Mark Bell's Power Project - Strength Training Concepts Every Athlete Must Know - Andy Triana & Jake Benson || MBPP Ep. 917

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Andy Triana, Jake Benson give a masterclass on how to build strength! Andy, Jake Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about strength Training concepts every athlete MUST know. Follow Andy on IG: https://www.instagram.com/gosuperbrain/ Follow Jake on IG: https://www.instagram.com/jakeyb_43/   New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw   Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject   ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin!   ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!   ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM   ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!   ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements!   ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off!   ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order!   ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!   ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!   ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off!   ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150   Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject   FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell   Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en    Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz   #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

Most movements that strength athletes focus on are sagittal. So just because you're like really strong in the squat, does that mean you're a strong organism? And a lot of times the limiting factor in able to lift more weight is literally just... Going hard looks different depending on what you do. The question I try to ask is what do you want your muscle to do? I promise muscle fibers are not made of fat or glucose. Did you get stronger or did you just have more stuff in your system that allowed you to express the strength? The strength stuff is cool, but what can I get some like injectable carnitine?

The less you can take, the better, really. Like you don't want to be taking things just to be able to, you know, be a human. I'm going to listen to everything he says. I just want to hear his voice. What'd you call it? The Slick Panther? It was called Smooth Panther. I did it on my YouTube channel a few years ago. But just guided mobility and stretching.

That's all it was. I did like 20 or 30 videos to voice it over. Did you have your shirt off for it? No. If you took your shirt off for it, dude, you would hit a massive demographic. That's his TikTok. Especially with the name Smooth Panther. I know.

And then you see him and you're like, oh, that guy looks like chocolate. I should have just put that on my phone. Smooth Panther. Exactly. You don't even need to change the name. That's actually not a bad idea. The perfect kind of chocolate, too, because the too dark a chocolate doesn't taste great. It's kind of bitter.

It's kind of like this is milk chocolate. Oh, God. You got everything you need. For all the dark chocolate brothers, we love you, too. Yeah got everything you need. For all the Dark Chocolate Brothers, we love you, too. Yeah. Don't trip. Don't trip. I was talking about like a bar, like a chocolate bar.

Yeah. Yeah. Of course you were. Yeah. Cacao. Right. I don't know what else you would have thought. Oh, man.

Hey, this year coming up is going to be the year of the moon. The year of the moon. So let's start the podcast to be the year of the moon. The year of the moon. So let's start the podcast with giving some credit to the moon. The sun gets all the credit all the time and no one's ever talking about the moon. Isn't the moon reflecting some of the light of the sun? Not just that. The moon is our circadian rhythm. So it's tough to say that we actually have day and night in the brain.

It's more of like continual responses to photon exchanges with light and it's really that our circadian rhythm or like your less loosely attached term sleep-wake cycle slightly different slightly similar depending on how educated you are is predicated on when you made contact with the moon and melatonin was secreted so if you think about jet lag you get jet lag because you miss the moon and if the sun was you know that more potent, it would just be ameliorated when you got in the sun when you landed. But we all know that's not true. So the photon exchange with the moonlight is actually what's going to trigger your own body to secrete melatonin. Our pons is the part of the brain that kind of takes notes all day long and decides how much sleep you need total and gross amounts and how long you need to go through these REM cycles.

So that's why if you take melatonin, you might pass out right away, wake up at 2 a.m. wide awake or you might wake up the next morning groggy as shit because the supplement is overriding your moon photon-based exchange that triggers your pons to be like, all right, this is how much sleep we need and so on and so forth. So the amount of melatonin you secrete every night endogenously is totally different. And how do you go about just getting moon exposure? Obviously, just go outside and kind of look at it. But do you have to, like with the sun exposure, you're trying to get like more of it on the surface area of your skin? Do you need to be like shirtless outside when it's freezing out? So luckily, photons traverse skin.

They traverse bone. They traverse clothes even. So that's why like you can wear like those UV covering sleeves but still get a little bit of sunburn and that type of stuff. So as long as you get exposure, as little as 90 seconds has been shown to trigger a response. But what I tell people is just pair it with something mindful. Go out there and like meditate or I call it play the world's smallest violin. You rub your thumbnail against your index finger and try to feel the ridges, something very, very fine to distract your brain electrically from all the other bullshit you have going

on. Do that in the moon and then go to bed. All right. So what's this year of the moon thing, though? What were you guys talking about? I was just kidding just because people talk so much about the sunlight. And so we're just trying to give credit to the moon. Give credit where credit's due.

Yep, start a new trend. Do you think people are underestimating how much light or lights like this affect them during the evening? Do you guys pay attention to that for yourselves at all? Do you dim lights in your home prior to sleep, et cetera, or not really? I know I do because Jake's the same way. We work a lot on the computer. So it's definitely a factor you have to be aware of but if you're like construction worker out in the field all day like you probably don't need to worry about it quite as much okay um you so you guys

are writing a book together right and uh that's a nootropic book or is that a different no the nootropic stays alone and that's coming out what like a couple yeah but by the end of april it should be done i'm sorry I'm trying to enjoy my delicious steak shake real quick steak shake commercial withinyourbrand.com everything you need nothing you don't you nailed it

what's the book about that you guys are working on so it's mostly about going to be strength training it's going to be pretty much front to cover the basics of everything you need to know how to build your own program to be pretty much front to cover, like, you know, the basics of everything you need to know, how to build your own program, how to assess yourself, how to know what you need. And, you know, Andy's covering stuff from the biological aspect. I'm kind of putting in, you know, how to take these things and make them applicable. And then Joe's

giving the, hey, this is how you actually do it. It's got to be tough for you guys to write a book because you guys are looking under every single rock that there is, right? You're leaving no stone unturned kind of. So how do you delineate like what's going to be in this book? Is this going to be something that's going to be basically just strength training or you're going to even get into like the ocular stuff, the stuff of the eyeballs and like how deep in are you going to go on some of this information you think? Well, that's a good question. I think for the most part, we're not trying to go too deep with it.

We don't want it to be like a textbook where it's like, okay, I don't know what to do with this now. Like this blew my mind and I'm just not going to do it, right? We want it to be, you know, anybody can really pick it up and as long as you're willing to learn and stick to it, it'll be pretty easily readable. Yeah, so I fly a lot and the idea came to me. I was like – I was just like thinking, wow, strength training has come so far in the last couple of years.

Like people are doing significantly more advanced stuff than they were doing even when I was in college. I was thinking we had 5-3-1 was game-changing for the fitness. Mark Ripto's Starting Strength was game-changing. It's like the books that – right? It's the books you think of when someone is like, hey, I'm a total dingus. I want to squat. What do I do?

They're like, oh, go buy Starting Strength. It's not the worst place to start by any means. And as I was sitting there on the plane thinking, like, wow, it's actually been quite a bit of time since like there's been an update to the strength amalgam in the world. So I was like, you know, I think Joe, Jake and I are great people to be able to do that. I think combining forces and everyone taking their own specialty is a great way to do it. So our goal is that your average person or your advanced person can pick it up and learn something new and understand what it means to be strong. We're not going to make it just about powerlifting or anything like that, although that's an easy introduction to strength that most people traverse like as an avenue. But it's really talking to

people about like you know when you think of strength like what do you guys think of strength you know like what image comes to mind when we ask you what is strength it's such a hard thing to define you know i you know years ago i thought it was just kind of like lifting um but i also you know i also did recognize like there's strength in other sports and obviously things like gymnastics, but there's strength all around in so many different areas. It takes a certain amount of strength to run fast. It takes a certain amount of strength to jump. And so I think the old way of thinking from a strength coach perspective,

I think a lot of strength coaches would think, oh, a lot of these guys, they don't have a lot of muscle mass, so we've got to stick them in the weight room, and we have to have them do all these kind of lifts and things like that. And I think that you're seeing people start to move and shift away from some of that, but leave some of it in because some of it still does have value. Sometimes a person literally just needs to be heavier, needs to be a little bit bigger and literally a little bit stronger. But what does it mean to be stronger? It's a great question because i don't know like you know doing a set of deadlifts or increasing your stiff leg deadlift is that going to yield uh more power when you're doing your

sprints or if you're running back is that going to help you run someone over better i don't know i don't think anyone knows what about you and sema i mean when you were talking about i'm just thinking of a squat because of our strength, but like of our gym bias. Right. So it's fairly simple for me. I'm just thinking of like things that we generally do in the gym, even though there's a lot more aspects to that. But like that's what I'm kind of wondering, because when you guys were talking about making the strength book, I wrote down starting strength in five through one because those are the classics. I five through one was the first strength program I did when I was like 20 years old. Right. Um, so what I'm curious about is like, what are, what are you guys going to be tackling differently from what like a lot of these older programs have done?

So I think we're going to open the fields to like, like the question I just asked, what is strength? If you think about starting strength in five through one, they're approaching the book already with that definition created, thinking strength is more pounds on the bar. So the way we're writing is we're each taking like our own perspective. I'm going to write the intro to the book and the first couple of chapters talking about strength from my perspective is a neurological phenomenon. I'm going to make a nerd joke here.

Strength is just electricity going into your neuromuscular junction. Duh. So it's like I'm going to – yeah, you get it? So like I'm going to write it from that perspective. Like what is strength under the hood? And Jake is going to talk about like what he's going to write about from his perspective. And then Joe is going to come in to finish the book talking about the manifestation of strength maybe on the platform or in real life. Like what does it mean to just grab a barbell?

Because if you think about it from whether it's the training, the mind, or the actual brain and spinal cord, the definition changes a little bit. Strength is maybe an ability to recruit motor units, right? Something along those lines. How quickly you can do it. Right. How explosively you can move a certain weight. I always found it interesting.

I always felt like there was a gap or a hole between the guys on the field that were really strong and the guys in the weight room that were really strong. And every once in a while, you'd see some good crossover. Every once in a while, you'd see a guy that had good technique on the field, good strength on the field, and he worked out hard. And usually that was the guy that killed everybody. Yeah. And he worked out hard and usually that was the guy that killed everybody. Yeah. What I'm curious about too is like when it comes to I guess how you guys are handling this book, from the neurological perspective, I don't think that there are – I don't think it was talked about in 531 much.

Starting strength maybe a little bit. But what are some things that you notice that a lot of people don't pay attention to because I don't hear many people talk about it from that perspective. So I think the thing that people don't pay attention to is like think about it this way. I take pre-workout and I lifted more weight. Why? What the hell happened? Like drinking a coffee isn't a strength performance enhancing drug. It's not on any banned lists. But yet we know caffeine does have performance enhancement abilities in the right scenario,

whether it's aerobic running or lifting. what is happening that's making you do this? So like Jake's portion is about like the training aspect and tackling stuff in the gym that makes you stronger. And then when we think about what that perspective was taken in five through and starting strength, it's all just barbell work. But I think Jake's going to do a great job of explaining why it goes beyond that and how maybe if you're looking for transfer on your deadlift, you're better off choosing like a lateral hop than the stiff leg deadlift to make it stronger. It doesn't mean the stiff leg deadlift is not great to build up your hamstrings and to maybe continue to improve that pattern. But if we want to put weight on the bar, I'll take a lateral hop or a certain type of broad jump any day over the stiff leg deadlift for deadlifting PRs. And that's what Jake's portion is entirely about. Do you want to explain that lateral hop

bit actually? Because like, that's not something that I know I haven't heard that mentioned before. No, absolutely. I think I'm guessing you're kind of approaching it from this way. Like, well, anything with jumps really, a lot of the times we can do jumps and we're very, very safe. We can produce a lot of force and feel safe in that aspect. And a lot of the times we can do jumps and we're very, very safe. We can produce a lot of force and feel safe in that aspect. And a lot of times the limiting factor in able to lift more weight is literally just not feeling safe or having this like limbic system. Like I get the green light from my brain to be able to hydrolyze, you know, enough ATP at once, right? But if you can do that, you know, in a different setting, you can train this ability to contract harder and faster. you can train this ability to contract harder and faster.

And one thing that like a theme that we've been having the past few years now is we've been having a lot of people come onto the podcast that have been talking about things outside of sagittal plane movements and barbells like David Weck and the go-to dudes and all that type of, all those individuals. And a big thing that they've, they've been helping us understand is doing a lot of maybe rotational work and work in different planes. I'm curious, in the book, do you attack that also from a strength perspective? Because, like, you notice that most movements that strength athletes focus on are sagittal, same direction, same movement pattern. And they seem to have weaknesses in other areas. So how are we tackling that in the book?

Yeah, I'm curious if you guys do. Yeah, I think that would probably fall into Joe's unless you're talking about that a little bit as well. Well, I think the reason rotational work can make you stronger is everyone talks about bracing your trunk, right? When you're squatting, we need to brace. And if you look at an anatomy skeleton and you see your ribs and diaphragm get into this brace-like position, it's not sagittal. Your ribs – so when we do the rib tackle we talked about, we're going infra, rostral, and caudal. These are the anatomical terms for down, in, and back. So the ribs go down, in, back towards the belly button, almost like the trough of a wave hits the beach. If you were to imagine a wave in

your head hitting the beach in 3D, it's not just going this way. It's going this way down and then in at the very last second. So when you think about this in 3D, it's actually quite rotational. It's frontal plane. So bracing your trunk is a frontal plane accessory skill that is needed for sagittal plane competency. And that's not a coincidence why everyone's like, you suck at bracing. You suck at bracing. You suck at bracing. You need to learn it, learn it, learn it.

And people are like, oh, I can't figure it out. It's because you're in a sagittal position trying to learn a frontal plane skill you don't have. And that's that direct correlation I was saying about the lateral hops with Jake and stuff. It's like the reason is not just the force production. It's not just this and that. It's you're actually able to continually progress a skill that will literally have direct transfer to squatting more weight on your back you know joe's broken four world records in a row with jake and you'll see joe very competent doing frontal plane throws it's not a coincidence yeah so you guys want people to be able to express their strength in many different areas like i saw you guys doing a lot of throws today yeah absolutely i think that's kind of the purpose of the book is like what is the limiting factor of your strength and like how how can we express it right and those limiting factors from person to person are going to be different and being able to uh to assess what that is and then you know correctly apply it is really the goal yeah good it's just lining stuff up so mark you were an excellent squatter and like there's a different eccentric speed

that's optimal for a thousand pound squat versus 750 and everyone just attributes that to oh like it's part of it. You got to mess it – like you can't mess it up or you're going to lose the lift. But if you really think about what's happening, that slower eccentric with 1,000 is actually priming your hip musculature differently than doing a banded safety bar high box squat. They both have value but they're different. And when we talk about strength, I think what needs to be encompassed in the definition is multivariable environments.

If you tell me you're only strong with your rectus abdominis doing the six-pack crunch-like motion, I can't use the adjective strong for your core. You're missing 80 percent of it. So I can't use that adjective anymore. And I think going – like the ultimate plight of the book is to get people not just to look at strength differently but use the word differently. The ultimate plight of the book is to get people not just to look at strength differently, but use the word differently. So just because you're like really strong in the squat, does that mean you're a strong organism? How much creatine can you store in your body and liberate and use to squeeze really hard? You know, that's a part of strength. If you can only do 90% of your max for one set of one, I struggle, in my opinion, to use the adjective strong for you.

I struggle in my opinion to use the adjective strong for you Power project family quality sleep can make everything with your health and fitness easier, which is why we've partnered with hostage tape Now we've been talking about mouth tape for years and nasal breathing for years But one of the problems that we've had with tape is we all like to rock facial hair And a lot of the mouth tapes we would use would fall off of our face at night Hostage tape doesn't fall off your face if you have a beard or if you're not a man and you don't. I'm joking. I'm joking. You don't need a beard, right? But either way, hostage tape makes sense. It'll stick to your face when you're asleep. You'll have better quality sleep because you're breathing through your nose all night long. It is a no-brainer. And if you head

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that comes with competency and I think Jake will talk about that a little bit, the programming aspect, because we do a lot of one and a half rep work, zero acceleration work, rhythmic work, and that's part of the skill of being strong. If you can't use your squat motor pattern at different eccentric concentric speeds with different weights, with different accommodating resistances, maybe different types of squats, then again, you're struggling to do something

very inherently important to being strong and squat in the first place. How do you guys think someone that's listening can you know just get a couple tips on getting stronger they they got to the gym they uh they they kind of know how to lift they've been kind of poking around for maybe a little bit uh but they want to start to kind of sink their teeth into some strength training um you know just literally start participating and figuring out like hey you know what am i good at what are my skills um and where am i lacking right like if you are let's say you go to the gym and you end up really enjoying some squats right but it's like it takes you eight minutes to recover between you know a set of three and your heart rate's super elevated and you can't even control your respirations after it's like hey maybe let's you

know work on that a little bit right but being able to uh just hey what's the next step forward like do i have any of these things that are really limiting me, right? Like, is it difficult for me to just, you know, grab something off the floor? Is it difficult for me to like rotate? It's like, you know, those factors kind of start playing in once you've been in the gym long enough. Now, do you guys go into the lifestyle stuff in the book too? Because, you know, on your podcast and then on the podcast you did yourself and Joe talked about meditation, walks, resting heart rate. Do you go into those things in this book too, or is it more focused on programming, the neurological aspect, and then the practical application?

No, there's a little bit, especially in my part, there's a little bit. It's not, we're not going to try to, you know, get into a deep dive with it, but there are things like, hey, you know, if you have like, I'm going to build an actual like program out that, you know, for something to follow. And it's like, hey, you know, during this time, this would be a good time to meditate between sets, you know, or or at this time, you know, superset it with this to be able to, you know, accomplish this or whatever. So absolutely. We'll kind of get into it. But I don't think we'll probably make a deep dive into it. Gotcha. Back to like this, the building strength for somebody that is still fairly new. Do you guys recommend building like a base of like just some hypertrophy and developing some muscle size before they start attacking like some strength? So meaning like the higher reps before

you like, like, Hey, let's see if you can get a set of 10 clean before you go for a one rep max. Yeah. I mean, to some extent it's like you have to have mature enough muscle tissue just to be able to handle your nervous system, right? Like if you see a lot of these brand new lifters, you know, they're going to a first meet or whatever or just doing something heavy and they're shaking, you know, like crazy. And it's like, you know, you really just don't even have the tissue to be able to handle your nervous system yet. So absolutely, I think there's a lot of value in, you know, doing some of the higher rep stuff and just literally, you know, hypertrophy, doing a little bit of hypertrophy work just to be able to move forward. I would even go as far as saying like is that hypertrophy work for the novice? Because novices get all the results from everything.

So it's more so – and this is part of the plight we have for the book as well. You need to have enough skill to do a one rep max. Just because you put a ton of weight on the bar and did one rep and called it like the heaviest you can lift that might not be your one rep max i can probably give you two cues and alpha gpc and you hit a 10 pound pr in that case it wasn't your one rep max so it's more like have you even done enough stuff to earn the right to attempt a one rep max for real like with the rotation work with a rep work you know if we do a set of 10 and six out of the 10 reps look different you didn't really do a set of 10 and six out of the 10 reps look different, you didn't really do a set of 10 with that motor pattern. You did four reps with whatever dog shit you have attempted.

And then you did six decent reps. So in reality, neurologically, the brain has two motor patterns that just did that set of 10. So that's why all of a sudden when you do like, you know, kind of dog, your accessories kind of dog, all your introductory work, and then suddenly get to your strength and peaking phases. And today's squat felt so different than last week. I don't know why. It's like, well, I can tell you now why. You guys think people need to like push it pretty hard or if like you're newer, you can

kind of just, you kind of just go at it, but not, you don't have to go to failure. I think pushing it hard can come in many different ways, right? It's like you can push it hard just by, you know, doing some zero acceleration or like some, you know, there's so many ways to push it hard can come in many different ways, right? It's like you can push it hard just by doing some zero acceleration or like some – there's so many ways to push it hard. Absolutely, yeah. Just kind of depends on what you want to define that as. Yeah, I think we're both guys that agree on like sending it all the time. But you have to – kind of the intensity scales we've used with our athletes as like we've worked together and mentored and stuff is like you want to go hard all the time on everything you do but that going hard looks different depending on what you do if you're hitting a one rep max and maybe like you're

snorting and like like you know that makes sense for that behavior strategy but that doesn't mean i want you to apply less effort to your respiration drills that doesn't mean i want you to apply less effort to like your rotational slams. And it's a different behavior strategy you're selecting. I want you to use a 10 out of 10 level of focus. But now that 10 out of 10 focus for a breathing drill means mindfulness. You know what I mean?

But I still want that 10 out of 10 recruitment. Yeah, like even Joe, for example, it's like he's 100% all the time, 100% focus on everything, always going hard on something. But he's not squatting over 800 pounds year-round. He's squatting that like once maybe before a meet. But there's so many things for him to focus on that are absolutely going to –

he's just got to put his face to a grinder just to be able to PR at this point. Again, watching you guys, it seems like you guys aren't – and maybe for today and maybe yesterday, you guys just also may be fucking around a bit. But it doesn't seem like you do like a ton of sets, and I'm sure that changes from time to time. But I think that's like an interesting strategy, and it's also something I think that can be refreshing to somebody to know. Like you don't have to necessarily do eight sets of something. You don't have to do five sets of something. If you're new, uh, like you did today, you, you gave me a prescription for some movement and you're like, try to do that once a day for a

minute. And I was like, how many sets you're like, just one, you know? So, I mean, people can get a lot out of if they've never done it before. Right. Well, that's like the quality of the example I just gave with that 10 reps, you know, like one of the things Jake and I have really kind of melded together for this book is, uh, he told me like a long time ago, he used to have to do 10 sets of 10 to get his legs to grow. And we were talking about a long time ago when we started mentoring was like, what's that paradox? Like how come I can grow now that I'm stronger with less volume? And I was like, well, realistically, Jake, look, look at what happened. You needed the first four sets to get some lack of oxygen, that oxygen debt to your rectus femoris. That's what you're really getting out of the end range of a leg press or a leg extension,

shortening of the rectus femoris. So it took four sets to get into the oxygen debt realm that you needed to actually build muscle. The next four sets, let's say, actually built a little bit of muscle. And the final two sets were actually attaining a little bit of failure and really tearing those myofibrils. So in reality, you kind of did three different leg press protocols. You just called it a 10 by 10. So like my, one of my primary philosophies in coaching is the environment in which you exercise and cause stress is more important than the exercise and stress prescription itself. So if you want to hypertrophy, I'd rather you do a third of the volume but be truly

low on oxygen and be in a hypoxic state, in a high respiratory and high ventilatory state and do a third of the volume than do all the volume with a ton of rest and four different mini little sets within the bigger picture of the exercise yeah at that point it's like you got the same amount of contractions under hypoxia which is kind of the thing that counts so uh does it make sense uh the way that jay cutler used to train back in the day you know before he would do his squats he would do like 60 to 90 reps or so of leg extensions so it it sounds like he was maybe priming himself for the squats, getting himself warmed up, but maybe going into the squat with a little bit of like oxygen debt.

100%. I mean, Jay can talk about what causes hypertrophy, but with Jay Cutler specifically, everyone knows he has a massive chest. And what's the one thing he never, ever, ever does in chest work? Lock out his elbows. And people are always like, because you said the range of motion like oh it's bullshit we need full range of motion for motor recruitment it's like ask jay cutler like you know it's funny even me saying i'm the science guy go ahead and ask jay and he'll tell you why you don't need to lock out

your elbows to grow your pecs because that's going to get you the full shortening contraction anything more than that is actually going to allow you to respirate get more oxygen through without any more shortening of the pecs and then you just took a little bit of a break and then you come down and you start a whole nother rep you know people are doing full range of cheating exactly not cheating but it's like now a different protocol yeah cheating arresting so i think about you know everyone loves to show like these top sets and like widow maker and death sets on instagram and they'll do a rep and then sit there like oh and then just do one more rep you know throw that shit out the window is useless you know yes it's useful for grit yes it's useful for

toughness yes it's useful for a couple of small variables but realistically in my opinion you're doing it for the gram because you stopped building the hypoxic muscle tissue you wanted to change two reps ago those extra two reps where you were breathing heavy and dying sure they have sport athlete individual value but you can't tell me that you're building more muscle okay so can you guys explain this like what makes an effective set for hypertrophy for any given movement um really contracting under hypoxia right it's like you want to be able to drain as much oxygen in that tissue. And the more that you can literally just contract in that super hypoxic state, the more reps that really count like towards hypertrophy, I think.

I really think that's like the most succinct way to describe it. Give us an example of how you get there. Well, man, there's like what Jay did, right? It's like he just did like 90, I don't know his exact protocol or whatever. Like five sets of 10 or something like that or 15 or something like that. Yeah, it's like, I mean, do that, like contract super hard, do like a zero acceleration version of it, like superset it, right? You don't ever really have a chance to really fully recover and you can get there really quick. You can do like these zero acceleration where it's like really slow, concentric, eccentric. So you're going to get hypoxic really quick.

And what does like for someone who's newer and they don't know what this feels like, what does that feel like? Just, you know, get onto anything and go and you'll feel it. Like just don't stop until you feel something. You'll feel it. It's like that lactase hits and you'll know exactly what that feels like, right? Yeah. You can get on any machine and do it super safely and do your triceps, do something that feels really safe, and you'll know exactly what that feels like. So like a tricep pushdown or

something like that, you can just get on there, load up some decent weight, get yourself pretty fatigued, and maybe do like a drop set or something like that? Absolutely, yeah. Just keep those rest times relatively short, and really the more you're getting in that hypoxic state, the better. So this is actually interesting. I'm curious to hear your thoughts about this because you know, a lot of lifters that are specifically like on the natural bodybuilding side of things, they're like big on increasing volume, increasing volume, and you need to be able to move more volume over time. And part of that, part of the, like a strategy that you utilize for that is like, okay, you do a set, you take a minute rest so that you can get more volume in. Like the goal is always getting more volume in versus getting in these type of intense sets in that cause a lot of fatigue, right?

Because with these types of sets you're talking about, they'll cause so much fatigue that your next set you will inevitably be, you know, you'll be way more fatigued. So maybe you might not be able to move as much load, et cetera. But what you're talking about here is having a more intense set, which can ideally lead to better hypertrophy. Yeah. It's just kind of like that 10 by 10 example Andy was just talking about. It's like really the first like four sets didn't really even count that much, right? It's like it didn't really do anything that we wanted it to do. So get there quicker.

The question I try to ask is what do you want your muscle to do, right? So let's say, and the best way to learn about this is actually looking at how growth hormone intervenes with myofibrils. You know, Dr. Andy Galpin's done a lot of great research in this world and a lot of other researchers have as well. What we learned is when growth hormone is present while you exercise, you favor myosin heavy chains, which is really cool. What that means to the layman and what that relates to what I was saying about your environment mattering so much so when you change your myofibril right and it comes back bigger stronger whatever it's going to be specifically adapted to what you did so if you did one set of a hundred reps and i just did that forever you're going to have one

fibers that transmutate or slide the scale slightly towards more aerobic, those type 1 fibers. You're going to have different types of vascularization and you also target deeper muscles. So the depth, it's called tensegrity, how close it is to the surface or not, is also impacted. So let's say you wanted to have the strongest deadlift possible and your hamstrings were weak. We need type 2 superficial fibers of your hamstrings to get strong that is targeted through plyometric high force movements so you can get more jacked doing a box jump but it's a specific type of jacked you can get more jacked doing one set of a hundred but it's a type of jacked you know one thing we talked about with your marathon

running a lot was transmutation it was like like, Mark, your whole life, you've been this explosive, hard squeezing, rigid guy. You're choosing a sport that is on the exact opposite polar spectrum from the muscle fiber perspective. So we need to intervene with supplements and training types that tell your brain that it's OK to switch to this other side of the spectrum. So along the way, it's funny. You gained actually a couple of pounds and got more jacked and leaner. So that's the perfect way to describe what do you want your muscle to do. Mark's able to gain new muscle tissue while training for a frigging marathon because he's exposed to novel stressors and he's making muscle fibers that previously weren't as active more active and growing. active, more active and growing.

So even though he's doing something that, you know, the long-term adaptation to a marathon running and that style stuff is a decrease in plasma leucine so that you can actually be more efficient on each step, he's actually still hypertrophying, doing the wrong things because it's specifically matched up to what he needs. It makes a lot of sense. You know, what you guys are saying makes a lot of sense in terms of like muscle hypertrophy and just different protocols I've seen people do. I remember Stan Efferding was, he was kind of warming up for like a leg press and he just did a couple sets and then he went over to the leg extension and he did two really

hard sets of leg extension and then finished back with the leg press again and just went kind of nuts on the leg press. This went, went all in and it's describing exactly what you guys are describing. And Stan famously did 10 sets of 10, 10 sets of 10 twice a day with a flex, but flex wheeler also kind of discovered that, you know,

that, that was just like an annihilation and maybe there wasn't a reason to have that much volume volume that much work and so that actually came from flex wheelers flex taught it to stan and stan showed it to me and it was uh you know it was really really brutal here you see us messing around with some of it um but you know it just you know people's training is going to going to evolve over time and they're going to continue to try to find these kind of different ways to be more efficient. And if you don't necessarily need to do 10 sets of 10 and you could get there with great results with three sets or five sets or one set, it sounds to me like you're saving time and getting the results that you want.

And not just that. You can pick how you want to train too. Like people just tend to think there's only one way to train. If I want to be jacked, I have to be as intense as ben pollack and if i'm not i'm just not going to be that jacked it's like well realistically if you told me that you're just like kind of a little wuss and you're like you know i just i'd rather just do 10 sets of 10 easy with 30 seconds rest it's like okay we still get you jacked doing that and if you're you know maybe on like the stand efforting set and you just want to rip your face off we can also do that you know And I think that's one of the cool things that you'll see in Jake's part of the book is that when he talks about periodization, he's going to talk about the individual difference associated with periodization.

Where someone like maybe Joe, because we've talked about this specifically in the past, we have to be careful with intensity constraints on Joe because he will literally go absolutely bananas and screw himself. So you need to put constraints to manage how you want someone to complete something. How will he screw himself? What will he do? You want specifics? Yeah. I think it's important for coaches. No, that's a great question. With Joe, it's like he has a crazy amygdala is what we would call it.

He can get really intense really quick and he can produce a whole bunch of catecholamines and he can do a whole bunch of damage to himself with really, you know, not needing any extra stimulus. So for a lot of the times with Joe, it's like, Hey, you know, we're not doing caffeine before a workout. We're not going to do things like, um, you know, any kind of stimulant or whatever. It's like, I literally need you to come in and, you know, meditate between sets, you know, sometimes because you can just incite so much damage so quickly. I mean the dude can squat 850 pounds at 220. It's like if you had him do a 10 by 10 and we gave him some caffeine and was like,

hey, I want you to listen to this death metal. It's like, dude, he would kill himself. Be sore for way too long. He'd probably be 10 pounds heavier just from edema after that. Do you guys get into the supplement side of things in this book? Because obviously we've talked about that. But does that happen? I don't think so because I think that's going to be too many weird – like our goal is to kind of redefine strength in a sense and not redefine like what you think about like how you should train.

I mean redefine like the dictionary definition. You don't need to squat 900 pounds to be strong. You could squat 900 pounds and in fact be weak in some areas in the same way. Yesterday on our podcast, I talked about like, what's the biggest discrepancy between some of the pro athletes. It's like some of them can get really frigging strong with a 30 pound dumbbell split squat. You know what I mean? Maybe there's a little bit of genetics involved. Maybe there's a little bit of like extra pro athlete sensory motor stuff, but it's still possible. So I think that's really

ultimately our goal. And maybe Joe will talk a little bit about responsibility with supplements and like the proper timing and tools, but it's not going to be about like supplementation for strength. That might be like a version two of the book or a whole nother separate thing to it. And one thing I am curious, and I want both of you guys and Mark yourself too, because, you know, one thing that we've gone into podcasts with you guys is like supplementation and even the PED side of things because you guys are fairly like genius in that sense and how to use these things effectively to increase performance, muscle mass, strength, all these things. But like I think back to myself when I started lifting and I was 13, 14, 15, I took my first first I got my first gallon of protein from a gold standard from Costco when I was 16 years old yeah and that shit actually helped me get a lot bigger a lot quicker because I was like down I was like finishing that in maybe 10 day periods right

yeah I was doing like three servings of that shit a day and my mom's like is this the steroid my mom was just like are you are you sure you should be doing this this much? Cause it was helping. But my mind, when I started taking that, I was like, this is the shit. This is helping me. Right. And you guys are going into straight concepts and stuff in the book. But I, I think that someone young knowing and listening to some of the podcasts that we've had with you guys is going to be like, well, this, this strength stuff is cool, but what can I get some like injectable carnitine? And you knowable carnitine? So what are the things that people should be focusing on even more if they're newer besides the supplements and the extra stuff that you guys understand?

Yeah, I think just fuel the system, right? Especially what you're just saying with protein. You literally just started taking whey protein, right? Nothing super special, but started getting way bigger from it and whatever. It's like, cool, you just provide yourself with enough nitrogen to actually like make, you know, new tissue. Right. And sometimes that's the missing link. It's like, you know, make sure you're eating enough, like make sure you got enough. It doesn't have, you know, if you're a beginner starting with L-carnitine, it's really not necessary. Right. It's like, you know, there's so many things you

need to work on on your own. But really just just start by making sure you get enough protein is a great way to go. I think it's impossible to divorce from the vague sexiness associated with supplements. It's like, yo, I'm going to pop this shit. I'm going to go deadlift. I'm going to do this. You know what I mean? So I think the plight I would have is like the synergy concept. So kind of like what Jake was saying about if you want to build muscle, you need to have enough nitrogen to do so.

I promise muscle fibers are not made of fat or glucose. So it's like where are you going to get it to build new muscle? But let's say – because one of the protocols me and Jake did today is like 20 sets of one on deadlift and med ball throw. You pair them back and forth, take a good amount of rest in between to reoxygenate and you do that. Well, it's like, well, let's say that's the type of jack you need to get. It's like I'm just not explosive. I need to get a jacked explosive. Well, the supplement for that is actually creatine you know so you you should probably sip on some

creatine while you do your med ball throws so you could maintain your high levels of force through more throws because the reason i think a lot of people get pent up in volume too early on is because obviously you need a criterion amount of volume in anything to grow but the problem that people experience they think just doing the number of sets and reps is volume. But volume, kind of what we've talked about, is actually the quality and intent of what you did. So let's say you need to do arbitrarily 15 med ball throws at like 200 newtons, let's say, to be stronger, right? But let's say you did 12 med ball throws at 200. Then the last couple, you were texting some girl and

you wanted to go on a date, so you rushed them. So now the last eight were 120 newtons. You did them under less oxygen than you needed, and you actually used up the extra creatine you had too fast. So you only got stronger from the initial 12. The last eight were different. If you would have supplemented with creatine and maybe did a quick meditation or nasal breathing in your 45 seconds between throws, you maybe would have been able to do 25 and get stronger based on 25 med ball throws instead of 20 that you originally were going to do. That's well said. Pepper, how's your family? How's it going? Now, we talk about meat a lot on this podcast, which is why we've partnered with Piedmontese and have for years now because they have some

of the best beef on the planet. All right. Piedmontese beef has cuts that are fattier in terms of their ribeyes, and they have also cuts that are leaner in terms of their flat irons. But you can get cuts for no matter what diet you're on. Andrew, how can they get their hands on it? Yeah. Head over to piedmontese.com. That's P-I-E-D-M-O-N-T-E-S-E.com. Check out EnterProboCode Power for 25% 25 off your entire order and if your order is 150

dollars or more you get free two-day shipping links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes what do you think the difference is between building strength versus building muscle because we talked a little bit about hypertrophy what's the difference what's the mechanism how does someone just get stronger i I, you know, I know sometimes we're talking about kind of like a beginner, but just in general, like what's the difference between strength training and like specifically trying to train for hypertrophy? I think the big difference is in what's happening. People think that like the end outcome of both are similar. Strength is literally a behavioral manifestation, whereas hypertrophy is just a new part of you.

All you're doing is storing more glycogen in your muscle cells. People measure hypertrophy in size. We call it cross-sectional areas, like the roundness. When in reality, that has nothing to do with how strong you are. You're literally just storing more stuff in a muscle cell so it's bigger. Whereas strength is a momentary expression. Like Joe is probably the best squatter pound for pound on the planet. But promise if we pulled him out here right now he's not going to squat at 50 so it's a behavioral expression you're still hypertrophying when you get stronger but it's

very little so it's in micrograms that the myofibrils are making new stuff to attach to the protein fibers so you're still hypertrophying in both aspects but you're just not seeing it because you're looking to get bigger increased cross cross-sectional area, which happens. And this is why Jake was talking about the hypoxic stuff. The best way to increase cross-sectional area is to do it in a hypoxic state. Glycogen is the largest molecule we can hold in a muscle cell. So if you want to make your muscle cell bigger, are you going to do it through grams of glycogen or micrograms of protein filaments you want to get jacked fast you're always going to pick the grams it's way

bigger you know but it doesn't mean that the strength isn't happening and then getting stronger doesn't mean that you're not hypertrophying so i think the biggest mistake our industry ever made was thinking that you had to choose one or thinking that they're at all similar they are that's like saying like you do you want carbs or fast? It's like, well, dude, I need fucking both. What's wrong with you? You know what I mean? It's the same concept.

And let me ask this too. When it comes to getting stronger, one thing that you see a lot are like individuals that eat way too much because they believe that if they just pack on mass, mass moves mass, right? But it gets to an unhealthy place. Like you, yourself and Joe, you guys are fucking – you guys are jacked. I know you're – like right now you're not focused on even like doing a crazy amount of stuff in the gym, but you're still in very good shape. So what are your – like how do you guys handle the nutrition side of things not to get fat to be able to be strong?

Like especially like when we're in this state, like this, uh, off season. Well, I mean, you just kind of always are fueling the system, right? It's like, if, uh, if I'm doing X amount of work, I need, you know, this much, you know, like calories or whatever to be able to fuel it. Um, but, uh, yeah, I guess like whatever you're doing, it's like, if you have a creatine day versus long, like kind of more substrate day, like those are going to have very different fuel demands, right? It's like, one's very lactic. Thatactic that one's you know maybe you need a little bit more fats on one day and one day you need a little bit more carbohydrates yeah but it's always based on like what you're doing i think actually let me ask you this then right now you're lean right

do you think that you could be a better strength athlete if you were 30 pounds bigger with an extra 15 pounds of fat and 15 pounds of muscle like would i be able to lift more weight yeah probably right like just by having the actual like assuming that some of that's going to be, you know, cross-sectional, some of that's going to be like actual new myofibril density. Right. Yeah. Um, and then some of it's going to be fat. I mean, I'm just going to probably be in better leverages for a squat, better leverages for a bench and whatnot. Um, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to be able to force more electricity into like these neuromuscular junctions too. Right. Yeah. And do you guys think that there's maybe an upper level of body fat that would be,

this is maybe as high as you'd want to be as a strength athlete? Because some athletes, you'll see some strength athletes who are, they look very fat and you wonder, could you be leaner and still perform at a higher level? Could being leaner help your performance out? What do you guys think? Oh yeah. I was going to say like, I think to a certain point, like especially with these, like, super heavies, their motor cortexes are just so developed for this pattern now, right,

that if they dropped a whole bunch of body fat, it's like technically you could, you know, still have the very same amount of electricity coming in, the same amount of, you know, actual contractile force. But because those leverages are different, I think we just kind of mess up with you know your motor cortex yeah i think the problem is it's like strength of what and this is like the point we keep coming back to so earlier mark was uh asking about like trt like

what's what's the deal with trt like how much can you really take and still call it and i always phrase the question well what are you replacing you know are you sedentary so you kind of ask like how do we maintain our hypertrophy because we're both saying how busy our lives are right now with business. The funniest answer is because I'm stressed as fuck, dude. Like I'm not going to have hypertrophy disappear even though I'm only training four days a week less intense because I'm still forcing my body to make forward adaptations. I just have less to give in the gym. But that's still getting done. So my body's not going to move backwards. So like, let's say you were worried about your biggest squat ever

might be beneficial to have a belly, but if you wanted to be maybe a well-rounded power lifter, that belly is going to inhibit your deadlift. So it's like, well, the strength of what that hypertrophy of what, what do you want to adapt? So if you told me you wanted to have like the highest med ball throw possible, we can shred body fat off and still get that med ball throw higher but if you told me that you wanted to squat 850 and you've never squatted it before maybe that belly comes into play but you don't need to squat a pr to have a total pr and a power lifting so that's like really the equation you end up playing there's also strength goes down too right like so if you gain a lot of weight especially if you gain 20 or 30 pounds kind of out of nowhere uh pull-ups are going to be harder

body weight stuff's going to be harder if you're playing a sport it's going to feel way different if you gain even five or ten pounds it might feel way different 100 you know it's like we talked a lot about like resting heart rate and health and how that impacts strength. If you are too out of shape to do four sets of 10 reps with 30-second rest on a light machine accessory, you are not fit enough. You are too fat to hypertrophy. And it's not that the fat is the problem because you don't have to be fat to be too unfit to make changes. But it's the same thing. When we were saying volume and sema, if you just aren't in good enough shape to be in a creatine phosphate system for eight sets of three guess who's only doing six sets of three to get stronger yeah true so can a muscle that does gain size be weaker yeah it's just like weaker and what

right yeah i know but that's what i'm saying because like because me like I don't train for strength, but I've gotten stronger. So like all my sets are typically above 12 or more. But, you know, in a caloric surplus, if I start gaining size, then I'm going to get stronger, even though I'm not training for strength. for strength. So what I'm trying to like, what I'm really asking is like, even though if somebody's not focused on, on strength, they're just trying to get jacked. Won't they automatically then become stronger? Well, you'll make the adaptations of what you're doing, right? So if you're always doing like these sets of 12 or above, like you're, you're making very specific adaptations to that protocol. So you're, you're going to get better at it. I'm actually going to pose a question back to you, Andrew. Let's say you hit your one rep max on squat. Let's just say for easy math, it was 315.

I know you're a lot stronger than that. I'll take it. Yeah. Let's just say it was 315. And then let's say we did another attempt and I gave you – let's make up a crazy scenario, like a bunch of testosterone suspension, a bunch of GPC, and you hit a 40-pound PR. Did you get stronger or did you just have more stuff in your system that allowed you to express the strength? Did you get stronger or did you just have more stuff in your system that allowed you to express the strength? So it's like, well, when you're in a caloric surplus, the reason you feel stronger is for nothing more.

You have more choline and more creatine in your muscles. So you can do it a little more. But does that mean if you starved and then only squatted 275, you got weaker? It's like, well, no. I wasn't able to express that strength. So you could certainly get less jacked and get stronger. You can certainly get more jacked and get weaker and everywhere else in between because strength is that momentary expression.

If I hooked you up to a car battery and you didn't die, you'd probably deadlift a thousand pounds just because you had that much electricity coursing through you, but you're not strong enough to deadlift a thousand. I hooked you up to a car battery. Got it. I want to try all those experiments

minus the car battery. How did you guys end up meeting each other and getting together on some of these things? Actually, I talked to you about Andy on the podcast last December or whatever, and then I think we just met through social media. Yeah, I think

you reached out for the Tom Platt attempt uh to ask a couple questions and we just like kind of hit it off uh by the way so matt winning broke that record do you what are your thoughts on his record oh like well done you know well do you think anything of the height just curious no i think like you know it's 525 pounds and you did it for what was 25 reps 25 reps i mean regardless it's it's a lot of you and you did it for 25 reps? 25 reps. I mean, regardless, that's a lot of reps. Are you going to go after it again?

You did 18 reps? Yep, I'm absolutely going after it again. It's something that's definitely going to happen. That's one that's... What did some of the protocol... That's very nice. What are you talking about? What did you think about that winning swap?

I thought it was cool. Platts definitely did it deeper. But it was still, I couldn't do that. I couldn't do what winning did. It was absolutely impressive. I mean, I didn't either, right? It seems like you're trying to get at something. No, me? No.

Okay, I'll move on. Might be. What are some of the challenges when you have something like that? Like what the fuck's going on when somebody does a set like that? Like the 525 for the AMRAP thing? Yeah. So there's a lot of things you're trying to control. And Andy helped me a ton with this because he helped me understand a lot of limiting factors that were going to be there.

We've built so much muscle since this video, not to interrupt you. I think I was like, well, like long story short, but when we attempted that, I came into Vegas to Joe's house weighing like about 226, 227-ish. And Joe's AC broke. And so it's the middle of June. And so for like three or four nights, we slept in like a 90-degree house. So when I came in to attempt it, I was actually down to 218. I freaked out to Andy. I'm like, dude, I'm 218.

Everything looks like waves. What am I going to do? So it was pretty cool. I'm really happy about the performance regardless. It was awesome. The experience was cool. But there's a lot of things, right? Like one of the things that was really hard to manage was you can't get too excited too easy right like with

this whole thing like with what we're talking about with joe it's like we can contract really hard like you know i don't squat even anywhere close to where joe does but i still squat 760 and you kind of start to associate the squat as a power lifter it's like i gotta be amped i gotta feel like super hyped up, um, and, and bring up all the electricity I possibly can to make this attempt. But if you do that with something like, you know, for this many reps, by the time you get to like rep eight, your hypoxia gets over, right? There's, there's nothing left. Um, and so it was, it was a very different approach of like, Hey, we've got to come in and I need you to like, you know, these first couple

reps, we just have to almost be like loose. I almost want to be like meditative in these first couple of reps. Um, and, uh, yeah, dude, it was, it was gnarly. It was, it was brutal. Um, I'll never forget that guided meditation I did with Joe. Oh yeah. Dude, those things are so helpful. It really set us up for, for success. I literally came in and I walked into dragon's ladder and we, I think we had maybe what, like 90 minutes before the attempt? And I'm – like the floor is waving and I'm like, oh, no. Like this is not a good day to attempt this. But Andy gave us some guided meditation and I like literally came out like, OK, let's do this. I felt pretty good.

What did that guided meditation look like? You mentioned that. So it's funny. Like I said, like meditation – not that we need a new word for it but it's just not i'm sorry i'm still watching this um i think we all are yeah it's just not the right connotation to what you're actually doing so yes i had them laying on the floor breathing a certain way but what i was really doing was coaching them through a spatial drill where i was like jake we're gonna imagine you as a chalk look at me. Yeah. I'm that quiet guy.

That's everywhere somehow. But I was like, Jake, imagine yourself as a chalk outline. Now fill that chalk outline slowly and red from the feet up. Slowly fill your chalk outline like a red meter. Now let that red get more and more intense. Now let that screen in your head.

Yeah, this is filled with red outside of those chalk outlines and see your whole screen fill with an aggressive red. And then finally on your next exhale, clear the screen to white, open your eyes slowly, and allow yourself to be fully immersed in what you're about to do. I learned some hypnotism stuff from a consultee I was working with in Poland who actually is very, very wealthy in Poland for the hypnotism work he does. He taught me a lot about it and what you can do with spatial drills to force people's brains to actually function differently. So the guided meditation Joe did was different than Jake's. Jake was a little anxious. He was a little kind of freaked out about his weight. He didn't have a good warmup. So Jake's had to do with overcoming something and actually exciting

his amygdala. So his aggression, fear, resistance-based center, because the amygdala is kind of two sides of it. We can get to that in a second, but we're forcing him to overcome fear and to keep the same brain area turned on and be aggressive. Whereas with Joe, his was actually calming and dissociative because I knew Joe was going to go up there and like bite the barbell and like do something crazy. So we needed to do the opposite to get them in both the same threshold where Jake had just to come up and Joe had to come down. But there's an optimal behavioral threshold for every task. Like imagine if I came in here like with a heart rate of 160,

be a bad podcast, right? Whereas if you're going to go do a max deadlift, that's probably the correct behavior strategy to select. Power Project family, your normal shoes are making you weak. This is why I partner with Vivo Barefoot Shoes because they have a wide toe box, they're flat, and they're flexible. So with every single step you're taking, if you're taking a 10-minute walk outside or when you're working out in the gym, your feet are able to do what they're supposed to do in this shoe. They have tons of options for hiking, running, training in the gym, chilling and relaxing, casual shoes if you're out on a date. You need to check them out. And Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, that's over at vivobarefoot.com slash power project, and Andrew, how can they get it?

Yes, that's over at vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject and you guys will receive 15% off your order automatically. Again, vivobarefoot.com slash powerproject. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. When it comes to food, what does the fuel look like for this? For the 20 rep? Yeah, so morning of we ended up going

I think just some MCTs and some protein. We were trying to keep the heart rate really nice. The last thing we wanted is just to incite this like massive sympathetic response right like we don't want to come in and like basically blow your load before you're even getting there so we we're intentionally trying to keep that heart rate low and even the second we got to the gym I was like you know don't let yourself get amped or fearful of it let's let's do a little bit of meditation get comfortable with your environment and let's really try to like not get you know amped up before we're actually even like warming up or anything um and then i think probably right after that uh that little meditation that was the first

time we introduced a little bit of carbohydrates some slin and data right i think it was carb slin data yep yep and uh yeah data we kind of joe I talked about it on the podcast yesterday about the Tom Platt squat. But, yeah, and then, but, yeah, it was kind of it. We didn't really need to, like, load up a ton. Yeah. You didn't need to eat, like, a ton of carbs, like, a couple days out or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, the training wasn't, you know, very intense. So we kind of just, like, naturally, it's not like we didn't have to overfeed for it, right?

It wouldn't really have a big purpose well and you know there's actually contraindications to being overfed for a participation like a 20 rep squat same with a marathon right like if you're hyperfed you have too much blood in your stomach means you have less blood to working tissue and furthermore what you eat should be the direct fuel for what you're about to do so we needed to eat an amount that was relative to the amount of degradation he was going to go through. It was one set of 20. Doing a set of 20 on squats properly is really more of a training adaptation than a nutritional

one. If you're just too out of shape and can't do it, there's no amount of carbs and slin and data on the planet that's going to make you do it. So it was more like we need enough carbohydrates to actually fuel and foster performance. But in this case, going beyond it is going to be worse. Everyone has gone to their first powerlifting meet, eat too many Oreos, and you shit your brains out, and then like everything goes terribly from there. There are contraindications to being too high or too low whether it's nutritionally, behaviorally, or whatever. What does some eating strategies look like in your guys' opinion for someone wanting

to get big and strong? I like using what I call the bell curve. And I know Jake will answer after, but what I call is like the bell curve diet. So the bookends of your day should typically be devoid or lower in carbohydrates. Maybe your carbohydrates only come from fruit to really foster liver changes. People always overlook liver adaptations when it comes to really foster liver changes people always overlook liver adaptations when it comes to talking about nutritional changes so if you want to lose fat you need to be able to have a liver that's low on glycogen and still be able to do work which is

going to trigger norepinephrine norepinephrine your blood liberates helps liberate fatty acids from fat cells via hormone sensitive lipase and stuff like that. So if you – let's say you want to lose fat. We talked about fat inhibition yesterday, right? This is a part of it. If you get to low levels of liver glycogen, your heart rate spikes and you get muscle cramps and all this stuff, guess who's not getting shredded? So you want to keep your carbohydrates generally around your workout or a majority of them. So you want to keep your carbohydrates generally around your workout or a majority of them.

Yep. And then you're going to flux, meaning you're going to go in and out with protein and carbs at the key times. So before the gym, it will probably be higher in the carbs, a little bit lower in the protein. After the gym, I'm a huge fan of hydrolyzed whey. I think it's a little extra special. Then you're going to flux the carbs in. And the carbs then have a two-pronged effect, not just helping muscles restore, but that's what's going to bring your heart rate down. That's what's going to bring your respiration rate down.

Maybe you have one more carb meal than your low carb meal before bed and you end up having these wave-like systems happening again and again and again, causing compounding nutritional adaptation. That's the key to everything. I couldn't have said it better myself. I have nothing to add to that. It's well said. We kind of talked about the two-fuel theory yesterday, just kind of brought it up. And that's kind of what you're doing with those fats too. It's like you want to be able to use those fatty acids to change proteins, right? And I think that can be a really big inhibitor with a lot of athletes is they literally cannot beta oxidize fat, right?

They can't utilize fat to be able to use it for a lot of athletes is they literally cannot beta oxidize fat, right? They can't utilize fat to be able to, you know, use it for a lot of different processes. I saw you guys eat a little bit yesterday and we got a chance to eat together for a little bit after we did all our shows yesterday. What do you usually advise people to eat and how do you guys normally eat? I think this is Jake's ballpark because he's had tremendous success across all sports fixing nutritional and metabolic issues because I'm kind of in like the pro athlete world right now. So I'm seeing this stuff way less honestly. I'm just telling people like, dude, eat some nuts and kefir. Just eat like a fucking adult.

Don't be too stupid. And then we'll approach this again in two months. Yeah, no, I mean, that's really funny because I can think of so many. But yeah, no, it just totally depends on the person, right? Like we were kind of talking about Kiara's prep yesterday. And Kiara's someone that got away with like a lot of high carbohydrates. She's literally on peak week right now and her carbohydrates are still high, right? Never really had to drop them.

We didn't really have to do like a you know like a low calorie thing but we're trying to grow the whole time right it's like and we had a lot of cross-sectional work which we've kind of discussed a lot so it's like we were feeling that with glucose um but someone else like brianni it's like you know we kind of have like a lower carb um approach to it so it totally just depends on like what what you're trying to feel and what kind of training is i think you always start with the training um and based on what kind of training you, you're feeding that process, right? Like if you're doing a ton of cross-sectional work like this, you know, hypo, a lot of reps under hypoxia, you know, it's going to be paid for by glucose, right? Um, if you're doing like a lot of a lactic work or these creatine

days that we're doing, those are, you know, being paid for more by fatty acids or like, you know, creatine. So it just kind of depends of depends um always build the training and the adaptations you want to make from training as an athlete and then fuel the process something like a vertical diet would probably be it has good recommendations in terms of types of food to eat and things like that yeah absolutely like you know if as far as like food quality goes yeah i mean absolutely some beef some you know like actually eat real food. It can go a long way, like gummy candies and like, you know, what's that? The Fair Life stuff. That's not a real meal.

We can't do that all the time, right? But yeah, absolutely. Just some rice, not using those like weird microwavable, like cheesy, you know, garlic rice things, whatever. It's like, that's not, you know. You're talking about Jeremy Avila's diet. You're describing it right now. And jelly beans, right?

No, there are times where it's like you could absolutely make sense to throw a little bit of like maybe some gummy candy and like post-workout just to get a little bit of mastication and actually inciting hunger, right? But for the most part, like sticking to things like a vertical diet is really nice. Like let's get rice, potatoes, actually meat, you know? Absolutely. I'm kind of curious about this. We can come back to nutrition, but I want to know one thing that you hear purported a lot is especially right now with a lot of people that are talking about hormones is that for men, testosterone after 30, you're just going to go down by 1% each year. And it's just like a given. A lot of people say that as if it's fact. I'm just curious about like your thoughts on that idea because, you know, the amount of things that we can do through lifestyle, habits, exercise, it doesn't – I don't necessarily think that people like us, our tests are just going to be going down 1% each year, TRT or not.

So what are you guys' thoughts on that idea? Like testosterone metabolizes like anything, right? So if – I mean obviously your testosterone is going to slowly go down as you go, but it's like it's totally based on lifestyle kind of like what andy was getting at already it's like um testosterone is a thing that metabolizes and does things in your body so you know it's it's absolutely can be necessary and sometimes like you know adding in a little bit of extra testosterone here and there but um like uh there's just so many so many ways to go to that but just uh kind of throwing in a blank statement of 1% every year is kind of funny. Well, testosterone is allostatic, not homeostatic.

Homeostasis is things, the seven factors that will kill you if they get messed up. Oxygen, pH, glucose, sodium, calcium, stuff like that. Testosterone is allostatic, meaning in nature, it's going to have a defended value dependent on what you're dealing with. So during the Great Depression, testosterone levels were high because protein was low, stress and vigilance were high, safety was low, and because you were eating so little, you still need to subsidize life because of the world around you. So testosterone levels went up to increase protein synthesis efficiency so that you could have like one shred of beef a day and still survive.

You only need 50 milligrams of leucine to survive, period. You might not be able to get out of bed in the morning. A lot of shit might be wrong, but you only need 50 mg of leucine. Think about how really little that is to survive. So when your testosterone levels are going down with age, because one of the coaches on staff that I work with, he's in his fifties and his testosterone levels are in the 500s still. And it's because of the lifestyle he lives. He pushes himself really hard, does difficult things all the time and eats properly. So I think it's more so seeing that lifestyle degrades after 30 and effort in pushing yourself degrades after 30. Yeah. And effort in pushing yourself degrades after 30. Caring about your nourishment and minerals degrades after 30.

You do not need to be subjected to having low tests and your dick not working at 26. Stop eating cauliflower pizzas. Maybe like eat a piece of steak. Go to the gym and push yourself hard a couple times. Yeah. Take some boron and you'll get a boner. And kind of along that note along the terms of the boron i got you huh the longevity side of things you know joe was

mentioning yesterday that um right now he feels like he's been getting newbie gains because of a lot of the adjustments that you guys have made and one thing is that like a lot of athletes think that once they hit a certain point it's just going to be downhill for their performance for what they're able to do so i'm curious from both your sides because you work with a lot of athletes think that once they hit a certain point, it's just going to be downhill for their performance, for what they're able to do. So I'm curious from both your sides because you work with a lot of professional athletes and you work with a lot of athletes yourself. Do you think that athletes, you know, into their 30s, that they can maintain good longevity and continue to perform at a high level? Because like when you see someone like LeBron, he's one of the highest performers in the league. And obviously he has hella money and great trainers, but he's still at this peak level of athleticism. So what do you guys think about what generally people put forward as far as athletic and longevity? Do we have longer than

we usually think we do? For sure. I mean, it's funny because we have the perfect dual, like polar perspectives. Jake's worked with a lot of legends who are getting older now, who are getting great results. And what I see is it's just understanding that what worked for you when you're 24 is not going to work when you're 30. Maybe your performance went up or down, but you're just straight up not the same person from a genetic perspective, from a personality perspective, and from an exposure perspective. You've been doing this for six years. Why do you think you're going to get a novel response if you swing a hammer at a nail and hit your thumb are you going to re-swing the hammer and be like probably won't happen again you're just going to move your fucking thumb out of the way right so it's understanding that just because i got these adaptations when i was 24 i still

probably need to look at things differently now that i'm 30 and i think that's what ends up stopping people they go back to this comforting place of, I remember I did this. It made me feel so good. Let's go back to that and be comfortable. But I just pretty much told you your testosterone levels are degrading because you're so comfortable all the time. Instead of driving to the supermarket and just getting a bag of Doritos and calling that dinner, why don't you just walk to the gas station and get beef jerky?

They both cost you 99 cents. The latter is actually going to be decent for you, even though it's 99 cent beef jerky. They both cost you 99 cents. The latter is actually going to be decent for you even though it's 99-cent beef jerky and the comfort you save by driving to the supermarket to get Doritos is more detrimental than the actual Doritos. Gotcha. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's really well said.

I think Joe is a really good example of it just because we all know him. But as he's trained and got stronger, like the same protocols he was doing when he was 22, 23 and first getting really strong, those are absolutely not the things that he needs now. We don't need to do near the amount of volume. He's so efficient at it that things change. But as you make, you literally become a different person. You have new epigenetics.

You have these brain and spine adaptations. You've gone through all these cycles of LTP and whatnot. It's like approaching it the same you did back then makes no sense. It's a completely different protocol than it was back then. What are some things that are like just really offbeat that make a difference in strength or even your body that you guys didn't think mattered? I think it's hard to not say the meditation visualization stuff i know you even had such great success with it mark but sometimes you bring it up to people and they're there that can't work yeah you know it's like well did you try it you know like it works like the research proves it all the people who've done it prove it but people still

need this hump to get over of understanding how does my brain actually make me do something better? And I think that's what deserves all the credit here. If you're doing five sets of one on a squat and you want the last one to be perfect, you're better off visualizing it, doing a spatial drill, incorporating your five senses than playing your favorite song and pounding on your chest and taking ammonia. Sure, that might get you cranked up and might get you really tight. But if you're already good at that, the returns are diminishing. Absolutely. You know, the meditation is a huge one. It's such a low-hanging fruit that I think people kind of disregard pretty often.

It's like, you know, I get so many questions like, what can I take to accomplish this, right? It's like, hey, I have, you know, knee pain or back pain. Is there something I can take that is good for my joints or whatever? It's like, hey, I have, you know, knee pain or back pain. Is there something I can take that is good for my joints or whatever? And it's like, you know, have you tried doing some meditation? And a lot of times it's like, you know, oh, like, no, but you know, what can I take? Right? And it's like, dude, like, you know, like putting on some toe spacers, like doing some meditation goes a long way. And it's something like, you know, the less you can take, the better, really. Like you don't want to be taking things just to be able to, you know, be a human. What about some of the eyeball stuff? That's cool stuff. It's funny. I actually remember a story. Someone reached out to me

recently. They're like, Andy, I need help lowering blood pressure. I'm like, simple, do some vision drills, do some breathing, and like, you'll be good. And the response was like, Andy, I'm here for the real science. I was like, oh, oxygen's not real enough science for you, you know? But the vision drills kind of correlate with the meditation in like, Andy, I'm here for the real science. I was like, Oh, oxygen's not real enough science for you, you know, but the vision drills kind of correlate with the meditation in a big way. As far as the biological response to meditation, our eyes are a huge focal point, no pun intended for taking in information. So if you just have like dial up, you know, instead of like really good internet, guess who's not going to be able to use, you know, like whatever it is, porn hub, your email, like whatever you want to use, guess who's not going to be able to use, you know, like whatever it is, Pornhub, your email, like whatever you want to use. It's just not going to work as well.

Think about your eyeballs as the same thing. You have peripheral eye muscles that are tonic, that are lacking blood flow due to super occipital and super trochlear nerves, not having proper lymphatic drainage and function. Guess who's going to perceive squat as vigilant? Guess who's now going to be unable to feel safe enough with a bar on your back because it's an exposed position think about it you have a bar on your back your organs are like up out here you're pushing into a belt your back's arched and now you're squatting downwards it's quite a vulnerable position like you could beat the shit out of anybody if they're in the bottom of a squat it doesn't matter how weak you are and how strong

they are so you need to allow your eyes to be in a position where peripherally they're in the bottom of a squat, it doesn't matter how weak you are and how strong they are. So you need to allow your eyes to be in a position where peripherally they're relaxed enough to be exposed through the squat pattern. But then focally in front of you, you have a centerpiece wherever it may be that isn't moving. So you have the same reference for your feet and hips and ribs as you descend through the squat if you start squatting and your head starts moving you start looking at a different point that's giving your brain different information about the floor about where you are relative to the floor about where your center of gravity is and all of a sudden we see people talking about bracing and head position right but they're in my opinion viewing it through the wrong lens bracing and head position is a product of respiration and eyeballs, not a product of you just going, you know what I mean? It's not going to work. You looked exactly like me right there. I'm kind of offended right now.

And Jake, you mentioned the toe spacer thing so many times now. And Andy, we talked about the feet and stuff yesterday, but like, what are the, I guess, what are the the low-hanging fruit of what you think people should be just trying to do for better foot health because that's something that I don't think that most people really pay attention to that's actually probably more of his thing he's the vision guy um I think people just don't understand that like the reason you don't feel your hamstrings on deadlift or squat is because of your feet it's not because you don't know how to squat. Your muscles are purposely stupid. If they were smart and made their own decisions, you can give me that argument.

The reason you can't recruit your hamstrings on squat is because of your rib-pelvis association in your feet. We talked about the feet being the neurological ceiling for motor unit recruitment of your hips and stuff. So if you're descending through the squat and you're not able to grip the floor and create an arch, you're not going to have adductors and hamstrings turn on on the inside medial border, which are the primary hip extensors when you're above parallel in a squat. So all of a sudden, when you see people missing squats one inch out of the hole, and they're like, oh, I'm doing all these GHRs,

it's not working, it's because it's not your hamstrings, it's your feet. Gotcha. Yeah, some of the drills you had me doing today where I was kind of like mimicking, I guess, swinging like a golf club. And I had like a two and a half pound plate or something. And I was looking at the ground with my head stationary but my ribs moving. And then you had me do it where I focused in on the plate and had my whole body moving with the plate. That made such a drastic change, even just that small, like a little drill.

And then also you did some of the kind of pressure point stuff. I don't know what you call it, but you did some like release therapy of the eyes. Where have you like learned some of this stuff and what kind of impact have you seen it make on people? Andrew, by the way, how much time we got? 15 minutes. Love it. So this way, how much time we got? Fifteen minutes. Love it. So this will determine how much I go into this.

Jake will talk about it too. Jake's squat and deadlift have gotten better with less training because of these things, you know, and even back health and all that stuff. I also want to add it. It seems to have had more impact on, at least from what I've seen, you working on me. And I think you did some stuff on Encima and you did some stuff on Graham. It seemed to be more painful for the individuals that can't see quite as well. Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. But I was originally exposed to the concept through the Postural Restoration Institute.

So Dr. Pat Davidson, Bill Hartman, and a couple of these guys, Dr. Pat Davidson was a teacher of mine in school, are the people that exposed me to the PRI, the Postural Restoration Institute. And they've actually were back in the day. I mean, it's funny, people are talking about ribs and all this stuff now. They've been talking about this stuff since 2010. And I think that's why I'm luckily a little bit ahead of the eight ball when it comes to this stuff. But they were using glasses to realign people's posture and improve their squat and stuff. So that's where I was originally exposed to it. And then I was telling you guys in the gym or maybe it was just Mark or maybe I made this up in my head and never said it out loud.

But I would just start looking around the gym with this new set of eyes. Again, no pun intended and looking at like what are the worst squatters in the gym doing with their eyes? And suddenly you see that they're the ones that unrack the bar and start looking around and as they squat down their head moves and so are their eyes and then i realize i'm like it's not a coincidence you can't hit depth and it's not a coincidence that the mobility drills you're doing aren't improving your depth because it's not a mobility problem it's literally a vestibular eye issue yeah i felt a lot in my hamstrings when you have me do that drill where i was changing where because it's not a mobility problem. It's literally a vestibular eye issue. Yeah, I felt a lot in my hamstrings when you had me do that drill

where I was changing where my focal point was. Yeah. And I would kind of teeter-totter back and forth between having balance and not having balance. So think about it like a field sport, whether it's hockey or soccer or football. These people, when they make juke and cut moves, they're not consciously deciding,

I'm going to make this triangular angle and go this way. And they're not like flexing the muscle to do so. They're not turning their glutes on and flexing their glutes before they go into it. It's actually reciprocal based on their eyes. So it's like, if you're looking this way, and it's funny, if you, uh, you can do this test in the car, look where you want to drive and put your hand dead center in the middle. I promise your hand and the car will start going to where you look. It's just the nature of the beast. There's a trick in golf.

Try to hit the ball without looking at it. It's literally impossible. I've seen pros make a little dribbler hit over this. It's just inherently tied. You can't divorce from it. So when we really start talking about things like this, it's like, well, how can I set up my feet and my eyes to give me the best opportunity to participate in exercise? Let me ask you this as far as like, because you did quite a few things on my eyes and around my face. But one thing is when you had me

look all the way to the side and comfortable amount, I was like, I don't do that every day. Like I don't, I don't take my eyes through that range of motion all the time. And I'm thinking something like something as simple as just taking my eyes through those extreme ranges might be beneficial. Is that something that would like actually make a difference? Totally. Especially in grappling,

you know, I'm like, Jake can talk about his single leg balance and some of the drills we did and how it literally impacted performance positively. You know, I remember like the first leg balance and some of the drills we did and how it literally impacted performance positively. You know, I remember like the first time he did some of these drills, he was like off and his foot got funky. And all I did to make him better was cue his eyes and his feet. And magically everything else just kind of fell into place. So, you know, in grappling, let's say you realize like, damn, whenever this guy shoots a high crotch to the left, I'm just late.

I can't whizzer. It's too late. I feel like an idiot on the side but if the guy shoots the same exact shot to my other leg i see him transmit the shot and i see the footwork that's not your defense you just your eyes aren't set up for that you have a blind spot so especially when you notice things like that it's like oh like whenever i get into the hole no matter what my right hip just kind of hurts and like i stretch my adductor it doesn't hurt any other time except when i'm in the hole with 405.

It's because it's not a mobility issue. What you got over there, Andrew? Well, I want to know more about the eye stuff because I've basically worn glasses like almost my entire life. But it's funny. When I do take them off, my peripheral vision is kind of on point. So when I used to play basketball, I was really good at passing because like i i don't know i think having the glasses on forces me to be right here but then when i take them off i'm like holy shit i have so much space over here and so i'm curious maybe we can talk after the podcast some of those um exercises for the eyes

and stuff but i do want to go back to a little bit about nutrition. The guys that I train with, whether it be jujitsu or lifting, we all like all kind of have the same setup family and then we got to go to work, you know, so like we have to get in before anybody's even awake, get out and then start the day. So we don't have time for a pre-workout meal. Can we kind of do the opposite and chase a workout with a post-workout meal and have some like kind of similar benefits of a pre-workout meal or is it like already out the window and now we just need to look forward towards the end of the day? Jake's the catecholamine guy, so he should take it. You know, at that point, what I would do is just, you know, try to get something or just do an intrashake,

right? Like try to fight off some of those glucocorticoids just by introducing some, you know, carbohydrates and maybe a little bit of growth hormone. It's like you can kind of fight that. So at least you're not, you know. That'd be so good. Yeah. I'm also casually. It's over there.

Hold on. Wait, I'll take this round off. Hold on. Absolutely. So good. Yeah. The intent, though, is like you do want to have some kind of if you're doing this like kind of, you know, higher rep thing. It's like you want to be able to pay off the acute debts of hypoxia as you're going, right?

And you can't do that without some kind of carbohydrates there. Even if like, I mean, I'm not like overweight or anything, but I still have some body fat. Like my body won't just like adapt and start using some of that. I mean, it's to some point, but you're kind of just limiting yourself too, right? Like you want to be able to, you're just going to put yourself in a little bit bigger of a hole from there. It's like you want to be able to pay off those debts as you go. And you're still going to be able to use, you know, your own body fat while you're training

too. It's not like we're ever just paying something completely with glucose. Okay. Your performance will be better, which should make everything else a little bit better. Yeah. Could something like just like some Gatorade, you know, work well? Or do you kind of recommend something different? I'm a big fan of those, what are they, HBCDs, the highly branched cyclic dextrins.

Really low or really high molality. I can't remember, but vice versa. But basically, it's just going into your bloodstream, really minimal impact on your gut. I think it's the best way to go. That's what I would recommend. Like, Carbolin has a really good one. There's tons of them. I think it's the best way to go. That's what I would recommend. Like carbolin has a really good one. There's tons of them. It's like, I think even like waxing maize would probably be okay too. Stuff like that. Yeah. How about like just a shot of honey pre-workout?

Yeah. Heck yeah. It's glucose. Absolutely. I think Andrew posed a really interesting question that I don't want to let go. If I just like, you know, essentially starve, will my body just use body fat? And the answer is not necessarily, you know, we talked on my podcast yesterday about fat inhibition you know you hope that these things happen but it's just like the same way like when you take a flight at night there's the guy with like the glow sticks and he's like telling you which way to go you better fucking pray that your airline pilot knows where to go but a little bit of guidance is nice and i think that's why mark's nutrition advice helps so many people with the protein leveraging because you're taking away the bad option from metabolism.

By leveraging protein and getting a little bit of fats in, even if it's just one handful of nuts and some amino acids, you're helping the pilot with those glow sticks at night make better decisions easier. So it's not that – and this is where genetics comes into play. better decisions easier. So it's not that, you know, and this is where genetics comes into play. Maybe my cortisol response is a little bit aversive to fat when maybe yours, you know, whatever arbitrarily might not be. Maybe when I have high levels of cortisol, it really messes with my insulin sensitivity and my ability to store fat in a negative way. Maybe when yours is high, it's not. And we could fix both of them. Let's say you're like, you know, when I fast, I just get fatter.

You know, you should be able to get leaner fasting at times. And if you don't, that's key information on what's going wrong. Yeah, we're almost up on time. So if you guys want to, I don't know, anything else. You got anything else? Nope. We're all good. I think we're all good.

Thank you guys. Appreciate it. Andrew, take us on out of here, buddy. Thanks for breaking my pinning virginity today. Oh, I was going to announce it. It was testosterone. Shut up! Injectable L-carnitine. It was the nectar that these guys talk about.

It's L-carnitine and choline. Ain't nothing illegal about it. There we go. Damn, but the seal has been broken, though. My shoulder's shoulder's still why'd you guys laugh when i walked by you guys that was perfect timing you guys are both like checking your shoulder that's why and then you just looked at it and see me like that was hilarious so good all right cool this is another amazing podcast so uh drop those comments down below let us know what you guys found most interesting there's i mean there's gonna be a ton of them

so just uh let us know hit that like button subscribe uh follow the podcast at mb power project all over the place my instagram is at i am andrew zane don't forget to stop by powerproject.live for everything podcast related in sima where you at discords down below comment any questions you guys have at sima ending onYinYang on Instagram, YouTube, and NseemaYinYang on TikTok and Twitter. Jake and Andy, where can people find you? GoSuperBrain at gmail.com. GoSuperBrain on Instagram. I'm a little bit hard to find, but not too hard to get

in touch with. My assistant or someone else will certainly reach out to you in a prompt and timely manner if you do reach out. And the Utropics book is coming out soon. I don't know when this will get posted, but by the end of April, it will be up. Heck, yeah. Can't wait, man.

Yeah, then at jqb underscore 43 and at Better Through Biology. Yeah. You guys are collaborating on like some supplements and stuff like that as well, right? Absolutely. Jake is the one leading it. I'm giving some consultation advice and helping him make his dreams real. But Jake is going to be the driving, driving changing pioneering force in the supplement and training industry in the next couple years uh you might be sleeping on them now but you want to open up

your eyes jake's doing some unprecedented things with bodybuilding and power lifters and they're big names that you know are already really good and jake's making them better it's a pretty cool thing yeah big praise thank you thank you i'm at mark smelly bell strength is never weakness weakness never strength catch you guys later bye