Weights and Plates Podcast - Ep. 120 - You Can’t Out-Train a Lousy Lifestyle

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

A great training program can only take you so far. If you’re barely sleeping, under-eating, mismanaging stress, or drinking too much, those choices will eventually follow you into the weight room—hurting your performance, slowing your progress, and increasing your risk of injury.In this episode of Strong & Sleek, Robert explains why some of the most important work happens outside the gym. He explores how sleep affects strength, hunger, recovery, and joint health; why proper protein, carbohydrates, and calories matter; and how lifestyle factors can make a normally manageable workout suddenly feel impossible.Robert also challenges you to take an honest inventory of your habits, separate what you can control from what you can’t, and stop automatically blaming your training program when progress stalls. Because lifting is only one part of the equation—and you can’t out-train a lifestyle that keeps working against you.

Welcome to the Strong and Sleak podcast. I am Robert Santana and I am your host. Welcome back to the show. We're on a roll here. I've been doing this every week now for most of the summer. And we're now going to fall in most parts of the country. Here in Arizona, it is still summer in September. It is hot as shit.

But we have a cool one this year. So we've been mostly staying in the low hundreds. The nights have gotten better. But yeah. got me thinking about a lot of things got me thinking about different environmental factors that can affect your training you know we're always talking about programming diet and technique those are like the top three things people talk about and a lot of people don't even talk about technique it's a lot of it's programming and diet follow my program do my diet and become just like me um but as we all know

Other things can influence your results, how strong you get, how your body looks. Mango, get rid of that pause. How strong you get, how your body looks, you know, how you feel. I'd say, you know, I was talking to somebody this morning and I said sleep loss probably disrupts training far more than anything else with diet coming in a whopping second place. This is assuming a healthy human. You know, when we talk about a human who's chronically ill, that's a different story, of course. But assuming that all things are consistent, losing sleep will fuck things up way more than any other variable. And why is that?

Well, there's a lot of things that happen when you lose sleep. Number one, your nervous system gets disrupted. It's not working properly. Obviously, you're not developing neuropathy or any neurological condition. but your nervous system's not working the way it's supposed to. It's not as efficient. So what you'll find is you'll take a weight you can normally do for, let's say, eight to ten reps.

You'll go for a set of five with it. Then after rep three, you're grinding out the last two. And I mean grinding them out. They just get slow. I experienced it this morning. Another thing that happens, you'll see it on the deadlift. The bar just won't come off the floor on a weight that you can normally do. So I often get this report from clients and various people that I talk to about this, that, you know, this was this workout is normally easy.

Why is it hard now? And it's usually regional factors, as I like to call them. So, you know, I always start with sleep. You know, if you're burning the candle at both ends, last night I slept, I don't know, six hours if I'm being generous, but it was pretty choppy. my mother's in town visiting so i went out to dinner stayed out a little late still woke up early and dragged my ass into the gym you know like i said i'm trying to be one of these six o'clock in the morning people which means i'm waking up at five and my days have been a lot more productive with that you know i need to get a sleep guy in here to talk about circadian rhythm someday but it's not

something i've done a deep dive on but i understand the basics of it and what i know is you're nervous system isn't working properly because you're poorly rested. Your hormones get disrupted. Cortisol goes up. And there's a lot of data that goes back. I think the first time I heard about this was over 10 years ago suggesting that loss of sleep will alter your food preferences acutely, meaning you're going to want things that sweeter, saltier, more savory. In other words, you're going to eat more garbage if you're poorly rested. I've certainly noticed that. For me, it's sugar.

I want more sugar. And that could just be my nervous system craving it. Remember, your central nervous system likes to consume sugar. So for me, I like to eat a lot of sugar if I'm poorly rested. And then there'll be other stuff too. But I've certainly noticed the pattern with me. It's been measured in the lab. Grelin, your hunger hormone.

Those levels go up. And there's several others that get altered that I can't recall. off the top of my head. But yeah, it affects the way you eat too. You know, if you're trying to cut weight, losing sleep or operating on four to six hours of sleep chronically is a recipe for disaster for weight loss because the drive to eat goes up and the drive to eat the wrong things goes up. Like I said, I'd like to get somebody on here who can dive into that a little deeper than me, but that's just general baseline knowledge of the topic. Also, you're stiffer. Joints are stiffer. connective tissues are stiffer.

Your risk of injury is going to be higher. If you're training hard on low sleep, I have to explain this to a lot of people. Shift workers struggle with this for different reasons. You know, the timing of when you go to sleep can affect this. I mentioned earlier. I'm trying to get in a more natural sleep schedule now. Maybe a little bit too early, in my opinion. But, you know, you get all these motherfuckers that say, oh, the winters wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning.

Yeah, maybe that's true. I don't know. I prefer a six to eight o'clock start time, which ends up being more like seven to eight. But I'm really trying to do this five o'clock thing, trying to go to bed early, trying to wake up early. I'm definitely more productive. And maybe because it's different in novel, we'll see how, you know, how things play out over time. Anytime you try something new, you've got to give it enough time. You got to get past that honeymoon phase, that novice effect so that you can see if something works.

But so far, so good. But I will say that when I wake up. up at say 9, 10, 11, which pretty much isn't a thing anymore. But when I've done that in the past, I am less productive. I'm grog gear. I'm crankier. And it's much harder to focus because I've lost those key hours of the morning. So I think there is such a thing as a natural circadian rhythm. I think it's similar for most of us. But I think there's some of us that, you know, fall outside the norm. There are certain shift workers that are unaffected by it. I don't. I know if I stay up all night, even if I sleep eight hours, I'm just not, I'm not with it the next day.

We're not nocturnal creatures. I think most of us are on a natural circadian rhythm where we wake up sometime in the early morning and we go to bed sometimes sometime in the early evening. As fun as it is to stay up later, I have found that, you know, going to bed earlier generally feels better. You know, for me, it's always been more like sometime between 10 and midnight. Now I'm trying to get to bed between 9 and 11. It's been 930 to 1030 most of these nights and it's been fantastic. But yeah, I got that question earlier. You know, why is, why does this feel hard? Well, if you're poorly rested, everything feels hard. Your warm-ups, some of your warm-ups will feel difficult. So you have to understand that. When you're lifting weights, it's not always,

you know, for a given weight that you can complete for, let's say, one, two, three, five, ten reps, right? your rep range, the performance of that weight for that number of reps is going to vary depending on what's going on with you. So, you know, we just really hammered on sleep here because it's a big one. You know, if you're constantly getting less than six hours of sleep, for most of you, you're going to have all this variability. You know, one day it'll feel great. The next week, it'll feel like shit.

And by the way, advancing as a lifter, that happens a lot too. One week it's there. One week it's not. So it's understanding that once you are no longer. longer novice things tend to vary all over the place but losing sleep uh magnifies the problem the second thing in line is the thing we talk about a lot in this show nutrition you know i'm a registered dietitian i've worked in a clinical setting uh back in the day i worked in dialysis centers lots of sick people there worked in nursing home lots of old people there with no

appetite. You know, they were 70s, 80s, 90s, sometimes it's close to 100 or over 100. And trying to get somebody to eat with 70 to 100 year old hardware is a lot more difficult than somebody who has 18 to 25 year old hardware or even 18 to 45. The older, the sad reality is, Mango. The reality of the situation is we're like vehicles or. any type of hardware. This vessel, this body we live in, it depreciates over time. And we're not stopping that through lifting weights or eating healthy or taking supplements or all these other enhancements that we've learned to do to the body.

You know, the thing about the 20th century is that modern medicine grew exponentially in terms of the technology we had and the knowledge we had about it. the thing is a lot of people took that as well we can beat death you know you hear things like 30's the new 20 50s the new 30 etc and no no no that's not true you know you're better 30 year old than you know trained 30 year olds better than an untrained one a trained 40 year olds better than an untrained one a trained 50 year olds better than an untrained one but at the end of the day your hardware still has age on and think about vial You take care of vehicles.

Yeah, they can last a long time. But, you know, the higher the mileage, the more you're maintaining things, whether you're doing what you're supposed to or not. It's not a failure as the vehicle owner if you have to replace a transmission at 250,000, 350,000 miles. Don't fucking jinx me because I'm at about 250 on my truck and it's holding up nice. But I'm just throwing arbitrary mileage up there. I'm not claiming to be a car expert. But at some point, you have to replace the transmission. At some point, you got to replace fuel injectors.

Even if you do all the maintenance, replace your fuel filter on time, do your oil changes frequently. All those things are good. And it bends the curve. So it's slowing down the decay, if I may, but you're not eliminating it. It's still decaying. You're still putting wear and tear. You're putting mileage on your body, just like you put mileage on a car. Every day that you live, you've tolerated more.

stress a lot of it's micro stress hopefully for a lot of us obviously if you lift heavy that's a more stressful if you're in a laborious job that's stressful if you are a combat soldier that's going to be even more stressful especially if you are in a combat zone so you know getting shot stabbed uh getting fights you know get hit with things uh what do they call that blunt force trauma you know all that stress needs to be recovered from in some ways you adapt to some of it but ultimately as the body gets older your ability to tolerate it and adapt to it your adaptability goes down so it's just really understanding that and understanding what the purpose of what we're doing here is you know we lift weights to set ourselves up to be more productive as we're dying essentially

if without being well that's a little bit too morbid let me mango we're setting ourselves up to go into our, what are they called our twilight years, strong, productive, and functional so that we're not, you know, grabbing our backs to pick something up, asking somebody to help us out of the car. You know, we're still able to do basic functions. And lifting weights allows you to do that because most basic functions, most of the things you lift aren't that heavy. They're awkward, so they're difficult to lift because they're awkward, but they're not that heavy. And when you lift barbells, those things can get heavy, even if you're not a competitive lifter.

You know, let's say you're a small to medium-sized female, you know, deadlifting 200 pounds. You're probably not going to have to pick up something that weighs 200 pounds, but something awkward that weighs, let's say, 20 or 30 pounds, but it might be more doable. And when you have this surplus of strength as you age, that becomes very useful. You also look better, too. You know, you're going to lose muscle no matter what. But if you don't train, you lose more. You lose more.

You become saggy. and you look like an old frail person. But if you train, yeah, skin will start to lose its elasticity. You'll get all the typical aging signs, but far less. People will look at you and know, hey, that person does something. So you still look better. But again, if you have a 50, 60, 70, 80-year-old body, it's still 50, 60, 70, 80 years old.

You know, you're not going to completely erase normal aging, at least not with what we have now. Unless one of you is the Highlander and you haven't gotten your head cut off. Some of you know what that means, I hope. You know, if you're the Highlander or you're a vampire or a lichen, if that's a real thing, I don't know that I want to know because that means I'm going to get turned probably or something, right? Like, I don't know if I'm ready to be a werewolf or a vampire. But I do find it interesting.

talking to a friend the other day about this and i'm like i'm choosing to believe this that are vampires but anyhow for human beings in the absence of uh in the absence of vampirism or like likean likeanthropy i think that's how you say it likeanthropy you're going to age things are going to wear down your job is to slow that by eating healthy, by lifting weights, by staying active. You do all those things. You're going to be better off. A 50-year-old that trains and eats well and keeps his conditioning up is going to look, feel,

feel, and move better than one that doesn't. Apply the same to a 60-year-old, 70-year-old, 80-year-old. Male or female doesn't fucking matter. Sick or not sick. Trained is almost always better than untrained, but it doesn't just end with training. That's the moral of this episode. It's everything else. You have to address the sleep.

Some of you keep hurting yourself because you're not fucking sleeping enough. A lot of you keep hurting yourself because you're not eating enough protein or you're not eating enough calories or you're trying to train too skinny. And by too skinny, I don't mean that you're not getting fat. I mean you're too damn skinny or bean pulled trying to train you to put on a little bit of weight. You'll still look good. You know, I'm not saying that you have to get so pudgy that you're a chubby guy now. but you got to put on some waiter at the very least, eat a productive diet, get the protein

up as high as you need to and avoid falling into low carb stuff. If you do that, you're probably going to train better. You're probably going to look better. Things are going to go better. It doesn't just end with a training program, with a jar of supplements. It doesn't end there. This is a lifestyle and that becomes more true, both as you age and as you advance as a lifter. There's no getting around it. This is probably the most. difficult conversation I have to have with people. And I've had it many times throughout my career. And I try to explain to people.

The most important thing you can do is show up and do something so that you're not withering away. But at the same time, you need to take care of, but at the, mango, but at the same time, you need to take care of yourself so that when you do show up, you're not getting hurt doing something stupid, like doing a warm-up set. You know, that happens a lot. that happens a lot you start warming up you're doing the bar boom back tweak but you've been sleeping four hours a night and you're eating 30 grams of protein you know i'm exaggerating but all those

things matter you know if you're staying up late you know fighting what your girlfriend or your boyfriend every single night now you've added stress to it too you're putting yourself under high stress you're not sleeping well probably not eating well maybe you're drinking more yeah alcohol use I run into that a lot. You know, a glass of wine is five ounces. That's not even half the wine glass. So, like, filling it up higher, it's still not a glass. You don't get to game it that way.

You get the effects of what's probably two to three glasses. Same thing with a beer. If you're drinking something that's higher alcohol by volume, like a high-gravity IPA, 10 to 15%, well, that's not a beer now. Now each beer is closer to 2%. two beers. So, you know, knowing these things too, you know, alcohol beyond a certain amount creates a stress response. That doesn't mean you should be completely free of alcohol, you know, like the bodybuilder say, you know, a drink or two is probably fine. More than that,

you're probably going to feel the negative side effects of that. So you have to be mindful that, Hey, I like to drink, but if I start getting drunk, it's going to affect my training in a way that's going to get me injured. So if you don't want to get injured, a lot of the work actually happens outside the gym. I think that just hammered the fucking point home that I was looking for. Let me repeat that because I like the way that that sounded. I don't really like the way that the things I say sound usually, but I like the way that sounded. If you don't want to get hurt people, take this message home. If you don't want to get hurt, then you need to take care of yourself.

outside the gym. You know, I will teach you how to live properly. I will program you in a way that you progress safely, right? We'll use exercises that makes sense, but you can't out-train a shitty lifestyle. You can't out-train a bad diet. If you have really shitty things going on outside of the weight room, those really shitty things are going to cause really shitty things to go on inside of the weight room. So don't just program hop and say, oh, you know, I just need another program as you're, you know, sleeping four hours or eating 60 grams of protein. Like, you need to address these things. One way or another, the work shifts, you know.

Maybe you don't need to spend so much time in the weight room. You should still show up. But maybe, just maybe the issue is that your time outside the weight room isn't being spent productively. And a lot of that comes down to you. I can't read your mind. Your coach can't read your mind if you're working with somebody. So we don't know.

what your lifestyle looks like. And this is the problem with studies. Studies don't measure lifestyle. So I would say research studies, professional research studies conducted in university laboratories, they don't control for lifestyle. They're making assumptions about lifestyle. And I am the guy that likes to challenge those assumptions. There are a lot of biases involved when you ask somebody to report what's going on in

their life. I mean, just on its face, you're pretty much assuming that the person, person's not sensitive about his information, that they're just going to divulge things to you. You know, diet could be a sensitive subject for some people. There might be undiagnosed disorder eating, undiagnosed eating disorders, over-exercising, body image issues, eating to cope with some sort of personal problem, drug use associated with some personal problem, anabolic steroid use, you know, that's stigmatized for a lot of people. I think that's gone away with the biohackers and the, you know, rise in my

modern bodybuilding. I think, you know, it's pretty acceptable to use some sort of steroid, you know, at least testosterone at the least, but still there's that stigma around it. Oh, I'm cheating. Nobody's going to respect me if I'm doing steroids. People think that, right? So, you know, there's a lot of things about lifestyle that people aren't just going to disclose to you. You have to earn their trust. So if you're just a bureaucrat in a university that's sitting there reading off an IRB approved checklist, for those of you don't know, when you do a study, you have to put it through what's called an IRB, an institutional review board. This is typically a board comprised of anywhere from, I don't know, three to ten people

depending on whether it's a full IRB review or expedited, you know, sometimes the panel, the size of the institution. There's things that factor into that. But it's a multi-person committee of people that evaluate all aspects of your study. They may or may not know your subject area. it's usually a variety of different academics that sit on this. And they're going to sit there and approve your study so that you can carry it out or disapprove it if they don't think that it's safe or they think that something about it isn't protecting human subjects, right? So it could be things such as privacy, the invasiveness of the methodology.

There's all sorts of things, right? So when we're evaluating something like diet, we're typically asking the person what they're eating. Let's say that the person has a problem with overeating and they're drinking a case of Coke a day. They're not going to tell you they're drinking a case of Coke a day. That's embarrassing. You know, for some, maybe not. And if like you remove yourself emotionally and look at it on its face, well, it's just data. Well, they don't think that.

That's one of the most unempathetic things I've ever heard. It's just data. Yeah, obviously, it's just data, but some data is more sensitive to the person possessing it than others. This is something I've learned over the years. So if you have a doctoral student or a master student just sitting there going through a line item checklist, asking people about what's going on in their life, you know, now you have some what they call intras. Mango. Now you have variability between.

interviewers. And typically in the university setting, you're trying to standardize things. So interviewing a person and gaining trust, like a counselor gains trust or like a crisis hotline person is supposed to gain trust. I'm a big Chris Voss fan for those of you who've read about negotiation. Mango, get rid of that reference. I don't want to go there. when we're talking about interviewing a person,

there are skilled interviewers or unskilled interviewers, which do you think most graduate students are in technical traits? Probably unskilled unless, you know, they're just innately skilled at it. You know, but now you're probably talking about outliers, right? Interviewing is a skill. Counseling is a skill. Obviously, we're not going to counsel anybody

because we're not counselors, but we're trying to build trust with a new person so that they disclose information to us that we need to do our jobs. And a lot of the time I'm telling you working in this business and I'm working in healthcare, people don't just readily divulge the truth. I learned this in dialysis.

I had people with high phosphorus levels. Phosphorus is a mineral similar to calcium. It's in your bones. And when your kidneys fail, it builds up in the bloodstream and you take this medication called a phosphate binder to soak it up like a sponge and get rid of it, essentially in your poop. Now, there's two things that affect those levels.

One, whether you, the patient, are taking those binders, that medication, or two, more importantly, you, the patient are restricting phosphorus in your diet. Now, in some ways, some things are pretty easy to restrict things you don't need. Like dark colas, high in phosphorus, don't need it, right? But then other things like nuts, seeds, beans, dairy products tend to be normal foods. Dialysis diet really fucking sucks. But I bring this up because I had a guy, was high every month. I thought it was something out of our control or out of the patient's control.

And after two years working with this guy, you know, he told me all sorts of stuff. We built a lot of trust around certain topics. But then when it came to food, the thing I'm formally responsible for, mind you, I was a young dietitian at this time. I just gotten in the field. I was working in Los Angeles. This guy became my buddy. I miss him. He was awesome.

I hope he got a kidney. You know, he certainly deserved one. A hardworking guy. One day, and I'm about to say how he's noncompliant as I say that, one day I'm talking to one of the dialysis technicians. These are the guys that hooked them up to the machine that pulls out their blood, cleans it and puts it back in, essentially, the dializer. And he tells me, oh, that guy. That guy's taking the liquid that pools under the beans because this guy was from Belize, so he ate a lot of beans. And you're not supposed to eat beans on dialysis.

He claimed that he had stopped. And I think he told me the truth based on what I'm about to say. Well, he was taking the liquid when you cook the beans. Maybe one of his relatives, his spouse or children were eating them. And he would pour the liquid over the rice because they were allowed to eat rice. And there was probably a lot of phosphorus and also sodium in there. I can't remember if he was holding onto a lot of fluid, most likely. But that was a source right there.

And when I talked to him, but he laughed. He was a good sport about it. It wasn't a sensitive subject. But it was just, again, this was a guy that I was buddy-buddy with. Sometimes he would do stuff and tell me I did this. But this was the thing he was routinely doing. He shared it with the tech because the tech's not talking to him about his diet. The tech's just there to hook him up, make sure he doesn't get infected,

make sure that the line gets placed right. I mean, that's his main buddy. That guy gets all the information because the nature of their relationship's different, right? That guy's got no stake in it, whether he's eating like shit or not. That's my area. You know, that's how people look at it. We all have a stake in it. We're all health care providers for this guy.

But the perception is, well, this guy is who can me up to the machine. He's my homie. We're talking about all sorts of shit. He's not really assessing me and asking me, you know, questions about my plan. You know, if there's high blood pressure or something shows up, they might ask him a question. But for the most part, these guys are. technicians are hooking them up they're taking them off they're monitoring them throughout the day they have a lot of responsibility got a lot of respect for these guys i don't think they get paid

quite enough for what they're doing but um you know i made some good friends that were techs i had a good time they were cool but then then i learned that they possessed all the information they knew what these people were doing way better than we did um and part of that was i just didn't know how to interview people back then so again this is one of the limits of studies you're getting a report of what somebody's eating. And if you don't have a skilled interviewer collecting that data, the person is inclined to lie to you, especially if you're studying people that are overweight.

There's a lot more to be ashamed of. Sometimes with people that are very underweight, there's things to be ashamed of if they're underweight because of an eating disorder or body image issues. So, you know, keep that in mind. Keep that in mind for those of you who are coaches and who are in the business of assessing these things. and when you're evaluating research as a consumer,

you know, when you're reading stuff about diet, when it comes to weight loss or weight gain or supplements, you got to understand some of this stuff is ascertained through self-report. You don't know anything about lifestyle. So the best thing we can do is connect with different people that are doing what we do. Read the studies, of course.

Sometimes it lines up, sometimes it lines up with what you see out in the field. I call that the smell test. You know, look at the study. This is what they look. at this is what they found and look at what people are doing out in the field if it's similar and you're seeing a similar result probably works right if the study finds something and then you try it you can't reproduce it you know okay you're an individual the study is studying a specific group

you can't really generalize from that group to a bigger group you know there's all these problems but it's okay to challenge it you like you know i tried that it didn't work you know maybe it worked for a handful of people in that study but it didn't work for me you know and you're not a professional researcher. It's not your job to follow that study up with a better one, you know, but it's your job to share the information so that other people know that, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't always check out, right? So it's the same thing with training, you know, lots of different training programs out there and mango. And it's the same thing with training. You know, there's lots of programs out there that are studied that just don't pan out in the real world. Then there's a lot of

programs out there that are done in conjunction with anabolic steroids that don't pan out. And So the whole takeaway from this episode really comes down to understanding that you have a job to do beyond just going to the gym and, you know, clocking in doing your lifts going home. You know, there's a way of eating. Before we even talk about weight gain or weight loss, there's a way of eating. You have to drive your protein up. You have to eat enough carbs. That's going to vary from one person to the next. It's very individual.

You have to get good quality fats in your diet. some of you need calcium supplements some of you need iron supplements you know it's going to vary you know some of you're older than others there's a lot of individual variation here there's not one diet that works there's a general framework that works typically for most of us a diet that's high in protein that's moderate to sometimes high in carbs and that's moderate and fat tends to drive progress and typically pushing more carbs pushing a little bit more fat when you're trying to gain weight will push performance, push muscle growth, et cetera. And when you're trying to lose weight, trying to preserve as much carbohydrate and protein

in your diet tends to mitigate strength loss, tends to mitigate muscle loss. Those are the general first principles. Now, obviously, you're going to modify that from one person or the next. Everybody's different in certain ways. There's nuances, of course, when you're dealing with individuals. But they're not as big as people think. They're not as big as people think. I think a lot of it is just committing yourself to the,

work you do when you're not in the weight room. The work you do when you're not consuming content. You know, you have to, again, sleep enough, you have to eat enough, you have to manage your stress, and you have to eliminate shit that's pulling you down for the most part. If you can't, because let's say you have a job that's very stressful, you can't find another one necessarily. You're very specialized, whatever the reason may be, a bunch of kids that are tiny and they're eventually not going to be tiny. Yeah, you've got to ride that out. And you've got to do the best you can. and you got to not expect to be a superstar while you're managing all that. But at the same time, there's still things you can address.

You may not be able to sleep a lot if you have a couple toddlers, right? But you can still eat good. You can still eat good. Maybe you can find time to take naps. Not ideal, of course, but you're not in an ideal situation. You know, we have survived this for thousands of years. And some of us have had to be more physically active than others in spite of all this. So there are ways to manage this.

But it all starts with expectations and all. so understanding the thing I've been harping on this whole show. Once you get past the honeymoon phase of all this shit, the real work begins at home. And that is where you're really thinking about things and committing yourself to a lifestyle that you hopefully want to pass on to all of those around you that you have to live with. You know, your family, your friends, etc. You want to lead by example, essentially. And if some people don't want to follow, that's fine. You know, sometimes just make new friends that are into this stuff.

and it's not like something that you formally do like fuck all of you get away from me just start drawing different people in certain people start hitting you up because they like what you're doing and certain people call you less often because you know they're not into it you know you go out you have one drink you go home you know you're not staying out with them late or uh um or maybe you don't go out at all because you have to work out early in the morning you know it just varies you know varies it's priorities you got to look at this at three dimensionally and not one dimensionally and also be honest about what you're doing. That's the most important thing.

You have to, whether you're coaching yourself, you have to be honest with yourself and write down the things that could be harming your progress rather than leaning on the thing, Mango, rather than leaning on blaming training or blaming something, mango. Rather than leaning on, I'm going to blame training because it's easy. I'm just going to ignore that I'm not sleeping, not eating, not doing other things, right? Be honest with yourself. If you're working with somebody, get your money's worth and share shit with that person. Give that person the data that he needs to do his job.

And if you don't trust him, you're with the wrong motherfucker. If you can't tell the guy that you're working with it, you've entrusted to get you strong, to make you look better, to do all the things, then you're with the wrong guy, right? You should be able to have an open conversation. Because withholding information just builds frustration on both ends. You continue to the same problem continues to persist. And then the other person gets frustrated because they know you're bullshitting them, right? And a lot of them will bite their tongue.

I tend to. Sometimes I don't, especially if I'm friends with the person. I'm not going to bite my fucking tongue. I'm going to be like, you're on some bullshit. Either put up or shut up. You know, I'm a little bit more assertive than your stereotypical personal trainer. But I digress. So, yeah.

That was a fun little episode. You know, I'm trying to keep these short. I was told, stay around a half hour, see how that goes. So I think that's what I'm going to do. I don't even look at the clock today. It's pretty cool. I'm getting better at this every week. But yeah, this was my message to everybody for this week.

Think about what you could be doing better at home and forget about your training for a second. And write all of those things down because every single one of them matter. Then ask yourself which one of those things, or mango, then ask yourself which of those things you can control and which you can't. And the things you can control, start mapping out a plan to control them. And once you get those things under control, then you can look back at your training and see if that's fucked up. That's where someone like me can be helpful, right? But I would do that.

That's my homework for you, the audience. Let's put training aside for a second. Let's even put aspects of diet aside for a second. You know, I told you what you need to do if you need something more. specific we're happy to help but look at all the other things i want you to take an inventory and drop some comments you know on youtube if you're watching on youtube mango and drop some comments here you know tell me some of the things that hey you know it's kind of ignoring this and yeah i'm really fucking this up like i want to see some of this stuff you know you know drop it in the

comments you know on youtube or instagram that's where i spend most of my time uh in terms of posting content. And let's see what we learn. Maybe you'll learn something and maybe I'll have something to contribute to help you out. But yeah, that is my homework for you. Be honest with yourself. Call yourself out on your bullshit and let's figure out a way to work through it so you can keep looking better, moving better, and feeling better. So with that said, I'm going to sign out.

Thank you for tuning into the show. You can find me at strong and sleek.com or on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. If you are in Metro Phoenix, my new gym, strong and sleek personal training, is up in the North Scottsdale area in the air park off of Rain Tree in the 101. It's a great location. We got good equipment, good vibes. Come on in, get a training session, or you can hire me online.

We have a Instagram page for the gym. It's strong, mango. It's strong underscore and underscore sleek. And you can find us on YouTube if you want to watch these or see clips of these or clips of other things. You know, I'm putting out content again. YouTube.com slash at strong and sleek, all one word. Thank you for tuning in and I will see you next week.