Weights and Plates Podcast - Ep. 122 - You Can’t Starve Your Way to Strong

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Chasing a toned physique? The answer might be adding weight to the bar instead of taking more food off your plate. This week on Strong and Sleek, Robert explains why repeated dieting can leave you lighter but still disappointed—and why building muscle deserves a bigger role in your plan.Robert breaks down the difference between working up a sweat and training for measurable progress, explores how protein and carbohydrates support recovery and performance, and discusses hydration when the Arizona heat won’t quit. He also shares why building a reserve of strength today can help preserve your independence as you age.If you’ve tried cutting calories, piling on cardio, and chasing the same results over and over, this episode offers a new target: get stronger, fuel the work, and build something that lasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Strong and Sleek podcast. I am Robert Santana. I am your host. Welcome back for another week of fun. It's been quite the adventure getting through the Arizona summer. I can't say it enough. It's something that's on our mind here because you feel at the moment you walk outdoor. And it's interesting. Growing up in the Midwest and suburban Chicago, the gym culture, was such that, well, you bulk in the winter when you're covered up in winter clothing, and then you cut the weight down in the spring so that you're looking shredded for the summer, only to start it all over again, except, as we know most of this country, the taking it off part typically didn't happen. So you'd end up in this perpetual incremental bulk. I mean, I wouldn't, but a lot of people would. But those of us that were more committed, we typically would go through the whole cycle that way.

And you're warmer too. But here in Arizona, it's quite counterintuitive. So you have a different problem. If you decide to gain weight in the summer, that's usually when you have less clothing on. But it's also a time where you're susceptible to dehydration. So thirst drive goes up and you inevitably want to eat. eat more. One of the reasons that have been cited for people overeating is because they're thirsty. They're not drinking enough water, not consuming enough electrolytes, and then you end up

overshooting that with food. Because remember, sodium and sugar pull fluid into the system quite quickly. So that's why beverages like Gatorade and PowerAid are formulated the way they are. They tend to be high in carbs, high in sodium, and high in potassium. Although I think they're a little light on electrolytes when I read the label, at least for us Arizonans, because I am an Arizonan now. I've been a Chicaguan in a very long time or an Illinoisan, whichever you choose, because when you're in Chicago, you don't say you're from Chicago if you live in the suburbs. When you're in the rest of the country, if you say Illinois, they ask Chicago.

but when you're in the state of Illinois, if you don't have a Chicago zip code, you say I am from whichever suburb I am from. So nowadays, I just say suburban Chicago. I try to be precise so I can get the best of both worlds, but I digress. The electrolyte composition is not as relevant in states like Illinois. In the summer, it probably is.

It's quite humid in Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, even Ohio, I've lived in all three of those states during summer months. And it can get quite humid, so hydration is arguably more important because it's much more difficult to evaporatively cool in a humid climate versus an arid one where, you know, we can hide into the shade, you know, sweat as much. There's less humidity overall, obviously. But regardless, you have to focus on hydration more. more in hot weather.

And now they have these electrolyte-focused gatorades. I think they're gatorade electrolyte. I don't know what they're called. But they are a little bit higher in electrolyte, but I think they're kind of light on the sugar because the low-carb thing is super popular and they want to market things that can be sold. So when it says no sugar, high in electrolytes,

people are likely to consume, but it's not as good of a beverage to hydrate quickly. The sugar helps the water get into the cells faster than you can get into the types of sugar. So I don't buy any of it anymore. I make my own. I have dextrose powder and I have potassium salt. So why do I have potassium salt? Why don't I just use regular salt?

A lot of my friends have bags of regular salt in their vehicles. When I worked in renal, so Kinney disease, we would recommend Mrs. Dash because it was lower in sodium and gave a salt-like flavor to the food. So people with failing kidneys may or may not have to watch potassium. Obviously, if you're on dialysis, you have to watch potassium. So there's all these different salt substitutes that are high in potassium. I believe Mrs. Dash had a formulation that was not high in potassium or sodium. I don't remember what the formulation was to get that flavor,

but it was something that we'd recommend to certain patients. So many salt substitutes are high in potassium. They lower the sodium intake. They lower the sodium content and raise the potassium content, still has chloride, to reduce the amount of sodium that the person is consuming. And this is important for certain people with high blood pressure, not all. Salt sensitivity varies from one person to the next. And people with varying stages of kidney

disease, especially dialysis patients. So when kidney disease become so severe that blood potassium levels get high, a salt substitute is not going to work. This is where Mrs. Dash products become a better alternative because they are both low in potassium and low in sodium. They, create the illusion of a salty flavor using various seasonings derived from vegetables so like dried onions dried tomato flakes there's some cayenne in there it's a long list of ingredients that give it more of a salty slash umami flavor with a little bit of a zing

and uh when she had mentioned a low sodium salt that i remembered that i was like oh we used to not recommend salt substitutes when I worked in dialysis because they were high in potassium. But in the case of hydration, the additional potassium gives you a more complete electrolyte powder, essentially. You're getting potassium. You're still getting sodium, just a lower amount than you would with table salt. And you are getting sugar from the dextrose, which is pure glucose, so it doesn't

have any other sugars in it that can alter the absorption. You're getting straight glucose into the bloodstream, and glucose and sodium share a transporter to pull water into the intravascular space quickly. So in other words, you're hydrating faster when you have sodium, potassium, chloride, and glucose. So the no-carb, low-carb thing is typically not recommended if you need rapid hydration. Now, if you're already well hydrated, you go into the gym, bloated, you work out, not a big deal. You know when you need this. You go on a hike, you're going to need it. You know, you're out in hot weather. You're going to need it. If you're doing long distance, long duration cardio, you're going to need it even after, you know, if you're doing sprints out in the heat, you're going to need it. So these are things you tend to think about when you live in the desert or a hot weather climate to begin with. So something I'll keep reminding you all of every time I do an episode. at least until the winter, then I won't be thinking about it as much. But it kind of segues into, you know, the topic that I wanted to hit on today.

I wanted to talk a little bit about diet. You know, it's a topic that comes up, no matter who you talk to these days. As I said earlier, many of us in this great nation are in the overweight or obese BMI category. you. I think the last time I looked at it was about 40%. And, you know, it's a complex thing. You know, I can pick a reason why I think that is, and we can spend a whole episode on it. The thing that I like to focus on, people ask me, you know, who do you want to train? Who is your market? You know, I will help anybody that needs help, obviously. Where I take the most pride in it is when I have somebody who's trying to get ahead of all the breakdown that happens in the second half of your life.

see i have a lot of friends that are doing the lord's work and training people at the end of life to be more functional as they wrap up their time on this planet and i respect that it's a great visual to see that to see an older person getting stronger and i've helped my fair share as well but my journey began as a young man that was trying to get ahead of things you know i think maybe i even naively thought that uh i can function like a young man as an old man you know a lot of us believe silly shit like that, you know, years ago. But I always tried to balance what I was doing against how likely it was to have a negative effect of my health. You know, I didn't use steroids as a young man. I didn't do illicit drugs. I didn't, well, I probably drank a little bit more

than I should have when I was in college. And so there was that, but I wasn't like a routine daily drinker. In fact, in my late 20s and in my early 30s, I didn't consume any alcohol. I'd stopped drinking completely for seven years. And man, I just really, I always wanted to indulge in all these different whiskeys that, you know, you may or may not have heard me talk about over the years when I made some more money and I was making some more money and I wasn't drinking. So, you know, I started consuming alcohol. I'm not like a bodybuilder that won't have any. Some weeks I don't drink any, some months I don't drink any, and then other times, I just want to drink a glass of whiskey. Or I'm out at a conference like last week, and I saw my fellow starting

strength coaches up in Omaha, Nebraska, and, you know, we partook in some alcoholic beverages. But I really like to help the person who wants to get ahead of all the bullshit that happens when you get older. You ain't going to stop it, but you can slow it. the hell down and be more functional so you're not having to hire somebody at 70 to help you learn how to stand up again. You've been standing up your whole life. Maybe you can't do it with as much weight, but you're still able to do it. You know, I want to build that person. Maybe not somebody who's going to be an elite power lifter that's, you know, deadlifting 530 at age 75. You know, there's an old guy on the internet you can find that did that in the 90s. I'm sure there's been more since. There's

just this popular video of a meet that Ronnie Coleman, former mystery. Olympia was at or this old gentleman deadlifted 500-something pounds but he had been competing for a long time but that's not necessarily what we're talking about you know if you're 18 25 even 30 you know 35 and you're starting to do this i want to get you in good shape when you have ideal or you know fairly ideal recovery capabilities we're building a surplus here, people. You get on this early. You have a surplus of strength. Then when things start to decline, you're declining still above baseline. You're stronger than you would have been if you just went about your life, not doing it. And you're able to do shit. You're independent. You know,

you're not having to train to become independent. You know, you're already independent. Your connective tissues and joints and bones have gotten thicker and stronger, more dense. There's a lot of benefits to doing this a long time. I've done this a long time. And I will say that the men that were my age growing up all had back neck pain, hip pain, knee pain. Back pain was the most common. I grew up around a lot of blue collar laborers. My stepfather delivered beer, which meant he was picking up cases of beer all day, picking up kegs earlier in his career. My father was a machinist. And back pain was the normal thing. Everybody had back pain. I don't have back pain. If I sit too damn long, I do. Like right now, my hips are getting a little tight. And I'm kidding.

but I don't have that kind of back pain. It's not that nothing ever aches, but I don't have that kind of back pain at my age. And these men were 10 years younger than me and already had it. And you can't say, well, you know, they had more active lifestyle. Okay, you know, you sit at a computer all day, that causes just as much pain as doing a laborious job. You know, that was always the thing.

You can't do these jobs because you're going to hurt. You're going to destroy your body. Well, you destroy your body in front of a computer screen. too. Isn't that interesting? So there's that. And then on the female side, you don't have as much muscle mass as a man to begin with, number one. We don't need you to be a bodybuilder. We don't need you to look like men. Most of you certainly don't want to. But as you get older, you're going to lose it just the way we do. Everybody loses muscle with age. And if you don't have much to begin with, and you're not very strong to begin with, and your capacity for strength is much less relative to a man, it's even more important. because as you get older, you know, things like simply putting luggage up in an overhead compartment get difficult. Skin loses its elasticity. I know that one of the common goals that I have from female clients over a certain age is, oh, you know what, this just jiggles. There's nothing I can do about that, right? Oh, yeah, that's true. You know, a little bit more muscle mass early in your life

might spread it, might have spread it out more. You know, some of that's genetic, of course, if you're storing body fat in certain areas, then it's just going to go there, right? And the skin's going to lose its elasticity. But if you have muscle mass, the skin has something to press up against. So it could preserve some of that. Your bones are more dense. You can pick things up, set things down.

You're not going to need help getting off the toilet when you're 70. So the benefits are the same from a functional standpoint, and you're going to look better. Strong always looks better than weak, whether you're a man or a woman. obviously the extremes start to look a little caricature like, right? Some of us like that. You know, bodybuilders like it, powerlifters like it, strong men like it, being big, huge and, you know, intimidating.

But for the rest of us, we're not going to get there unless we are born that way and really want to. That's something I talk about a lot. So when I'm talking about nutrition, I always speak on. this topic in the context of training. I want to help people with all of it. I'm not 100% of it. I'm not a medical doctor, so I don't prescribe medicine or do anything like that, but I want to help people get stronger. And in order to get stronger, you have to train. In order to recover from training, you have to eat a certain way. So it all ties together. I never really saw much sense in just learning training without understanding how the diet facilitates it. It was something that I learned

early on that you need to eat a specific way to be able to perform. As a swimmer, I was told you need 4,000 calories. And we got the food guide pyramid. I was a high school swimmer. And I'm like, what the hell is this? You know, the girls got it too. Nobody really fully understood it. I just knew I had to eat a bunch of pasta.

That's what I took from it. And there were guys starting to take protein shakes. Guys starting to take creatine. I didn't really mess with the creatine. But I think I took weight protein at one point. Maybe when I was a senior. I didn't stick. I was always bad with sticking with things.

So that was the first thing I heard. Then when I got into lifting after high school, I was told I needed all this protein. So I got on that and I've tried it with powders. I've tried it with foods. And I got nerded out quite a bit on diet and nutrition-related topics to the point where I can make myself gain or lose weight at a fairly reasonable pace.

I could lose it pretty fast. I can put it on. I'm not a modest pace. I wouldn't say fast. but, you know, not slow. And I was really good at that, but I wasn't building muscle. My body wasn't really changing. I'd get down to the same place.

I'd get up to the same place. I'd look the same at the top. I'd look the same at the bottom. And that's where I learned how important the training was. I picked up those lessons much later. I knew the general basics of it that the things that are working are the things I'm doing with a barbell. My body's changing in response to a barbell. I'm getting harder, denser thighs.

I'm getting an ass. I didn't used to have one of those. My shoulders are broader. You know, my lats are wider. My pecks are filling out. Like, I started to see some of these things where certain areas were getting more dense. And then others weren't. Then I learned how to train.

I learned how to make it get heavier. I learned how to use my entire body during a movement, regardless of what it is. You always have to stabilize things. If you're doing a cable biceps curl, your back still has to be stable. You're responsible for your spine still. Maybe it's not getting loaded as much as a deadlift, but you still have to lock that in. So this idea that you can achieve looks and function doesn't matter

is kind of a misnomer, because even if you're isolating a certain movement of the human body, you have to stabilize everything else so that you can isolate that movement, which means everything else is still getting work to some extent greater than zero. You're never truly isolating anything. You're honing in on a particular joint, Sure, your elbow is bending and extending, but when you're doing that, your back's being locked in position.

You're not going to just relax everything and move your elbow. A lot of people do that. It's not a productive way to do it. So there's no truly way to isolate one individual muscle or even a small group of muscles. You know, your whole body has a job to do. You're not going to sit on a chair and do a seated machine preacher curl and leave your hips relaxed and your knees relaxed. You're not going to have much leverage anyway. So there's always force transmission occurring through other joints and muscles of the body.

But that's all training. Where does diet play into this? Well, let's assume that you're working out. Many people listening to this are or have. There's many people that are very health conscious that have done something with a weight, whether it be a kettlebell, a band, a dumbbell or a barbell. and we've all tried a lot of different diets. So let's talk about that, right?

If you're working out and you're just going to the gym and breaking a sweat, you're probably exercising. You're probably not training. You probably don't have a training log. And you probably don't care about the number because you are more focused on how it feels. That's what we've been told. Mind muscle connection. Feel the stretch. Go nice and slow.

Good form. meanwhile not defining what that means. You know, it's funny, everybody talks about good form. It makes it very difficult to market and sell what I'm doing because I follow a model when I'm putting somebody into a position. Here I go trying to articulate this thing. I follow a model. There's a certain way that your body's supposed to move in accordance with gravity.

We're conforming to gravity. We're not conforming to what the other guy looks like. And the subjectivity, is my eyes see something that somebody else's eyes don't. That's subjective. You know, I could, you can get 10 trainers saying, oh, yeah, we want your back tight in the deadlift, and only one of them gets the back flat.

And those kind of numbers are probably not far from accurate. Because you have to watch thousands of bodies and have a reference point to compare to. You could watch thousands of bodies and be guessing, but, yeah, looks good enough, which happens a lot because in most commercial gyms, their success is measured on how much, they're selling. But I want to make sure everything is locked in and nothing is relaxed. That's how

I define good form. I don't really care if momentum is being used as long as everything's locked in place, right? So if you're training and you're using good technique and you're focused on the number, that was my point. Most people don't focus on the number because they've been told it doesn't matter. The feeling matters. The feeling is not what changes what your body looks like. The number is you have to do more than you previously did now what does that mean for what you're eating one order to do more than you previously did you have to consume more than you would to maintain what you previously had in other words if you're sitting on your ass and you're just doing a workout that feels good sure you can get away with a low carb diet that's not very high in

calories you might get away with that if i'm now stressing the system beyond that and i'm saying you're going to lift five more pounds in a couple days and five more pounds than that a couple of these after that. And we're just going to add 15 pounds a week to a lift. Well, now you are stressing the system a lot more. That's a different physiological event, and you can't get away with starving when you're doing something like that. But why does that matter? You just want to lose fat, right? Well, who are we talking to? Are you really strong? Okay, sure, it doesn't matter. You're already really strong. That's not your limiter. For a lot of you listening, ladies and gentlemen alike,

you're not that fucking strong. And if you try to focus exclusively on losing fat to enhance your appearance, guess what happens? You get bone skinning and people think you're fucking sick. You miss out on the objective you're trying to achieve. You're trying to have a body that looks good. I mean, how do you even fucking define that, right?

Maybe anorexic looks good to you, but there's usually a reference point. you're looking at something that is generally perceived as attractive. Back in the day it was magazines, now we've got social media, but typically people are trying to achieve a look where they look like they're doing something. Maybe not like a bodybuilder, obviously. Maybe not even like a fitness model, but they look like they're working out.

Somebody who's bone skinny, like the Christian Bale movie, the machinist, or some of these runway models, no offense to runway models, but sometimes it is taken too far. It's been extensively written about. you know, that's not the look of somebody who's active, you know. So what happens? If you're a man and you're 165 pounds with a squishy torso, chances are you're just not that strong.

And I know you think, well, I've got to lose the fat first. To do what? To be 135 pounds and scraggly? And then guess what? You're going to gain it back while you're getting strong again. So just start training, see what happens. you know a woman who's you know tip i'm trying to think of some average numbers i see so 5-4 130 pounds untrained saying there's certain parts of her body that she thinks are squishy it's the same deal things get a lot

more dense when they get a lot stronger now you don't have to go she had a records at a powerlifting me but again you are training to look better looking better isn't simply a function of losing fat because of what i said just now you lose fat you start to look sick if you don't have a found of muscle to build upon, right? If you do, that's a different story. We're not talking to you. Most people in the middle of the bell curve are somewhere in between, or skinny fat. So you can address the fat part through diet and starve enough to get the fat off.

But guess what? You're not going to get what you're looking for. You're not going to get that tight, solid-toned physique just by starving without training. And simply playing with pink dumbbells and bands and all this other shit and not making it heavier. It doesn't do anything. It does absolutely nothing. It gives you a nice feeling in the moment. So if you like that, great. But by the time your diet is over, you're going to be skinny, skinny and scraggly. People are going to think you look sick. Not always, but often. So what's the answer here? Well, we got to train and we got to make it harder. Sorry, it's the

way it goes. So how do you eat for that? Well, you have to get enough protein. Shocker, I know. It's like I might have said this before. You know, if you're a man, you want somewhere between 150 and 250, depending on the man. You know, extremely tall men probably need more. Short guys might need less. Really muscular guys are going to need more than really skinny guys. But 150 to 250 if you're a man, if you're a woman, I'd say 100 to 150 grams of protein is a safe range for most females.

It's going to help you recover. I know most of you who are listening, which is like that 1.5. percent of my population that I'm trying to grow here, but most of you women listening, know damn well that either you at some point in your life or people you know, other women you know, are eating 30 to 60 grams of protein a day. If left to eat ad libidum, which means just eat and don't pay attention to it. And that's just not going to cut it. It's not good if you're not training either.

Remember, you're trying to hold on a muscle mass too when you're doing other things. So if you want to get the most out of your experience in the weight room and change your body composition so that you're moving from a less squishy, since that's a familiar word, a less squishy presentation to a more firm, dense, or tone presentation, then heavier weights need to be lifted, and you're going to have to double up the protein. And this goes for both the men and the women, because most of you are under-eating that shit. I don't care what these self-reported population-wide studies say. You get these studies that say Americans aren't under-eating protein. Well, then the reference range is that, what, point one, it's like 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight, which is nothing.

And that's just to function and survive. We're not trying to function and survive. We're trying to optimize. You know, we're trying to look better, which means we're trying to move the needle here. We're not just sitting on our asses waiting to wither away and die. And how the hell do they come up with these numbers anyway? You know, there's nitrogen balance studies which have their issues. We're not going to go down a science rabbit.

whole today, but there'll be an episode on that too. But, you know, they come up with these averages, you know, based on subsets of the population that are small and number and try to extrapolate. Well, now you've got a population of lifters or aspiring lifters, people that are coming to the weight room to achieve an objective. That 0.8 grams per kilogram is not going to cut it. And then when you start dieting and your body just wants to eat up protein, well, you've got to fight that back, obviously through training. If you create a stimulus, then your body wants to hold on to muscle and lose fat. If you're eating a lot of protein, now you're feeding it enough to do that, to hang on.

You're fighting the good fight, trying to minimize muscle loss. So can't hammer that enough. You need to eat enough fucking protein. Whether you want to or not, you just got to do it. And it can come from animal products. That's ideal. Vegins, I just don't know that I can help you anymore. There was a time where I thought I could figure it all out for everybody,

but fuck, man, I have not seen a Vegean succeed in this. And if you have, write a book on it, go make some money, but don't try to ram it down my throat because I'm about giving up on this. I'm just very straightforward with you. I'll train a Vegean, but I will tell you, your injury risk is higher, and your progress is going to stall early because you are limited by your diet. A Vegean diet is a limiting factor to getting as strong as you want to get, whatever that may be.

If you're naturally strong, you might get away with it. People get away with a lot of shit because of how they were born. remember that. So, you know, I had a vegine in my gym that did great, but then she wanted to do a chin up at age 80, and I think she could have. But I had to tell her your diet is limiting factor. You know, the other problem is, too, when you're a virgin, you're getting fat and carbs with your protein sources, which increases your calories. Now, if you don't care about being heavy, that might not be a big deal, and you might be able to make this work. If you can put all that food down to a accumulates enough amino acid, but in this case, I got an 80-year-old female who doesn't want to gain weight.

And she was at a healthy weight to do what she was doing, so I don't think she necessarily needed to gain weight. But it's a common thing on both sides. I see it more on the female side. They don't want to gain a bunch of body weight. So if you're a virgin and you're a female and you don't want to gain a bunch of body weight and you're aware of your physique and aesthetics do matter, you're not going to consume enough protein from vegans sources. It's just how it is, you know. If you have dairy products in your diet and fish, you can definitely offset it now because now we're getting into some higher quality proteins.

But, I mean, I could do a whole episode on this. The point is, you need high quality protein typically and preferably from animal products. I will still try to train you if you're not, if you are a vegan or a restrictive vegetarian, but not without reminding you that it's a limiting factor. You're only going to go so far. And if you keep trying to push, far beyond novice, the injuries inevitably come, you know, and I don't want to hear about the outlier who didn't have them. So that's number one.

Two would be carbs. You know, the younger you are, the more important those are. The older you are, they're still important, but maybe not quite as much because your needs for everything kind of go down, except protein. That goes up. So the low-carb thing is popular, but are most people training? There's the question. A lot of people that are in gym or fitness culture. outside of the competitors are working out.

They're not really training. They're not pushing the envelope. They're not lifting heavy weights, certainly. The heavier the weight is, the more you need to have carbs in your diet, not necessarily for that specific event. But your blood sugars need to be at a certain level. They help with hydration, as I said earlier. If you're working out first thing in the morning on a low-carb diet,

get ready to have a problem training hard. But you need them. Your nervous system relies on them. It prefers them. Somebody's going to come on here and talk about ketones. Yes, I know that, but they're not as an efficient. They're not as efficient or preferred of a fuel source as glucose. So if you are a hard training lifter and you're in a phase where you're trying to build,

you're trying to add muscle tissue so that you get firmer, denser, have a harder physique, that's what you're after. Or you're trying to hit PRs because you're trying to get stronger because you don't like that you're weak. then in a situation like that you're going to need more carbohydrate you're going to need more sugar in your diet now obviously the quality matters i don't want you eating skittles all day you're going to feel like shit you know eating a bunch of refined sugars with all the other shit that is on that ingredient label definitely not recommending that but your total carb intake needs to be high enough you know i'd say that most women need to keep it over about 125 150 is a good lower limit there some smaller women get away with 100. I know a woman who trained fine on 80,

but she was under five feet, you know, so size matters there too, genetics matter. And, you know, you're always going to have outliers. You know, this isn't an absolute thing I'm saying. This is a most of the time thing I'm saying. Remember the mode? I think in one of these episodes I talked about the mode. It's my favorite measure of central tendency.

What happens most of the time? I think that's what we're all interested in. I think that tells you more than averages or what number falls in the middle of a stream of numbers. I know I'm going on a math rant here, but the mode, the mode, how often does it happen? Most of the time, a diet that's higher in carbs is going to lead to better training. Try it out for three to five days. Just double your, I wouldn't say double them.

Maybe for some of you you need to double them. But eat one and a half times as many carbs as you're eating. Or maybe double them. Just do it for a few days and see how you feel a few days from now when you have to do a workout. So if you're squatting, that's today's Thursday, if you're squatting next Monday, and you're eating 200 carbs a day or 150 carbs a day, if you're a man, go up to 300. See how that feels when you have to squat Monday.

If you're a woman and you're eating like 50 to 75, you know, go up to 150 and see how your workout feels, you know, Saturday's Sunday or Monday. You know, it varies from one person in the next, but usually a few days you feel it. I had a guy I'm friends with tell me once that when I doubled his carbs, it was like getting on a drug. He was on testosterone, replacement therapy, as they say,

or what I would like to call low-dose testosterone, or lower-dose testosterone than what competitors take. And he said that the carbs kind of gave him the same type of delta, like the change was drastic very quickly. So, you know, I think it's very important when you're pushing. Now, when you're dieting, things change. The carbs have to come down, the fat has to come down, protein has to stay up because you're trying to hold on to muscle and you're trying to drive

calories down so that you can lose body fat and you're also trying to manage appetite so fiber needs to stay up so now your carb sources you start cherry picking those to which ones are going to get you the most full when your calories are low and you know I can do a whole episode on that I have before I don't know that I've done one by myself maybe I need to redo all my old episodes as monologues I'm getting better at this shit but uh yeah that's the last you know and then your fat sources i always say focus on quality over quantity because it is impossible to not get enough fat you look at the low fat research out there it's in a type of diet you have to follow is just impractical in today's society i don't know that it was ever practical to be on a very

low fat diet um so it's not something i tell people to watch unless they're losing weight we restrict it but if you're training you're just trying to get stronger you're trying to figure out your body You're not really losing or gaining weight at this point, or you're gaining, you know, you're trying to build muscle. Focus on the quality. You know, omega-3s are the best, so including fish or marine wildlife in your diet is good. Watch out for swordfish or macko-shark. They're high in mercury, but the other ones have a nice ratio of mercury to selenium. Selenium's a mineral that can bind the mercury and help you get rid of it.

if it's in the food source at an appropriate ratio. The ratio is what matters. If you have more mercury than selenium like macko shark or swordfish, then that's where you can have a valid reason to worry about mercury poisoning. But I digress. You want omega-3s in their diet. Fish is king, right? Wild caught is going to be better than farm-raised,

because that's where you're going to get a lot of those oils from the ocean. And then you have your, what I call omega-3 analog. or your ALA, which is an omega-6, alpha-linolinic acid, which converts to EPA and DHA, which are found in omega-3s. I like to cut out the middle man, I go to the source, but, you know, if you're eating things like, you know, peanuts, avocados, and these plant-based sources of ALA, you're going to get those omega-3s you're after

just not as efficiently and not as high of quantities. So if you have to take a fish oil supplement, that would be the next thing down the list. And then there's a whole long list of other things you can do with your diet to optimize, depending on your goal. But at the end of the day, if aesthetics are your goal, strength is the answer. And if strength is the answer, that means things have to get heavier. And if things have to get heavier, then the diet has to change to facilitate that, among other things. But these are the things we tend to focus on here, the things we can directly control, your diet and your training and are qualified to control.

So if your goal, whether you're a man or a woman, is to have a, you know, I want to stop for a second and say, you know, aesthetics are subjective. You know, I said this earlier. You know, what one man's trash is another man's treasure, right? What looks good to one person may not look good to another person. But there's a pattern that I've seen in gym culture. that's held pretty steady for a long time. Typically, hard, firm, or toned is perceived as more attractive than squishy, fat, or soft. So if you want hard, firm, or toned, then you need to lift weights. And if you're not getting harder, firmer, or toneder, it's not even a word, but we'll use it,

more toned is the correct way to say it. If you're not getting harder, firmer, firmer, or toned, or toned, it's not getting harder, firmer or more toned, then you're not getting that much stronger, so you need to go even heavier. And that doesn't mean to add 50 pounds to all your lifts tomorrow. It means to start pushing them beyond what you did. What you do today has to be lighter than what you do tomorrow

or next week or the week after, however you're planning your programming. If you want the physique of somebody who's doing something above sitting on their ass, if you want to look like you're doing something active, not necessarily like a pro athlete or bodybuilder, but like somebody who is in shape, again, harder, firmer, or more toned, then strength is the answer. Strength is the answer, and the diet will help you do that, and if there is fat to be lost, you can deal with that too.

But you've probably already dealt with that. Many of you who have this problem you're trying to solve have resorted to dietary interventions. and lots of different types of them. You've resorted to cardio. Those things do not work on the building side. They work on the breakdown side. Sometimes fat loss is the answer.

But if you've done this several times and you're dissatisfied with the result because you're still soft, squishy, and fat, even if it's skinny fat, then strength is the answer for you. And again, this applies to both ladies and gentlemen. So with that said, I think I'm going to close out. about a lot of random shit today, but I think it all kind of weaved together. Make sure you're

staying hydrated, especially if you're in the southwest. Summer's not over yet here. We're almost there. We're sitting in the low 90s. It's nice, but it's not over yet. If you're in a cold weather state, oh God, I'm sorry. I grew up in that. I left. I'll take the triple-digit heat over the negative degree temperatures of the north. But I like seeing it. I'm I can, I almost, I hesitate to say I like feeling it for about a day because it's different and it's familiar and it's nostalgic. But after about the second day, Eddie money, man, take me home for different reasons from the song. Anyhow, now I'm like rambling, so let's close the fuck out. Thank you for tuning in, as always.

I appreciate the support all of you have given me over the years and the support. that I'm gaining from those of you new to the show. I hope you're enjoying these monologues. I see they're getting longer. I don't know if they're getting better, but hopefully they will continue to get better. And we'll keep it going. I'm not going anywhere.

So I think I've found my stride here, and, you know, we're going. I've lost track of the week, so that's a good sign. You can find me at weights and plates.com if you are local to Metro Phoenix, my gym, strong and sleek, training is located in the Scottsdale Air Park near a rain tree and the 101. You give us a call at 480590-490-4-933, and I'm happy to set up an appointment to get you in for an intro.

If you are traveling to Metro Phoenix, I do offer day passes because I would like traveling lifters to see my gym, tell people all about it, take the pictures, the videos, spread the word. This place is real important to me. I could have walked away, but I like having a gym. It's important. I'm on Instagram at the underscore Robert underscore Santana. My gym is Strong underscore and underscore sleek, both on IG. You can find this show on YouTube if you haven't already at YouTube.com slash at strong and sleek,

all one word. And if you do go on there, please smash that fucking subscribe button or whatever the hell these kids say. That's it. So I am out. Thank you very much. And I'll see you next week.

You know,