plays into it too. You know, my back's creaky when I lift. You know, I get that one a lot, right? Well, what are you doing all day? You're sitting.

You're sitting. You don't do anything else, and then you go put a bar on your back, right? Or whatever. You know, you might be deadlifting. Could be a lot of different lifts. Well, why is your back creaky? Well, your hips aren't moving very much. Your knees aren't moving very much.

You're stiff as shit. You've got to warm up twice as much as a young kid who's jumping. around all day bouncing off walls it's more of a process you're in a cold weather state i'm in a hot weather state shit i'm in arizona so there's a good point i noticed that my training progress would go in the toilet every summer and uh not the worst but just didn't have great training in the summer and i was kind of zoned out with it i just you know i go through the motions i miss a lift try it again in a couple weeks or three weeks depending on the exercise and eventually i get it or i move on i'm like all right i'm going to do threes i'm do ones you know

max out. But like I saw a pattern, I think. It was like a year or two ago where I'm like, you know what? Every summer I'm getting shitty training. Then I think about it, I don't like to drink liquids. You know, I don't. Probably get more fluid from my food than I do from beverages. And, you know, it's a problem. So I've been trying to drink more water, drink more electrolytes, especially this summer. I'm really on a good role here with lifting. So been more cognizant of it. And I've probably had the best summer of training ever. Now mind you, the testosterone is a confounding variable. But I'm at all. actively thinking about, hey, I got to stay hydrated, you know, especially when I'm working dogs outside the sun all day.

You know, those are the worst days. Then I go and lift afterwards. So you got to think about that. If you're in a cold weather state, shit, your warm up is going to be long, especially if you're one of these people training in your garage and, let's say, Chicago, right? And Chicago winter or somewhere like that, you know, Wisconsin, East Coast, Canada. You know, you're stiff as shit. It's fucking cold. You know, you're going to have to warm up more. You know, it might be that your lifts are going to shit because you're not properly warmed up because it's cold as fuck out. Or you're not properly hydrated because it's hot as fuck out. And you have to think about all these things. You might be struggling to lose weight because you eat out on the weekend.

That's the most common thing, right? You're very social. Typically, the heavier you are, the more you can get away with, the leaner you are, the less you can get away with. And then it comes down to individual differences. You know, some people just can't get away with a lot in general. Look at food and gain weight, right? and some people cut the damn cream out of their coffee and lose weight. So you got to ask yourself those things.

I just spoke to a gentleman earlier. Who wants to get really lean? And he's already pretty damn lean. So to get really lean, everything's got to be perfect. So, you know, we took him off the diet because he was burning out. We're going to put some muscle mass on him. But then I told him, you've got to keep this in your mind for the future. In order to get leaner than you are now, it's a full-time job.

So your social life's got to, you know, take a back seat for three months. And this is a guy who's got visible abs, vascularity, all those things. He just wants to be ripped. So that's the deal, right? Eventually, your social commitments become the limiting factor. So you can't pretend those aren't in the way either. The variables are endless, but they all matter. You know, and the further you get from being new to something, the more all these things start to matter.

So the problem is, many of you really are still novices. You may not know it. You know, maybe a lot of people on this show have trained for a while, especially my long-time listeners. But if you're new to this show, you're probably still novice. You may have had a gym membership for 5, 10, 15, 20 years and you may swipe in three to six days a week. But you're still a novice. You know, you haven't pushed yourself past your limit to set a new limit. That's what makes you less of a novice.

showing up and doing something doesn't make you less of a novice you know you're just coasting as a novice because you're doing the same thing every time if you want to advance and see something new happen you have to do something new in this case you have to overload the system and then you got to repeatedly do that right and in the beginning you just got to learn how to work hard and push yourself and show up it's as simple as that for most of you then the longer you do it the more of these nuanced things become an issue. You know, your diet becomes an issue relatively quick. That's the first thing that pops up, diet and sleep.

You know, then you dial those in, and then you get a little bit further. And then stress gets in the way. You know, lifting weights isn't a full-time job for many of you. Technically not for me. Shit. So now you got work, you know. You got a couple days a week you're not sleeping enough. Or you have an asshole boss or you got a project that's dominant,

dominating your time. Or you have a job that's making you travel everywhere and sitting on airplanes and getting off airplanes and altitude and coming back down to, you know, down to the ground or the earth, like all that shit, sleeping on hotel beds, sleeping in your car or a camper van. All those things are forms of stress, right? And your body can only respond and adapt to so much stress before it starts letting things slide here so you can keep moving over here. And usually it's, you know, it's your lifting performance that suffers or your weight loss that suffers. You know, if you don't sleep enough, if you're chronically sleep deprived, there's data out there that say you're going to crave more garbage food. You know, you want more sugar, maybe more salt, more fat, right?

Think about that. Does your diet slip when you're not sleeping enough? Or if you miss meals, you know, I have a client that we talk to all the time. every time she ends up eating too much and it's snack food I laugh because at this point it's become predictable we know each other very well and it's happened less because she's very aware of it's been pretty cool to watch over because I've had it for several years she knows that she skipped a meal so if you're somebody who's very active and you skip a meal your hunger could overtake your willpower right so I'm big on minimalism and I will say it over and over and over again. You don't need a ton of complexity in your nutrition or your exercise program to look better, to feel better, and to move better. But the human body is still a complex system.

And at the heart of everything is you are getting better at tolerating stress to move to the result that you're trying to get to. This applies to any skill. To become more skilled at something, you have to overcome. a level of stress than is greater. You have to overcome a level of stress that is greater than the level of stress you're used to in that area. And it could be musical instruments, it could be lifting weights, it could be training dogs, it could be dieting, right? The situation has to get more stressful for you to adapt. But as we said last week, too much stress can shut you down.

And we see that all the time. You keep missing lifts over and over and over again. the most common reason people quit. You part-time diet where you are low calorie for three to five days and then high calorie for two to three days. And the net result is no weight change. And what does that do to your mind? It starts breaking your confidence, right?

Because you're asking too much of yourself. So when you're asking too much of yourself, the first question I like to tell people to ask themselves is, how can I make this a little bit easier so that I can accomplish? shit. Just a little bit easier. You know, you don't want to do nothing, but you want to do something so you walk away productive, right? So maybe you just need to eat at maintenance for a week and stay there so that you can get seven days of not having a big swing and deviation, you know? Maybe the problem isn't that your calorie level's too high. Maybe it's that you can't stay at a given calorie level consistently to let's address that piece. maybe you keep trying to do a weight that's just not there at this point in the training cycle or you were so poorly recovered that your body just needs a break so maybe you need to go down 10

on that set of five and do 10% less for a set of five and then another set of five and another set of five and then you work back up right sometimes it gets so bad it's like well maybe it's just not squat this week and don't do that that should be or don't do that very often usually you shouldn't have to drop an exercise but hey man i've had a guy say i hate going to the gym because when the squat gets heavy i don't want to go so like all right let's not squat this week okay and go leg press or something you know we still want to work the muscles and then we go revisit the squat right i've had people not deadlift for entire training cycles but they're still doing rdls they're still doing some form of a hinge you know you got to keep yourself in the game

psychologically because ultimately that's going to dictate how long you're going to do this for and how long you do this for or do anything for will dictate how far you go with it. And your baseline's your best predictor of where you're going to go. So if you're not a great place to start out, then you've got an uphill climb to get to a decent place. Right. And to maximize your potential, you've got an even more uphill climb. So, you know, my advice today is let's just put these nuances aside and not major in the miners and focus on the macro things first. you know are you doing your big lifts all of them every week are you trying to make them heavier

are you eating enough protein are you eating enough carbs are you getting enough sleep you know just start with that stuff you know if you check off all those boxes first you'll probably do a lot better than you've been doing chances are one or multiple of those things are falling apart those are your basics that's your minimal basic competency to make progress in the weight room or on a diet, right? Then, if you are doing those things and you're stuck, now we can talk about the nuances, right? Okay, where's your diet coming from?

Where are you getting protein from? What lift is getting stuck? And what are the other lifts looking like? How often are you going heavy? I can start diving into those things. Once we have a consistency, a level of consistency with the basics. Chances are, many of you even,

that are listening to me right now because you don't have me over your shoulder talking shit to you telling you, hey, you're fucking this up. I bet you're getting creep somewhere here. Tell me the truth. Could be form creep with your technique, your lifting technique. It could be diet creep. You know, that one day a week, you know, you're snacking during your favorite show,

or you're going out to eat every Saturday and you just had to get dessert, you know, or you're going out to eat and you're snacking, like, or you're having that extra glass of wine or that chocolate. I've heard it all people. And one of the benefits of having a coach is that if you're being transparent and sharing all this, fuck, I'm going to remember. You might forget. There's this thing called cognitive dissonance, right?

You might forget, but I'm not going to let you forget. Not as long as you're paying me, you know, I'm definitely going to let you know. And if you're my friend, I'm going to let you know too. So, you know, do that mental inventory often. You know, constantly ask yourself, how am I? doing with the basics. Have I mastered the basics yet? If you've mastered the basics, let's dive into the nuances.

Let's not do, well, the basics have gotten hard. I need something that's going to feel easy again. And then you just kind of abandon ship, go to another program, do other exercises, maybe do a different type of exercise. You know, people go and do BJJ and stop lifting, right? Or try a different crash diet or overeating. You know, if they're trying to lose weight, then they just start overreating. reading. I say, fuck it, I don't care. You know, there's lots of things people do to avoid just simply

staying the course with the basics, you know, so came in here today. Didn't know what the fuck I was going to talk to you guys about. You're on the journey with me, the monologue journey. You know, I started this show out with co-host six years ago. Had that for several years. Fuck, I've lost track of time. What, four years of the co-host. And I'm still trying to learn the monologue. So you've watched me go. through it. I took four months off because I did this very thing. It got hard. I'm like, shit. I'm just sit in front of a fucking camera and talk, you know, sit here and talk alone, you know. Now I feel like I'm watching you. I envision all of you in the room, you know, or I'm in a big

stadium, you know, sitting here talking, all sorts of mental things I got to do to forget that I'm talking alone. And you're watching me do it. You know, the show's gotten a little bit shorter, but you'll see over time, it's going to get longer because I'm applying this stress every week. You're watching my stress recovery adaptation cycle when I do this show. Even with my interviews like, when I had a co-host, we just bullshitted. When I have a guest, I have to interview that person. I have to think about how to do that. That's a little bit easier for me because I've got another person in here.

I'm kind of learning the structure in the format of being a good interviewer. But it's still a skill I'm learning. But the real skill you're watching me work through right now is sitting here alone and talking to you, coming up with topics in between episodes and kind of stringing it all together. So that's the beauty of it. I'm telling you to do it and I'm living it. I've come every week. That's how I started this episode.

This is week five, I think, fifth week in a row that I've recorded. And there'll be a sixth and a seventh and a eighth. My goal right now is to show up every week and share some knowledge with you. And I hope that in these ramblings you're learning something. I think that was the big bottleneck for me this year. I'm guilty of the shit that I try to coach people out. of it got hard and I stepped back but I never actually gave up never actually gave up I knew I'm like I got to get back to it I got to diagnose the issue and there were some issues with the production distribution and the direction I wanted to take the show I had to rebrand I had to do all these things there were several things that needed to happen that were very important but I think on the personal level the most important is that I show up and do this I think that I was trying to get out of showing up and talking to you guys

So now I'm just committed to be becoming better at the monologue. And I hope I'm doing well. You know, I'm enjoying it. I don't feel like I'm alone anymore in here talking. I've gotten past that part. And, you know, we'll see where it goes. Anyhow, cool, I went longer than I expected. But I think I've beat that to hell.

Takeaway points today. Don't major in the miners, master the basics. If you haven't mastered the basics, then you have no business fucking around with the minutia. Stay the fuck away from it. Ladies and gentlemen, you know, you don't need to do a single-leg glute kickback unless you're entertaining yourself. You don't need to bicep curl unless you just like the way it feels.

That's a different thing entirely. In terms of progress, you know, get yourself the five to ten chin-ups if you haven't done that yet, right? Get yourself to a nice bodyweight squat if you haven't done that yet instead of doing your little kickback. to do them at the end and you probably will do them do your curls at the end of the workout do your kickbacks your your your uh glute glute kickbacks with cable you know i've seen that do that at the end but master the basics that's what's going to make you look better feel better and move better which is what we specialize in doing here hence the new name strong and sleek we want you to get strong and not look like shit and not move like shit and not feel like shit you know

that's what we're here so i think i beat that to hell so i'm going to close out here thank you for in to the show. You can find me at strong and sleek.com. If you are in Metro Phoenix, I am located in the Scottsdale Air Park near Rain Tree in the 101. Please come down and visit. It's a fine looking gym. And I will give you expert coaching, of course.

You can find me on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. And on YouTube, thank you for tuning in. And I'll see you next week.