Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 610: Dr. Andy Galpin
Episode Date: October 5, 2017In this episode Sal, Adam and Justin speak with Dr. Andy Galpin, a tenured Professor in the Center for Sport Performance at CSU Fullerton and author of Unplugged: Evolve from Technology to Upgrade Y...our Fitness, Performance, & Consciousness. This is a fun and informative episode. Andy is a long-time contributor to the Barbell Shrugged podcast and has his own podcast The Body of Knowledge, which you can find on iTunes and other popular podcast platforms. To learn more about Andy go to: http://www.andygalpin.com/ or find him on Instagram @drandygalpin Getting noticed in public (2:05) Joe Rogan Experience (7:10) What motivates him? How does he survive financially? (12:40) What influenced him? (18:23) Unplugged talk (23:42) The Untouchables (43:14) What is getting him excited now? (51:10) History of bodybuilding (57:00) Fiber splitting (1:27:55) How does he give advice? (1:34:41) Chef, cook or baker What excites him coming up? (1:42:50) What hacks does he utilize? (1:44:00) Related Links/Products Mentioned Andy Galpin (@DrAndyGalpin) · Twitter/Instagram Andy Galpin, PhD (website) The Body of Knowledge Podcast — Andy Galpin, PhD (website) Unplugged: Evolve from Technology to Upgrade Your Fitness, Performance, & Consciousness - Brian MacKenzie and Dr. Andy Galpin (book) Can a whole town lose weight together? (article) Water: How much should you drink every day? - Mayo Clinic (website) Arthur Jones, MedX, and Nautilus Exercise Principles (website) Joe Rogan Experience #989 - Dorian Yates – YouTube Remembering Joe Weider: The Science Of The Weider Principles (article) Anabolic Bible - Johann von Reinhardt (book) Inferno: My Week on DNP | T Nation (article) Academics Write Papers Arguing Over How Many People Read (And Cite) Their Papers (article) Jimmy Bagley collection of papers Skeletal muscle fiber splitting induced by weight-lifting exercise in cats. (study) Skeletal Muscle Fiber Hyperplasia | The ISSN Scoop The 3 Things Most People Don't Know About Muscle w/ Dr. Andy Galpin (article) Joe Rogan Experience #996 - Dr. Andy Galpin – YouTube Psoriasis and vitamin D deficiency - Harvard Health (article) Organifi Discount Code "mindpump" Would you like to be coached by Sal, Adam & Justin? You can get 30 days of virtual coaching from them for FREE at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Get our newest program, MAPS Prime Pro, which shows you how to self assess and correct muscle recruitment patterns that cause pain and impede performance and gains. Get it at www.mindpumpmedia.com! Get MAPS Prime, MAPS Anywhere, MAPS Anabolic, MAPS Performance, MAPS Aesthetic, the Butt Builder Blueprint, the Sexy Athlete Mod AND KB4A (The MAPS Super Bundle) packaged together at a substantial DISCOUNT at www.mindpumpmedia.com. Make EVERY workout better with MAPS Prime, the only pre-workout you need… it is now available at mindpumpmedia.com Have Sal, Adam & Justin personally train you via video instruction on our YouTube channel, Mind Pump TV. Be sure to Subscribe for updates. Also check out Thrive Market! Thrive Market makes purchasing organic, non-GMO affordable. With prices up to 50% off retail, Thrive Market blows away most conventional, non-organic foods. PLUS, they offer a NO RISK way to get started which includes: 1. One FREE month’s membership 2. $20 Off your first three purchases of $49 or more (That’s $60 off total!) 3. Free shipping on orders of $49 or more Get your Kimera Koffee at www.kimerakoffee.com, code "mindpump" for 10% off! Get Organifi, certified organic greens, protein, probiotics, etc at www.organifi.com Use the code “mindpump” for 20% off. Go to foursigmatic.com/mindpump and use the discount code “mindpump” for 15% off of your first order of health & energy boosting mushroom products. Add to the incredible brain enhancing effect of Kimera Koffee with www.brain.fm/mindpump 10 Free sessions! Music for the brain for incredible focus, sleep and naps! Also includes 20% if you purchase! Please subscribe, rate and review this show! Each week our favorite reviewers are announced on the show and sent Mind Pump T-shirts! Have questions for Mind Pump? Each Monday on Instagram (@mindpumpmedia) look for the QUAH post and input your question there. (Sal, Adam & Justin will answer as many questions as they can)
Transcript
Discussion (0)
If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go.
MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND, with your hosts.
Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews.
In this episode of Mind Pump, we have to do it really fast
because Justin has to get on a conference call in like 30 seconds.
Uh, we interviewed Dr. Andy, how do you say his last name?
Gaplin. No, galpin. I knew you'd say it wrong.
Uh, brilliant. wrong. Brilliant.
Dr. G.
Brilliant, brilliant dude.
Love talking with the sky about muscle adaptation, fat loss, technology, how it's affecting
our fitness.
He's the author of a book called Unplugged, Evolve from Technology to Upgrade your fitness
performance and consciousness.
Incredible fucking book that aligns exactly
with the message that we've been promoting
on Mindpunk for quite some time.
It's a great book, you need to read it.
He's also the host of the podcast,
The Body of Knowledge, and his website is Andy Galpin.
That's A-N-D-Y-G-A-L-P-I-N.
Dotcom and his Instagram page is at Dr. Andy Galpin.
Now that all being said, we do talk a little bit
about recruitment patterns in this particular episode.
I do wanna mention, we have the prime and prime pro bundle.
This is our correctional exercise bundle.
So if you have injuries, if you have pain,
you can't figure out why your shoulder hurts,
if your squat is stagnant and you don't know why you're not able to do it.
By far, our most revolutionary program that we have created to date, for sure.
To date, so everybody doesn't matter what kind of program you're currently following.
Like Tyle said, bodybuilding, weightlifting, obstacle course racing.
Crossfit, whatever.
You name it, this orange theory, this is ideal for everybody everybody within it comes an at-home test to assess you
So it's very individualized to each person for their specific goals and whatever they're doing as far as their workouts
So make sure you guys check that out check it out. It's at mine pump media dot com
So without any further ado
Here we are talking to Dr. Andy Galpin. Oh boy
He sounds more handsome than what he really is.
That's it.
That's it.
Well, no, it's good.
It's a good thing.
Right.
Adam hits on our guess a lot.
You know, I'm exactly handsome enough.
That's it.
That's all you have to do.
I like that.
I know what that means, by the way.
It means you're not overstating yourself.
It's hard to navigate all the punetang that you're surrounded.
So you're like, if I were more handsome,
I would be, that's the one I'm saying.
You'd almost die.
Exactly.
Listen, there's water.
There's water.
They might suffocate you in the giant.
And then there's a flood that you can drown in.
And Andy, it's almost drowning in the tang.
He's keeping his nose above water.
Let's just do the nose.
That's it.
No more handsome. Gotta breathe. So besides pussy, what's keeping his his nose above water. It's just nose. That's it. No more handsome Gotta breathe. Yeah, so besides
Besides pussy. What's the other motivation behind the field that you went into and studied?
I don't know what other motivation there would be
Because when you decide that how old are we right we're about 17 to 19 years old
What's your what's your PhD in exactly? Oh, no way. Oh, really? I was gonna say you lie, you did nothing.
What's your PhD in any?
Human bio energetics.
That's awesome.
Fancy way of saying muscle physiology,
muscle chemistry, that type of stuff.
So human performance, I mean,
I think like most of us that get into this field,
we were pretty decent athletes, but not good enough.
You know, and you're like,
you have that right level of incentive,
you know, if you're shitty,
an athlete, it's like, ah, I'm never gonna get there.
Like, I'm gonna be an artist or something.
That's funny to speculate on.
Like, do you think if you were like this super gifted athlete that you would not go down
the direction that you went?
I don't know.
Like, I think that has a huge part to do with it because for me, you know, if my training
wasn't right, then that was the difference between playing a lot
or playing a little, or being an all-American,
or just being on things like that.
You had to fine tune everything to the last degree, right?
And I just grew up in a culture,
both my family and the city I grew up in,
where if you lost, and it didn't mean
you're losing a sports game, or losing a mortgage,
like any form of loss, because you didn't work hard enough,
that was just completely unacceptable.
Unacceptable.
Like they could lose a tiny little town
called Rochester, Washington.
So, guarantee you not a single person
that town will listen to this podcast.
Oh man.
You'd be surprised, dude.
I was in Alaska, okay.
It, not in a place like Anchorage or place in one,
I was in Skagway and some other place.
For a huge in Skagway. Yeah other place. For huge and Skagway.
Yeah.
And I had we had fans.
The Skaggers, the Skaggers like us.
I'm like there's like 800 people here.
How the fuck you know what?
So do you be surprised, man?
Dude, how cool is it the first time you guys started getting recognized in places like
that?
Yeah, it was it was it was a trip and I remember with that came the other embarrassing
moments though too.
So we and we've shared this before on the podcast,
right when we started to get, you know,
we get, we get, we fly down LA, get recognized,
and it was like, oh shit, like people are listening to us.
It's official, you know, and you know,
you see your downloads and she like that,
but until it starts to connect like that,
where you're out of your own major circle
and somebody recognizes you.
Someone besides your mom's, this job, yeah, right.
So that started happening,
but then like the asshole moments would happen. Like we were at this like fitness convention where are now that I've gotten used to people
Running into it so I'm like okay
There's probably a lot of people here that probably know it's right a fitness convention
And we just and I are walking around this corner and like this group of probably 10 or 15 like hot
Chips oh they like are waving and waving us down and they come running over with the camera and they're like can we take a picture?
And I'm like yeah, of course
I don't have to
Yeah, after no problem here. He's like me and he goes of course. I did not do that
But I did I did go in to put my arm around the girl and she hands me the camera to take a picture
For it over
Yeah, it's just so I took a picture of him taking a picture of them to just, you know,
just to flated the shit out of him.
I was working on, I was working with Kevin James the actor
on Paul Blart 2, the movie.
Oh, no way.
We filmed all of it in Vegas.
I kids love that movie.
Yeah.
So I was flying back and forth between Vegas and LA quite often.
And one of the times the limo driver picked me up
and I was wearing a barbell shawing t-shirt, the limo driver picked me up and I was wearing a barbell shrug t-shirt, right?
And he picked me up and he's listening and boom,
like he's listening to barbell shrug.
Oh wow.
And so he's got my little name you know
when you get off the thing, it's like Andy Gap
and whatever and he comes down and he has,
he doesn't put the connection together at all.
Oh wow.
And he's just like bang it and then he looks
and he's just looking down and he's like,
wait a minute.
And he was listening to an episode that I was on. And you were on there. And he was like holy shit, he's like, he pulled out his phone, he's like, look, look, look and he's just like, bang it. And then he looks and he's just looking down and he's like, wait a minute. And he was listening to an episode that I was on.
And you were on there.
And he was like holy shit, he's like, he pulled out his phone, he's like, look, look, look.
And he's like, pause like 30 minutes in or whatever.
And he's like, holy fuck, I'm picking you up.
And I was like, that's great.
I'm big time.
Nothing like that, that's ever happened again.
But that's the one thing I can got.
We consider ourselves elisters.
Elisters.
Yeah, that's what this thing's what Vince said, right?
Vinnie told us that Vinnie torturing.
Natasha calls me E minus.
E minus?
E minus.
You're getting there.
She was like, you were G, and then you were on Rogan,
now you're E minus.
Like, you bumped up a level.
How was it being on Rogan?
That's how he's like the king of pod.
I really enjoyed that episode, by the way.
Yeah, you know, like he's a really awesome dude.
And I like that format as you guys know,
like I like being able to talk for a long time.
I hate the short little shit because most of the people
that are in the positions I am,
like anytime you ask my opinion, it's extremely nuanced.
And I want the full time to be able to vet that explain.
I just wanna be like, oh, keto's bad or keto's good.
Like I hate that.
So I liked having three hours to just really settle
my position on things.
But having said that, it's sort of funny because,
you know, like, he just has a different environment
for a lot of things.
So it was like, the whole time you're having two conversations.
Like you're having a conversation with him
and you're having a conversation with yourself
the whole time.
Not like you're nervous, but it's always like,
Should I have said that?
Yeah, yeah, or you're like, oh fuck,
like, and then he'll say something,
and you're like, what? Like, like you try to figure out where he's going
Yeah, like because he's sometimes he's you know out there like all of us are right, so we always you know fun
Like did you notice like a big surge and you know, I don't know social media or and just yeah
But like you got a big it's not what people think okay, wow the book took off of course
So that launch, but it's not like you go
from 5,000 followers in Instagram to 185,000.
Like you don't have these rocket of numbers.
Like you definitely check your phone, it's blown up.
For sure, but like people like to think
you're gonna have like, you have a million followers,
like no, you gain like 5,000 followers.
How long did you notice the impact kind of,
I mean, I'm sure it's still rolling.
I just say you're probably still getting stuff trickled in but did you see like this first initial like huge wave
and then now it's just like kind of keeps trickling it yeah like it was pretty big like from the
second the show started because he goes live oh so you're filming live and all said it's like your
phone is like being being being being being just you know going and that didn't really stop for
a month or or something like that. Oh wow.
Did he find you or did you contact him?
So that's like, it's funny because I've answered that question more times than anything else.
How do I get on Rogan?
It's like, that's what you're asking me.
Just come on and say, you give me Joe's phone number.
That's what you're saying.
That's your saying.
No, he reached out to me.
Oh, very cool.
Which I think is the only way you get people in that position, their attention.
Now you have to do some shit.
Is that why Oprah is not responding to my email?
No, that's totally separate.
Yeah, it is totally separate.
Oprah, she was in line.
Did he get a dad bod?
Do he get a hold of your book?
At a time, I mean.
He didn't even know until like the last five minutes
to show, he's like, oh, you have a book out.
So I had nothing to do with the book.
Oh, wow.
It was completely a serenity, but it's like super lucky
that it, I was on Rogan two weeks after my book came out.
Wow. Yeah, that was not
I bet you see I mean everybody is as interesting everybody has to think the same way
I thought which is I thought that was all about the reason why I was part of the launch in the strategy
Which is why we didn't even talk about the book until the last like five minutes of the show
Everyone's like all your PR people like fuck down. They didn't do anything like the book published
No, like I have done like none of the stuff that we've done.
It was, it was the planets were an interesting alignment that science.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, the universe energy.
Like he just came upon us.
Jesus.
It's sort of funny because I mean, I'll just give the secret away here exclusive, you know,
to, you know, how we love those.
Yeah.
Uh, you know, when I look at the like that, and I know, you know,
because we're all e-lifts people, right?
Right. So we have that same thing of people wanting to get on your show.
I'm sure. And it's like, you have, okay, people wanting my attention.
I looked at the things like, what gets my attention and what pushes me away.
I'm just going to do the same thing for him.
Like, I'm not going to do this yet that the normal people do that I get
irritated by. And I'm going to do the things that actually when people get my
attention. And that is what first and foremost,
like you have to do something of actual quality and interest.
If you're not doing something super interesting,
like, go fuck yourself.
You're not gonna get in an interesting place.
You're not there yet.
Right, exactly.
Like you don't honestly deserve it.
You gotta work your way up.
Yeah, so I'm like, okay, I wanna do that.
And I looked at how I handled my social media,
and I looked, I'm like, well,
he's not super active on Instagram,, he's not super active on Instagram.
And he's not super active on Facebook. And he said this a million times, like how many times does he talk about loving Twitter?
All right.
So I'm going to go there.
Well, I had like a thousand followers on Twitter.
I don't have a huge following, but he doesn't care.
Like if you notice the guests he brings on, he doesn't care about those things.
Right.
He wants quality.
Right.
Or somebody that's really interesting.
Interesting.
Interesting.
And so I just made sure that like my Twitter page, I didn't, like for the record,
I didn't build my Twitter page
just to get Joe Roman's attention.
Right?
But it was like, okay,
this is a good way to think about
how you handle your social media.
It's like, I want, if someone,
because what happens in situations
when you get people's attention like that,
you get one chance.
And they're gonna give you like a quick scroll through,
like, all right, what's this dude all about?
If your last seven tweets are like something irrelevant about your dog or politics or something, they're gonna be through, like, all right, what's this dude all about? If your last seven tweets are something irrelevant
about your dog or politics or something,
they're gonna be like, well, I'm not gonna,
this is a muscle physiologyist,
but then his last 12 tweets were about the Seahawks,
they're like, whatever, like I'm out, right?
Right.
So I just make sure like,
the vast one, you already my stuff is really related
to what I do, like, oh, here's this fiber type paper,
this new thing we learned about how muscle grows
or why it shrinks or something, and I still tweeted about it as shit if I
wanted to, but I made that my profile and I made sure that when I did stuff on it, it was mostly
focused on what makes me unique and different. So if he did or anybody else that's important,
happen to scroll past me, they're going to be like, oh, shit, this person's doing pretty cool
research. Well, it's because your attitude towards social media is business, is promoting your business,
helping you grow your audience in that particular sense.
Most people social media's are distraction.
It's actually, yeah, I don't have any business at all.
I don't have a single thing of business.
I don't have a single newsletter or mailing list.
I don't know anything business-wise, but it's the same point.
I kept a genuine.
I want to put on there what I actually do
and what I find helpful.
So if people are following me,
I'm gonna do something that I genuinely think
that they might be interested and helpful.
And if that means I have 1,600,
it doesn't matter to me,
I don't really care about that type of stuff.
Let's get into this a little bit
because I already, off air,
I asked you a few business type questions
and you were-
So I'm gonna almost throw up.
Yes.
You were, you can tell,
you're almost allergic to a lot of these fucking questions.
Like you don't want anything to do with it.
I asked the sales and marketing and you're like,
you know, I had to business another thing,
partner, you're just like, I don't,
you have no desire to do that.
So what is it that motivates you?
And then also on that note,
how the fuck do you financially survive with that attitude?
How have you been successful?
Well, you know, so the financial one is an interesting one.
And like, I have a full-time job.
I'm tenured.
Like, I'm done there.
And I don't get paid much.
You can look up my wages if you want.
That's all public information.
And so, like, this is not a huge part of my life.
You can look at that. And I can survive financially. But I'm also not... That's not how... Like, this stuff is not a huge part of my life. You can look at that and I can survive financially,
but I'm also not, that's not how,
like this stuff is not how I feed myself.
I don't pay my mortgage because of my book sales.
If I get a book sale, then that's just gonna allow me
to buy more plane tickets to come up
to San Francisco to work with Jimmy Moore or whatever.
So I don't have those things, I'm not trying to build
a company and make sure I have a retirement on things.
So I don't, I just have a totally different aspect of what I do for a living.
So that's my real job.
Now, of course, all of us like to make more money.
Like, that's more, that's great.
But my philosophy has been, like, if you do something that's genuinely good, you're going
to make money.
And, and I'm not going to try to scrape every single penny out of every single thing I
do because I feel like if you do something really, really good, and it's worth $10 million,
and you make a million off of it,
well, a million dollars is so pretty awesome.
And eventually, what's happened recently
is people have come to me being like,
I love the business aspect of it.
Why don't you let me do that,
and you do what you do, and I'm like, that's perfect.
That's exactly what I want to do.
If you want to handle all that shit,
and that's why I have Josh Embry in the guys
at Body Knowledge, he's like,
you got amazing stuff here, dude.
Like you're sitting on a gold mine.
You just do you, let me put business behind it.
Fine.
I'm not scamming people.
I'm not doing anything disingenuous, but I'm not doing any of that stuff because it drains
me emotionally.
It drains my time, like it jains all that stuff, and I'm like, I don't want to put myself
in a position to fail.
Why try to learn a bunch of shit?
I have a PhD in muscle physiology.
Why go spend time trying to learn advertising marketing?
So tell me, tell me where this attitude has benefited you
and then tell me where it's hurt you.
Well, it's definitely hurt me in terms of,
I'm sure I could have made quite a bit more money.
Like, I'm sure that I could optimize book sales
and figured out ways to do that and made a lot more money,
got a lot more attention.
Like, anyone that's business that will hear my attitude is like, well, that's, yeah, but
what you don't realize is if you spend a little bit more time on the business, then you're
reach will go further and then what you want to do is easier.
And I totally acknowledge that.
So it's clearly going to hurt me in those ends.
Like if you look at my social media, I don't have a huge following, you know, relative
to what it could be.
Right.
Some other people might feel have the digit more than me and things like that.
So I think it obviously, it hurts opportunity,
it hurts travel, it hurts, is her income, things like that.
But where it's helped is, it allows me
to actually keep focused on doing the things I wanna do.
And it allows me to do stuff and produce more
of what I do, generate more content
and have better relations with people,
which most importantly, it lets me go to bed at night.
And I'm like, I feel great here.
We've got to paper out and I'll read it,
but I wasn't really happy about it.
Or whatever.
So you have to find a balance between,
yeah, you want to work hard and being uncomfortable
is important, and you do want to do things just
because it's not comfortable, you shouldn't avoid it.
But at some point, you have to be realistic also
in being like, this is not worth any
Like the amount of discomfort is worth such little gain
That maybe I need to step outside here and give up that if money is the only thing I'm working for
Well, that's a fucking stupid, right? Like don't do that. That's that's that requires a good deal of a self-awareness. There's there are
Some very intelligent people out there with great information
But it never gets out
because they don't understand what you understand,
which is I'm gonna do what I'm good at,
and if I wanna get it out, I'll have people who are good at it.
Help me do that part, which I think I wish
more people would do because then we would get
better information that's out there.
Cause unfortunately the ones that are doing such a good job
especially in the fitness world,
people who do the best job of marketing information
and reaching people are putting out shit.
You know what I mean?
You know as well as we do, the vast majority of mainstream fitness information is garbage,
whether it's training, nutrition, supplementation.
It's not only is it wrong, but it's bad.
It's opposite of good.
Well, honestly, if I'm being real too, that is a huge reason of why I react like I do
to things like that.
Because whenever I see things like that,
like, wow, how's your fondle set up or your trip?
And I'm like, God, like fuck you.
I mean, you think you're trying to do some shit
that's not good.
And that's not totally true,
but the vast majority of people it is like that.
And so I'm like, I'm not playing that game.
Snail salesman, yep.
Exactly.
I'm not trying to just trick you into buying an extra thing
so I can, you know, buy another, another Lexic or what. Like I'm like, oh, like don't do that.
This field is, this field is full of way too much of that shit. It's not helping people.
It's making shit worse. And we're end up in this, you know, quote unquote, like here you go,
Chris Bell, like land of confusion. So I'm like, yeah, like I don't want to contribute to that at all.
Like I want to be the exact opposite.
That's why we made our podcast.
So I'm like, I want to do the shit in the middle that goes,
hey, this is all bullshit.
This is where we can actually land on some subtle things.
And here's how you can approach yourself
so you can actually get better.
Now, like there's a balance between that
because if you don't have any industry here,
then we can't actually progress as a field. So I just don't want to contribute to noise at all in this area.
So I'm like, I'd rather just step the hell out and not be part of it.
You have a genuine passion for what you do,
which I respect and admire.
And I wish there were more people like you in that regard.
Was your, when you, we're talking earlier and talking about what drove you to learn what you did,
it was initially you alluded to the fact that it was to help you become a better performer
and athlete.
Were you also deep in the fitness industry at the time?
You have a lot of knowledge about, you know, old-school bodybuilding, that whole market.
I know we talked in the past.
Was that something that influenced you as well early on?
No, no, like, I mean, I grew up in that country town.
And I started lifting on a universal machine
that my dad bought and the concrete weights,
like you guys remember those, right?
Oh, yeah.
When I was 13 or something like that.
And that's just again, because the culture I grew up
in that city, like, if you wanted to be good at sports,
you lifted weights, all right?
And everyone was just kind of getting started.
So I started there.
And then, you know, I went on, I played college football. And then we had no strength conditioning coach. We had no
help there. It was like, you're just on your own. And so it started to build from there.
But, you know, I was like, most of you probably were like, all right, there's a muscle and fitness
magazine. Like, all right, let's do that workout. And it's like, you just getting grain in that
stuff. And then as I, as I went on through my career, like, I was like, man, there's some
pretty smart people that just because this book is 20 years old, maybe there's some
good shit there. And I just started looking back and being like, this is a really cool
field. And it's a really cool story. And then especially when I did that episode for
our show, we traced the history of these fields. And I just started getting back and you're
like, ah, it makes sense now. Like that'll make sense now. So.
What were some of the things, do you remember those times
when you had some of those moments
where you were maybe following the routine
and muscle and fitness and then you
read something from 30 years ago and you're like,
oh shit, they did it differently.
Let me try that.
Ooh, that works.
Did you have a lot of those moments?
I remember myself, I had a lot of those moments
where I just had these realizations, you know,
throughout my personal work.
I think, honestly, I probably started off
doing the workouts that were on the side of the machine.
Oh, wow.
You remember back up with the red,
where you're supposed to be working?
Oh, that's where it's supposed to fit.
And then this.
Exactly.
And it would be like,
do three of these in 10 of these.
And okay, like you're reading this thing
as you're doing the wrap,
and you're like,
all right, like this is what I'm doing.
And when you're 12 or 13 or 14,
like it all works.
Like this is great.
And then tell you have a shoulder surgery at 15.
Oh, shit.
Right.
All right.
And then, but I just like to, you know, I like the idea of being better than everyone
else.
And I like the idea of being like, I'm going to win because you are taking the time to
read as much as you can to do this 5% better.
And I'm going to invest that time and I'm going to get 5% better and I'm going to win.
And so I don't have any of those moments,
it's not really that jumped to my mind,
but I do remember, for example,
going up and spending time with Bill Gillespie
at the University of Washington,
a legendary guy, a world record holder,
and a lot of stuff, and literally just like
cold calling him out of the blue,
and being like, hey, can I come up and like job shadow you?
And he was like, here he is, like a world champion,
the head strength edition coach for a PAC 10 school.
And he's like, yeah, sure, come up.
So like I go up there and I'm walking in, like,
oh my God, the University of Washington facilities,
and he's doing a workout and he's got a mouthpiece in
and he's doing dumbbell presses with like 180.
And I'm like, holy shit.
And I'm like, okay, this is cool.
And that was just like a huge leap in my like,
you got to really, like you're, these magazines are not work like you got a really
Star paying attention to people that really know what they're talking about. And then everything from the world's strongest man on TV and you're like, wait a minute, like I'm not doing anything like that.
Okay, I could actually see. And then I got exposed to weightlifting and weightlifting really took everything off for me.
Weightlifting is, I've said this many times on the show, if you were to look at all and take like just all forms of resistance training, you know that big umbrella, including powerlifting, bodybuilding, what are all of them.
Weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting, in my opinion, and maybe correct me if I'm wrong, I think probably has the most science.
I can correct you, brof, it's your opinion.
Well, I think it probably has the most science applied to it in terms of performance with resistance training mainly because it's been Olympic sport and because it was
depends on what you mean by science so in terms of like peer-review publications
it's it's hypertrophy by a landslide
but in terms of science like if you look at what the Russians collected in terms of
that's what I mean it was a state oh my god no one put even remotely close to that much attention to it in weightlifting
I mean when the when that I when Soviet Union, you know collapsed or whatever like it was like we we just learned a whole shit
Tana. Oh my God. Yeah, I mean pick the name like spit out any Russian name you want
And they probably have a book out and it's probably like 30 years of training logs and better than so much of the stuff that we had
Yeah, like so in that terms and I by the way, I do consider that to be research as well.
And so I would agree with you, we learn what,
like the whole concept of periodization met via,
like Matt Viv, like all those guys,
we have these concepts of periodization
because of the Russians, yeah, for the most part.
Yeah, I appreciate it, say, but it's totally true.
Like all those guys and you look at the contributions
of Rikoshansky and all these people coming over
and you're like, oh, yeah, okay, like it's fair, it's a fair issue.
That's where I really first learned that, you know, these lifts and training was just much of learning a skill as it was just breaking muscle down and causing growth.
Oh, sure, yeah.
And they were experts at that. They would go and lift, you know, sub, you know, high intensity, like moderate and
tensi, but just practices moving so over and over again, and get really fucking good at it and really strong.
And when I started applying those on myself,
on my clients, it was like, shit, just explain.
Then you learn about how the central nervous system
adapts and all that stuff.
So, very, very awesome stuff.
Let's talk a little bit about your book.
What motivated you write your book unplugged,
which if you don't mind giving a little,
just kind of a rundown of what it's about.
And so the book is called unplugplugged Evolve from Technology
to upgrade your fitness performance and consciousness.
And it's not an anti-technology book, really.
It's more of a book of how to appropriately use fitness
technologies and how they can screw up your training, actually.
And we don't really, it's not an extensive,
like here's a chapter on Fitbit and here's a chapter in HRV.
Like it's not a dive deep.
It's more of a higher level of saying.
It doesn't really matter what the technology is
because these arguments are gonna hold the same way.
And I'll use some of these technologies as examples
to make it easier to understand.
But everything from HRV to a mirror to using your phone,
to do you know, like any of these things,
these are all technologies.
And sometimes they can be helpful for your fitness
and your training and sometimes they can be harmful. And the reason we wrote the
book is to not be against those things but to simply say you need to be conscious
about this approach because it can suck the training out of you and it can make
you actually get worse if you're not really being aware of what's going on.
And that's the surface the high-level reason we wrote the book. Brian McKenzie, who's last book was the best seller, he started CrossFit Endurance.
He and I wrote the book.
It was our idea, and mostly Brian's idea, because Brian was, you know, he was out for a run
with one of his athletes, and the athlete was like, check out his heart rate, and he's
like, I'm 165 or whatever.
And Brian wanted to pick up the pace, and the guy was like, well like, well, I can't go to 167 because I'll blow up.
You know, he's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
He's like, we're talking right now.
Like, who cares?
And he was so worried about the data
and so worried about the technology.
And he wasn't paying attention to his own physiology.
And then from my perspective,
I work with a lot of these companies up here
in the valley, all these tech companies
and these wearable EMG software companies
and all this fancy fitness stuff.
And you guys would be shocked at how inaccurate they are.
And so I was just getting so pissed
because I'm like, don't outsource your coaching
to this technology that's wrong.
Like it's fucking terrible.
And we got to, like, it's not telling you,
it doesn't understand context,
it doesn't understand all these things.
So it's not that you can't use all this stuff,
but you just need to be aware of what you're actually doing.
So that was the basic idea of what the book is.
Now, it's interesting hearing this from a scientist because here we have devices that
give you or supposed to give you objective data, and you're saying to go more, to be also
subjective in the sense of, you know, pay attention to your own body.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And so it's not completely be one way.
I'm not going to say through all science or technology out.
That's, that would be a bad approach, right?
But I mean, pick your favorite fitness technology,
it doesn't matter what it is.
Well, let's, let's talk about one of the ones that,
so I finished reading a book called,
Irresistible by Adam Attler,
and a lot of the stuff in there I've been told
is similar to your book on Plut.
They have similar ideas.
One of the ones...
Probably stole all the good stuff.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Even if he was that before, it doesn't matter.
He's totally.
One of the things that I actually struggled with that they said in the book was they weren't
fans of the Fitbit at all.
And I highly recommend it to every client that I ever trained. Now, I also use this as a tool to make them more aware
of the things going on with their body.
So I coach through that.
Yeah, that's the fundamental difference.
And I can, like, I'm sure you have a bunch more to add there,
but I'm gonna stop you right there on purpose.
Okay.
To simply say that, like, that's the key.
Like, that's the piece that's missing though.
If you're just getting out the Fitbit and then collecting
the data and then have an
algorithm designed a program or you let the client go by themselves because of that, that's
the mistake.
It takes that second level.
That's really what we're talking about is you have to have that second level of using
that technology to then enhance their own understanding.
Because if you look at simple things like, I was talking to Jimmy's class last night about
motivation.
Depending on what study you look at, something like 90% of people stop using their Fitbit
after a few months.
And so does that mean don't use Fitbit or not?
Right.
No, it doesn't mean that at all.
No.
So here's an example.
If you start a client off and you ask them, for example, how physically active are you
throughout the day?
And they think they're 7 out of 10.
And you look at the Fitbit and you go, dude, you walked a thousand steps today.
Right.
And they're like, shit, I mean, that's a fantastic use of generating awareness, generating
calibration.
There is some accountability that can be held there, especially if it's like, we're all
three, you're going to start a new workout and we're all three going to wear it.
And like, these are all good, but you have to move past that eventually.
You know what this reminds me of? 100% reminds me of when people learn how to track their food
and they learn how to count their calories
and track their macros.
Exactly.
And it's important, but they stay there.
It's a part of awareness, especially if you don't know
what's in food.
Yeah.
But people get stuck there and then they become these
IIF lamb robots where they stop listening to their bodies. Right. And you stop right there and then they become these IIF lamb robots where that's it and they stop listening to their bodies.
Right. And you stop right there and then because you don't even want to talk about the accuracy of those things.
Right.
They're completely inaccurate, but that doesn't mean you can't use them because the accuracy doesn't matter when you just
learning calibration, when you're good at its consistency, that's about it.
Right. Exactly. They're generally fairly reliable, right? They're consistent.
And so let's take advantage of the part that's good, but let's not become relying upon the bad part.
And that's your fault as a coach, if it fails,
because you, the expert, you, the person they're giving
fucking money to, should have known that.
And that's your fault.
That's not their fault.
Oh, they got my own vote.
And they stopped doing the workout.
Well, that's your fault.
That's why they're paying you.
So that's just the stuff we wanna talk about is like,
okay, what happens with the gamification?
Why do they release a new app every six weeks?
Why do they have a new software?
Well, because they realize you're gonna be bored
or shit after a few weeks.
And you're stopped doing it.
I'll get you re-back in by adding this new tab,
this new like button, this new, whatever, right?
And so let's say use it to our advantage,
it's all we're saying.
So, you know, like, I'm gonna go for 100 examples of this,
but you're getting the basic point, food, tracking,
all this stuff.
It's completely inaccurate for the most part.
It's unusable, but it can be helpful as a certain place.
But if you don't, you can't match that with feeling
perception.
So with your clients, I'm sure as they're going along,
it's like, do you notice how you're feeling better?
Do you notice how you're sleeping better?
I'm making you're connecting the dots for them.
And then they go, okay, and then eventually they stop using
the fit better they stop caring or some may be sucked
to it, but that's not the only thing they're concerned.
Well, and I like that too, because it's like,
you don't just demonize the company.
No, okay.
Because what they're trying to do is keep and retain
these people to keep using them, but they're not coming
from a coaching background.
So, the importance there is to be able to take your client
and lead them to this and build that understanding there.
Tools like this can either make you more aware
or they can actually take you away from awareness.
Absolutely.
Social media is a great example.
I could go on social media.
We're not even talking about fitness here.
I can go on social media and bring more awareness to what may be happening with my groups of friends, what may be happening
with the world, you know, all these different things, or I can go in there and distract the
shit out of myself and completely become unaware about what's going on. They can use it in both
different ways. And the same thing I see with some of these fitness tools. And there's this
I see with some of these fitness tools and there's this misconception in the fitness world, weight loss world, whatever you want to call it, wellness, that more information
is going to solve the problem.
And good luck.
And we live in the age of information.
It's out there.
It's all out there.
It's easier to get to than ever before.
But I laugh because there's studies that have shown,
not that we need studies as coaches, we've seen this,
but there are studies that have shown
that more information doesn't necessarily mean anything.
There was a, I don't remember what it is,
I gotta find it because I've referenced it several times,
but there was a, I wanna say town or city
that passed the law. They wanted it,
like, get everybody to lose weight. So they're like, okay, what's the problem? People lead too much.
So this is what we're going to do. We're going to pass a law where all restaurants and fast food
places have to post in big numbers, the calories of the meal. And this should help because now people
are going to know, right? Now people are going to know if I eat this burger instead of the meal. And this should help because now people are gonna know, right now people are gonna know if I eat this burger instead of the salad,
I'm eating 300 more calories so I'm gonna lose weight.
So they did this, they put it out there
and they found that it caused people to eat more calories,
actually studied and saw people's behaviors
and found that people ate more
when they were provided with this information.
Now, why a lot of people are thinking, well, why?
How could that happen? Well, here's what happens.
If I'm going into this fast food restaurant, I really don't give a shit about losing weight.
It's not on my goal. It's not my, I don't have the awareness about it.
It's not something I'm focusing on. And I look up on the menu and I see, you know,
cheeseburger, you know, 400 calories, double cheeseburger, 600 calories, I may say to myself,
it's only two and a more calories.
Right.
I think I'll go with that one.
So they're doing the opposite,
and this is what can happen with information.
Yeah, I mean, we have a story in there.
Well, we have a section called tool, but not taskmasker.
Task master.
There you go.
It's the same way Tim Ferris wrote a section at the end,
which is his like top eight ways to
use tech when you're training, to monitor your own training.
One of his major points in there was saying, every time I've come to the wrong conclusion
in my training, it's because I collected too much data.
That's his point number six or something like that.
There's one free before you out there.
You're going to have to buy the book to get the rest of it.
Tim Ferris, exclusive. You know, it's what's interesting about all of this,
is we've all heard the terms, go with your gut,
you know, listen to your body, you know,
listen to your feelings.
And for a while there, science said that's stupid.
What do you mean go with your gut, you know,
that this doesn't exist.
But what's funny now is,
studies are showing that on a subconscious level,
we'll just, just the brain itself,
it aggregates way more information
than you could ever be aware of or perceive.
And so what you feel is a gut feeling
that you may attach some kind of mysticism to,
and reality is your brain nudging you
to make a decision based on all this ridiculous information
that you couldn't possibly even be aware of.
I think a new paper came out in a zeal
and looking at power lifters and they used basically,
it was an exercise selection study.
So they chose the exercise for the day.
I think they kept the program about the same,
but they chose what exercise they got to pick.
So I think this is where they had like a hinge program
or something, but they got to pick whatever hinge they wanted.
And so they had that autonomy in that.
And I believe the ones that had the autonomy
had a much higher success rate, strength got a much higher.
And there's a fine line there because you can lie to yourself.
And that can be abused.
So you don't want to just completely like throw out all technologies
and just like do whatever you feel like when you go to the gym.
That's probably a very bad approach for a lot of people.
But like there is something to be said for a little bit of both.
I mean, we have the classic mistakes that my wife
works in elementary school special ed and every one of her
colleagues are obese, right?
And every single month they do a fat loss challenge and whoever loses the most weight like wins the
pot, right? And you could see where this is going. They're all 100 pounds overweight and the person
who loses like two pounds wins. And then that's also because like, all right, that just in wins
this week, he lost or this month, he lost two pounds, but YouTube fuckers gained 12.
And the next week, you're next month,
you're gonna win, because you're down two months, next month,
but like, over all the months, they keep all gaining weight.
Like, they're getting higher, and they're all using Fitbit,
and they're like, well, I hit my 10,000 calories today.
All right, great, I'm gonna get a donut today.
I'm gonna get ice cream, because I got my 10k.
I'm roaring myself, yeah.
Yeah, and you're like, this is the bad use
of the technology, right?
Well, so it really, it's a false sense of health.
And you think that's more or less, what do you think right now?
Do you think more people are using it?
I think more people are using it and getting more benefit than, I think these people are
probably not, any more people are probably using it as a start.
But what happens is, I would say the vast majority of people are getting massive improvements
in their health the first three months, and then after a month, three or four or five
or six, they're right back to where they started. Well, when you look at
the motivation list, if that's true, what you say, then it really isn't because that's about the
same pattern that somebody who knew your resolution says, hey, I'm going to work out and start doing
it without any tech. It's a go for three months and then they fall off. It's motivation, right?
It's behavior change. It doesn't matter if that's tec or not tec. If you want a sustainable pattern over time,
you're gonna have to create something besides your watch.
It's just not working.
100% and it's the false paradigm of motivation
that we have in fitness where I need to be motivated.
And if I'm not motivated, I can't do it.
What behaviors, long-term behaviors don't depend on motivation.
That's right.
At all.
I mean, I get up in the morning and I brush my teeth.
I'm not motivated to brush my teeth.
I'm like, fuck you, I'm gonna brush the fuck out.
I just brush my teeth.
Pre-workout for your teeth brush.
Yeah, exactly.
It's just what I do.
And so these behavior changes, and the problem is,
the fitness industry understands the motivation factor and knows
they can get people or trick them or whatever
into doing something for a short period of time.
Absolutely.
And that's easy money.
The hard problem is, how do we get people to change
for reals permanently?
And you've now said the word awareness several times
or becoming more aware.
And I really think that that's what it's all about.
But the problem is people are,
they're in a state of unconscious incompetence.
They don't know, you know,
when you tell someone listen to your body,
they don't even know what to listen for.
They don't even know what to listen for.
And then when they think about that,
they think about all these biohacker guys, right?
Like they must know everything about their body
and they're just like adding all these new technologies of their body
And they're not really listening to the signals of their body. Is this sort of so this book
Have you like were you inspired a bit by this book by like seeing this rise of that kind of culture with the biohackers?
Yeah, I have to be careful on that one
Because you have some relationships
Shit Mike Blitz, though.
Oh shit.
That's good.
That's your boy, man.
He's like dear friend.
Oh man.
We all love him.
No, no, he's great.
Just because, like, that word means different things to different people.
So I'm gonna make sure we're at least having the same conversation.
I think I'm pitching about something else when I'm not.
Like, I think what those folks do is important because that's how we make progress.
That's how we learn more.
That is incredibly important.
So it has to be the guinea pig.
Yeah, and we have learned a lot of things
about supplements or foods or habits
that we would have never gotten
if people weren't trying to hack shit.
So I think it is generally a good practice.
But I do think that people misapply how important that stuff is
when it's the dime before the dollar. That's when I have a problem with so it's like, people misapply how important that stuff is,
when it's the dime before the dollar. That's when I have a problem with so it's like,
if you're so worried about hacking your new tropic
and getting your four-sigmatic ready and free plug
and all this stuff,
but it's like you have any inevitable in three days.
Or you didn't sleep, you haven't slept like the last two days.
Yeah, exactly.
Just rest out of your mind because it's your major move.
That's really what the book is about is saying,
like let's just put this stuff in the right place
and make sure it's way down there.
If everything else, and like one of the concepts
I'd bring up in there, is understanding
different between adapting and peaking.
So if you're peaking all the time, you're not adapting.
If you're constantly optimizing your sleep,
you're constantly optimizing your nitropic,
you're constantly optimizing your coffee,
and all this is optimized, You're never fucking adapting.
No, because what does that have to be stress?
You have to be overdo.
You have to be stressed.
You have to be in a suboptimal position.
So like one of the things I talk about is,
okay, let's say you have two important business meetings.
And one of the days you sleep 12 hours,
you do all your de-stress,
you do your transcendental meditation,
and you do your cold shower,
and you get your anal coffee probe,
or whatever blood says to him.
That's a true story.
I haven't tried that one yet.
Oh, he has.
He has.
I believe that.
Oh, man, I would have asked him that.
I turned water into coffee with my ass.
Yeah, you can ask him about that.
His wife actually did it too.
No way.
I've actually had several people DM me,
and be like, hey, what do you think about this?
Does it help?
Like, what's the science plan?
I'm like, I take coffee the other way.
So anyways, let's say you do that right.
And you have, and that's what you need to do
to be your creative day or to do your hard meeting
or to make your tough decision or whatever it is
is difficult in your life.
Great, that's fantastic.
Well, how often are you doing that same thing
when you don't get that shit?
Right.
Like, why can't you just show up and be like,
you know what, fuck that.
Like, I'm going to show up, I'm tired, all these things,
and I'm still going to perform.
Like, you have to be able to get to that gear occasionally
because if not, what happens eventually,
all the caffeine starts to not work as well.
And then the team's not enough, you got it in the middle
and all of a sudden you're like,
you have a two and a half hour routine
every morning just to check your email.
Like, now you've gotten real precious.
Like, you're a real precious soft bitch.
Like, you know what I mean?
Real fragile.
In fact, what happens is the body does start to adapt
in a sense that it tries to take you down back
to your normal.
No more places.
That's a really good point.
When I look at all the biohackers,
there's not too many of them that I'm really scared of.
Yeah.
I don't know, I wouldn't fuck a bin. I wouldn't fuck a greenfield. Greenfield is still not worth it. There's not too many of them that I'm really scared of. Yeah. For sure. I don't know.
I wouldn't fuck a bin.
I wouldn't fuck a green field.
Green field.
He's still not worried about me.
He's still not worried about me.
He'll rip my ball out.
I feel like he'll be just so worried about me.
Well, he's a good example.
I was talking to him and I asked him sort of similar questions.
He's like, I don't do all this shit all every day.
He's like, this is my job is to look into these things.
So I experiment with these things.
But he's like, you think I'm lighting up all the stuff all day
and like taking this every day?
No.
Like, sometimes I go out in the woods
and I don't do anything for four days or whatever he does,
right?
And I don't know exactly his routine.
He can speak for himself on that.
But I would just say like,
you need to be making sure you're putting yourself
through understanding,
do things sometimes to optimize,
but do some times to adapt
and make sure you're running a balance there.
And you should be able to have a productive,
like one of the ones we use is similar,
like a follow up with what Rob did with his,
why are you to eat?
And it's like, okay, you use that to measure,
you figure out which foods you respond,
glucose best to, okay, whatever.
Well, if you're having an afternoon meeting
and you're like, oh, I'm sorry,
I'm just in a shitty attitude
because my blood sugar's low.
Like, go fuck yourself, fix it then.
Like, you're gonna let that little marker run your whole life. I'm just in a shitty attitude because my blood sugar's low. Go fuck yourself, fix it then.
You're gonna let that little marker run your whole life.
Oh, I'm sorry, I slept for four hours last night.
I'm just having a bad, no, no you aren't, get over it.
Now fix it later.
Overcome an adapt.
Well yeah, let's not be so reliant on our own physiology.
The hunger one is what kills me.
My body works best when I eat really frequently.
My wife is actually the opposite. We've done a lot of testing in this.
I've worked really well on a bunch of really small meals all day. But sometimes I
don't do that for that exact reason. Like we're gonna go the opposite direction.
And those days when I go into class and I've got meetings all day and all this crap going on and
I'm on a fast, I don't give myself the excuse to go, you know, on Andy, like just don't worry
about getting that today
because you're fasting today.
No, I'm expecting myself to do the exact same quality stuff,
not have to go back and redo my work,
have a great class, be super energetic and positive
and give my students what they deserve in the classroom
and not have a bad performance
because my blood sugar's low because of any insects hours.
Well, I think people forget why adaptation happens
in the first place.
Like, why is your body building muscle burning body fat,
getting smarter, whatever, why is it adapting?
It is responding to a stress.
And if you take all that stress out,
your body will not progress at all.
And I love giving this example. I tell people look
Laying you know work out as hard as you possibly can today and then lay in bed for a week now
You've rested and recovered and had no stress on your muscle
Give them all the time to build that they could possibly have and you know
Have you don't happen when you come back to your workout? You're gonna be weaker. You're not gonna be as strong
Cuz you're staying in bed. Yeah, more sore because you stayed in bed the You're the worst one. Yeah. You're the worst one. Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah.
You're the worst one.
Yeah. You're the worst one. Yeah second, because that's a good one. I'd never hear anybody, no fitness coach or anybody who says, hey, everyone, so while
don't drink as much water or don't drink water today and see what happens, everybody's
like, drink all this water all the time.
Let's talk about that for a second.
So it would be the same thing.
I think you can apply this, well, in the book, obviously, we do.
We apply it to cold, we apply it to hot, we apply it to sleep, thirst, hunger, any stress
that you can go through, focus.
I think you should have days where you work 16 hours a day, like get after it and then
have days off, right?
We acknowledge it in all these other realms, right?
But we don't acknowledge it in sleep.
Like why isn't it good sometimes to do some sleep deprivation?
Why not?
Like having a hard time, why can't I give you a sleep?
Really?
Let's sleep for two hours, three nights in a row, and then tell me on that fourth day
if you have a hard time going about.
Like you're gone, right?
You're gonna sleep. Well, it's probably you can pick evolution, you can pick whatever two hours, three nights in a row and then tell him, on that fourth day, if you have a hard time going about, like you're gone, right? You're gonna sleep, well, it's probably,
you can pick evolution, you can pick whatever you want,
but these are all actually very natural stimuli,
and we don't have any real science behind small bouts
of dehydration, but we didn't have any science behind small
bouts of cold exposure until 10 years ago either.
So we don't have a much of the,
but to me, like it makes extremely logical sense
and we don't have it with the sleep either.
Other than the BDNFs, but it's like,
it has to make a ton of sense.
And I don't know how often or how much you should do it.
I can give you like very loose recommendations in the book,
but if it's been 10 years since you've ever gotten thirsty,
like really thirsty, that's probably a problem.
If you've never gotten cold in the last 12,
if you haven't ever been hungry,
and I get a don't mean like grumbly,
like my stomach, like my blood,
blood, sugar, bad, I mean really hungry.
Nobody knows what hunger feels like.
Everybody's gone without food for longer than 24 hours.
Right.
I mean most people.
So these are ways you actually find a lot of connection
back with your body and understanding,
what does it really mean to be thirsty? And it's probably good to be super hydrated a lot of connection back with your body and understanding what does it really mean to be thirsty and it's probably good to be super hydrated a lot.
That's speaking though, right?
That's optimized.
But then it's also probably good to be a little bit dehydrated occasionally where we get
into problems and this is a sleep is a very good example of this is when we are our hard
days are not hard enough and our easy days are not easy enough and so we end up with this
low level under slept for a long time.
And we're slightly, slightly dehydrated for long periods of time.
And that I think is when we have problems, we don't do well enough getting hydrated when
we're trying to be hydrated.
But we also don't match that with little short bouts of dehydration.
And we end up being like slightly under slept, slightly overfed, slightly under watered,
and it turns out that's not good.
Do you feel, do you feel most people, I say this a lot in the show, are doing the opposite of what they
really need most for their body?
For example, I have found all the clients that I've trained, typically the type a high-stress
level clients also gravitate towards the stimulants, the high energies, you know, intensity driven type workouts.
And then my yogi crunchy, hippie stress free people
that do yoga, meditate, never see a PR
or ever push their body.
Don't you feel-
No, no, for sure.
It seems like it's the,
everyone who's doing what they're doing,
you need the other opposite.
Yeah, my friend, like I won't tell too much of the story, but my friend, you guys know
Brett Contreras.
Yeah.
So he went, he's like, my fun, like one of my most favorite guys ever to troll, by the way.
He's so easy to get him all riled up.
Our buddy Jordan, Jordan shallow just riled him up two days ago.
Yeah, like he's, you know, I love Brace Great.
Just, if he was walking by, I'm just, you know, I don't know if the glitz's really so important, bro.
Like, I need to step back.
Drop that and run.
But he got all rolled up on the internet.
I don't know what meeting it was on.
About something and somebody else
like talking back and forth.
But his basic point was like, yeah,
you guys are never hurting your program
because you never have any overload.
When's the last time you got stronger?
Like you've never added muscle mass,
you've never lost weight.
Yeah, like your shoulder mobility is great now.
And for nine years, you've done nothing
but improve your shoulder mobility
and your fat and soft and have no muscle.
And your heart rate's never been above like 120.
Except for when you do hot yoga.
Like, some with you too,
like we've got to make sure we're playing on all sides here,
especially if we're talking about longevity
or well-roundedness or overall health. You don't want to be just in one end of the spectrum.
We're being as amateur about that as we have thinking that one of these things is going
to take care of all of our bodies.
What do you think it is that drives us like that?
What makes us want to be in boxes and stick to one, I mean?
Try it, man, it's your tribe.
That's how we survived.
We found people that we could stick to, and then, you know, I mean, the number one killer,
I mean, one of the worst, probably worst things you could ever do
if you lived in the wilderness with your hunter-gatherer friends
or whatever was be isolated.
You're for sure going to die if you don't have your tribe.
So it's just natural.
In fact, if you look at when people list their top fears,
you know, the top 10 fears that could happen in life,
one of the top ones is public speaking,
and it's only because of the fear of making a fool yourself
in front of your tribe and having people shun you
or whatever and being isolated.
So that's just a natural tendency,
but I do think what we're seeing with the connection
of people worldwide is our tribes are starting to get larger and larger
whereas you're trying to be.
Well, they're being defined by different things now.
That's the big thing.
It's no longer defined by who lives and works on my gym.
Because now I can have a different tribe of liberals or whatever this, they can be and
they can be completely geographies no longer the limitation behind tribalism.
And it's expanding.
But I think a part of it also is what we talked about beginning today is it's confusing, right?
And there's all this shit.
Now I'm confused like, wait, is yoga good for me?
Is it bad for me?
And then it's just, you know what?
Like I found one thing, I'm not getting hurt.
I like it.
I'm just gonna stick to that.
And I think that's one of the reasons.
And then of course you develop buy-in
and you develop community and that.
And then you want to defend that, right?
And we're, I think one of the real difficult parts
of the internet that people have is people
that are not very good about separating discussion information
from wanting more benefit or success of the thing itself
than the actual merit.
And that's sort of like, I want to defend mind pump media.
That's what I want to do because I love them
and I got their shirts and everything.
And regardless of what they do, I want to defend them
and I'm more vested in their success than what they're actually saying.
And that's great for you as a company, right?
But it actually, it makes discussion really difficult because when you do fuck up or you
say something wrong, like they're defending you no matter what you do.
And then now I don't, I can't trust their decisions anymore because I'm like, you're not
really worried about that.
You just want to defend them at all cost and that is a problem
And that's where we have so many of these fights back and forth because of most of those fights don't matter
Yeah, you know the irony of that is we encourage
Consul encourage our audience to question us and you know if we're gonna say something that you feel you have different opinion
Or if there's evidence to suggest the opposite only because we know the long-term strategy
is better that way.
I think if you build this false,
whatever around your fake tribe
or whatever you're right,
the second we really do fuck up,
which is gonna happen, everybody does, we're done.
Well, if you build a fake facade of the fallibility,
one crack, the whole thing's gone.
That's right.
But if you got holes all the time,
everywhere, it's like, oh, that's gonna hold.
Yeah, trust me, we talk about how.
It helps that the tree of us disagree on a lot. And got holes all the time, everywhere, it's like, oh, that's going to hold. Yeah, trust me. We talk about how it helps that the three of us disagree on a
lot and argue openly on the show. I think that is what it moves over into the forum and
all of our other platforms. So I think that's part of the deal too. So people feel comfortable
with if we challenge each other all the time on the show, they feel comfortable to do the
same thing. And I think that's probably the problem with a lot of podcast shows or anything
that we listen to that have, you know, one, two or three or more guys that
are connected is they all agree on all topics where that's part of the magic heroes that
were three different guys that train differently, eat differently and openly discuss it. And
everybody has an intelligent point of view. I agree. And we encourage that with our audience.
I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. I agree. And we encourage that with our audience. I agree. I agree. I agree.
I agree.
Anything in the current, in your current space
that is really exciting, you had brought up a,
I don't know if I can mention a study
we're going to do on Cray team,
or anything now that's getting you real excited?
Well, you know, we have a bunch of projects going up.
For those of you listening about a foot and a half
to my left is my friend Jimmy Bagley
and he's got a muscle physiology lab up here at San Francisco State.
We got to play a paper for sure.
We definitely want to check that out.
Dude, he just built, so man, he's got a bunch of these one laser scanning confocal microscope
and he's got these other ones.
And then you just build, how big is your new gym?
About 2000 square feet, all rigs, with lefting platforms, all this shit,
like in his university.
Hell yeah.
So they just opened it yesterday.
Like we just walked in there.
So it's really badass.
I'm like, you walked down the hall
and he's got barbell, squat racks, hex bars,
you know, all this stuff.
And down the hall is just,
ladies and gentlemen, can focal microscope
or energy-aging muscle fibers
that the single-stile level.
And you're like, that's what it is. That's a conscious.
Holy shit, awesome.
So, it's really cool.
You guys can go up there and do a day up there with him sometime.
But we have a lot of projects that we're working on together, which are really cool.
We just submitted yesterday a paper from Irene Tobias, my postdoc, where we actually were
pretty confident now we're finding a difference in post- in post exercise, anabolic window between the fiber types.
So there's a different window,
the length at which the window is extended
is specific to the fiber type.
Interesting.
What are you seeing?
What are you, are you noticed as it consistent,
like guys with more slow twitch tend to respond this way,
more fast twitch.
So the preliminary data right now suggests the slow twitch fibers have a more traditional
30 to 60 minute post exercise window, but the fast twitch are up to like two to and
half three hours.
Wow.
So that just that'll that'll kill the post workouts, you know, supplement.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To build muscle.
That's mostly the same.
Yeah.
Yeah. Slam it right after. That's that's true. Yeah, we kind of poop
on that already because as it's splitting hairs, the difference
in comparison, what are you noticing between the two different
fibers? Is it is it that drastic of a difference? It is. Yeah.
Wow. Yeah, it's massively different. But here's the key, like
this is another example of you always have to use context, right?
Right. So for example, do any of you three guys work out in
the morning, fasted? Yeah. Okay. Great? So for example, do any of you three guys work out in the morning, fasted?
Yeah.
Okay, great.
So for you, it might be really important that, especially if you're a slow twitch kind of guy,
you work out in the morning and you're fasted.
And if you're trying to optimize muscle growth, then maybe it's super important to get that
meal in really quickly.
But the rest of you guys work out in the afternoon.
Right.
Then it probably doesn't matter.
And we already got food in here.
And your fed and all these things, right?
So even with signs like that,
you still have to take it and put it under context.
Well, how are you applying it?
What are your life situations?
Even if we took you against it and we changed the goal.
I was just gonna say, if this goal was to lean out,
you actually would probably be better off not having it.
Or maybe you go through periods where you're trying
to optimize, right, maximizing muscle growth,
but then you go through a period where you're like,
let's teach the body to become more resilient
and then we won't give it all the things it needs
and it has to figure out ways.
And that's kind of like a janky way of saying
what happens, I kind of skip the science there,
but you get the basic idea, right?
And so we have to be careful with any of the science
that we do or anybody else.
It's like, it doesn't mean blanket prescription.
It just means, okay, this is information,
but now you still have to think through
of how you're applying it in the situation, what's the goal of today, this week, this month,
what's the client's goal, what stage of win, what are we trying to do here, and that determines how
we apply these things. So giving blanket prescriptions like that are a really terrible idea.
Context is so important. Dude, you have to, do you just ignore questions
when people ask a question that's the case? Yeah, because there's no way too long to answer.
Because there's no way what there is no like
Exact answer. Did you see my real gun episode? Yeah, that's every
I was like I don't know depends man like what I do like what's the goal? Well, consider all the variables
That's what we sound like when clients ask us certain you know certain questions the same thing
It depends is always the first answer
It's funny because you we notice these things with exercise. It's pretty easy like you know
What rep range builds the most muscle?
Well, what rep range are you in now?
Because when we change it, you're gonna get a new,
you know, you get some new growth.
But if you were to compare head to head,
you got the eight to 12 and all that stuff,
but we don't apply that to anything else.
It's as if nutrition doesn't apply.
Like, no, I'm gonna keep my protein 175 grams
every single day, or I'm gonna eat exactly 10 minutes after my workout,
every single time.
And what ends up happening, your body becomes less efficient.
There's actually evidence to show with protein, for example,
that eating high protein all the time super frequently
reduces your body's efficiency with it.
You actually become less sensitive to protein.
And we know this with hormones as well,
if they're elevated too long, your body down,
regulates receptors, and does all that stuff.
So it's a great idea.
I recommend people have like low protein days.
I recommend people fast after the workout sometimes because I know when you then go back
and eat post workout or when you do go back and you have a high protein, all of a sudden
you get this animal sensitivity.
There's easy ways to implement this stuff where like, if I'm working with an athlete and they have multiple practices or something,
well, I'm gonna have a completely different approach
because they didn't, and they're six weeks out
from a fight or something.
Well, we need to maximize recovery.
We are eating the second they get off.
They're, I'm trying to get them to consume stuff
during workouts like that, right?
Well, that's different than saying,
like, I'm gonna work out really hard on a Friday,
but then I'm going to nap a valley for the weekend,
like, I'm not gonna work out again till Wednesday.
Well, like, you're gonna be fully recovered by that Wednesday.
You don't need to maximize the signal right then.
So it all depends on the context
and we are, by the way, going tomorrow to Napa.
All right.
So I brought that up.
I'm on sabbatical, guys.
I'm gonna go with two hard ones.
I wanted to take Andy to the conversation
that we had back in Austin that, you know,
mysteriously disappeared.
I never made the light of it. Yeah, I never went up. Yeah, it's up with that. No, it didn't. that we had back in Austin that mysteriously disappeared.
I never made the light of it.
Yeah, I never went up.
Yeah, it's up to that.
No, it didn't.
They lost the fire.
Your boy is over on your side over there, lost the audio supposedly.
Oh, you guys let them in charge of it?
I know, man.
Never get that.
We handle this, we handle this one.
Doug?
Yeah, Doug.
He's far enough, bro.
Mike too much new tropics and supplementation over there. Uh, but that was an incredible conversation.
It's not, it would not be the first time some shit like that's happened.
So, just a bus chuck and now, yeah.
Fuck, barb.
But that was such a great conversation.
It's not that often I feel like we bring somebody on the show and they just completely
blow our mind on a topic that I feel that most of us are pretty well versed in.
And it was the history of bodybuilding, right?
Was it?
So what we got into?
Yeah, we were talking about just how it became popular
to use body parts split routines
versus the traditional full body routine.
You know what's funny about this shit?
Is that it's all starting to make full circle again.
I fucking love it.
All of a sudden I see all these people being like,
oh dude, if you train your muscles,
you know, you use the same volume,
but train them like three days a week instead of one day
a week with this all that volume one day,
you build more muscle, we got studies supporting it.
And I'm like, dude, that's how people lifted
before steroids.
Yeah, I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that's funny.
I mean, that's why we took all that time
to trace that episode.
It was really actually pretty cool because, let's see, when were we in Austin in May?
I think it was in April, man.
Well, like two months after that, I was at the NSCA and I was getting my fellowship award
and people that get awards sit at the same table.
I was sitting next to this old dude and like, no, I was talking to him.
I'm like, who else is this guy?
What award?
If I'm at the NSCA, I know who you are.
I'm like, I don't know who this guy is. And there's this lady sitting next to him, I'm like, who else is this guy? And what award, if I'm at the NSA, I know who you are. I'm like, I don't know who this guy is.
And there's this lady sitting next to him
and they're like old, and they started talking.
And I was like, wait a minute.
And they told me their last names.
And I'm like, Jan and Terry Todd.
And I was like, holy fuck, you guys have done all the sports history
of all bodybuilding history, weightlifting.
Like all the shit I talked about in that episode,
all the thing I told you about was all from their work
that I was reading.
Oh, no way.
And I was like, oh my god, I was like, straight family, like fumbling I told you about was all from their work that I was reading. Oh, no way.
And I was like, oh my god, like,
I was like straight family, like fumbling my phone.
I was like, can I take, like no one else knows
who these people are.
Like, they don't have.
But Jan, I still, she was telling me
she's like probably 65 or something
and she's still deadliftin' 400 for triples.
What?
Like, just savage.
What, do you know deadliftin' just in? She's 65. No, Like, this is savage. What? Do she out there living in justice?
She's just a fine man.
Oh, man.
Oh, man.
Oh, man.
But she held a bunch of world records
and power to do that.
Maybe you're back in the day.
And he did too.
So they're sport historians.
Like they trace this whole thing.
And their story, the conversion of Dr. Carpavitches
where we got most of it and then had a bunch of other follow-up.
So I got a bunch of gold from them too.
They have a really cool facility in Austin.
Next time you guys, if you guys go back to Paleo,
you guys gotta go to their lab.
They have a huge history of bodybuilding, like facility.
History of weightlifters.
This isn't at UT.
How do we miss this?
Oh, we're going.
Yeah, we're going.
I can connect you guys.
We're going with that.
Yeah, this was a great trophy.
For a long time, this was like a passion of mine. I read all the stuff and then kind of figure out like the origins of
You know, all these if we talked about the studies by
Dr. Arthur Jones. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the the the not all the studies. Oh, that's right. How did machines even come about and how they don't happen?
So in addition to that, literally yesterday,
the guy from Men's Health,
that was up here as Lou Schuhler,
if you guys love,
but he used to work for the Weaters.
He used to work from back days.
I dug a bunch of gold out of him.
Oh really?
How cool.
It's an incredible story though.
If you understand, we did it because,
probably what we're talking about earlier,
one of the things that motivates me
through this field is helping people,
there's nerds like us that wanna dedicate our lives
like diving into this shit, right?
And I have fun, like I love the confusion,
part of it, you know, personally.
But I understand how that's extremely frustrating
and unhelpful for other people.
And so I'm like, I think if you can just trace
the history of why things are the way they are,
it can relieve a lot of pressure from the other day person,
they can go like, oh, okay, maybe that shit doesn't matter.
This is all I have to do.
So we traced and went back and it just kind of helped people
understand why the nutrition field evolved,
why the supplement industry evolved,
and why the exercise, and I love the way Thomas Coon
puts it out, who's, I think it was German philosopher,
but he says there's synthesis, right?
Or there's hypothesis, right?
Thesis.
And then that swings all the way to the end
of the pendulum, which is antithesis.
And then it actually lands almost always back
in the middle, which is synthesis.
And just a quick version of our story,
because it took me like 17 hours of audio
to get this whole story down.
So I'll give the condensed version,
but basically what happens is the field moves along and this is going to be traced through
any field economics, anything right. The moon was pretty solid with that idea. And let's
just jump to Arthur Jones right and it's like not a list. Okay great. That's fantastic.
And this is how we optimize muscle growth right and it's pretty damn good right. The hop
on a you train like that and and then, you know, mencer came along
and did his eye intensity stuff and that's fine.
And it was all machine-based for the most part.
And it was our classic muscle split, you know,
like delts and backs and buys.
Okay, great.
And that was fantastic.
And people were really happy
because people gained a lot of muscle mass.
And you started looking like superheroes, right?
And this is prior to the Instagram and Photoshop.
And like you actually physically had to look good. And it's like, God, you look like a fucking superhero. And
prior to human, like any time in human existence, you couldn't physically look like that. And
so we're literally seeing people, I mean, like our generation, like look at the bodybuilders
that we grew up looking at. We're like, holy shit. Like these are fucking golf stars.
Yeah. And people got that from these damn machines and you can get that right and
And so that was a huge thing and then but that left a space for well, maybe this isn't great for
Cardiovascular health or maybe this isn't great for
Whatever rather mark performance, right? You're not super powerful this way. Maybe you're not long rotation or whatever it is right
And so enter this big hole, so there was their first thesis.
Swing the other into the pendulum with this, antithesis was like, okay, now enter CrossFit.
And CrossFit's whole thing was like, first of all,
you're not gonna be here for three and a half hours
like a bodybuilding workout takes you,
because you have to do 12 sets of every body part,
six different ways, right?
And we're gonna get you in and out 20 minutes
to get you hearty super high,
you're gonna lose a ton of weight
and health marker's gonna go way up
and that's way more quote unquote functional.
And that took off and people started seeing results
and it was like, wow, I can get in and out the gym
in 20 minutes and I'm doing big movements
and this is great.
And so they swung back then and said,
okay, that's fantastic.
But before they landed on synthesis,
they actually went back the other direction,
which is now CrossFit is the only thing.
Therefore, everything from bodybuilding must be terrible.
And that was the problem.
It's like, well, no, no, no, hold on here.
But if you look at the CrossFit culture,
and I think we're coming out of that right now,
from that culture of going like, well, wait a minute,
I showed their fucking hurts.
And my knees killing me.
And I constantly have the same problem
every time I do this workout.
Well, I because I refuse to do any bicep curls.
Why? Because they're not functional.
But why can I never do the pull-up routine? Like, why is my elbow blow up every time I do this workout, well, I, because I refuse to do any bicep curls, why, because they're not functional, but why can I never do the pull up routine?
Like, why is my elbow blow up every time I do this one?
Because you ever,
you ever thought about doing some bicep curls?
No fucking way, bro, not function.
You know what I'm saying, yeah.
Yeah, because you have a muscle,
that's somehow not functional.
By the way, yeah, like, again,
and now you see them integrating that.
It's like, well, as a finisher,
you know, I'll do this pump rotiner, whatever, and as a finisher, I'll get my tries and I'll pump them out.. It's like, well, as a finisher, I'll do this pump rotina or whatever.
And as a finisher, I'll get my tries and I'll pump them out.
And you're like, bro, now we're back to 1980.
We're right fucking back to 1980.
And then you see that swing.
And so now we've landed on a synthesis,
which is to say, okay, maybe just running five miles a day
is not the only thing that's good for me.
And maybe just doing an hour and a half of each body part
isolated on a machine's not the best thing ever. And then maybe doing fucking pull ups and squat every day. That's my only thing, but good for me. And maybe just doing an hour and a half of each body part isolated on a machine's not the best thing ever.
And then maybe doing fucking pull ups and squat every day,
that's my only thing, but it's so varied.
And it's the same three exercises every damn time.
Sorry.
Okay.
Maybe that's not the whole thing either.
And we land.
And so we swing back and forth,
and there's a piston match and Dick's swing and contest.
And then eventually we just end up in the middle
a little bit, which is a synthesis saying,
this is a good part about this and the good part about that.
And this is maybe the whole of this
and this is the whole of this approach.
And now we can actually just take and implement the pieces
that we need depending on the situation and circumstance.
Bro, that's what we, that's exactly what we try to do.
We really, really try as hard as we can to do that
for people to help them with that process
because that pendulum, it swings back and forth
and it keeps swinging back and forth.
And I'm going to give credit to the CrossFit world.
No, it's fantastic.
No, let me tell you why I want to give them credit because you're right.
They were ridiculous.
In fact, some of our first episodes were literally titled Why Mine Pumped Doesn't CrossFit because
of that, when you're talking about.
But to the credit of the CrossFit community, they seem to, everything can get dogmatic,
but they seem to want.
They reintroduce some of the most important movements
that we have neglected for fucking 20 years.
But they saved fucking weightlifting.
Yeah, for sure.
Like not even close.
Like this is, I have 90, for one bad thing
I say about CrossFit at 99 good things.
Yes, but it's not even that what I'm saying is
the CrossFit community seems to always want to just
improve and do what's better.
So they seem open.
They've evolved very quickly.
Bodybuilders have not.
They take a long fucking time to evolve.
They're very hard-headed.
The CrossFit world tends to,
it looks like they tend,
because now I see them talking about eating
certain starchy carbohydrates, improved performance.
Well, five years ago, five years ago,
it was fucking paleo like our core.
But now they're talking about, oh, buck lead.
And if you eat this one, and eat that,
starchy carb, it can help.
And they're implementing different exercises.
And I'm seeing programming now,
we're doing less of the going to crazy fatigue
with the complex Olympic lifts
that cause all the injury type of stuff.
So I just want wanna give them that credit
because I like seeing that.
No, I would say like, I'm on record years ago on radio
and everything saying this about CrossFit.
Because I actually was one of the first scientific
defenders of CrossFit.
Because I'm like, you can't blame CrossFit
for all these problems.
First of all, they're random,
depending on the person, the coaching is just as bad
or good, depending on the person.
Has nothing to do with the name of CrossFit, et cetera. They saved my sport like they saved weightlifting they did a lot for powerlifting
they got people doing big exercise. They got women squatting and doing that. Yeah like this is a
great thing like got power cleansed in the vernacular like this is in the lexicon now. Like this
is good for the vast majority and then if he like in fact like most of what we do with body knowledge
in my coach Kenny Kane,
like he was one of the first guys I came across
that was like, he built this thing called context.
And he has this unbelievably unique,
in fact, that's the mastery method,
shirt I'm wearing,
like this super innovative programming style
that's, like he runs CrossFit LA,
which is the 7th or 8th ever CrossFit gym.
But he does this really innovative programming
where it's the fact that we like,
if you have a month programmed out,
60% of the days are built for practice,
30% or whatever are built for competition,
and then 10% are mental toughness.
And so he's had this model for years now
and he hit like nobody gets hurt in his gym.
That's great man.
And so he programs backwards things like that
and people have stole that left and right
and like gone on with it.
And I'm like, but no, you're right.
This is, you're seeing an evolution
and the one thing, the first thing I said positive about cross
when it came up was I've never seen a field
that is more concerned with everything else in the life.
Yeah.
Very excellent at that.
Like, well, let's build a healthy lifestyle.
So let's talk about your sleep.
Let's talk about your hydration.
Let's start eating better food. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, no other community has at that. Like, well, let's build a healthy lifestyle. So let's talk about your sleep. Let's talk about your hydration. Let's start eating better food.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, no other community has done that.
I'll tell you what, dude, because of our message,
because we hammer all that stuff
in about the whole athlete
and looking at all these different things,
it's funny because we're always blown away
about how large our CrossFit audience is,
even though our early episodes,
we hammered them so bad.
And it's because of that, it's because they're always looking. And I really like that about, about that community.
Well, a lot of people, a lot of people, I mean, it's funny that, unless you, if you're
an outsider, right, you don't listen to my impumps, some people thought that about us. But,
I mean, we talk probably more shit about bodybuilding. Yeah. And I'm an, I have BB pro. So it's
not, as nothing to do with, with that, It's like exactly what we're talking about right now.
It's just challenging everything.
It's helping people understand to take the good
of everything, everything that we've been doing since back then.
There's something good to take from all of it
and apply to your own life and to not become dogmatic
about any of it.
You hear me shit on science more than anybody.
So what I do.
Yeah.
Hey, take that science throw it away. Listen to your do. Yeah, hey, take that science throw it away.
Listen to your body.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Right?
Like, come on.
I just, I think with bodybuilding, in that particular sense, bodybuilding's just, it
was, most of the information that was promoted through bodybuilding when it kind of became
a thing was through the lens of selling supplements.
It was these magazines that were, you know, these, these muscle and fitness, or as, as
we call it, muscle and fiction, flex, you know these muscle and fitness or as we call it muscle and fiction flex
You know whatever muscle media 2000 and iron man which were basically designed to sell you
both the sportive body building and
Supplements they were not designed to inform you they were never that with big pamphlets sure and so a lot of the information
We've gotten from them was through that lens
Which is why it's say it states so stagnant for so long And then the other piece of it is when Annabelle Steroids came into the, into the field,
you're talking about entirely new science.
And these athletes stop progressing on their training because they were progressing with their drugs.
They got really fucking smart.
And I'll tell you something right now, if you want to talk to any athlete in the world about how to maximize and stack and take
which drugs, when, or whatever, to maximize muscle adaptation and growth, nobody comes
close to a bodybuilder.
I know bodybuilders are no more about hormones than scientists in the field of hormones.
In fact, I had a client once who was an endocrinologist.
Endocrinologist? I an endocrinologist.
Am I saying endocrinologist?
Yeah, see I say it right, Doug makes fun of me sometimes.
And I was talking to him, and I know a lot
about the drugs that bodybuilders use
because I was a big, I was just passionate about it.
And so I just, I tend to obsess over shit.
And so I'm talking about how bodybuilders use testosterone
and selective estrogen receptor modulators
and how they use growth hormones and peptides and insulin.
And he's looking at me like, holy shit man, how do you know about all this stuff?
Oh, it's just fucking, that's all their science went into that.
Hard of bodybuilding, right?
Bodybuilding.com.
And they stopped looking at the other stuff.
But I am seeing now a return to the important, because bodybuilding
for a long time totally ignored exercise programming. It was a thing for a second and then it became,
everybody's routine looked the same. It was just your favorite bicep exercise, but everybody
did the same shit. You're starting to get a return back to exercise programming, even in bodybuilding.
Did you hear that amazing interview with,
oh, who was it?
Oh, oh, Dorian Yates?
No, I didn't listen to him.
Oh my God, it's awesome,
because he basically was like,
we don't know what we're doing.
It's just like,
just started taking drugs off dinner, right?
I think nobody knows.
It's true though.
We'll figure it out.
It's true, and it's really hard to get through.
So I remember coming up through the body building circuit
and I've got a lot of buddies that are pros
and you know trying to get them to listen to me.
It's just impossible.
When you're trying to talk to somebody
and I think the part of that problem is the aesthetic piece,
right, when they have built so much muscle
and look so good in spite of what they're doing, it's really tough to try and convince that guy like, hey, you probably don't want to do this.
Do that because they're like, fuck you. Look at me, bro.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, uh,
Hey, man, when, when, when, you know, when you're telling me, oh, you're, you're telling me that a deadlift will develop my back more than,
you know, whatever other exercise.
Meanwhile, I can take insulin and take a bunch of carbs with it and gain, you know, 15 pounds in two months.
Right.
Who gives a shit about dead lifts, you know? Yeah, yeah. It's not that important. So,
but you know, I love the, I love watching the evolution of programming from bodybuilding through the lens of the markers behind it because I find it so fascinating. Yeah. Because you have
like the weaters who really popularize body parts splits. It was the weaters that popularized that,
and they made it their thing.
And then they came up with these like,
you know, the weater principles.
I don't even remember them all.
I remember all those.
No, absolutely not.
I have no idea.
I remember them for sure, but I remember them.
Do you remember they were weater frames?
Yeah, absolutely.
Like the principle of pumping and the principle of whatever.
And that was really to sell magazines.
It really was.
And then everybody started training that way.
And then Arthur Jones was, you know,
we talked about him for a second.
He wanted to sell Nautilus equipment.
And the way he did it was, he took a pro bodybuilder,
Casey Vider, who was a massive, massive,
19-year-old bodybuilder who was totally
deconditioned, stopped working out.
And he said, hey, come in here.
I'm going to train you on my nodalists, start taking some gear again.
We're going to film how much muscle you gain, and then we're going to talk about the routine.
And he did the opposite of the weeder, which was lots of sets or whatever.
And he just went, go to failure as hard as possible, each muscle group on these machines
before and after.
And then you created a new movement based behind that. None of it based on actual science.
Oh, there you go.
There's one of his principles.
The Force Reps Principles.
Oh, yeah, there you go.
Yeah, the pre-exhaustion principle.
You know how much I learned from these magazines,
muscle confusion, so you know when you see an extol,
when you hear these assholes talking about muscle confusion,
they went back and learned from the gods
of marketing and bodybuilding.
Absolutely. Again, you went back and learned from the gods of marketing and bodybuilding. Absolutely.
Yeah.
Like again, you're not gonna find anything new in these areas.
Like no way, you're gonna find something.
Like P90X just came up on some brand new way
to try and go fuck yourself.
Oh, come on now.
I love hearing you say that because someone asked me
about Orange Theory and they have completely built their model
around the
You know, yeah, you will they're on target heart rate. Oh, yeah
Like that's yeah, right, yeah, right and because they put some colors on it and then give you like a little graph
That only is that not new, but that's like been shown to be so wrong so many years ago
Yeah, like oh god, I thought we were that. I literally stopped putting those slides in my classes
because I'm like, all right, no one even knows
what I'm talking about.
I'm breaking a myth that no one's even aware of anymore.
And now I gotta put it back in.
It just seems like they need a hook so they go back
and they find a term and they're like,
oh, let's use that one and make a franchise out of it.
Like, those guys were good at, though, man.
Like, they spent some time there.
Leader and Hoffman were no joke in those areas.
No, no, they were brilliant.
Mark, they created the whole industry. And then, don't you have, you know, other people that cameman, we're no joke in those areas. No, no, they were brilliant. They created the whole industry and then there were you have
other people that came along. We talked in a previous episode about Bill Phillips and
he took supplements to an entirely new level and then they really broke things down and then
you had Dan Ducane, who was you know, I don't know who Dan Ducane was. So he was a good
friends of Bill Phillips,
one of the authors of Muscle Media 2000,
and he wrote the steroid Bible,
or what was it called?
Do you remember that book?
The Anabog Bible.
Anabog Bible, I think he was one of the authors,
and he was like this.
No holds barred, you know, kind of fitness guru,
who would talk about all these secret ways,
that he was one of the first guys to talk about
The fat burner and I know I'm getting it wrong. I think it's DNP if I'm not mistaken It's actually something that's used to make dynamite and it's this highly poisonous thing
Healthy makes you sweat your dick open inside
So people are using it. No, this is actually right now in the bodybuilding world
This is actually resurfacing right now
Yeah, bottom my pro buddies are fucking around with this right now DNP. Yes, can you look it up?
Doug I want to make sure I have it right put DNP fat burning or something like that. I'm pretty sure that's funny
Cuz like those are the types of questions I'll get in class from occasion. I have no idea
They're like what this is what you this what you do like well like no like and they're blown away
You don't know what it is. Yeah, I'm like a state of muscle is what you do? Like, no, like, no. And they're blown away, you don't know what it is.
Yeah, I'm like, I studied muscle physiology,
like what are you talking about?
So there it is, so fatal,
I'm making a scary comeback.
What's the name of it if you can look up the,
because that's DNP obviously stands for,
oh, they're all, yeah.
Yeah, there you go.
So apparently you take this and you fucking feel like
you have the worst flu of your life.
And I'm just reading what people are writing.
Oh, it turns your temperature up.
Like, I mean, you're walking around like you're in a sauna all day long.
Yeah.
And it's just terrible.
How much of that is needed?
And it'll come on.
It'll literally kill you because it's that.
So like you're cooking your insides to get like this slightest edge for.
But this is the shit that makes me a rack the way I rack the marketing stuff.
And I'm like, oh, like I want to know part of this.
This is not helpful.
Well, so here's the thing.
So we taught sales training in four people in fitness for a long time.
I did this for a very long time.
I would teach managers and trainers and fitness managers how to sell.
I'm selling DMP.
No, not at all.
Shhh.
Sling that DMP.
Let me tell you, if you're going to take a drug in these way, crystal meth.
You're craft that is unique. It is your teeth too, but that the MP. Let me tell you, if you take a drug and lose weight, crystal meth. You're craft that is unique.
It is your teeth too, but that's different.
So anyway, I would teach them how to sell training,
memberships, whatever.
And every single time when I would talk to sales people,
they'd have no problem with what I was telling them.
When I'd be in trainers in the room,
I'd go to other gyms.
I'd take trainers and then they'd be like,
okay, we're here for our training.
Like cool, I'm gonna teach you guys how to sell training. Everybody was like, eh, I'm not other gyms. I take trainers and then they'd be like, okay, we're here for our training. Like, cool, I'm gonna teach you guys
how to sell training.
Everybody was like, I'm not a salesman.
I'm a trainer.
I don't want to say, it's like listen.
No, you aren't.
You're a salesman.
Well, listen, here's the thing.
And same thing for you, like you have this bad taste.
Sales really is nothing more than effective communication.
Now, your experience with a lot of sales
is what a lot of our experience is with sales is there's a lot of bullshit out there. But at the end of the
day it's about being able to communicate effectively. And the only one of the the only
ways that I can think of to beat the bad information is to sell the good information better.
And so as much as we get turned off by it, we got to get good at it. Otherwise we're
going to lose. You know, we're going to lose. We're going to lose the battle.
This is the only reason I have social media.
Is that it's the exact conversation played back three years ago or something with Doug and Mike.
And they had to explain to me, walk to me like, why?
And I was like, okay, actually, I see the point now.
And that's why I do it.
And it's still like, Jimmy and I get a lot of shit either in front of our face or behind it
because of how active we are.
And then how much stuff we take to put on there.
But that was the basic point.
The study came out,
a handful of years ago that said,
like I think it was on average, seven people.
Like I think on average,
seven people read a scientific study.
So you're like, okay,
how much impact you're really making that?
When you just post studies?
No, just like, like period.
If you do a study, like seven people will read it.
Oh, on average, if you look at all the studies that are out there on average,
that study gets read by like seven people.
Wow, wow, wow.
All the way through.
Yeah.
So you're like, okay, how much impact are you making?
That's got to kind of sting a little bit, right?
So then it's like, okay, here's your option then.
You need to be able to take the responsibility and the leadership to go, you know what?
I'm going to take that science, put it in a way that is understandable
and implementable for everyday people.
I will take that extra time because it is a huge time drain
and put it out there.
And then actually you start get some interaction,
people start to get, so the real information does get through,
but the scientists in our case need to take the time
their responsibility to go that extra step to do that,
or else you're just going to continue to get rounded out
in nonsense.
And if we aren't doing that, who's going to?
Now, there are studies that a lot of people
will refer to and know about, but this is because
the supplement makers and marketers
grab on to one piece of a study that sounds cool
and they're like, fuck, we could sell this.
And then they do a great job of getting it out there
and they're like, hey, what about that study that show
that if I eat, you know, tilapia, that I get this. And then they do a great job of getting it out there and was like, hey, what about that study that showed
that if I eat, you know, tilapia,
that I get this increase in proteins or whatever,
and I'm making shit up, but you get the dress.
Yeah, yeah, like, so such a high percentage
of the times I've been in the media, I've been misquoted.
Like, it's just ridiculous.
I have, like, I'm very stringent about that stuff now.
I'm like, I need to see the final version
before you're getting it clear now,
because so many times, especially with our papers,
like we did a study where we looked,
we're the first people to do,
look at banded deadlifts, right?
So you're doing heavy banded deadlifts versus regular.
And it came out, if I'm remembering it right,
I think the bands were better for power and velocity,
but the non-banded was better for force production.
And then the title was something like, you know,
bands don't work.
I was like, what in the hell?
This is not even remotely close to what we found
or like it was some other nonsense
and there was several of them that kept popping up.
And eventually I just like stopped chasing them down
but I was like, this is not even remotely close
to what we found and I even did like a little email exchange
of them and then the thing that came out
and I'm like, that's not what I said.
That's not what I wrote. You're taking this completely out of context.
It's really, really hard to do that.
And I stopped doing it eventually.
People always ask me, like, do you chase these things down?
I'm like, no, because there's so many hundreds of them out there now.
I'm like, that would be my whole day.
I would just be running around trying to fix all these misquotes and bands.
So I mean, Jimmy had a paper that just took off really big.
He just came out the first-
You mean more than seven people already? So I was a first he did a review article on concurrent training. So you guys
probably saw this paper actually or at least heard of it. But he was the first
reviewer that came out and said actually you know we have this idea that
aerobic exercise actually blocks all of your hypertrophy, like your potential gains.
And he actually was the first one that came out and was like actually like the data
doesn't show that at all.
So there's some context there.
And that took off in people because they're like,
aha, like concurrent training or doing both.
Actually, maybe it doesn't block all of your gains.
So that one took off for him pretty well,
but the rest of our shit, nobody reads it.
Excellent, I want to hear more about that.
I just say, how did you set that up?
It's fine.
I want to hear more about that.
Explain the, that's a Jimmy paper.
You're going to have to get in front of this mic
to walk through that.
Or we'll give us, get the information.
We'll read it up.
Yeah, except we'll read it.
I'd love to read it, read more about that.
Um, yeah, I don't remember exactly what you guys did that,
but yeah, you can, awesome.
You guys can talk to us.
We'll look at it and then we'll put it in the show notes.
Yeah, for sure.
Are there, um, are there any, uh, can you off the top of your head?
Are there any studies you've gone into
where you expected, totally expected one thing? You're like, I'm going to study this, but this is going to happen. And you come out and of your head, are there any studies you've gone into where you expected, totally expected one thing?
You're like, I'm gonna study this, but this is gonna happen.
And you come out and you're like,
what, this is the opposite of what I thought.
All the time.
Oh wow.
Yeah, I mean, that's science.
Like if I knew the answer, we wouldn't do the study.
Yeah.
Right, like there's no point that science is
the fact that you don't know what's gonna happen.
Can you recall any?
Yeah, what's the most recent, like,
well, I didn't have the recent,
but something that you learned that you're tired of.
I'm sharing an opposite of what I thought.
Well, like paradigm shattering is pretty difficult
to do with one study, you know,
because if you find something that's counter-intuitive
what you thought, like the first reaction is like,
oh shit, that we screwed something up.
Yeah, yeah, you gotta do it again.
Like did it get contaminated?
Like did we do this wrong?
Did we miss something or something wrong
and you go back and you call them to the data?
One of the ones that jumped out at us maybe,
well, the one that's jumping out to me, this is a bit of a stretch.
This is quite a while ago, but I wasn't on this paper, but I was in the lab.
When I was a graduate student, we worked on a study with a world record holder in the
100 meter hurdles and I think 60 meter hurdles, something like that.
We wanted to look at fiber type, and so they bi-absede him.
The way that fiber type works is you got slow twitch and fast twitch, right?
Sure.
But it's actually far more complicated.
There's type two A, type two B.
No, so this thing is two B.
Really?
No.
Oh, fuck.
He must have, that's like 30-year-old nonsense.
Oh, shit.
You're so far behind.
Oh, I love that.
No, this is great.
So, oh, you don't have these shit.
Oh, the ass shit.
But what about the idea that slow twitch can adapt
and start acting more like fast twitch and vice versa?
Yeah, yeah, in fact again, Jimmy has done the vast majority of his review article on this one where like it's very clear
You can go from fast to slow and slow to fast
Okay, like that happens in both directions and you have actually pretty extreme plasticity
I go to this a lot but we've seen now does that mean that they change for example?
We know fast twitch muscle fibers have the most
Now does that mean that they change for example, we know fast switch muscle fibers have the most
Prepensity for hypertrophy to have the biggest potential for growth if they start if you get slow twitches start behaving like fast I don't know if that's necessarily fair. Was that true? Yeah, I don't think it's necessarily true either really and they're not
I'm blowing my mind today dude the fast switch fibers aren't necessarily always bigger
Iler I think you're actually showing pretty clearly they're usually about the same
Depending on how you try.
You guys gonna do a whole episode
on just like this with Nimmie.
Yeah, it's like me.
Cause yeah, he's gonna just
ruin you the whole day.
Like all this shit.
Wow, this is fantastic.
Yeah, this is what he really does.
He's shaking his head.
No, these are smart guys I could tell.
Yeah.
You just being nice.
No.
Then there are a lot of inherent characteristics.
So the fibers, for example,
a slow twitch fiber can get faster.
It can take on faster trooperies.
It can also change to BA fast twitch fiber.
Those are not common, in fact, that happens pretty regularly.
And the opposite.
There was a paper that came out a year ago
that showed high fat, high sugar,
high fat, high carbohydrate diet can change fiber type.
Wow.
And it was very troll troll can counteract that.
And we've actually just finished a couple of things.
So, where's the air troll is what they have
and they find in red wine?
Yeah, but is it high-ass doses though,
or is it just a case of wine?
Okay, so it's not like, I'm gonna take the supplement.
It's completely garbage.
Well, yeah, you would have to,
if you're using that excuse to drink wine
and you talk that every night, like.
They think it can happen.
No.
Okay, good.
I'm glad you said that.
Yeah.
So, it's very, very, very plastic.
In fact, that's what Jimmy and I have done more than about anybody.
This just makes this case for, if you look at the data, in fact, there was one study that
came out looking at carbohydrate, sorry, CO2 concentration, carbon dioxide concentrations
altered fiber type.
So you have a lot of mechanisms.
They're very, very, very plastic.
The, we just finished a 10-day study where you basically put one leg up on a cast basically for 10 days and we looked at the
soleus and it looks like nothing really shook there. But what we see happen is a little
as days sometimes a week. What's the shortest one year aware of and maybe like bed rest study?
Like two weeks maybe? Yeah, a little over two weeks, fiber type changed with laying in bed for two
weeks. What does that change? What does that change look like from, fiber type changed with laying in bed for two weeks.
What does that change look like from fast to slow because you're in bed?
Slow to fast.
Slow to fast.
Same thing with aging.
Well, sorry, the opposite.
That's your body trying to adapt and become efficient even though you're trying to
send it an opposite signal then, right?
But that's fucking fascinating.
Wow.
That's amazing.
Metabolically conservative as well, energy wise.
And then when you get, so there's a faster end,
so you have one in two A,
one being slow, two A being fast,
and two X are mega fast,
but we don't ever find two X until like you're
on deathbed kind of thing,
or you haven't literally have not had
a muscle activated for a decade.
Which is spinal cord injury.
Which means if you're trying to activate those,
you're actually strong.
And if you have any, as soon as you do anything they're gone like they go
away they convert away now how do you look at them and determine I mean this is
probably a complicated question but is it okay now we take a biopsy so we take a
muscle sample we take it out and we literally you can check either of our
Instagrams like we post videos this all the time like you go into the
microscope with the tweezer and you just pull them out one by one
And then you take each one run it through little experiment and put it under his laser and measure it
Is it oh wow fascinating? Yeah, now what about let's talk about
He actually sorry like don't forget your question. Oh, yeah, but he has he has a really cool thing
He's building right now where you he's a tiny tiny tiny force transduer, and you can lay the muscle fiber in this little tiny dish,
tie one end with like a rope,
and put the other end of the four-strand stucer,
and measure exactly how much power velocity
the individual fiber is in.
The little fiber?
Yeah.
So Jimmy's done how many of those you think you've done
in your life?
That's super cool.
Several thousand of those probably are in his life.
Wow.
Now there's a lot of variables there though, right?
Because the CNS might not be firing at the same, you know,
or more.
Yeah, well, the whole point we do with that way is to take out the central nervous system
to take out connected tissue.
Just muscle.
Just look at the muscle.
Yeah.
Good.
Wow, that's fascinating.
Wow.
So let's talk about this for a second.
Every, we talk about muscle hypertrophy.
That term is actually people should understand.
Muscle fibers grow.
That's what happened to lift weights.
That's what we're looking for.
What about hyperplasia?
Do we have evidence of this? Because I know it's been debated. I know we've seen evidence of
it in animals, but maybe not in humans or what's the deal with that? And hyperplasia, by the way,
is you can explain it. Well, it's so the more probably the more correct term is fibers splitting,
and the where you'd have one muscle fiber and it was split and become two muscle fibers.
So it depends on who you ask here.
Jimmy and I have this secret picture that he got.
He sent me one day.
And it pretty sure we see muscle fiber splitting.
But for various reasons, we were able to heap it and save it.
So we can't do muscle with it.
And our friend Kevin at Kentucky
dispublished a favorite recently showing fiber type
splitting in this sort of weird animal model.
So I'd put it this way, the summarize, I guess.
I have no doubt in my mind that happens in humans
and normal humans, no doubt at all.
The complicated question is, what takes,
how it does, it takes years of training to do so,
it doesn't happen in probably four weeks of training.
Either it has to have a huge overload, it has to be a training stimulus for a
very, very long time is probably what's happening.
And probably certain humans and bodies probably do it better than others.
Well, I mean, I just, I would speculate to think we see this example in some
of these like crazy bodybuilders.
Well, so that's the, that's the data we have on the bodybuilders.
Their fibers are actually really small
This have a lot more. Yes, you know, we don't have see we don't biopsy them when they're 10 and now it's hard to know
But it's pretty good evidence to suggest it's probably happening and and again, Jimmy you can hop on this one
But the the vast majority of the thinking here is there is data out on acknowledged anabolic steroid users
And it looks like they have a lot.
And Jimmy actually, his specialty is the mild nuclei.
So the mild nuclei are what control your DNA
until your muscle, the grow, shrink, dyno, repair.
And an anabolic steroid used testosterone
exogenous specifically can increase that number,
which is what controls how much you hypertrophy.
So the real thing that determines
how much your fiber grows is how many nuclei you have
because the nuclei have a certain domain space.
So they have to do with satellite cells
or is this within?
Yes, satellite cells will turn into the nuclei.
Okay, okay.
And so that all influences it.
And that's really one of the things
thought to be the real regulator of hypertrophy.
Yeah, because so, you know, bigger muscle fibers
is great, but then the atrophy, the theory goes, if you get hyperplasia and you have more muscle fibers
and you stop exercising, you don't lose those muscle fibers.
They may just atrophy, or at least that's how it's sold.
I mean, this is, you're, you're, this is Jimmy's dissertation.
So this is his whole line of research is muscle memory.
So what happens retrain, detrain, why is it easier to connect?
Why is it so fast to come back to second place?
Well, don't you, don't you just all think that,
I mean again, we're speculating again,
but when I look at a body builder who hasn't,
you know, fallen off after he's done 20 years of body building,
like they just have a weird, a different look to them.
They don't look like somebody who's at your feet
all the way down to somebody who doesn't have a lot of muscle.
They have this thing.
I would bet my career that if you trained hard like that
and did downbell storage for 20 years,
you're gonna go through fiber splitting.
It's gonna be super difficult.
Actually, I don't think it'd be that difficult to test
if you had some bonding.
It'd be kind of expensive, but not that difficult.
I don't know how would you get approval for that.
Hey, we're gonna take these subjects
and put them on high doses of antibiotics.
Well, if they choose to do it,
she just do it retroactively, say,
hey, if Amy, you were doing this and rolling my study.
Oh, yeah, retroactive, yeah. Pro, you could do pro-actives, say, hey, if Amy were doing this and rolling my study. Oh, yeah, retroactive, yeah.
No, pro, you could do pro-actives, say, hey, if you're planning on doing this, let me know.
I'm gonna collect your biopsy.
I'm wondering if how much growth hormone plays an influence, because growth hormone causes
everything, or most things to grow, and if that would promote more.
Yeah, but growth hormone is not on a ballroom.
So you have to be careful there.
But does it change the environment to make things stop?
It certainly is related with IGF1 and things like that, insulin is be careful there. But does it change the environment to make things that cause the problem?
It certainly is related with IGF1 and things like that
in Sloan is a relationship there.
But the exact role of growth hormone
in the antibiotic process, especially
in endogenous concentrations is really difficult to get.
Now we actually have a paper on that.
We publish like the false understanding of growth hormone
and what it doesn't actually do.
It's not an antibiotic steroid. It's not an anabolic steroid.
It's entirely different type of steroid.
So there's not to say there's no relationship there, especially with body composition.
It activates fat.
It's a metabolic hormone for more than anything.
Well, I know bodybuilders will say growth hormone doesn't do anything unless you take it
with a lot of testosterone.
Complementary with testosterone.
And insulin.
They'll play with insulin with it. Right. So there's a relationship there, but it didn a lot of testosterone. complimentary with testosterone. And insulin, they'll play with insulin with it.
Right, so there's a relationship there,
but it didn't itself, I don't think there's any evidence
to suggest it would activate satellite cell.
I don't think so.
That doesn't, maybe just hasn't been done yet.
But it doesn't mean it doesn't do anything.
It just doesn't do that.
Okay, so we get,
ask this question all the time.
We have a pretty solid stance on it,
but I want to ask your opinion on. I hope I disagree with it so much. Yeah, so fun pretty solid stance on it, but I wanna ask your opinion on...
I hope I disagree with it so much.
Yeah, I'm gonna be so fun.
That's so hot opinion.
I don't know, but...
I wanna argue with you guys so bad right now.
I just wanna have some spice here.
I'm just so boring all the time.
I know, so...
Who did you want?
Who did you vote for in the last election?
Let's talk about that one.
Yeah, yeah, let's go there.
Don't touch that.
We're in California, bro.
Yeah, don't touch that.
So what I was gonna ask you is your opinion
on these new class of drugs that are coming out,
selective, androgen receptor modus.
So arms.
Yeah.
What is your opinion on them so far?
Have you looked into them enough to even have one?
I don't even have a remotely educated opinion on it.
Okay.
So I can't speak.
Damn it.
I like you to speculate on things you're not that.
Yeah.
You want to get some debate and have some fun on the wall. We got to talk some shit about stuff
We don't know like any true person on a podcast the majority what you're talking about is supposed to be things
You don't know about exactly this is why we
We give relationship if I
Ended you talk about
Spirituality all the shit that we don't know about we're experts. I don't know
Hey about that. Yeah, we just we tell people basically like fucking who knows and why would you mess with anything? You don't know what Yeah, we just, we tell people basically like, fucking, who knows, and why would you mess with anything?
You don't know what to, like, take testosterone
if you take anything, because at least you're not a big fan.
Yeah, like that works.
Yeah, pretty damn well.
We've seen that, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I go back to like the dime on a dollar
and this one, like, I don't deal with that
because of Aspen, Jordy, people that I work with
don't have that option, right?
Because they're all under usada or water.
So, like, they help me at all?
And me personally, with my website and the people I deal with,
those are not the conversations I want to have.
I want to have the conversations more that are like,
again, are you having a decent relationship with your own self here
and why are you exercising and are you exercising?
Are you sleeping? Let's get that shit.
And then when you get to that level,
go hire somebody else.
I don't wanna do those things.
So let's talk.
Not that I'm against them.
Ethically, I'm not against it at all.
I think that's actually cool shit.
I don't wanna spend time on that.
We agree a lot on this because we have a very similar
point of view.
And so I would like to hear,
and you probably outlined this in your book,
what are the big rocks that you, like when someone asks a question, like this stupid
anabolic window question or something that's, you know, oh, should I have 30 or 50 grams
of carbs before my workout to maximize, you know what I'm saying?
Before all of that bullshit, what are you telling people?
Like, okay, give me.
It just depends on, you know, like, it depends on why they're coming to me.
So if it's a professional athlete versus, you athlete versus my mom asking for advice or something,
these are gonna be entirely different.
Well, let's talk about build muscle or lose fat
since that's a majority of average guy,
average male or female wants to either build muscle
or both.
Most people wanna have a little more muscle
loose in the body.
So what I actually do is a little bit different
and you probably, I think I explained this
on the Rogan's podcast.
I try to do my best to communicate to that
person in a way that they like to be communicated to. And I
think this is one of the things that makes high level
coaches very successful. If you look at guys like Brett
Bartholomew, and like he spends a tremendous amount of time
doing things like this, and I think it's very good.
I just bought his book. Yeah, it's solid, right?
I haven't read it yet. I'm gonna start reading conscious
coaching, right? Like he could have done a little bit better job
copy editing, but, you know.
That's it.
Just take some time.
No, it's a great book.
But he takes the responsibility saying,
like, that's my job instead of saying,
like, this is my way of the highway,
this is how I run my ship,
like, get on and get off.
He goes, how do you like your ship run?
Okay, well then, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll,
run the ship that way.
And so one of the ways I do this with nutrition, especially is I like to think about people
in three categories. I call them either a chef, a baker or a cook.
And do you know the difference between cooking and baking?
No, tell me.
Nobody knows. I know you know because you saw the episode.
We get baked sometimes.
But I don't remember.
Wrong kind of guys. We are in California.
Yeah.
Tell us cooking baggy. Tell me the difference between cooking and baking.
So it's chemistry, right?
So if you bake something, it is very clear instructions, very clear list, you cannot deviate.
Like you can't be like, oh, is that quarter table spoon or a teaspoon?
Okay, good point.
Right.
Cooking your kind of little dab of this, try a little bit of that.
Exactly, right?
So you get the analogy.
And so the first thing I try to do whether I physically ask that question or if I just
do something to get to that answer is I try to figure out like, well, is this
person a cook or a baker? Do you want to know exactly till timing, order, volumes, or do
you want just some ideas and some concepts to work with? And then I'm going to have that
discussion based on that, those parameters. So for example, when somebody goes, some people
that are OCD, right? It's like, oh my gosh, if they don't know like my wife,
when we first started, I started working
with her nutrition on her, it was like, hold on,
I get a text like you didn't specify how many alms,
was it 11 alms or was it 12?
Like I need to know, is this, what do you mean by handful?
Your hand my hands bigger than your, what?
Could you, what?
She's absolutely a baker.
Like she wants exact detail and she gets anxiety
when she doesn't have that detail which
causes her problems, right? And she's not happy, she's not comfortable, she's not sleeping, she's
losing confidence, all these problems happen in the program and she doesn't have tremendous detail.
I am much more of a cook. I'm like, you give me that much detail, I get anxiety, I'm not bringing
a scale with me at all times, I'm not going to weigh how many ounces of cream when they're like,
I hate that, you give me concepts and ideas, and I wanna figure out and feel things
and I wanna match progress to sensation, right?
So first thing I do is try to put them
in a position where they succeed.
And then for the most part,
I like John Barardi's model, his three-step approach,
which is step number one, add things,
like fixed deficiencies.
Oh, you're not eating enough water,
you're not getting enough fiber, you're not getting enough fiber,
we're not getting enough.
And so the first step of the diet is adding a bunch of shit.
Oh, I like that.
That's what Adam talks about that all the time.
Right, and look what happens to the relationship,
like that you came to me to be on a diet
and you just gave me a bunch of extra shit I get to eat.
I trip people out every single time I do that.
Look at their diet for a week
and they go, okay, now I want you to add this into your diet.
We're not getting, you know, oh god it's-
Right, it's amazing, right?
And then all of a sudden they feel better
and all these things get better
and they're much more excited to do a diet
when they're like, I get it,
like you're making me feel way better.
This is amazing.
Whatever the hell you want to do now, I'll do it.
A man.
So step two is take stuff away, reduce things
and step three is fine tuning supplements,
I all that stuff.
But usually honestly, by the time you get to step three,
they're gone.
Which is great.
Like get it. You don't need to take off with gone. Which is great. Like, they get it.
You don't need to take off with it, which is ideal from that perspective, right? I like that.
That's great.
The cooker or a big analogy.
So here's the fun part.
What's a chef?
Dude, like the master then, like the person who teaches all the, but they know when to bake and when to cook.
And they can, they can break the rules of baking.
I understand the chemistry so much, I can break that rule.
But here's the problem.
Everybody wants to step in day one and be a chef.
I want to know my chef.
Takes years of cooking and baking before your chef.
Exactly, right?
Years.
It's quite a great analogy.
So if you walk in trying to be a chef
and you're worried about mixing your timing of your
newtropic and everything lined up with the...
Now you're trying to be a chef
and this is your first and this is day one in sous chef school and you're gonna learn how to cut
bell peppers first. So stealing. Spend a year. So stealing this analogy. And then go. Yeah.
Every we want every other episode. Yeah. Yeah. And then it'll slowly.
Yeah. What? Really? Two one before. Knowledge. We just came up with an analogy.
Some doctor. Oh, there goes Andy talking about my analogy. Yeah.
There's a whole episode of our podcast about that too.
Oh, yeah.
It's a go fuck yourself if you're sick, too.
Kind of for eight months.
Yeah.
That's how I like it.
And so the thing is that analogy extends to the rest of your life, too.
And what I mean by that is, like when it comes to nutrition, I am absolutely a cook.
Like I hate all that kind of detail, but in science, I'm a massive baker.
And when I give public talks, I'm a baker.
I want complete creative control.
Every single, with Jimmy and I, I will spend hours going over the final word in the document.
I want tremendous detail on those things.
When it comes to my financing, I'm like, I'm a cook, just like, can I just give somebody
else to do it?
I don't want detail there.
But when it comes to my workouts, I am now back in just like, can I just give somebody else to do it? Like, I don't want detail there, but when it comes to my workouts,
like, I am now back in Baker mode,
because this is like what I do,
so I'm passionate about it.
We've been doing this our whole life, right?
So I think it's, it's, it's fine to acknowledge,
like, even if you're not, it's not a good or bad,
like, these are not, these are features, not bugs, right?
So don't, if you're like, thinking,
I guess it's better to be a baker,
it's better to be, no, it's not,
none of these are better.
It's just, put yourself in a position to succeed.
And don't give yourself unrealistic expectations.
Understand yourself.
Yeah.
And if you don't try, and I'll switch back and forth,
like one of the several of my athletes,
I will talk to them like cooks most of the time.
But then when something's going wrong,
they want that extra little level of detail.
Now I switch into Bakering Up mode.
And I might have one conversation and we'll go into Bakering Up mode for two or three weeks.
We're weighing, we're cutting everything, we're titering stuff out.
Fix the problem. Okay. Cool. Now let's retract.
And I generally feel when someone starts a nutrition program, start them off like a cook,
give them very few rules, a couple of things, get them early success.
They're probably then going to gravitate into baking for a little bit, but cooking is far more sustainable for
most of us.
Oh yeah, cooking is, really you become more intuitive with things I think, or at least when
you're a chef, but you're absolutely right because this is true with training too, like
people will see the latest technique that this athlete did where he's sprinting with
a parachute and he ran this particular angle for this time did where he's sprinting with a parachute and
he ran this particular angle for this time and oh he's the fastest guy in the world, that's
what I'm going to do.
And it's like no, he didn't do that for the majority of the time he trained.
That's what he does now because he's now learned how to become that chef.
Yeah, exactly.
And you can flip back and forth between those things like, so for example, if you're sustainability-wise,
I think cooking is a better approach, but then if you've got a competition in six weeks,
or you've got a bake.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, now it's going to bake remote,
because now we've crunched down details.
We've really tight here, and we're not wondering
why we're not hitting our goal,
because we know like, hey, we're 28 grams of carbs too high.
We've got to bring that down by 15 grams.
We're in a lifestyle that's not going to fucking matter.
But you're trying to get on stage,
or you're trying to compete with something,
you're trying to make weight, that detail matters.
It's just not sustainable for most of us for long periods of time.
So now we're receiving go great job baking, you dialed it in, you got real good, we got
there.
Now let's take it back a little bit and let's make nutrition, not control so much of our
lives.
And we're just going to hit these same concepts and the diet might not change hardly at
all between those.
But now we've just changed the energy that we're putting into it and the way that we're
approaching it.
So we can switch back and forth between those things.
Excellent. That's excellent analogy. I love that. That's beautiful. So looking forward,
what excites you? What do you see the new frontier looking like when it comes to training?
Well, probably the thing I'm most excited about right now are like threefold. Number one,
the stuff Jimmy and I are working on. And Irene, I mentioned her a little bit.
She's doing some really cool studies.
We're trying to collect biopsies from as many people as we can
with the American Open, because that's in Anaheim,
which is like five miles from my lab.
That was awesome.
No one's actually ever studied muscle
from any elite's speed or power guy.
Or girl.
So we're really excited to start looking at female
and Irene's doing some really crazy stuff
with that post-exercise animal. Like, when window stuff. We want to start doing that in women because we can we just know nothing about
physiology and muscle of women
So that's those those two are pretty exciting and then my website that I'm about to like officially sort of launch
Which is the thing that I'm probably most passionate about
Which is just a website where I'm taking
all of my university lectures, all this type of stuff that I've created and just throwing
it up all in there and it's totally free.
That's all.
I can't even have a question.
There's no newsletters, there's no membership, it's just like straight up free.
Being that you're kind of like a cook probably most of the time with your food, supplementation,
things like that, what are some things, whether it be supplementation or hacks that you utilize?
I know that you probably don't do anything religiously because you probably don't believe
in that and I agree.
What are some of the things that you do find do help you?
Well, honestly, this is going to be the least sexy part because it's generally the basic
stuff.
With the athletes and stuff, generally it is creatine, like creatine's
very, very effective. For a lot of things, Jimmy just came out with the paper actually,
this week, this came out, looking at the cognitive benefits of creatine's documentation.
Especially with vegans. Vegans have the biggest IQ boost with it, probably because they...
This is, yeah, this is all on his paper, right? Like is came out. It's like yeah like this isn't my problem So the creatine is one of my go-to ones alright
um
If they have depending on how they eat a increasing variety of food
Is often a real problem
Sustainably because they get these habits of like this work last time
I'm gonna do this and keep eating this for 12 years
All right, probably not a great thing um proteinin powder is depending on what they're doing,
our carbohydrate supplements, beta-alany, caffeine,
like the very standard ones are generally,
I generally don't feel like I have to go much
beyond the very, very basic stuff.
Not to say we don't, because we will,
but those are when the situation really demands it
and we're searching for answers,
we're gonna go looking for things like that.
But if I don't feel like we have to answer that question, I mean, I've used everything from vitamin C
to iron, to vitamin D, like anything I'll use if the blood work or some other markers coming back,
and this is the problem, zinc, like all of it, I'm used,
echinasia, like you name it, like I've tried it if a situation came up.
Right, right. I mean, I use vitamin, I have psoriasis, so I use vitamin D for that purpose, you know,
for the most part, I think we're the same way as far as how we use.
So, like, that's a good one too, because like, I don't know if you saw Graham close his
new paper on vitamin D, but it's like, it turns out we've been measuring that in the lab
wrong.
Oh, wow.
So now we need to rethink all of vitamin D.
Like you can get false, like, like the vast majority of the field, all the science, all
the blood behind it is all now, like, looks like we measured the wrong thing entirely.
You know what's interesting about this is,
that's not to say doesn't help your psoriasis,
but like, you know, it's working.
Well, it could be, it's working.
Well, it could also mean that they measure you
in the normal level, but you're not necessarily
getting it all out, you don't know.
Are they opposite?
And this is why, this is one of the mistakes,
I think, Western medicine may,
but it's starting to change is where they only look at numbers and a lot of times ignore symptoms.
So it's like, well, I know you have all the symptoms of low testosterone, but your testosterone
numbers look normal.
So it's not your testosterone when it could be, you know, it could be receptor down regulation.
It could be all kinds of things.
So it's important to look at.
So I'll give you a good vitamin D example.
I did some blood work maybe a year ago
or something came back low vitamin D, like all of us have, right?
Well, first of all, it's really difficult to figure out
what that even means because low relative to what?
Like where are they getting these standardized numbers from?
They're not good places, by the way.
So young, healthy fit guys like us,
I don't know where we're supposed to be.
I don't know what a normal number is,
but it came back close.
So I could have supplemented with vitamin D.
Instead, I chose like, well, where are we supposed to give vitamin D from?
This, to me, is a signal that my lifestyle is not appropriate. I need to make a lifestyle change. Rather than fix the blood marker, the symptom,
let's fix the lifestyle. I live in Southern California, and I have low vitamin D.
Like that's a shame on you. Yeah, yeah, right. Right, so. But here's why I love telling the story
because the vitamin D wasn't the problem.
I didn't feel tired.
It wasn't having a hard time growing muscle mass
or having any of these problems.
I felt fine, but I used that as a way of going,
okay, I need to get outside more.
So I started going outside and taking more of my calls
outside and walking my dogs,
and I've got two shepherd mixes.
And if you know anything about dogs,
like they are very, very smart
and they require a shit ton of energy.
I don't have the time.
They need two, three hours of exercise every day
to not tear up my house.
So they started getting an extra walk of an hour or so a day.
So I fixed my vitamin D. Great.
The dogs also started getting more exercise,
which meant I have to spend less time
specifically taking time out of my day to exercise them,
which meant less shit went wrong in my house,
which meant more free time for my wife and I,
which meant we got to talk more,
we got to spend more time, which is always a problem
in our relationship, right?
Oh, and then also, do you know how many ideas
and problems I solved because I was out walking for an hour?
How many more additional conversations,
all these other things happen that would have never happened
if I would have just taken vitamin D.
And that's why I think like supplements are good
in a case where I need a quick fix for something
or other here, but the lifestyle change is where it needs
to get to because all these fringe benefits
that came from fixing the lifestyle,
that's really what happened.
This is something they talk about in economics all the time.
Well, they'll say, oh, we passed this policy, look at these jobs that we gain.
And people are like, well, we don't know how many we would have gained without that
policy. For sure.
Or we don't know all of the unintended consequences.
Or we don't know, you know, what you could have happened because of the new
process. And just like you're, you're, you're explaining right now, I mean,
that's a brilliant way of putting it.
And I hope it makes sense to people, or at least it inspires people a little bit
when they're trying to solve their health problems.
No, it's the exact same way that I actually,
I remember when Sal was the one who actually
shared the Harvard study with me
of the correlation that was found between
everybody that had psoriasis,
and it was like 90% had a vitamin D deficiency.
So I thought, well, fuck, I've never supplemented,
let me try that. And I thought, that's crazy to know and said that to me. And D deficiency. So I thought, well, fuck, I've never supplemented. Let me try that.
And I thought, that's crazy to know and said that to me.
And there was something that I ever remember
very, very clearly.
I grew up on the lake, outdoors, sports, everything.
I was outside to the point where my skin complexion
is completely different than what it was when I was a child.
I was like dark, dark, all of a sudden.
You were so much more handsome than that.
Yeah, it was definitely. And now that's why you like, dark, dark, all those are kids. You were so much more handsome than that. Yeah, it was, definitely.
Or now that's why you're reading
your last song, right?
That's right.
Then I, right around 20, I get into the gym,
the gym, fitness industry,
and I'm working in a gym, you know, eight to 10 hours
from morning, I'm there by six, seven in the morning
when the sun's barely coming up,
and I don't see sun all day.
Right around 24, 25 years old,
all sun, psoriasis comes up in my life. Never had it before. Didn't even know what
the fuck it was when it came on and then been battling it my whole life. No clue
that it could be connected to vitamin D sunlight or any of those things.
I had a really bad realization maybe three years ago because your first
couple of years when you get a professor job like it's pretty intense in
terms of workload and I was like I'm living in Southern California. I was single and I'm not seeing the sun.
Because I'm in my office before the sun come up and I'm there until the sun goes down.
And I'm like, it was like a crazy stat like three months and I had not seen the sun.
And I was like, oh my god, like this is not this is not a good thing.
But in the that's a lot that another story too is the reason I wrote the book.
I'm like, man, we've got to figure out,
these should be signs of fixing lifestyle.
And getting back to physiology,
that's a really interesting way of fixing itself when you let it.
You just get out of its way.
Like, listen to what it's telling you.
It's not telling you to take a vitamin D stuff.
Look at the backlash we had on fish oil.
Oh yeah.
It's like, oh, take 28,000-8 grams a day.
No, it's like, maybe we shouldn't have been doing that.
That might be inflammatory.
Yeah.
It's like people warning blue blockers at night
because they're trying to stop the blue light when it's like,
dude, just take a turn off your electronics.
Maybe that.
Maybe you need to turn off your electronics first.
Yeah.
And I want it before you go to bed.
Yeah, exactly.
And whatever.
Right, those are classic examples of things
that blue blocker great, but let's improve the last time.
And so the Crate team example, especially for vegans
and boosting their IQ, I use that example
for vegans all the time to tell them like,
they see, like you can measure IQ boost with vegans
for sure, not always necessarily with omnivores,
what do you think that tells you about your diet?
That you may be lacking something
because you're not eating something
that we may be we need.
Right, and the 12 of a bunch of other parts.
Oh yeah, other stuff too.
Crateeans in interesting one though too,
because now they're finding it's got interesting impact
on the lighty cells, I think of the testicles.
Oh, lighty cells, yeah.
Yeah, and it may have seen some interesting effects
on Androgen receptor density and stuff like that.
Pretty cool, pretty cool stuff.
We've done some work on beta adjunctive receptors
I don't think we've ever done a relation to creatine
But we did that with a short term overtraining
So this is like 10 straight days of doing 10 sets of one of a hundred percent of your max back squat
And if you didn't get a successful lift like it didn't count. So you just keep okay
So you're definitely on the train yeah short-term you do it like 10 straight days or 14 straight days and then you look at beta adrenergic receptors.
We just published a couple of these studies recently.
I'm looking at how those density go way down
in the shortest those 10 days, which is super fun.
Wow, what does it mean when that density goes down?
So then you're gonna be far less sensitive
than the anabolic signal, right?
Because that's what testosterone is gonna bind to in the cell
and that's gonna communicate then the nucleus. So that goes way down. And that's what testosterone is going to bind to in the cell and that's going to communicate then the nucleus.
So that goes way down.
And that's how plastic your body is.
Muscle, it's everything you do matters.
So this is similar to what we call the recovery trap, right?
Where someone's been hammering themselves so hard for so long and they just can't.
Let's go in and out and out, recover, hammer, recover hammer, when they're not building.
They're just recovering.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just getting that damage, just getting soaring and getting better. getting better. Well fuck man love having you on the show brother.
It's fun. It's starting to get you right up you're coming over here all the time from now on
whenever you're listening every time you're up here I want you to message one of us and we'll
get you on the show we could do guests we could have a like you help you be great for Q&A we trust
you to answer questions. Oh you I think you guys want that.
And we're cool. We invite.
And we got the whole facility here.
You know, you talked about the business side.
If you need help creating media, whatever.
We I love that side. So I got you.
That's what we do, man.
I just want to show up my shirt off looking like that guy.
You guys do the rest.
Who's that? That's Sergio Olivia.
And you got to keep your shirt off.
You have to go out in the son of it more of there.
One of the few guys to be Arnold Schwarzenegger
in bodybuilding and then Arnold beat him ever since.
A bunch of times.
A bunch of times, yeah.
He shouldn't of though.
He should have beat Arnold every single time.
You have it, those pecs, man.
How do you say no to those Arnold pecs?
I ain't, that's tough to walk away with.
Powerful.
Well, excellent brother, check it out.
Go to YouTube, subscribe to MindPumpTV.
There's a new video every single day.
Check out the one we posted today.
It's gonna blow your mind.
Also, mindpumpmedia.com, that's our website.
Go on there, register for 30 days of coaching.
It's available for free.
Thank you for listening to Mind Pump.
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