Mark Bell's Power Project - Keys to Prepare and Perform Like a Professional Athlete - Joel Jamieson || MBPP Ep. 858

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Joel Jamieson, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about  how Joel prep's his fighters and the extremely interesting world of peptides. Follow Joel on IG: https://www.instagram.com/coachjoeljamieson/ Joel's 8 Week's Out Program: https://www.8weeksout.com/ New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWER20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz Stamps: 00:00 - Joel's background 02:59 - Thoughts on Nasal breathing 05:26 - Endurance training 12:07 - Importance of Conditioning training. 15:16 - Joel's training model. 18:31 - Fixing heart rate & breath problem 20:02 - Use of heart rate Monitors 21:21 - Training for quality not quantity 25:28 - Bigger vs.Smaller athlete's breathing techniques 28:01 - Zone 2 Cardio benefits 30:48 - Thoughts on PEDs 32:52 - Workout Recovery tools. 35:17 - Consistency is the KEY 36:49 - Impact of Sleep, Travel & Jet Lag 38:58 - HRV analysis 42:10 - HRV cut-off Values. 49:40 - Training people with breathing & sleeping problems. 54:47 - Belly vs. chest breathing. 55:42 - Thoughts on MORPHEUS. 57:17 - HRV+ - HRV boost supplement 1:00:40 - Joel's diet routine 1:06:09 - Metabolic Analysis 1:07:54 - Is it good to avoid certain foods 1:10:47 - Food Sensitivity tests. 1:13:57 - Foods that lowers LDL 1:15:06 - Good Genes & healthy habits for longevity 1:16:36 - ApoB explained 1:20:14 - Fasting & Mitochondrial Health 1:25:10 - Caloric restriction. 1:28:27 - All about Metabolic Optimization 1:30:27 - Muscle mass, strength & longevity 1:33:28 - Avoid rebounding after fasting 1:37:43 - Different types of Peptides 1:45:37 - Who needs Peptides 1:47:27 - Impact of peptide on HRV 1:50:51 - Achilles tendon clinical trials 1:51:30 - Benefits of injectable L-Carnitine 1:57:50 - Side effects of L-Carnitine 2:00:43 - Losing Stubborn Fat 2:02:00 - Peptides for sleep 2:08:20 - Contrast therapy for performance longevity 2:11:17 - Experience with Mighty Mouse & Matt Hume 2:18:44 - Way to connect with Joel. 2:19:04 - Smelly's tip 2:19:30 - Outro #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

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Again, that's at merrickhealthalth.com slash PowerProject. At checkout, enter promo code PowerProject to save $101 off that entire panel. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Don't give in to the peer pressure. Zip phase is a classic, man. Remember my mom would give this to me before soccer games and shit. You know what I mean? It's classic.

All right. Goddamn peer pressure. Like now I'm going to be the only one without that. I don't want to look weird. So. So what's been going on? It's been a while since you've been on the show. Things changed.

I don't know. What do you got going on? Lots changed, right? It's been COVID. Gym closed down. Moved to Hawaii. Moved to Hawaii? Moved to Hawaii for the most part.

That's amazing. It is amazing. I love it out there. Is it like hard to like be in Hawaii and the most part that's amazing it is amazing I love it out there is it like hard to like be in Hawaii and not do much or is it dope it's amazing just to be there

in general I mean it's 82 to 84 every day 72 to 74 every night somewhere in that range I'm out in the

North Shore of Oahu which is where all the world class surfing is so I live in a stretch called the 7 Mile Miracle it's just this 7 mile stretch of incredible beaches and surf breaks,

and it's really hard to beat. That's pretty awesome. Especially this time of year. And you got there from being a trainer, coach? Yeah, so actually the NSCA, of all things, invited me out there to a talk in Honolulu. I'd never been to Honolulu before. I went out there, and I was like,

this place is like a tourist trap. I was not that into it because it just kind of felt like a city on an island. And then I decided to go up and fly a glider on the North Shore, which is the other end of the island where all the surfing is. And I wanted to see that area anyway.

Went up to the North Shore and I was like, holy shit, this place is amazing. And it was a very different world than Honolulu and Waikiki. They call it the country. It's their version of the country at least. And it was a very different world than honolulu and waikiki it's they call it the country it's it's their version of the country at least and it was just a really beautiful place and the beaches were amazing the people were great the food was awesome so i kind of just started going back more and more and every time i went back i'm like why would i leave here

and i just kept staying longer and longer and and uh when covid hit i spent months out there and just kind of decided this is the new home. This is where I want to spend most of my life. So I spend a good amount of time out there and moving there more and more, you know, as we speak, looking for a house to buy out there. Nice. Leaving here shortly for the winter, and yeah, I love it out there. So last time I had you on the show, I think I may have asked you about nasal breathing, or it may have been like just conversation that we had back and forth had back and forth. Have your thoughts changed at all about like the practice of nasal breathing? Do you think it's like an equal net positive for people? I think the biggest thing is people need to learn how to control their energy, right? And a lot of that happens through breathing. As we need to

produce more energy, we breathe faster and our respiration goes up and we become more and more anaerobic as we go higher up. But you don't want to mismatch how much energy you need to produce versus how much you are producing. And I call this dynamic energy control. It's just managing your energy and being conscious about doing that. I think what breathing through your nose does is makes you get as much energy as you can before you start to increase that up to a higher plane, I guess you will. So I think it's just really good for controlling your energy

in a very productive and efficient way. Obviously, you don't want to nasal breathe at 180 beats per minute because you can't do it. But you also don't want to mouth breathe at 110, 120 beats per minute because you don't need it. So I think it's a really good tool for just managing that control aspect and teaching yourself that you don't necessarily have to ramp up your energy production until you actually need that.

So efficiency. Efficiency, exactly. It's one thing in combat sports a lot, right? One of the things you find out is conditioning isn't always the guy who's the best shape. What I mean by that is I could test VO2 max, I could test lactate threshold, I could test all these things, and some guy

might look really amazing in the gym, and then he goes out in the fight and he gases out. Well, why did he gas out? Because he burned out his energy in an inefficient way. He was super nervous. His adrenaline shot through the roof, and he gassed himself out, right? Like he got the anxiety factor, and it just overcame him. And he was way too tense and threw wild punches and just was very inefficient with his energy. You need to learn how to control that anxiety, and you need to learn how to control your energy and manage your energy efficiently.

So the guys that have more experience, DJ is perfect at this. He goes out there. He looks calm. Now, he's not calm. He's in the middle of a fight in front of a lot of people, so he's clearly not just calm, but he's very aware of what he can and can't do in terms of he can't throw punches for five minutes straight. He's going to gouge himself out. He doesn't do that. So I think a lot of it is just learning how to control your responses.

And I think when you're forced to breathe through the nose, you're learning how to do that. You're learning how to control your energy, and you're controlling that sympathetic nervous system and trying to get it where it needs to be rather than drive it to the roof, which is going to produce more energy but come at the expense of fatigue. Speaking of kind of energies, and when you mentioned energy, but come at the expense of fatigue. Speaking of kind of energies, and when you mentioned DJ, you're talking about Mighty Mouse Johnson. Yeah, Demetrius Johnson. You trained for a really long time.

We've heard people say that a lot of times people that are real muscular, they're going to gas out earlier. What have you seen with this? And does it all just kind of depend on how the person trains? And would it even depend on how the person acquired their muscle mass? So let's say maybe potentially a natural athlete versus one that maybe is using performance enhancing drugs. Yeah. I mean, look, heavyweights gas out a lot faster than lightweights, right? I mean, there's no denying that. How many heavyweight fights do we see when they're gassed out in the first five minutes.

So in general. And you're like, oh, like what's going to happen in this thing? And just kind of hang all over each other the rest of the time? I mean, look, the reality is the bigger you are, the more mass you have, the more energy it takes to move it around. And so the harder it is to move it around for a longer period of time without becoming more and more anaerobic. So the smaller you are.

Whether you're fat or muscular. it doesn't matter, right? You just, the more energy it takes to move, the more likely you are to reach fatigue because some of the energy starts coming from the anaerobic side. So bigger people are always going to have less endurance, but they can produce more force and power. I mean, if a heavyweight hit a flyweight in the face, it wouldn't go very well for the flyweight.

But, you know, all things being equal, of course, that's very trainable within reason, right? We can never probably take someone who's 280 pounds and have them run a marathon at any reasonable pace. It could be highly impressive. But we can train people's endurance significantly because we can shift how their body creates energy from a more anaerobic state to a more aerobic state. We can teach them to be more efficient with their movements. We can teach them better techniques so that it takes less energy to move and to do those things. And we can build this ability to increase your endurance significantly from where you might start. So it's hugely variable. I mean, everyone's got different

muscle fiber composition. Everyone's got different capacity of their heart. They've got different capacity of their lungs. They've got different capacity of their lungs. They've got different amounts of mitochondria and all these things that get built over time. So it's independent of biocysors genetics obviously that play a role. But there's a lot of trainability in that side of things. I would say there's more trainability

in the aerobic and the endurance conditioning than there is in the strength and power side. I think you're more limited by genetics in the strength and power side because you're limited somewhat by, you know, fiber insertion and fast twitch fibers and all sorts of things that are pretty heritable and trainable, but not quite as trainable as I would say the aerobic side, just because there's so many things we can improve on that end of things. And, you know, the interesting thing is like when I started, cause I've been doing jujitsu for almost seven years now.

And when I learned about focusing on nasal breathing, I read the book The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown and he talked about it there. When I started doing it in practice, initially it was something I had to think about a lot. But over time, it kind of – I mean I don't know if I just put too much importance on it. But it kind of turned into a cheat code for me because I used to gas out quickly. But when I started focusing on that, it's like my endurance got better. And then I was just able to roll with anyone pretty much nasal until I chose to pick up the pace. And then by that time, their mouth is already open. And then when I choose to pick up the pace, if I do need to move faster, I can breathe through my nose and out through my mouth.

But it's like there's way more control to it. There's control. It's way more control. that's what i'm saying you are by forcing yourself to breathe through your nose you're controlling your energy expenditure because you can only go a certain pace through purely nasal breathing and a lot of times what you'll find is if you roll someone who's if you roll someone who's like a high level black belt or really what you're like they're they're not putting that much energy into it because they don't have to yeah they can kick your ass without really trying that hard. So they're just kind of relaxed and they're calm and you're just tight and tense and getting

your ass handed to you. It's that ability to be really calm and still be effective that I think you're reinforcing by not breathing through your mouth. You're breathing through your nose. It's keeping you in that calmer state, which means you're using less energy anaerobically, much less, and you can maintain it a lot longer. So it's control and awareness of what your body is doing. And there's one thing I did notice this, and I don't know if they even thought about it when they were doing it.

But guys, if you've watched Hadra Gracie roll, if you've watched this guy, Kenan Duarte, there are certain high-level black belts that you'll see their mouth open immediately even though they're still high-level. But there are some that are really good where they just look so chill. It's like they don't even look like they're working when they're rolling with you. And even when they're rolling with like world-class athletes where it's just like, God damn, like they have control over their breathing. Yeah. And they don't even have to be well, like, you know, Matt Hume, who we were talking about, to me, he's the best MMA coach of all time, but he's absolutely phenomenal on the ground.

And he was really kind of one of the early catch wrestling guys and trained Josh Barnett and Mighty Mouse Johnson, obviously, a bunch of guys. And Matt would take quite a bit of time off. Maybe he was injured or he was traveling. He could come back and he could roll somebody who had been training nonstop and Matt would just crush him. Even though he was not in what you'd call training shape

because he hadn't been training, he was just so efficient in his technique and so relaxed. It didn't matter what kind of shape the other person was in because Matt would just use his leverage. He would use his technique, and he would frustrate you and get you out of your game and kick your ass. I watched him take on guys like Rich Franklin who were 30, 40 pounds bigger than him,

and he would roll them up like they were pretzels and just dismantle them. And it's just because he's so good at what he does. He's so calm and so smooth and so fluid and has such technique that he can just toy with you and then you'd watch the other person get frustrated. I mean, more than once, this is a real thing, I would come out of my gym and I would see somebody,

like, I will throw George Grigiel under the bus. And George is a great guy, a black belt friend of Rich Franklin's. I came out of the gym one day and George was crying on the bus. And George is a great guy, a black belt friend of Rich Franklin's. I came out of the gym one day and George was crying on the curb. Like literally hands kind of like, you know, in the fetal position, practically on the curb.

Like, George, what's wrong? I'm thinking he got injured or like family died, like something. He's like, I suck. I'm so bad. I'm shit. He just rolled with Matt. And Matt had just destroyed him

and kind of rocked his identity of like, I'm shit. He just rolled Matt. And Matt had just destroyed him. And it kind of rocked his identity of like, I'm a high-level black belt, and I just got my ass handed to me by this guy in his 50s or 40s, whatever Matt was at the time, right? And it's just Matt is that good. And he would take guys who were black belts and make them feel like they were white belts or just had no clue what they were doing.

And that's just what you see when you have that level of skill disparity. You take someone who's that good, and Matt did that shit all the time. It was entertaining to watch. I mean, Chris Lieben and Rich Franklin and George. I mean, George is definitely not alone now. Matt beat the shit out of a lot of really high-level guys, and I was there to kind of watch it and laugh. I'd be like, oh, you sparred with Matt yet?

He's like, no. I'm like, let me know when you do. I'll come and watch it. It's always entertaining. Wow. How big of a problem is conditioning sometimes? I mean, obviously these guys are really skilled, and we're talking about efficiency.

So I'm sure a lot of them end up having tons of efficiency. But how big is the conditioning part of MMA? It seems like it's almost everything. It is everything. So really, here's the thing. Everyone knows what strength is, right? Strength is how many times, how much can I lift

or how many reps can I get. That's strength. People know strength. Okay, what's power, right? What's my vertical jump? What's my 10-yard sprint or whatever? We know what power looks like. But when you talk about conditioning,

people have different ways of thinking about it. You know when you see it, but how do you define it? And the way that I tend to look at it is how effectively can you use your skill from the start to the finish of competition it's how can you use your fitness to do something right so that's a great way of looking at it because then you won't hopefully you won't within that hopefully you won't go too far outside of that like there's no reason for you to run a marathon if you're doing these five minute fights probably yeah so i would say we can talk about fitness is like having the tools so fitness is like having a high vo2 for a fighter fitness is

having mobility and having strength these are all fitness qualities but you still have to be able to use those fitness qualities to do something in fighting context it's you know the actual combat so i'd say it's like okay if i want to build a house i have to have tools and i have to have the materials i have to have all these things but it doesn't mean i i want to build a house i have to have tools and i have to have the materials and i have to have all these things but it doesn't mean i know how to build a house i still have to learn how to actually build a damn house that's what conditioning really is to me i can have high vo2 i can have good muscle strength i can have good mobility and movement if i don't know how to put those pieces together within the context of a fight then my condition is going to be shitty

and i'm not going to be able to use my skills very effectively. I'm going to gas out. In a sport like MMA where you're talking a five minute round, if you gas out, your skills don't mean anything because you don't have the energy, you don't have the capacity to use them. If you watch MMA, watch combat sports long enough, people gas out in world championship fights. People gas out in

two rounds sometimes in world championships. Conor McGregor gassed out and got his ass handed to him towards the end of his career more than than once and conditioning really is a huge part because of the nature of mma it's it's a sport where you get tired if the guys that guy's not as tired as you you're in big trouble right so it's a huge piece of it and i think when we were first getting into combat sports we were in i was doing a lot of with with Pride. They were a 10-minute round. So you had 10 straight minutes. And this is really interesting, I think, because when you have 10 minutes, your pacing is different. And a lot of the Pride guys came over to the UFC when Pride collapsed, and now it's three fives.

And Pride guys lost. And you'd be like, well, why would a Pride guy lose if he was used to a 10-minute round? And this is a five-minute round. It should be easier, you would think. But it's because the pacing was very different you you pace yourself first three four minutes didn't matter it didn't matter as much right and then boom the round's over so the pacing of a 10 minute round is a very different thing from a five minute round so a lot of conditioning comes down to that it comes down to pacing using the energy and using the fitness tools you have effectively

because again it's not always the best, most fit person wins. It's the one who can use that fitness the most effectively within the fight to make sure they can use their skills before they get tired and gas out and do something stupid. How do you get it to translate over into the actual ring or onto the actual mat? Because in the gym, there's so many options. There's so many options there's so many like ways of lifting um and we've had uh people on the show before say like a lot of times it doesn't transfer over but what have you seen so the way i look at it is you know the fight itself is always the goal right these guys aren't getting paid to lift weights they're not getting paid to

run or bike or whatever right they're getting paid to use their skills in the fight. And my job is to make sure they can do that. So are there aspects that I can do outside of their training to make them better so that they can then have more conditioning in the ring? And the answer is, yeah, the way that we do it is we build fitness outside of the sport, right? So we build their aerobic capacity. We build their VO2 max, like I'm talking about. We build their strength.

We build the mobility. We build the tools, but you still have to use the sport itself to be the thing that turns that into an effective use of conditioning. So what I would say is in our training model, the further out from fight, we're building skills. We're building strength, mobility. We're looking at weak points. Where is the athlete good? Where are they not so good? What areas of athleticism do we have to build?

And that's what we can use weightlifting for. That's what we can use running or biking or any form of aerobic and metabolic conditioning. We can use a variety of tools. Then when we get closer and closer to the fight, the training itself, the MMA training, has to be the primary conditioning tool. I'm not having guys run five miles leading to a fight

because they're not going to have the energy to train very effectively they're going to be tired from the five mile run and that run's not going to have as much direct transfer as sport itself and yeah what if uh their knee starts to flare up exactly run it's like you really made a big mistake yeah so during the run-up to the fight most of their conditioning work is going to be specific and it's going to be run by matt human in my case my case, in sparring, right? You guys have a lot of communication. Yeah, a lot of communication.

It's a team, right? And the thing that's missing in combat sports, you have an athlete who goes to this gym for boxing and this gym for wrestling and this gym for jiu-jitsu. There's no kind of central hub or coach overseeing it. That was very different with us. We had Matt. Matt ran everything. He's as good as there is. So, again, the closer we get to the fight, the more the actual training of the sport becomes the conditioning tool.

And my job at that point is injury management, prevention, make sure he doesn't lose strength, help him make weight, you know, recovery, that kind of stuff. So he's not coming over to my gym or she is not coming over for strength conditioning and doing some crazy two-and-a-half-hour strength conditioning workout and then going to spar at night, they would just have no energy left. They'd be more likely to get injured. They'd get fatigued, and it would take away from their actual sparring, which is where their conditioning is going to be developed leading up to a fight. I think it should be the same thing in football or team sport, any sport really. You develop fitness qualities and fitness capacities away from the competition.

The closer you get to that, the more the sport itself needs to become the primary way that you condition and train because you have to transfer those fitness abilities into the actual skill itself and your ability to use them so you know when you get close to a football season the conditioning is is running plays the conditioning is actually playing football it's it's not running a whole bunch of gashers and doing things that are not actual football. They need to be playing football to develop football conditioning. And I'm actually curious about this because there's probably athletes

that are listening with this specifically. But if you run into an athlete who's very inefficient with the way that they breathe when they're doing their sport or any type of conditioning, you can see that immediately. They just go, they're really inefficient. How is it that you first start helping that athlete deal with that?

And then also, because of the nature of the sports you're in, there's a lot of athletes with deviated septums who do have issues breathing through their nose, right? Does that cause a hurdle in terms of efficiency when breathing, or is that something that you just breathe through your mouth and you deal with it? No, I mean, if you can get it fixed, you should get it fixed. I think it can definitely make a difference.

There's multiple ways you can look at this, right? I tend to use heart rate as the way that I can give people feedback and buy out feedback to see if they're going harder than they need to. And you can look at nasal breathing as a way to augment that basically. So if you show someone their heart rate and they're doing a certain level of work output, you start to learn what they can generate at different levels of heart rate, right?

And you can train them to be more relaxed so they can bring the heart rate down. So while you might say, okay, we'll make sure they nasal breathe, that's my way of keeping them in a controlled state, I can use their heart rate as a way of doing the same thing. It's a way for them to be able to be aware

of what their heart rate is, how high they can go, how high they can't go, and manage that fatigue effectively. So whether you're talking about focusing on nasal breathing or you're focusing on hitting a certain heart rate, we need to give them tools to learn how to control that energy expenditure and control that output basically.

So there's multiple ways to do it. I use heart rate a lot, but I think nasal breathing is a good way to augment that as well. On that note, kind of like for athletes tracking heart rate when doing something like jujitsu or fighting what type of do you use

something like whoop do you use an aura ring I have a chest strap so I have a heart rate monitoring system that I built

we have a chest strap so the reality is sorry to anyone who's using Morpheus yes exactly train with Morpheus anyone who's using

an optical sensor so something that goes in the arm something that goes in the finger they're good at measuring things when you're walking around they're good at measuring whether anyone who's using an optical sensor, so something that goes in the arm, something that goes in the finger, they're good at measuring things when you're walking around. They're good at measuring whether or not you're sleeping

or not for the most part. But they're really shitty at measuring high intensity heart rates because they're measuring by sending a light basically through your skin and measuring your flexion back. And because of that, they have a hard time getting higher heart rates. So if you look at data from anything that's an optical sensor, meaning it goes through the skin, as soon as

your heart rate gets 140, 150, or if you're making rapid change direction movements, right? If you're sprinting and changing direction, you're throwing punches. Anytime you're doing this rapid type of movement, the accuracy goes out the window. It's very hard to get good, accurate data at higher heart rates through that type of sensor. So unfortunately, chest traps really are the way to get good data when you're training at higher intensities. There's no way around that. But yeah, that's the chest trap, the M7 that we use for training.

And there's just no way to get good, accurate data without a chest trap these days. And a heart rate and or something like nasal breathing is giving you like a governor giving you a tool with the athlete so that you can make sure they're just not like completely annihilating themselves absolutely you can set them in a target heart rate zone it's been said to me and said on the show before sometimes people are training way too lightly and they're also training way too hard. Do you kind of agree with that? Like sometimes people are going full throttle and pushing the heart rate maybe too high. And when they're supposed to kind of like relax a little bit, they're maybe way too relaxed.

Yeah. I mean, it depends on the person. Obviously, there's always the individual differences in the sport itself. I would say in general, people go harder than they. Obviously, there's always the individual differences. And the sport. The sport itself. I would say in general, people go harder than they need to, more often than they need to, because it's really about quality. I will say this. Training, performing is an effort in quality.

And I think people mistake volume for quality. They just think the more that they do or the harder that they go, the better they're going to get. But it really has to be quality repetition. So if I'm going to learn a skill, I need that skill repetition to be good quality skill or I just learn shitty habits, right? Everyone knows like if I'm going to golf or I'm going to, I don't know, throw a baseball, if I just throw 10 balls as hard as I can, am I going to really get better at throwing a baseball? Probably not as very effectively.

So when we talk about training, I really think the biggest problem that we have here is we just do a lot of training that's shitty quality because we just mistake volume for progress. And so I think it's more about how many quality repetitions you can get in, whether that's lifting weights, doing metabolic conditioning,

doing skill work. I think that's got to be the focus. And when you start to lose quality tremendously, you start to lose quality tremendously, you start to really drop off the map, you're just reinforcing bad motor patterns. You're reinforcing bad habits. And I think we see this a lot in MMA, right? And a good example of this is what do we see a lot of times when people get tired in a fight,

their reaction is to swing away and just wing at somebody, which is the stupidest thing you could do, right? If you are tired, do you really want to leave yourself vulnerable to get punched back? Or do you want to take a second and back off, conserve your energy, give yourself a chance to recover, and then go after somebody again, right?

We see people develop really bad habits of, I'm tired, my first instinct is like, okay, swing to the fences because I'm tired. That's literally the dumbest thing you could possibly do if you're really tired. But they've developed this habit because that's what the coaches are constantly yelling at them, right? As coaches, our first instinct is, you're tired? Go harder.

You're tired? Keep going. But see, right? We sit there and constantly reinforce this idea, the more tired you are, the harder you have to go. And don't get me wrong, there are certainly times when that's what you need to do. But we also need to be very conscious of, as we get more and more tired, our technique gets worse, and we need to be smart about it. And so that's where I think, again, good coaching and good conditioning is self-awareness and then reacting appropriately. So I think it depends on the person, obviously. But I think in general, you need to know when to go hard, and you need to know when to go light.

That's the most important light. That's the most important thing. That's the awareness factor that has to be coached. That is not something that we just know. We have to build that awareness through training and through good coaching so that when we're... And if the intensity is high, then you have to pay attention to the frequency. And if the intensity is high, you got to pay attention for how long you're really going to do that for in a given training session. Yeah. And when I talk, when I go high intensity, again, it's quality. So I think we, again, sacrifice quality for intensity. But our goal

should be as we drive up our heart rate and as we're more and more towards our limit, we should be focusing on technique as much as anything else. Because I think that's, again, the biggest thing that suffers is we go really hard, our technique goes to shit. It increases your risk of injury and it just, again, develops a bad habit of when I get tired, my technique is out the window

because I'm just trying to put in the effort. So I think you really focus on quality at all points in time, whether you're going hard, whether you're going easy or really anywhere in between and let that be more of the dictator of whether or not you're going to keep going. If your technique is just totally gone, are you really going to build mental toughness by just going even more or are you just going to build mental toughness by just going even more or you just have a shittier technique or injuries you know this makes me kind of curious about um the difference between bigger athletes and smaller athletes when it comes to general martial arts

because i know specifically within jujitsu big guys usually have the stigma of having bad technique because when they're in their lower belts they're able to barrel through things because they're so strong. But they have to end up working harder on building good technique because they're so strong. And when they're able to do that, then they're very dangerous, right? But when you were mentioning how bigger athletes also have an issue with breathing, I wonder, yeah, they have more muscle to move around, more to move around in general, but is that also because maybe they don't work on their breathing as much? Is there a tendency for bigger athletes to just kind of not work on their breathing versus the smaller athlete that has less mass to move around so they end up being better at breathing? I don't know that that many people work as much on breathing as they should to begin with, whether they're big or small. I think it is bigger consequences when you're bigger, right?

Yeah. I think that's probably more the case. I think breathing is still an area that people need to be more aware of and they can train a lot more. But again, if I'm huge and I'm having poor breathing and poor respiration, it's going to have a huge consequence for me because I've got so much more mass versus a smaller guy who can probably get away with it a little bit easier

just because they don't have so much mass to move around. The reason why I ask this is because, again, I've noticed such a big difference that I just can't shut up about nasal breathing. Because when I played soccer when I was younger, I was the guy who's like, I could sprint really fast, but I would tire out really fast because I didn't have a handle on breathing. So I had good intensity but low gas tank. And I always thought, oh, that's just because I'm big. But once I made that switch to focusing on nasal breathing during performance, it's like now I have the endurance that the smaller guys have.

So the difference is control. Nasal breathing is a tool for you to learn better control. So I don't know how much of it is nasal breathing itself. I'm not sure it plays a role. But a lot of it is just much better self-awareness and much better control of your energy. That's really what it is nasal breathing itself, I'm sure it plays a role, but a lot of it is just much better self-awareness and much better control of your energy.

That's really what it is. So you've learned how to control your energy more effectively and only go as hard as you need to because putting out more energy than you need to is not necessarily more productive. It's worse, right? Because you can't sustain it very long. So again, this is where I think good coaching

and awareness becomes such a key. You're teaching your body how much I can put out before I do have to start raising my heart rate and raising my breathing. Because there's a cost to doing that, and the cost is fatigue. The higher heart rates I go, the cost is fatigue. So I have to be aware, do I actually need that? And if you don't need it, then doing it is detrimental. How much can you get away with just kind of chilling in zone two cardio? Can you do quite a bit of that and end up being tremendously fit and well-conditioned?

I mean, yeah. Look, the less intensity you use, the more you can do of it. That's kind of the double-edged sword. Like the less intensity you're using, you have to do more. But the good thing is you can do more because it's less fatiguing. Now, you'll develop a big foundation or you can develop a potential there but you still have to use higher intensity work

along with it. If all you did was nothing but zone 2 cardio, you wouldn't be hitting the fast twitch muscle fibers, you wouldn't be hitting the respiratory system as much, you wouldn't be hitting the upper limits of VO2. So it shouldn't be an either or. I think we, for some reason, in fitness tend to default to, oh, intervals are good, or oh, zone two cardio is good.

They're both good, right? It's the dose and the frequency and the timing that matters. But you need a both. And you actually need the full range. You don't just need really low or really high. There's reasons to go through that whole spectrum of intensity and volumes. And it's depending on, it depends on the person,

what they need in general, you're going to do more lower intensity than high intensity work because you just can't recover from that much high intensity work as a general rule of thumb. Let's throw out, you know, generalities a couple of times a week is, is where you really want to get your heart rate up higher. You start doing considerably more than that and you're going to pay the price

in terms of fatigue and lack of recovery. even the best guys in the gym we're sparring twice a week driving heart rates up to the 90 percent above twice a week not really more than that maybe for a small window in a fight camp but really it's twice a week of pushing towards higher intensity limits and the rest of that is lower and more moderate because you just you can't really recover from three four five days of of true high intensity if really recover from three, four, five days of true high intensity. If you think you're doing high intensity five days a week, you're just not really doing high intensity because you couldn't sustain that very long. It makes a lot of sense. The strongest athletes I've ever seen didn't miss lifts. They like be really, really rare that

someone would miss a lift. I remember when Stan Efferding trained at Super Training, I saw him miss one lift, one particular bench, and then he ended up actually making that bench and then some when it came to game day. It's quality, right? It's quality. It's this. To me, it's this. It's how much volume can I get in of a really good quality.

That's the driver. And like I said, when you see guys like that, they put in the time of high-quality lifts and they do a lot of repetitions, but they're high-quality lifts. They don't miss every other set. They're not going for maxes they can't hit. They're doing a lot of quality work.

And that's the same way with, like I said, skill, metabolic work, strength. I just think it's how much high-quality work can you get in? And that's where you have to balance recovery and training and lifestyle and everything else so that you can maximize that. And that's where you have to balance, you know, recovery and training and lifestyle and everything else so that you can maximize that. And that's where drugs ultimately come in,

right? Performance enhancing drugs do one thing. Well, they do a lot of things, but. How long did it take us to get here to PEDs? About half an hour. Half an hour?

It's like time to draw dicks. You guys know that one? Time to draw dicks. You never heard this? No. So there was a, there was a game that was invented back in the 80s or something like this. It was kind of the first game where multiple people could be online and they could just draw and doodle.

It was like this weird game. Yeah. Right? And so basically it was launched and the first thing people would do when they'd go in this community is draw dicks. Let's go. This game didn't start in the 1980s. It go in this community is draw dicks. Let's go. This game didn't start in the 1980s. It started in the year A.D.

Exactly, exactly. It's been around for a long time. The question was always how long to draw dicks. So it's time to draw dicks. We used to talk about that in the gym. When we traveled through Europe, my son was like, hey. He's like, hey. He kept pointing to all the dicks that were drawn all over the place, everywhere we went. Exactly.

It's universal language, man. Yeah. For us, at least. I don't think women are drawing dicks, but we're drawing dicks. What are we talking about now? We're talking about dicks. P.D.s. P.D.s.

Oh, yeah, that's right. And dicks. But my point was the biggest thing they let you do is train more, right? So Louie had the famous thing, right? Like, oh, I've never seen a bottle of testosterone lift weights or whatever, something like that, right? It's true. It's, you know, the drugs themselves, you just take the drugs, you're not instantly better, but

you can train so much more and recover from so much more work that you get better as a result of that just sheer increase in volume. You can just train so much more and do more repetitions and you get more practice, you're going to improve your performance. So I think we need to recognize that, you know,

the more that you can train in high quality, the better you're going to get. And that's where we need to optimize the recovery regeneration so that we can train more. And I think that's what people miss. Lifestyle should be a way to drive more training, right? Like sleep is a huge piece of it,

right? Nutrition and stress management and regeneration tools. All of these tools are so you can train more, right? Nutrition and stress management and regeneration tools, all of these tools are so you can train more, right? They're not a way to train less. They're a way to train more if you do it effectively. Yeah, cold plunge and sauna

and people talking about eating properly, they're all tools to help you recover faster from the training. That's the goal, right? It's putting my work and then recover

so I can do it again. And that's where sleep is the number one thing, I would say, because it's where you're the most anabolic. It's where most energy is being driven

towards recovery and regeneration. It's where motor learning actually happens. So if your sleep's compromised, people don't realize this, when you do a skill, you're not like

instantly better, right? It's through sleep and through consolidation of those motor patterns and trimming those motor patterns and making those motor patterns more efficient. That happens when you're sleeping for a big piece of it, and then you go do the skill again, and boom, I'm better,

right? But if your sleep is compromised, that doesn't happen. You lose some of that training effect because that does not happen as you're sleeping, that ability to consolidate learning, motor learning. So sleep affects skill, which people don't necessarily think about. If I get two or three nights of shitty sleep,

my skill training is not going to have as much benefit. So sleep is a huge piece of it. Obviously nutrition, right? If I don't have the nutrients that I need to run through my metabolism and turn into different pieces of myself, then I don't have the recovery to get any better. I don't have the adaptation.

So that's a huge piece of it is nutrition. So stress management, right? If I go home, I'm stressed out of my mind, what am I doing? I'm, I'm burning up energy that I should be using for recovery and I'm using it on mental stress, right? So all those things matter. We actually did an interesting thing. We looked at our database of, of HRV, resting heart rate, training, all these sorts of things. And we looked at activity, we looked at our database of HRV, resting heart rate, training, all these sorts of things. And we looked at activity. We looked at a bunch of metrics. And we looked at people that got better over a period of time in their HRV and people that got worse.

The people that got better only did like 7,000 to 8,000 steps a day. The people that got worse did like 12,000, 15,000, 20,000. And their HRV, like their HRV score went up. So people that did less activity aside from training did fewer steps. Because if you go 20,000 steps a day less activity aside from training, did fewer steps. Because if you go 20,000 steps a day on top of your training, you don't have the energy

to recover as much. So what we found is like if you're training consistently, like 7,000 to 8,000 steps is better than like 10,000, 12,000, 15,000 steps because you have to conserve some energy for the recovery end of it.

So it's interesting. You have this finite pool of energy and how you use it matters tremendously. So this idea that just go 20,000 steps a day. No, train, get in your actual workout and then go 7,000 or 8,000, go a more reasonable amount. It's not just a step counting contest. What type of detail do you put into an athlete's sleep? Do you put a big importance on, okay, you want to try to sleep at the same time each night because you know some athletes are going to sleep at 10

and some nights 1 and they try to get the same hours. Timing is everything. Consistency, I just think in general, consistency matters so much. The biggest thing is the body gets more stressed, the less consistent it is. It's a fact.

The more your life is unpredictable, the more stress you're inherently under because the body doesn't know what's coming. And lack of predictability is itself somewhat of a stressor. So consistency is key. Going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time, eating the same foods habitually. Like when we were in a training camp, I would say that's one of the biggest things we stressed is we ate the same shit over and over again. The same programming.

It's very monotonous. And if you look at sports world in general, their training is monotonous as shit. It's boring. You don't want to surprise with your stomach bothering you. Yeah, you want to eat the same food. As soon as we'd go to a new city to train in the week up to the fight,

we'd find the food we were going to eat and we'd eat the exact same shit every day. You really want predictability in your training, in your lifestyle, because that breeds less stress in the body. And the body can adapt to the stress of training rather than dealing with all the other shit it has to adapt to. So nutritionally and sleep and everything, the more consistent you can make that, the more you're going to have the ability to adapt to training. Effectively, you will recover faster just because, like I said, you've got less other new shit to deal with. And also I'm just curious about this. When you have athletes that they now go to a different city because they're

going to fight, um, there's probably variability in their sleeping conditions. So how do you try to have that athlete have like we like similar temperature, all that type of shit. Do you go that, that deep into it? A hundred percent. I mean, even so far as if you're going to go East coast, you've got three shit. Do you go that, that deep into it? A hundred percent.

I mean, even so far as if you're going to go East coast, you've got three hours or if you're going to go somewhere else, we start sleeping and shifting our training towards that time zone before we go about a week out. So we'll start shifting, you know, when the meals are,

what time practices and training, uh, you know, what time the athlete's going to bed and waking up around that time zone change. So that when we get there, we can be a little bit closer. Okay. And then as soon as you get there, you want to establish those

patterns as fast as you can because you want to get in that routine. Like I said, the biggest thing, like I said, that makes athletes perform worse is the further you travel, right? The more out of your elements you are, the harder it is. Why do Seattle teams suck on the road a lot of times? Because they're traveling from Seattle to New York or Seattle. Like the further you have to go outside your normal area and the further you have to travel and jet lag, it screws you. So the more you can shift yourself before you go,

if you have the opportunity, the better. Just from what you said there, when you look at the NBA, where there are teams spread across the U.S. and teams have to travel to certain places, do certain teams have an advantageous location? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Like, do you know which one?

Like, do you know, like, which coast? I mean, it kind of depends on the divisions you're in, right? Part of Seattle's problem is their teams they play are far away. So they have to travel down to Texas. They have to travel down to Southern California. They have to travel around quite a bit. If you have a division you play in that's fairly close teams, it's not as big a deal.

If you have to travel far away for the divisional opponents, which is who you're going to play most of the time, it's just worse for you. But historically, you can look at teams, at least Seattle, so I've looked at it the most, but their record in the road is always somewhat shitty, just historically

because it's such a hard thing to do. I talked to a good friend of mine who's a baseball coach and he kind of said the same thing. He's like, the problem with Seattle is you're spending so much time far away from different time zones, and it's just hard. It's really hard. Especially in baseball, we have 162 games a year. It accumulates.

What have you found with heart rate variability? You're someone that's studied it for a long time, and I think you're one of the people that helped put it on the map. Yeah, I mean, look, to me it's the single best tool we have for two things. One is judging the direction our body is going in terms of are we making progress or are we under too much stress and we can't recover from it or we're starting to go down the wrong path. And really, to me, HRV is more important than trends. We like to look at it on a daily basis to look at recovery and what's going on. But the trends in HRV tell the most important story.

You can see the direction you're going. If I look at your HRV over the last seven days, I have a pretty good gauge of whether or not you're recovering well or whether or not you're not. You're starting to get too much stress on you. And then the second thing is if we look at just kind of your overall average HRV, that number tells us a lot about aerobic fitness. It tells us about your overall metabolic health. It tells us about your likelihood of disease, cardiovascular disease and strokes. It's a single number that gives us a very good overview of your health really. And there's a lot of research showing it correlates very well with, like I said, cardiovascular disease, survival from COVID even,

overall likelihood of diabetes and these different metabolic disorders. So as a single number, that average number that you have is a very important number for longevity and health and performance. And then looking at the trends, like I said, can help us make better decisions about, hey, Mark, like you're going downhill. Let's back off a little bit or let's look at why you're going downhill. Because the biggest thing you learn is a lot of times it's not the training. It's the recovery from that training that's the problem, right? So people have this idea like,

oh, I can't be overtraining. I'm not doing that much. Well, sure you can. If you can't recover from it, it doesn't matter how much you're doing. It matters how much you can recover from. And that's where sleep and all these things come into play.

You'll see two people that have different workloads, right? And maybe the higher workload guy is recovering just fine, but the lower workload person isn't, and because their lifestyle is shitty, right? If you're getting six hours night of sleep, they're stressed out of their mind outside of gym and their lifestyle, they're fighting with their significant other, they've got financial problems, their diet sucks. I mean, that impacts your ability to recover tremendously. And you wouldn't know that unless you have some sort of tool like HRV to see that. You might intuitively feel it.

But again, they kind of go, well, I'm not doing that much. I can't be overtrained. Well, you can be under-recovering. Put it that way. Yeah. What about just resting heart rate in general? Is that a good marker for people to look at, like on their Apple Watch and stuff like that? It is, actually.

I mean, resting heart rate and HRV are very well correlated, so a lower resting heart rate will be a higher HRV on average. So it's less reliable on a daily basis, but looking at kind of your overall baseline, resting heart rate is valuable. I would say your

average person for maximizing just kind of health longevity, like mid 50s, upper 50s, low 60s is probably what most people want to shoot for. For resting heart rate. For resting heart rate. It's a good kind of just general baseline. Now, again, that depends on sport and age and gender and all those sorts of things. But if you get yourself down to mid-50s, up through low 60s, that's a pretty decent range.

And HRV, they will correlate differently based on the system. But if you just have nothing, you don't want to measure HRV, you just want to measure heart rate, measure heart rate. It's still really valuable. I started, when you were talking about HRV, I started looking at my Oura Ring tracks and my 8-Sleep, the mattress we use tracks it. And I was curious, so with HRV,

sometimes I'll see a lower consistent number for a few days. Can we have a description of what it is exactly. It's your heart rate variability varying from what? Yeah, so that's a good discussion. So we think of heart rate, obviously we just talk about number of times it beats a minute. So we say, oh, my heart rate's 60. Okay, it beats 60 times a minute. But what's actually happening is your heart rate is constantly speeding up and slowing down over that course of a minute. And it's doing that basically influence primarily the rest of

what's called the parasympathetic nervous system. So we got to back up a little bit. You've got two systems that regulate energy production and regulate the body's just overall homeostasis, how it survives. One, people have heard of these, right? One is the fight or flight, right? That's the sympathetic nervous system that cranks up energy production and it drives catabolic processes to break energy down. So sympathetic system is inherently catabolic because it's producing lots of energy for you to go be active and do something stressful, right? The other hand, we have the parasympathetic nervous system and that's the anabolic side of things. And that shifts energy production more into an anabolic state where it's using energy resources produced

by this side to build something up, to build up muscle, to build up fat, to build proteins, to build. It's anabolic. At rest, we normally have most of the influence of that parasympathetic nervous system. But it doesn't just stay on. It's a pulse

and it cycles with our respiratory system, our breathing. So this is where breathing comes into it. During the exhale, our parasympathetic nervous system is on and influencing things. During the inhale, it shuts off. And so it's this constant pulse, right? And that means that our heart rate, as that parasympathetic nervous system turns on, our heart rate slows down because it's slowing down the heart rate. And as we do the opposite, we breathe in, our

heart rate is slightly speeding back up. So it's measuring the influence of that parasympathetic nervous system. The stronger that system is on, the more variability we're going to get in our heart rate. The stronger which system is on? The parasympathetic, the rest and digest recovery system, right?

So that's the anabolic system. When it's on, your heart rate slows down. Because again, the sympathetic system is speeding heart rate up. The parasympathetic system is slowing heart rate down. Is this why sometimes you might notice that some really high level athletes have the ability to just like kind of fall asleep anywhere? Yeah.

They just be like super chill and just like. Part of it is they tend to have higher HRV for sure. But so what is happening is over a period a period of time you're measuring hrv this is where hrv gets a little complicated because some systems ura and whoop they're just kind of measuring hrv in the background you don't really know when they're measuring it they're just kind of measuring it whether it's at sleep or daytime you don't really know the way that i prefer hrv to be measured is consistently in the morning and you actually take a measurement of HRV. The difference being this, if you were going to lose weight, would you say a better approach would be wake up every morning before I've eaten and weigh myself? Or would you just randomly step

on the scale throughout the day, right? Which would give you better numbers? You want to measure yourself in the morning, right? Because that's giving you a clear picture of where your body's at in a consistent basis. So sorry, quick question. So when people are using these things to track HRV, it's not taking an average of your full day HRV? Most of them are not. Most of them are. Most of them are measuring some period overnight, but some are measuring, like there's no like standardization here. They're all doing it somewhat differently. The problem is, again, if you're measuring at different points in time, then it just reflects what you just did. It's like, yeah, of course, I weigh more weight. I weigh way more. I just ate food. No shit. So yeah, my HRV is low because I

just did something active. So if you're just measuring throughout the day, you're just kind of getting the same information you get from looking at steps or looking at heart rate. You're not really getting anything too novel. But if you measure your HRV consistently at the same time, now I'm seeing, again, where's my weight going? Well, I'm seeing where's my HRV going if I measure it consistently. So I would call that active HRV where we have to measure it actively

and take time out of our day to do it. It's a little bit less convenient, but it gives us more context of what's happening. Passive HRV is like URA and Fitbit and whatever they're measuring in the background. You don't know when they're doing it. That's the problem. So it's harder to gauge a daily change.

So in those scenarios where you're looking at just, your URA is giving you a number every day, look at the trends, like the long-term trends. So if your long-term trend's increasing, that's probably something good. If your long-term trend's decreasing, that's probably not so good. But it's much harder to get something

from the day-to-day variation. It's hard to know what that really means. It could just mean you were active yesterday. It doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot more than that. Does the Morpheus thing that you did, like is that easy? Yeah, we measure every morning to get a standardized number. And it's a risk thing, right? It's a risk thing, yeah,

exactly. So we measure every morning and then you get, it's the equivalent of stepping on the scale every morning, which is something I advocate too. I think that's an important thing that's overlooked. I don't care if your goal is to lose weight. Yeah, I say it all the time. Yeah, I don't care if your goal is to lose weight. Stepping on the scale every morning teaches you something about what your body is doing, right?

It is valuable just from an awareness standpoint. And that's where I think all these tools, whether we're talking about HRV or resting heart rate or body weight, all of these things are tools for us to build better awareness of ourselves. And that awareness allows us to make better decisions. If you're not aware of something, it's not going to factor into your decisions. But if I started to see my scale weight changing, why? Am I eating more calories or eating too few calories?

Am I getting shittier sleep? Like what is causing this to happen? So I just think the more awareness you can have of your body the more you can make smart decisions and so you know that's something i started doing a lot as i decided to drop it away just just looking at my weight every single day and it became much more obvious to me why my weight was changing right like oh shit this is this is why i lose or gain weight like a couple days of shitty meals can kill a week of progress. And people don't know that until they step on the scale

and realize I've just gained all the weight back that I might have lost over the last five or six days. So I played a game with myself of how close can I keep my weight every day? I want to see how long can I go within one pound every morning. I made about 30 days, which is pretty damn hard, actually. To stay within one pound every single day is harder than you think. But it teaches you a lot about how the foods affect you, how stress affects you,

how sleep affects you, how training affects you. You really get to be more in tune with what your body actually does as it responds. So every morning I weigh myself, I measure my HRV, which I get resting heart rate, I track my sleep, and then it just tells me this much better picture about where my body's at, what it's doing.

I learn a lot more about how to fine-tune things is what it comes down to. So I think it's really underrated. People should weigh themselves every morning. It's valuable exercise. Yeah. I'm not cutting or anything, but I still do it just to make sure I'm within where I should be. I know the weight I should be at.

It's nice to also be able to kind of predict what you weigh. Yeah, it is. I think I'm like right here. And you go on and you're like, damn, I was super close. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, again, it's just becoming more in tune with how your body actually functions. It's that awareness. So, you know, I think it allows you to explore how do you respond to different foods or different dietary strategies?

How do you respond to different training? Am I gaining muscle or am I losing muscle? Like you can see all that just, you know, the scale and a mirror and some measurements, and you can have a really good gauge of, of what you're actually doing yourself, which I think people are lacking these days. They just kind of went full thousand steps. Cool. What does that mean? Right. It needs to be more of a big picture of what you're doing yourself and just how far you went. On the HRV thing, there's actually a few things, but the, one of the first things I want to ask about that is the way a person is just breathing through the day because we've had quite a few people come on the podcast and talk about like breathing and stuff but when you see someone you see this a

lot within um maybe bodybuilding and strength sports because the mass that some people need to carry around they end up breathing a lot through their mouth could that be something that is on the back end of things affecting their ability to recover? Absolutely. So, I mean, would you just tell them to just stop breathing through their mouth and just learn to breathe through their mouth or something? Yeah, I mean, you have to train it, right? Like you said, you have to train it. It's like anything else.

It's a habit. Breathing patterns are generally very habitual. It's like anything else. It's a pattern that you learn. It's a motor pattern. You have to train it. So if you want to help someone improve their respiratory capacity, you train it. Training fitness is a way to do that. Using nasal breathing as a feedback mechanism, using heart rate, you have to build those awarenesses of what they are and they aren't

doing and constantly reinforce that until they start to improve it. But yeah, if someone's not breathing very well, it affects their HIV dramatically, which affects their recovery. Have you noticed also maybe snoring with athletes that you work with? Is that something that you try to fix or is that something where you're just like, I mean, some people have sleep apnea and they naturally just breathe horribly when they sleep. How do you work on people's sleeping when it comes to their breathing and sleeping? Yeah. I mean, if they have an actual sleep apnea, you should try to get it treated. I mean, if they don't treat it, it's going to have a significant impact on their recovery.

So again, we use some of this data to see, you know, if someone's chronically under recovering or overtrained from what looks like a amount of training they shouldn't, then the question is always why. Breathing and sleep and those things are always where you start. And then you want to look, you know, everyone's a little bit different. I can't just say, you do this and it's going to work for you. It might not.

So you try different strategies. Sometimes literally just improving the room they're sleeping in makes a tremendous difference. And I've seen people who snore chronically fix their room and that goes away. Like what, adding a humidifier? Dark, making it dark, humidifier, temperature wise, quiet, all those things matter.

So the room that you sleep in is where you spend, what, a third of your life? If you don't optimize that or at least put some work into making that room a good sleeping room, it can have a huge impact over 30, 40, 50 years. Like even this morning, I hate leaf blowers. Leaf blowers are the goddamn worst thing. They fucking suck. Whoever invented leaf blowers needs to be shot because

I'm going to take you on a walk through Davis everywhere every morning I'm like how much how big of a problem are these leaves yeah

and I decided to put all these trees here it's the end of December who gives a shit about leaves but I was woken up this morning in a hotel by a fucking leaf blower

so I live in this house on the lake for a couple years and our neighbors i don't know if it's intentional or not but they would fucking have leaf blowers over like eight nine in the morning on saturdays which really pissed me off right it was the worst thing ever i couldn't do anything about it because they were assholes to begin with uh but i finally you know moved out of the neighborhood and I got eight acres and I had these landscapers. I hired the landscapers. The first thing they do is show up

in the early weekend. I'm like, God damn leaf blower. I literally open my window. I'm like, get the fuck out. So I hate leaf blowers. Andrew,

what are they called? They're like fake? Like they're extras? Oh, they're NPCs. NPCs. Yeah, they're NPCs. Yeah, exactly. Oh my God. Yeah, they're like fake, like they're extras. Oh, they're NPCs. NPCs. Yeah,

they're NPCs. Yeah, exactly. Oh my God. They're just, yeah, they're just NPCs that have leaf blowers all over you.

They just follow you specifically. That makes sense to me. That makes sense to me. I love it too. Like there's somebody that cues them too. There's someone that's like

three, two, one, go. And then like they're watching the response. Is it normal to be blowing leaves outside

of a hotel early morning in the end of December? Apparently. Where you are at. but anyway the the room that you sleep in is is so important yeah and it's something that people can you know chip some some blackout blinds uh you know a white noise machine my dad knows how much i hate leaf blowers so he sends me uh every once in a while he thinks it's the funniest thing he sends me it's like 10. It's on YouTube of just leaf blowing. And he's like, you could use this as white noise. No, that's the worst.

That's black. That's the worst noise ever. You'd be up all night. So I finally got, actually in my house, the worst thing is I got rid of the leaf blower, obviously, because I told him to get away. But now I've got a goddamn woodpecker. Six, seven in the morning, woodpecker is outside my door.

So now I'm working on figuring out how to get rid of that damn thing. Probably put some poison on the tree. Yeah, I mean, it's illegal, but maybe it happens. Yeah. But look, the room that you sleep in has the biggest impact.

So we start there, right? So if your bed's not very comfortable, if you don't have a good pillow that you sleep well on, if your blinds aren't very good and blind light. Make sure your significant other puts out too. Come on.

Whatever you got to do, right? Help you go to bed, right? Sucks you right out. So whatever you got to do, basically, sleep is such a big piece of it that you've got to really improve it if it's a problem. And for a lot of people, it is.

Just looking at our Morpheus data from thousands of users, sleep is the biggest thing we see being a problem. What you got going on over there, Andrew? I was going to ask, do you put an emphasis on belly breathing versus breathing up top in the shoulders, that sort of thing? Yeah, that's a long conversation.

There are better breathing patterns than others, certainly. Belly breathing itself is a bit overrated, but you want to get full respiration through the diaphragm. There's ways to train and prove that. There's whole train systems. If you guys want to learn, I mean, Brian McKenzie does a lot of this. Mike Robertson. Start blowing up balloons.

Blowing up balloons. Before you know it, you're going to be laying on your back blowing up balloons. A lot of that stuff is, you know, there's a lot to that. And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole, I think Mike Robertson and Bill Hartman and McKenzie and all these guys have tools and methods and training strategies that you can go down and do that. But everyone's going to breathe a little bit differently. You're going to walk a little bit differently. You're going to run a little bit differently.

There's slightly different breathing patterns that are going to be out there based on your body type and your shape and internal structures and all that stuff. Influence to some extent. Since you have so much data with Morpheus, how have you noticed, because I mean, within sports in general, a lot of athletes like smoking weed. So how have you noticed that effect? Maybe sleep or maybe recovery, negative, positive? What do you notice? In general, I think it's positive for people that need it. So if people that are generally kind of anxious, right, they have some level of anxiety or they have a hard time relaxing, it can make a big difference because it helps them shut off that anxiety and that stress response. So that could even help them, those specific types of people, with their sleep?

Sure. Okay. Because look, to go to sleep, what do you have to do? You have to shut off the sympathetic system and that parasympathetic system. You're also probably overstressing somebody if you tell them you can't do that. And they enjoy it, right? Sure. Yeah. Like I said, anything you can do at nighttime to help shut that sympathetic system off and relax is going to improve your sleep quality and your ability to go to sleep.

So people, again, naturally have a hard time relaxing, which tends to be a lot of people that smoke weed. Like why do they like smoking weed? Maybe it's because it's fun or whatever. A lot of times they are drawn to it because it helps them relax. It helps them cope. Like it's a stress coping mechanism when they feel like they're able to do that better

as a result. So in those people, it's going to have a benefit because they're able to shut off that anxiety and that stress response. If someone doesn't have any issues with it whatsoever, it's going to have less of a benefit for the most part. So it's hard to always say this is always good

and this is always bad. But I've seen basically in the athletes or in the people who have that kind of natural ADHD and anxiety and have a hard time dealing with that, then it can make a pretty big difference for them. There's a lot of give and take, right? Like there's 27 things you want someone to concentrate on to be the best in the world. And all right, well, this one thing is halfway screwed up a little bit. Yeah, and there's actually a supplement. I don't think it's out yet, but it's an HRV, quote-unquote, boosting supplement that I tried.

It did actually raise my HRV quite a bit. It's a cannabinoid system as part of what regulates HRV. It's really complicated. Do you know what it's called? Is it called Mind Bullet? I have some for you right here. No. It's like mode method

you can put show notes or something mode method mode method I believe what it's called but it's interesting I think it's actually

I think it's a company I know I think about it I think it's like HRV plus I should know this but I'll get you guys the name you can put it out there

but I measured my HRV to see if there you go HR HRV plus. See, that's what it is. So you got to be 18, huh? I mean, it's got legit. Because it works on. Yeah, so that's the HRV plus by mode and method.

Does it have like THC or something in it? It's got just some cannabinoids in there, I believe so. There you go, specific cannabinoids. Very interesting. Yeah, I was introduced to it by a friend who's been in the industry a long time, and they said, here, try this out. And honestly, whenever someone gives me something and says it's going to increase your HRV,

I'm incredibly skeptical because very few things will have a measurable impact on your HRV. But this one did, honestly. Magnesium, curcumin. Yeah, it's probably a combination of things, right? But it's something I tested out for about six weeks. My wife as well in both of us saw an increase. It plateaued, though I definitely saw it go up. It didn't go up indefinitely, obviously.

I wouldn't expect it to. But it went up, and it was noticeable, and it did improve sleep quality. And I did notice that I habituated to it fairly quickly, so I had to take a little bit more to get more of an effect. But it's kind of the one few supplements I've seen that had a noticeable increase in HMV. The biggest thing I think it did is sleep. It's really cool hearing you say that about weed though because a majority of people that I've asked – and I've seen as far as content on this and not like I'm pro or anti,

but within the sleep space, a majority of people are like, bad for your sleep, bad for your sleep, bad for your sleep. But in my head, I'm like, there has to be some people that is very beneficial. I think it's some people. Exactly. I think it's specific to the person. The problem is when we get into research, holy topic, when you look at research, it's giving you the average, right?

So if you look at a population or a subject group, it might be really beneficial for some people and maybe just nothing for other people. Or maybe it has a detrimental effect for some people. The average might be zero, but it doesn't mean there weren't some people in that study that saw a benefit. And there is something to be said for even a placebo is an effect. So if you think it calms you down, you think it benefits you, just that feeling of thinking that's doing something for you is a benefit in and of itself. So it's hard to make blanket statements like this never works, right? This always works.

It's just the human body is too complicated for that. We are two different individuals, different genetics, different environments over years. Our bodies are different. So I have a hard time ever saying this. This is great.

Everyone should take this. This is shit. No one should ever take it. Sometimes things work that you wouldn't expect to. And sometimes people have effects that, you know, I might not have, but they do. So I've seen, like I said, people that have specific issues with anxiety and stress. Yeah, we can calm them down. But maybe if you don't, then it doesn't have a good effect. It depends. We talked about recovery a bunch. We talked about sleep. We talked about your heart rate and all these different tools and things.

What have you noticed in terms of your food? Have you personally noticed any changes in the way that you deal with stress when you eat better or anything like that? Well, what does stress do, right? Stress makes you want to eat shitty food. One of the things that brings the sympathetic nervous system down is shitty food, basically. There's a reason that when we get stressed out, we eat poorly. So conversely, it's true, though. By eating healthier foods, we can help our body.

What do you think the mechanism is that might trigger that? It has to do with glucocorticoids and stress response and cortisol and all these things. We try to drive those things down by eating. It's just a reaction. Like literally a comfort food, huh? It's a real thing, yeah. Puts a little warm blanket on the situation. it is a real thing though as we become stressed we drive up cortisol and the way that we can bring that back down is by eating um and other glucose

cords but in general yeah your diet and nutrition and everything else is is hugely uh related to recovery obviously you see the leaf blower out there. You're not like, God damn, I need a chicken breast and some broccoli. I'm going to throw at him if I need to. But that's a bigger question. I think metabolism is something I've been digging into a lot lately because when most people think about metabolism, they think of it's how many calories I burn. Like if I ask them about metabolism, oh, it's how many calories I burn a day.

Okay, great. That's just the output, right? someone about metabolism, oh, it's how many calories I burn a day. Okay, great. That's just the output, right? So my metabolism, sure, it burns X amount of calories per day. But we step back and we think, what is metabolism really doing? And at the zoomed out, thin thousand foot view, metabolism is taking the foods that you eat and turning them into you. That's literally what it's doing. It sounds funny, but it's true. So when we eat food, right, we have...

You are what you eat. You are, but you have macromolecules, right? You've got your carbohydrates, your proteins, your fat, nucleic acids in foods. Yeah. And you have them in your body. Well, how does it get from an apple and a steak or whatever into my muscle and my glycogen? Metabolism. Metabolism is taking the foods, breaking them down into amino muscle and my glycogen metabolism metabolism is taking the foods

breaking them down into amino acids and glucose and this whole process of breaking things down and that's rebuilding them into you it's you know your protein you eat is what becomes protein in your muscle that's how it works and so in that whole process there's a lot of room for variation there's a lot of room for it to go really well and a lot of room for it to go really poorly and be very inefficient. So the foods that you eat are obviously the starting point and foods that are higher quality in nutrients and density and have different amino acid spectrums and different amounts of different sugars and carbohydrates. All these things will impact obviously how the body breaks them down and turns them into proteins that make up your body. But it starts with this understanding, again,

that the foods we eat have to go through metabolism to become us. And that's where sleep and training and nutrition, all of this impacts our metabolism's ability to do that. So if I'm eating shittier foods, it's harder for my body to convert those or it takes more work or we end up with less vitamins and minerals along the way. We end up with more bottlenecks, whatever, then our recovery is worse because we have less, we have more processing to do to get to the end result

of what we're trying to get to, which is proteins. And I've been doing a test called metabolomics lately with a lot of people. Metabolomics. So metabolomics looks at the energy-producing process. It looks at how your body breaks down and digests, carves proteins and fats, and then how it turns those into energy through the different processes, right?

Your body specifically? Yeah, each person, right? Wow. So you can do urine and or blood and plasma. And what I do is just urine. But it looks at basically how your body metabolizes food and then how it then turns those foods into energy. And, you know, takes them and turns them into energy and then uses the energy to build building blocks of us. It's really fascinating because what you find basically is different people based on genetics and environment and diet and everything else

have different bottlenecks, I guess you would say. So if you're lacking certain nutrients, this process might take a lot longer. It would be a lot slower. If your body is naturally digested towards or naturally shifted towards protein only or carbs or fats and you just eat a lot of one particular macronutrient, you'll be probably pretty good at digesting that, but probably not as good at the other side of things. So it's really fascinating to kind of go down this rabbit hole of seeing how each one of our metabolisms differs in our ability to process

foods and then use those foods effectively to build new proteins in our body. The biggest thing I realized when I started doing this is my food spectrum is not very wide. You are personally? Personally. I tend to not be very varied in my foods. I like to be habitual. I eat the same shit. I go in the same pattern.

So I'm very patterned in how I do things. It allows me to control things, but I realize I'm lacking probably in some nutrients, a lot of antioxidants. I don't like vegetables as much as probably I should. And I miss out in certain food groups as a result of that. And I see very specific patterns in myself that I'm lacking in. Somebody else who eats a ton of fruits and vegetables or eats a lot of fibrous foods that I don't necessarily get in some senses, they're going to have very different patterns of what their metabolism looks like. So it's been really

fascinating because we can take that metabolomics test and we can figure out, A, which foods should you probably eat more of? B, which foods should you probably eat less of? And then C, can we supplement some things if you're not going to eat those foods? Because in a perfect world, you wouldn't need supplements, right? You'd get all the foods you need from your diet.

Most people don't live in that perfect world. And so supplements can fill in that gap. But if you don't know which ones to take, you're just kind of throwing shit at a wall and hoping it meets a need. But you might not need that supplement. Is the test showing you like an efficiency of like how you took X amount of calories? Because we consume a certain amount of calories and then the body, I guess, kind of digests it and works through it and decides how much energy we're going to turn it into. through it and decides how much energy we're going to turn it into.

It's not like a measure. It's not like an exact measure of X input equals X output. But you can see the bottlenecks. Like I said, you can assume that if you have a lot of bottlenecks in the process, it's not going to be as efficient. So the efficiency comes largely from the mitochondria metabolizing

all these things into your system. And they call that basically metabolic efficiency. It's how much oxygen does it take to produce a given level of ATP. That's what metabolic efficiency is. And they find pretty big variances there. And the body can change and shift this, right?

What does DNP do, right? DNP is... People burn tons of fat. Yeah, why? Because of the mitochondria. Because it makes your body less efficient. Because it makes your metabolism have to take way more energy to put out a certain amount of energy.

So you end up burning way more energy in the process, and that energy just comes from your fat. So efficiency is a double-edged sword. The more efficient your metabolism is, the easier it is for you to put on muscle mass, but it can also be easier for you to build fat as well. So it's not necessarily like we want to be as efficient as possible. It kind of depends on what the goal is. But again, the bottom line here is each of us has differences in how we metabolize foods. And that impacts how we then turn those foods into energy and affects our health, affects our longevity, affects our performance, our recovery, our muscle growth, all those things. So I think everything starts with metabolism of foods.

And that's what we have to talk about. Not just the foods you eat, but how your body individually metabolizes those things. And that's where testing and these different tools come into play. Power Project family, hope you're having a good day. Now we've partnered with eight sleep mattresses because it's made a big difference for our recovery

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Just this general thing, because you hear some people who are like, oof, I find it so hard to digest red meat, or oof, when I eat certain vegetables, I get kind of effed up. Would it be a safe general idea that if a person slowly introduces and adds that food into their diet moderately, they'll become better at being able to metabolize it and turn it into energy? Or are there just certain foods that maybe some people from some populations generally should stay away from? I think there are certain foods that people should stay away from. They're just,

they have a sensitivity to them. They maybe don't have the enzymes. I mean, obviously at far end, you have like celiac and you have real conditions. And then you probably have things in between where people are not that far down to like a clinically diagnosed, but they're just sensitive to them and they just aren't going to react well to them. And then you've got some things that, like you said, you can become more habituated to as you do eat them. But there are a lot of differences in our metabolisms. There just are. Whether it's – it can come literally down to what your mother ate when you were in the womb.

I mean there are prenatal influences that are real and they're out there from how we digest foods to how we manage stress. Some of it goes back all the way towards, you know, our genetics, but also how we are shaped when we are fetuses. That literally can influence the foods that we are sensitive to, not sensitive to, you know, our heritage. All these things can influence it. So I'd say we're all very different. There are certain things that you might digest very well and I might have problems with and vice versa. And the only way to know is, again, awareness. Pay attention to how your body reacts. You can see that in HRV. You can see it in resting heart rate. You can see it in how you feel. You can see it in body composition. But being aware of the foods you're eating is the

only way to really kind of sort through that. And that's where there's a hole in the rabbit hole. We can go down. But that's where I think when people do stuff like keto or carnivore or whatever they cut out a lot of foods as a result right you cut out a lot of processed foods

and like I feel magically better maybe it's the keto carnivore and maybe it's the elimination of all the other shit that you're eating that you were sensitive to you know who knows

they both could have benefits regardless but I think there are definitely things that I will never digest particularly well and there are things that that I will never digest particularly well, and there are things that you will probably never digest particularly well.

If we eliminate those through whatever means we eliminate them, that can lead to positive health outcomes. Now, the expense of that could be maybe I'm missing some of the vitamins and minerals that those things could provide. So you could end up with deficiencies that are still better than the sensitivities you had before, but you still could be missing something

if you cut out entire food groups. What test or like, yeah, yeah, like which brands have that test that would actually help somebody be able to figure out, oh, like, you know, food allergy test or whatever. Are there certain ones that you think this is better or this is generally good for you? Most of these ones you have to go through a doctor

or some sort to get prescribed. so we offer one called the metabolomics by a couple different companies genova diagnostics is is one of them diagnostic solutions is another one so we have a couple tests that we offer that that we do yeah but generally speaking most of these tests you have to have prescribed by some kind of health care practitioner you can't usually go online and just what's your company uh so i have a supplement side of things called Precision Metabolics. Okay. And then we just do this test. It's a few hundred bucks.

It's not like, you know, $1,000. It's reasonably priced. But it gives you a report back that shows you, again, kind of how you break down the protein, carbs, and fats, which vitamins and minerals you're deficient in, where those vitamins and minerals deficiencies are impacting your ability to break down carbs, proteins, and fats. And then it'll make recommendations about food choices, supplements, and all that kind of stuff.

So it's really interesting, like I said. See if you can bring it up, Andrew. Try it. Do you— Look up OMX. OMX testing. What else do you guys do? Basically, we take that test, and then we can custom formulate supplements for people or make recommendations.

So we can take your results and say, hey, here's where you're deficient. That's the test we're using. That's what I love about you, man. You're into it. You're fucking in it. That's right. We can take basically the results of that test, and then we can custom formulate you a supplement that's got the exact dosages and ingredients and things that you need based on where you're deficient. Or if you don't want to go that route, we just say, hey, here's the foods you need to eat that are going to make you better, right?

So look, foods are the answer. You should always eat foods to solve your problems. But again, we live in a world with shitty food and we live in a world where it's pretty hard to get the diversity that we need and most people aren't going to. So you supplement where you have to based on your deficiencies.

Do you guys give any recommendations with training and stuff like that too or no? You can, right? We can certainly do that. It's not like a part of that. I understand. But you certainly can do that as well. Cool.

Have you ever heard of the company Routine? Mm-hmm. Is that similar? Somewhat similar, but their test is not nearly – I think their test is either like free or it's like 50 bucks. It's not the same level of diagnostic testing to see that. They're looking at these gross deficiencies which exist. We're looking at the actual process of metabolism.

It's a much more in-depth test. Our test costs more than their whole supplement does for a year just because they're not looking at things at the level of detail that we are. This test isn't something that just I do. Other people do this test. I didn't invent metabolomics. It's a whole thing that's been out there for a long time.

But healthcare practitioners are the ones that have to prescribe it, and most people don't have one that they can go get. So that's where we come in. I've got a couple of healthcare practitioners and a team where we can prescribe you the test and then help you interpret the results. What do you collect? Urine. That one's a urine sample.

Oh, okay. That's easy. It's a morning urine sample and then a test comes back a couple weeks later. It shows you where your body is breaking down these things effectively, where there are roadblocks and where you might need different foods to help eliminate those or resupplement

with them where you can't. You mentioned an over-the-counter supplement in the gym and you were talking about just lowering your LDL cholesterol. What are their, and I think you about just lowering like your LDL cholesterol. Like what are their, and I think you said it was what? Red rice yeast. Red rice yeast.

So the FDA tried to ban it to some extent because it does have a naturally occurring statin in it, but it is still available. So there's one called Cholestine that the cardiologist I've worked with recommended. It was used in some clinical studies and it worked. I tried it and dropped my LDL noticeably. Are there other things on the market that are super beneficial that are maybe a little bit more general that people might be kind of missing out on? Honestly, fiber.

Getting enough fiber and just eating a generally healthy diet is the best thing there. But there's big genetic ranges here like we talked about. My genes are shit when it comes to LDL. Like the reason my family dies in their 60s of cardiovascular disease and stroke is because we have – Both of your parents, right? Yeah, my mom had a stroke in her 60s. Then had to have – and then she had cardiovascular disease and then breast cancer. Like a lot of shit went wrong.

My dad's early 60s. My grandpa early 60s on both sides. So genetically, we're pretty screwed yeah i'm curious about that real just you know because we talk about like lifestyle habits a lot sure for individuals who are predisposed to that could adding in some cardiovascular work and good like people aren't i mean let's colestine yep i would wonder when it comes to that like you have healthy habits you're probably gonna even like you have healthy habits. You're probably going to, even though you have that, you're probably going to live a long time because of the simple habits that you have, right?

I mean, hopefully, yeah. Hopefully, yeah. But there's, again, the further outside normal genetics you are, the more you have to do, right? So my dad was normal body weight, worked out his entire life, didn't smoke, didn't drink. Heart attack. I think it was actually late 50s his first heart attack. Fuck. Like in 160s. My grandpa was 160 pounds.

Now, he did drink and smoke. So there's that on his side. My mom was 105 pounds. Didn't drink, didn't smoke. Normal body weight. She was a flight attendant. She walked miles on end nonstop and was active. So if you really get the shit in the genetic stick,

there's a lot you have to do to overcome it. I mean, on the other end of the side of that, you have people who live to be 100 to 110, right? They're called centenarians and super centenarians. Yeah. They don't – like they've studied them. Like they generally live a good, healthy life for the most part, but a lot of them don't actually. A lot of those people just kind of live normal lives and they just – they hit the genetic lottery. I hit the genetic opposite end of the lottery, right?

So there are certain things. But you do have some individuals in your – Yeah, my grandma. My grandma is the scythe from German that has pretty good genetics. She lived to be 86 and smoked and drank her whole damn life. Bad joke there, but let's keep going. And then have you gotten like your – I don't know all this stuff, but like the ApoB. Have you gotten all those different things tested?

Yeah, I'm pretty good in those areas. Yeah, so there's – I mean that's what's good nowadays is it is easier to get tests, right? People can go to InsightTracker. Can you maybe explain that a little bit since I don't know what the hell I'm talking about? ApoB is basically just a transport for our cholesterol more or less. And we look at ApoB as markers of just overall amounts of bad cholesterol in our body, which are somewhat related to what we eat, but there's lots of other factors that are outside of just what we eat because we make most of our own cholesterol.

But people are very different genetically in how their body does make cholesterol and how it turns into the plaque in our arteries that kills us, more or less. So you need basically a lot of plaque. You need stress, and you need inflammation, those three things. Or you need plaque-building ingredients like LDL. And you need stress and you need inflammation, those three things or you need plaque building ingredients like LDL

and you need stress, you need inflammation those three things over a long period of time kill us is ultimately what it comes down to or kill a third of the population which is a crazy number if you think about it so I do my best to manage stress effectively, I do my best to not let my body become chronically inflamed

or have inflammation as it's called. And then I train, obviously, to build as much mitochondrial health and VO2 max and aerobic capacity. And then I try to eat well. So I do everything I can. But, you know, hopefully we'll find out in 20 years where I'm at. I'm 43 right now. And we'll see.

It's much easier to do the right things in your 40s. And then hopefully that pays off in your 60s or 70s. But honestly, by then, I think the medicine will have advanced quite a bit. If we can eventually get to the point where we can reverse plaque buildup, then you'll increase lifespan dramatically. Yeah, we're kind of not there yet, huh? Like with anything real definitive. It seems like people have anecdotal information, but there's not. Once you build the plaque, they don't really have a good way to get rid of it.

They have stents they can put in your heart. They can do stuff like that that can help, not your heart, but your arteries. All hell is going to break loose when they can figure that out. People are going to start eating like crazy. The best way to avoid aging diseases is to slow down aging. I mean, that's what it comes down to. And the best tools we have for slow down aging are training. Training and lifestyle are obviously the biggest things we can control.

And I'm certainly trying to control those things as best I can to live as long as possible. That's a big part of living in Hawaii. It's a much different lifestyle and much more relaxed. Yeah. Higher food quality and just sun exposure. And, you know, just you get the ability to be outside all year round and you're not stuck indoors. Like I hate being stuck indoors. I hate running on treadmills, but I'll go run on the trail.

You know, I love hiking and biking and being on the beach and getting in the water. I mean, all those things to me are very essential for living a longer life. And there's a reason people look this up. Hawaii people live on average about 10 years. I think it's like, depending on the year in the study, like seven to 10 years longer than someone in Mississippi because Hawaii is number one. So Hawaii is the longest date for life expectancy.

It's over 80 years old. And Mississippi is the worst, right? Yeah, 10 years, almost 10, 18 years, depending on which studies you look at. So think about that. Someone born in Mississippi versus someone born in Hawaii can live up to 10 years different on average. I mean, it's like 8 to 10, but it's a significant amount of difference because people in Hawaii

are more active. They have more community. They have better foods. They have less stress. They have just a beautiful paradise they live in. And people in Mississippi, no offense to Mississippi, but it's not a paradise. And they're obviously eating worse foods and there's just all sorts of things that go into these studies. But there's a reason that

people in Hawaii live longer. Yeah. I was curious about this. For yourself, what do you notice as far as maybe lifestyle factors that can be beneficial towards mitochondrial health? Because we actually had a guy, Jay Feldman, that was on the podcast recently, and he was talking a lot about that. You mentioned exercise. There's some people who are big on like red light therapy and other stuff, but what are some things there? And then also after that, what are your thoughts on fasting or intermittent fasting? Yeah, those are good questions. So I think there's good research to support things like fasting and thalassemic ulps. Some of those things that activate some of the same pathways can increase mitochondrial efficiency.

They can make our mitochondrial better. But multiplying mitochondria really does come down to training. You have to put mitochondria under metabolic load. In other words, you have to physically tax them through training to build more mitochondria. When you say training, by the way, metabolic training for the most part. Metabolic training. So not like weight.

Well, you can. So lifting weights has some impact on how mitochondrial function, but they don't multiply and become more dense the way that they do with metabolic training. So that's where people get this idea like I can just lift weights for everything. I wish it was that simple because I do love to lift weights personally. But no, you need metabolic training because it's the best tool for multiplying mitochondria

and making them more efficient. Now, obviously, you want to build strength. You want to have enough muscle mass. You want to do those things because as you age, you need to move. You need to be healthy. You don't want to fall and break hips. You need bone. Like all those things with strength training are really

important yeah but you need the metabolic side as well because that really is the best way to multiply and increase the number of mitochondria you have it's the best way to make the mitochondria as efficient as possible so what's interesting is mitochondria fuse and they, they come together. Nice. Mitochondria can adapt in a lot of ways, and they fuse together. They break apart. There's all kinds of stuff that mitochondria do, and the best way to make them become as efficient as possible is they fuse together,

and they have a longer surface, and they have more mass, and they become more efficient. That's just training. But what's interesting is fasting has benefits here as well. When you put your body in a caloric fast, what is the body going to do? Well, it's not going to build a bunch of new proteins because it doesn't have the calories, doesn't have the metabolic resources. So it starts to become shifted more towards conservation and that means efficiency. It starts to upregulate autophagy, which is a big word these days, right? Autophagy is a huge word. And it starts to do all these things

that are beneficial for us. But the reality is you have to fast quite a while to do these things. I don't know that time-restricted feeding, you know, like 18-6 or whatever. 18-6, 16-8, 24, that shit. Yeah, I don't know that that is enough time in the research to show that it massively upregulates autophagy but

I think training in some fasted states or doing other things in fasted states accelerates that a bit. I don't have tons of research on that but anecdotally and just thinking mechanistically if you are in a fasted state you're inherently in a bit of more metabolic stress maybe not enough to trigger a ton of autophagy. But if we do a little bit of cardio or we do a little bit of lifting or we do a sauna,

whatever, we do something that adds to that stress, I think there's benefits there. So for years, there was, right, the bodybuilding community said fasted cardio is going to burn more fat. And then everyone else said the research doesn't support that. I don't think you're necessarily burning more fat because I it's calories and at the end of the day that matter but i do think we could see some benefits from being in a fasted state and adding some metabolic stress on top of that from an autophagy kind of cellular level because if we are in these periods of deficits where we're not eating we let we don't have calories coming in again our body's best survival

mechanism is making itself more efficient. And if you think about from an evolutionary standpoint, how did we survive? We had periods of famine and food lack of resources. So our bodies had to be able to be efficient to survive those periods. And then we had periods where food was available and abundant and we had to get good at storing those foods

for later in case there was another famine, whether we stored those in muscle tissue or fat tissue or usually combinations of both, depending on what we were doing. But we're adapted to these periods where we can have fewer calories coming in and there's benefits in that. And then we're adapted to periods where we can have more food coming in,

turn it into muscle. In our world, the goal, obviously not fat. But I think there's benefits to putting ourselves kind of through both cycles. So I think there's benefits to going through periods where we are a bit caloric restricted. We do use some

form of fasted. We can do some form of exercise fasted or cold plunge fasted or heat plunge or heat therapy or whatever we are doing to accelerate that metabolic stress on top of the fasted state. And then we can go to periods of growth where we are trying to actually build muscle. We're trying to build

strength. We're trying to increase protein synthesis, all these things because there's benefits to both sides of it. So I'm curious, what would you say to someone who hears that and is potentially saying or potentially has the idea that, well, since we have food readily available, why would we ever put ourself into an intermittent fasted state? Like why would we restrict calories like that if we're able to have four to five even meals during the day to have more consistent energy? Well, so what's interesting is if you look at the research of longevity, the single thing

that's the most consistent across all animals is caloric restriction. Now, in the research, caloric restriction means a lot, like 20, 30% of calories of what the animal eat normally. That, across all animals, leads to increases in life expectancy and significantly in some species, four, five, six, eight years, in human equivalent years. Because there's benefits to the body being in states where it's not overloaded with food, right? There are just benefits in how our body, again, becomes more efficient, how it uses the food. It clears out basically shitty cellular components. Just to interrupt for a second, and maybe it's not even a 30% caloric deficit.

Maybe it's just what we're supposed to eat. Maybe it is. You know what I mean? Because like the number, you know, whatever number they use. Yeah, we eat too many calories. We eat too much because we're programmed to eat too much, because we're programmed to survive. And in the short term, survival depends on food resources.

In the long term, it kills us if we eat too many calories. In the short term, it's a double-edged sword, right? Obviously, we have to eat or we die. But we eat too much and we die. So it's both sides of it. But again, I'm not saying everyone should restrict 30%. That's not going to be very pleasant. You're not really going to like it for most people.

But there are periods where we can restrict calories. We can lose extra body fat. We can put ourselves in these facet states. We can do some training on top of that. And I think there are real benefits to that from, again, that autophagy standpoint, clearing out the junk that's in our cells because our body will recycle them. That's what autophagy is basically doing.

And it gets rid of the shitty cells that aren't doing their job and it optimizes itself to be more efficient. They're still sticking around. So there's benefit to that. And I think you're seeing more and more research showing that and people are trying to use 16-8 or 18-6 or whatever. But I think you need probably either longer fast or fast with some additional stress on top of that. And again, it's not like you do this every day for a year. I think you go through periods and fast or fast with some additional stress on top of that.

And again, it's not like you do this every day for a year. I think you go through periods, and that's kind of what I do. I do cyclical 8, 10, 12 weeks where I'm trying to drop a little fat. I'm going to be purposely in a caloric deficit. I'm going to add in some fasted training and some other tools. And then I'll go into a period where I want to build some muscle. And I'll lift more weights, do a little bit less metabolic work, eat more calories, and I'm going to go the other direction. And I think they also prime each other.

So if I'm at caloric deficit for a while and I'm doing quite a bit of metabolic work, I'm lifting maybe a bit less, I think we upregulate our sensitivity to grow again. So we upregulate our sensitivity to mTOR. We upregulate our ability to store proteins as muscle. We can help kind of go back and forth because I think we prime ourselves

to be more likely to see it benefit from the opposite of what we're doing now. So there's benefit to cycling, but you can't do it the dirty way, right? The dirty, bulking way was like, eat a shit ton of calories and then try to burn it all off. I'm not saying do that.

That's not the right approach. We all tried that one. It didn't work, right? But there are benefits to restriction and then periods where you're trying to grow. How big of an impact did just flat-out bodybuilding

culture have on the strength community, do you think? Because when you start to mention some of these things, I'm thinking like, yeah, cut and bulk. Bodybuilders do it all the time. A lot of times when they bulk, they tend to do more weight, lower reps, and things like that. They switch things it all the time. A lot of times when they bulk, they tend to do more weight, lower reps and things like that. They switch things up all the time.

Some of the stuff probably was right. Like I said, I don't know that fasted cardio has any benefits from a fat loss, but I think it actually potentially has some benefits in other areas. Well, and if you think it does and your coach tells you it does, maybe it kind of does. Maybe it does. There you go. Exactly. Maybe it's just a way of controlling itself. There you go.

Exactly. Maybe it's just a way of controlling itself. But yeah, there's some stuff that bodybuilding – I mean, bodybuilding from a physical standpoint, physique in terms of lower body fat and enough muscle mass, they win, right? From just a general standpoint of being lean and not carrying excess body fat, they win, right? And there's things they did that were obviously effective towards doing that. So I think if we step back and look at the average person, we can not worry so much about optimization as just foundation. Like the average person that doesn't get enough sleep, that eats too many calories, that doesn't train,

like that's a very different problem to solve than someone trying to maximize longevity that already does all those things. So I think the bodybuilding community is good at optimization and some of those things. But I think the bodybuilding community is good at optimization of some of those things, but the average person, like Jesus Christ, eating reasonable amounts of calories and getting enough sleep and managing their stress better and just getting to the gym. The average person just needs foundational things

to get their lifestyle on track and make big improvements. But once you've done those things, then I think we can add in things like fasted cardio and caloric restriction and these cycling type things. But that needs to come after someone has the basics down. I think we can add in things like fasted cardio and caloric restriction and these cycling type things. But that needs to come after someone has the basics down. I think people try to jump. If you're 200

pounds overweight or you're 100 pounds overweight and you don't move and you don't get any sleep, fasting is the least of your problems. You need to fix your lifestyle before you worry about some more advanced optimization or peptides or supplements, right? Like you just need the basics first. Do you think muscle mass or size

in general is a little problematic when you look at longevity? I think that you need enough muscle mass and strength to be able to move around as we age. That's what we need, enough muscle mass. We need enough muscle mass as we're 60 or 70 or 80 years old to get up out of the couch, to go walk down to the store, to climb up the stairs, to get out of bed. I mean, my mom ended up at 80 pounds when she died. She had bad sarcopenia. So something that's interesting too is they think part of the reason, not maybe not all the reason, part of the reason we lose muscles as we age is because our metabolism loses its ability to support that muscle. So if our metabolism is shitty, our aerobic side is worse,

our ability to convert food into energy is worse, then our body's going to shed muscle mass because muscle is calorically demanding, right? Muscle is calorically active. So if our body says, well, I'm having a hard time getting enough energy, it's just going to get rid of muscle because it doesn't need it if you're not using it

and it doesn't have the energy to support it. So that's why metabolic efficiency and strength go together as we age. We need both. We need the metabolic health and the aerobic system to drive our ability to maintain our strength and muscle mass. But to your point, there's a limit to the benefit. You don't want to go 250 pounds of muscle. It's probably not going to help you physically, at least from an aging standpoint. If you want to get more women and whatever you want to do, that's up to you. But I don't think that's the key to longevity and aging. I think most people, a sufficient amount of muscle and strength to move and be active and do the things they enjoy doing is probably the

right amount and more is probably not better. And we even see things like mTOR, which people may or may not be familiar with, but mTOR is one of the signaling cascade mechanisms that facilitates muscle growth. And one of the most potent anti-aging things people are using now is an mTOR inhibitor called rapamycin, which blocks mTOR. So if we have a longevity agent that blocks mTOR, that seems to increase longevity, maybe it tells us that a ton of muscle mass is probably not necessary. And I looked at a review paper not too long ago.

They looked at different amounts of lifting that people had done. This is all self-reported, so we have to take that for what it's worth. People did like 30 minutes a week, an hour a week, two hours a week.

The benefits of lifting and longevity seem to be associated with like 30, 60 minutes a week of lifting. That's about it. Once you went above 60 minutes, there really wasn't much improvement in longevity.

These are correlations, not necessarily causations. But I think the average person probably should lift a couple of times a week, maintain enough muscle mass to do all the things they need to do. And a whole lot beyond that, it's probably not beneficial, particularly if it comes to the expense of avoiding work or metabolic work because they're lifting five days a week. they don't have time to do metabolic work, they're probably better off lifting twice a week and doing metabolic work the rest of the time for a longevity standpoint. So the answer is you need both. And if I'm going to err on the side of which one's higher, it'd be higher metabolic work with enough muscle mass to move around versus having a lot of muscle mass and less metabolic work.

I think that's probably worse. I wanted to ask you about the, um, you know, cause you had said, you'll go through blocks of fasting and then you'll kind of come out of that. Um, cause a buddy of mine, he's a Brown Mountain jujitsu. He just competed at 195 pounds and, uh, he wants to compete at 181, right? I think that's the next one.1 at worlds in september so he's been utilizing fasting and like i said so he competed about a month and a half ago and with fasting he dropped already down to 180 so it was very very fast so my question is like i don't want him to have like a crazy rebound especially because we're still so far out we're talking like september sure so like what should he like or what should the process look like as far as like now that he's kind of basically at the weight that he wants to walk around at and compete at, what should he be focusing on now?

Like I said, it's just maintenance obviously and that's where weighing yourself every day comes into play. The question is what did he drop? Did he drop fat? Did he drop muscle? Did he drop just glycogen and water storage? I mean what did he drop, right? If he dropped muscle, that's not so good. If he dropped fat, that's obviously what he wanted to drop. But the question now is, you know, it's like anything else. You eat a maintenance

calories to maintain your body weight. And that's where weighing yourself every day comes into play and making sure that you're getting that maintenance level of calories. If you're not weighing yourself every day, it's really hard to maintain body weight because you do have that urge to put, you know, if you burn fat, your body will kind of drive back towards its set point. And it does that by making you a little bit more hungry, giving you a little bit shittier, calorically dense foods.

So you avoid that by weighing yourself every day and being aware of what your body is trying to do. And if you drop weight, my experience tells me the faster you drop weight, the faster your body wants you to put it back on. It's a shock to the system. So it's like a really big push to rebound back to where you're at. And I'm aware of that too when I shift back and forth.

But weigh yourself. Have him weigh himself every single morning. Be very diligent about being aware that he might have cravings for additionally caloric-dense foods. And if he starts to see the scale weight going back up, then he's obviously giving into those more than he should be but again it's to me it's weighing yourself every morning being very consistent the food you eat is is the key to that yeah i've been checking in with him a lot like how's the energy he's feeling good like are there weird cravings or anything but he's like no he's like i just want to because he you know he has this end goal in mind right so it's pretty easy for him to push everything else out of the way so now my worry is when when he hears this, he might be like, actually, you know what? I

am craving something. I think I'm going to go eat that. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen. It's a lot of that subconscious. But you know, again, weighing yourself is really the best way to be aware of what it is that's actually happening to your body weight. And that's what I found is people that aren't, they don't really know how different foods or portion sizes or any of these foods affect them. They just kind of naturally gravitate back towards more calorically dense foods. They have a cheat meal that's maybe 2,000 calorie cheat meal.

Boom, their weight's back to where they started. So if you're weighing your stuff every morning, you can see it happening, and hopefully you can make decisions and be a little bit smarter in your food intake before that cascades from one pound back up to three, four, or five or beyond that. So again, in my experience,

why do people in Biggest Loser lose and then boom? Because it was this very rapid fat loss and very rapid weight loss. To me, a better strategy is the long-term picture. And even if my goal is fat loss, you wouldn't do it 12 months out of the year. You would still go to periods where you're trying to just maintain. I think the best strategy is drop a bit of weight

and then try to maintain that for a while. Achieve a new set point and then drop a little bit more weight and then maintain that for a little while. When you take a very short-term view of weight loss, it's very hard. People will just rebound right back to where they were. So I think it's a skill to drop some weight and then say, hey, I'm going to spend two months

just at this weight. I want to drop more, but I'm going to stabilize here first. It's a step approach. It's better than just a downhill drive because that downhill drive is going to have a big rebound back up to their side. But that takes time, man. It takes time.

People don't want to put the time in, but that time is going to happen. Whether you want to or not, I'd rather be spending that time going the right direction over a long haul than constantly rollercoastering up and down bodyweight-wise. That's what happens when you take a very short-term view of things is you end up in the short-term dropping and then rebound right back up and right where you started or more and then you just do this vicious cycle.

So it's the longer approach that fixes that. But it's hard people. They're patient, right? Yeah. What have you found with peptides, some experimentation of peptides? What have you found and which, I don't know, which ones do you really find fascinating? I mean, all of them. I mean, so are peptides performance enhancing?

Maybe, depending on what you're doing. Are they illegal at all? It depends. It depends on which peptides. doing. Are they illegal at all? It depends. It depends on which peptide. An illegal is not the right word, I would say. They're illegal to sell for human

consumption? Generally speaking, yes. Illegal to use or possess? No. They're not banned substances? Some of them are banned from water, sure, but banned and illegal are two different things. Sure, a sports organ like water can say, no, you can't use this because it's performance enhancing.

But it doesn't mean it's illegal in the same sense that, you know, Anivar and Androl and Deca and whatever other steroids you want to throw in, those are illegal, right, to actually sell for human consumption and to, you know, even just use, I believe at least. But peptides are really just,

what are peptides? That's probably the best question. They're just little sequences of amino acids. They're short-change amino acids that play a regulatory role in the body. They signal tissues to do different things, whether that's release growth hormone or whether that's improved mitochondrial function. There's lots of peptides that do lots of different things. Kind of the standard ones that most people hear about are the growth hormone peptides. And they basically just tell your body to make more growth hormone, which is different than taking it synthetically, right? So it'd be

like telling your body to take more or make more testosterone. Like you use HCG, it turns on LH, which turns on your body's own testosterone production. That's different than synthetically injecting testosterone, right? It's the same thing with growth hormone-releasing peptides and secretogags. When you inject those, it tells your body to turn on growth hormone. So as we age, obviously, our growth hormone decreases with age, and we see negative effects of that, same way it can decrease with testosterone. So most people start with those growth hormone-releasing peptides. The most common ones are like ModGRF and then ipamirelin or GHRP2 or there's different combinations of these two different types of growth hormone releasers, but they cause growth hormone to go up. So there's the same benefits I would say with those as with growth hormone, just at a much lower impact. It's not the same strength as taking 4IUs or GH, but it doesn't have the same negative feedback loop.

You're not going to turn your own body's GH off. You're actually turning your own body's GH on. I know you can't make recommendations for people, but for people who are in their 40s and 50s, if it was a healthy dosage, is that actually healthy for their longevity? Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Within reason. Yes.

Within reason. Because again, it's not exogenous. It's not synthetically injecting something that is replacing your body's hormones. It's turning your own body's hormones back on. So I would say that's the first category, right? It's got the same overall category benefits, you know, skin and hair and thymus, preventing the thymus from atrophying. So immune system function is a really big part of aging. One of the things that happens is our thymus basically matures and we stop producing new T cells, and it's called thymus invocation.

We lose immune function as we age. That's why we become more likely to be sick when we get exposed to pathogens. It's why we become more inflamed. Our immune system does not do the job it needs to do as we age. Immune system is hugely important as we age. And one of the things that these peptides can do is help support immune function. And it's a really key piece of this. So there's the growth hormone peptides are the place most people start.

And like I said, the most common combination is like ModGRF and then ifamorelin is kind of the standard thing that people do a couple of times a day, once a day. And again, I would suggest you cycle these things. You don't need to be on these things forever. You would do a little period of regeneration. That's how I use them. So maybe it's six weeks or eight weeks of allowing our bodies to have a little bit higher levels of GH with these peptides, and then we go off them for a while. Do you notice anything?

Absolutely. Better sleep, a little bit faster recovery, notice changes in my skin, all those sorts of things start to happen. The same things you would see with the GH, but at a lower level. But again, somebody who's not eating or sleeping or doing these things, start there. But if you're doing those things, this can help, and particularly on the sleep end of things. And again, cycling makes a big difference as well.

And they've been studied pretty extensively, at least at this point in time, and they're generally recognized as safe for the most part, despite not being legally prescribable drugs. But what's fascinating to me, this whole other topic we get into, if things change, but I doubt it,

these were kind of underground for a long time. So I was exposed to them like 15 years ago. There was just a few people, a few sites were talking about them from a longevity standpoint, right? They weren't regulated at all. There was no water. No one knew where the hell they were. They were just underground.

And then about three or four years ago, maybe less actually, they started being used by compound pharmacies. So there was a company called TaylorMade. You should get the guy that was TaylorMade's CEO on here. TaylorMade was the biggest compound pharmacy

that was supplying peptides to every doctor and naturopath and healthcare practitioner that wanted them. And it blew up in the healthcare space. So the naturopaths and kind of more progressive doctors were prescribing all kinds of peptides and TaylorMade was doing millions of dollars, I would have to assume, in peptides. Well, the FDA came in and I've heard the story, at least from the CEO. Taylor Bade was doing it completely legally. They were a compound pharmacy. They were not doing anything illegal. But the FDA came in and kind of said, hey, we're going to start regulating peptides.

You've got a few years, but just be on notice. And then a few weeks later, they came in and raided them and shut them down basically for unrelated things. But we all know it was probably related to peptides. So the FDA is starting to crack down pretty significantly on peptides because they became so much more popular and so much more available. And they work in my opinion. And so the FDA is starting to regulate them much more and they're starting to pull away peptides that are effective but maybe under clinical trials or who knows what else. So peptides are getting harder and harder to get. And the problem with peptides is because they're not controlled in the same way that other

things are, you don't know what you're getting. And there's a lot of bullshit companies online selling you repackaged China junk that's got contaminants or it doesn't have the amounts in there that says it does or has something else in there. And that's a problem. And that's why compound pharmacies were so valuable because the compound pharmacies were controlling quality, right? Like if you were buying something from TaylorMade, you were getting what TaylorMade was putting in there and told you. You're buying stuff online. You're kind of taking a crapshoot and you're kind of in the wild.

You might be wasting your money. You might be getting something that's just poorly made and it's got contaminants in the vial. You might be just wasting your money on junk. Like that's got nothing. That's the hard part about peptides. And the more the FDA is cracked down, the more the good companies have said, I don't want to deal with this and just shut down.

So, you know, I don't want to give any names to companies because by the time this comes out, they might not be around anymore. You kind of got to do your own research on that end. But to answer your question. I would say that they are, some of them are still prescribed. Yeah, you can still get them.

So doctors are still prescribing these. They are still – some of them at least. At this point in time, you can still find progressive doctors. I have one that I work with who can prescribe them. The problem is they've become so expensive from the compounding pharmacies, like really expensive compared to what they used to be. What kind of money are we talking about? $100 a month. I mean, compared to GH,

they used to be a fraction of the cost of GH. At some point, GH could be less expensive, which is crazy because they used to be, like I said, pennies on the dollar compared to what a GH prescription would cost. And now they're probably comparable in some cases. So yes, you can still get them from doctors. And I would suggest if you want to make sure that you're getting the right dosages and you're having doctor supervision, then find a good progressive doctor who will prescribe them and you can get them.

But they're not going to be covered by insurance and they're going to be at least a few hundred dollars a month, if not more. Who are candidates? Because we've talked about TRT on this podcast before. And within this industry, there's a lot of like 19, 20-year-olds getting on TRT just for mass gain. It's crazy. You're not a candidate for TRT. So when it comes to things like peptides, who are candidates for peptides where this is something that could actually be beneficial for your health? Sure. I mean, look, I think when you hit your 40s, your GH is going to start going down more and more and it's progressive.

So I would say someone in their 40s, 50s who's just seeing the effects of aging really, it helps with sleep, it helps with skin, it helps with generation, it helps with soft tissue, all that sort of stuff that GH help with. But it's not really going to be beneficial unless your GH is decreased to begin with. And I didn't personally use them that much in my early 30s because I didn't really need it. I played around with them for a short period of time. Now that I'm 43, I feel their benefits significantly

more. And there's another category that are like wound healing type anti-inflammatories. So people have probably heard of TB500, which is a thymus in beta-4, and then BPC157. Those are the two most common, but they're also really effective. I've seen good

uses and good benefits from both of those. It seems like they do all kinds of stuff too. They do all kinds of stuff. There's mitochondrial peptides, MOTC. There's ones that are just immunity in general, thymus and alpha-1 and 1-alpha. There's a range of peptides because they're just little proteins that turn on things in the body and turn things off in the body. But the biggest thing a lot of them do is they're immune-supporting. They're anti-inflammatory.

They're growth hormone stimulating. There's lots of stuff. So I think the best use of that kind of stuff is, again, it's in cycles. The best way to prevent injuries is to prevent the accumulation of damage, right? So if I do a little six-, eight-week cycle on dysregeneration and wound healing, I'm going to prevent the accumulation of damage that might lead to degeneration and injuries down the road. So I try to stay – the best way to keep training is to not get injured, really,

and stay healthy. You mentioned one of them had an impact on your heart rate variability. Yeah, so epitalin and thymolin are two, this is a whole other story,

but the Russian, there's a Russian guy named Cobinson, you can look him up, K-H-A-B-I-N-S-O-N. If it's the Russians, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,

that's what I was going to say. He came up with these things called things he called bioregulators. And they're originally like extracts of glands that you would take. So an extract from the pineal gland would be the first one they came out with. And then they figured out what the actual

actin ingredient was. And they synthesized these different bioregulators. And they came out and they were encapsulated. But now there's injectable forms of them. And they just regulate the pineal gland, they regulate the thymus, which is thymolin. And the thymus, again, is hugely important because it regulates immune function in a lot of ways

and T-cells and different aspects of immunity. And those two together are taken for anti-aging purposes. The original Covington study was like a small dose. I think it was once a year, maybe once every six months for a few years. And it showed huge increases in longevity, at least in the Russian research. Once every six months? It was either once a year or once every six months.

I can't remember. It was Covington's original research. But it showed big improvements in longevity in the test population in Russia. Wow. Now, you'll have some people, especially in the Western population, oh, the Russian research is bullshit. They'll just kind of flat out dismiss it, right? It hasn't been replicated because it hasn't been studied extensively.

But I can just tell you anecdotally it's had the biggest impact on my HIV of anything I've ever tried. I consistently see it. I do about once every six months for just about 20 days. That's all I do. Could be a pretty strong performance enhancing benefit from something like that. Potentially.

I don't know. I mean, to me, I get much better sleep, which is obviously a big piece of that. Maybe that's part of it. And things to help with immunity. I don't know. I mean, to me, I get much better sleep, which is obviously a big piece of that. Maybe that's part of it. And things to help with immunity. So how much does immune function help with performance? I mean, it does in certain ways because the immune system is part of regulating stress. But I think it's less of a performance enhancer.

It's just a general health booster, more or less. And if you see your HRV go up, if I'm not doing any more training, my HRV is going up because I'm shifting more into anti-inflammatory status and that kind of stuff. So I don't know how to call it performance enhancing. I don't think that those two are regulated either by water. I wouldn't think.

But I've seen personally, and just with other people I've had try it, really big benefits in that. So hepatitis, like I said, they're a really interesting area because they're just aluminum acids, right? They're naturally occurring. Your body has thousands of them. GHK is another one. GHK-CU, GHK-COP, or people have probably heard of that one.

What's that do? It's another one. It's regulated thousands of genes. It's just a little teeny protein combination or amino acid combination that regulates all sorts of stuff. People take it in cosmetics because it's beneficial for skin. But injectable GHK and GHK-CU. My white girlfriend would take that. But it's beneficial for a variety of soft tissues and immune function and just a whole shit ton of stuff.

So I kind of put the GHRPs and GHRHs, the growth hormone stuff in one category. And then I kind of put this other category of wound healing and overall soft tissue health. That's TB, BPC-157, and GHKCU. And then you have these kind of like health anti-aging, just broad ones like thymolin and epitalin. Those fall into that category. And there's so many more outside of that, but those are kind of the three categories that I've been the most into and seen the best benefit with. Wasn't there like a rat study done

where the Achilles tendon grew back or something? There's been a lot of stuff on the TB500, TB4, and BPC of both. But not in humans, just, yeah. Yeah, no, there's not. There is some research in humans depending on the one you're talking about. And there's a lot of drug companies

starting to study these. So there are more clinical trials. I would be very surprised if in the next 10 years you don't see a fair amount of peptides as actual drugs that have become, well, it takes a long time to prove them. Pharmaceutical. Pharmaceutical drugs,

which is why the FDA is going to take them away from doctors prescribing them now until they become actual clinical drugs. But I think you'll see that pretty significantly. Another one I really like for just general cardiac health is injectable L-carnitine. L-carnitine is another really good one. I should do it. I'm too scared of needles.

You've never done injectable L-carnitine? Not injectable L-carnitine. We had a guy, Andy Triana, talk about like the benefits of it. You've got to inject it. You do have to inject it. The problem is if you take it orally, A, it's hard to get. It's not very bioavailable. B, you can get what's called TMAO.

It's a byproduct as your body metabolizes it in the gut, and that's not so good for cardiovascular health, I think at least. So when you inject it, you solve both those problems. It doesn't go through the gut. You don't get that problem, and you just get much better bioavailability. So I would liken L-carnitine injectable to creatine. And not to say they don't work similar at all, but creatine upregulates your storage of phosphocreatine, which it brings cellular – brings water into the muscles.

It does a lot of things that produce anabolic activity and recovery and things you wouldn't expect. Carnitine is a fat transporter. So in order for mitochondria to get fat and lipids, it has to transfer that basically across the membrane. And that's what carnitine does. It carries it across. So you upregulate that. You can actually increase it above physiological norms. And that's where injectable carnitine comes in. And it helps transport fat across the membranes. That's actually how a big part of mitochondrial health. It's really important in the cardiomyocytes.

They use it in the cart failure patients. And health. It's really important in the cardiomyocytes. They use it in cart failure patients, and they can see regenerative stuff in the cardiac cells from just better oxygen supply because it's being delivered more effectively. So it's got a lot of cardiovascular benefit, which is why I do it. I feel modest. You do it for yourself too?

I do, yeah, absolutely. Just like I said, anything cardiovascular-wise that I know is safe and effective, I'm going to try it. And I feel more energy from it. I do notice my recovery a bit better after these sort of high-intensity work. How often do you take it? And what's the process?

How often do you take it? And how should people be careful with it? Because now, hearing it again, it's like, fuck, I do need to just mad up. So the good thing is injectable L-carnitine is prescribable. Very easy to get prescribed. So finding a doctor to prescribe it for you so you know what you're getting is not that difficult and it's not expensive. It's just amino acid. It's nothing

novel or unique. It's like creatine in the fact that it gets through the membrane quicker and more effectively with carbs. So you have two options. You can either use carbohydrate to load it a bit faster or you can just wait and take more of it

and you'll load it longer. But you don't have to load creatine with carbs. It just happens faster if you do it right. So injectable, usually like 500 milligrams to a gram is a normal dose for it. It usually comes in like 30 milligram vials. And they're 500, sorry, they're 30 ml vials, 500 milligrams per ml, so 15 grams.

Usually, like we said, half of one dose is usually 500 milligrams up to a gram maybe. And then either with carbs if you want to do it quickly or on its own if you don't care. So I usually do like 500 milligrams before a workout if I'm going to do cardio. And that may or may not be fasted. Or if I'm going to lift, I'll do it afterwards with some carbs. And does it matter like, sorry, I know you're not talking about something Mark, but like frequency of using injectable L-carnitine. You want to get like, I would say like three to four grams a week.

Three to four grams. It depends on things, but if you do three or four or five injections a week, it's. 500 milligrams. Yeah. Is it intramuscular, subcutaneous? You can do intramuscular. I usually do intramuscular. So what does that –

It can be either way. And you can do less, honestly. You can do less. I'm not saying you have to do that much. You also don't really need to have a strict protocol with it. You can just kind of blast it whenever you want. You can just kind of blast it whenever you want. But like I said –

So there's no dangers. No. It's just quarantine. But you do want to, again, your goal is to increase the amount stored in your cells. That takes some time to load. So yes, you can blast it whenever you want. Yeah, the only danger I see is that sometimes the shots can hurt. So if you start getting into trying to take a lot of it, it could potentially hurt.

But it shouldn't hurt at the dosages that he's talking about. No, yeah. It shouldn't hurt at the dosage that he's talking about. No. Yeah. If you do like three grams, like people have talked about like two gram dose. Yeah. That's shitty. But 500 milligrams,

you won't even notice it. You won't even notice it. Just like a butt cheek or a... And that was kind of... So I used to... Want me to pinch your butt cheek now? I'll show you. I mean, people won't believe me,

but I've never done this before. So I don't know where... You got that. I got the... Okay. I don't know. You got that. Okay. I don't know nothing. But I used to do higher dosages and it is more painful when you do higher dosages. And I did it less frequently because of that.

But now I've kind of switched to this, just 500 milligrams. It's just one CC, you know, three, four, five times a week, sometimes twice. It depends on what I'm doing. Last dumb question on this. I'm going to ask a couple more dumb questions. I have a last dumb question on this because sometimes you see horror stories of people like, you know, doing shit. So like shoulder just and then just, you know, do you clean whatever you need to put a little bandaid on it? I don't know, dude.

I don't know. I just want to be safe. That was going to be Andrew's question. Andrew's like, I don't have any questions now. I don't know. You just use the instant needle. Spongebob square pants. You get a little lollipop after you do that. Whenever they do it at the hospital, I get a little thing.

There's your carb. You do the lollipop afterwards. You get a little surge. No, it's really not that big of a deal. I'm using instant needle. It's the tiniest little needle ever. Again, doctors can prescribe this. You can go to a doctor and do it for you the first time if you really want to.

But it's really not a big deal. I don't think you should even bother in SEMA. Because once you break that skin barrier, people are just going to – Fuck it. My question, because I've never done anything like this, because once you break that skin barrier like people are just gonna just anyways but yeah my question because i've never done anything like this but um like can you like because i don't like shots either but like can you draw like test and then draw that in the same syringe or no it's water-based okay i don't know that i mean in general no that's not a good idea um but it's just like so it's a little easy to syringe.

And the test is oil and thicker, and you wouldn't use the same gauge and all that sort of stuff. Got it. Yeah, it's not, I mean, it's a current gene. It's an amino acid. And like I said, you could take it orally. You just have to take a lot of it and be potentially getting the downsides of the oral side of it. Hey, listen, it's also testosterone. It's already in your body.

I have a last dumb question. I'm going to come back here as we do 65. I've had some injectable oil quarantine in my fridge for like nine or ten months. Does it go bad? It's fine? Okay. So wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. Just give it to me. How did you end up with injectable oil quarantine in your fridge? After Andy Triana came on the podcast, I was like, I'm going to get injectable oil quarantine. And then I got it. And then I was just like, I'm too pussy to fucking pin. I just hate needles, dog. You don't know how much I fucking hate it.

Well, the only way you get over that fear is to pin yourself and then. I know, but still, I just don't. I've never liked it. I still don't like it. But you're the second guy. I bet you won't notice it. I mean, you'll notice it obviously, but I don't think you'll think that was the scariest thing in the world by any stretch.

When you take it before a workout do you notice anything? A little bit. Once you load you just kind of want to maintain that loading once you've gotten enough in your system. You don't need to keep blasting it all the time. So I notice the difference when I go from nothing to a good state and then I kind of

feel that normal season. If I take time off of it then I come back off and go back on, I feel the difference. Does it matter if you're fasted? No, I mean it's not going to be absorbed as well if you're doing your fasted. So maybe when you're first – the first week or two, it's probably better to take a little bit of carbs because you do want to get as much in to kind of load it the same way creatine would be. But then after that, you can take whatever you want. You just need less of it to maintain what you've already upregulated.

There's not that many things you can upregulate significantly above baseline, but creatine is obviously one. There's lots of research. And quarantine is the other. I like it to creatine simply because it's upregulating a normal thing that happens. You have creatine in your body. You have L-carotene in your body. You're just

upregulating storage of those. Creatine upregulates her muscle function through anaerobic or through alactic activity. This upregulates fat oxidation for the aerobic side. So they work on different ends. But they're simple, easy things that people can do aside from people who are afraid of needles. But it is – How old are you? 30.

Yeah, I mean you probably won't notice as much in your 30s as you will as you get older, but there is still a benefit. Okay. And then do you notice like a huge drop off, like once you're not taking it anymore? Other than mentally, maybe, but like- You notice a little bit. Again, this is an amino acid. This is not-

Very mild. It's not a test. It's not a PED. It's an injectable amino acid. So no, I'm not going to like double my VO2 max overnight because I take it and watch it drop off. And I don't. It's not that level of effect. But for me, it's cardioprotective and I have bad genes and I want to maximize it.

And I do feel a bit of a difference in terms of fat oxidation. I've noticed personally I tend to burn areas of fat that are stubborn when I'm on it for whatever reason. I tend to notice that. I'm psyched. It could just be that those – Let me get that. It could just be that, again, that those areas lack blood flow or they have fat types that are more stubborn and maybe upregulating L-carotene to increase fat transport helps tap into those fat stores.

That's a security guesswork. All your research and stuff over the years, have you heard of anything that helps with stubborn fat? Before, I've heard some speculation that some of it may have to do with the quality of your sleep and that when you're really well-rested, that increased brown fat or something like that. That could make sense.

I mean, people talk about cold can maybe help some of it. But your body just has certain fat stores that are more stubborn to burn than others. I don't know there's a magic solution. But like I said, I personally know it's the best thing is for me at least L-carotene. And I know there's things that people can get now. They'll inject it directly into the fat that seems to maybe have some effect. But I don't think it's that dramatic. They've got all kinds of shit now.

You can freeze it. You can wipe it. There's so many things out there that people can do if they really want to. But like you said, I think for the most part, it just comes down to patience and effective diet, and you'll burn that part last. The problem is the part that gets fat first is the part that loses the fat last. So it's just kind of we're screwed in that area,

but patience and maybe some L-carnitine if you'll take the plunge. Oh, I'm going to do it now. No, I'm going to take that plunge. I mean, look, don't convince yourself it's going to be like this transformative thing, but it is beneficial. It helps. What about sleep? Is there any sort of peptides that can help with sleep?

I actually think that, well, there's delta sleep-inducing peptide, DSIP, which can work. I've seen people mention lanotan, which I haven't seen do that. But like I said, the pineal gland is part of what regulates, it produces melatonin where your sleep circadian rhythm is regulated by. So I've seen in epitalin, I've seen benefit from that one. Like I said, epitalin and thiamine together. But epitalin to me has been the best for just all of a sudden my sleep cycle becomes a little bit more dialed in. And it's easier for me to maintain it because I'm a night person by far.

Like my normal schedule is go to bed around 2 a.m., get up around 11. Like that's just how I normally function. But I do notice, interestingly enough, when I go to Hawaii, I shift back about an hour. And then when I take Epitalin, I tend to just be even more consistent and get a little bit earlier awake. So that seems to be the best for me. But, you know, a lot of it comes down to just getting your habits in line and being very patterned in your activity and sleep. And, you know, the usual get some sunlight when you wake up and, you know you know have a dark room like that shit to me makes more of a difference than almost anything else will what about for the brain cerebrolysin c-max cerebrolysin cerebrolysin is phenomenal

stuff again i think the russians if i remember the russians might have been the guys that i think russians are yeah r, Russians did pioneer cerebral isin. It is another peptide basically that's injectable, unfortunately for you. But cerebral isin, it's amazing stuff. Upregulates B to F significantly, which is your neurotropic factor in the brain. To me, it's a memory recall drug miracle.

Like if you have problems recalling stuff, cerebral lysine cycles are fantastic for it. Dangerous. No, not really. Expensive? No, it's cheap. What the fuck? Injectable.

Taylor made a lot of compound pharmacies. You can get cerebral lysine from lots of compound pharmacies. So here's the thing about it, though. You don't do it for that long. And there's two schools of thought. The old school and kind of what most people still do is they call them pushes. So like five mLs a day for six days or ten days. Like kind of high dose, but for a shorter period of time, which I tried in the past.

And I felt it, but it wasn't as dramatic as I feel it now. Like felt it, felt it? Like felt something in your brain kind of? Yeah, you feel – not like – I mean your brain doesn't explode or anything. A little bit of smoke coming out of your ears? You just start to feel that you can recall

things better, your memory improves, your fluidity of language, my writing gets better, that kind of stuff. How about athletic memory? Like you do something. I don't,

I've never seen anything on that. I don't train for skill, so I can't personally evaluate that. But I would think just based on the fact you're upregulating BDNF

that yeah, you would think that it would do something there. with shooting some free throws or something. Yeah, I would think yes. But I don't know.

I've never tried it because I don't play a sport anymore. Well, I play racquetball but pretty shitty. But yeah, I think there could be something there for sure.

But anyway, TaylorMade and some other compound pharmacies that were making it came out with a different protocol which was one ml a day for like 30 to 40 days. I tried that.

I noticed that personally quite a bit more than I used to notice from the high pushes, like the five mls for 10 days or whatever. But I think that's the most powerful nootropic known to man by far. There's definitely other stuff like C-Max is another Russian one. Selenic is another one that's on the relaxation side. There's endless stuff in the choline, you know, acetylcholine. There's lots of different ones out there. Or alpha-GPC, I meant. But I think cerebral lysine is phenomenal.

And it's neuroprotective. So that's why I take it as, as I age, I don't want to have dementia and memory loss and all that sort of stuff. To me, there's three big pieces of this, right? Well, it's four, okay? Cardiovascular health. If your cardiovascular system isn't healthy and you don't have a good aerobic system, everything else is going to be worse. Two, which is directly related, is your immune system. You need a highly functioning immune system because it regulates growth, repair, defense, inflammation, all those things.

Three is brain function. You have to have a highly functioning brain because it's coordinating everything. It's where our cognition and motor learning and all of that is in our brain, obviously. And then fourth is muscle mass. You need enough muscle and strength to move around and be active and do the things that you enjoy doing. If you can get those four areas, you're going to live a lot longer and you're probably going to be protective against cancer, which is somewhat related to all of them, and your quality of life can be significantly higher.

So I look at those areas like build a big VO2 max, maintain enough muscle, do things to train your cognition, and then immunity aside from just taking these sort of things is benefited by lifestyle and everything else you're doing. So if you can get those four areas dialed in, chances are you're at least doing the most you possibly can to live a long, healthy life. And if you're an athlete, those are the same things you want for performance. Obviously, you can't take things if you're regulated by WADA. But those four things are still what regulate performance as well. And because it's energy production, it's recovery, it's inflammation, it's motor learning and brain capacity,

those are the same things you want for any area of performance. They're the same processes. You mentioned Selenic. Yeah. Okay. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the one that it helps you like relax. Okay. I thought that was the one that helped you learn things and make them stick.

Well, it can. Okay. But that one's more of a relaxative, anxiety-releasing type. But C-Max is probably more what you're thinking of. Okay. I probably have them confused because the one that I had heard about, basically if you learn, say, the wrong pattern for something, you can't unlearn that pattern, basically.

So does C-Max do anything like that to where you get locked in? Not that I've seen, but you know, who knows? Like these are all Russian peptides that don't have a shit ton of research in the U.S. on a lot of stuff is anecdotal and people have tried to report different effects. It could, I don't know, anything that upregulates, you know, this BDNF is going to have somewhat similar potential benefits. Those are kind of the core ones, you know, like I think cerebral isin is, again, I do that once every six months. I don't do it for a year round.

I'll usually do like 30 days, sometimes 40 days, but every six months or so, I'll usually do a round of that. And then same thing with epitalin and the thymoline, same thing every six months or so. Got to figure out how to get that one. You know, we do a lot of, Mark mentioned like cold and sauna and stuff. We do a lot of that. What are the benefits and potentially drawbacks and how can we optimize the way that we use our,

from what you know about cold plunging and sauna, how can we optimize the way we use it for our performance, longevity, et cetera? Yeah, look, I think they're all similar pathways into these, I mean, we can call them longevity pathways, but they're just making the body more resilient, right? They're making the body more efficient by turning on genes that are associated with the stress response. So whether we're talking exercise or fasting or cold plunge or heat, they're all just similar pathways to activate.

Same thing. So the same thing applies. I think you should do it in cycles. Like I don't think, I think you're going to lose some of the effectiveness if you just do the exact same thing for endless amounts of time. So there's reasons to cycle it, measure the response. You know,

that's where something like HRV or resting heart rate or different blood markers, make sure that you're actually getting the benefits of it. Most of it does come down to, you know, amplifying fasted states. If you, if you don't want to do that much of those things,

then you add in fasting and then you do them and they're additive. Or exercise and then you do them and they're additive. So you can get a little bit more bang for your buck, so to speak, if you add in those types of stresses together. So like I said, that's why I'll do fasted cardio or I'll do some cold plunges fasted. What I would tend to avoid

is cold plunge right after training. That can actually dampen some of the effects of training. So one of the things that training does is upregulates inflammation, and that's part of the signaling cascade. If we immediately cold plunge ourselves and shut that signaling off, you see some decrease in the benefits of training. So I would separate those out a bit. So another thing I would just say is people respond very differently to these things,

and some people have really good benefits to cold in particular and not so much for heat and some people might be the opposite there are quite a bit of individual variations in these things that I've seen so playing around with different strategies and seeing how you individually respond is a really important thing so I personally kind of treat myself as my own experiment right I'm going to try cold I'm going to try some heat I'm going to try cryo I'm going to try red light I'm going to try peptides I'm going to try some heat. I'm going to try cryo. I'm going to try red light. I'm going to try peptides.

I'm going to try all these things, and I'm going to have a way to measure whether or not they're effective, right? I use HRV, resting heart rate, heart rate training, blood markers and blood tests. I use markers to see whether or not I'm improving, but I'm constantly learning

what my body responds really well to and what it doesn't, and that's kind of how we have to approach it. You know, what works for Mike, Mark might not work for you. So the only way you can find out is to give it a shot and see what the hell happens. Yeah. So, I mean, I personally respond really well to heat. I fucking hate the cold.

We all hate the cold. We all hate the cold. I just, I can't bring myself to do it. I would rather do a lot of other things. And the older I've gotten, the more I've disliked the cold for whatever reason. I would rather do a lot of other things. And the older I've gotten, the more I've just liked the cold for whatever reason. So I tend to not do a whole lot of cold, but I do quite a bit of heat work and stuff like that.

I like fasted cardio. I still do that and just play around with things really. Okay. What are a couple things that you saw from Mighty Mouse Johnson and from Matt Hume that separated them out from other people? And what are some things that you maybe took from those guys? Look, the first thing is, like I mentioned, one of the problems with combat sports today is you have a lot of athletes going to multiple coaches. And they go to one gym for MMA, they go to one gym for boxing, they go to one gym for jiu-jitsu.

Or even though it's not a separate gym, maybe it's a separate coach. And so there's very little in cohesion. And then they go to a strength and conditioning coach, and the strength and conditioning coach just wants to layer on intensity, high-intensity intervals, whatever. There's no integrated plan, and no other sport's like that. Every other sport, for the most part, you've got a head coach who oversees all the skill work.

And then you probably have a strength and conditioning coach. And hopefully those two work together. MMA is a crapshoot. You know, there's just very few gyms out there that do that. So you're left with athletes that are over-trained. Their program isn't very cohesive. They don't learn a transition game.

Because Matt is so good at all of it, he's able to take all these different skill sets from grappling to wrestling to striking and put them together and coach the whole system. So one of the things that made DJ so amazing is his transition game. So he would strike to grapple, to take down, to pass guard, to submit.

Like all the transitions were so smooth because he would just roll from one area to the next. It wasn't like he was striking and then he was grappling and then he was going – like he was just moving. And his ability to go through these different movements and be very smooth in one area was really what made him so unique on top of his athleticism and work ethic. So I think that's one thing is you need a good head coach

to oversee the program. It's really hard for athletes themselves to make smart choices about their training when they've got five different people telling them what to do. So if you're an athlete in a sport, your head coach, whoever it is you trust your decisions to, is a really big part of that

success or failure. It's a huge part of it. And the second thing is DJ is a very patterned, very habitual, like our training programs and our camps were the same. Like I said, they were very, very patterned, very habitual. Like our train programs and our camps were the same. Like I said, it was very, very patterned. And just every train camp was the same pattern. You know, he'd pick an opponent or his opponent would pick for him.

Matt would do all the film work and build the strategy. And we'd talk about the strength and conditioning. And it was just the same day in, day out, day in, day out. And you knew exactly what he was gonna perform like on fight night because everything was so consistent yeah and that's why i think he won or he set the record for most title defenses because he was so consistent in his training he had little injuries pop up here and there like every other athlete but for the most part he was just so consistent in the way that he approached everything that he was always consistent

and come fight night and the second you know third thing is he like everything, that he was always consistent and come fight night. And the third thing is his lifestyle was really good. He took his job very seriously as a professional. He focused on sleep. He focused on nutrition. He had a good family support and good community around him. He was very good in taking care of things outside of the gym, and that paid off for his longevity in the sport and his health and everything else.

I've seen a lot of other athletes. They have success, and his health and everything else. I've seen a lot of other athletes they have success and it changes who they are. You guys get to the NFL, make $20 million and their work ethic changes or their attitude changes. The people they have around them changes. They get these entourages,

pull them in different directions. They're spending half their life on social media. They don't spend the same time on their sport because they're pulled in so many directions and they feel like they've made it dj was never like that okay dj was always trying to get better he didn't care where he was he was just trying to continually improve and i remember i can't think of who the fight was um he beat the hell out of somebody quickly like i think it was the first round victory i can't remember who it was i have to think about it it might have happened in sacramento

um no it wasn't that one because that's the one that i saw no i can't remember who i have to think about but anyway he knocked a guy out in the first round he went five the night he came backstage and dana white came up and congratulated hey that was amazing fight dj best performance the first thing he said to matt was he critiqued something he had screwed up. He was like, shit, why did I throw that knee or why did I get in that position? His first thing was not like, oh my God, he just crushed this guy. No, his first thing was evaluating what he did wrong and what he should have done better, despite the fact that he just literally did have one of the better performance of his career. He is always focusing on what can i do to get better and

that's a very unique quality an athlete who's already the top right he was already the best of the best he was already uh you know a multiple time champion at that point and he goes out and has a performance like that and he's you know still thinking about what could i have done differently to be better so he was very self-aware of of constantly trying to improve, which I don't think you see in a lot of high-level athletes, in my experience. A lot of them are just trying to get paid. They're trying to get through the season. They're a contractor. They want to perform better.

They just kind of go through the motions at some point. DJ never did, and still doesn't. His focus is always on getting better. There's two people that Matt's seen, and from day one said, you're going to be a world champion. It was Josh Barnett,

who was a world champion, and DJ. It was the only two people he's ever seen train very early on and said, you're going to be a world champion. And that's part of Matt's genius is he knows what he's looking for and how to evaluate that.

But, you know, DJ had both the work ethic, the lifestyle, the mindset, and just the innate skill and ability to learn and get better. And then he had Matt. And hopefully I contributed to that in some part. But it's really just a combination of things that's rare. It's just why he is who he is. Was he really good at stress mitigation?

Was he calm? Yeah, he's very relaxed. He seems like fun when I've seen him in interviews and stuff. He cracks jokes and stuff. Yeah, he's a very relaxed guy. He would basically come into my gym in the morning, do his training conditioning. He'd go upstairs and we had a little office. He'd play video games all day and then go train at night and then go home to his family.

How is that, getting your ass kicked by a guy who just plays video games all day? Oh, he plays games all the time. But that's the other thing about him. He's not like a lot of fighters I've worked with that just had totally crazy social lives and home lives were just i've had fires get hit in the head with he had kids and stuff yeah he's got kids and he's he's he's got his shit together that's what it comes down to he takes his job seriously and he's just a great great human being so he's one of those guys you really root for to have success it was kind of unfortunate i think he didn't get as promoted as he probably

could have been in the ufc or see as much success financially in the UFC as he probably should have or definitely should have. But he's doing well now. He's fighting for 1SC, which is a huge organization globally. He just came off of a great win. He's going to have another fight with that guy in May

in the U.S. actually. So he's doing great things and I know he's planning to fight until he can't. Cool. Andrew, want to take us on, until he can't. So cool. Andrew, want to take us out of here, buddy? Sure thing.

Make sure you guys stick around for smelly's tip before we get out of here, but, let us know what you guys think about today's conversation. Uh, drop those comments down below. We'd love to see them. Uh, make sure you guys hit that like button on the way out and subscribe. You guys are not subscribed already.

Uh, follow the podcast at MB power project on Instagram, Tik TOK and Twitter, my Instagram, Tik TOK and Twitter's at IamAndrewZ. And Seema, where are you at? You got me pinning, Joel. I don't think so.

Do it. Do it. Do it. Justin Jackson. If you want to see him do it, comment. I was going to say that, but I want to discourage it. Add Seema Indian on Instagram and YouTube. Add Seema Yin Yang on TikTok and Twitter. Joel, where can people find you? And Morpheus and all those. Yeah, it's on Morp YouTube. Add and see me on TikTok and Twitter.

Joel, where can people find you and Morpheus and all those? Yeah, it's on Morpheus, trainwithmorpheus.com. Website's eight weeks out, just number eightweeksout.com. And then Twitter is just at Coach Joel Jamison, J-A-M-I-E-S-O-A. I think last time I was on here, I didn't have Instagram. So now I do and I'm making regular posts. Moving up. So find me at Coach Joel Jamison.

doing and making regular posts. Moving up. So find me at Coach Joel Jamison. The tip for today is to just continually work on, you know, trying new things. We talk about it all the time. We talked about it here today. You know, explore some new things. Don't be afraid to give it a go. And even if you get to be really good at something, hopefully you can be humble enough to be like

Mighty Mouse Johnson and keep working on your skill, keep working on your trade, and keep working on getting better. You should get him on the show one time. I would love that. That would be amazing. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye.

See you.