Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 44 - Luke Leamon: Health, Physiology and Chewing Your Food

Episode Date: June 12, 2020

In this episode, we sit down with Luke Leamon. Luke is one of the most brilliant people in the fitness world and someone I have had the pleasure to learn a lot from. With decades of experience behind him coaching and educating, Luke and his partner Zoe, started Muscle Nerds Health, Australia's premier fitness education company.Thanks For Listening!---RESOURCES/COACHING: I am all about education and that is not limited to this podcast! Feel free to grab a FREE guide (Nutrition, Training, Macros, Etc!) HERE! Interested in Working With Coach Danny and His One-On-One Coaching Team? Click HERE! Want To Have YOUR Question Answered On an Upcoming Episode of DYNAMIC DIALOGUE? You Can Submit It HERE!Want to Support The Podcast AND Get in Better Shape? Grab a Program HERE!----SOCIAL LINKS:Follow Coach Danny on INSTAGRAMFollow Coach Danny on TwitterFollow Coach Danny on FacebookGet More In-Depth Articles Written By Yours’ Truly HERE!Support the Show.

Hey everybody, welcome in. Today we are sitting down with Luke Lehman of the Australian education group Muscle Nerds, one of the smartest men in the fitness space, period. He's somebody that not a ton of people know about, but a lot of the people you probably follow learned from him when he was the head of the Poliquin Institute's instructional group. The dude knows his shit when it comes to training and physiology, and we're going to talk about some amazing concepts. The minute I heard Luke speak for the first time, I immediately enrolled in his course. The dude is a straight up OG when it comes to fundamental concepts in fitness. So sit back, relax, enjoy this one.

I promise you, you're going to learn something. So Luke, how's it going, man? Oh man, it's good. How's it going over there? How's it going in America? It's good. And we're getting our gyms open here, supposedly county by county this Friday out here in California. So things are going to be a little bit more normal. Fantastic, man. That's good news. It is. So for those of you guys who aren't familiar with Luke and Luke's work, and I'll be honest, I for a while was not directly, indirectly I was, and what I mean indirectly was there are quite a few people in the Instagram fitness space who have learned a ton from Luke's concepts. And I caught onto to those first. And I

started following some of these people and being like, man, where do these people learn this breadth of information? I feel like us here in America, we're completely missing this. And it was always these Australian coaches or these British coaches. And somebody had sent me a message. Oh, that's one of Luke Lehman's concepts. And I said, who is this? So I Googled it and I found out about Luke's course and Luke's company, Muscle Nerds. I took the course. It was unbelievably thorough. I learned a ton from it. And so that was really how I spent my whole summer of 2018 was diving in that course multiple times into Luke's concepts. And so Luke is somebody I feel like you guys should

know. He's one of the better educators in our space. He's somebody who I think does a really nice job of tying in things we don't often talk about. And I think for everybody listening, many of them are coaches, many of them are hobbyists. How did Luke Lehman start to get to where he is now? And how was Muscle Nerds born? Kind of just give us the background, man, to get to where he is now and how was muscle nerds born kind of just give us the background, man. Cause you're quite a, a, a rabbit hole yourself. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I am. And thank you for all those nice things you said about my, my stuff. So, yeah, I guess, you know, man, being a little kid,

I lived in a really small town in Texas and we didn't have a whole lot to do there. Everything was about Texas football and that you spend your whole childhood dreaming about the day that you get the suit up and go smash heads with someone else. And so, you know, I kind of got an early start with weightlifting where like the high school all-star quarterback lived across the street from me. So I would go out on like mile and a half runs with him and try to keep up. And I accumulated, you know, a lot of weight equipment because my sister was five years older and all of her ex-boyfriends, uh, from that time to try to win favors from her would just give

me old rusted equipment and benches and things. So I had a backyard full of equipment and I'd be out there in the hundred and 105 degree heat, you know know bench pressing and squatting and all that and just fell in love with it man i you know i think the first the first time i saw a real bodybuilder was arnold schwarzenegger and probably like a lot of guys that's kind of your first thing is seeing arnold and some of the old school you know 60s and 70s and even the 50s bodybuilders and going man that's what a guy should look like that That's a real man. And so I kind of took that on and just started reading everything I could. And back then it was, you know, just old books from the library you could find. So in high school, I started powerlifting

and I was fortunate enough to have some really good high school football coaches that were also powerlifters. So I was always taught how to use good form, how to get brutally strong. We used a lot of Bill Starr's stuff back then with just basic power clean, squat, bench, overhead press, deadlift. So that's what we smashed. And it was a good environment for competition because you get a lot of corn fed country boys. And you know, you've got 60 guys all trying to get on the first team. So there was a lot of incentive to to work really hard so that's how we spent our summers in a hot tin shed and 100 and plus degree heat just banging out weights and listening to thrasher music so you know about about when I was

14 we got the internet and so that's that's how old I am. So some people listen to this, they don't know what life is like without the internet. But, you know, that was back when we had no cell phones, and we didn't really have internets, and we have really, really old computers and things. So I got the internet, and that kind of opened up another level of education for me, where I was learning, you know, indirectly, you know, online from, you know from Charles Poliquin, Charles Staley, Paul Cech, all these old school guys. And I resonated the most with Charles because I would do the programs that he would post online and they worked. I would just get brutally strong. And he was excellent at taking all of these systems that people had developed and then you know just

pulling out only the information you needed to know and then how to sequence it together yeah and i said man one day one day i'm gonna meet this guy and so in 2007 i saved up money and i took my first trip solo trip outside of texas and i flew to chicago and i did my piscp level one and i did my uh like back then it was a one day biosec course. And the dude walked in, he had such a presence about him. And I said, you know what, one day, I'm going to work for this guy. And then you fast forward a few years later, and I started working for Charles and assistant teaching and things like that. And then, then eventually, when he left Pollock and group, I kind of moved into that role of what he was teaching and kind

of develop some of their material there. That went on a couple of years. And then I just kind of, I just kind of was over it because he was gone. A lot of the coaches that had built the material and taught it and that I was friends with, they were all gone. And then finally I decided, man, it's probably time to get out of here. So, you know, I left and Zoe and I started Muscle Nerds. And we thought, you know, let me think about what I've been teaching over the last 10 years with Polican Group. And it was all about training Olympic athletes and national level athletes. And I went, man, it's just no one's teaching anybody how to train normal people. Like, if you look, if I look at training gen pop, you're either looking at like NASM or ACSM,

you're looking at like sports medicine, bullshit, BOSU ball training, or you go right into learning how to train Olympic athletes. There's no one like looking at both sides of that and saying, well, we need to put this stuff and meet in the middle and find something that's practical and something that works for the average person. So then we started muscle nerds. We decided we're going to specialize in training, teaching coaches how to train gen pop and how to think critically instead of just believing bullshit. Um, because I think

that's, that's one of the things I was prone to do because I don't have a formal education in any of this. Um, I basically, uh, left college. I was a computer programmer. I don't have a formal education in any of this. I basically left college. I was a computer programmer. I left college because I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. And then I spent my college money on doing mentorships and interns with high level coaches. And you just, when you're that young, you just believe everything they say. And then later on, when I started learning from guys like Dr. James LaValle and some others and actually reading biochemistry textbooks, Dr. Brian Walsh, Dr. Ben House, people like that, I realized, man, a lot of this stuff I've been teaching is not exactly 100% true. So what I would rather do is only teach the things that I know to be true based on literature. So kind of letting evidence literature guide us. So being evidence guided,

not particularly based because there's, you've got two different levels of evidence. One of them is empirical observation. If I've been training, if I've trained hundreds of people over 20 years and I find things that work, I'm just going to go with it. But then you also need the research back stuff to understand why things work in a certain way or why they don't and why they work for different people and don't work for other people. And so that's kind of the Reader's Digest story of where I got to where I am now. So it's kind of Zoe and my aim to teach coaches how to sift through the bullshit, how to think for themselves, how to create new things and new ways of doing things and how to put things in perspective so that you're not just throwing

shit at people and seeing what sticks and hurting people and doing stupid rapid transformations and all this other things that we're prone to do in the industry and actually understanding how this stuff should be done correctly for long-term success. I completely concur. And one of the things that I really gathered from the course for everybody who's listening was everything that we tend to be taught in our formal education as coaches is already at the physical level. We don't really address anything at the biological and physiological level. They actually start at the level of the tissue.

Hey, this is what this workout is going to do. And so trainers who almost all get in the industry with the idea of, I really want to help people, they miss on perhaps the most fundamental way that they can do that, which is by addressing physiology and addressing health of the people that you're training, regardless of that training level. And I think Luke made a really good point here, which is that, yeah, we all get into this field with these aspirations of training people at the highest level, but most of us are going to train a lot of people who are just general pop. And if you don't understand physiology, you can't get the results because you're not helping people be healthy. So for all the hobbyists and enthusiasts that are listening, as well as the coaches, this is going to be a really insightful episode as to how to truly have a base from which you can build whether you're gen pop or even at

the highest level, because Luke, I'm sure you would say that not all athletes are healthy. There's nothing healthy about about competition. So that's what people need to understand. So, you know, if you decide to go to a coach that only knows one subject, then that's what you're going to get taught. So if I go to a powerlifting coach, I'm going to learn how to powerlift squat, powerlift bench, powerlift deadlift. I'm going to learn three ways of lifting which are very detrimental to health but very beneficial to lifting the maximal amount of weight and I was a competitive power lifter for a long time and I can tell you the one thing that power lifters don't talk about is it's almost like putting your physiology on a credit card like you can get crazy strong by manipulating the way you lift and progressive resistance, but then you end up paying for it later. And the interest rate on that is massive. Like I've got, I was fortunate enough to never hurt myself in powerlifting, but now some of the stuff I did back then, I'm now seeing it with like

lower lumbar issues, hip issues, you know, you're eventually, it's going to eventually catch you if you don't do the right things. So understanding that you really need to, when you're looking for a coach or you're looking for a program, you have to say, is this right for my orthopedic profile? Is this right to progress me to my goals? Is this too extreme? Or do I need to be a little bit more patient and take my time and let my body do what it's supposed to do naturally, um, to do naturally without pushing it to a point where the wheels get out of alignment and stuff starts to fall apart. My oil pressure gets up too high. So there's my blood pressure. You know, there's a lot of things that can happen. Lifting too much and having your heart change in ways that

are not beneficial and avoiding cardio, which is a big one too. Or the other way is doing too much cardio and not doing enough resistance training. So, you know, somewhere in the middle lies the truth of everything. And that's why, that's why we teach the way we teach is because we try to get people to think. Yeah. And I think that what a lot of people end up doing is they approach things, even if they're gen pop coming from a place of extremes. I want the most advanced diet. I want a really intense training protocol because I want results fast and coaches are like, shit, I want results fast too. This would be great. And this is how a lot of us are conditioned to think about fitness, which is that the more you can do, the better, the faster you start, the better. And a lot of people end up to your point,

leveraging their physiology and putting it on a credit card. I'm going to get as rapid of results as I can now, and I'll pay for the punishment on the backend. And one of the concepts you've really touched on a lot in your courses, and that really resonated with me was this idea of prepping to prep. And to me, prepping to prep represents the anteceding prep is prepping for a show, a competition, something at a high level. But that prepping that we do before we even approach the big goal is so important. And for people, what does that really look like? What are you looking to do if you've had somebody who's not getting the results they want? Maybe they've never done this before. Maybe things aren't working. And a lot of that goes back to physiology, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I came up, that was a thought process I had one day where I'm like,

all right, I've trained a lot of people for physique shows, bodybuilding competitions, strongman competitions, powerlifting competitions, track and field, you name it, I've probably trained somebody that did it. And when you're looking at a lot of these people, when you look at athletic training, you have two main phases you're going to go through, right? And then there are two broad categories of general physical preparedness, where you get the athlete healthy enough to then go into their specific physical training, then you go into their preseason. You go into their season. Then they're pretty beat up after it.

And you go back to a GPP phase. And one of the things I saw was that people in the general population, they just go right in a specific training without really taking care of the general foundational stuff first. And it's the same thing with physique athletes. Like you'll get a, you'll get a bodybuilder that wants to bodybuild, but they've got stage two hypertension. They've got high resting heart rate. They don't sleep well.

They don't, they haven't taken a solid shit in two weeks. You know, they've got all this stuff going on and it's like, you're not actually ready to begin to get ready for a show. We need to actually get you to a good level before we decide on a show. Because I just got tired of people coming to me, I'd have girls coming to me at 34% body fat, and they'd say, I picked the show in 12 weeks. And I'm looking at them like, you understand, like, you're going to need to be in like the low teens to be competitive. And that's going to take longer than 12 weeks to drop 20, 20 something percent body fat. Like I can do it. But these are all the negative repercussions.

It's going to happen like your hair is going to start falling out. You're going to lose your period. You're going to be freezing cold all the time. You know, you're going to have issues with your heart, your cardiovascular system, all of this stuff is going on. Like we can do it, but it's not a good choice to do because once you get off stage, it's going to lead to binging. Then you're going to get in a disordered eating pattern. And so like, you're going to end up having to have therapy just to get your shit straight because you want to win a plastic trophy. To me, it doesn't make any sense. So, and then they would look at me and they'd say, well, you know, Joe down the street said that he could do it in 12 weeks.

And I said, I'm sure he can. I said, you know, you can do it. I said, but he's also, all he cares about is getting your money. He doesn't care about your health. So all he cares about is getting your money. He doesn't care about your health. So he wants your money and he wants a really nice before and after picture for his Instagram marketing. But he doesn't give a shit what happens to you after the show. And so I actually care. So I'm telling you, you're going to need at least four to six months of prepping to prep, then when I feel like you're at the right level to begin prep for a show, I'll tell you when we're ready and then we can pick a show because it's much better to take your time and build your physique over a long time than it is to just try to rapidly do it. And, you know, I come from the old school where you would train for five or six years before you

ever decided to do a show. Nowadays, people think it's really cool and edgy. I'm going to do a show. Shit, they hardly work out. They're not well trained. They're still in the beginner stage. They don't know what they're doing. They've got injuries. They're all fucked up.

And they just arbitrarily pick a show. And then they start starving themselves. And they start training like 25 hours a week, eating 800 calories. And they do the show. And then after the show two months later they're fatter than they were when they started and now it's harder it makes it harder to come off and then they get locked in this this endless cycle of basically binging and purging using exercise and starvation no and that's so common over here in the states

too particularly because competitive, the female side of bodybuilding has really exploded, particularly in the bikini divisions. And you see a lot of women who've never really trained at all. You know, they're ready to do a show eight to 12 weeks after they bought their gym membership. They're like, yeah, I'm into this. This is my thing. And, you know, more power to people who recognize that they want to take their fitness down that avenue. But one of the things that we're really getting at here is that to be in the business of seeing results, you have to be healthy first. And that's something that a lot of people don't even begin to address. A lot of coaches don't even begin to address. It's, hey, you came

to me and you told me you wanted to build your glutes and your quads, so I'm going to put you on the leg press. And I didn't ask a single question about your health metrics. And I think that why a lot of people who are listening or coaches who are listening have clients or even themselves running into walls is they don't have those fundamental elements of health understood. And for you, Luke, as a coach and as an educator, what are those things that you're looking for before you've signed off on somebody to prep? They've finished that first GPP phase and they finished that foundational physiology phase. Yeah, I think, I mean, the first thing is to get some basic physiological metrics. So

blood pressure is a big one. So if I've got, you know, a lot of guys will come to us and they're hyper tense. So we, their first phase might be a lot of conditioning with, there's still weight training, but the emphasis isn't on the weight training. The emphasis is on the conditioning, right? So we might start with a basic conditioning to get the blood pressure down. A lot of those guys too, when you're sympathetically dominant like that, it creates a level of threat in your brain, which then causes the body to get much tighter. So if you think, like, because I'm a computer programmer, I think of things as in relationships to computers and I'm a car guy. So I think about things in relation to cars. So if I think about your brain as being a processor and you think about the muscles as being the display, so, and then we could go deeper and talk about fascia, like proprioception being the keyboard as well. So your brain is constantly

looking at its environment and saying, do I feel safe and secure? Do I feel threatened? If it feels threatened, it's going to get into an overly reactive state. So you're going to have muscle tightness. You're going to have issues in joints. And then you go to train hard and then you end up injured or you end up with a long-term chronic injury that then you're going to have to address later. So with the women, a lot of times when they come to us, they've kind of done the opposite. So most guys, when they want to transform their body, they'll go to weightlifting and they'll eat a shit ton of food because that's how they feel. That's what they've been told is how you gain a lot of weight. And it is, you need to eat. But if you overdo it, you have to understand that overfeeding isn't natural for

our biology. We're not made to overeat like that. We didn't evolve with that surplus of food availability. No, no. And that's the thing, like eating for hypertrophy and even training with weights, people need to understand that is a completely artificial construct. There's nothing normal about putting 200 kilos on your back and repping it out. There's nothing normal about anything we do. Our bodies aren't really designed for that. We can do it and we can do it well. But if you put your body in an artificial environment, like the gym, you're going to get an artificial response. So if you are, evolutionarily speaking, it doesn't make any sense to put on a ton of muscle

because traditionally we don't know when we're going to get the next meal. So, and being bigger as a human doesn't make a lot of sense because that's energy costly in an environment where we might not have enough food. So that starts to pose a problem where they don't, people don't understand that biochemically, the more I train for hypertrophy, the more I eat for hypertrophy, the more inflammatory signaling I'm going to get, the tighter I get, the more it's going to have a negative health effect if you take that to the extreme. So one of the things I think the whole COVID thing has taught a lot of people that I train is they need to focus, still focus on the weights. That's great. focus, still focus on the weights, that's great. But you also need to focus on movement because our bodies are designed to move in multiple planes at the same time, not just sagittal plane,

right? So, you know, a lot of our clients who are powerlifters, they're now forced to do pistols because they don't have gym access. And once they got really good at pistols, all of a sudden, their knee stability issues started going away. And now they're squatting deeper and better and they've actually PR going back to the gym. So we need to put those types of things in perspective, right? With the women, we typically see them being very hypotense because what do women do when they want to change their body? Well, they've been told that 1200 calories is what you need to eat and you need to do a ton of cardio. So the prescriptions for most guys and most girls in a general sense are a little different. The guys probably need to do a bit more conditioning and maybe tone the weight training down or not lift as heavy for a bit of time. And the women might need more weight training, not body pump classes, but actually lifting heavy.

Yeah. And a little less of the aerobics and maybe a little bit more of the HIIT training. And typically if we use those prescriptions, the guy's blood pressure comes down, the girl's blood pressure comes up, everybody's happy. I think that's the main metric I'm looking at is blood pressure. And then I want to look at resting heart rate and then we can get into the discussion on HRV as well. Yeah. Well, both of those metrics, I think, let you peer a little bit deeper into the physiology than just what most people think because blood pressure isn't just indicative of what's going on with your heart and your, you know, I forget the other one that you mentioned off the top of my head, but, you know, those are influenced by multiple systems, like your

endocrine system, your nervous system. And if there's regulation there, you're probably looking at somebody who could stand to be healthy. So I love that you've boiled it down into that simple as one or two metrics, because it really does give you the tools to be like, I don't know if I should really be hammering myself this hard. I don't even have this down. Yeah. I mean, if they get that down in a lot of cases, you know, most people will come to me because they want to make, they want, they want to transform their body. I do have, you know, a handful of people like I mainly deal at muscle nerds with a high level athletes at the very, very most advanced people that we train. They usually come to me or the people who are the most fucked up.

Yeah. So they come to me and I look at their labs and And I'm like, Oh, my God, I don't understand how you're still alive. And we've got to help them find like refer out to the right people and then help them do what we do with the performance nutrition and the exercise prescription. Yeah, working with you know, working with our integrative personal training team to get them the right help. But they need to understand that those are, those two metrics show you a lot about how your body is performing without taking anything else. And I can get that in the first interview if a client's comfortable and I can

say, shit, man, you've got 158 over 95 blood pressure. That is not good. And your resting heart rate's 90. All right. We need to, we got some shit we need to work on before you think about doing a five rep max on the squatter getting in the leg press we got some other shit to work out if if we have people that come in and like you said eight to ten weeks they want to do a show but they are at a very high body fat level they need to understand like we need to take care of that body fat first and get you to a certain level before we pick a show. And typically, you know, typically I like a very long prep because you don't have to suffer. You can actually grow muscle going into the show. So

like if I'm dealing with, um, most of our clients are natural. We do have some people who are, you know, assisted. They're enhanced. Yeah, they're enhanced. But, you know, probably 96% of our clientele is completely natural. And they have to understand, like, if you want to do a photo shoot or physique show, and you want to do this the right way, this could be a 24 month prep prep after you're done getting ready to start the prep. And then it becomes a process in the general phase. Let's get a lot of weight off you really quick if you're really overly fat. And then when you get to a level, maybe I've got a girl at something like 23, 24%. Now we're going to start chipping away at it into down around those low teens. And now

we can do a show guy comes in, same thing. Guy comes in at 30%. Let, we can take you rapidly from 30% to say 17, 18. But at that point, I'm going to want to start slowing it down because that's at the level where your body's going to say, well, if I'm going to get rid of something and while I'm dieting, I'll just get rid of muscle. So we want to try to make a place where they start to look good. Once you start to look good, we slow it down a bit because every few hundred grams of fat you lose a week, that's another vein in your abs. You look radically different when you're already getting pretty lean. You don't really have to rush it at that point and it's probably not beneficial to. Well, I love the duality there because everybody listening was probably like,

oh, that first 10% that I lose, I can lose that fast because being 30% is genuinely unhealthy and I'm better at 20. But if I try to go from 20 to 10, like a slap dick, I'm going to fuck myself up. And I think a lot of people don't even think about that. They're just like, I'm just going to crash diet myself all the way down to 10. And they really end up somewhere around 17, 18, all fucked up. Can't figure out why they can get leaner for dudes. And that number is like 21 to 23 for women. And so these things all kind of foundationally come back to the physiology, which I really love. Yeah. And like, just to give an example, I have a friend who, um, he was sitting at a hundred and 120 kilos, um, a little over two months ago. And I said, okay, that's great. You're, you're sitting at 30 something percent body fat, right? So we will rush the first eight weeks, but then when you start getting close to

100, we're going to slow that down. So we've we knocked off 18 kilos, which for you Americans is about 40. Yeah, about 38 to 40 pounds came off boom, just by doing a lot of work and cleaning up the diet. And then it's like, all right, cool. Now you're sitting around 1819. We're going to start slowing this down a little bit. And he's happy. He's like, okay, I don't want to rush this. He's been stuck at 102 for a few weeks, but he's okay with that because we're kind of in a maintenance phase. And then we'll gear up to do another eight to 12 weeks and start chipping off, you know, five, 600 grams of fat off a week. And then within, you know, he'll lose another 12 kilos within say 10 weeks or so and he'll be really happy yeah no i love that for everybody listening when luke says

chipping off grams of fat he's talking about grams of fat from the physique in america we use grams to as our our macro so they're probably like you took a hundred grams of fat from the man how much was he eating before i guess yeah i guess that's important to for me to keep in perspective that we're over here on our stupid metrics yeah and i've i've been overseas so long and i've been studying the science for so long like science all revolves around the metric system and most of the rest of the world does too so one of the first things i'll do with american clients i'll have them switch their scale to the metric system because, yeah. And the reason is, is because when I'm doing the mathematics of things, if, if I say, okay, if you want to lose a pound of fat a week, that's 454

grams, the 454 grams doesn't sound as scary as one pound. So then if they, if they do a refeed and they put on like one kilo, they can't, they can't process that. That's two, 2.2 pounds, right? Whatever they can't, they can't figure that out. So, um, so what we'll tend to do is work on switching the scale. So it switches your mindset. And then this is the number that I want to come off on average over time. And then we'll make a timeline so that if they do hit a plateau, we can say, well, you're actually still ahead of the, of the range I wanted you in. So we don't need to change anything. Let's just see the minute you fall below the range, then, then we'll, we'll make some adjustments, but usually somebody will cruise it. They'll lose a tremendous amount of weight. They'll cruise for three or four weeks and kind of be stable.

But they're still ahead of their timeline. And then they make another big drop. And they're like, holy shit, cool. We didn't have to pull any calories. We didn't have to do anything else. Just had to be patient. You just got to be patient because when you hit a plateau, if you've been eating the same calories and you're

training the same for me that plateau usually means you're recomping which means you're probably putting on muscle at a similar rate as you're pulling off fat so you're actually getting better but that scale doesn't show it but if you do some conference measurements or skin folds or i have an ultrasound body fat device or if we do decks you'll see that I'm slowly building muscle very slowly, but they might be building say, you know, a hundred grams of muscle a week of tissue, but they're losing a hundred grams of fat. So the scale is not reflective because it balances out, but their body looks better. Hey guys, just wanted to take a quick second to say thanks so much for listening to the podcast and if you're finding value it would mean the world to me if you would share it on your social

media simply screenshot whatever platform you're listening to and share the episode to your instagram story or share it to facebook but be sure to tag me so i can say thanks and we can chat it up about what you liked and how i can continue to improve. Thanks so much for supporting the podcast and enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah. And again, these are reasons why people quit their diets or quit their fitness endeavors entirely. And so you disarm them in a way by making them switch those metrics around. So they're focused on things that they don't have that same connotation with. Because you're right, the term pounds to us, that is something that we generally have a negative connotation with. Grams is like, whatever, it's just grams. Like, I don't even want to do the math. I'm just going to log it and send it off to coach, which regarding, you know, weighing in frequently

enough to stay on track, you have to kind of detach the morality from that experience that is stepping on the scale and be able to say, this is just data. And so I think that puts power back in the hands of the people. Yeah. And I mean, if you think about this, like I've got a, I'm drinking a Pepsi Max here. I love Pepsi Max. It keeps me, it keeps me on track. If I get a craving, I can have Pepsi Max that helps it with no calories, right? This is a 375 milliliter can that weighs 375 grams. So if I have a client go to the store and buy like a half liter bottle of water, I'm like, that's what you're losing a week. That's actually a pound. And when they hold it, they go, that's a pound. Like that's a pound. That's a lot to lose.

Yeah. And they, well, they look at it and they and they go well that that doesn't it changes the way they view a pound because they're like oh that doesn't seem like a big deal you're right you're right so and then also understand that if you eat more carbs if you eat more sodium if you have more water that's what's fluctuating most of your body. So if you gain, you know, a kilo overnight, it's probably from water and glycogen and sodium, possibly extra fecal matter, because you might not have pooped in a couple of days. So then you change their mindset. So they're not so neurotic about the scale and they understand that it is impossible for you to put a pound on overnight. You can put a pound on in a week if

you go off the rails and you don't pull yourself in. But if you put a pound on overnight, that's simply water and other substrates. It's impossible to put fat on that quickly. You would have to eat. Man, you would have to- Absurd amounts of food. Yeah, that would be the most absurd refeed that i've ever seen and i've seen some crazy ones and another concept i'll say look at the guys that are in the eating contest like most of them are skinny as shit most of them you see you see like a skinny little asian dude like eating you know 80 hot dogs in five minutes and he's knocking out like 10,000 calories or whatever they do, right? They're not getting fat. So one blowout like that, even though your weight goes up the next day, all that is,

is just all that extra food you need to poop out and you just got to burn off the water and the glycogen, sweat it out and you'll be all right. Yeah, no, I love that. I think that there's so many times that clients have come in and been like, oh man, I really lost it on Sunday. How's the diet been? I lost it on Sunday again. And I will forever now use the analogy of the hot dog eating contest. Well, you couldn't have done that much damage, Mary Muffin Top. And then when you think about what people are going to do over the weekend, like most people are very structured during the week because they have a nine to five. So it's easy for them to stay on track. One of the problems is that I see is a lot of under eating during the week because you get coaches that tell them they need to eat six

times a day and they need to do all this ridiculous shit that we now know is not actually true. They skip meals, they end up under eating during the week. And then that leads to binging on the weekend. And then a lot of people will self-medicate with booze. When you self-medicate with booze, that's inflammatory, that's going to make you hold water. So now it's kind of a double whammy, you've got the food and then the inflammation, and then you swell up a little bit, and then you look different, and you weigh different, and that messes with your head. So it's really important to me, when I do my first interview with a client, it's I'll do, I tell them the book at at least 90 minutes because that's how

long I'll talk to them because it's an entire educational thing about how I work, what to expect, what I expect of you, how we do things. Don't freak out. And I explain all of this stuff to them, how we track food, how we don't focus on the scale, how we focus on the scale plus other metrics like circumference and body fat and how we focus on performance. If you're getting stronger in the gym, your circumference measurements are going down, but your weight's going up. I don't care. So if my waist measurement drops, even if I put on a pound, that's good. That means you're actually building fat-free mass. You're getting stronger.

This is what we're looking for. So everyone's programmed to focus on that scale as the only metric. The Earth's gravitational pull on your mass is not your identity. That's not you. That is just an arbitrary measurement of weight. That's not you. That is just an arbitrary measurement of weight. So the moment we can get somebody to stop focusing on that and focus on their check-in ticket to crazy town whenever they you know gain a bunch of weight just because of food or whatever no I totally agree there's there's something I want to touch on here because it really shifted

my paradigm as a coach and I think that it's in in some ways good that our space has gone away from excessive cardio, but we've done what we often do in fitness, which is when we, when something loses favor, we completely destroy it altogether. And for much of the like mid 2000 teens, like 2015 to 2019, it was sexy to, you know, say cardio is stupid. Cardio makes you fat to ridicule cardio. And I use this meme that we've all seen of the African-American sprinter running next to the Kenyan marathon runner. And they show the physique differences.

And they usually in physiology textbooks and training textbooks, they use it as a way to depict sometimes the visual differences between energy systems. But people go like, oh my God, that's what your body's going to look like. If you do cardio, you're going to be this emaciated skinny fat person. And, you know, with regards to health, that's not exactly the case. And with regards to physiology, we have a lot of people not using what you would call their life pathway very effectively. And I'd love if you could kind of just, for those listening, give them some degree of understanding of cardiovascular fitness, why it's important, and maybe even just a gen pop prescription of what that should look like weekly.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know me, I'm big on giving credit where it's due. And like when you, when you kind of introed me and you talked about, oh, I see all these people talking about these concepts. I wonder where they got that from. And they never say where they got that from. And the industry has changed where everybody wants to act like they came up with something. So I always like to give credit where it's due and where I learned things from. So the life pathway thing that came from my wife, Zoe, who's brilliant. And she, we were sitting there talking about energy systems once. And, um, and I, and she goes, you know what? If the aerobic system is your pathway for life, why would you not want to make that as robust as possible? And I go, you're right.'re right like you you you train certain energy systems and

pathways in the gym to get better at certain things so if I have a performance goal then I have to train it in a specific manner so my body adapts to get better at the performance but if we think about it like you're training maybe maybe you're training four days a week with resistance training to end up getting bigger and stronger. That's your adaptation typically. Well, what about the other 23 hours of the day? How's that helping you? How does a 300 kilogram deadlift or a 660 pound deadlift, how does that benefit you in life? Are you going to have to pull a car off of a little boy or something off the side of the road? It's not a practical thing to think about. It is a specific adaptation for a specific goal.

So, you know, realistically speaking, if we want to have longevity and a longer lifespan and be healthier and be younger, then we need to also focus on that other side of the pathway, which is more the anti-aging metabolic side of things of doing more conditioning. And then that conditioning has to broke down into specific types of conditioning, which is aerobic training. Yeah. You know, you're, we are aerobic organisms. We are not anaerobic organisms.

So it makes sense to, you know, get your aerobic system to a certain level. And that level is going to be dictated by how far you want to take it. For me, I'm of the opinion that general population can't get too aerobic. Okay. The lit, the literature is really clear on this. And it always has been having a higher VO two max, having a higher ability to bring oxygen into your body and get it to all the working tissues increases your lifespan and reduces all cause mortality. Now, if you have people going hashtag F cardio, and I just told you that like getting more oxygen is really important for living a long life and not having any disease, you're full of shit if you think that that's not important, right?

So if we look at the realms of resistance training and aerobic conditioning they're both really important but they're important for two totally different reasons yeah they're not mutually exclusive you can have both like and i think a preference for one isn't a license to say i can't do the other it's not sacrilege to be a lifter who goes for a run like it's amazing to me how many people have great totals in the powerlifting community or great physiques but in absolutely pathetic mile time and it's like okay well there is some middle ground here yeah i mean when i was a powerlifter i was at the same mentality because i was in my mid-20s. This is a long time ago. My deadlift was around 730 something pounds. My squat was around 700. My bench was around 480. And I was 268 pounds.

And I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath and needing a post-workout shake and a nap because no one did, powerlifting conditioning back then. The prowler hadn't, the prowler hadn't been invented yet. No one did it. It was all we did was smash weights and eat water burger or burger King or whatever. Um, and, and drink protein shakes to get as big as possible to lift as much. And, you know, to be 24 years old and have lifts like that and have that weight and to have a blood pressure like I had back then is crazy. But when you're in your 20s, you're not thinking about your future self. Like you're being a dickhead and you say, fuck that guy. Fuck that 42 year old guy. I'm going to YOLO. I'm going to do it for me now. And it's like, put it on the metabolic credit card. And

now it's like, man, if i could find a delorean and a flux capacitor and i could uh go back in time i i would slap the shit out of myself and i'd sit myself down and have a long coming to jesus talk about the reality of this is your future if you don't take care of it and i've been one of the lucky ones because i realized it early and took care of it so you know with know, with, with conditioning, I think it's very important to build up a good aerobic base, right? So there, there is, um, there's a phrase that's often talked about in the strength community called strength is the mother of all qualities. And so people who are really into lifting weights, they'll use that as a license of avoiding conditioning or aerobic work and then glorifying building of strength.

But they're taking that phrase out of context or they're not putting context to it. The original person who said that, he is like a speed and power development expert. expert. So he's really saying like, in order to get to the maximal levels of speed and power and velocity, you're going to have to build a sufficient amount of strength. Now, I own a general population gym now, none of my clients care about that. What they care about is feeling good and being strong enough. And they want to live long, healthy lives, disease free and without having a lot of injuries. So, so I came up with kind of a kind of an inverse side of that. And I said, Okay, well, if we're going to say strength is mother of all qualities for resistance training, then I'm going to come out with a statement that the aerobics is the mother of all qualities for

conditioning. Because without a good aerobic base, you, you are going to limit yourself on performance, even anaerobically. So, you know, if you, if you read a lot of Joel Jamison stuff, who's the guy who got me again, giving credit where it's due, he's the guy who got me thinking about this type of stuff. And he talks about aerobic reserves versus anaerobic reserves. And depending on what your out, your desired outcome is, you need to make sure that both of those are sufficient at a certain level. So for gen pop who don't care about being fast or power or any of that stuff, they can have a really high aerobic reserve and that's probably more beneficial for them. And if they tell me they want to go play flag football on the weekends, they want to do

some sport, cool. Now we can build an anaerobic reserve because now that's important but we have to respect the aerobic reserve to be able to get through an entire game without losing power production because a lot of team events aren't particularly power events they're power endurance events yeah right so that would be the difference between a guy throwing a discus or a shot put or a javelin, which is like can be high force and high velocity type stuff versus someone who, you know, needs to play 90 minutes in a soccer match where they're doing repeated sprints over and over. And if they don't have a well-developed aerobic base, then the first half they do really well. And the second half you see their speed slowing down

and that can be the the the deciding factor on whether you win a game or whether you lose the game and you see this a lot in like mixed martial arts where you see people yeah oh yeah yeah you see people like um you know like the Diaz brothers who do triathlons as an offseason you see it with people like um um fuck i don't know a lot of the new guys i like i still watch but i don't follow it that much but you see a lot of the new guys that have a lot of really good conditioning yeah and they can fight five rounds and they're not even breathing hard then you see the old school mentality the guys would like if i don't get you in the first two i'm i'm not gonna get you yeah that's right it's like that's why his fight with diaz the second time was so interesting

because mcgregor had to train for an entire year to be able to stand with him for five rounds because he realized i can't knock this guy out so i have to i have to last yeah yeah he's he's tough man he's a Stockton boy. You're not going to knock him out, man. That dude, you can hit him with a baseball bat to the face and he's just going to bleed and laugh at you. But that's the thing. It's, it's like, um, you know, if, if all you have is a round and a half out of five rounds, you're going to get choked out. And that goes, that goes to any sport. The person that can keep producing power, endurance over and over and over is typically the person who's going to win, whether that's gridiron football.

People look at gridiron football as, well, this is strictly an alactic power sport because every play only lasts a few seconds. Well, what if you're in a no-huddle offense and you've got to go over and over? You're not getting sufficient complete rest. And even the rest periods between plays aren't sufficient enough. If you don't have a good aerobic base, you're not going to, you're not going to keep being able to perform well. Absolutely. I mean, if you're playing wide receiver and you run a go route and you, and, and you don't get the ball, maybe it's incomplete. You you've just ran 50 yards at a full clip as fast as you can. You have to walk your way or jog your

way back to the huddle you're not going to be recovered from that for two minutes even if you have an amazing aerobic base from a sprint that of that speed but you got to get ready and you got to run fast again so it's it's certainly not just a lactic work when you think about in the context of how a game is actually played. Yeah. And when you look at sports specific positioning, if you're looking at O line D line, yeah, they may only have to, you know, hit and wrestle for five or six seconds. If it's, you know, if it's a passing team, like when, when Brady was with still with the Patriots,

they might have a 10 to 12 second play while they're guarding him. So he finds a receiver. And then you, have 30, 40 seconds to recover before you have to hit that person again. So if you march up the field, you better make sure that you can recover between those sessions. But when you look at the programming for like aerobic training for those guys versus a gen pop, it's completely different because you're not going to get a 350 pound offensive lineman to go out for a 5k jog that ain't gonna happen that wouldn't even be wise you just wear out that tissue that's right it would be way too much joint damage and and deceleration things like that so what's more practical for them is to do things like you you know, driving off and hitting and driving a pad

or driving a prowler for five seconds, resting for 45, hitting it again. The first few minutes of that, yeah, that's going to be a big anaerobic component. But if you do that over, say, 30 minutes, that's massively aerobic in a global sense. So I think there needs to be more training like that. If we look at gen pop, for them, usually it's the lowest hanging fruit. They don't move well. They don't have good body awareness. So just standard steady state, low intensity cardio is probably good for them. low that they have to do a large volume of it. So if someone's time poor, it's not practical. So what we'll do is we'll say, okay, how much time do you have to commit to this? And if they can get up and they can go out for a 60-minute walk in the morning, great. Now that walk, once they adapt to that, you're going to have to pick the pace up a

little bit so we have to move them into more of a jog or run or put them on the rower put them on an aerodyne and we've got to get their heart rate up to a level we like somewhere around 70 70 percent of heart rate max yeah because that's at about the point where fat oxidation kind of starts to drop and carbohydrate oxidation starts to go up and so we're working these systems in order to get them to burn fat in a more efficient way. And then as they get more fit and they raise their VO2 max, their maximum heart rate goes up, resting heart rate goes down. And now we just keep progressing to go to harder and harder conditioning until they've gotten to where we need them to be. And then we don't have to focus on that. And we just focus on training or weight lifting how many people would you say that you've trained genuinely when they

come to you and they they begin doing cardio in conjunction with their resistance training actually see improved anaerobic adaptations their lifts actually improve uh as a as a byproduct of beginning to see improvements in their aerobic health in their life pathway. Dude, I can't even tell you how many because it's not just about who I've trained, it's who the guys you've trained and the other 7,000 people that have come through Muscle Nerds programs that are using this stuff. And we get emails and texts all the time like, oh my God, we get emails and texts all the time. Like, Oh my God, you guys have made me again, like you said, shift my paradigm, uh, paradigm to, to understanding what I need to take care of. And all of them say, the minute I started doing cardio, I got better at weightlifting and I got

more fit. I can actually train longer and harder with less rest. I'm actually eating a lot more food now and I'm getting leaner. I feel better. I'm sleeping better. My guts aren't all destroyed when I eat, you know, my food and sensitivities are gone. And, um, so it's been a massive, a massive benefit for basically almost every, I would say every single person that we've run that through and what people need to understand with the aerobic stuff and with the conditioning, it doesn't take a long time to build up the aerobic system. You could take eight weeks to just really hammer it,

and then the drop-off from that is very low, so then you could maintain that with a couple of Tabata sessions a week, and you would maintain your VO2 max fairly well. Yeah. Was it Caldeets who said it was about 4% per week. That's about 2% or is it Mel SIF? I always get them mixed up because they've short first names and short second names, but I believe it was Cal deeds. Yeah. And I read that I think in his book, triphasic training. So I haven't been able to back that up, but I've talked to Mike Nelson about it and he was like, yeah, that seems like something that Cal would say. Cause they're quite good friends. Yeah.

about it and he was like yeah that seems like something that Cal would say because they're quite good friends yeah whether whether that is an actual factual number based on that's evidence you know guided I don't know but you know it might be evidence guided from his perspective of being a coach for a very very long time at a very high level yeah that'd be really hard to even test in in a like long-term clinical study But one thing I'll say for sure is after I did muscle nerves, I started running just one to two mile just base level jogs. And within four to six weeks of doing that two to three times a week max, I noticed massive improvements in my ability to recover set to set. And there certainly is an interference effect between aerobic work and anaerobic work,

but I don't think that that, uh, P I think that people don't even get close to that line. I think they're so afraid of going to that line that they don't even do cardio, but the lines a lot further away than, than people think. I think too, like just like talking to Mike Nelson and then, and then looking at some stuff from Andy Galpin, they reckon that number one, the interference effect is so small. It's probably not even a big deal. Like it's such a small percentage over a long time. It doesn't really matter too much. And realistically people, people are worried about the interference effect, but they don't train hard enough to worry about that anyways. So, you know, you, you, people say that they're, they're beast mode lifting and all that. No, you're not. You're not beast mode. I

mean, you like, from my perspective of how I train and how I was taught to train as a kid, most people train like massive pussies. They don't understand what hard, hard actual training is. And, you know, I'm a big history buff, especially physical culture history. And if we look back in time, in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, everyone did cardio, and they got perfectly massive. Even in the 50s, before people had access to steroids, they had amazing symmetry and physiques, and they were healthy, and they were all doing gymnastics and powerlifting, Olympic weightlifting and bodybuilding, they're very multidimensional and they were healthy and they were all doing gymnastics and powerlifting olympic weightlifting and bodybuilding they're very multi-dimensional and all the stuff that they did um and then it wasn't until you know you get to the 70s when ken dr ken cooper

started getting people to do a lot more of the aerobics and you know then it kind of the aerobics kind of took over from there um but i don't think the interference effect is really that big of a deal. And if you look at your needs analysis, is that something you need to worry about? If your blood pressure is 160 over 100, then you don't, who gives a shit about the interference effect? What you need to do is get your blood pressure under control, which you can do that easily with a few months of aerobic training. Once that's under control, then you can pull a lot of the conditioning out and now you don't need to worry about the interference effects. You're not really doing much anyways. Yeah. And you stay relatively fit and the degradation of that aerobic fitness goes down slow anyway, and even more slowly because

you're doing some type of exercise like resistance training, which while it's not aerobic in nature, it certainly helps mitigate how much of that you lose. So you have to go to the point of training hard before we move on to the last question. This is always an anecdote I love to bring up because people will always say, well, you can't just train hard and get results. Every gym has one guy who trains like an idiot with garbage form, but all he ever does is train hard as hell. And every guy who does that has some respectable amount of muscle. It may not look good. They may get hurt a lot. They may not last long. But even if you train like an idiot,

as long as you train hard, you will get something. And I think that there is something to be said for most people just playing not training hard. And I didn't want to, I didn't want to miss that before we move on to this last question, which is, you're right. You're right. I mean, the thing is it's, it's about, it's about balancing out how much hard training I can do and how much volume I need, because for a lot of people, they train with a lot of volume, but it's not hard, or they train really hard, but they don't have enough volume. So you've got to find that and that's individual for every person. But what we'll tell people is, and here's the thing, man, I've been so far out of the commercial gym space for so long, I've forgotten how terribly the general population lift, how they move, They don't have any plan. They just come

in and kind of just tinker around and just do things. Yeah. And it's painful to watch sometimes. Oh, it's so painful. We opened a week and a half ago and I'm just like, oh my God, watching some people lift and what they're doing. It's like, please let me, please let me help you. So here's the last thing that I have. And this was something that was really impactful for me going through this course. Again, I always bring up the course, guys, because for me as a coach and even just as a hobbyist, I think that educating yourself is one of the best things that you can do. It keeps things interesting. It keeps you exploring.

It helps you connect the dots. And something I'd never really thought much about as a coach, for my clients, or even just as a hobbyist with my own body was the importance of digestion, taking my time to eat, how that can contribute to a lot of different things. But as a trainer, I was always, you know, 10 minutes between each session, oh, I haven't eaten in six hours. So in 10 minutes, I'm going to run to the taqueria across the street, order a super burrito with double meat and eat it without even chewing. And never once did I think to myself, how important is chewing your food? And when Luke brought up the concept of you must chew your food, and I'll let you expand on that. indicative of everything he talks about, which is if you aren't willing to do this primary first step, which for digestion, that's chewing your food, you're going to miss out on everything down the road and you won't get the gain. So can you talk a little bit about that concept and then maybe just wrap us up with the importance of taking things slow and starting from the beginning?

Yeah. So, I mean, here's the thing, the digestive system, you have all of these different parts that need to be able to work well together. And for them to work well together, they all have to do their own job really well. So even the people think about chewing the food is kind of the first phase of digestion, but it's not really the first phase. It's a phallic phase, which lives in your brain. So people need to stop, get off your phone, get off your computer, get off whatever, no distractions, just enjoy your food, sit there and think about your food,

enjoy it, eat things you like that way. And then get calm because a lot of people they'll eat in like, like you said, a really rushed, really hectic state where they're already in a sympathetic state while they're unhinging their jaw and doing the original snake diet and just shoving a burrito down the throat instead of chewing it. Getting into that calm state makes your metabolism work a lot better. That's why, you know, parasympathetic state is the alternative, rest and digest the other side yeah rest and digest so i need to make sure that i'm in a calm state before i eat and then i'm cognizant of taking this is the one thing i've learned it takes smaller bites of food because then you can chew it more thoroughly

and the reason chewing is so important is because the whole theme of digestion assimilation is surface area. That's like a big resounding theme. So the more you thoroughly you chew your food, the more surface area your food has. So your gastric juices don't have to work so hard and they can break stuff down more completely. So if I'm getting my brain in the right thought process and I chew my food effectively, saliva mixes with your food, that attaches the taste receptors and tells your brain what's coming in. Now your stomach and your small intestines can get ready because they know what to expect. If I chew that food well, it goes into the stomach. I can start breaking that down with my hydrochloric acid, with pepsin,

salivary amylase that you get out of your mouth keeps breaking down carbohydrates in your gut then when it gets into that upper portion of your small intestine duodenum now the food's chewed up effectively now the pancreas their enzymes the pancreatic enzymes like lipase and trypsin chromotrypsin all that that can work better on the food the gallbladder can now break the fat down more effectively that makes pancreatic lipase work better and then those enzymes will also activate enterokinases which allows for the foods to finally get down in the smallest pieces possible to get put in the circulation so if you don't chew your food effectively and you don't eat in a calm state that eventually leads to things like food intolerances and allergies and an overactive immune system, which then raises your stress

and you start secreting more cortisol in order to calm some things down, which makes things worse over time. And then you get locked into a loop of bloating and gas and food intolerances and all sorts of other, you know, diarrhea, constipation, SIBO, and all these other things that happen to people. Yep. And I don't think it's any accident that a lot of the people who are the most rushed are experiencing these symptoms. And I love that as a finishing anecdote, because if you think about all the things we've talked about today, guys, we've talked about the importance of having your physiology aligned and your biometrics aligned, and that that might take time on the front end, but it'll give you better results. We've talked about doing the same with your aerobic system, getting that developed so that you have everything

aligned for better results with your anaerobic systems or all the various systems you're trying to train. And here again, with digestion, if you don't do the front end work to chew your food, you're going to struggle with the assimilation and the absorption and the fat metabolism. And that's really a lot of what I think is important about the work that you've done, Luke, is you've given people the opportunity to take things to that most fundamental level and grasp the why. So thank you so much for coming on, man.

It's always a pleasure to chat, and I'd love to chat more on another episode, certainly. But where can they find you? Where can they find your work and where can they learn more about these things if their interest has been piqued? Yeah, man. Um, yeah, it's been great being honest. Thanks for having me. And I'm always down for a chat. So if they want, if people want to see what we're all about on Instagram, muscle nerds, underscore health, you can find us there. Obviously on Facebook at MuscleNerds. Then if they want to inquire about any of our programming, info at MuscleNerds.net. If they want to look at, you know, online training or in-person training or, you know, consultations,

mentorships, we do all that stuff. Any of our like program design class, we just started another round. And, you know, I think you've been through how many times have you been through that course now? I when I bought the course in 2018 in the summer, I went through it twice in summer and fall. So for those of you who are listening, the course is 12 weeks and you get it kind of trickle fed to you week by week. At least that's how it was when I did it. fed to you week by week. At least that's how it was when I did it. And it's put together in such a way that you don't even get to those fundamental concepts of program design until you've gone through the anatomy, the physiology, the biochemistry, the stress. And so like by the first four weeks, I was like, dude, I know more about how physiology, how nutrition, how anatomy

and functional anatomy, which is really important, interact than I did from my degree, my undergraduate degree in just the first four weeks. And so I went through it the first 12 weeks. I went through it immediately after that. And I went through it again, I think, because you did an intake back to back. And then again, I think I've been through it now twice going on three. Yeah. So we, this is, this is, it's important to me also that people understand this. We, we are a, a student and client centric company.

We're not a money centric company. So when you buy the program design course, you get to go through it as many times as you need to, to understand the information. So it's now 2020. We just started in June. Your access is still open. So you're able to go in there and go through all the modules again. We just added more stuff to it. We added some business stuff into it. We've added more. We're actually, we've got a lot of videotapes of us, videotapes like it's 1980.

We've got a lot of digital content, I guess would be the non-grandpa way of saying it. We've got a lot of video of us lecturing that we're now uploading because we have a practical portion that everyone goes to that where we actually get that. It's kind of like meet the instructors and let's network and hang out. Let's talk about what you guys aren't understanding. Let's whiteboard a lot of stuff and and work on a lot of stuff in person. So that's all included in it. Now, COVID screwed that up for us for the rest of 2020. So what we've done to make up for it is we're actually uploading a bunch of lectures that we've already previously recorded. So it's almost like being at the practical. But you can do it in your home and your underwear and all that.

So we keep we keep adding to it, but you can do it in your home and your underwear and all that. So we keep, we keep adding to it, but you only pay for it one time. And then you're, you're basically in it for life if you want to. You just keep going through until you, you feel like you don't, like you've gotten, you've squeezed everything out. And then once you feel like you've squeezed everything out, guess what? Oh shit. They just add another module. What the hell's going on? Nobody does that. And it really, it really is loaded guys. Like just add another module. What the hell's going on? Nobody does that. And it really, it really is loaded guys. Like for, for, to put it in perspective, I would train clients every day and I would come home and I would sit in front of my fish tank and listen to

the lectures and take notes. And, um, I filled up three spiral bound notebooks, uh, from that one course. And, and the, and what's nice about it is it's not, hey, here's one module, and this is an hour. There's, you know, for those of you who like to really dive deep, 30, 45, an hour and five minute modules, or lectures inside of each module, several, several lectures. And there's so much to dive into and understand. And because it's trickle fed, you get the chance to really absorb it and then tie it into the next concept. So many coaches ask what I've done for continuing education. This one is a course that I recommend thoroughly and regularly. So Luke, thank you so much again for coming on guys. Check Luke's workout, check muscle nerds out. You won't be

sorry. And we'll have you on again soon, man. Thank you again. Yes, sir. Thank you very much, Danny. Appreciate it. So guys, there you have it. The man, the myth, the legend, Luke Lehman himself. Again, check him out on Instagram at Muscle Nerds Health. Do check out Muscle Nerds courses in general. I did their foundational program design course, and I thought it was fantastic. I learned a tremendous amount about everything from human anatomy all the way up to the most intricate concepts in physiology. Luke really, really, really knows what he's talking about. And he is the man behind some of the fitness professionals, most intelligent people. And he's a good dude.

So at the very, very core of it, in a space full of bullshitters and charlatans, Luke is a straight shooter. He's a good dude and he's as smart as they come. So thanks again to Luke for coming on. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it. Tag me, tag Muscle Nerds. Get it out there. Let's help people continue to grow and educate themselves in this space so they can take full control of their health.

Have a good one.