Mark Bell's Power Project - Mark Bell's Power Project EP. 196 Live - Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

Dr. Andy Galpin is a tenured Professor in the Center for Sport Performance at CSU Fullerton. His interest in Human Performance led him to obtain his PhD in Human Bioenergetics in 2011. Throughout his strength career, he’s gotten into MMA, BJJ, and weightlifting where he got a 7th place finish in the 2007 National Championships. He also co-authored the book Unplugged: Evolve from Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness, Performance, and Consciousness. He now focuses on teaching and running his own Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Lab at CSU Fullerton. ➢SHOP NOW: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Find the Podcast on all platforms: ➢Subscribe Rate & Review on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-bells-power-project/id1341346059?mt=2 ➢Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4YQE02jPOboQrltVoAD8bp ➢Listen on Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/mark-bells-power-project?refid=stpr ➢Listen on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Izf6a3gudzyn66kf364qx34cctq?t=Mark_Bells_Power_Project ➢Listen on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell Follow The Power Project Podcast ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/MarkBellsPowerProject Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/  Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz

Can somebody give me a fucking instruction book or something? No shit, like I didn't know how to do anything with it. And the nurses is like, honey, they bounce. I was like, fuck yeah. Yeah, they're made out of fat. Yeah, like they bounce. She's like, okay, she's like, you're going to drop them. Like it's going to happen.

Just get it out of your head now. I'm like, whew. Thank God I haven't yet. But like the time is coming. There's been several times. You said you're going to drop them? Yeah. Like it's just going to happen.

It's great to close their fingers or foot like in a door too. That's perfect. Exactly. That works out great. They don't scream for eight hours straight, and you don't feel like the worst person on earth. I still can't hold a baby. I'm afraid I'm going to break it. Terrified.

I can't do it. Oh, yeah. A baby baby? Yeah, like brand new. Yeah. I don't know what to do with it. It's terrifying. Nothing scarier on the planet was trying to get her out of the hospital, into the car

seat, and home the first time. I wanted out of that day so bad. Car seat. Yeah. How about the car seat? That thing's impossible to figure out. So that's what I'm fucking talking about. We did not get that.

I wish we would have set that thing up. We didn't though. So we're out there with a one and a half day old and fucking get into a fight. Cause I'm like, Oh my God. We did the same exact thing. And the car seat is crazy. Cause like,

it's funny. Cause you don't never understand like minivans. You're like, why would anybody in their right mind ever have a minivan? But you don't understand until you have a kid. Because when you have a kid, even if you have a big like sedan and you have the child like in the middle seat, you, I mean, that's the only place you can have them when they're an infant is kind of in the middle there and they're facing backwards. You can't really even get them out of the seat it's fucking i mean it doesn't matter

how strong your back is you know i was squatting over a thousand pounds at that time and i thought i was gonna uh throw out my back every time i'd reach over and grab jake out of the thing but you have a minivan and you just slide the door open and boom you can get in and out of there real easy no it's a giant pain in the ass like oh that was the worst thing we didn't know how to get a minivan or what fuck no she even knows you i keep saying no let's get a tesla suv and she's like all right yeah when are you gonna stop me a teacher then fuck hard to get teslas on teacher money anyways how's all that going how's the teaching going it's fantastic man i love it it's what i do uh it's my favorite part part of my whole life for the most part. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you're doing really well kind of like in your own private sector as that if you try to finance that privately, my whole life would be about just securing money and keeping money.

Right. And I don't want, I don't want to do that. Um, I can't, I've come to a realization in the last maybe five years, but that part of it really, really rips out my soul. And so I'm just like, well, why? Right. And it's a lot of soul searching time. It's a lot of thinking about what do I really want to do? And part of it is, you know, I have to give sort of credit to Chris Moore. I mean, you remember Chris Moore and when he passed away, it was like, fuck man. Like this thing is, it's really, it really hits you when you have somebody really close to you pass away. It's super early for no reason. And it hits you a lot. Like you better really figure out what you want to spend your time doing because it's just no guarantee.

And so one of the realizations that came to me was like, I just, I hate being in the sales and then nothing against that stuff. Uh, but I just don't want to do it. And so you don't have to be out there like selling yourself. Yeah. Like, Hey, check out my book and check out this and that. Like you just don't, that's not your thing. I don't want to do it. I want to just walk away from that piece. I want to do the things that I love and teaching. I love and talking. I love and storytelling. I love, and I don't like the backend of it. And so I could either, uh, get through that and hire somebody or bring somebody on board to work on that piece, which is a viable option. Or it could just be like, I don't really care about that piece.

Right. Like I tell Natasha and my wife all the time, like, man, we're young, healthy, and rich. We're not fucking super training rich here. We're not slingshot rich, but really compared to, to, to how I grew up and compared to a lot of people, we're rich as fuck. Right. So like, why am I, why am I going through all this stuff? It is a strain on our relationship. It's a strain on things I want to do. I'm like, we make teacher salaries, but they're real good salaries relative to the rest of the world. So.

Right. I'm just not going to go. I love what I'm doing right now for the most part, man. So. It gives you a lot of options though too, right? But you know, because you're, you're like literally like in a lab, right? I mean, you can study whatever you want to study, right? You can, you can, uh, I mean, just whatever's going on in the world,

you can say, hey, I think that's bullshit. We're going to start our own study. 100%. 100%, it lets me really do, and because of the spot I'm in with the center and because of the university, the way that they don't put pressure on me to do a particular type of research

or anything I want, I really can. I mean, I'm a strength conditioning junkie. It's what I do. So I can do the studies on the shit I really am excited about. And I don't have any pressure and any mind. And I don't have to be like, well, no, we got to do this because the brand needs this or because, Hey, well, if we do this and it comes out in the other direction, it screws our whole cons. Like, I don't really care where the wind blows in terms of what's effective or not. It doesn't affect my end game at all. And so that's that's really freeing for me um and from the athlete perspective since i do i do like working with athletes so much but i get to do it on my terms so i work with very very very few select um

i have the vast majority that reach out i say no no i'm not gonna i can't do it whatever go see dolce go see lockhart go see you know one of my other sports nutrition people that i brought to depending on what sport they're in and the ones i take are either something that is like really really exciting like i got one actually i can't announce it uh the person per se but because the fight's not announced yet but we got a world title fight in a major major organization here uh for july that's gonna be announced soon oh cool and so i'm like hell yeah like i'm really this is gonna be something i'm gonna spend a tremendous amount of time with this guy and that's what i want to do i want to work with one or two people at a time and not just be like okay here's the diet here's the plan here's the thing just to be like no no man like i'm spending

the bulk of my day on you most days for six months and we're gonna try to win a world title that that to me gets i'm way more interested in that than be able to say like oh i had 300 athletes this year i had 600 people i got 400 people my this is not my jam man i like i really like diving in hard to the individual stuff and figuring out really what's going on with somebody and really getting like something really massively accomplished whether it's a world title or it's somebody hitting a pr in the back i don't really care like that's not the thing it's just the fact that we can go hard like really really, really hard into something. And someone's going to really dedicate their life and be super passionate about something. And I want to be, I want to be on board with that.

Like I want to support that. You must really love like kind of mentoring people. That's probably what attracts you to teaching because I'm sure you have, like when I went, when I went to your facility, you know, you had a bunch of people kind of assisting you and helping you. And I'm sure those people are looking to you for advice, not just on how to conduct a certain study, but like life advice, like real advice. And then also when you're dealing with these fighters, the same thing. Yes, we're trying to make different decisions towards these foods because it's the plan that we're on. But there's just a million other things that go into all that to me coaching teaching is the same thing mentoring like this is all it really is exact same scratch it's the same thing and and

i get fortunate i mean i'll say this all the time because my one of my former actually uh i claim him as a mentor but he's actually just my co-, Lee Brown. So he just got last year NSCA Lifetime Achievement Award. So just an unbelievable sports scientist. And he would always say, like, doesn't matter whatever the kids say that I gave to them. Like, they always gave me more than I'll ever give to them. And I feel the exact same way. So, yeah, it's fun to teach them, but really I get, I get way more out of it than, than I give them because of people like Kara and you get these people that come through and I'm like, man, to watch somebody work as hard as they work for the two years they're with me or the time,

whatever the time they're with me and to really dedicate their life to something and to deal with me emailing them at four o'clock in the morning on Saturday going, Hey, I need to go in and get this right now. Cause I'm up working right now or whatever it is. And they're just like, yep. Okay. I'm on it. And you're like, well, I was going to go, my family's too bad. Like there's, there's just things like sometimes we get done. I mean, I just have a real soft spot in my heart for anybody or any story where someone just really gets after it for a while. And whether that's to get your degree, to build your business, to win, I don't really care what it is, but somebody to me, I'm like, man, you went after it. It's not the talent issue, it's the work.

And that part of it, I'll go to the end with you if you're going to give me that back. And I'll get more of that than you all will be. So all that hands, all those people that come into my lab, it's a tough game, man. I get a lot of people that will hear me on this show and others and be like, oh, I want to come work in your lab. Sounds like you're doing awesome. And I want to meet Mark Bell. Yeah. We'll see.

We'll see how bad you want to be here. Well, remember Mike Tyson had a famous quote where he said, you know, I'd like to see your average person try to be me for a day. He's like, you would cry, you know? And he, he broke down, you know, cause he's a pretty emotional guy, but he was like, you know, he's like, I'm up three 30 in the morning and I, know, he's like, I'm up 3.30 in the morning and this is what I do. I fight.

Yeah. And I'm pissed off and I'm angry and I'm very rarely satisfied. He's like, just try to walk in my shoes for one day and you'll fall apart.

I think Ben Bukowski said it really nice too in Generation Iron. He's like, oh yeah, you think it's all the PEDs? I'll take anything you fucking want and get through my day.

You won't. Like, you won't. And I was like, yeah, that's a real selling get through my day you won't like you won't and i was like yeah it's a real selling point like you won't because this is really really really really hard yeah i think you have a huge leg up on you know a lot of uh a lot of people in the fitness space and a lot of people in the space talking about uh just exercise science talking about strength and conditioning because you know on this show we will say oh well you know this study showed this or this study showed that but that might be a study that you actually conducted yeah or thoroughly reviewed and maybe you're the like one of the few that i can actually

kind of uh interpret some of these things what are some of your thoughts on you know what studies can do for us what science can do for us because there's so much talk about it nowadays, uh, where, you know, Joe Rogan, uh, talked about my brother and I on his show, uh, kind of recently and said, the bell brothers don't give a fuck where the study comes from. They want you to actually be doing it, which, which is partly true. Uh, I hold value in, in, in sciences as well. Um, I think it, it does, uh, hold value for value for sure. But at the same time, I like to learn from people that have done, you know, and it's hard to get the combination of the two. But it sounds like you're one of the few people who's trying to like work towards that with the athletes that you work with and with the people that have come through your program. Yeah, I mean, I think it's because

I come from that front side. Like I didn't, I'm not a scientist who also likes to work out. I came up straight. I got into fucking science because I like strength and conditioning so much. And I wanted to get more science. That's why you got so huge. Yeah, exactly. No, it's because I told Kara, actually, when we walked in, I said, look, because she's a competitive MMA fighter. And she's subject to some random drug testing.

Eventually, I said, you better not wear gloves. Don't touch anything in this fucking building you never know you might just might something might be on a table somewhere and boom gets in your hands put in a lab coat exactly so you better fucking take a real chlorine bath i mean i don't know just get rid of it all a ton of water just get it out of your system from what you've seen how can we use the science yeah oh yeah back to your actual question maybe we should answer that you know um a couple of things i would say is be very very very careful of interpreting science yourself or listening to other people uh describe it who if you're in this space human performance space who don't work in human research.

It doesn't mean they're wrong, but, and I don't want to mention any names because there's no, there's no, there's no need, but people that come from say they work in biology research or they work in aging research and then they try to give people advice about what we should do for our health and exercise when they themselves know very little about exercise either like pragmatically in terms of they don't actually exercise or they don't understand the exercise science literature exercise physiology or the opposite are these like pseudo science people who you know like did a one case study and oh yeah i did a vodka enema and oh my god my glutathione went up like that means fucking nothing that's

dick all that means absolutely nothing and i love anecdote as much and i i lean i mean i've i've watched your stuff a lot i've learned from a lot of people uh in these things that are not scientists but they try stuff and i'm like oh okay maybe that maybe there's more merit there because it did work and now let's go further so i'm not saying don't listen to anecdote but just be very careful right because what translates from a mouse from a cell culture to a human, to an untrained human, to a moderately trained human, to a very well-trained human, those can be leaps and bounds. So when we use the science, we have to consider, okay, great, this is an interesting study, but they use to say what most of us use as a college age, okay, trained people. Okay, good. That's a nugget. That's a piece of insight. Will that actually translate to a professional fighter, an advanced powerlifter? Maybe, maybe not. And now you have to use the next step of your personal experience, your coaching, your acumen, very, very difficult. So my answer to how you use the science is it's always a piece of the conversation, but

it's not the entire thing. Just like your anecdote shouldn't be the entire thing either. It's what we call evidence-based practice, right? People hear that term and they think, oh, that means what's the science say? That's not what evidence-based practice means. Evidence-based practice means science is a third of the component. Your experience is a third of the component. And what other experts in the field is a third of the component?

And you use that to make the most sense. So don't be dogmatic about any of those approaches. I have to do this constantly, even with our own research, because when I'll do, say, a study and- You probably get excited sometimes. You're like, oh, this is cool. And then you're like, oh, this is a new thing. That very much happens, right? But because I come at this from my background, I'm always thinking in terms of context. And if you ever heard me on any show, people get super annoyed because I'm always like, fuck, I don't know. It depends. Like, I won't give you a straight answer. But that's because, like, I know right now, if I took the same concept with Zoila, MMA fighter, and I tried to use that same exact concept with Morgan King, an Olympic weightlifter. It might not work. Why? Because I've done both. And I know, okay, this would never transfer over to here. So when you have that little bit of knowledge, you start expanding that to everything else.

You start to realize, oh, okay, yeah, there's huge limitations. There's a crossover here. And so you need to speak and think appropriately because of the fact that they're going back to your point, Mark. The reason I can do that is because I have done these things and I do do these things. And so I have a better sense of, unlike most of the people, it's like, no, no, we showed a lab clearly. This grip was better, so therefore it always better. Well, maybe because I've seen dudes like Dr. Deadlift here with 12 foot arms.

So don't think that's going to matter for him, right? But then I've seen other guys like me with six inch arm. Okay, great. Well, if you've never worked with athletes, if you've never coached athletes, you've never coached athletes you've never been weight room if you've never been these things you're not you're not gonna think about those extra layers of well fuck maybe right but i have and so that's why that stuff jumps into my head and because the athletes i work with are so sporadic and across different sports and body types age genders um i'm thinking about that all the time because in my head i'm thinking of two or three of my athletes and going yep okay maybe

her maybe him nothing not not him at all at all and so that's just why i tend to answer the way i answer is because i'm always thinking those situations in my head so it's super annoying i get it no no no sorry you've passed your opportunity to ask questions we're back to you mark um i'm curious since you get to work with like a lot of fighters probably a lot of grapplers in general um is there a trend that you've noticed in terms of what works for them nutritionally in terms of like do certain athletes tend to work better with much higher fat and moderate carbs or in general do all of these athletes just work better with higher carb because of what they're doing in that like in that sphere in general i feel like i want to just take my

shirt off right now and cuddle up to you that voice is so smooth i know i'll make it a little bit higher i know know. I've asked the people listening to put their hands on the table. Keep their hands up where we can see them. Exactly. Visuals. Yeah. Sorry, my left hand's going to be gone for a minute here. I can do both. Either way is fine.

Just nothing premature. He does have a kid now, so premature maybe. We have to actuallyasha he does have a kid now so premature maybe oh you have to actually have some mature to be premature have a nine month old and see how often that happens oh boy so i'm sorry she knows i'm kidding she's a savage that way uh anyways what was oh yeah um you know there are general trends but i don't think that would they would be that exciting or enticing or novel they would be what you would predict them to be

whether some do better on high fat stuff in the sports i work with i have yet to come across anyone who does better on a very high carb sorry sorry, a very high fat, low carbohydrate diet. And that doesn't mean that there aren't any there. Uh, give me, I think you've, um, I mean, you know, Matt Brown. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic. So he'll go into a ketogenic diet often in between, but even when he gets into camp, he has to back off of that. It just doesn't work well. And so, I mean, we've done for a couple of years now and it's like, okay, it just doesn't seem to work very well when he gets into camp. Uh, so again say you couldn't i just haven't come across any that that do better that way so there's a there's a lot of reasons for it but uh i mean one one of the main things is just

digestion and just like logistics so if you train three times a day and you were to eat steak in between your training sessions really tough even a small amount of eat steak in between your training sessions. Really tough. Even a small amount of meat in between training sessions would, first of all, not be appetizing. It would be kind of gross. And then secondly, like these guys are going pretty hard and they're doing some really intense workouts. So it's like, you know, the odds of that stuff really sitting in there well, it's probably not great. getting from one workout to the next, sort of using the carbohydrates and the lower fat model to kind of recover from each workout is probably the best option for most, right?

Yeah, and you know, again, when we have to differentiate, yes, a really good question. We have to differentiate these professional athletes, which are really pretty novel, from somebody like any of us who, you know, trains probably mostly every day, maybe a couple of times a day, but very rarely are we going to do more than, say, 10 training sessions in a week.

Is that fair to say? Yeah. Maybe you're a double. I don't know. Kind of, yeah. Okay. Most people then, even in our field, are really talking four to six to seven workouts in a week would be pretty high end still. Like Zoila, again, an example.

I'm just thinking her cause she's right on the street here. It's insane. Like if I can summarize 90% of our conversations, it's please stop training so much like that. That's where we're at. Cause she's constantly almost every day does some sort of cardio in the morning and then has some sort of either striking or kickboxing class and then has sparring or something like that. So she is almost always training three times a day. Across the week then you're looking at something like, depending on how much she will listen to me or not, 15 to 18 workouts in a week. And I'm not talking, you know, like I went for a 30-minute power or a 10-minute walk as of my workout.

This is not counting her coaching and her personal, her privates and all this other stuff. None of these are throwaway workouts. They're all pretty damn hard. And she's kickboxing and grappling and wrestling and doing her cardio sessions or 45 minutes on the treadmill sort of things. And so to be able to get recovered for that in time, it's just so much easier with carbohydrate. She handles it well. Digestion's no problem. Getting her on weight is, you know know it is what it is that's

part of the sport but it would be really really really difficult for just us to can carbs as much as she wants to and she's constantly pressing that right i'm like yeah well we need these things in here so you just don't have the as you mentioned the point is you don't have the logistical time you don't have the well okay i got i gotta do my fasted cardio at 9 o'clock in the morning, which I don't advise, but she does. This is part of working with an athlete, right? Not that I don't advise it, but it's not my go-to. So sometimes, though, when you run into something like this, and this fits into the fighters, their mental, what they believe in, right? It fits into their beliefs.

You can't really take that away, huh? Man, you got to be – and this is also what we were talking earlier. That's dumb. You shouldn't be doing that, but you can't really do that to in, right? If it fits into their beliefs, you can't really take that away, huh? Man, you gotta be, and this is also, we were talking earlier. That's dumb. You shouldn't be doing that, but you can't really do that to them, right? Well, you, yes and no.

You're mostly right in terms of no. This is the reason why I wouldn't really teach a seminar on these things or do like a book or anything like that because you have to manage going back to science. Okay, science tells us X.

Okay, your individual athlete then tells you another huge percentage. You know, how do they respond? But then past that, you have to start getting into the soft skills. And you have to start thinking about what have they done before? What's the culture in their gym? What's their head coach want them to do? What are they scared of? What does their teammate do?

What are they nervous about for this particular contest going on? And so you have to think about all of those things. So if you look at the advice I have given any of my athletes, every single piece of it would sound unbelievably contradictory. And I'll straight up lie to them sometimes. I'll for sure straight up lie. Saying something like that, like right now if Zoila texted me and said, hey, do you think I should do faster cardio right now?

I'd be like, absolutely. We definitely need to do this tomorrow. Because I know that she really wants to do it anyways. And I could fight her on that. And I have sometimes I'll put my foot down and be like, hey, but I'll always do it this way. I don't want you doing this because of this reason. And if that is a secondary good reason,

then she'll totally buy in. It's no problem. It's not like she's not bought in, but it's just really, really hard when that number's on the scale in your head and the weeks are cutting closer and you're just like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. And you just sort of get panicked.

And so you absolutely don't, there's certain things I won't touch, even if I know that they're wrong. There's certain things where I'm like, okay, if you want to do that, fine, but then we have to do this. Can we get here? Fine. Great. And Marie Spano, who's fantastic dietitian for the Atlanta Hawks, Braves, and the other team down there. I heard her say this at a conference one time about a ketogenic diet. This was maybe four years ago and I've totally stolen this. But she said, look, when an athlete brings you on board as part of their team, sometimes they're going to ask you about what you think you should do and then you can tell them.

But most of the time they're paying you to help them get where they want to get. You're on the same fucking team. Like let's not forget you're on the same team. So if they come to you and say, hey, Andy, what do you think I should do? Ketogenic diet is probably not going to come out of my mouth very often at the gates, right? But if they come to me and say, hey, I want to compete here. I like doing keto. Can you help me do keto better?

Then why would I waste time going, no, no, no, you shouldn't do keto. That's the opposite fucking team. It's not helping. It's only going to drive things and they're probably going to walk out the door, not listen to what I said and or work with somebody else, which is fine. My point is like, we need to take what they're already doing and figure out what are the negotiables, non-negotiables, and then work within those parameters. That's how you actually get athletes that are really, really happy and want to come back because it's like, no, no, I'm going to help you do better here. And in this case, a lot of the times there are few things that

can't be adjusted. If you understand things at the high enough level, I can say, okay, you really want to do this, this and this. Okay, fine. Let me work this around to that, to that, to that, that. Okay, fine. And now we're set here. But when you go just to one thing, you got to let me know because this whole system is kind of predicated on balance here. And if you throw one off out there, so that's how you deal with it but that that stuff only comes with enough experience coaching and being in the gym and being there and and understanding what it feels like and it's like that so every uh every coach needs to be a good liar and you need to be able to straight up uh you know like uh like if i helped in sema with something in the gym um and somebody else comes to me and says hey i was thinking about doing this for my deadlift i'd say no you know i i gave in sema this tip the other day it worked

really well for him they would go shit he deadlifted 755 so maybe i should even if i even if i didn't tell him to do it or you know just just whatever way you can get the person to do it right you do that sometimes you pit them against each other do you have any idea how many times i've had an athlete ask me questions particularly like are we okay here and i've gone yeah no we're fine and then turn around to their head coach and be like oh fuck or or in myself or called this i mean like oh boy this is gonna be a tight one yeah especially like how can we do this and make weight yeah no no we're totally okay is this where i was last camp yeah yeah you're dead on spot 26 pounds oh shit yeah okay you know we're like we're way higher than we were last time can i get there yeah i mean if i don't

think they can get there i'm not gonna lie like i'll stop it immediately i haven't had to do that yet but i would but oh well one time but one anyways uh but yeah like you have to be careful within that last stretch of not breaking them upstairs right you have you have to appreciate the psyche and just be like you know it's more important right now that i worry about this and you just think that we're in a good spot right and i fucking hope we get there so yeah it's got to be hard because you know with fighting there's multiple coaches right there's a kickboxing coach and there's a jujitsu guy and there's i mean they got a lot of different people pulling them in different directions and there's kind of the just they got a lot of different people pulling them in different directions. And then there's kind of the, just the old school mentality,

which I think has slowly changed over time of, well, it's still sitting there, I guess, kind of the wrestler mentality, which is just like, we'll just kill ourselves to get to wherever we need to get to, right? It's still prevalent a lot in the kickboxing community. It's still prevalent.

I got one, Nathan Tomasello, sensational wrestler uh a house a guy like really really good chance to go to tokyo uh and he works tremendously hard but but he's he's good the people around him are really really solid and they're really respectable so whatever we say basically he'll roll with and it's really really good um others in that same sport i'm like all right just let me know what the damage was and i'll see what i can do in the back end. Cause I know you're not going to listen to me. So here we go. Like, again, I'm on your team here. This is what you're going to do. I'm not going to fight you with it. It's better. I'd rather you be honest with me. Tell me that you're not going to listen

to me from the training point, but you want my help in the recovery. Okay, fine. But eventually they'll figure it out. Like, man, we're having to pull all these recovery tricks off. Maybe we should just think about the training. But sometimes that takes time. So, I mean, specifically to fighting, you know, it sounds like you got most of these athletes, you know, utilizing carbohydrates, right? We also hear, though, kind of in the general population where everybody kind of always wants to say, well, everybody's different. How different, you know, how different are we really? Like some people will say, I don't respond well to carbs, but typically when I hear people talk about carbs, when they talk about them in negative context, they're talking about pizza and ice cream. Yeah. And when I hear bodybuilders talk about carbs,

they're usually talking about like rice and potatoes. So we've got people talking about kind of different things, but. Well, you're on fire this morning. You're on fire with good questions. So yeah. Okay. A couple, a bunch Well, you're on fire this morning. You're on fire with good questions. So, yeah. Okay. A couple, a bunch of ways I want to go after this. Number one, for an athlete who's training 18 times a week versus somebody who's training five times a week versus somebody training no times a week. These are very different recommendations.

For example, this is actually why I loved your. So maybe just for a second, maybe it's not so much in the difference of each person, but in the difference of activity. Obviously, there'll be a lot of differences between like you and me and him. Right. But it's probably almost maybe even more important of what we do. Right. I would say both of those are very, very important. We do have to respect there's some major inter and intraperson differences.

But like your war on carb thing. Okay. Initially when that, when you started doing that, people were just like, Oh my God, another keto zealot, blah,

blah, blah. Just fucking listen to what he's saying. Actually, it's not what he's saying. First of all, that's, that's just a novel idea, right?

Like actually listen to what they're saying. But for example, I gave that to my dad, right? Because no physical activity basically. And he needs extremely simple guidelines and instructions. So translated to him was don't eat carbohydrates. Copy. Because you know what he thinks carbohydrates are exactly what you just said. He doesn't understand that a vegetable is a carbohydrate. Right. Fruit is not a carbohydrate to him. So translated to my dad, carbohydrates were all the food I shouldn't be eating. where all the food I shouldn't be eating. And so it's an extremely simple message.

It is one rule, basically. It's very follow. It's very easy to follow. There's no confusion here, right? This turns out to be pretty effective for those folks. You can tell somebody in an elevator, hey, don't eat carbs, catch you later. Right?

Which is what they want. Like, they don't want to be bogged down like you're saying about your book. You're like, okay, I got to do this and I got to go to page 14 and I got to manage. Most people are just, they're not in in this space aren't going to do that um moving over to the moderately active person and the extremely highly active person then i think we can start having conversations of oh okay let's talk about when carbs are good when carbs are bad and let's talk about what carbs really are um differentiating

sugar that word we won't actually get into the chemistry of it here, but anytime someone's making a lot of ruckus about what carbs do or sugars do, I always want to ask, like, what is sugar? Like, do you actually know what that is? Here you are selling your anti-sugar diet or pill or company behind it. Like, do you actually, could you explain to me what literally sugar is? The vast majority can't right they really really really can't do you understand that the difference between sugar and starch could you literally tell me what they are not give me food examples because that's the easy one oh yeah potatoes to start okay what is that why is it a starch

right dead and then you want and you you're a nutrition expert and you don't know what that is no you're out like going you don't get to be part of the conversation like you don't know what fructose does oh yeah it's it's sugar it's bad nope oh it's in fruit okay great do you know why it's different than glucose no do you know how it's processed differently oh you think that causes fatty ass liver disease you don't know fuck all like you need to stop talking you're out of the conversation yeah i always say you go like three questions deep on somebody and they're completely lost and a lot of times it's even more than that i mean it's even less than that two usually what is sugar done we're out here conversation over right i think just to give some my opinion on those pieces i don't know anyone um i mean fucking bring lane norton back why did i get to debate lane by the way what the hell

bring him up here lane i'm challenging you right now to to debate lane by the way what the hell bring him up here lane i'm challenging you right now to a debate i don't know what because we probably agree on almost everything but fuck you i want a debate how about politics that'll be popular oh yeah yeah gun control yeah i'll get people excited i'll bring in my freezer full of yeah religion talk about religion and politics there we go i don't know, Lane. Whatever. You're an asshole, Lane. Yeah. So most of us that are reasonable are going to say, hey, let's minimize the amount of added unnecessary sugar to our diet. Like, I just don't know. Even somebody like Azula or Scott Holtzman, whatever, that are training these ridiculous times, we don't need to add a lot of sugar to their diet. We can still get that from real food most of the time, with the exception of some very unique circumstances. We might add some honey or things like that, right? So that to me is like, why do we even have that conversation? Everyone's in agreement. This is generally not

a good thing. For normal health, like it's a no brainer. We don't need to be adding a lot of sugar. Can you? Fine. In some cases, if total calories are controlled for and you want to remove something else. Cool. Got it. So that to me is out of the conversation. Moving to the middle piece, so that's a little more dicey is, okay, what about carbohydrate foods that are real foods? Fruit, things like that. And now you get into your, well, some people handle them well, some people don't. get into your well some people handle them well some people don't um the vastment it's a it's a two-way thing so one of the reasons why you maybe don't handle those foods well is because you don't eat them often like what do you this is the problem with the elimination thing so like we'll take it out of your diet for 30 days and then put it back in and see what happens i know what exactly what's going to happen you're going to feel like shit and you're going to shit your shit your pants yeah like this is not an effective use of elimination diet because when you take something out of your diet, you effectively downregulate the ways that you metabolize and break down that food.

So then when you reintroduce something that hasn't been in your gut for 30 days or 60 days, it's going to feel like shit. You're not lactose intolerant now. Like you just haven't had to metabolize that in a long time. So we have to be careful there. long time so we have to be careful there um i mean obviously for the most people uh metabolic flexibility is the way to go which is that term has been hijacked recently i don't know into thinking maximizing fat is metabolic flexibility that is not i'm sorry i won't name you but that's not what that term means the term means is you should be able to have a bolus of carbohydrate or even sugar for that matter and and not feel horrible for an hour

like you might not feel perfect but you should if you feel terrible then you're not very good at using carbohydrate like we would call you very precious let's say like you're very precious yeah you're fragile you're fragile as fuck everything gives you a fucking allergy yeah everything you know that's not a good place to be in it's not like for some reason we want to be like that's like a badge of honor like oh my god no if boy i can have berries but man if i have any melon just by the way like watermelon you know like not actually super full of sugar like dipshits think it's mostly water that's water yeah yeah like very like very satiating very filling and very little calories actually um so like if you're about a watermelon i crashed

you've got metabolic problems right you should fix that shit same thing like if you're like I bought a watermelon I crashed You've got metabolic problems You should fix that shit Same thing like If you If you can't You know Wake up here and decide Hey fuck it Let's go train really hard

I'm not gonna eat Let's go fasted And you get 20 minutes And you're a crybaby Well you're not flexible In the other direction You need to be able To power yourself

If you can't wake up And go 16 hours Without food And still maintain Cognitive function I mean you might be hungry and the pangs might be there, but you should be able to function just like physiologically refined. If you can't do that, like you're a precious little bitch. We need to fix that metabolically

with, unless you're optimizing to one of the spectrum for a sport or some particular contest or competition, right? But for the most part, we need to be able to do that. And my athletes are the same. They need to be able to use that and my athletes are the same they need to be able to use if they become extremely carbohydrate dependent that could be a problem the other way that somebody might not the other type of person that may not utilize carbohydrates very well or say that they might not use carbohydrates very well might be someone who's heavy yeah right that can't happen um like maybe they got some insulin resistance along the way well definitely if that happens okay yeah if they get if they are or moving towards insulin i mean people say like oh the carbs make me fat and again hey you want to know something they're choosing some bad they're

choosing some bad carbohydrates that they're talking about well it's it's the calories that made you fat right right and you just um happen to like to overeat most of your calories in the form of carbohydrate right which i actually agree with with you and a lot of other low-carb proponents. It's because I'm a fucking genius. Absolutely. Could you stop talking so much, by the way? Jesus. I can't get anything out.

Well, he's upset because you got so excited and he doesn't know what to say now. No, there's something I want to ask you. Let me finish my point anyways. Yeah, go ahead. And, okay, good. I'm sorry. He could kill both of us. I know he can.

Look at him. I think he's planning on it. No, no. I can see where those eyes are boiling. I get it. I can smell. I actually agree that most people in the general population, a disproportionate percentage of the extra food

they eat comes in the form of carbohydrate. So I actually agree with him in saying like, hey, if we get most people to think maybe we should eat so many carbohydrates, especially when we're extremely inactive, that's not the worst message in the world. People typically aren't overeating on fat as much as they are carbohydrate as a general rule.

So I actually would agree on that. And I can't remember where I was actually going with the major point. So I'll just let you ask your question now. So, um, no, that's cool. It's cool. Uh, so, you know, like the IFYM crowd and the bodybuilders obviously don't have as much expenditure as, you know, your MMA athlete and those types of athletes that do a lot of cardio. Oh, I remember. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, do you? No, no, I won't forget this time. Okay. that do a lot of cardio. Oh, I remember.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, go ahead. Oh, do you? No, no, I won't forget this time. Okay, okay. But something you'll see a lot in the crowd that tracks macros is, let's just say, a badge of honor in terms of eating a lot of carbohydrates while staying fairly lean.

So an upwards of like 400, 500, 600. And this could be a 160, 70 pound male that eats that many carbs and maintains their weight and they have a decent level of activity. I see that as being somewhat detrimental. Like you don't need that many carbs and maintains their weight and they have a decent level of activity. I see that as being somewhat detrimental. Like you don't need that many, but a lot of them do it because like, oh, well, when I start prepping, then I can have a lot of food to work with, et cetera. But I mean, what would be the detriment, especially like long-term health, like detriment to that? So I don't know if there is a huge long-term health detriment to that,

but I would agree with you fully on the fact that it's probably not necessary. It's easier for most people to think about protein as being a supply chain. It is the raw material you need for, of course, muscle, but immune system function, neurotransmitters, hormones, those are all proteins. So we need to be honest with those. Car ask for those carbohydrate and fat are a lot more flexible so if you want to go on 40 carbohydrate and 20 fat or the inverse that's not going to make a whole hell of a difference or some you want to switch those ratios around i don't think it matters so do you need to be six to seven hundred grams of carbohydrate or body mass so of 160 so now you're really you know four to, six grams per kilogram

body weight of carbohydrate. That's not outrageous, but that's perhaps a bit higher in the spectrum than I typically do. Especially for like the type of work they're doing, right? But what's interesting about that, and this was, I actually was going to talk about when you brought up insulin sensitivity. So we have two different types of muscle fibers, fast twitch and slow twitch. Well, the slow twitch are typically not as powerful, but they have better endurance, which means they're better at using fat as a fuel. Fast twitch fiber is the inverse, more powerful, faster, and they're much better at using carbohydrate as a fuel. One thing that is incredibly clear is people that have a large percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers are at extreme risk of diabetes.

And this is because if you lose regulation of those fast-twitch muscle fibers, you lose the primary place that's controlling blood glucose. So it's a huge problem with particular communities, particular ethnic backgrounds that have a tendency to have more fast-twitch fibers. They also happen to be at a huge risk of that. Having said that, then that is also the answer. Specifically, this is why strength training, in my opinion, is even more effective for prevention and treatment of diabetes type 2 than endurance steady-state exercise because of the fact that that's the only way to efficiently target your fast-fetched muscle fibers. Get those things to start burning glucose.

They'll start taking in the blood glucose. Your actual blood glucose will be very well managed. So it's an incredibly important part for most people, again, who are not into this field. You dabble yourself with a moderate dose of carbohydrate under control, not excessive, not 600 grams, not 70% like some people. I mean, look at the national data. Some people, it's not uncommon to see people on 70% carbohydrate diets that are not physically active. You manage that with no contractile stimulus of your fast-twitch fibers, because the only way to

turn those on is high-force activities. Your normal activity, even a steady-state cardio is almost effectively, basically fully slow twitch fibers. So you have this combination of you're not using, because you're not asking the muscle to ever produce any force with overload of carbohydrate and then wha-bam, wha-bam, major, major problems. So you want to prevent that. You want to stop that.

If we dose normal people with controlled carbohydrate and some strength training, boy, I really think independent of obesity, because that's another, but independent of that, type 2 diabetes risk, I think is really, really, really manageable. For a long time, I used to kind of think like people could kind of do any exercise they want, you know, they could like walk or ride a bike or whatever. But I've changed my opinion on it. I think everyone needs a lift yeah i really do i really think that you know i guess there's some people like if you're really active in certain sports and maybe you don't like quote unquote need to lift right um but i think that a lot of us could really you know most of the population benefit very strongly from

some weight training yeah moving around some damn weights you know well for that reason alone you want to start talking about aging too. The data are just incredibly clear. When you lose muscle mass with age, it's coming almost entirely from fast-twitch muscle fibers. And so again, this is the reason why, yeah, gardening, walking, taking the stairs is helpful for burning more energy. And that's helpful for maintaining body mass. And that's critically important for aging and health.

But really, you lose the quality and the amount and the size of those fast-twitch muscle fibers i mean you go from rhinoceros to like squirrel muscle fiber size you're gonna have a problem maybe not now but you're gonna have a huge problem with aging in fact i mean these are you go over the things that predict successful aging and wellness this is, and, and not to jump ahead of myself here, cause I'm going to go into this in depth with, uh, with Rogan, but we have to be very careful of then prescribing things that are like, Hey, super low protein diets because we want to downregulate mTOR. Really dummy. Yeah. Yeah. That rat might live 30% longer and your motherfucking ass is gonna be in a wheelchair when you're 50, you're going to have no muscle when you're 60. You ain't going to be living by yourself at all.

It's a real stupid idea. I'm not saying you have to be on high protein your whole life, but you really want to start taking medications pharmacologically and prophylactically and you want to start going on 20 gram protein diets per day. Yeah. We'll see who looks better when they're 75. Let's see who's running across the street. Well, when I was-

Yeah. Insane. When I was on Rogan with my brother's running across the street. Well, when I was, yeah, insane. When I, when I was on Rogan with my brother, I kind of mentioned to Joe, I was like, I don't think you're going to live to be like 125 years old because you're be like on a special diet. Yeah.

Yeah. And he's like, I disagree. But, and then we kind of like went past it cause we got Rogan, you know, he sometimes just goes, goes off on his own thing.

But I don't think we're there yet. You know, I don't think, I don't think we know enough to like obviously there's so many other factors there's just too many things to even but you know we're not we're not really seeing that obviously you can i think i think what's happening is people are not really uh uh living longer they're like dying longer you know they're they're alive for a long time but they're in a lot of fucking pain and so i think we can starve that off.

Yeah. And I think you can get to 80 or 90 before you need like pills and a bunch of different things. I think, I think that's kind of almost all we can hope for. I don't know if we're going to

just all of a sudden be like, hey, look at, there's Joe Rogan, 145 years old. You know what I mean? No, I don't,

I mean, I'm sorry, Peter D. Mattis, but I don't think so either. I mean, we, the one thing that will help were things like, okay, early detection of cancer and stuff.

And that's going to shake people off, all that stuff. But in terms of barring any accident, barring any death early, what I'll call early unnecessary death, cardiovascular disease, things like these. Yeah. The top end, I mean, I don't know, more than five, 10, sort of 15 years. I think aging well is the more than 5, 10 sort of 15 years I think aging well is the more appropriate play right now so none of us are interested

especially from our backgrounds I also think too I don't think people have thought this through very well if you live to be 100 well you can just stop right there period end of podcast full stop well if you live to 150 that means every single person that you've ever met is dead

yeah you gotta make a lot of new friends twice Well, if you live to 150, that means every single person that you've ever met is dead. Yeah. You got to make a lot of new friends. Twice. Yeah, yeah. Many times over. You probably saw your grandkids die and everything. Your great-grandkids. Yeah, right?

Yeah, that's not particularly interesting. Doesn't sound fun. Yeah. So, I mean, I think we all want to age better and we want to continue. We're in a spot actually, which is really nice technology wise. Like our parents' generation. I mean,

your dad and mom are probably getting close to retired. Yeah. They're in their seventies. Yeah. Are your parents retired? Sisters. My mom's 60. Okay.

So they're getting close to that age, right? Our parents' generation, we're just like, you get to 67 and you retire, right? Cause you don't want to do that shitty job anymore. You don't want to go in the office and you don't want to work on people's taxes anymore.

Right. Whatever the shit you're doing, right? But now with the space we're moving into, I don't think you're going to see as much retirement. There's no need to do it. And I think that will have a massive impact on our wellbeing and health, right? Because one of the quick things that we say is-

You need an obligation of some sort. You need purpose. You need exactly all those things. And that's going to help us. That'll be a thing that'll move us in the direction upstairs. Now, as long as we can survive the technology thing, which may put us in the worst direction, we have a shot. You're very persuasive. When I went to your facility, you and I think everybody else was in on it too.

You guys made it seem like it was no big deal to do a muscle biopsy. It's not, but I'm, well, I've never had it done before and I'm probably just a big pussy, but no, probably man, that shit hurt.

Did it really? It did. Yeah. For weeks. Really? Yeah. Fucking hurt. And everyone was that needle.

Yeah. Everyone in that lab was so excited once they pulled Mark's muscle fibers. It didn't hurt when it happened at all. It didn't hurt at all. When it happened, it had, it't hurt at all when it happened. It started hurting like a couple days later. That's interesting. Probably the infection. Yeah, well.

The alien babies they put inside your leg. What we didn't tell you is you're in an experimental government trial. Yeah. So lucky. You lured me in to check my penis size. You could have just measured it. You could have just asked. Well, we actually had to do that rectally as well. So that was part of why we did that other thing too.

That's why I was out cold. That's exactly right. Yeah. That's why you woke up pregnant four months later. Yeah. What happened? That was weird. No, you know, I've had 35 or more on my own self.

Yeah, that's what you guys were saying. And now I understand why, because you can't find anybody else to do it. No one else is dumb enough. It's me and my brother. heart and all that stuff. You got to do a minute and a half at 90 plus percent of your VO2 max, two and a half minute recovery. You got to do six rounds of that. And then you got to do two more biopsies afterwards. Damn. And none of those girls have complained afterwards about their muscles.

They're a lot stronger than me. So, so it matters. I have biopsied hundreds of people at this point. And I would say only just me. A couple of people have complained about. I'm a big bitch mean i'm pretty curious how this looks because like i was told the size of the needle is like a little bit bigger than a straw right uh it's probably more like a barbell width wait seriously no no it probably looks like a pen like the pen you have it's disgusting i hate

yeah i'd be a bitch too yeah but the the sounds that it made when they pulled it out it was like an actual suction cup like i was like whoa what does it do it like it literally uh not being dramatic literally like like cut some muscle out right yeah so basically there's a bevel in the needle and the needle goes into your thigh and we have a suction attached to the end of it so it sucks sucks whatever muscle is, can go into the bevel and then we chop down and cut that off and remove it. And so we ended up getting call it a hundred milligrams of muscle tissue, which is like the size of a P. So the needle looks big and scary and all that,

but really taking the size of a P out of your muscle. But if it takes two people to, to pull it out, I think that's, I mean, this is mechanics. It doesn't take two people to pull it out. It takes me one hand. It takes one pound of pressure. It's, we have assistants holding the cords but this is mechanics. It doesn't take two people to pull it out. It takes one hand.

It takes one pound of pressure. We have assistants holding the cords and stuff like this. They don't trip me, you dick. What was great is so after they pulled out Chris Bell's,

you know, they're like, oh, this is, you know, whatever. This is awesome. Then they pulled Mark's out and they start, you know,

everyone's like, oh my gosh, look at this one. You know, they go crazy. And then I just look over at Chris and he's just like, they didn't react

like that when they pulled mine out yeah these guys act like they scored a touchdown in the super bowl yeah that's not true chris uh what happened was simply we got a sometimes when you get the better sample yeah we got a better sample with yours and yours happened to be particularly nice he was like i guess mine wasn't that impressive his it's all right, buddy. No, and to make you feel better, Chris, we have analyzed your fibers as well. I just didn't put them on the poster

because it was kind of hard to explain the two different, and I was like, whatever. So we put his, but we have yours too, Chris, and it looked equally impressive.

So don't worry. There you go. You're not lying. Equally impressive? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, snap. Yeah.

No, for sure. I mean, we haven't gone through all of his fibers yet so i don't know if he has any that lined up quite rhino style um but he was um i can't remember his exact fiber type profile relative to yours but uh both of them were very clearly highly trained you get a a pretty accurate analysis just from you know one one thing from someone's leg or? Yeah. I mean, it's not perfect. There's always small discrepancies.

Would the upper body be similar or? No. Okay. So actually a couple of things on that. The fiber type can actually be different within the exact same muscle in different areas, but we know that. And so I go with this exact same area on every person to make sure in depth, you know, closer to the bone, further away to the other side and all that stuff matters up and down. So in your case, closer to the hip or closer to the knee, but this is what I do for a living. So I got that part pretty figured out.

No, your muscle fiber, the muscle composition of your muscles or the fiber type composition of your muscles differs depending on each muscle group. And it depends, it differs between person. It's highly subjective to change based on how you train in fact there's there's significant evidence to show everything from cold water immersion hypoxia vitamin D resveratrol polyphenols obesity aging inactivity all these things can change your muscle fibers the composition of them now the non exercise stuff is not well documented in

humans, but all the exercise stuff is extremely well documented in humans. So with the muscle, the different muscles, it really, we call it structure follows function. So if you look at like your spinal erectors, not that kind of erection mark, the spinal erectors, stay on point. I don't know what the actual composition of your erector, that kind of erector is. I don't know. I mean, I'm sure yours is more of the fast twitch explosive. You never know. Not a lot of endurance. Hey,

I don't know. Sorry. Hey now. Like your spinal rectus, or I'll go to your, actually your shank. This is easier. So in your calf,

you've got two primary muscle muscles. You have the soleus and the gastroc, right? The soleus starts in the back of your lower leg and goes into your Achilles and that's what we call an anti-gravity or postural muscle so it's keeping us all standing right now right next to it is a gastroc and that it goes in the foot the exact same spot through the achilles but actually originates behind the knee and that's the one if you flexed your thing it would pop out to the side right it's that vertical thing that's the one, if you flexed your thing, it would pop out to the side, right? It's that vertical thing. That's extremely fast twitch. The soleus is extremely slow twitch.

So when I'm walking, my shank then has the ability to produce force such as the force is needed. So as I walk or if I'm standing, the gastroc is basically completely turned off. It's useless, right? It doesn't need to be going there. But you want to propel, jump, sprint. When the gastroc kicks in,, can't do it a lot of times because it gets fatigue, but it can propel you to explode. Hamstring, glutes, quads, biceps, triceps, shoulders, diaphragm, heart, all these things have actually fairly predictable. Once you

think about what they do, QL, extremely slow, right? Anti-gravity muscle. But traps, very different, right? That's different different function so it's pretty specific to what we need them to do you were saying uh what like 80 percent of my muscle fibers were type 2 is that right 2a yeah which is a very very high number in fact um we when we did our uh weightlifting study so that just came out about a week ago so that was very very interesting with our olympians and world champions And we took their biopsies. They had as a group, the team, the world team members, the Olympic members, um, were all happen to be girls, but all of those girls as a group were over 70% fast switch, which

is extremely rare. And in fact is the fastest ever documented. Yours was 80%. Some of the girls in that study that were higher than 85%. So your 80% was extremely rare. And some of those girls were 85 percent plus just exceptional values. What was actually very interesting is we compared them to like what we call national caliber girls and guys. So these are people that are qualifying for national championships in weightlifting, which is still really, really, really hard to do. At this point, the numbers are really,

really high, but they weren't quite world team members, right? So they weren't traveling to international meets in one of the Olympics. And they were noticeably lower. I think more like 66, 65% fast twitch, which are still exceptionally high numbers for most people. But there was a big difference between the world team girls

and the national level girls and guys. So it was very, very interesting. What have you seen, uh, you know, learning that information? Uh, how would you utilize that information? Even if you can use it, like, well, yeah, no, there's, there's a couple of things. Number one, we're simply, first of all, trying to figure out what we've been looking at. Right. So I can't rebuild your engine until I open up the hood. That's the biggest piece. We're going to do a whole bunch of follow-up analyses on this tissue, looking at some of the stuff like we did with you, with the mononuclear domain and all these

other things. Where we can get to is a couple of things. Number one, we've actually done this with three of the athletes from that study, where we, based on what we found, we have changed sort of like the velocities that we want them to train at. And all three of them have significantly improved since then. And that's not my words. This is their coach. So their, their head strength coach was like, I can't say who, cause I got to keep the people confidential. I would give you a shout out buddy, but I can't. And he's like, no, no, I took this and we changed the velocities and prescription based on, so two of his individual athletes came up very different on their spectrum. And so he changed and one of them had to go up in their velocity.

And one of them, he's like, Oh no, it's okay if we go down a little bit more. And the other one pretty much stayed, or the other one went up too. And that has made a significant change. Even more recently though,

this is what we're getting at. So right now we're on the cusp of, I think actual legit major changes to how we actually train people because of some of the muscle physiology. Before this, I would have said that what I told you was like, well, I don't really know exactly how we're going to use this. But Cody Hahn, Mike Roberts out of Auburn, had a study came out. What was today? Thursday? I think the paper came out Monday. And he looked at the fiber type of the people before training. and he looked at the fiber type of the people before training and the fiber type profile going in predicted how well uh how successful the training program was and so this is something

i've been talking about for a long time and he actually showed the first evidence of it he actually also showed recent evidence of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy which is something we've been talking about like talking shit about from zatsyorsky's days, right? People are like, oh, now it's happening with scientists. We're like, bullshit. Fuck bro science, man. Bro science is like 90 for 100 right now. It turns out you bastards figure stuff out. But anyways, I think this is where we're going to get to.

And this is where we're at right now on the cusp of is what we call precision training. It's no longer like, well, okay, well, all of you are going to try it off, start off in the same kind of thing. And then based on who's responding, what kind of adjust, right right which is how you would individualize well now it's like no no let me take these metrics and i think actually we can just

start here this is where you're going to be at um we can't figure out your bot your fiber type right now without a biopsy but with how close imaging is getting and i know of several things i'm pretty sure we're gonna be able to do that with your cell phone fairly quickly and so I think that is a place where it's just like everyone pulling a picture over there. I think you're more like this. Or we have some other non-invasive ways to measure it. And then you get put on different prescriptions based on that. And there's some other good evidence to suggest when you do that, there will be more effective carryover. There's some problems there, but I'll come back to that later.

What would different prescriptions look like for somebody like Mark who has 80% and then somebody who has like 60 so this is really now this is when you have to put your thinking cap on and this is actually where i think coaches are far ahead of scientists so right now if we said okay mark is 80 and um you wanted to do a bodybuilding show again okay when's it how long has been since you've done a bodybuilding or yeah just almost a year okay year ago you want to do one now we know you're primarily fast twitch do you want to train your fast twitch to make sure those are as big as possible or do you want to actually train your slow twitch knowing that those are the actual things you lack the most of i don't actually know there's no right answer there like that's actually coaching philosophy what do you want to do do you want to if you're a knockout puncher and you're terrible at wrestling

you want to actually spend all your time wrestling to get a little bit better at it or do you want to just make sure that to hell with it you're going to be as make sure that you don't uh give up your strength right don't give up the goose the golden goose that got you whatever the hell that sounds great you get it right well this is the thing that science is never going to be answered because that's always going to be a coaching philosophy issue, right? You ride your strength or you shore up your weakness. So I don't know. One of the things like for Mark we would say is,

hey, for your bodybuilding, I don't know, buddy. Right now there's a theory that higher rep ranges being something like 15 reps or more, preferentially hypertrophy slow-touch fibers, but like 10 to less certainly like more 5 preferentially hypertrophy slow-touch fibers, but like 10 to less, certainly like more 5, preferentially hypertrophy fast-touch fibers. Now, that's never actually been documented.

Actually, Brad Schoenfeld and I have been trying to do this for a couple years, but we can't get any funding to fucking do it. It's a super easy study. We just got to get a little bit of cash. If that were true, and I actually think it is, then I can say,

I know you're primarily fast-twitch. I know you're going to respond well to like the 1 to eight or so rep range you may not respond as well to the 20 to 25 right but whether you want to do that then specifically because you don't you want to work in your weakness or not that that's up to you but that's what i can tell you in terms of a training adaptation and the other piece would be taper so now you don't want to do a bodybuilding competition you want to do a powerlifting meet. Great. Well, one thing we have shown actually is we did a study with cross-country runners and we looked at three weeks of taper where they reduced their volume by 50%,

running volume by 50% in three weeks. And we saw about a 10% increase in fast twitch muscle fiber size, force, and velocity with three weeks of reduced tapering. The slow twitch fibers didn't change at all. And so what that tells me is if you're a super fast twitch guy or girl or a super slow twitch guy or girl, your tapering recommendations should be different. A fast twitch guy like Mark, I would say you need a lot more of a taper. You got to be really careful of the volume. I think you respond really well to backing your volume way down. Somebody who's maybe 50-50 or 60% slow twitch, I would say, you know what? You don't have to cut the volume as much.

It's not a big of a problem. I don't know if you actually find that to be true in your training, if your person needs a bigger taper or not. Yeah, I usually can't do that much stuff. I'll get too sore. Bingo. That's what a lot of people, yeah. That's what a lot of strength advocates. And I'm signing off, walking off right there.

Just kidding. I mean, if somebody gives me a prescription to do like you know five sets of eight or something like that i'm gonna be i'm gonna be very very sore from that i'd probably have to use 15 or 20 percent less than what they suggested in week one and you're 25 years into training yeah right right and that would kill me it would kill me um Whereas like somebody else might, they might do that with no problem. You know, they might do that really easy. It would bury me. And the frequency too, you know, I need like another, I need a whole week to recover from it. But again, if we were to look at it and say, okay, well, you never really done this before or haven't, I haven't done it that much, then we could say, okay, you can do it three times a week, but it's going to be at like 40% 40 in week one and we'll maybe bump it up and see how you feel because i might get killed from it so that to me is where this stuff is coming and these papers are coming there are actually some

other mark some other biomarkers i'm pretty fascinated by a strength aerobics and that was something that uh you mean like jacqueline lane style yeah yeah the strength aerobics is uh it's in uh burshansky's book, science and practice of strength training or whatever it's called. Um, I utilized a lot of that for, uh, recovery from injuries before really,

really slow training, tempo training. Oh yeah. Yeah. Um, the difference being like, you don't lock anything out. So if you're bench pressing the elbows,

stay bent. Um, you don't, you touch your chest, but you don't rest on your chest. And it is absolutely, it's, it's brutal.

Yeah. I wish somebody had a product that you could maybe wear when you're benching that would take some pressure. Yeah. No one's thought of anything like that. No.

Anyways. Somebody's going to work on that. No, they actually make a lot of money too. Probably buy houses and cars and it's going to be a truck out there, man. Yeah.

Not bad. God, what are you compensating for? Trying to make up for something. Andrew, any way you could put a ticker on this show about how many genital jokes I've made? Penis references? It could be a good drinking game, right? It's about 14 at this point.

Sorry. I didn't intend to do that coming in. It's just, I think about you, I think of penis. I was going to say it's the vibe, right? It's the energy in this room. Just putting that out. Putting that out there. Yeah. I think about you, I think of penis. I was going to say it's the vibe, right? It's the energy in this room. Just putting that out. Putting that out there. BDE.

BDE. No, I think that's actually another interesting area is we have spent a lot of time in research looking at muscle in terms of strength training. Probably more time looking at the nervous system. But the third piece to actual muscle contraction or movement in that say, is the connective tissue. So what people tend to forget is, yeah, in order for me to lift a barbell, there has to be a signal from my nervous system,

my brain or spinal cord or something that has to tell the muscle to contract. But the muscle is all wrapped in connective tissue. That connective tissue comes together to form one tendon. The tendon connects to the bone. That's what actually moves the bone. Virtually no information on that side of it. We haven't really looked, I mean, relative to the other two at that side. And why I bring that up is the Virgo-Shansky stuff.

Right now, most of us would say, I think that stuff is so effective for rehab and prehab because some reason it targets that area more. So coming back from injury, prevention of injury, whether you look at Cal, Cal Dietz's dry phasic system or anyone else who's used the same type of things, it looks like the slower those contractions or even the isometric work, which, you know, me being a football player and then Olympic weightlifter and then a combat athlete, like didn't do anything cause I didn't want to be slow for 12 years. Yeah, that was dumb, right? Probably should have done some things where I control the barbell. Maybe at some point that stuff, I think is very, very helpful. We don't know the science behind it as much as we do this stuff,

but I think you're, you're right. And I think it's a misconception. I think that people think that they have to move stuff really fast in order to train that. And I think that you can, uh, we've seen it time and time again, you know, we don't need any research for it. We've seen athletes move weights slow and sure enough, when they get a heavier weight on there, if they're asked to perform it for one rep and they're used to it, they can call upon their nervous system to move the weight. Now, obviously you can, you can train yourself up to it more efficiently by implementing different techniques and stuff. But, uh, you know, some of these bodybuilders like a, like a Jay Cutler and some of these other guys over the years they'll say oh yeah i don't really go for one rep maxes but meanwhile they're burying 500 pounds you know with their ass on the ground for sets of 12 and

squat with a minute rest in between sets and their conditioning is just you know through the roof and obviously there's a lot of peds involved in that as well but but they have plenty they're not lacking any strength is my point you know know, they're not lacking any. A lot of people might think some of these bodybuilders aren't very functional, but man, as somebody that can move 500 pounds like that. All right. So I got to give you two stories in that one. Number one, the, one of the first things I do in my senior level strength conditioning

class is I go through what I kind of think of that as the paradigm of, of, um, anaerobic sport activities. So, okay, there's speed and power and strength, hypertrophy, muscular endurance. Okay. And then I kind of go through and I hallmark like one sport that represents that. So if we look at absolute running speed or movement speed, okay, let's look to the track and field community. They're clearly the best. We get to power. That's obviously Olympic weightlifting. Strength is actually powerlifting, right? But then I throw in world's strongest man.

Okay, are they as strong as powerlifters? Well, not per se based on like math, right? But they have a little bit more muscular endurance. Go to CrossFit. Are they as strong as powerlifters? No. Do they have probably more muscular endurance though than, and again, we're talking super general here, right? Then strong men, because they're doing a higher rep range, right? Strong man is going to do five, six, eight, 10, 12,

you know, but CrossFitters 600, right? But now does that make you think CrossFitters aren't strong? Oh, clearly they are, right? Does that make you think bodybuilders? Oh, where do they fit? And people always say, oh, they're, they oh, they're all show, but no go. Really? Google Ronnie Coleman leg press. Google it, right? Those dudes are strong girls and guys strong, and they've got a huge work capacity. You can't get that kind of training in without it.

So you have to think a little bit, you know, past the initial. One of the things that's great about bodybuilding too is that it's not killing their joints, you know, when done correctly, done correctly, done under control. We're not competing at a high, like maximal level. Yeah, right. And I think that that's something that any athlete can benefit from. Like, look, just go over there and do some curls and do some shoulder presses and don't get fucking hurt. Lower it with a four-second count and work on your breathing.

Anyone who's ever shit on body bodybuilding uh is probably 25 yeah or younger or or just has run into a douchebag bodybuilder look at that that doesn't know what they're talking about yeah exactly it's the same thing with crossfit baby yeah yeah buddy so look at um look at crossfit crossfitters are savage what about matt frazier that guy's a fucking right i've never seen anything like it all those people at the hop-ins are fucking mutants. All of them. What is that, like 2,000 pounds or something? Insane?

Ronnie Coleman doesn't make any sense. No, I would love to biopsy that, too. Some of these dudes that are from the South, man, they don't count. Some of these dudes from the South. Yeah, those are fucking monsters. Just unreal. Yeah, tell him he's all show and no go. See?

Thank you. That's why you're there. You're the man. The guy on the other side was spotting. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, then it doesn no go. See? Thank you. That's why you're there. You're the man. Yeah. Well, the guy on the other side was spotting. You know, he was- Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, then it doesn't count. You got to boost.

And plus he had knee wraps on, so that doesn't count. It's a leg press. Yeah, 2,300. I'm sorry. Oh, fuck him. That's not even that strong. It's a leg press. Yeah, I mean, totally.

That's not functional at all. No, what could he squat, bro? Yeah, not functional. Meanwhile, he squats 800 for reps. I bet he- Yeah. Deadlifts 800 for reps. I bet he couldn't do a. Deadlifts 800 for reps.

I bet he couldn't do a kipping pull-up or whatever. What's that? I'm blanking out. Muscle-up. I bet he can't do a muscle-up. He's not functional at all. He probably could have. Anyways. Interesting story.

I'll give you the whole background of strength conditioning in one minute, if you will. I tell the story in detail in the first season of my show, but if you look at, typically in philosophy, you say this paradigm happens, or this pendulum happens, rather, where you start off with thesis, okay? Thesis meaning like you have a point, a contention, and then that typically gets met with an antithesis, which is swing the entire opposite direction, right? And then usually that results in you swinging back in the middle, landing in the synthesis, right? Somewhere in the middle. Well, initially, before Arnold came around, right, there's a guy named Dr. Karpovich, and he was anti-strength training.

This is bad for you, bad for you, bad for you, bad for you, pitched a whole shit about it. Bob Hoffman showed up. He brought Gimmick and a bunch of these other guys, uh, to, to in front of this guy, to his lab and all these bodybuilders who were not functional, blah, blah, blah. And they started doing backflips holding 30 pound dumbbells and they started stretching and all this other stuff. And you're like, he was like, holy shit. So he had to acknowledge that. No, no, no. All this stuff doesn't make you muscle bound. He then switched to think, okay, actually strength training is maybe not bad. Started doing more research in it.

Kind of our point earlier, like actually thought about, actually listened to what they're saying. And Hoffman thoroughly convinced him that actually strength training was beneficial. So then the field moved right about the same time. A little bit after that, Arnold came in with pumping iron, boom, boom, boom. And now the whole world thinks, oh my God, not only is this stuff not bad for me, it can make me a real life superhero. Think about how powerful that is, right? Like legit, look, he's a superhero.

He's Conan. He's the liquid, the incredible Hulk, right? And we start seeing these bodybuilders pop up in culture. That's fine. And that ran for 20 or so years as the predominant exercise. When we were kids growing up, there was basically nothing but bodybuilding, right? There's just no other type of strength training.

Strongman was still on the fringe. All those Muscle Beach movies too. Yeah. Back in the day where it's like the guys are working out and they're getting all the chicks and everything like that. Exactly, right? Like this is what everyone wanted to be. So we have this thing building. Joe Weider kicks in because of Arnold and sports supplements take off, protein, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then mass, mass, mass, mass, mass. Well, the problem with that became people started to realize, all right, I'm a normal person. I want to get bigger. I want to look like a superhero. But I got a wife and I got kids and got a job and I can't spend two and a half hours in the gym. Right. And I feel like this is not working and oh by the way like I feel like well then I get out I because I did you know a two and a half hour

bicep curl workout my back is hurting now my and we people started to get broken down and this opened the space up for someone to come in and say no no no not only you're not gonna be there for two and a half hours I can get you in and out of the gym counting your warm-up and cool-down of 30 minutes and this is CrossFit, right? This is their whole pitch. It was the exact antithesis. We'll go the opposite direction. No, we're not doing these small isolated movements.

We're doing the big compound. You're going to clean and squat and you're getting the fuck out of here. And you know what? So much so, all of that other single joint stuff is useless because they have to go- We don't need any of those machines. We don't need any of these machines, right?

And then there was a pitch against it. Oh my God, a leg press. That's garbage. Bicep curls. Biceps aren't functional. Motherfucker, do you see anyone without a bicep? You don't think they have a function? Yeah, they do.

Well, the problem was that took off, right? And then the pendulum had to swing back because then people started to realize, oh, well now I'm only doing these same four or five movement patterns and my elbow is starting to kill me. Because everything i do has elbow function and i'm not training my bicep oh and then my hamstring's getting me because everything i'm doing is a front oh great and now what is the crossfit community doing almost all of them are finishing

their workouts with accessory bodybuilding movements right getting jacked and tanned we're now back in that spot where it's like okay maybe, maybe we shouldn't have thrown out all the bodybuilding. By the way, I'm not a doctor. I'm not on your level, but that took longer than a minute. Ah, shit. I did the same thing on one of my videos on my podcast, and the dude- I think it was like four minutes long.

Yeah, my guy put up like a timer, and it was just like way, like this will be done in five minutes, and like nine minutes later, it's just like negative three, negative four. I'm sorry. Point being, maybe we shouldn't have thrown on

all the bodybuilding concepts. Maybe we shouldn't throw out all of the CrossFit concepts. And I think actually we're right in the middle of saying, okay, yeah, we need to be efficient with time. Most people don't want to spend six hours in a gym every single day to do their wrist curls.

But let's get a piece here. Let's get a piece here. And we're taking things from the weightlifting community. We're taking things from powerlifting. And now Strongman's getting back up, which is, I love this. This is to me like far more functional, if you will, and fun. And, but you come in and do a 20 minute strongman thing. I think for general health, that's the most efficient thing you could ever do. I think it's great. I think the one thing to watch out for would just be, you know,

the amount of weight, you know? So, I mean, sometimes people think they see these guys flipping these tires and stuff and you probably don't need a thousand pound tire. Start out with something that's much easier to manage and realize why you're doing it. You're not doing it to get on ESPN necessarily. You're doing it more for function.

Why do you think it's so much better though? I'm just curious. Well, because of I think the movement patterns are much more sustainable. They're much more global. Like a farmer just you just the learning curve is so easy walk with it uh i mean squat's complex you want to add load and you don't add volume to that i think it's much easier to you know where to put this giant yoke thing on your back you're gonna walk even flipping a tire which has some dangers to like your bicep and stuff as long as the weight's appropriate it's not it's not that hard to learn yeah it's fun it's novel um it's typically a little more unstable and unpredictable as opposed to like a barbell which is evenly loaded um and i think there's some some of these

movements too they allow you to have like a rounded back for example like totally you know picking up a sandbag or the stones and stuff it's because the weight's not that heavy whereas like if you're trying to 500 pound deadlift it's like that's probably not a great idea to lift the rounded back yeah exactly so it controls for people a lot like that i think it also does a really good job of exposing major holes you know it's like yeah major holes and you're like if you if you can deadlift 600 pounds but you can't pick up 150 pound stone right something something's something's amiss there right yeah yeah something's not right so i think that stuff is, is really, really good. And I'm, I'm very happy to see that coming back.

And also it just feels cool to drag something that's feels more germane to the world. Yeah. A yoke walk feels awesome too. Like these, these things, they just feel like barbaric in some way. They feel. Yeah. I think dragging, like dragging a big ass sled. Yeah.

I mean, fuck. I remember actually. Powering. It feels good. After last, I think it was last time i was on the show that fall um when i was out hunting i we happened to harvest a nice buck that was really fucking far out and it took my brother and i have no idea how long to drag that son of a bitch out and it was pretty close to when i'd been here and so all i kept thinking

about was that goddamn tank it's just like i'm dragging this thing oh yeah i'm dragging this thing like fuck this is functional like your hands are dying you're blown to pieces it's cold out like footing's uneven and he's just not there and i was just like yeah this this feels good you know we just can't it's hard to find a dead deer how much that damn thing weigh ah the deer we shot probably eight nine hundred pounds oh my god i'm just fucking kidding it's like 200 pounds 800 was like where bullshit. Where'd you find an 800 pound deer? It was big though. It was nice. So big fatty.

On the, uh, cause we, we touched on it a little bit. We like longevity and aging, et cetera. So there's multiple things I want to try and get out here. First off, in terms of longevity,

is there anything that like you think that people can be doing right now? Cause like, you know, there's Rhonda Patrick's talked about sauna and there's things about like, you know, fasting in terms of helping out with that. What do you think are things that athletes, not like your super high level UFC athletes, cause you wouldn't expect them to fast or anything, but athletes can do for longevity and recovery. Recovery is the second part of it. Um, things that like powerlifters, jujitsu athletes can be doing easily to really

like help with recovery because i've found that for myself um i started just doing sauna a lot recently and i mean it could just be totally mental but i'm i feel like i recover much better with all the workouts that i do over time so it's two-prong longevity and then recovery yeah we'll recovery. Yeah. We'll do the longevity piece first. Okay. If you just simply look and think through the things the human body is supposed to be able to do, just challenge each one. Challenge one in an appropriate fashion that allows you to be a little bit overloaded, but not buried. That's it. To me, what that stacks up to be is something that challenges your heart rate to get really high. You want to do that on a spin bike in class? Fantastic. You want to go to cardio kickboxing class? Hey, well, that's great. You want to sprint upstairs? You

want to pull a giant sled? You want to drag a stone or an atlas around? It doesn't really matter. The thing is you're trying to challenge the cardiovascular system. So do anything that is within your abilities, your technical skill, your desire that you'll want to do often. Piece number one. Piece number two, something that requires you to sustain consistent elevated energy output. This, most people would call that steady state cardio. I don't call it that for a whole host of reasons. It's a poor description. Again, actually in Monday in my class, my students will be doing this and they'll be doing a 45 minute circuit that's at a steady state, not an interval circuit. And it will be things like, I'll be doing some bear crawls up stadium stairs for a

few minutes and they're going to rotate over and we'll do like some medicine ball toss and chase things. But there's no intervals. You're considerably seeing the same output. They'll do some other movement stuff. There'll be some Turkish get-ups and there'll be some light. And they're going to move consistently for 40 minutes and their heart rate will be within about the same 10 beats per minute the entire time. It's not going up and down. Just something that challenges your ability.

This could be a walk. This could be go hiking for two hours. No problem, right? So that's piece number two. Piece number three, something that requires you to contract hard. Whatever that contraction hard means to you. It needs to be safe. It needs to be technical.

It needs to be within your desire. All those pieces. That's what we want to be getting at. And it's primarily because of that fast-fetch fiber thing. We can't lose those. And those things die out fast. When they die out, they're gone forever. So if you're comfortable going to the local gym and doing a seated bench press, and that

feels good, you feel a nice strong contraction, you feel comfortable there, start there. Doesn't really particularly matter. Try to do several different movement patterns and try to do at least something in each muscle area. But if that means you're going to go and do bent row, seated chest press on a machine, and some leg press to start off with, great.

We'll get you there. And then the last piece is something that makes you contract fast. Could be the exact same machines. Cut it in half and just try to go fast, as fast as you're comfortable with. The adage I actually like is, as soon as you stop, stop jumping, you start dying. Right now I'm not saying like, Oh, I haven't exercised in 20 years. I'm going

to go out and do some plyometrics. Like let's use our head here. You can be sensible. Um, minimize the eccentric component to that stuff. But, but those are the four pieces. And I think of longevity, like that needs to be there. You want to start adding other stuff to that. Great. And we can be more detailed. Somebody I would certainly add assistance, bodybuilding stuff, muscular endurance things, some rub to fail stuff. But for the most part, those are the four big areas that I take for longevity. You could also, more importantly, you could combine that stuff. The fifth one I'll sometimes add is I think there's actually a lot of merit to what I'll call body control. So this could be something like an animal flow or a yoga or something like that, where you actually have to move yourself in a non specifically planned movement patterns,

but you can combine that stuff. So do a 10 minute, uh, yoga flow or whatever, and then do 10 minutes of strength training and then finish up with some intervals on the bike. It could be in and out of there in 30 minutes. So this could be a two-day work plan, and you can knock out all five of these. It could be a three-day week. You could do an hour and a half each one, and you could just really go crazy depending on your aptitude.

So that's how I'll answer the longevity piece. In terms of recovery, we have to be very careful with our methodologies for recovery. Love the sauna like anybody else does. But if you're an athlete who is consistently training in areas in ways that make you sweat and lose 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 pounds of muscle, we don't need to add sauna to that picture. So if you're in jiu-jitsu and you're wearing a gi constantly, I don't need you adding more sauna work. That's not gonna help It's not the sauna per se that's helpful people are it's maybe the relaxation It's people get lost that the thing that the fucking thing becomes the thing

It's not the sauna. It's the fact that you got really hot So I'll get hot however you want if you don't do anything I have my grandpa actually with the sauna because he doesn't exercise at all. I'm like, fantastic. Good for you. If you're training in a gi or you're doing kickboxing class and you're walking out of there puddles of sweat three times a week, you don't need to add a sauna to that. Right. If it helps you with relaxation, sure. Benefits to that too. But you, a lot of people get that from the workout, right? They're going to get the endorphin, whatever it is, right? So if you have nothing in your, in your space, in your life, it could be your 10 minute walk in the morning, right? I don't need to be your 10-minute walk in the morning.

There's nothing magical about the sauna. What's magic is what happened inside your body. We talk about this all the time. Exercise is an external stimulus we use to cause an internal adaptation. Fuck the external part. It doesn't matter. Whatever is causing the internal stimulation, that's what we're after. So pick whatever method you want.

So I'm great that you're implementing a sauna. Great. I think for lifters, great, fine also, but that could potentially reduce recovery if you do it too much. Oh, sorry. Even if you make sure to like rehydrate, because obviously you're losing a lot of water, but it just becomes,

because obviously I trained jujitsu in a gi, so I'm sweating already, right? Fuck all, then I wouldn't add any sauna to you. Okay. I mean, keep doing it. If you're lying, for sure. And tell them to come back in here and be like, no, dude, I'm telling you, it helps me.

And I'll be like, great. Like, I want you to win. I don't want you to. I'm going to do what's best for you. I would say for you, then, maybe there's other things we need to implement for recovery instead of the sauna. Because it's probably just giving you more dose of the same thing. Can we find something else to substitute that gets you that same mental relaxation? I'm not convinced in the science at all that it's anything special to the sauna. How about an ice bath? Have you jumped in

an ice bath? I haven't jumped in an ice bath in a long time. Yeah. So this is what I would say is you probably need to spend those three or four days a week that you're getting in the sauna in the ice bath. That would probably be a better use of your time because that's the stimulus you're not getting. It's the entire opposite of the other side of the equation, right? You're already getting enough of this side of the equation, which is hot and sweaty. So jump into there. But we have to be careful how we dose these things. There's a pro and con to everything, right? There's no free passes in physiology.

Everything pays price somewhere. So you just may not be seeing that price. A lot of times, too, the benefit of getting cold is that your body is trying to regulate itself back to being as warm as it was, and the same thing with getting hot you get hot and your body's trying to regulate itself back to being cold right well we can see too that like we would i would actually it's like a little bit of almost the opposite right of what we think i guess yeah yeah right um if you know when are you doing what part of the day what time of the day are you doing this on these are other questions we'd have to answer because sometimes the sauna can actually help us get into a sympathetic

fight or flight. Sometimes it can push you into parasympathetic. So we have to think about how are you using it specifically. For an athlete, there's good data that suggests the faster post workout you can get into a parasympathetic state, that enhances long-term adaptation. Typically, when we walk out of this gym, right, and we've got the smelling salts and we smack the chalk all around and we just walk out, you're going to walk out of here and be sympathetic for a long time. That's going to harm recovery a lot. It's going to harm long-term adaptation. And so maybe we want to walk out of here, do five minutes of art of breath, Brian McKenzie down regulation stuff. And Hey, now we're actually going to get long-term better. Same thing after the key, right? You go, you just went three or four rounds the road live probably should do some down reg before we

walk out of there right now if the sauna is helping you feel that rule fine but you don't need to spend maybe 45 minutes in the sauna we could have done that in three minutes with some breath work yeah right or some other things right and so there's just a lot of variables i feel like i'm everyone's like god this guy hates sauna. Like, I don't. I just think people are way too excited about it right now and they're not thinking. They're just like, oh, the sauna. I got to get a sauna.

No, not necessarily. We need to think about all the options on the table, your lifestyle, what else is going on, your brain, how your chemistry works. The cold can do the same thing. Some people that puts in a super sympathetic, but after they get out, they typically have a massive parasympathetic response. So for sure, when you walk out, you're going to be

sympathetic. You're going to be fight or flight. But again, oftentimes the research shows this, you will respond by getting into a major parasympathetic state. And so some people, and I've had several athletes do this, will take ice baths at night right before bed and they'll just zonk out. Some people can't get back in that parasympathetic and it's like, I couldn't sleep all night I was wired. Okay, great. So then we mix and match and I have some that'll take a hot bath or a sauna right before bed.

We just have to make sure I'm like, hey, don't get in there and sweat out eight pounds. 20 minutes you're gone, right? Play the music you want to do and then we're out of there. I'm not, right? Depending on if it puts it, but some of them they get too hot and they're staying up hot and I can't sleep all night. So, it just depends depends on that ice bath um does that is ice bath versus cryo is there a difference oh yeah oh yeah yeah very good question um research right now will suggest for muscle soreness they're fairly equivalent okay um

seems to be okay everything else basically the cold water immersion wins. So if I have an athlete who's sore a lot or in the middle of a camp, like Zoila right now will pop in quite often just because of what she does, but get in the water if you can. It's not the same thing at all. All the other benefits you get doesn't seem to be shaking from the cryo. So sorry if you guys just spent money on a cryo or you bought into a company or something. They sucked you in.

But the cold water immersion is cheaper. It's more effective scale. You guys should just have one in here. I saw that look on your face. He's like, no way. Yeah, brutal. That'd be great. You guys got to get in.

I love it. Yeah, is just like a cold shower cold enough or do we need ice? No. No. Well, I mean, it depends. So that's just uncomfortable then? It depends on the outcome you're looking for. So why are you using

the cold is the question I would ask. Some of the benefits of the shower are mimicked but not all of them. So some people that like to say take a cold shower and they feel it wakes them up more. Okay that's going to be just fine. The physiological benefits though probably not coming in terms of that. So just don't be a baby, get in the water and it that cold it's, it's that cold, but it ain't that hard. You're mentioning, you know, getting done with a workout and then kind of still being fired up and stuff like that. Like, uh, have you seen any studies done with, uh, like taking a nap

or going to sleep after a training session? I have not, but I haven't looked. So that's a really good question. I don't know. I wonder, cause like, I wonder if it would like maybe help, you know, kind of lock it in more or something like that. Because I know like Michael Hearn, he does his real early training, you know, early morning training sessions and he goes home and he eats and he takes a nap, you know, and I'm just kind of curious on whether that aids recovery. What's he? I don't know. He's kind of out of shape.

Maybe I shouldn't have brought him up. I mean, he's a soft old guy. What's he, 300 pounds? You're going to take advice from a 300-pound guy? He's not in very good shape for being in his 50s. No, I think it would be hard to take a nap and is sympathetic. So almost by default. I don't know what is caused there. I mean, if you have the time, that's great. can yeah if you can figure it out right yeah um i mean i think if

you can make it a priority it's probably how do you help some of your athletes sleep because sleep can be a tough thing for people nowadays with all the technology and yeah distractions that we have well the obvious ones all i'll just sidestep getting off your phone, especially the athletes. You guys get this too, I'm sure, Mark. You get a lot of hate. Oh, yeah. It's just not good to see that right before you go to sleep.

Most people, or some people can just roll off their back. But even after years, it's still like, sometimes it's still like... Yeah, it still jabs at you. Yeah.

So getting them the hell away from that, even unprovoked, it's mostly unprovoked it's mostly unprovoked stuff just random tags of fuck mark bell what you know like it's just i've had other companies use the code like fuck mark bell and i get like yeah pretty good whatever it is i'm buying yeah i know tell me i'm in i ordered i didn't want to order this thing but god that's great just hurting markrell so much.

Why do you have to be so petty and such a hater? Like if it was your buddy doing it, I would say that's funny. Beyond that, yeah. Whatever. What are we, three? So those are the same. The blue light thing, if they have to, is typically my first thing I go to. But if they're into it or if we've tried three or four of the things we'll do the blue light blockers. Breathing drills are big. We,

we, I would say 90 plus percent of the people I work with, we can get them on very specific breathing drills that are personalized to them. So it's a particular cadence of inhale, hold, exhale, hold. That'll help them get into that state. And sometimes that takes some playing around. We have to figure out, okay, that actually riled you up a little bit too much. We need to change the ratio of inhaling and holding and things like that. Brian's got an app coming out really, really soon that is just wonderful that we've been working on for years now that'll really help this personalized breathing stuff. And we've been using it with actually my athletes for a while now, that actual app, And that's been helpful. There's other tricks you can do too. I would say play with the cold or

hot. Try one of the two. May help, may not at all, but that seems to be effective. Eating right before bed helps. Protein and carbohydrate, it really, really, really helps. Particularly if you're the people that have a hard time sleeping through the night. If you put in a nice little bolus of protein and carbohydrate, it's a very high success rate with those people. Now, if you were like my athletes and in weight class sports, you have to then account for those calories, right? So you can't just, we're just going to wake up fat. But it doesn't seem to be. In fact, if you look at Mike Osborne's research out of Florida State. It's very, very clear that doesn't actually add anything to fat mass.

If anything, it helps you add lean mass. Osborne, Ormsby, sorry, Mike. I don't know why I said Osborne. Mike Ormsby's stuff. So you can do that. You just have to calculate the calories in the back end. And it helps people typically, or I said they oftentimes wake up with a more stable blood glucose. They don't wake up up as like, oh my God, I got hit by a, you know, here they wake up like feeling refreshed. So that can be as simple as like Nathan Tomasello, 125 pound wrestler.

It's whole milk right before bed. He handles dairy very, very, very well. So no problem there. Maybe some out of protein powder in there. Zoila does some just like egg whites. Some of the times we played with different things with other people, they need more food. You could do like a little bit of slower releasing carbohydrates. All those things can be very, very helpful. So if you're someone who's like, man, I just can't, I struggle staying asleep and like that, try that. You're not just going to wake up 30 pounds fatter, right? And

just make those calories come out the rest of your day. It can be a good trick too. Yeah. It makes, that makes sense. What, what are, what are some other things you use for recovery? Like, is there, are you into supplements at all or, you know, recovery drinks when they're done with their workouts? Sure. Yeah. In terms of overall recovery, the first thing i'll do is is try to actually figure out why they're not recovering in the first place and then i address that i will go to supplements but that's far down my list number one is well what's the training is it is the training program appropriate is it periodized um and i don't mean like uh linear but i just mean like maybe it's just too hard is there a plan yeah like do we have some sort of day when we're going to back off?

Is there a week when we're going to back off? Are you just training your ass off? Which is what a lot of them do. They just train as hard as they can. And then like a week before the fight, they don't do as much. And then they try to fight. And then as soon as you're healthy again,

they just do the same. That's not a training program. Like that's just, and then you wonder why we have recovery problems. So number one, like is there an almost always, there's no plan. It's just like then you wonder why we have recovery problems so number one like is there and almost always there's no plan it's just like i won't train i fixed almost all recovery programs with that number two are you eating enough calories period right so oftentimes they're calorie scared or the quality or your ratios is screwy or you do not pay attention to it at all

what you're eating right so it's like, some days I don't even know. I'm 80% carbs. And other days, like, all right, let's get a stable, consistent plan so we can get a baseline and figure out what's going on. The vast majority of recovery issues I have done with that. A really simple thing, too, that I've noticed with people that have trouble eating the amount of food that they're, you know, that they kind of need to recover from their workouts. Which is true. It's just throwing in some carbs because it just makes it easier to eat the food. So like if you have, you know, if you eat some ground beef or something, it tastes pretty

good, but it tastes so much better with some rice, you know, or have a steak and a potato or something. You got like the two kind of pairing together. It's a lot easier and you can eat more. And we typically will then also, I try to get them, if we can, to consume some sort of carbohydrate and protein during the workout. That really, really helps with that. Like a donut?

Probably not our go-to choice, but we could fit it in if it fits your macros. There's some sort of liquid. Yep. Typically, right? So in jiu-jitsu, I mean, you're on the mat for an hour plus, right? Well, there's breaks. Instead of sipping on water in between rolls, let's sip on this drink, right? And now we're going to actually build in 30 to 40, 60, 80 grams of carbohydrate, 10 to

30 grams of protein. That just helped a lot because a lot of times they do that and then they get up, they shower, et cetera. Then they got to go on a media call. They got to go do an interview, something, something, blah, blah, blah. And then they got to drive the next space and there's virtually no downtime and they're training again, right? So getting that stuff in the workout

helps the recovery process get started immediately. If that's not possible, we're going to food. And there's a lot of research behind that that shows that it aids in protein synthesis and stuff like that, right? Well, the two primary factors are protein synthesis, of course, and muscle glycogen restoration. And that's very, very, very clear.

People will look at the research and say, well, there's no evidence that you have to have your protein immediately post-workout, the whole post-exercise anabolic window. Actually, we have some new research on that that I could get into quickly. But that's true. Sure. What matters is the 24-hour window. But that's under a couple of assumptions. One, you're fasting when you work out and two, you only work out once a day and maybe even once every couple of days. That's not true. My athletes. So you have to condense that window into like six hours. I have to get the, I have to have protein there immediately because they are training again, two or three hours later and then training again. And then

that doesn't account for what is clear is the carbohydrate timing matters. So while the timing of protein post-exercise maybe doesn't matter as much for these sort of things, carbohydrate does. It sounds like your athletes almost remind me of when I did my bodybuilding show where it's like, man, you better get out in front of this thing or you're fucked. You better be ahead all the time. You better be well-prepared with your food all the time. So in their case, the requirement of these post-workout or even intra-workout shakes and stuff, it probably doesn't matter so much about the specifics of what it is. I'm sure you can kind of nitpick and say, oh, let's use this carb and let's do this. It's probably more of just what you talked about where it's like, it might be three hours

before they get to their next meal. And now they're behind, they're behind, they're behind. They're not getting their nutrients, not getting the salt, they're not getting the potassium. They make bad choices and the training quality goes really down and you can't afford to lose a training session. You just can't.

It's going to hurt too much. And literally your chance of injury goes up. If you're gassed, if you're a little bit wobbly and you're trying to not be a bitch and right which is the things you're telling themselves and they're trying to go through it when they're getting every signal it says like your legs aren't there right now and your training partners are like come on you gotta fight in three weeks wait something happens and it's just like and it always it's like yeah well fuck i didn't eat after this thing because i had to go do this instagram live thing and you're like but it's part of their job like this this is how they sell fights. And the more

self fights, they sell them more money. They make it's their income. So it's hard to knock it. One of the actually thing that is fun, it's extremely preliminary care study where we've looked, where we looked at this post-exercise recovery window. And that term is very big. So keep in mind, that's like 80 different things, what I just said there. So one of these little aspects, or two of them actually we looked at, which is the molecular cascade, which controls carbohydrate utilization. One of the things that we're seeing very clearly is that post-exercise window differs between the genders. And so this is an area I think we're really going to get into is, well, you know what?

Maybe the recommendations need to be different for women and men. Maybe it is more or less important, and I'm not going to tell you which one yet. Differences between men and women? No. It's all in title. Just in name. No actual physiological differences.

But this is the stuff where we can enhance this. It's like, you know what? Maybe it is important for men and or women, but maybe it's not as important for the other species. I want to know so bad right now. I mean, we know. Like, the numbers are extremely clear. It's not like 10%.

It's like double. That's pretty crazy. I remember last time you were here, too, you mentioned that the carbohydrates, you know, in terms of like bodybuilding or, you know, whatever the activity is that you're doing will go kind of directly into the muscles that you exercised, right? So if you, for example, if you have a lagging body part, your chest or something like that, you train your chest, have some carbohydrates post-workout, theoretically, it could kind of help you head in the right direction. Pretty clearly. Yeah.

I mean, especially acutely, you're going to see water retention is going to go in there, which is going to be a good thing. It's going to follow the carbohydrate. The cells in the actual exercising tissue would be much more sensitive for quite a bit of time for both protein and carbohydrate. I think that's clearly established. You have to then balance that throughout the rest of the day. We have to be careful of what we can do with...

So protein's pretty unique, right? So your muscles are made of protein. Well, if you say trained your traps like crazy, but you didn't train your hamstrings and your protein intake was exactly what you needed to be or lower, you will start robbing the hamstrings of the protein and taking it to the traps. And this is why the one protein is like typically almost everything we do, regardless of sport, that's the one that's kind of fixed. Like just don't mess with protein almost ever until the very, very end of the weight

cut because you're going to pay for it somewhere. We can't make up the amino acids. We can fluctuate back and forth between how we get energy from fat and carbohydrate. And that seems to be not identical, but very interchangeable. Protein is not. So we have to be very, very careful of maintaining that. The other thing is, look, fat post-exercise, number one, it blocks protein synthesis. I shouldn't say blocks. It may compromise, it may compromise it. And number two, it doesn't help in restoring muscle glycogen. Um, so like this is a consideration. Having said that we have to then think about context. So if I'm a, if I'm a, like any of us and we're training say five, seven, eight times a week. And, uh, I trained yesterday at noon. Yeah. Okay. Train

yesterday at noon. And then I didn't train last night. I'm trained yesterday at noon. Yeah. Okay. Trained yesterday at noon. And then I didn't train last night. I'm not going to train this morning. Maybe in this. Okay. When we get busy today, I don't get a training session in and I got a bunch of stuff tomorrow flight and end up being two and a half days before I work out. Okay. I hope that didn't happen, but let's say that happens. Well, making sure I got my carbohydrates immediately post my noon workout yesterday is probably not a super big deal because the next time I go to train, I've had two and a half days to replenish. I'm going to be just fine.

So we have to think about context, right? If you're going to go eat, you're going to go work out the last day before you hop on a plane to go to Italy. Like, I'm pretty sure you're going to eat enough pasta over there. You're almost like I can just eat. Yeah, I got it taken care of. Just fine, right?

You look very, very full right now. Thank you. Just very full. I'll take that as get eaten. Yeah, I got it taken care of. Just fine, right? You look very, very full right now. Thank you. Just very full. I'll take that as a compliment. Yeah. So we have to think all these factors, right? This is why my job when I work with some of these athletes, it's very complicated because I'm trying to factor in,

not just like give them a workout plan or give them a nutrition plan. Like what else is going on in your life? Let's talk about the recovery. What do you have access to? Oh, you don't get this. Oh, you also live with your mom. She's a giant pain in your ass. Are you always getting woke up to this

Okay, and the kids scream all this stuff the whole thing is mosaic and it changes everything So we have to be able to look into multiple aspects of under under the the human performance umbrella and think well We can't fluctuate or move this piece in Some cases that's the training right like for whatever reason whatever reason, you want to mess with your training. Okay, fine. Well, can we enhance your recovery then? Okay, yes. Well, can we get more sleep?

No, no, no, because of this. Okay, well, can we do this? Yeah, okay, great. Well, then that's the area we're going to go to. And maybe I won't even have a conversation about carbohydrates or food because the athlete's terrified of it. Do you try to sometimes encourage your athletes to try to get out of certain environments

or do you not mingle in their personal life too much um well i have one particular athlete um who has had extreme personal life issues the the last year and i will be an open ear when that athlete needs to come to things but it's also like you express the concern and then you let them decide on kind of like what they're. Well, I take a more of us what's called Socratic method. OK, so this is how Socrates taught. Instead of me going and saying, Mark, you know, hey, look, you really got to get got to dump your boyfriend like he's a giant pain in the ass. It's things that I love him and he's standing right here.

Love you, too. You guys need to break up get out of it right we can't we can't quit each other i need it for the warmth i'm gonna let you come to that conclusion yourself by saying things like man okay let's look at last competition how can we how can i help you do better what area do you think is having the biggest problem i'm not recovering okay great yeah well let's think about all the things that go into recovery and what are these areas is the biggest problem. How's our nutrition recovery?

How's this? All right. How's our overall stress? I mean, I know where I'm going with this the whole time, right? God, well, you know, Mark and I have been fighting a lot lately and just, and I'm, boy, and then you just, uh-huh. And you listen and it's sort of like, and they sort of, my man, me. And then they'll ask you, she's like, do you think I should break up with them? And I always will say, look, I'm never going to tell you to fire a coach.

I'm never going to tell you to leave a gym. Those words will never come out of my mouth. What I will come out of my mouth is the stress equation is unbalanced right now. Something has to be adjusted. I'm here to help you however I can. Almost always they're like, yeah, I got my word done.

Do you even care if your athletes like listen to this? Like if you have an athlete listening, right? andy dude that's me does that matter let me tell you another story yeah there's a bunch of people listening right now i mean my uh my wife has a master's degree in um behavioral sciences or not behavioral sciences um psychology no her undergrad degree is in psychology and then but... Is it science? No, it's changing people with bad behaviors. I'm sorry, honey. And so she works with elementary school, kindergarten, special ed. And her whole jam is like, you take a kid who's autistic or down,

or just has extreme ADHD or something, and you have to cue them very specifically or else you make the problem worse, right? And oftentimes it's not intuitive. You're going to have to do these weird little tricks. Well, about a year or so in our relationship, we got a dog. And training these autistic kids

and training the dog are the exact same thing. Like you can use the same tricks. And it's some of it, it's unbelievable. It's like parlor tricks, how effective these things can be. So I watched her doing it. doing it i was like damn like you're really good at this and then like the wheels just started turning and i started thinking it was like a flashback in a movie like a flashback to like that one time we were out and she did this to me and then one time we were at home she did this and i was like you motherfucker you have been fucking me for a year now. You have totally mind fucked me.

You completely turned me into your little puppeteer here. And I'm like, son of a bitch. Hey, that's not only your wife, buddy. That's everybody's wife. Oh, my God. So my point being, I don't care if they see the magic behind the veil. Yeah. Because they don't know all the tricks yet. I'll still get them.

So watch on, ladies and gents. You're still screwed. Damn. Yeah. But, yeah, gents. You're still screwed. Damn. Yeah, but I mean, you do have to, there's a fine line, of course, between lying to them, which I will do,

and simply trying to speak to them in a manner that's going to be most effective for them and not effective for me. So I don't speak to them the way I like to be spoken to as an athlete. I try to figure out what's, what's actually going to help them make an adjustment.

And that's how I'm going to target. And so, in fact, if you were to randomly pull all the athletes that I have or have worked with and talked about like my personality traits, some of them would be like, what? He's like that?

Cause like, I'm not going to be right. Some of them really sweet with some of them. I only say mean things to. Some of them I'm really supportive of. The other ones, you know, kind of go back and forth. And all of them are sitting here thinking like, no, I've only fucking heard the mean stuff. Where's the sweet part?

We have to dose that properly. Any of your athletes reached out and gotten like some sports psychology from? As many of them as I possibly can. We are fortunate. And you found that to be effective? In our department at Cal State Fullerton, we had two, and just recently we had three, actually four of the most talented, most prestigious sports psychologists in the world. As good as I brag about our muscle and strength training program, our sports psych is, trumps us.

It's really all mental. We always go back and forth. One of them actually just moved here to Sac State. She's Andrea Becker. Oh, wow. I'd love to have her on the podcast for sure. Oh, she definitely. She was the first female ever hired for a male sport at UCLA.

Oh, awesome. I took them to a national championship. She's done all kinds of stuff. She's a beast. Yeah, we need more chicks on the show for sure. She did college softball player at Tennessee, I think, but just an absolute savage. Awesome. The other two in our program are really

good. The same thing, like they're in, they're in Rio and on Olympic teams and they got national championships and other stuff. As many of my athletes, I can, I have conversations and, and people still must understand what sports psychology is. It's not psychiatry. They're not therapists. Like for example, Tracy Statler in our department, she does the mental side of excellence. So you're not going to sit down with her and she's going to be like, well, tell me why you're upset today.

No, it's going to be things like biofeedback. So you'll sit in their sports psych lab and there'll be a thing where you'll put a heart rate on and there'll be a screen that pops up and the screen is all black and white. And they'll do something to elevate your heart rate and then they're teaching you, based on how quickly you can lower your heart rate, the screen starts becoming in color. And if your heart rate gets back up, it goes back to

black and white. So it's things like, can you take something that is typically not autonomic or something that is typically autonomic? So you don't have a somatic control over, and can you make yourself with your mind have control of something like your heart rate? That's what sports psychology does. And so we can- The training of your brain, basically. It's performance. It's performance psychology, right? So it's optimizing focus. It's optimizing excellence, right? So we need you to be in this peak state where you can control as many of this stuff in your brain as possible. It's not right it's there and so that's what our

i'm just like i focus on my research in the side of performance stuff they focus on um not the like let's talk about reducing your stress and blah blah no let's talk about making you just a fucking savage upstairs and so because i talk non-stop shit to them and it doesn't faze them one bit like i just talked i talked so much shit about how I'm like, well, yeah, that's great. And all I felt, I was focused and I was all really happy. And then I was still weak as hell cause I didn't talk to Andy. So, so you actually, you touched on something that I'm curious about. Um, I'm sorry.

I'm, I realized by the way, I've been swearing a lot. I know we're not supposed to swear in this program, right? No, you shouldn't be doing that, buddy. I'm sorry. But go ahead. You're in a lot of trouble. But, um, you touched on like, you know, after heavy exercise, like breathing techniques to bring the heart rate back down to relax. Right. Um, and you just

mentioned with her, you know, watching a screen and doing things to allow yourself to not get affected by what's going on, like keeping your heart rate down, et cetera. Uh, do you find like working with athletes, do you ever have to, especially when they're like doing their exercise or sparring or whatever do you mess with the way that they breathe and the reason why i ask you yeah the reason why i'm asking you this is because like um obviously like when doing jujitsu i try to i don't nasal breathe the whole time i just breathe through my nose obviously when i'm doing something very high intensity and when my heart rate starts to go up i breathe a little bit more through my mouth just a little bit but i do find find that when I watch other individuals roll

and they start to do that, they become extremely erratic, right? How do you think that that affects or how do you change that in athletes to help them breathe better, to perform better? Rob Wilson, Brian McKenzie, artofbreath.com. I don't know what the URL is, but those guys got it on lock.

They're not too far over. I don't know if you, you know but that those guys got it on lock. They're not too far over. I don't know if you, you know, Brian, you should got him come over one to do a little similar. It's San Francisco area, right? Yeah,

he is now. He's not too far from, I mean, I think he could never probably be too far from Kelly Starrett. Right. Just like you guys, just romance a million. But those dudes got it like really,

really figured out a different cadence. And we have integrated this system with several. One of the athletes I've been fortunate to work with for a long time, she's a multiple-time world champion. She does almost the exact same thing. And it's almost like a sports-like thing with her now because now in competition, even on her competition days, she does nasal only as long as she can.

It's what Brian and Rob call the gear system. So there's gear 1, 2, 3, 4. And the reason she does this, and not one of the reasons, but one of the byproducts of this is she knows when, like when she's going against her opponent and she feels the same thing in her head, she's like, got her,

got her. I know. Like, even if she's more tired than her, she's like, ah, yeah. And she's like,

even though she wants to breathe out her mouth too, she's like, got her. And it just, it snaps her mentally and she's there. So there's that piece. But of the physical piece of it too, one of the things we've been actually messing with recently because of Brian and Rob is looking at what's called respiratory exchange ratio. So this is how much fat versus how much carbohydrate you're actually burning. And it does look like that change is based on mouth versus nasal breathing. So we need more work in this area, for sure. This is not proven, like stamped hard science. I burned a crazy amount of carbs. I had a test done here at UC Davis. And it was like, which weird, because I don't really typically

eat that many carbs. What did you do? It was kind of confusing. Were you standing or were you actually moving? Oh, no, I was moving. Yeah, I was on a treadmill. How hard, like how hard? I was just like, it got beyond that. I mean, I was, I was walking, but the treadmill, you know, was going up and the speed was going up. I didn't get to like a run.

Yeah. But it was, I don't know, it wasn't too aggressive, but. We'd have to take some resting measures first to get it better yeah and i'm sure it would also matter uh like what i ate leading up to it well right before if you eat a bunch of carbohydrate before you know what happens you burn carbs burn more carbs and you know what you burn less of fat you eat a bunch of fat right before you burn more fat but you burn less carbs right so it doesn't matter equation is the same like doesn't eating carbs before workout doesn't make you not lose fat. The fat loss will be the exact same.

People confuse fat burning for fat loss. Those are not the same thing at all. Anyways, back to your point, it looks like nasal breathing potentially helps you burn or helps you utilize a little bit more fat, where mouth breathing shifts you over to a little more carbohydrates. So we're actually, we're almost finished with our first study and we've got probably 50 or so subjects we've already collected. So a decent sample size here. That can also be measured with, there's correlations between that and what are called state and trait anxiety.

And so there's something here. We're very early, but there is something here with how you use your air, how that relates to your psychological state, and how that relates to your metabolic fuel usage. The best I can say is something there right now. Like, we just don't know. Yeah, there you go. I mean, mouth breathing, there's people that will go as far to say mouth breathing makes you dumb. Well, Brian would probably say that.

I won't. Yeah. dumb well uh brian would probably say that i won't yeah i've heard i mean i've heard people say not necessarily make you dumb but it uh i've heard people kind of say that it can limit your capacity yeah for learning and children and stuff like that i mean people go they go pretty far with it yeah what is this whole thing blowing up these goddamn balloons i see people doing that all the time are those condoms uh no there's a lot i don't want to jump into their worlds but yeah this is um what they're trying to do with the balloon there very specifically is it's a very quick tell uh it's kind of like having someone do a box squat in other words it's a quick tell of your breathing mechanics okay like i can watch your box squat immediately with one rep and be like okay like i can see if

you know this yeah you squat like shit yeah exactly right and i don't have to divert so the balloon there helps with that. From there, because there's multiple pieces. There's breathing mechanics, which is just the position of your body. There's squat mechanics, the physical stuff of it. I need to go to one of these seminars. I don't know what I'm doing. I got to be honest.

You guys need to just have him come out and do a seminar here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you guys don't have really a big name, but I'm sure if I asked him, he would. If you could pull some strings for him. Yeah, he. I mean, you guys don't have really like a big name, but I'm sure if I asked him, he would. If you could pull some strings for us. Yeah, he would come out. He's not too far away or pop over, but they're really, we've been working on this stuff. We published a study on this stuff five maybe or so years ago. Then we got launched into this whole world.

Brian was working on it. We started working with Wim Hof and that group. And then I joined up with Laird and Gabby with XPT. So we've been doing a lot of work with the XPT front. So it's another good resource to check out. It's different stuff, but Brian and XPT kind of do different things. So it's been nice to work with both of those groups, especially in a lot of these areas with cold, the movement stuff, the breath work. When we started four or five years ago, we were super crude.

And I look back now and I'm like, yeah, a lot of that was wrong. And so I'd say for sure what we're doing right now is something's wrong. But there's a lot more here than I thought of. In fact, when Brian first brought it up to me, I'm like, this is stupid. This is all dumb. And then I looked at it and I'm like, oh my God, there's actually dozens, hundreds of studies in this area. I just never really look judging before you look again. That's this guy. So yeah, there's here. And I think the more Brian works and other people that do it and the more, um, PJ Nessler and the guys at XPT get moving that area. Like we're learning more and more and more of, um, you know, the relationship between how you breathe at rest and again, your ability to handle stress, your

resiliency. And right now it looks like some pretty good connections between those two, which is pretty crazy. Has there been some other weird things that have popped up over the years that you never thought you'd be like studying? I mean, there's people that are talking about, you know, pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth and, you know, creating a certain jawline and all these weird breathing. We ran a study on that, um, looking at putting a mouthpiece in versus not a mouthpiece, um, maybe six, seven years ago and didn't find much. So we looked at absolute performance and a bunch of different things. But having said that, we didn't dive extremely deep in the topic. There's things there.

My feeling on that, though, is you got to be careful of washout in terms of there's so many things that go into maximal performance. If you isolate one, you might see something there, but it may or may not be important when you consider everything that's going on to it. So it may. To me, it's sort of like, okay, all of us, nutrition for all of us is probably very similar at the big level. This is one of your very early questions. Like, are we really that different? No. The big tickets are really there for almost all of us. Having said that, there are some small, small, small percentage of us where it's like, okay, maybe you don't

handle meat very well. Okay, great. But if that is happening in 0.001% of people on this planet, well, the fact that we have seven plus billion people, that means there's going to be a hundred thousand people that helps. And so this is when you look around, you're like, oh my God, this particular thing is getting so much. And so many people seem to be responding. Yeah. There's placebo effect that accounts for a lot of it, but then it's also just a lot of people and it's easy to see numbers if you know how to run your social media things right so um yeah there's a lot more to some of that stuff and there's a lot more to like some of this reflexology stuff which is very very interesting but how that washes out in terms

of yeah okay you could do all that stuff but you know what's probably more effective? Like maybe caffeine, take some smelly salt and be really fucking jacked up. I don't know if you did both those conditions. Then you did your like touch my shoulder, rub my foot and tickle my ear. I think that'd just be washed out. Yeah. So you're talking a little bit about what the Russian weightlifters have done for years where they pull on the ears before they go lift, right? That kind of stuff.

All kinds of things like that there's a lot in that space we haven't learned um i think some of that stuff i mean i don't know if you've ever seen the russian weightlifters do it but yeah they aggressively pull on the guy's ears i'd imagine it would just make you pissed off maybe might be good to get you fired up you know i hate that did you like getting slapped before you know no i hate it yeah no i don't need it i don't want it man i had i remember a friend did that one time and i was like stop it that That's it. Now I got to, let me start this whole process again because now you just distract me and it stings and now I'm all irritated.

Hey, bro, that really hurt. Yeah, right? Like I know this dude in here is about to try to choke me unconscious. Ow. Don't slap my thigh. That stings. Yeah. Ow.

So again, it's not like there's nothing to this stuff. There is, but when you take it in isolation, I think it may be some has maybe has a bigger effect than when you put the whole shebam and you put the competition nerves and you got the crowd in front of you. Like, I just think some of this stuff maybe washes out, right. You know,

a bit, but man, I've been wrong before about a hundred thousand times. So yeah. And how do you apply it? How do you continue to apply it? Is it too much of a pain in the ass to apply it? You know?

Well, this is the game we talk about with um most of the athletes i work with but it's not the earlier in my career and earlier in other coaches careers they get excited about what all can i give to an athlete the more and more you get into this you start to realize that's not the game the game is what can we afford to not do like that's it right if you're already training this many hours i can't have you drive somebody crazy you gotta do ice bath you gotta be on the complex machine you gotta do the sauna they get anxiety like fuck they get huge anxiety from it and it's like you know what now i'm gonna lose because i'm not doing all of

what he said to do yeah or it's just like fuck mentally you know like it's really hard to get a lot of us have a hard time getting mentally up enough to go do one really hard workout now imagine you do that two three times a day and then you got to get mentally up to go in the ice bath you got to get mentally up to go you know stretch and you got to get mentally sometimes you want to just be like whoa and you have a whole gym on your back yeah you have the whole you're representing everybody that fights in that camp you know it's it's a big deal. A hundred percent. And it's TV and it's embarrassing because you're going to get on SportsCenter if it goes wrong enough, you know?

And it's just like, it's your career. And in fight sports, one bad one can be it. I mean, that can be a wrap. It's just hard. There's like powerlifting, you have one shitty meet. Ah, who cares? Lifting, ah, but one bad meet. Well, you got the next one.

Like right lift or combat sports, man, that could be a wrap. I'm sure the intensity of it too is probably, and the conversations that happen in the household are probably like, this is kind of like your last fight that you're going to do, right? And I can imagine that they keep pushing. Like, that's happened to me many times with powerlifting, which powerlifting is not, the stakes are not nearly as high. At least they're not for me. I don't care as much. Performance-wise, they are, but safety-wise in terms, they are. Like, if you're not dialed in when 800 are back things can go very bad yeah you're done

but i imagine yeah it's got to be just insanely stressful yeah and it is and um so like right now that i told you that world title fight it's it's july right now that's that's when it's going to go down we're building the whole camp right now. We've got effectively four months. And what my job is right now is literally to sit with his strength conditioning coach and a couple other key pieces of his members. We'll be on a whiteboard next week and everything, all the stuff we've been talking about today, all goes on the whiteboard and more everything, everything we can possibly think of goes in the whiteboard.

And then from there we go, okay, what do we need to pick from? Okay. We know what, like this is going to be out for this and this is going to be out and this is going to be out and this is going to be out until we can dial it back to, okay, buddy, uh, right now, month number one, it's going to be this type of training and we're going to use this recovery. That's what I could do. Month number two, we go to this, this, this is, and yeah, I know we need to be stretching the whole time. We need to be doing this and we need to be

signing up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You cannot throw this to an athlete. They get super overwhelmed. And you also honestly start getting conflicting physiological signals. You start compromising adaptation, right? If you start training for too many things at once, nothing happens. And you start, now you're just working and you're adding extra volume, which is not helpful at all three months out, four months out from a fight. And so people will maybe look at his program the first month, I guarantee it. And you've got a world

title fight and he's doing this. He's not on supplements. He's not in this, blah, blah, blah. You're like, yeah, I got a man. Your coach don't know anything. Oh yeah. No, no. We know more than you dumb, dumb. Cause we're thinking about the entire picture and this is a four month plan. And there will be a time when we'll ramp up recovery supplements. There'll be a time when we do this and this. But right now, this is all he can dose with because it's month one, physically and mentally. Like, he came off of a, like, he's going to be coming back from some mental things from his last fight. And it's just hard to get like, okay, we're doing this again.

So it's an easier conversation to say, hey, you know what? You're only going to be doing this, like, really hard shit for about three weeks, four weeks. Yeah. Or it's like, hey, we're going to take a month to get rolling into it. Then you'll be in shape. And then we're going to roll and it's going to be this set up. And it's going to be hard. And then we're going to back off to here.

And then it's like, oh, yeah, I can do that. As opposed to going, all right, buddy, Monday, start fight camp. 16 weeks. Let's go. Exactly. Like, oh, my God. Get the extra caffeine. You're start fight camp. 16 weeks. Let's go. Exactly. Like, Oh my God, the extra caffeine. You're like,

geez. And then like, I don't want to do that. And then have, well have this happen. And like, it's hard to, I mean,

one thing, if he just like, we had a first round knockout in his last fight, but he didn't. And so like, it's just real hard to get right there again. You can't just drop a minute. You know, this guy's a current champ?

Not a current champ, technically. Technically not a current champ. So last time you were here, the gym was kind of brand new. What did you think this time around? I mean, it wasn't really put together. You have hired some fantastic decorators. I don't know if that's your job it is

interior design it's all me is that what your undergraduate degree is in? yes interior design the feng shui is fantastic it still has a little bit of that homoerotic vibe which I like

that's what I was going for yes you nailed it very erotic no man I gotta say I'm really proud of you oh actually before I don't know what we're doing on time but I gotta mention this before we leave because you made me think say, I'm really proud of you. Oh, actually before, I don't know what we're doing on time, but I got to mention this before we leave. Cause you made me think about it. I'm so proud of you, this whole thing you've built, man. And I just heard, I don't know how I miss this. I was listening to your show a month ago or something. And somehow the story came up of how, why you named the super training. Oh, cool.

super training oh cool i was that it made me like tear up yeah that's awesome it's so cool man like that that's the stuff i live for yeah like man and we're talking kind of early in the show about like mentoring stuff and i'm like dude what that dude did for you yeah mel siff give me a free book and then look what you did in return like super training will live on well past yeah the generation and some percentage of your idiotic fans will get so interested about super training maybe they'll pick up his book and now his legacy will, right. No one's going to read that book. It's impossible.

No one understands it, but you should have it just to say that it's in your bookshelf. Hey, strength aerobics is in there. You can look it up. Um, but no man, like the place looks fantastic.

And every time I see that you're buying a jet now, you guys know, he just, he just bought a jet. Mark has a jet now. Um, no, it's a little slower than I wanted.

It looks like a truck, but, uh, no, it's just so awesome to see people that come from like like actually strength people and they come from this stuff and to just move the whole thing and i think your your pro wrestling days your taglines are just so money man they're just so money it's like you'd have some entertainment entertainment i don't i didn't mean like that i mean like in terms of like make the world a better place to live. Right.

Like what an amazing message. Like let's just move that forward. And it's that stuff that it takes that to move the actual culture, to make this the norm. I feel like people still don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. So I'm working at it very, very hard every day. Well, I mean the company is obviously growing and the stuff is out here. The last time I was literally in this building, it was boxes, no floor. Yep.

There was just stuff everywhere. Yeah, we built a floor. And now you're opening. No floor. You're getting the next place over. Yep. I told you, dude, like, when are you going to just buy this whole building? I know.

I know that'll be next. Yeah, you guys got the money. Just do it. That'll be a lot of space. He's over there thinking like, maybe we should give me a raise before we start buying buildings. What's this cute little person I see on your Instagram?

This little nine-month baby that you have. Oh, man. What's her name? Tatiana. It's beautiful. Thanks, man. I saw a picture the other day. She looked like pebbles from the Flintstones.

Yeah. Yeah. It's such a trip. So the wife is Russian heritage-wise, and so we wanted to keep her a Russian name. her the other day she looked like uh pebbles from the flintstone yeah yeah it's such a trip she uh so the wife is is russian heritage wise and so we wanted to give her like keep her a russian name so pretty pretty stoked that he's taught to and in fact one of the first gifts we got for her was a set of baby styrofoam dumbbells and i think headgear and shin shin guards and Kara was what got us that. So it was like two months old. She's got her sparring equipment. She's got her dumbbells

already. And now she's, uh, she's talking already and she loves, uh, like she lives in my, my garage is a gym. So she loves being out there and like I put on the barbell and she had, look at that. Oh yeah. This is classic. Those are baby. Those are Tatiana squats. Is she... A little more unstable back then. She's starting to get around a little bit, nine months? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. She stands, she picks herself up. She has like...

My son used to do, we called it the perimeter walk. He would like hold onto the wall and shuffle. Yeah, I forget what they call that. Shuffling, I think that's what it is. But she'll do the like Spider-Man, hold on the wall and shuffle around. And she loves to hold onto the dumbbell and shuffle. Yeah. I forget what they call that. Shuffling, I think is what it is, but she'll do the like Spider-Man, hold on the wall and shuffle around. And she loves to hold onto the dumbbell or the barbell.

Look at that. How many times have you seen her just totally wreck herself? Not too many because she's so fat that her belly kind of gets her a center weight so she can't really topple over so much. Isn't it? Yeah, it's interesting to watch them fall because they strategically kind of fall on their butt a lot of times.

Oh yeah. It's not that far for them to go. There's the picture I was talking about where she looked like pebbles. Yeah. Look at that. That's her, like for whatever reason she adopted that sleeping position. She normally sleeps like that.

Yeah. That's no, that's like a, we took a picture of the baby monitor thing. She all night, 10 hours like that. It's like she sleeps 10 hours, but still,

uh, no, she, she loves it. That's her go to now. It's like that. Like she sleeps 10 hours, but still. No, she loves it. That's her go-to now. It's funny that the trip with kids, man, in strength training and where we come from, you're so used to these linear progressions, right? But no, she said her first word like a month ago. And then the next day she said like four other words. And now, and within like a week,

she had like 10 other words. So I'm like, you go from zero to like, now all of a sudden you can talk. Not just like a slow, just boom, other words so i'm like you go from zero to like now all of a sudden you can talk not just like a slow just boom now you can talk dang man she goes from uh i had her sat down on her little playpen i was feeding the dogs i turned around and she was standing up and i was like okay nope got that skill down so now she learned to like grab do a pull up and stands all the way up and she can stand up and like she laughs and changes all the rules on how you have to watch them because like she could do all kinds of get herself in all kinds of crazy trouble now. Exactly.

So now she torments the dogs now just like chasing around and grabs their paws and just laughs and they're like knock it off. One of our relatives was like eight months pregnant and she couldn't find her son. I think her son was like four. She was frantically looking all over the house she runs outside and somebody left a ladder uh to fix something on the roof the kid was on the roof oh my god and she had no idea how to get him down she was like i she's like i could climb the ladder but i'm also like nine months pregnant and it's a pretty tall ladder so she did eventually get up there and get her down uh get to get her son her son down. But she was like, ah, this is like iffy, you know, you

cannot tell me those stories. My heart can't handle this. Tell me this when I got a 15 year old buddy. Yeah. I was the worst when my kids were young. I was terrified they were going to like wipe out somewhere, you know, you miss those days at all? A little bit, yeah. Like when I see a baby. I love babies. I always have since I was young. We have a lot of people in my family. And so somebody was always cranking on a baby.

So I always had a baby in my hands. Yeah, yeah. I love kids a lot. Like when I was young, I wanted to have a lot of kids. But once I had one, I was like, fuck that. I don't think we can have more. I don't think we can have more. I don't think we can have more than like two or three of these things. So did Andy have to convince you to have the next one or you, or were you both kind of

like, okay, we'll do it more, but that's it? No, well, we just, we thought it was a good idea to have more than one just to get, got a buddy, you know? Well, that's what like Natasha and I were anti-kids for forever. And then I was like, okay, I'm doing zero or two. There's no other negotiable options here. It's kind of nice to have a sibling. You have like this inherent, oh, not always, but oftentimes like a guaranteed best friend.

And it's really cool, especially I think if you have them the same gender. My kids definitely like they team up against us, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool. And later in life, you know, like they're always going to have, like you guys eventually will be old and senile and they're not going to want to hang out with mom anymore, but they're going to be still really, really close friends most likely. Right.

Just like, I mean, you and your brother, like you always have so much in common that it's always there and you always, you know, send them a message on this or show them this and you're always going to have that thing of like, you're interested in many, many similar things. Yeah. You got a built in, a built in buddy. Yeah. So I think it's a good idea.'s fun what do you got coming up uh sure there's a lot but oh my gosh so that world title fight is going to be major focus um for the summer and we actually are starting this is going to be really cool

we're finishing up kara wednesday right so three now will officially be done with that study. Anyway, data collection. And we are literally starting, we're about to start an intermittent fasting study. So this is really going to be cool. We're looking at probably more specifically time-restricted feeding. So 16-8, that you're all familiar with, compared to

your traditional four meals a day. Equated for total calories and equated for protein and basically equated for carbohydrate and fat intake as well. But the thing is we're using well-trained people and the primary outcome, outcomes are going to be hypertrophy. So I know that fat loss is identical between these two things and all the health and obesity things, but no one looks at performance with all this stuff. So that's what we're looking at is we're going to look at does this compromise help or aid

or is it the same in terms of your ability to grow muscle mass? We're also looking at how if any of the microbiome changes in the gut with these two different feeding styles, we're looking at taking biopsies, we're looking at all these cellular mechanisms behind that. We're looking at multiple muscle groups.. We're looking at all these cellular mechanisms behind that. We're looking at multiple muscle groups. So it's an extremely comprehensive study. And so that is actually starting. And we're basically ready to go right now. So you're mainly accounting for calories and protein?

Mm-hmm. And then what's the deal with the carbs and stuff like that? So those would be pretty much the same between the two groups. So the only real difference would be the time-restricted feeding group will eat within their eight-hour window. The other group will eat within more like a 12-hour window. So we want to isolate that particular point. Everything else is going to be the exact same. And does that really influence?

Does it help? Does it hurt? Does it not matter at all? And to me, that's going to be a very important question because if you look at the time-restricted feeding literature, again, it's clear that you can lose fat that way, but you don't have to. It's identical. Once you equate for calories and protein, fat loss is identical between time-restricted feeding, 16 to 8. What do you mean equate for protein? Like, why are you saying equate? Like, I've heard people say equate for calories, but not protein. Why are you saying protein? So for a whole host of factors, but that seems to be the thing that drives satiety the most.

It drives muscle the most. So you're going to have, as long as you maintain amino acid intake, you're going to be able to maintain most of your muscle mass. If you don't, that will go quickly. So those are some of the reasons. You have to equate in almost all of these studies. If for example, we didn't equate for that and say the time restricted feeding group had a lot less protein. Well then at the end of the study, I would almost guarantee you they have less muscle mass. And I wouldn't know if it was because they just had less protein or if they, it's because of the time restricted feeding. So I don't want

that to be in the equation. I want to simply know is adjusting your time of eating going to help hurt or does it really not matter? And I don't have a dog in the fight. It doesn't matter, which is nice. Cause I'm, I don't have a company that's behind me. I don't have a, like, this isn't my whole research lab line where like, I am here to show that time-restricted feeding is the bomb or not. And so however it comes out to me, it's going to be tremendous answers, right? I'm going to be able to say, hey, look, do 16-8 or not, and you'll be just fine. You can grow equally. Or, hey, it might be fine if you're trying to lose fat or for health, longevity, but don't do this if you're trying to gain muscle.

What do you think? I don't know. What do you think it might turn out to be? Well, the obvious hypothesis is that the time-restricted feeding will compromise some of the muscle gain. Not because I'm against it or anything like that. I do fasting so all the time. But simply that's what the literature suggests right now.

And if you look at the molecular mechanisms behind that, that's what they would indicate. Now, mechanisms don't necessarily always predict whole muscle outcome, but that's literally why we do this study is to say okay do they actually match up and so they give us clues so based on the available clues right now that's what we would think would happen but since no one's done it we don't know and that's why we're going to actually do it it's going to be fun no it's going to be good i think the microbiome stuff we're doing that with um my buddy jimmy bagley at san francisco

it's gonna be really interesting to see if he's actually shown this has been really cool. He has published his first study now looking at how aerobic exercise changes the microbiome in the gut. And no one's looked at strength training. And I would be betting my career strength training will also change the microbiome there. And so we'll be the first study to look at that as well. So that'll be really, really cool. And we'll have a whole bunch of other things. It just made my mind explode a little bit. Yeah. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. No, I think this is, I mean, this is obviously, if you look at all of physiology science, the gut is clearly the thing moving the needle right now over the whole scope. And I think it's about time that it moves into our area as well. You think from like a perspective of people just being just flat out too fat, people having trouble controlling, you just triggered me. I'm triggered controlling their app, controlling their appetite, right? Yeah.

Um, do you think something like, like fasting, like, do you think there's some simple answers like telling people maybe not to eat carbs or telling people to eat less carbs, people hey man like maybe you should try some fasting you know like do you think there might be some simple things that people can try even just adding more protein like we just had a gram of protein per pound of body weight i would typically that would restrict your other habits my response to that um i think it's easier to encourage people to add than it is to tell people to stop doing so I would rather your latter approach hey let's focus on making sure you have protein at every meal and let's make sure like you eat whole food and you have some vegetables and things like this whenever you start restricting you run into all kinds of problems so if I add so much to your

plate there's not a whole lot room for a lot more a lot of a lot of error you've effectively whenever you start restricting, you run into all kinds of problems. So if I add so much to your plate, there's not a whole lot room for a lot more, a lot of error, a lot of error, right? You've effectively reduced the likelihood they're going to eat other stuff because they're, they're going to there.

And just from a perspective of, um, the way I always say is like, I'm not interested in a game of a little bit less worse. Like, don't ask me, well, which one's better,

the Triscuit or the fat free Triscuit? You're eating a fucking Triscuit. Like, I'm not going to answer that question i don't i do not answer the question um you're the only question i will answer is which one of these two is better for me so that that's how i want to shift the entire conversation and i want you to pick the one that's most good not the least bad and almost always they already know the answer that right so if the option is an apple or a triscuit, you know the answer here. So it really makes nutrition very, very simple. We have to be cognizant, I think, of people with or that are susceptible to eating disorders or eating disorder-like issues. Now, I don't deal with that at all.

Not my area. I would never dabble in that. But some people, restriction gets a very negative feedback and negative spin. We have seen clearly binge dieting for the average person not only doesn't work, but often exacerbates the problem. And so I think you have to be careful with those restriction messages. So for those reasons, I think it's tough to walk around and say, hey, you should go try some fasting because that has such a negative connotation in most people's mind. So the way that I approach it is

this. I'll just keep saying my dad, right? Which is the average person who doesn't give a shit about this space, isn't into it. I typically don't bring fasting up. When you move past that and you're like kind of a nerd in this space, then I totally flip gears and go, no, no. If you can't fast, you're weak. That's a problem. We need to be able to have a relationship with food that it doesn't control us. So I need to be able to go 24 hours, 48 hours, whatever it needs to be. I need to be able to say, no, you're only eating this or you're not going to eat this. That sounds totally fair.

So if you're in this game, then it's fair to be called a bitch. Yes. Right? Yeah. Like you can't lift that weight. You're a fucking bitch. Yes. Period. Right. Agree. But that's not going to called a bitch. Yes. Right? Yeah. Like you can't lift that weight. You're a fucking bitch. Yes. Period.

Right. Agree. But that's not going to work for the, I think it actually does a worse approach. So I fast, I'll challenge my students to fast. One of the experiments that my students in my sports nutrition class has to do is for in the semester, they have to do 60 days of a major nutritional change. I've had some do carnivore recently. Some of them will do fasting. They'll do 24 hour fast twice a week for two months. They'll do all

kinds of other stuff. They have to do something that hurts. And that's the thing, because these people are on that next level. They're not like, they don't have a negative mental, most of them state attached to nutrition. For them, it is now I want you to suffer. We need to understand what food does and doesn't do for us. Because I know this is not going to turn into pity. This is not going to turn into issues with your life, self-esteem, which is a real problem for a lot of people, right? They just don't have that relationship with food. So I think we can, but we have to be responsible and think about who we're messaging and who we're talking to. and think about who we're messaging and who we're talking to.

So most of your average people that maybe don't have a fight in the game, they want to just kind of skim close to a little bit of suffering and have it be a little bit challenging, but not. Well, I think the message needs to be overly positive for them. It's like, Hey, you want to feel better? Yeah. Well, did you notice how when you started eating this real food, you, your energy was more stable. Did you notice that? Yeah. Yeah. Great. And it's all positive, positive. And the more you gravitate towards that, the better you're going to feel. So you should continue down that path. Yeah. Let's make you feel good. Yeah, exactly. great. And it's all positive, positive, positive. And the more you gravitate towards that, the better you're going to feel. So you should continue down that path. Yeah, let's make you feel good. Yeah, exactly.

I want you to feel better. I want you to do that. Where I think we can use the tough love, negative messaging is that more middle ground. It's like, no, you can't handle a carbohydrate. You can't handle fat. And we can get into this. You're weak, you're soft. We need to get there.

And that typically, I think, works. Or just challenging, right? Not necessarily weak weakest thought, but let's just challenge you. Like, let me challenge to see what you can do. So I wouldn't hesitate to have any of my athletes do a fast if I need it for it. Because for them, nutrition is just another piece of what they need to do to train, right?

It's not like they're not as challenged with those areas. Something you said earlier in the podcast, I think is probably the best thing that I've ever heard on this podcast uh besides everything i've ever said um it says challenge every function of the human body at least a little bit it's something that you said earlier and i think that that's that's a fucking great message anybody that's in this fitness game yeah go for a walk every once in a while maybe sprint you know, do some explosive lifting, do some slow and controlled lifting, you know, mix things up a little bit. If you can't stand on one foot

without your arch collapsing or getting a cramp on your foot. All right. If you can't, why are you calling me out? Right. Like again, think about what the body should be able to do and you should be able to do at least a little bit of it every once in a while. It's pretty damn complicated. Thanks so much for coming on the show. We can talk to you for hours on end as we have in the past. I think, you know, the last time you were here, I think we talked for like six hours or something. We broke some sort of world record.

Yeah, it was absolutely world record. I check again. You got to file the paperwork. That's why. Where can people find you? You can, the socials, you know, Dr. Andy Galy galpin dr andy galpin that's pretty easy to find and one piece i'll throw out at you my mission my goal is i i i care a little for the university system in terms of i wish some of this information that i have is available when i was a kid part of me me wishes, part of me doesn't. But I think it's – I almost said a bad word there.

I think it's very silly and unnecessary that we put some of this information behind, oh, you got to get into the school and you got to take two years of prereqs and you got to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're like – and then you got to get in your actual sports nutrition class and then you have to wait until the like actually three weeks when we actually talk about how much protein to eat to gain muscle. Like, why can't we just go to the end? And so what, what I've effectively done is taken all of my, my goal is, and I'm not there yet, my university education, my lectures, my class, my coursework, my nutrition, my program design,

my physiology, my strength conditioning stuff, and put those all up on YouTube. And that's all free. It's a hundred percent. There's no newsletter even to sign up. There's no upsell. I don't even have anything to sell. So I want to put that up there and I'm working towards it. So if, if you had an undergraduate degree or don't have one on the field and you basically want to get that whole free education, that's up there on YouTube. And if you were in the field, I promise I teach these areas a little bit different. Maybe we can, uh, teach, or maybe we can encourage Lane Norton to subscribe so he can learn something. Oh my God. You know what? Actually every single video of his, I see, he just steals my stuff. Literally. I make a video. It goes out a week later. He makes exact

same video. Oh, exact same one. It's true. I know that's true, still um no his stuff is really good up there too so the the way that i am able to operate all this is that's attached to i'm sure you guys remember the patreon yeah so it's just up there if contribute to that that's fantastic if not i don't really care those things will be free till the day i can't make them anymore so that's all up there awesome strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later