Hey everyone, welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host Peter Atia, this podcast, my website and My Weekly Newsletter, all focus on the goal of translating, the science of longevity into something, accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness. And we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoyed
This podcast, we created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you want to take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are or if you want to learn more now, head over to Peter attea, m.com forward, slash subscribe. Now without further delay, here's today's episode, my guest this week is Lane Norton, Lane was a previous guest on episode, 163 back in May of twenty Twenty-One and then 2005 back.
It may of 2022 in both of those discussions, we were never able to fully get through the content we wanted. And we knew we were going to have to sit down and do this again. So, here we are on to round 3. And this episode we talk about Lanes training and work as a powerlifter, this is in large part because at the time, we recorded this Lane was in the final weeks of training for the World Masters powerlifting Championship. We focus the conversation around what non powerlifters can learn about muscle strength and the principles to get stronger in the weight room. Even if they, of course,
I have no desire to ever compete in a powerlifting meet themselves. We also get into a much deeper dive around creatine, which we only lightly touched on in a previous podcast, we talked about Fitness and Nutrition experts on social media. And the importance of being able to change your mind, talk a lot about nutrition and this includes the three areas of nutrition that lane has changed his mind about overtime. We also discuss some nuances around time, restricted feeding, tracking calories, and more. Now, just a way of quick background Lane is a bodybuilding figure and physique coach.
Addition to being a natural Pro bodybuilder and professional power lifter, and though, we didn't know it at the time of this recording. We now know it, as I make, this intro Lane has very recently 1D 2022, Masters World powerlifting championship in October, in a drug-free tested division. So, without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lane Norton. Well, lean back for another round of this. But this time we finally get to do it.
Person.
I'm looking forward to this, this will be, I said, be a little bit
different. So let's talk about your training. Because right now, you are training for worlds, in powerlifting. We had a great chance to kind of catch up on some of your training yesterday. I probably won't get into as much detail as you and I got into last night because that might be more detail than the average non nerd is interested in, but maybe just briefly kind of explain the sport of powerlifting. There are three lifts how it works and then I want to talk about kind of how your training for that and some of the challenges
that pile of thing is very basic sport, like you
The surrealists, the squat, the bench, press the deadlift and they go in that order. You get three attempts on each and they're Progressive. So for example, once you put in an attempt like let's say you put in a squat attempt of 550 pounds for your opener. If you miss it, you can't go down. So usually the way people do it is first attempt is a pretty conservative. Wait, kind of like a last warm-up. Second attempt is getting close to something that's pretty reasonable. Like, our PE 9.
Nine and a half and then your last one. You're hoping to get kind of your true maximum. Basically highest total wins
between the three different lifts
correct. So at Worlds, they will give medals for individual lifts, they'll be a gold silver and bronze for Squad gold, silver bronze for bench press and gold silver bronze for deadlift and then they'll be those metals. Also, for the overall and the overall is just the summation of the total of the number of lists you
hit. And when you do your three squat, three bench, three data.
Bring them in that order or you
going. So it's you do all three squats, go, then all three bench press than all three
deadlift, typically, how much time in between each
attempt? It can really depend the last time I did worlds in 2015, that was a very, very fast meet. So in our flight there was only 11 people. So meaning the person who has the lightest squat will go first up to the heaviest Squad, and then those will continue to cycle through same thing for bench-pressing. Then we're dead lifts and the whole meet took over just
Just over two hours, but I've been in meats that have taken as long as three and a half. So it really just depends on your flight how quickly the
spotters. And, but if I'm doing the math, that means you might only have 15 minutes between
lifts. Usually you'll get about at least 30 because the way they run it is there's no real breaks for people who are spectating. So it'll have two flights going on same time. So what will happen is we'll have an a flight and be flight.
We sometimes I have see flights as well if it's a really, really packed meat like Nationals. But at Worlds, it's usually just an A, and A B flight and they just separate those based on opening squats and usually that the flight will have the top lifters in it. So you have some time while the other folks are lifting, your typically warming up getting ready. And then once for example, the squats are finished, a flight will start for bench and then if you're in be flight you can have time to warm up.
So what are you doing between? So let's just say,
Between lift one and two lifts, one shouldn't have been that stressful if you did it. Correctly is what you eat, matter much, are you getting any tissue work? Like what do you need to do it? Let's just say, you have 30 minutes between those attempts? What do you need to do to maximize your
odds? Usually between the lifts themselves that between Squat and bench press will have 30 to 60 Minutes depending on how quickly things are going.
But what about between the squat attempts like
between a so between the actual attempts themselves? I mean all
Drink a water. I might throw some candy and or something like that really quickly, if I feel like I need it, but for the most part, I'm just mentally trying to get myself in the right Zone and it is a little bit tricky because you can't keep yourself at that really high level of arousal the entire time because you're just wear out really quickly. So for me the trick is bringing that arousal down for about you know, five minutes or so. So that I can relax just enough and then start to focus back up.
And it's almost like, it's like a wave your kind of letting yourself come down. And then when the time is, right, and really timing is a big thing in this, because once the bar is loaded, they call, bar is loaded. You'll have one minute to get the down command for squat, or bench press or whatever it is. There can be mistakes where maybe you come out and you forgot your belt or something happens. So I really try to make it to where when they say bar is loaded, I get out there very quickly. So that if there is anything wrong,
Long. I can address it and have time. So really timing it and saying, okay, how many people were in front of me? How long do I need to amp up? Usually, for me, I like to have about two or three minutes to really get very aroused and very amped up and so just trying to time that correctly is kind of tough. But like I said, for the first five minutes afterwards, I kind of let myself come down, but I never liked truly relax. I'm still like got my music on. I'm still thinking about what I've got to do, but I'm not like, really hyper focusing.
And then as it starts to come into the last five minutes for the lift, I'm putting whatever I need on to focus myself, mental imagery, visualization. And then by the end, I'm even doing like, breathwork. I want my heart rate to be about 160 170 by the time I go out to hit my left like I want to be very amped,
I was going to ask you what your heart rate got to. I would imagine your blood glucose is probably about 160 as well probably I've never measured as just have had a glucose output at the
max. Your stress hormones are going to be high.
Hi. It's really interesting. I was his little bit off topic, but I was listening to a sports psychologist, talk about how the differences between excitement and anxiety and anxiousness are almost you can almost pick them out. It's just your perception. And I remembered when I played baseball in high school, I would come up to the plate with the thought process of don't strike out. You don't want to look stupid, just put the ball in play. It wasn't the process of. I'm gonna drive these runs in. I'm going to do XYZ.
And I was watching an episode of The Ultimate Fighter probably 13, 14 years ago is where Matt Serra versus Matt Hughes. And one of the fighters was vomiting before a match, because he was so nervous. And he was over the bucket going. I can't do this anymore. I hate the way. This feels, I can't do this and Matt Serra just looked at him and said, what are you talking about, man? That's the feeling of being alive. You care about something so much that your body is reacting this way and ever since then.
It completely flipped the way I looked at competition. And so now, before when I would get nervous playing baseball, I would try to like calm myself down. Like, why can't I feel normal? Why don't I feel relaxed? And now when I feel those nerves start to kick in, I just told myself, this is a good thing. This is a good thing. This is your body, getting you ready? This is you being ready to go really like that reframing of things and just accepting and being, okay? With the anxiety, has helped me so much,
you know, something like that.
In powerlifting where the stakes are really high and it's really short. It's not like, you know, in tennis you can have one bad match, right? Or one bad serve, and it doesn't end the entire thing in powerlifting at Ken. And I guess the other thing I guess is the stakes are kind of high from an injury standpoint as well because you are pushing at your limit. Have you ever injured yourself in a
meat? Not to the point where I couldn't continue or had really bad pain during but at the Arnold in 2015, at the Arnold Pro meat,
I had aggravated by back a week out pretty badly and then the day of the meat when I hit my last squat, which was 661 pounds. I kind of rotated a little bit coming up, and the next day I could definitely feel it was actually closer to my upper lumbar or lower thoracic. I definitely had quite a bit of pain there, so you typically don't see, people get injured at meets, it does happen, but I would say that it's less,
The during training, I don't have any data on, I'm just guessing, but I think part of it is you are so focused and you are so excited, you're very tight, you're very conscious of what you're doing. At the end of the day, it is just one rep or I've
tending hours, the volume when you're training and you're also probably more broken down and more fatigued
when you get ready for a meat. If you've done your due diligence, hopefully you've kind of dissipate a lot of that fatigue to rest and tapering whereas when you're in the throes of
Of training and you just have high levels of fatigue, maybe you're just not able to execute the lifts as well, because of that fatigue, that's where things tend to happen. Especially like, if you're doing multiple repetitions as you get closer to failure, just the opportunity to get out of position or make mistakes. Those sorts of things. So it is definitely one of the things that is part of the game you're just going to deal with pain. But I always tell people to, you know, I'm 40 now and most for
Your old 50 year olds, they have pain anyway, so I'd rather be strong and have pain than b. We can have pain. How many
times a year? Can you peek for a mate? Maybe not as surely even you but at the top level of power lifting, how many really good mates in a year, does a lifter
have? This is just completely my opinion, it's based on my own experience, but for me, I've done it where I've only, I've done one, I've done it, where I've done for high-level Meats for was way too much. I think probably to is The Sweet Spot.
Not for me, you know, gives you time to really, I don't think I've ever gone into a meat and just been like, oh I feel 100% healthy and nothing hurts or anything like that. It's kind of, it's not the same thing as getting ready for like a fight, but in order to be able to execute a heavy, lift you have to lift heavy and so part of that is you're going to accumulate some things and some dunks. Really it's about getting to competition day with enough. Fitness level in terms of being able to execute heavy lifts while dissipating fatigue
And being in low enough levels of pain that you can execute and so afterwards, really it's always been the most dangerous when I feel good after a meat because then I just tend to like going like on Monday and say, well, let's get right back into training and really the smart thing to do is just to take some time train for fun. Keep that core strength, but move more towards accessory movements and things that don't beat me up. So much for several months, then re-enter like more of a
A building accumulation phase where volume is going up at the weight still aren't super heavy. And then those last three, four months for a week, now, it's time to start putting in more heavy weights and starting to ramp up towards by the end of my training, I'm mostly on my competition lifts just hitting heavy singles
so that's from want to kind of talk about is what can the rest of us who aren't powerlifters? Learn just about strength because if I wanted to frame this for a listener because people have heard me talk about this but the
Two metrics that are most significantly associated with longevity so if we were to stack up every possible known risk factor smoking type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease and state kidney disease, whatever. And we were to talk about how much of a hazard ratio do these bring to you. In terms of all-cause mortality, they're quite big hypertension. Is about a 20 percent, type 2, diabetes is about a 30% increase. In mortality, smoking is 50%, increase being weak.
Weak relative to being strong is about two hundred and fifty percent having a very low vo2max in the bottom, 25% of the population versus being in the top two and a half percent of the population is about four hundred percent. So when you line everything up, the two things that stand out the most are incredible cardiorespiratory Fitness as measured by vo2max and strength and then a third is muscle mass.
But I think when you look at the data, you realize muscle mass is so coupled to strength that that Association is tight point being is if you're listening to this podcast and thus far into this podcast, your eyes are sort of glazing over as we're sitting here, talking about power lifting. It's probably worth pointing out that even if you never once care to do a heavy squat, or a heavy bench, press or a heavy deadlift, you have to be strong and in these studies where these associations continue to show up over and over and over again, you know they're using.
Things like grip strength, bench press leg extension things that are a little less technical but the point remains, anybody who's going to a power meat and crushing a deadlift as pretty strong grip strength. So I think it becomes important for people to understand how to train for power. So let's now talk a little bit about that. So if a person comes to you and says I want to get stronger and that's my primary objective in the weight room. It's more so than the aesthetic because we're going to talk about that later. What are some of the principles they need to keep in
mind?
What's interesting is the principles are pretty much the same, it's just the level to which they're applied, and I think it's important to point out that there are diminishing returns with strengthened term. Well, I'm sure there are other studies are refined enough to pick this out at this point because it's not like they're getting a population of power lifters and looking at their longevity. But my guess is that at a certain point, you pretty much get all the benefits and just getting even stronger as probably not going to give you
more especially if it comes at the risk of
of injury that can later on in life.
Sure. And then you also see with like running there's kind of like a j-shaped curve part of me thinks that just the people that take it so far, whether it be powerlifting running, whatever that it's not that their sport makes them more prone to early mortality but more so that they probably have other behaviors of being an extremist that probably contribute to that and interesting but as far as strength goes or be, really what we're talking about is Progressive overload, that is the most important.
Principal actually really applies to a lot of things in life to be quite honest. But when it comes to lifting weights, a lot of people here Progressive overload and they just think weight on the bar. And that is the most simple way to explain it, right? So if you come in, you've never done some sort of squat movement before and you do 95 pounds for 5 reps, and then the next week you come in and you do 100 and the next week coming into you do 100 105, the same number of reps at the same number of reps, right? That is a form of progressive overload, and most people, when they enter the
The gym. That's kind of their experience. They don't need to increase that number. They can increase the Reps, but for the most part, when you first start going to the gym, you're just gonna be able to put more weight on the bar, pretty much every week, and that is a perfectly reasonable way to progress. And, you know, I know we haven't gotten here yet, but people will say, well, you know, I'm postmenopausal woman or I'm a 75 year old male. It's too late for me. No, it's not. Now is the best time. In fact, when I was at
University of Illinois where I was in an Department of nutritional Sciences right across the street and the exercise physiology department, they were conducting a study on frail elderly people who, basically, almost couldn't really walk they could, but it was very tough for them and they just started progressively overloading them. And that looked like basically squatting to a really high chair to start and what they saw was incredible. And like 12 weeks, they actually had people who could squat down too.
Like a below parallel chair and come back up, which may not sound like much for the average person. But when you're talking about somebody who's frail, elderly the difference in functionality and their lifestyle is going to be incredible in terms of what they can do. So, what I'll tell people is what you can learn from powerlifters, is that Progressive overload one, in terms of weight on the bar, but nobody's able to increase weight on the bar forever. That's just not going to happen and the longer you get
To it, the more nonlinear it's going to be it's going to be you're going to go down and come up and go down and come back up. But there's also other ways to progressively overload, one being more repetitions and the other being adding more hard sets. So the latter adding more hard sets is really something you only need to get to as you get to be more advanced because like I said, you're not gonna be able to add strength forever and you're not gonna be able to reps forever either,
by the way, this is one thing that from one of our earlier discussions, that really started to change my training. I started
Adding a little bit more set at slightly lower, rpe net, increase volume. So I was doing a lot more rpe 89 stuff, but you can only get a few sets at that level, like, you're really, really spent. And instead, I was saying, we'll wait a minute, why don't we do a little more rpe 6 and 7 and add more sets? More volume 1. And I feel like it's lowering my risk of injury. And to, as you said, it's really just another way to progressively
overload. Your always, weighing the
Two things kind of your stimulus versus fatigue ratio. So I'm coach by a guy named Zach Robinson, who's doing his PhD in Mike Zola's Lab at FAU great lab and he talks about stimulus first fatigue, a lot and they do a lot of training in that kind of rpe 526 area, which some people call that easy when it comes to compound lifts. I wouldn't really call it easy. But, you know, it's kind of like, how can we maximize our stimulus and minimize fatigue? And if you're talking about an
P E9. For example, how many sets at rp9? Can you get?
I don't know about you. I have like 12 to
right before you really have to drop the weight down or what
not, someone like me. Who's not? At the level that a powerless is that like, my form starts to compromise,
right? Like Israel, actually a great kind of take on this to in terms of like training to failure. He's like if you take a squat like a free barbell, squat to failure for 10 reps and then you try to do another set with that same weight. How many reps will you get?
I know from doing sets to failure of 10. Reps of free barbell squat. I might not even be able to get like two or three reps on my next set because it's just so fatiguing. That is one thing that's important to point out when we talk about our PES, which is kind of a measure for proximity to failure.
We talked about on previous podcast, why don't you tell people how RP works? Because I think it's really a fantastic system, but you do need to push yourself in the gym to really understand what they feel. Like
Like, so rpe is kind of a it's been adapted from running to lifting and it's on a scale of 1 to 10 or I guess even zero, but rpe 10 being you had no more reps left. That was your absolute all out. 100% effort. Our PE 9 is you could have done one more rep rp8. One more rep, so on and so forth. And one of the issues that we know you don't have to train to failure to grow muscle. In fact,
May actually be a little bit counterproductive. Just in terms of the fatigue that it causes relative to the stimulus, we know that for most movements you get most of the hypertrophy and strength benefits going within a few reps of failure. So RP, like 78. And obviously, if you can do more volume, it may be even more beneficial. But the downside is, if you've never actually taken something to failure, like true failure, people are really bad at estimating it and so beginners and
immediate search. They find that they tend to underestimate their rpe by about five which is pretty incredible. You've seen in lab will take somebody in and they'll put a weight on the do a wrap
and and you'll ask them
what was that? Like and they'll say there are PE and then the research will actually make them take it to failure while they like yelling at them and encouraging them. And on average, they'll get five more reps than they estimated. They would
have, I can totally believe
that whereas when they look at our PE validity and advanced lifters,
It tends to be much more accurate, much more accurate. I was in a powerlifting meet where they had a tendo unit on the bar and they were measuring our bar velocity and they were asking us to raid our RP after every attempt and they found that rpe as validated by velocity data was a pretty good measure in that population of powerlifters because they've taken so many sets near failure. So your point is well taken, you do need some experience.
Since going really hard and really close to failure. But once you have that experience and you understand what that feels like, then you can estimate better, you're probably better off. Staying a few reps shy of failure and accumulating volume that way. Just because going to failure is just so incredibly fatiguing.
So for a person who again is not planning to go to a power meat, is there a need for them to go below for reps in training? That's an arbitrary number, but you know what, I'm getting.
That I would say probably not. I mean, you can get plenty strong even doing, you know, sets of ten. Those sorts of
things. I would have thought you needed to get at least into the fives and sixes sometimes.
But so you can get really strong doing such 1015, those sorts of things. Now, you will not be as strong even / cross sectional area as somebody who trains for strength because strength is a specific skill and even like myself. My best Squad ever is a big 68 and when
I was six months out from that, I added weight to the bar that was able to squat, but it's not like I added that much more lean body mass because I didn't. I was practicing the skill of a 1 rep max, which allowed me to better do the one rep
max. And you were practicing at what percent of ultimately became 661
usually around 90, 95, but not very much a 95 mostly at 94 like singles.
And what was your rpe when you did those singles?
Cause
they usually about eight and a half or nine.
And so you would do multiple doing the math. Let's just say that 620 or something like that. So it's called 600 pounds. So you would do a 600-pound signal three times in a workout,
something like that. And what you're kind of making gains on at that point is just your one. It just teaches you how to grind through a lift because a lot of people have never had the experience of really sticking with a lift and interestingly the more advanced somebody gets in terms of strength, the slower there. One rep max velocity will be
When we see this in research, studies all the time, somebody who's kind of new will come in, they will absolutely smoked await. You put five pounds on and then they get staple because it's
just they don't have that grind
capacity. Don't know how to do it. And part of that may be psychological part of that's probably physiological. To, in terms of you just haven't trained your body to recruit all the fibers that it can get. So lean body mass and strength are very closely tied together but when it gets to those final levels of strength,
It's kind of just practicing the actual one, rep, max. So when it comes to getting strong, you can absolutely get strong doing sets of 10 15 because you're increasing your lean body mass. Do you need to do sets of three? Four, no, but what I would say is like, don't necessarily count them out because a lot of people actually just do really well with variety periodization was kind of a big thing for lifting back in the day. And now, we've kind of shown that at least in the research studies.
Doesn't appear to produce greater gains in lean body mass, maybe a little bit better strength gains. But that's probably just because people Peak better when your period izing things but what tends to actually be shown is that people just tend to like periodization better because their varying the repetitions or not as board. So you never want to kind of poo. Poo, the psychological effects of those things I talked about this would die as well. Adherence is the most important thing just getting people to come in and do it. So, especially
Really for people who are coming into the gym if they're just trying to get stronger and be healthy. Well for me if I'm talking to them, or coaching them or whatever it is, it's like what do you enjoy? What's going to get you to show up consistently, you don't want to free squat, that's fine. Let's leg press. There's many ways to skin a cat. You don't want a barbell, deadlift. Okay, no problem. Let's do some rdls, you know, those sorts of things. Slightly less technical lifts are still going to produce really great gains in terms of strengths lie,
Body mass, those sorts of things. So if you're not going to specifically compete in a strength sport, there's so many paths to Rome in terms of getting stronger and increasing lean body mass. Do you
think there are some principles for example, like let's say a person isn't confident that they have the technical ability to execute a squatter, a deadlift. Let's look at a hip Thruster again. You can screw that up too and you could hurt yourself but it's a lot harder to hurt yourself, doing that. Do you think there is still an essential need for some sort of?
Compound Movement Like a hip Thruster at least as a compliment or a leg press. As you point out,
it's pretty funny. I went through a phase where everything I learned from the Magazine's, the Bro, Science. I was like, well, this all has to be junk. And now, we're actually having studies come out that are validating some of those Bro Science from like 20, 30 years ago. So, there does appear to be like different areas of the leg muscles, the quadriceps, for example, that are better activated by sale leg extension, compared to a leg press, compared to a squat. So I do think it is good to have variety.
I think it is good to have compound lifts as well. And in fact there's some interesting data that suggest that you don't have to get as close to failure on compound lifts to still get the same stimulation compared to isolation exercises where you do seem to have to get much closer to failure to get those benefits. But also just thinking about again, if we're looking at the longevity or the quality of life piece, what is most analogous to what these people are going to be doing where they're going to be needing it. Well,
if it's bending over and picking something up, that's some kind of hinge. If it's sitting down and standing back up some kind of squat, now you can use variations, right? And I would never say never because it's a superlative but I very rarely would take somebody who's like fresh off the street, put a barbell on their back and said, okay learn how to squat because it's going to be like Bambi trying to stand up. Ideally you're probably going to maybe even start them off with no weight and just teach them how to hit.
How to use their hips, how to use their knees, how to track their legs, with their feet, and those sorts of things and just balance. Because if you've never put a barbell on your back, it's not a comfortable position and honestly to do it, well you shouldn't feel comfortable. You should feel very tight most places once they're established with that then moving to where they're like holding a kettlebell in front of them and then you can progress with weight with that and then maybe you progress to something like a safety bar without having to worry so much.
Much about hands and whatnot to a box and then eventually took the Box away and then maybe then you can progress to a barbell squat. But I would say that the Puritan and new be like yes, everybody should barbell squat. But I know that. That's not true. I think the biggest thing is just getting something close and analogous to the things that are going to be important in your day-to-day life. As you get older, especially if quality of life is important to you. And I mean, when we talk about people who fall as elderly, I think I
Something insane like half the people over age, 65, who go in the hospital for a fall? Never come out. I think it's something of that
nature. I've seen many studies on this, the one that sticks out in my mind was Thirty to forty percent of people over the age of 65. Who break their hip will be dead within a year of that insult.
Yeah. Because you got infection and then you have they're going to have to be immobilized and I'm
thinking ammonia or atelectasis pneumonia or something like that. So yeah, it's awful. There's a study and I think I even mentioned this in a previous podcast
Podcast, but we should link to it. It was an Australian study that took a group of older woman. I don't remember exactly how old they were, but they certainly looked like they were in their 60s or above who all had Osteo at least osteopenia, if not osteoporosis, and it put them on a relatively unsophisticated lifting program unsophisticated in that. There wasn't a lot of instruction other than just pick up weights. It was mostly just pick up weights as I saw the video on YouTube of the Pisces guessing. This isn't it? Fantastic. Yeah, because they're in this totally old school.
Them. And you've got these old ladies picking up weights walking around. Some of them getting really. I remember one lady was picking up her body weight which was basically dead lifting her body weight, these are women who had never lifted a weight before and their symptoms just got so much better.
Absolutely, the best thing you can do for bone. Density is lift weight. So this isn't like a mutually exclusive thing. In fact, people get really focused on the bone density portion of this when we talk about Falls and whatnot. So they get very focused on how do we?
Keep them from breaking their hip. What if they didn't fall in the first place? What if they had the strength to catch themselves, the balance to catch themselves? And then again, even if they did fall, if you have more muscle mass you're probably going to have more bone density as well. These are all things that are going to help and resistance training is great because you can have these other sort of interventions that can improve lean body mass and whatnot, but they all work way better with resistance training because you're creating the need for the
Issue. And that's something I think that has been missed a little bit. Is the teleological perspective of this, which is you have to give your body a reason to lay down tissue muscle, tissues pretty energetically expensive relatively speaking. So, again, I'm kind of speaking philosophically, but the body is not just going to go. Yeah, we got some extra calories. Let's just lay down some lean tissue. It doesn't make sense because from the body's perspective, the number one thing. It's trying.
To do is keep you alive long enough to reproduce and then it once you've done that, just trying to prevent you from starving, the risk of dying from starvation. Over the course of human history is way, is magnitudes greater than like diseases from too much nutrition. I mean, that's basically a 20th 21st century problem. So the idea that oh well if I eat some higher protein, I can lay down some more lean body mass. Yeah you can but it's going to be really really minimal compared to what you can build through resistance training. And then when you couple resistance,
Any with high enough protein or any of these other modalities. Now, you're creating the turnover in the tissue that the body has the requirement to lay down that tissue.
What do we know about the peak capacity for strength as a person ages does this differ between men and women? And I'm sure there's variability for people, but on a per pound basis. Are you stronger today than you were at
20? Yeah. I am stronger than well as a 20.
Are you stronger than you were at
35?
No, that's come off my peek a little bit. I don't think that's like a sarcopenia thing. I just think that that's cumulation of injuries and not being able to train the way I used to be able to train. So I used to be able to train much harder than I can train. Now, my Governor is not the work ethic, it's the okay, how hard can I train before? The pain level gets too
hot, so it's not that you're losing type. Two fibers that you're losing some of the 2A or 2B fibers and that's why you're not quite as strong. Do you believe that on a muscle biopsy?
Basis, you could be as strong now, as you were at
30. I think I probably could, if you look at the research literature, you do. See differences between young and old but most of those, get ameliorated. When you start adding in resistance, training more to your point, you know, the idea how much strength can I gain, how much lean mass can I gain based on what I've seen. So let's take men and women. For example, women have been shown to gain just as much lean mass as a percentage of their starting lean mass. Now keep in mind
It is the relative increase. So, for example, if people add 10 percent lean mass, something like that. Well, if you're a male and you have 70 kilos of lean mass, now, your 77, if you're a female, you had 50 kilos of lean mass. Now, you're 55. So the male added seven kilos, the female added five kilos. But relative to their start, they added the same and that's what the research literature says is, they pretty much can add the same amount as a percentage of the starting lean mass and the same thing for strength actually. There's some evidence.
That women may be able to tolerate higher training volumes than men to. Now I'm not sure if that's a
threat across all ages, you think or is that within a certain
age? They've only really looked at it and kind of young adults 20s and 30s so it's hard to say but I wonder if that's just more of a function of they're just smaller, bodies handling less weight, my
wife would tell you that no one can handle a cold less than me because and I think it's true. I have an insanely High pain tolerance except for when
My sinuses or congested, and I have a miserable cough and I turn into a little baby. So, there might be something about women just being tougher
to. I've thought about this quite a bit. Let's look at Super heavyweight powerlifters, just an extreme
example. And these are guys that way over
what, like Ray Williams for example. So he's one of the greatest drug tested powerlifters in history. First, man to straw, squat, over a thousand pounds, he was a college football player. They Decks at him, he had 308 pounds of lean mass and he's probably over 400 pounds of total body weight. How much lean mass over 3,
Two pounds incredible. Now, let's say we're talking about working with 80% of a one rep max, his 80% is 800 pounds, a female's 80%. If she's doing a one arm acts of 300 pounds is 240 pounds, the same percentage. I'm not sure that you can say that the same thing in terms of what happens with the body.
I know very end of the day. Connective tissue is connective
tissue. I know very, very few, super heavyweight power lifters who
Rain the main lifts like three four times a week. Some of the lighter weight classes do. So I do think there's something about the absolute load part of me thinks the idea that women can recover a little bit better might be that they're just using absolute lower loads but we'd have to have some more intricate. Now, there's an
interesting point about that study because I know the one that you were talking about and I've heard people use that study to suggest that testosterone is not important in muscle. Gain the idea being, if women can add 10% to their
And men are adding 10% to their base, clearly men and women have a log full difference in testosterone. Therefore testosterone doesn't matter. But of course, you only need to look at tested versus untested powerlifters and bodybuilders to know testosterone is doing something. So, how do you reconcile
these? I think part of it is. So if we look at like, let's take them in. And women example, one of the main benefits testosterone is the increase in Satellite cell number that you get, which is going to increase.
Your potential for increasing muscle mass. So I don't want to talk about this. Like it's hard and stone proven but there's a theory out there. I tend to agree with called the, my own nuclear domain Theory. So for those people who aren't familiar with satellite cells, satellite cells are questioned cells that sit on kind of the outside of a muscle fiber and through various ways, resistance, training testosterone, whatever you can get those satellite cells to be donated to the muscle fiber and muscle fibers. They only sell
Rules that are multinucleated. And we think the reason is each my own nuclei can only control protein synthesis for a certain area. The muscle fiber can only grow as big as it has my own nuclei. So the more minor nuclei you can donate the greater, your potential is. So one of the things that we think is a reason that men have more lean mass than women is during puberty because up until puberty males. And females tend to have similar amounts of lean mass but
During puberty. That's when we start to see these hormonal differences emerge, and that exposure to testosterone increases that my own nuclei number and just gives them a greater overall potential for lean mass, which again, makes sense if you think about it as a relative percentage. So now when you talk about taking exoticness levels of testosterone, now you're donating even more nuclei and so you can reach a higher ceiling. So I think honestly, I mean this might give me a little bit of trouble but I think that's actually the strongest.
Against the crossover of transgender Sports of people who previously were male now identify as female is, you can't really get rid
can read those extra
nuclei of the long-term benefit. That's conveyed by the fusion of those Maya nuclei. So for example, and we see this with like, muscle memory, for example. So we know that if you train before, but you stopped raining, you can gain back muscle much faster than it takes to build it.
And they've even shown this in people who have stopped raining for years, that they gain it back faster than it. Originally took to build it. The other interesting thing is they did a study where they looked at giving testosterone to is that the rats or mice, I can't remember which one they were able to resist a train them. It's funny to see these rat resistance training set up, so I'm sure you've seen them. So one group they did not give testosterone the other group they gave testosterone. Now, of course, both gain strength, both gain, lean body mass, but the group getting testosterone, obviously came more. Then they had a
Wash out period And basically for as long as it took for them both to get back to kind of the original lean mass number. Then they both had them train again, no drugs in either group and the group that originally had testosterone just that once gained muscle significantly faster than the other group and our best understanding is it's probably these my own nuclei that got fused through that extra testosterone that confers that long-term
it. So that's kind of how we think about Max, we
things but that's kind of like only during a critical window of development or is that happen? If you're 40 years old and you're taking exoticness testosterone, see, that's where it gets more tricky. We don't
really know. I think part of it, maybe there's no data on this. So I'm speculating hundred percent, but if you have a certain level of testosterone through puberty, and I are an adult and you kind of maintain that, that's just kind of your native natural. Oh, let's see. Don't get too obese or to underweight. Whatever you've probably figured
Choose the amount of my nuclei that you're going to fuse at least from testosterone. But now if you start taking exotic genus lie, you've now ramp that up another notch. Now you can fuse more, my nuclei which again anecdotally would make sense because if we look at the drug use and bodybuilding, it's continue to go up up up. And now we're getting to the point where these guys really aren't getting much bigger, because there's just only so many drugs, they can take before, and we're seeing it. Now, many of them are I think last year there was something like that.
Half dozen, professional bodybuilders who died. So, it's getting the point where they really can't go any higher and drugs and you're seeing that lean mass start to cap out. And
this is why because you compete in tested or drug-free powerlifting as good as it is, they make you guys. Take a polygraph that says, have you used drugs in five years and that's an interesting window of time, right? Because you would think, like, why would they care if you used performance-enhancing drugs? 5 years ago. But in theory, they do care because you may
Will confer a benefit five years later. Even if you've actually been drug-free,
that's what we did natural bodybuilding. When I competed natural bodybuilding and powerlifting. They don't do the polygraph but they don't so you just you cannot test positive. So we're completely underwater. So, basically the way, the water drug testing works is once you enter the water drug testing pool. So you've qualified for some kind of international competition. You could be drug tested at any time. So you have to provide, you have to use a whereabouts form, you have to provide your whereabouts, all that kind of thing.
NG and if it's during your window and they say, hey you need to be drug tested and you don't do it, you can get a strike against you and be out of competition for a certain period of time. Those pluses and minuses to both methods. Polygraph obviously, is not something that's crazy accurate. I don't think they allow it in a court of law, but just the idea that you are going to be asked that and it could be something that you fail. Probably keeps quite a few people from doing it. And the other thing I tell people is there's just not really any money in this stuff. So are
Cheaters. Absolutely. Is it rampant? I would kind of be surprised because there's just not that much money. Now, when you talk about sports, we can make millions of dollars, I would not be surprised. If there's rampant cheating because you're talking about millions of dollars, I think the most money that's ever been on the line for me competing was like two or three thousand dollars. I love to do it not being done for the money, know for sure. So with the polygraph at least it allows you to kind of go back. Like you said, now, interestingly the data that we just talked about
About kind of suggests that. Well, if it was 5 years ago, it doesn't matter. You still got an advantage, but they're also trying to balance that with.
At some point you got to let people come clean if they've
used in the past and I actually agree with that point of view. I spoke with a guy who competed in bodybuilding, he's like you know I was 17 years old, some guy to Jim gave me something, I was an idiot, I didn't ask what it was and I got like a bunch of side effects and got bigger and stronger. But he's like, you know, looking back, it was like, I really regret doing that.
At age. Well, should I be punished for his like his entire life and not able to compete and drug-free bodybuilder? I mean, you can make the argument, I understand the argument, but I'm in favor of being a little bit more inclusive in terms of that
you mentioned that as you're getting ready to train for worlds. Yesterday, you said to me, you know, your back kind of hurt you really backed off. Also, this is your first major meet International meet in about seven years. Yeah. And a lot of that was due to injuries of which back was the most prevalent, but I think you also mentioned
little bit of knee pain as well.
Yep, knee. Yeah.
So how do you think about this personally, how much longer do you want to be loading yourself at basically putting cars on your back and lifting cars off the ground right? Which is effectively what you're doing.
Candidly. If I went out, I won Masters world's. I'd probably give him a real hard thought about. Okay, I think I'm done at least competing in this but the other part of me I think that part of my problem is
Love to train so much. I never really gave myself the time to get pain-free. As soon as I started feeling better, I would just start pushing again. And I do think I've slowly gotten more intelligent because I used to think I was basically Superman so I think I've just matured a little bit and even like yesterday getting to a certain point warming up on squats and saying. All right it's not happening today. There's no reason to try and force this. I think previously
I would kind of create a narrative in my mind of, I'm gonna power through this because it's what it takes. And yet some points you have to, I think one of the most important things is knowing when to press the gas pedal and knowing. When to back off a little bit, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. And for me, I'm probably a little bit weird in that. I would train three four hours a day, because I just love to train, I love the way it makes me feel. I love feeling strong part of me. The egocentric part of me probably loves to feel like a badass.
Got five, 600 pounds in the gym and whatnot, but I've kind of gotten to the point now where I'm like, all right. If it's there today we take it. If it's not there we take what's there? And then we live to fight another day because I just had so many experiences where I've tried to press on this. And with the way pain works, the more pain you have, the more pain you're going to have because you just end up getting fixated and ruminating on it and the research actually shows that the more you ruminate on it, the more you think about it,
And the more times you trigger it, the worse, it's going to get. And so it's like this delicate balance between, I kind of know how far I can press something before I'm making it worse. Because the research also shows that you don't want to completely just stop lifting because you're D train. And then when you come back, even if you're paying for your more likely to re-trigger it, because you've lost that adaptation. So it's kind of like when you have those pain triggers trying to find either a way to mount or a movement pattern or something similar to what you're trying.
To do with it, slow enough pain that you can start to build back from that. So like, for example, yesterday, ideally I would have done some squats and deadlifts couldn't do them. Okay, I'm going to go in and do some leg press. I'm still going to get some stimulation for my quads. The primary movers of the squat. I'm going to go do single leg dumbbell rdls. I was able to do those with no pain. Is it loading it as much as I would like, no, but I'm still using my hamstrings, I'm using my lower back. I'm getting in some of that movement pattern and I'm
Still getting a training effect, some adaptation without further, triggering that pain and then. So, what did you do today? Pretty much just cleaning up stuff I miss throughout the week so I just had some dumbbell pressing. I did some more single-leg are dlls, and I did some Mobility work, not a whole lot of intensive stuff, but when you consider like what I do, ideally all I would do would be squat, bench, press, and deadlift, because it's completely specific to what I'm going to express on competition day but those are all.
Very fatiguing movements. I think part of that too is just when you know, how much you can do. And you know, how much you've done, you kind of have like this anxiety about those movements because it's like you're almost being tested and comparing them to what you previously done. So sometimes just creating a little bit of a variation of that movement or you're not you can kind of just let the weight happen and pick your rpe and if it's not a previous set, wait, it doesn't bother you. So I've
Started using a lot more variations to build that Baseline level of strength. And then again, when it comes to the actual competition lifts, I mostly just focusing on doing heavy singles and building my volume through other areas.
And how many times a week will you do those heavy single
workouts once or twice just depending on how I feel?
I've often thought that would be really interesting experiment. I'd like to do I wouldn't do it but I'd like to oversee it. I'd like to see it being done I guess which is you take a power lifter.
Their entire training cycle. Like, six months, building up to a competition. They have no idea what's on the bar. They have a really good coach, and the coach is telling them, for every set, how many reps to do, or what rpe to go until? So it's completely being program, but you eliminate the problem, you just talked about which is you take the psychology away and you don't let the athletes suffer from knowing my God. I should be able to do this many reps. So, one day they might get down on the bar and the bar is going to
be really light and they're going to be told I think you're going to get 10 reps here. Let's see it. And they have no idea what percentage of their Max it ever is.
So it's interesting, one of the top lifters in the world. Somebody I competed against multiple times guy named Brice Louis. So, he actually trained entire training cycle that way. So he would have his girlfriend put trash bags over the weights. I don't know if he still does that, but he
just, she would load up every set. But she had to be the one to know what every set needed to be in
advance. She's competitive pal after as well. I
World champion as well. And so she would kind of like look at what has our peas were supposed to be at load the weight up, put the trash bags over it and then he would go do it and probably just for what you meant. Super interesting. Now, for me might work but for whatever
reason like to control things a
little. Yeah, there's some people on meet day. They'll tell their coach. Don't tell me what you're putting on the bar, just put it on me. Do it. I'll go do it. I want to know, I don't know, maybe it's just part of how my brains wired, whatever. Because I also have a trust with my coach and all the coaches. I've had it
Been great. Honestly, I've worked with a couple different people. They've all been great, I just had such a good trust in my coach that I just knew. If they put something on the bar they're not going to put something on the bar that they don't think I can do. They know I can do it. It's my job to go and execute. When you have a good meat day coach. That is so valuable because I know they're not going to put something on I can't do so it's just up to me to go out and do it.
So what about nutrition? How does nutrition fact and apparel?
In your 208 pounds or so right now it's about the weight. You're going to compete at you. Once told me that the difference in powerlifting and bodybuilding is in powerlifting. All of your pain is compressed into the gym and bodybuilding. Most of your pain is actually out of the gym. Yeah. Having not done either. I mean, I did some powerlifting growing up but basically having never really done either of those at a serious level, I can appreciate it just based on the concept. So you've been here now few days we've had a bunch of meals together. You're just eating like a normal guy, we're eating whatever.
The hell we want, is there anything you will do? As you get closer to the meat with your nutrition specifically? Because I know that you'd like to come into pounds or so below your target, but that's something you can modify and days outside of just calories, is there something you're going to manipulate with macros or anything that you're going to be thinking about, with respect to more creatine that you're going to be loading or anything that you're needling that way?
Not really. I mean at least for me because I'm sitting very close to the wait.
Last, I'm going to compete in. I don't really have to make a bunch of changes. I was sitting at say 215 pounds 217 pounds. Then it gets the point where a weight cut 2005 gums a little bit untenable because we're I compete at to, to our way in. So if you're cutting 10 15 pounds, you're not going to be able to rehydrate and refuel quickly enough.
Two hours. Meaning two hours between weigh-in and competition lifting. Correct. Yeah, I'm like the day before where you have a full day to
catch, right? So there are organizations where you can weigh in
A day before and I think actually one organization had 48 hour away. And so there were guys, which actually, in a way, makes it more dangerous because people will cut way really, really cut. Oh yeah, I think Dan Green, who's really well-known untested powerlifter. I think he weighed in at 220 and then, like, the next day was walking around like, 255 or some like that. So, just incredible amounts of weight. These guys are cutting, you'll see him with IVs and all that kind of stuff. So for us, you cut too.
Three, maybe four percent of your body weight, but you really don't want to go much more than that because with two hours just don't have time.
Are you doing 5 grams of creatine daily right
now? I keep my creatinine because I can modify which is like sodium and modifying fiber, a little bit to get some water weight out those last few days. And like you mentioned, I'll usually try to be a little bit under the day before the meat. So I can eat enough calories today before where I don't feel like I'm having to shovel down food because if I have to go pretty aggressive for a Saturday meat,
Thursday, Friday. Now, on Saturday, with that way in. I've got two hours to get food down. There's also other stuff I gotta do. I gotta warm up. I want my brain free to think about the stuff I've got to do not be like, okay, well, I've got to get down this. I've got to get down that I'll take some Pedialyte or, or some kind of electrolytes, those sorts of things. But, for the most part, I've never really had issues with cramping. I've never had issues with energy on meet day. I think a lot of that is just I keep myself pretty close to within Striking Distance and then the other benefit is
Your leverages can change based on your weight thickness, the tightness of your belt can change, all that stuff can make a difference in terms of the style of squat you do or how you feel. So just being able to train in a manner that can be very similar to how I compete. I feel like is a little bit of an advantage for me. Compared to people have to cut quite a bit of weight.
And if you had to guess by dexa, what would your body fat be at weigh-in?
I caliper at around eight percent. So I would say dex's probably like 11 or 12. Something like that because
I experienced X is usually 34 percent higher than calipers,
by most people's standards still, incredibly lean, but not necessarily by bodybuilding standards, of course. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit more about creatine. We talked about it really briefly on one of our podcast, but we were kind of at the end. So I want to kind of go back and make sure people understand that it's one of the supplements we get the most questions about. It's also one of the supplements that we feel the most confident, telling patients. This is a supplement worth taking. It's clearly past test number 1, which is it safe.
And it passes test number two which is it's probably got efficacy questions. It's got efficacy. The real question is are you okay with a little bit of weight gain because you know, you're going to pull more water in, so explain to people a little bit about why creatine is so important. And presumably, this is something that's really important in powerlifting. I'm guessing going into a bodybuilding meet. You probably don't want creatine for that extra weight or do you.
I think it's actually great for
bodybuilding. Okay. Great. I want to hear about it. I was assumed you have a little more water but maybe the water is all in the muscle.
Well, and that's where you want
it. So creatin is a high-energy phosphate donor so it muscle it exists as phosphocreatine and when you take supplemental creatine, it'll come into the muscle, it'll get a phosphate attached to it possible created. And originally the only mechanism we thought of, well, it's a high-energy phosphate donor so people perform better, but then we saw people increase your lean body, mass increase their strength, and there's even benefits in terms of cognitive benefits appear to be pretty clear that there's some cognitive benefits.
As well. So as you mention in terms of safety and efficacy data to me, there's no strikes really. I tell people I'm like I don't even know why we're having this conversation anymore and it's also, you know, it's gone up in price a little bit recently because of the supply chain stuff,
but it's still relatively
inexpensive, credibly. Inexpensive for what you're getting, you know, what I see. People talk about some of these other supplements and they're not even taking creatine monohydrate and I'm like, you're stepping over, pennies are sorry. You're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies because this is just the lowest hanging
fruit even at your side.
Sighs. And even at your demand, is there any benefit to taking more than about 5 grams a
day? Some people have postulated. There might be, I haven't seen really clear evidence for it yet. You could argue that, there's really no downside to taking the extra. The downside might be some GI irritation, for some people creates and can be a GI irritant, which I think will Circle back to, but we know it can act as a high-energy phosphate donor, so when you are exercising or just doing anything your energy currency of yourselves,
TP and in order to drive muscular contraction, your ATP donates, a phosphate and that liberation of that phosphate to form ATP and a free. Phosphate is energetically favorable and helps Drive these muscular contractions. So, creatine can act a phosphocreatine can act, as a high-energy, phosphate donor to reform ATP and allow you to perform better, but it's also a really powerful ozma light.
Right. And so it pulls water into muscle tissue which in and of itself may actually be anabolic. So just a muscle cell being more hydrated. There's some evidence that that can actually improve the, it's more anabolic environment. But regardless of the mechanism, we do know that when you take creatine, you see improvements in lean mass, and some people say well that's just water. That's what muscle mostly is. Its muscle is 70 percent water so and is actually research to show that
Even non-contract. I'll just water, May improve strength and contract ability. So we're not sure exactly how but it could just be the volume ization of the cell is just a benefit.
You could are also kind of, make up, at least conceptually a framework. That says, I'm more hydrated. Cell is more able to carry out its function. So if the function of a myofibril is contractile release contract release, and it has more water, it sort of seems logical to me that it's going to be
better at clearing metabolic waste and recruiting fuel, which at least be two things that would factor into its ability to do
that. The other thing about is if you look at anything that improves hypertrophy, a big portion of it is water. It's not just all myofibrillar, I think. Regardless of the mechanisms I mean it's pretty clear that this stuff works. It's pretty clear. It's safe. I mean they've done numerous randomized control trials. Some of them being well over a year long. Yes, you get an increase in.
Happening which can be a marker of renal function. But I
think well, though the data, you know, on this Lane there was a paper that just came out a couple weeks ago that we were really happy to see. We've abandoned looking at serum creatinine for renal function because it's just too easy to get fooled by people, with varying, muscle, mass and training volume. So we've completely abandon it. So every time you order Labs on somebody and you see their correct in it, it'll tell you what their estimated glomerular, filtration rate is just ignore it completely. We only look at cystatin C.
So everything we do is based off that and there was a paper in Jama a couple of weeks ago that basically said as much, which is maybe we should look more at Sixth and see instead of print. And so I would even say that. Hopefully, this is a PSA for other Doc's out there listening and other patients to say, please look at my cyst and see as a way to estimate kidney function,
you know, this is other things that can get a little bit wonky, like from lifting weights, like liver enzymes and whatnot. I tell people you have to keep in mind, these are markers. So if you have liver failure or you have kidney failure, it's very
Very likely you will have elevated liver enzymes and elevated creatinine but just because you have elevated liver. Enzymes are elevated creatinine does not mean that you necessarily have damaged those tissues. So you have to disconnect those two and I don't think that I feel like correlation versus causation. It's just not something that's taught very well in school because I even see that really good doctors. But some Physicians get so hung up on just well, this is on the page, and this is supposed to be a normal range, and it's not. It's like, but just look at the
Person sitting in front of you, who obviously works out is in good shape. If you're concerned about their kidneys, then do a 24-hour urine collection or an ultrasound or whatever you have to do to verify that they're safe. But I don't worry about that kind of stuff. There's also been some people who have said well create and can cause hair loss and you've got to be careful about that. I don't think the data on that's very compelling. It all there was a single study that showed an increase in DHT from supplementing with creatine one study
2009, I've never seen it replicated. Never seen any follow-up.
How much their DHT increase by?
I have to go back and look, I can't remember the exact amount it was significant, but the interesting thing is, we know creates and doesn't affect Androgen levels. So it's kind of like, where is this increase in DHT? Coming from, it has to come from somewhere. And like I said, there's no randomized control trials, showing that creates an actually causes changes to hair follicles or actual hair loss. So,
Maybe it does, but I would think that if that data existed, we probably would have seen it already.
Do we think that there are significant benefits from supplementation even on non lifting days? So for example on hard cardio days, assuming we're not talking about Sprint's. So clearly there would be a benefit in sprinting because the creatine phosphate system is really lending to that ATP generation during that incredibly high intensity stuff. But if you're out there doing a vo2max day, which is, that's a really hard,
Day. Those are kind of three to eight minute all out intervals, which is aerobic. Its peak aerobic, do you still get a benefit? Do you think from creatine?
I would guess. Yes, there was a recent meta-analysis that came out and looked at different ways of taking creatine, and it was useful data. But in some ways, it was kind of frustrating because they basically showed only Take 5 grams a day. You get increases in lean mass and strength and performance. You take more than 5 grams a day. You also get increases in lean mass and performance but it's hard to kind of compare them.
Directly based on the way they did the meta-analysis. They also looked at okay if we just take them on lifting days, okay, get benefits. If you take them on lifting days, you also get benefits. What I would say is that you probably can get away with just taking it on lifting days, but keep in mind that the benefits of creatine are an accumulation. So you've really got to saturate the muscle cell. That's the key. Because when we were kids, you would load it.
I feel like you did 30 grams a day for a week or something crazy. Yeah. And then 5,
Thereafter. Of course this was reading bro, science magazines, you would then do that for a couple months and then you would come off it from month and then you would repeat the cycle. Am I making that up? Or is that
about? That was definitely a thing. I will say that the research does show. If you load it, you will saturate the muscle cell faster. Now I always try to tell people like, there's no Solutions, there's only trade-offs. So the trade-off with this is a lot of people will get pretty bad GI irritation with loading creatine in terms of GI bloating.
Any nausea, those sorts of things. So if you just take your
playing a long game, it doesn't really
matter, right? You're talking about getting the results you want. In one week as opposed to three weeks, it's really not a big difference. So if you just want to take 5 grams a day within a few weeks, you'll be saturated, you'll be getting the same benefit. So it's really, I guess, if you were somebody who never taken it before and you've got like a big athletic event coming up and you really want to be on it for it, that could make sense. But for most people, I would say just take five grams a day and when people
So well, you know what? If I just take a lifting days? Yeah, probably could. But it's pretty darn
cheap. It's easier to forget something. When you only do it on certain days sometimes it's just easier to make it a part of the
routine. And what I would say too, is people ask you about timing of creatine, those sorts of things, there's some really small, really tenuous, I really want to emphasize that evidence that perhaps after a workout might be better than before workout. But I tell people, just take it whenever you'll take it regularly. So for me, I just
Get up in the morning and I take it and that's what I worry about now as far as like the cycling on and off. So there's evidence that you do reduce your endogenous production of creates and when you're on it there's also evidence that the creatine receptor on the muscle cell does down-regulate a little bit. Now, the important thing to keep in mind is that doesn't mean that your interest cellular levels of creatinine are falling. So they've actually never shown that. Even far out that those phosphocreatine levels in your muscle drop.
So, what I would say is, I don't really think there's a reason to come off because they have shown that if you do come off within a month or so kind of everything goes back to normal but you lose the benefit of the supplement of creatin. So I would say as long as intramuscular levels of creating are not falling, there's really no benefit to coming off used to be like I think people kind of just equated supplements with steroids and so like, well, you're supposed to cycle steroids so we should cycle supplements and creatinine is not hormonal. It's not the same.
I'm bio feedback loop, so I would say there's probably no reason to cycle it.
So something else. The kind of bridges, the world between bodybuilding and powerlifting. Is this question? I want to ask you about which is basically one of Newton's Laws, right? So Force equals mass times acceleration, let's just say I'm on the ground. I've got my dumbbells or I'm on a bench and I've got my dumbbells and I'm going to press them. One school of thought is press them as quickly as possible because Force equals mass times acceleration, the mass of this
Is fixed. So any speed with which I lift it is accelerating because I'm moving Against Gravity but the faster I can do it the greater the force but of course at some point the weight becomes so heavy that you increase the effort more on the mass variable than on the acceleration variable. In other words, we can manipulate mass and acceleration to reach maximum Force. Now, an extreme example of that. Is you doing
A one rep max but as you pointed out, the more Elite, a powerlifter becomes the slower that is in other words the lower the acceleration is and therefore the more they're emphasizing the mass which is, of course, what? You get scored on no one scoring you on the acceleration. How do we think about that in terms of mixing and matching the mass versus the acceleration variable in an effort to optimize for? Because, of course, we also don't want to go to maximum Force every time because if I did maximum force with a
Wait, wait, I'd probably move it too quickly. I could injure myself as well. Do you think about the variation of mass and acceleration when you're moving weight?
If you think about what the expression of strength is, it's basically Force. So as you mention, if it's a very heavy weight, it'll just move slower, it's a lightweight, you can still apply the same force and it will just move more quickly. So, this is actually a concept that I heard my coach Zack talk about on a podcast, was, they do quite a bit of would do a heavy single, or double
Double or whatever it is and then are back. Offsets are relatively light talking rpe 45 but trying to move them as quickly as possible.
Let's just talk about the concentric now and then I want to actually come and have a discussion
about the 'center. Yeah, on the concentric. Exactly. Because that is in terms of strength. That is the closest expression of that.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying your coach is saying, look on the heavyweights, they're going to move slow because they have to, but to keep training strength, I want you to move as quickly as possible as we come down on
weight.
Go. So the idea is we're still applying the same Force, it's going to move more quickly, but it's going to be less fatiguing because it's lighter weight. That's kind of the concept behind it.
Is that happening with you? So, for example, when you did, let's just say you back wasn't hurting yesterday. If you were out there doing today was an rpe Six-Day. Do you think that your speed would have increased sufficiently that you would have almost matched? 90% of the force, you'd put out on a one rep, max
best. It's hard to tell if because I've never actually done the calculation of the force
I imagine there's probably a Sweet Spot somewhere in there. We're too heavy probably has less Force than but yeah, I'm not sure where that is as far as like hypertrophy. I think that force is probably less important. I think it's more about just having enough, sufficiently hard sets. However, you slice that, for example, like the whole idea of time under tension training was very popular and if you look at some of the initial research, I think there was a study where they had people doing curls and I'm a butcher.
Of the study so I apologize. But it was kind of like a six-second, eccentric 6, second con Centric and they had them. Go to failure. And they had another group that just did normal Cadence. And they had to match the number of reps and found that the group that was doing the slow eccentric. Since low concentric, spheres gain, more muscle people said well see, there you go. Well, the problem is they were using, like, 30% of what their one rep max for like ten reps going really slow. Well, if you're going a normal Pace, how many times could you do?
30% of one rep, max. I mean you could do 30 40 50 reps. So it wasn't, I will say the study was bad. It's not bad. It answered the question of one of the answer, but if you're going to compare them straight up, really what it needs to be as if you take both of these things to failure. So the same level of intensity or sufficient difficulty. What does the outcome look like then? And so when they do that, they really see very little difference between slow lifting and fast lifting, there was a study
That just came out that looked at fastest Centrex vs. Louis in tricks and found that there was actually a little bit better outcomes with fast and Centrex compared to slowest Centrex and that actually relates back
to with respect to muscle mass. Yeah you mentioned this to me earlier the only time I've ever done a fast eccentric is on my extra fly machine because you're forced to it's pulling you down so quickly that you're screaming down and you're coming to a stop outside of that it never.
Occurred to me to do an eccentric quickly. Like, if I'm doing eccentric deadlifts, I'm actually come most trying to come down as slowly as I can, in my head thinking, this is more beneficial because I was thinking it's more time under tension,
it's probably partly with the lift to, as well, you know, I think it too extreme. If you're doing a squat, you just dive bomb and there's no tension on the bar one. That's going to look really bad when you're trying to come out of it and to probably not, but they're actually seeing in the research,
let's use a bicep curl.
To say for exercise. So This research suggests that you've take two people that are doing the exact same weight and they're the same people, basically, and they're doing the same speed of their concentric, and one of them is doing, let's say it's a two second concentric and he's doing a two-second eccentric, and the other guys going to up. Six down there saying the 22 will technically produce. More hypertrophy
might be better. So I say might because it's just so interesting, if you think about meccano transduction and
and the force, the mechanical tension being applied to a muscle when you're kind of getting that point where the muscle is stopping. And then having to come the other way, if it's fast, that's probably more attention at that specific point. So we just don't know enough about this stuff right now, to really be able to say, for sure. But I think I also don't want to make it sound. Like there's no benefit to like slow movements especially for people who have pain or they don't want to go heavy, you know, those sorts of things, then slowing down a movement.
Because a lot of times pain can be tied to Velocity. If you just slow down a movement, it won't be as painful. So I've used Tempo training pretty liberally into my training Cycles just to make it. So I had to use less weight but still make it pretty difficult. Now, was it as good as me doing my regular movement? Maybe not, but it's still better than doing nothing. So it's always important to keep those things in mind. In terms of like don't let Perfection be the enemy of progress. So I do think that like slow movements still have
Application for people, like I said, who have pain or if they don't feel comfortable with heavy weight, you can make it much more difficult, just by slowing down the movement. And at the end of the day, the biggest determinant is just doing enough number of hard sets. However, that kind of looks
now, they're a couple of patients that I've had over the years whose disdain for exercise is so great. That the most I can negotiate them. Doing is 1 20 to 30 minute workout
Week doing the super slow protocol you know, they have these specific gyms that have very specific types of equipment and they're going to do, I don't know maybe eight to ten different machines and they're only going to do one set and it's going to be to failure. And the sets are typically titrated to be somewhere between 90 and 100 and 5 Seconds. So about a minute 32, a minute 45 The Sweet Spot, right? As if you're going, more than that, the way it's too light. If you're less than that, the way it's too heavy. And then my
Do like for simple upper body for upper lower. So there might be a press of pull a bicep and tricep, but leg press, you know, all that kind of stuff. The reason I negotiate that is my alternative is they'll do nothing and I'm thinking, I probably can't get any better benefit in 30 minutes once a week. Then I can there, if it's done right now, the challenge that I've realized with that type of exercise, because I've done this many times myself, it's actually really hard to go to failure at the end of the day.
It can be done but it can't be done often and I actually think it's really hard to do it eight consecutive times, which is basically what you're asking a person to do in 30 minutes to truly, go to failure. So what is your take on the super slow, protocols? Which clearly guys like Mike men sir have like there are really famous bodybuilders who have taken these protocols to the limits, but what's your take both on the physiology of it? And then the
psychology of it, that just kind of shows that there's many ways to skin a cat when it comes to hypertrophy.
You really have a lot of options and certainly no one will argue. You can't grow muscle that way because you can,
it is kind of remarkable. Isn't it to think that these people could do 30 minutes once a week and grow
muscle? So a friend of mine, Jeremy Lin, Aquis professor at Ole
Miss Jeremy's been on the podcast bfr yeah.
Yeah, he's great. My claim to fame is I actually introduced him to be a far but they actually published a paper where they looked at just flexing isometric contraction and we're actually able to show with long isometric contraction some hypertrophy which before that we always
Auto isometric doesn't actually grow muscle. There's very little benefit to it. So I think I hate to be the typical tools in the toolkit but things are tools in the toolkit. We're talking about people who are they don't want to be bodybuilders, they just want to get some of these benefits from resistance training. It really is what can we do to get them in the gym consistently? And is it as good as compound movements with free bar and training? At a normal Pace? Maybe not. But it's a heck
Of a lot better than sitting home and doing nothing. Yeah. So I think that's really important to understand and when it comes to like the super slope of the physiology of the hypertrophy response, what's Wild is. We still don't fully understand how the process of muscle hypertrophy occurs we know that you need to progressively overload to continue. Causing the hypertrophy response. We know what things are associated with hypertrophy but every time they try to get really granular with it, we still
A lot of gaps in our understanding. Now, one of the things we do think matters is metabolic stress. So this idea that you're accumulating, these metabolic byproducts inside the muscle as you work it
out. Hence the
bfr, the pump that does appear to have some decent mechanistic data to support it in terms of hydrogen ion accumulation, how that may affect some signaling. Those sorts of things, even right? Down to like calcium release into the sarcoplasmic,
Plasm. So, I think when you're dealing with like that super slow protocol, you're kind of pushing a little bit more on that metabolic stress as opposed to, like the mechanical tension portion of it, but there still is mechanical tension. I think a lot of people think about mechanical tension, just literally is weight on the bar. I think, what people don't realize is mechanical tension, is kind of cumulative, because, otherwise, why wouldn't we just load up a heavy single? And just do that every time because that's the most amount of mechanical tension, you can get in terms of a set point in time.
So, to me, it seems pretty obvious that mechanical tension, has to be like a little bit cumulative throughout asset. And so, if you're doing super slow, okay, you might have a pretty lightweight, but you've also got a really long time to that's under that really lightweight and you're accumulating the metabolic stress and some mechanical tension. So to me, it makes sense that you would have some of those benefits. What I would say is, I think the bigger downside is you're probably not going to get a strong doing that methodology as you are doing a little bit more normal.
Normal pace and it may have a little bit less functionality than somebody who's done. Kind of more traditional strength training. That's my
bigger issue with it. Truthfully is one I don't think people really can go to failure. It's hard you'll get a couple of sets here and there but it's really difficult. I think it's easier to do an exercise where you don't have to go to failure, but you make up for it on volume. But then your other point here is I think you're really missing out on the reason why we exercise sometimes. We exercise to be a better at lifting powerlifting. Is the only example,
Of that. But outside of that, we lift for life and I do worry that when we rob people of movements that require more than one plane movements that require balance and some coordination, we're not giving them the full benefit of the exercise of the reason to exercise that is.
I would agree with that. And again, that has to be one of those things where
it's better than the couch as you said,
it's better than the couch. And so, I think a lot of people, when they get into things, especially now we have paralysis by analysis.
Analysis. I'll tell people like at a certain point your paralysis by analysis is actually just your excuse to do nothing so just go do, go do something go, throw something against a wall and see what sticks. But when it comes to people who may have been sedentary, I mean sometimes a conversational have is, hey, what do you like doing like, is there something you like doing? And let's press on that a little bit because if the only outcome that we're going for is perfection, well,
Not a lot of people are going to be able to hit that so I really do think a lot of it boils down to a conversation of. Okay. Yeah, this isn't as good as this but it's still better than that. And I think that conversation is a lot of the stuff that gets lost that Nuance gets lost in a lot of these conversations especially because you're an Optimizer. I love to talk about optimal because scientists that's kind of where we live. And what we think about do people really need optimal to get out of the state wherein where so many people have type 2 diabetes.
Be teased and have obesity and are dying from heart disease and cancer. I can honestly, if we can we get 50% of the way there, probably see a huge benefit
and that's really the flip side to the stats. I gave earlier in this discussion, which were how high vo2max and high strength. Were the two biggest predictors of longevity and that's true by a country mile. But the part that I didn't mention that is now worth mentioning is that when you break people down into quartiles,
Owls or quintiles of fitness and strength. The biggest jump in the benefit, right? So the biggest Improvement in mortality always comes from being in the bottom quintile or quartile to the next one. This is a really important point that shouldn't be lost. So people are sitting here, listening to us thinking. Look at these two idiots who train all day and love this stuff. Like that's nice for you to say. No actually you're going to achieve the most benefit when you go from being in the lowest.
20% of the population to the second 20th percentile of population and that can't be overstated. So, in other words, the curve looks like
this and I think one of the biggest failures of the fitness industry, quite honestly is convincing people that they need to have a shredded six-pack and be really muscular to be fit. No, you don't have to, in fact, I would argue that most people that are, that lean probably don't feel that fit. I know that when I was very lean for bodybuilding, I had no energy, no sex drive. It's all about food, all the time and was a miserable
Human. So, the real sweet spot is probably where got a little bit of fluff. You're still relatively lean but even not getting to that point. Just moving. I mean, look at the step data, the step data is very, very clear to like there is a huge inflection in about 8000 steps per day. You still get benefits by going, even up to like twenty thousand steps a day. But the vast majority of the benefits, the dip off in mortality. I'm sure you've seen it. It's like going from
Cousin to 8,000. It's like precipitous. It's like free falling off, a cliff, how drastically that decreases mortality. And I don't think there's nothing magic about steps. I just think you're just literally looking at people getting more active, so I think one of the biggest failures of the fitness industry is the messaging that you need to look like this in order for you to be healthy when the messaging should be, hey for you to be healthy. It's really like a very low barrier to entry even if you just get out and walk.
For 30 minutes a day. So much benefit from that just compared to just sitting down just doing anything in the gym. Peoples of all machines are worthless. They're not worthless machines are great tools, you're still applying tension in the muscle. What I argue that maybe a free barbell movement might be more functional, maybe, but if it's a difference between the 70 year, old female who's never resistant strain before getting into the gym and doing something or not. I'm going to be like, yeah, knock yourself out.
Machines. So I think that is a huge failure of the fitness industry in the messaging, which is you need to look like this. In order for you to have achieved Health on that
front. As I do want to talk a little bit about bodybuilding, both in your own personal experience and just again the insights that we can gain. I don't think most people listening to this myself, included ever want to be 4% or 5% body fat which is you don't trust me. But look I'm sure somebody who's 25 percent body fat would like to be 20% body?
D fat and can they learn something from bodybuilder? But just picking up where you went, where do you see kind of the general role of fitness experts in social media? How can a person makes sense of The NeverEnding see of experts out there.
And so a couple years ago we had a guy in our podcast named Alan Levine of its he's been on Joe Rogan's podcast to and he's a religious studies expert but you wrote a book on the naturalism fallacy.
And we were talking about how hard it is for people to identify experts and he said something that I thought was really insightful. He said what you should look for. An expert is the exact opposite of what? You probably think you should look for. If somebody sounds really confident, they're probably not an expert. What you really want to look for is people who sound kind of doubtful and they say things like, probably, maybe possibly when you speak to True experts. Usually, if you ask them a question,
Christian, the first thing they'll do is ask you a question back. Unless the question is very contextual, so I'll get people who say, what are your thoughts on X? And usually, I'll say, okay, well as it pertains to what like hypertrophy or strength or Fitness or you know I need context or to be able to answer the question correctly. People ask me like what do you think about like credentials this? Net credentials. Help if I see somebody has a PHD in a certain subject, I'm probably going to give them a lot more leeway.
Terms of, okay? If they say something I disagree with, let me see why they said that. Let's dig a little bit deeper, but I've seen some PhD, say some really dumb stuff. I've seen people's from Harvard say really dumb stuff. I've probably said really dumb stuff. Like it, it doesn't stop. You credentials, aren't a, they're a nice thing, but they're not foolproof. So really, I try to listen to how people speak,
but given that you have such a knowledge background.
Round. It's a lot easier for you to look at someone's Instagram account. And pretty quickly realized this person knows nothing, they might look good, they might be a great marketer but they don't really know anything, but the average person doesn't have your knowledge base. What else can they rely on? So clearly that's one great criteria or to some sense of credentialing can be helpful some sense of speaking with nuance and being comfortable with uncertainty.
T that's also helpful. Are there any other tools that a person can use to disentangle? This
world people who say the magic words. I don't know that again sounds counterintuitive, so when I was part of getting my PhD, I had to do what's called a qualifying exam. And so that is a for our oral examination, in front of, for professors. And when I was prepping for this doctor, Layman, who found the podcast? He said they're going to push you in whatever subject they start out on.
Until you don't know and you need to be able to say, I don't know. They did exactly that. I'll still never forget the way they started off. The qualifying exam was, let's talk about vitamins. What's your favorite vitamin D? Okay. Where is it synthesized? And they kept pushing until I just didn't know and I'll still never forget, they asked me like, an acid-base balance question in the long, and I started to get up on the wife off board and I just turned around said, I don't know, this one, it's okay, move on. And when I got done, they said you actually one of the best students. We've had the last few years because you knew what you
Do. And you knew what you didn't know that division put such an emphasis on not going outside your lane not speaking about something not speculating about something that you didn't know and trying to pass it off like you did. So I think that just got hammered into me. So when it comes to looking at other folks, one if they're willing to like know their scope and not feel the need to comment on every single thing that's good metric. Also I'm going to paint with a broad.
I'd brush and there's always exceptions to this, but people who use like tips tricks hacks, five things to never do five things. To always do the best worst people who use a lot of superlatives that's not. Typically the way that experts talk, I say a lot, there's no Solutions, there's only trade-offs. There's certain tools that make a lot more sense depending on some of these goals and where they're at, then compared to somebody else and vice versa.
But that almost suggests that social media
Is negatively selecting because a lot of those things that you said, certainty a flair for Showmanship tips. Tricks and listicles, that's what gets attention. I think the algorithm likes those things because they get a lot of attention. Even if some of that attention isn't warranted so that adds another layer of confusion to this, which is it is difficult. And it's even when I scroll through Instagram, I'm amazed at how much it's trying to push to me, you know, I miss the day when all I saw on.
Instagram. Where the 40 people? I followed. I feel like that was the good old days
sequence of the way things were opposed
to. It was like, oh, here's what this friend of mine did. Here's what this friend of mine did. Here's what this person who I don't know, but who I respect that the did and now it's insane. The Barrage of stuff that Instagram thinks I want to see and admittedly sometimes. It's right, but so many times, it's just wrong and it makes me think. Well if that's my experience that's got to be everybody's experience
and it is Alan talked about, this is in
Raishin silos and this is a broader problem but it is a problem in nutrition and fitness specifically if you just follow the people you follow and then the accounts that get suggested to you you're actually not broadening anything. You're sitting in an information Silo and what happens is or at least what I think is happening, is previously, 90s 2000s, 80s, whatever you'd come across people with differences of opinion to you and you
Have a conversation with them. And it usually was, you know, sometimes it could be contentious. But for the most part, I would say like when you can sit down and look at human being in the eyes and talk about your differences, it's usually not as confrontational. Now, we have whole generations of people who are not used to seeing opinions different than their own or thoughts or beliefs that are different from their own because they're in those information silos and when they get exposed to something different they just don't know how to handle it. Like you see some
Really like extreme responses even to stuff like nutrition. I can't name. How many times I've been called a shill for XYZ, big meat, big Dairy, artificial sweeteners, Big Sugar, you know, because it's almost like Well it can't possibly be it. Somebody just has a different opinion. Based on this data they have to be a bad person so I do think it's a real problem. And what you said is very well taken that is you almost have to be willing to do click.
Date to really get your stuff out there. And so I as a business owner who does a lot of the business or Instagram, I really have to try to skirt a fine line of I'm trying to get people's attention and not lose the nuance and the context and all those things are important. And trust me those days where I'm like I could make so much money if I just, but that isn't how I want to live my life or leave my legacy or anything like that.
You're an interesting person because
Personality on Twitter and your personality on Instagram, or quite different. And your personality in real life is totally different people who know you. Like I know you you almost don't recognize. Now, tell me a little bit about that. Has that been an evolution? Because I have to be honest with you, I quite envy your personality on
Twitter.
I'm just made a decision that I've almost always been able to. Uphold, which is I'm not going to get drawn into it. I don't really even look at comments on Twitter anymore. Post and ghosts and ghost is Rogue.
And has adequately reminded me many times so, but I'll be honest with you. I see enough - ones where I just want to spank the living shit out of the person on the other end. I mean, I want to, with words, eviscerate them. Yeah. And 99.9% of the time, I refrain from doing it, but I really get a kick out of the fact that a lot of times you just spank people into the next Century. So tell me about that. Is it a conscious decision? Because it never comes across as
Unhinged and never comes across as terribly reactionary. Usually comes across as kind of calculated. Walk me through your
thinking, I think it probably was a little bit unhinged. When I first started the internet was just in general, like I'm bodybuilding. Forums like your disagree with me. You call me a name well, but I think my style is going to be for everybody part of it. Honestly, if I'd like psychoanalyze, myself, probably goes back to like, me being bullied as a kid and I almost view misinformation and
And people who especially, you've probably noticed, I save my most the biggest amount of vitriol for people who it's very clearly have a pattern of behavior that's also being monetized. When you were like praying on the desperation and ignorance of people, I'm going to have very little sympathy for you and part of that evolved to out of my coaching and seeing how many people came to me, quite frankly feeling broken, because
Tried so many of these things that were the solution and the Cure and when it didn't work for them, they're just like, you know, something wrong with me, it's like nothing's wrong with you. Just you haven't been executing on these principles, that work. I really have tried to dial it back a little bit because I think I took it too far at a certain point, but now I just try to, like, use it to be funny to get some attention. So, what's funny is like, my best Instagram posts are all just screenshots of my Twitter. If you look at my, you can go to your insights. And you look at my top.
Performing Post, Its
95% Twitter screenshot Twitter.
Screenshots one of my top rated posts of all time was Mark, Hyman had said something, my response was just stop making shit up very like Cavalier and funny and there are some people who had absolute turn them off. And I get that, but then I also speak to the people who are like. Yeah, I'm tired of like stuff being overly sanitized and I just wish somebody would tell me how they really feel. That's funny because I've had so many.
Next reach out to me behind closed doors and so I love your Twitter. I love just watching you break this stuff down and the thing is I'll say to people it's never just me, attacking the person, I'm also providing citations or logic and data and what not but I'm just trying to make it funny and engaging but I'll always have a conversation with somebody like for example, Thomas de Lauer is a great example. So I've done several videos, be bunking, some of the claims he made and actually one day he just reached out to
Me and said, hey man, I want you to know that actually really respect you and you've actually made me change the way I think about some of the stuff. Would you want to come on my podcast? Yeah man. Let's do it because I really respect anybody who can be self-reflective enough to go, you know what I might have been wrong or just even like wanting to get a different perspective on things. So just another great example that I'm actually going and speaking at a low carb Conference next year.
The joke was do I need to bring bodyguards?
That's so interesting to me. I'm not close enough to any of the dietary communities to know. Obviously, I still get very strongly associated with a low-carb ideology which is fun and given that you see how many carbohydrates I eat. But what is the view about you and low-carbohydrate diets? Because I've never heard you say anything that is uniquely anti low carb. Other than the stuff we've already talked about on the previous
podcast. Well, I always tell people, so I'm like, how could I be anti low-carb, if you go
To our nutrition coaching app carbon diet, coach, two of the six settings are low carbohydrate. There's low carbohydrate, and there's ketogenic. So, how could I possibly be? Low carb, are anti low-carb. I think that this is just an example of a call this the Tim Tebow effect, but it's just like polarization. So, you ruined Tim Tebow was playing in a football. My hypothesis was, there are very few people in the middle about Tim Tebow. You either love them or you hate them. And the way this kind of comes up is
If you watch this guy and you're like, yeah, you know, he's not really that good. He's got weird mechanics, he's more of a running back then he is a quarterback and he's kind of preachy but you know he's all right. But then you see all these people saying he's the Heisman, you know, he's going the playoffs, he's better than your quarterback like, you know, this that what he talking about, like his completion percentage is like, 45%, how could you say his group? Then you have the other side, which people like me, I actually was kind of Tim Tebow fan because I like, you know, he seems like a nice guy who works hard.
Maybe not the best genetics to be a quarterback but he's been successful. That's admirable. And then you look over here and you see all these people going, he sucks. He's terrible. And it's like, well, he did win a playoff game. So I think this happens with many different subjects. We were talking about this the other day. You're a car guy. I'm not a car guy. So, I've posted many times in fact, when we bought our new house, I'm going to take a picture of me with the car outside the house. Give me the greatest picture ever, go, some of my social media because I've still got my grad.
Will car, which is a 2003 Alero. And I've just never felt the need to get rid of it. So I got this really dinky old car with me on the hood sitting outside. This wonderful big house and sure enough, we like 1,500 comments, but some of the comments were and I was talking about how basically saying, you know, my ability to delay gratification is what got me here. And you can do it to like, delaying gratification and anything is so essential for success in almost
See goal, because it's so crazy. How in almost anything whatever provides you short-term relief for happiness? Almost always makes it worse than a long-term and vice versa. But people would say, why do you hate people who buy a nice cars? Where is that hate people by nice cars? I never said that same thing with low carb. My messaging is consistently, been, usually, they'll be some kind of insane, claim calories, don't matter, or, you know, you can eat as much on low carb as you want, not?
In fact, well, here's a citation. Citation, citation low-carb does not appear to be better for fat loss than calorie protein. Equated diets that are not low carb but that means choose what you prefer because it's not worse. So by all means, if you like low-carb, go right ahead. I don't enjoy low carb but I know many people that do and so one of the reasons people get so tribal about this is they find something that worked for them. And
They then retroactively try to find the evidence to show that. It's the best thing that there is which
of the two Landscapes nutrition and exercise. Do you think is more culty? My impression is nutrition,
definitely nutrition, definitely nutrition.
And do you think that? That's because of the ubiquity of food in our lives and the fact that we all have almost equally a personal relationship with food whereas not everybody.
Sizes, the same
amount. So there's two things especially here in America. We come from a Puritan background. And I think that this this kind of thinking that anything that is pleasurable at all, must be bad for you and you cannot have it. You should feel bad about it. So I think that causes people to get a little bit tribal. I mean I've had people say horrible like moral judgments because I'll post me eating a bag of Skittles or something like that. Never mind the fact, I just wouldn't train for three hours.
I think somebody like called me a disgusting sugar addict one time. So that's one part of it. I think it's the smaller part. I think the bigger part is what you just said. It's funny, whenever I meet new people, I'm always kind of hesitant you know if they don't know anything about me to tell them, no, I've background in nutrition PhD in nutrition because usually one of a couple things happens, the other clam up real quick. We're out to dinner and they get very self-conscious about what they're eating which bro. I just ordered the fries like good or I get like blitzkrieg.
With questions, but mostly people wanting me to validate what they already believe to be true. If I sat down, I said, you know, I'm a theoretical astrophysicist, we might talk about space a little bit but they're probably not going to question my beliefs. Are my opinions on string theory but I think because everyone eats and everyone knows something about their body, right? Or wrong, they have drawn certain conclusions about what they put in their body and what happens to them.
ADI, I think because of that because everybody has an opinion about nutrition, it makes it really tough because people are already just natively, have certain beliefs and we know how hard it is to change people's beliefs. There was a classic study, it was in politics, was a classic study where they showed hard data and this was for both parties, they would either refute a preconceived belief or
Support it. I can't remember what they used for Republicans but for Democrats. The belief was that the George W. Bush stopped or outlawed funding for stem cell research or something like that. The reality was he just stopped Federal funding, he didn't out one. They showed people these facts by the way, again, if I butchered that, I apologize to anyone watching, but I think that was it. They showed people these facts and it didn't matter if they believed that he had outlawed it, even if they show them the facts that he didn't, it's
Still reinforced their pre-existing belief, it actually made their beliefs stronger. The same thing was true for Republicans, by the way. So I don't think it's a Republican or Democrat problem. I think it's a people problem, to be honest, one of the benefits I had very early on in grad. School was dr. Layman just absolutely dismantling so many beliefs. I had, but doing it in a way that wasn't judgmental, or made me feel bad. And
I tell people now it's being wrong about something is a beautiful thing because if I'm already right about everything that I'm already doing everything, the best I can and I can't get better if I'm wrong about something. That's actually awesome because now I have something I can improve on now. I tell people I like being right. Like I'll do cartwheels in my living room if I'm right. But if I'm wrong I don't really take that much offense to it because it's just data. There's no ethical judgment. And I've
Changed my mind about a myriad of things.
Over the I was gonna ask you what are three of the most impactful things that you have changed your opinion on in nutrition specifically and let's make it recent because I know for any of us. If we go back a decade it's an eternity. In terms of our understanding of nutrition science assuming that but let's pick a narrower window of maybe three or four years. What would be sort of three areas where your opinion has really changed?
In a manner that actually leads to either a different behavior in you or a different coaching input to your
clients. I think it's three things right away. So first thing being LDL cholesterol. So when I got to grad school The Narrative and even out of the lab I was in was we don't think it's LDL, it's more the HDL to LDL ratio and the particle size and those sorts of things. And I kept that probably until about five years ago. Four years ago,
And I just saw enough of these. Mendelian randomization is come out. It's like, wow, that's pretty powerful when you look at the mortality rate and it is like linear with the exposure. The lifetime exposure LDL, I'm like, can't really hold this belief anymore because it's just not supported by the data and actually changed my opinion on. Now, I'm a little bit more conscious about the saturated fat. I consume, we talked about actually started taking a low dose of a Statin. I've never had super high LDL but I've always been around.
152 125, even if I reduce my saturated fat, increase my fiber night, probably 60, 70 grams of fiber a day. So I think people get that one twisted a little bit because they'll hear things like, well it doesn't consider HDL, it doesn't consider this. No, you have to understand what an independent risk factor means. It means that all things being equal or you better off having higher HDL. Yeah. But HTML is more of a marker of metabolic health because we have some drug trials and
Mendelian randomization is now where they modulate HDL and doesn't really seem to make a difference whereas, if you modulate LDL. So even at high HDL or low HDL in both stratifications, lower LDL is almost always better for cardiovascular disease and more time.
Feel like I need to do a podcast on mendelian randomization. I write about it in my book, very powerful. And I understand why it doesn't get more attention because you do have to really get into the weeds of
Of genetics sorting and the statistical methods that are involved but I actually in the book, write about it as one of the five pillars of evidence that we should be relying on as we formulate insights with respect to anything that we do. So that's an interesting one and obviously it has a parallel piece which is around your relationship to saturated
fat. One of the things to keep in mind is when you're looking at mortality cardiovascular disease,
This is where nutrition science can become. So limited in the power with mendelian randomization is your kind of looking at a lifetime randomized control trial. So people will point out things, like the Minnesota, coronary study, and I think there's another Australian study and they said, we'll look at this randomized control trial where they looked at high saturated fat versus low, saturated fat and there wasn't a difference or, you know, that sort of thing. And one of the biggest problems with those studies is two years, which is a really long time for a randomized control trial. But when you're talking about a
Aziz, that is a lifetime exposure to years and people that are in their 40s. I mean, you just not going to have that many incidences to pick up on. So when you're looking at mendelian randomization, you can get around that because you're looking at people across their lifetimes. And the way I kind of explain and I don't consider myself a lipid expert, but the way I try to explain like lifetime exposure, risks is imagine if you and I start investing and you get in at 8%, we both invest.
10,000 hours, you get an eight percent, I get sixty percent if we look after a year or two, I mean you'll have more but it won't be statistically different. But if we look at 40 years you're gonna have a lot more. I don't know how much exactly but my guess is it's going to be magnitudes of times greater because you're again, lifetime exposure.
Actually I've done this exercise. It was initially in my book. I actually use this exact analysis. So really was a thousand dollars invested at. I think I chose six percent versus
four percent or maybe it was even 6 verses 5. It was something that was small enough that at 5 and 10 years, wasn't enormous, but at 40 50 and 60 years was staggering. And that was the exact point which is the cumulative effect of compounding over a lifetime is so nonlinear that I don't think we are capable of understanding it. Like, I don't think we can ever cognitively realize it until we literally just do the calculations.
They're staring Us in the face.
Again, that's one thing I changed my mind on that. I'm pretty strong belief about it. It's kind of like, well, how much evidence do you need? We still have LDL denial us out there.
I think it's one of the most dangerous things. I see, actually,
you have the mechanism, the penetration of the endothelium, it's very clear that that happens. We have the animal models that show, linear dose dependent effects,
the other mendelian randomization, and you have the clinical trials in
humans and you have the prospective cohort studies.
And then you have the genetic studies, you have the pcsk9 over
And under Express orders, I want to come back to Minnesota heart study in a moment. But let's go on in here. The other
two, it's a little branched-chain amino acids. That's another one. I used to be a big advocate for that. In fact, the first supplement company I had five years ago, we sold a product that branched chain amino acids in it, and then my current supplement company out, work nutrition. We do not have a branched amino acid product
because I was basically taking the three branching amino acids as an in workout
supplement as a post-workout recovery supplement,
I still do think there may be a small benefit for delayed onset, muscle soreness with Branch chains, that may be outside of just regular protein, but based on the cost and honestly like the negative impact on taste too, because that's Ana Lucia. It's horrible. Right?
Oh yeah, I used to spike 5 grams of leucine into my water during a workout. I mean, it's the most awful tasting. Is there any other amino acid that taste? As bad as
leucine? Probably, some of the sulfur-based ones.
Assisting our with eating nuts. Pretty bad. And the fact, it's also nonpolar. So it doesn't
dissolve that doesn't dissolve. All your kind you're shaking it constantly.
Yeah, so I was a big advocate for that. I was sponsored by a company called salvation for years that had a branch chain. Amino acid product
has the rest of the world caught up to that, or BCAAs still a
big product. They still are big product, but most evidence-based folks will say, it's not better than protein. In fact, the research tends to suggest whey protein is actually better than branched chains, even when
Like, wait for the dose of branched chains in the protein. So yeah, I just kind of got to the point where I'm like, if I put this in the products, I'm just doing it because I'm tied to Branch chains, right? Like people are expecting this from me because my PhD was in leucine in the branched-chain amino acid and the metabolism and their effects on muscle protein synthesis. But I couldn't hold that position anymore based on the evidence because it was just too strong. So, the other thing, I changed my opinion on was intermittent fasting at least in terms of, like, your traditional 16:8 because I used
To say, well, I'm worried about the catabolic effects of it, you know, that sort of thing, at least when combined, with resistance training and sufficient, total protein, the caveat should be that they also in these studies, they trained within their feeding window. There's some really good Studies by Grant tensley on this. There doesn't appear to be at least not statistically significant differences, in lean mass between people, who do 16 8, intermittent fasting versus people who just it continuously. So, I used to be like somebody like, well, really
Every four hours should be getting a protein, does that sort of thing? Maybe if you plot it out over 30 Years, it'll make a difference in how much lean mass you gain. So, I would still say if you're somebody who's a bodybuilder and you want to absolutely squeeze out every last ounce of muscle that you can get, I still would say, like, any form of intermittent fasting, probably isn't optimal, but for the average person, can you get plenty, strong, plenty big. And still do intermittent fasting at least.
A 16-8, I would say, absolutely
just really interesting because I've kind of gone the other way from. Yeah. You were saying I used to be a big proponent and then what I was seeing clinically so this was really just anecdotal. But when you see it over and over and over and over again on so many patients on whom you have dexa data and was we were seeing a real deterioration of body
composition now with a still definitely getting enough total
protein. Oh, and that's my point. So what I know was happening
Was they were falling behind on protein and so the question, then becomes one of efficacy versus Effectiveness. In other words, the data which are done under controlled settings. Say if I control for total protein, it can be identical. But the effectiveness version of that is in practice. Do people make that happen? I guess what I would say is we weren't seeing it. So we still use intermittent fasting.
Fasting in patients, as one of the three big levers, of energy, restriction. But we have a big red caution button all over it that says, if you choose this instead of caloric restriction, or dietary restriction, if you want to choose time, restriction, as your lever.
You're going to have to go out of your way, to make sure you are not compromising protein.
One of the things I'll tell people is I can do dogmatism over all these different disciplines, including what I like, which is flexible dieting. But people get too hung up on the actual fasting part of intermittent fasting. You're reducing your energy intake, it's a tool. And a lot of people, it works great, like they say I'm not hungry. It didn't feel like I was dieting, awesome. But so people say, well, is it going to break a fast? If I have coffee, will break a fast, I chew gum
We'll break a fast, if I have a protein shake, what I'll say is, like, why are you fasting? And usually,
if, and, by the way, I'm only laughing because I'm guilty of this, right? I used to really think about the details of that. And like, I think at apogee is an incredibly important part of our ability to regenerate. I just don't think there's a chance, you're getting any meaningful amount of it in 16 hours and therefore, to your point, we would even tell patients now too,
A protein shake outside of that feeding window. In fact, I think you. And I even spoke about that idea which was if it's really all about energy restriction. What's an extra 200 calories outside of your feeding window.
Exactly. Actually, if you look at some of the effects of high protein diets, they actually are not dissimilar from some of those effects, you get, from fasting, at least like liver metabolism and whatnot. So I would say to somebody well, don't worry about breaking your fast, in terms of you're eating something. If you're worried about it intermittently fast, your carbohydrate and fat.
Intake. And just have an extra dose of protein the morning or essential amino acid, or whatever you want because now you're getting that anabolic stimulus, spreading it out a little bit more. You're making sure you get enough total protein in during the day and quite honestly, I mean, this is a theory that dr. Lyman. And I had which was breakfast. Probably is the most important protein dosing of the day because you are coming off a significant period of fasting. And then if you're extending that out like how much longer are you extending that out? What does that mean? You know, the long
term I've had told you
I've officially taken to bribing my 14 year old daughter, there's now real Stakes on the line for her to get that minimum 30 grams of protein pun
intended with steak, right?
Minimum 30 grams before she goes to school in the morning, I'm like an awful father
June. It's interesting how that dogmatism plays out. Like you have the same thing with lokar people. So worried about getting any carbs. Meanwhile, they're like dumping oil on their salad, putting butter in their coffee and you eating, like loads of bacon or
They're being keto ice cream because it's not spiking their blood sugar. But if you look at the keto ice cream, it's actually more calories than like we're missing the entire Point here. And the same thing goes for like flexible dieting. I had people who were like they were trying to hack the system of. How can I eat as much junk food? As I want,
I'm allowed 3,000 calories a day. What if it's all Skittles?
So what if I do, just protein, shake Skittles, and peanut butter and my point is like, listen, if you take anything too far as pie, really bad idea.
Yeah, and one of things I said about flexible dieting to is like, we know, fibers really important. There are some folks who are kind of anti fiber
now. Oh, really, I've missed this movie.
Well, the carnivore, the carnivore folks, okay, okay, it's funny, like I was in the debate, one time with a carnivore Advocate and you do my research was sponsored by the egg nutrition center, a national Dairy Council and the national Cattlemen's beef
Association. If anybody should be Pro
carnivals and I said the fact that I'm sitting here defending plants is
Really kind of mind-blowing to me and if anything, it should actually increase your trust in what I'm saying because I'm a fan of high quality animal protein. I think it's,
what is the argument? Let's talk for a moment about the carnivore diet. Obviously, for people listening, it's pretty straightforward explanation. It's a diet where you only eat
meat. I've heard some versions now. When people eat honey and fruits and whatnot which I'm not sure how that's carnivore anymore. But in any case I would say, that's a little better. But so the argument
against, what's the argument
In favor of that. What do they propose is the reason
to do it? The reason to do it is, it's basically anecdotal. People have done this and they've seen this and of course, you could absolutely lose weight doing something like that.
Seems pretty easy to see how you would lose weight only through the lens of dietary. A strict enough dietary restriction is going to ultimately
reduce until much meat can eat, even if it's fatty meat and the justification been, well, I still go to the bathroom. Just fine. It's like well, that's not why you should eat fiber. I mean, yeah, it helps. But that's the last reason to eat fiber in my opinion.
Some people have said well help clear up some autoimmune issues that's hard to quantify and some people say, well, get lowered by inflammation and my GI problems. So this is one thing, a lot of people get mixed up, they'll get like bloated or have gi discomfort, they equate, that with inflammation, you might have some localized inflammation. Although, it's probably based on what we know about, like, IBS and whatnots probably just like, barrows sensitivity, but that's not the same thing as like, well, usually saves, well, did you get your CRP measured? Did you get your il-6 measured? That's in
Inflammation. We talked about inflammation, that's what we're talking
about. Let's assume that all those things are true. Let's assume that I went on a carnivore diet and my actual biomarkers of inflammation improved and my symptoms improve. I don't know what the number is, but if you think of the average number of foods, a person will eat in a given week different foods. Let's posit that it's in the tens, maybe 100, If you eliminate all. But one of them it's not a good experiment, you have
Really learned a lot. You've learned that something in those 99 might have been the problem. That's a hard way to
learn. So one of the things I've said, I think a lot of people are getting benefits. Is they're basically doing an Elimination Diet for the most part. Most people don't have sensitivities to meet. I think many people just not being in tune with their body. Probably have IBS fodmaps sensitivities, where they're fermenting on Africans. Look a saccharides, you know, those sorts of things and that firm.
In tation for people with IBS even though it's a healthy thing because bacteria getting fuel from fiber as a healthy thing if it's causing pain there equating that with being something - which obviously we don't want anybody in pain. I
still believe that there are a lot of people who have wheat sensitivities that are not full on gluten sensitivities. They don't rise to the level of celiac
disease. It's possible. So it's one of those things where they eliminate all plants and they go, well, I feel better. Okay, well, now the
That should be should be addition adding things back in one by one and let's figure out what's actually causing those problems. So what I would submit to people is like still try to include fruits and vegetables and just slowly add them back in and see what works for you. Because I think in this gets into dietary protein, a longevity. I think a lot of this negative perception of animal protein with longevity and health is people who eat high amounts of animal
Teen. These aren't people for the most part. They're not eating like lean cuts of sirloin and chicken breasts and what not people are eating. High meat, are typically eating high amounts of processed meat and they eat less amounts of fruits and vegetables. In fact, there's a really classic study in my opinion, from maximoff in 2020. I think it was quintals, so for different serving amounts of fruits, and vegetables, and for serving amounts of meat,
Eat. So lowest to highest when you look at low vegetable intake, there is like a linear effect of our sorry. If you look at like going from high to low vegetable intake, linear effect on the incidence of cancer and meet as you go up and meet, not correcting for fruits and vegetable intake. You have a linear effect of meat on cancer. But guess what happens when you couple the highest quintile meat intake with? Also, the highest quintile, a fruits and vegetable intake
There's no effect. You have the same risk for cancer with high meat and high fruit and vegetable intake, as you do with low meat and high fruit and vegetable intake. So to me that suggests, it's less about the meat, you're eating and more about what you're eating it. Instead of one of the things to keep in mind when nutrition is when we tell people to eat more or less of something, usually there's a replacement that happens. It doesn't happen.
In a vacuum. So to me if we're talking about carnivore, sure. I like high quality protein great. I would argue probably lean Cuts or a little bit better option but for god sakes have some fruits and vegetables with it because it's what's going to mitigate your risk.
You said you're getting about 40 grams of fiber a day. I'm around 60 60 and that's total soluble and insoluble. Yeah, it's total silence. So what are your sources? What's the main foods that are contributing to
that? I'll do like a lot of rice cauliflower.
Do broccoli, some beans, I love apples. So that's kind of my go-to
fruits or so many grams of fiber in an
apple. I'm going to say it's like three or four grams, maybe a little bit less than that. It's not a huge amount, but if you want something a little bit more packed berries, berries to be really fiber dense, compared to something like apples. Like a banana is a fruit. But relatively low fiber All Things Considered. But even like the higher sugar lower fiber, fruits or still relatively well associated with good health outcomes.
And then, honestly, people going to laugh and be judgmental. I Love Popcorn. So popcorn actually is pretty darn high fiber,
or than corn on the colonel. / Colonel
basis. I don't know about
that because I feel like you could eat more corn than popcorn.
Oh yeah, so popcorns actually very filling. That's one reason I got into eating it doing bodybuilding competitions. I would just like air popped popcorn and I'll usually like put a little bit of cinnamon and Splendor over that and then like a little bit of the butter spray 450 grams of carbohydrate from popcorn will take you 20.
30 minutes to eat it. So I just found that that help me control my hunger and in 50 grams of popcorn you're getting around 6 to 10 grams of fiber, depending on the specific brand you're using. I love that as a snack, is it as healthy as if I had some fruits and vegetables, probably not, but as far as the snap goes, it's pretty good and very filling. So I do that and then like just miscellaneous sources throughout the day. But one of the things to really look at is, I was in a debate with Paul salty. No one time. And we were talking
Talk about fiber and one of the things he said,
he's a big carnivore, a big
part of our Advocate. One of the things he said was well this stuff with fiber, it's just healthy user bias people, eat more fiber, they just have other health promoting behaviors. Now, that's a real thing in terms of cohort studies and cross-sectional data observational data, it is a real thing. But when you're dealing with something that's kind of a healthy user bias, typically you'll see the data is not consistent. One study will say one thing, one,
We may have no effect on study by say a different thing. You see that with meet. You see that with meet longevity. I was just looking at some meta-analysis earlier. That one, man, analysis, even showed that after controlling for confounding variables that actually, animal protein was not associated with increased mortality.
But you don't see it with
exercise. You don't see with
exercise, don't see it with the smoking studies in the opposite
direction. You don't see the fiber, the effect and fiber at least in terms of cardiovascular disease cancer. It is a very consistent effect and it's very consistent.
Distant. Even across all the meta analyses. I've seen. So, do we have a 10-year randomized, control trial of giving people, you know, enough fiber versus not enough fiber, and seeing how that comes known will never have that. But do I feel very comfortable saying that I think fiber helps reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer based on the data we have, oh yeah. I feel very comfortable saying that.
What's the RDA on fiber is at 30 grams, not that the RDA matters. I'm just kind of
curious.
30 grams. I'll be honest. I haven't looked at it a while. I know they changed the guidelines while back to what I tell people a good Target to shoot for is like 15 grams per thousand calories. I would love to go more. But at some point it just becomes intractable to get that much fiber. At that low
can do all the things that you mentioned for fiber. You're eating real food to get it. So how do we think about it in terms of bars and things that seem, I've heard different things about this. Where, you know, if you look at the in court, in effect, for example, it would suggest that the fiber that
It's in a processed bar is not really contributing the way a fiber is in the way you just described it if you're actually eating cauliflower or beans or things like that,
I try not to fall into the naturalistic fallacy. I get a little bit cringed when I hear processed unprocessed because what we do to food now and everything is processed processing. And of itself is
processing, doesn't mean bad. I just mean and I'm really talking about this purely through the lens of the disruption of the actual Colonel and what that actually does at the glp-1
level. Getting
To that. Yeah, I would say that Mother Nature's kitchen is probably better than a fiber bar. That's like, some indigestible form of glucose or some less digestible form of starchy carbohydrate. But is it better than nothing? It's probably better than nothing. But if somebody says well, I'm getting 40 grams of fiber a day and it's because they're eating three protein bars that 14 grams of fiber. I would argue that well it's probably not equivalent to getting six to eight servings of fruits and vegetables,
let's talk about one other macro nutrient or subset of macro nutrient which is polyunsaturated.
And fatty acids. This is one of those things. I always tell people, there's nothing in nutrition, that I'm more confused about than the role of omega-6 poof has. So let's go back to that, Minnesota, coronary, experiment, that you mentioned. It's a very unique experiment, probably, never to be
replicated. No IRB, whatever
proven, and I'm still trying to track down Chris ramsden. Who wrote the paper that looked at all of the data that were never published in friends' first study, but I'll retell the study.
To the best of my recollection, which is super fog at this point. So this is a study carried out in Minnesota. Please, correct me if I'm missing any details. It was carried out in assisted living or mental facility, and it might have been two arms. I can't remember what makes this special then. Is that the subjects in this study were fed every meal. So what makes this a really unique study is that it was not a free-living study though. It had free-living duration. I want to say the average duration was three
years.
Just over to I was it. Okay. The study was five years.
Yeah. But the feeding intervention was only too
well, I think, because people were kind of going in and out of the facility. The average subject duration was about two two and a half
years. So for this period of time, every meal is being fed and there's patients are randomized into two groups, ISO caloric ISO macro, but at the fat level, one group was high saturated fat one group as low saturated fat, if I recall the
Reduction in saturated fat was not trivial. It was 30. 18.5 is a number that sticks out in my mind and I can't remember.
But I remember the exact number because are really big reduction in Century. Not something that I would say. Well, there just wasn't a big enough
deal. That's right. I think we can all look at it and say, wow, these guys were getting a lot of saturated fat. These guys were getting a lot of omega-6 polyunsaturated. Was it canola? What was the dominant form of the
oil? I don't remember that actually
might have been corn oil. I don't remember which one it was which of the
Big force a flower, but I think it was canola but I could be wrong on that. Will obviously post a link to the original study. So the study goes on and they get all the data. What was the hypothesis that was being tested by hypothesis? Would being tested was in this really well-designed. Elegant, study the group on the lower saturated fat arm should have had fewer cardiovascular events because this was right at the time when the theory initially proposed by Ansel.
He's in about 1961 was that saturated fat, specifically was the driver of blood lipids and this was really the connection to the heart. The lipid
hypothesis supposed to be kind of like the nail in the coffin for that hypothesis in terms of cementing it as correct.
Legit. So the idea was this group on the higher saturated fat, they would have more heart attacks and couldn't argue these data. This was really clear. You've also had a high power to this study because it was very
large, it was like 500 something
people, I think it was more
More. Is it? Wow. Yeah, I think it was a stag. I was amazed at how big the number was and they were old which meant you were going to see events. You couldn't do a two-year study in 40 year olds, you see no events in anybody so it all these things going for it. 1973 the results come out. There's no difference. The study goes unpublished, it's not published until 1989 16 years later. Friends publishes it. When asked why he said quite plainly, we didn't like the way it turned out.
Now, a guy named Chris Ramsey, who I believe is still at the NIH though. If you're listening to this and anybody knows him, please tell him, I've been trying to reach him for the past two years unsuccessfully won't return any emails. He comes along maybe five years ago and finds a whole bunch of unpublished data and republish, has I think one, if not two studies in the bmj, before we get to what ramsdens, findings are my interpretation of the study that I just
ascribed, my initial representation or my initial interpretation of that. 10 years ago was saturated fats, not causing heart disease. 10 years later. My interpretation was that study wasn't long enough to see a difference at the time. They did measure total cholesterol levels. They didn't have fractionate cholesterol the time. So they couldn't measure LDL or HDL or anything like that, but there was about a 30 mg per deciliter reduction in total cholesterol, on the low saturated fat Group, which again now you have a biomarker that
You this intervention worked in the majority of that 30 milligrams per deciliter was probably LDL cholesterol. Could they have measured it so then my interpretation turned into two years of an intervention wasn't long enough. If you took a bunch of people and put them on a Statin for two years, you probably wouldn't see a difference. You could miss a difference now, the pcsk9 trials, suggested otherwise, it's really interesting. The Odyssey and Fourier trials 2015 which were testing the most potent. Lipid-lowering drugs available actually did show a benefit in a
About two-and-a-half to three years but they were crushing LDL. So again, it's an area under the curve problem. This one was reducing it but not crushing it. That's sort of where I
left. I think it's important to point out to the modifications. You can make to cholesterol from diet in some cases can be quite small compared to what you can get pharmaceutical interventions.
That's right outside of the most extreme. I'm sure if somebody went on to a zero saturated fat, 12 percent total fat,
Calorie restricted diet, they can probably cut their cholesterol in half, but they'd be doing a whole bunch of harm. I would argue along the way
and the other direction you do have some people like in the low carb Community who are bragging, about LDL cholesterol levels in the
500. Well, that's what's gonna say you can do the opposite much more. It's an unbounded problem above. So obviously abounded problem below ramsdens data suggests that actually the people in the pufa group had worse outcomes. Now that really kind of throws me for a loop. And that's frankly why I kind of want to have it on the
podcast because his data suggests that at least this particular pufa had a negative cardiovascular effect.
Now, to me
that study is probably if the details of that study are consistent. That would be the most damning evidence against n6 poof has in terms of lowering lipids, but raising events. And by the way, there is a precedent for that, there was a drug that was approved in
1960s that actually lowered cholesterol. But increased cardiovascular events drug was withdrawn. This was back in the day with the mechanism was for that. I can speculate. He actually recently discussed this on a podcast, the mechanism that it's believed that this drug worked, is it prevented the conversion of does master, all to cholesterol? That's the final step of cholesterol synthesis in one of the two Pathways. And so when you gave people this drug, and the name always Escapes Me, Try amateur all or
Something like that when you gave people this drug their cholesterol went down significantly and the drug was approved on the basis of cholesterol-lowering. Not on the basis of outcomes today. Cholesterol drugs are only approved on the basis of outcomes as well, but then it had to be pulled from the market because you saw the events. So I don't think they ever investigated it. But I think today, we look back and we think that does master all acted, perhaps, as bad if not worse than cholesterol in terms of the oxidative process. So, you basically lowered cholesterol, but the precursor went through the roof and
A cursor was at least as bad if not more damaging, interesting, that's the suspicion. The point only being there is there is a precedent for you can lower cholesterol, and worsen events, and so ramsden. Proposes, a series of mechanisms by which that might be the case with at least this polyunsaturated fat conversely. There is a lot of epidemiology that says the opposite that polyunsaturated fats whenever you substitute saturated for polyunsaturated things get better. Nobody's disputing.
Ting, move over here. The data seemed unambiguously clear that move has the best of the three fats both epidemiologically and experimentally. How do you think about the breakdown not the breakdown? But what I mean is the distribution of how one should think about Distributing their
fats? I've actually have seen some epidemiology that showed poof has were actually lowering events
more. That's one thing. The pufa data look like it's more favorable than the SFA. Well
even then monounsaturated to I've seen some of that as well. But again you're dealing with cohort data and
Not, we all know if limitations there as far as the Minnesota coronary study. It's probably a solid cop out, but I've really gotten to the point after seeing just so many random events and studies where I go. I don't know what one study means, no matter how long it runs is. Now I have seen studies that were so compelling that. I swayed my opinion a little bit, but it was usually because there was also other contextual data that made sense the way this one.
About it's like we don't really know how to reconcile this because even if you look at some of these omega-6 fats and I think one of the big mechanisms has been proposed as well, they're going to increase inflammation because those double bonds can be oxidized at oxidation causes inflammation but if we look at the Hard outcome data and randomized control trials where they give like the maleic acid or alpha-linolenic acid or whatever, you just don't see inflammation, go up if they're not increasing total calories. In fact, you usually especially if you're replacing a protector,
Fat sometimes. You see, inflammation go down. So this one, this is where I go. I don't really know what it means and I think
so, I don't feel bad now, saying, I just have no
clue. I think it's one of those things where it's you kind of have to look at the weight of the evidence and then couple that with some of the mechanistic evidence and look at the, the human outcome mechanisms, we can see, which is okay, maybe we can't do it to, you randomized control trial. But 12 weeks is enough time to see differences in inflammation. If something's going to
Cause a difference inflammation so we can look at that. I don't know if that was his main mechanism that he proposed for how it was occurring. There was
absolutely one of them got it's been so long since I looked at his bigger, bmj paper will attach to the paper in the show notes so people can kind of go through it. If I recall, I can almost picture it. There's a figure that kind of nicely walks through what the proposed mechanisms
are. The other thing to consider is we just talked about how when you suggest cutting something out, place it with other things and
I think in the last 20 or 30 years, the biggest contribution to added calories in the diet, is actually added oils on a per calorie basis. The big demon right now is seed oils. I've even done a post about it yet because the anti seed oil crowd is just so vitriolic and so nuts that I'm like, all right, when do I want to wade into this
conversation and tell me about this crowd? This particular sect is of which
religion, they're definitely more towards the low carb carnivore.
And there's a lot of people in the low-carb Community who've tried to abdicate saturated fat. It's not bad. It's innocuous. You know that sort of the Orient even if it's healthy because if you look at elderly people people have higher LDL cholesterol live longer and it's like well that's because they're probably actually getting in enough food. And when you're elderly, it becomes a wasting problem and not a Beastie problem, but that's a separate conversation. I think a lot of it stemmed from. Okay. We want to make saturated fat, a good guy. So somebody has
The bad guy so it's been seed oils. It's very very powerful belief that some people hold on this
and again, if you just look at top level stuff it fits a pretty good story, which is we never ate these seed oils 120 years ago. They represented this much of our total fat calories today there this much of our fat calories and look at all the things that are wrong with the world today. It's got that kind of top-level story, which I think a lot of things do sugar has the same thing like wheat
eat this much sugar in 1900. We ate this much sugar in the year 2000. Look what got worse. So it's important to understand I guess how I mean I've certainly fallen for that. I've looked at that and gone. Yeah, that's got to be the seed oils. It's got to be the sugar. It's got to be that it's got to be it's really easy to make a
boogeyman. I think when you look through the data and try to be unbiased about what you see is like the continuous boogeyman is Just Energy toxicity what you're dealing with is just extra energy because because people will say well we did the
Food guide, pyramid and people did it. And everybody got sicker people kinda did. It didn't really do it because the food guide, pyramid also said, exercise and reduce your calorie consumption. They added in more carbohydrates but they really didn't decrease their fat intake either. And so yeah as we added more calories, we had more of these problems.
I'd really love to know because unfortunately we only have food availability and waste data. So we have to use food availability in ways to take a Delta
To estimate what's happening and I personally always found that to be difficult. The only thing I find impossible is to estimate what I eat. And when I actually ask you about how you do it because I think you're much more dialed into this. If I could tell you at the end of a day within 1000 calories, not a thousand. I could probably do within 1000. There's no way I could tell you within a day 500 calories within what I've done, it's just not possible. I can't personally do it. I don't have that infrastructure. So I really believe that we've probably underestimated in the low.
Fat crazed, how much fat didn't go down and how much, low-fat stuff did go
up wealthy about going to a restaurant. And if you've ever been to a restaurant where they like, go to The Cheesecake Factory, you look at the calories on the dishes. You like, how do you get that much in there? Well, carbs, contribute to that, but the way you densify food is with fat fat is, what will take something from a 500 calorie dish to a 1,500 calorie dish. So when it comes to estimations,
Last night we were out and you were eating ad-lib, but I know in your head the wheels were kind of telling you like, at some point I think I even asked you and you made some comment, I got about 600 more to go. Is that literally just repetitions like you've done enough food logging in your life, you can look at a brownie and you can look at a sandwich and you just sort of know what you're getting.
I'll tell people for some people. Like that's not a sustainable way to live to just keep a running track in their head or what not. Let me back up just a little bit.
A higher level of you, if you want to lose fat or control body weight, you have to practice some form of restriction. Now, you can pick the former restriction, you want for me. The easiest thing for me is to be able to eat what I want. Within reason
what you want when you want, but just control the
amount bingo. So if you do that, you're going to have to track calories, or macros whatever it is, or you can restrict time or you can restrict a certain macronutrient group, or I'm just going to eat minimally processed food. So there's some form of restriction.
You have to do. Now, what's interesting is, none of these forms of restriction, seem to be emerge as being better than another, in terms of adherence across a population level. So, it really does boil down to the individual. So always say, you have to practice some form of restriction, but choose the form of restriction, that feels the least restrictive for you. So for me that's just been tracking.
Macros, did you play much with the
others a little bit like clean, eating back in the early 2000s, which was, you know, minimally processed
US Foods and high fiber and whatnot. And I actually found that I wouldn't say I developed binge eating disorder but I did start kind of binge eating. If you look at the psychology of binge eating, it's really interesting. We had Professor Jake lunardon on our podcast a while back. His expertise is in Eating Disorders. And he said, really, there's two things, they're kind of essential for an eating disorder to emerge. The first is some sort of poor body image perception, that's kind of a prerequisite. The second is
Ordered food rules. So when you create hard food rules, it just does a weird thing in your mind,
I'm sorry are both of those necessary or sufficient or the necessary and
sufficient both of those seem to predict when you look at the vast majority of people I will say every single person but we look at the vast majority of people who develop Eating Disorders. Those are two things that are common. So what I found was that in
sorry for my ignorance is binge eating defined as because I don't really know.
It involves purging necessarily right binging just means overeating. How do we technically Define
binging I actually don't know the criteria from what dr. Le Darden said, it's kind of like periods of really intense food consumption followed by a lot of guilt like feeling guilty and with or without compensatory mechanisms because sometimes people exercise and responsive to people will throw up a nurse or
deprivation would be another compensatory practice correct.
And usually
Talking about oh yeah, I had an extra cookie. You're talking about, like you ate the whole box of Oreos or whatever it is, I'm guessing, but it would probably on the magnitude of over 1,000 calories at sitting unintended. And the other thing is, it can be tied to stress as well. That's not a part of it. But for me, I found that I would just kind of go in the bodybuilding magazines said I couldn't have sugar, can't have this kind of that the rules for what was clean seem to be very arbitrary. But I was young, I didn't know any better. No. So I'm like, okay, well I won't have
Have these quote, unquote bad foods. And the weirdest thing started happening. I actually started eating more of them because when I would get more of the things you weren't supposed to write because when I get exposed to it, I wasn't able to moderate it because it was like I'm in college buddies. Bring home a pizza the apartment. Hey Lane you want some sure or I would try to avoid and it feels so bad, I'm trying to avoid but the outcome was the same which was I would just end up eating way more than I had intended to, or even felt
Before. But it was like this mindset of well, this is bad. I'm not going to eat this again. My last time, eating this because I'm going to be really serious after this. So since I've already broken the seal might as well just go away and just kept going through this. And finally, I was kind of like this seems to be really ineffective towards my goals. I wonder if it's the fact that I have pizza or the fact that I'm eating like an entire large pizza to myself. That's the problem. So at that point I was kind of like well let's just try this.
A portion control thing and see if this works and funny enough. I was able to modulate my body composition by eating Foods. I still enjoyed but controlling portion size and it was really interesting. I was supposed to debate. This is like seven eight years ago. I was going to debate a bodybuilding coach at a seminar about clean eating versus flexible dieting, which is what I practice, which is tracking my macros and kind of treating it like a budget.
And my opening argument. He ended up bowing out of the debate. But my opening argument was, I had gone to his Facebook and looked at his cheap meals and had estimated the calories in his cheat meals in terms of a per week basis, and then put up what my calories were from junk food on a per week, Basin was going to show that his was actually higher because in the concentrated amount he was taking and he was actually taking in more calories from those foods. And so my point was going to be. So you're telling me it's really bad to have a cookie
But if I binge on it, it's okay. As long as I don't have it, the rest of the week because that seems like a really odd metric
my guess. Is that everyone, if we exposed everyone to all three different forms of restriction, you would have a rank order for any person of what's most effective both biochemically and also psychologically, it's a min max, you'd have to find an optimization. What fraction of the population. Do you think we'll do best meaning? They'll have the best physical response and also it's just
Logically will have the best response to caloric restriction as a tool or flexible dieting. And I say this knowing, there's no data but asking you to think about clients and what
percentage it is, some people will be resistant at first and then actually really enjoy it later which I'm sure you've seen that with fasting as well, or low carb, those sorts of things, but it really just boils down to how willing is somebody to make this part of their lifestyle. All of them have downsides. If you're on a ketogenic diet and you're going out, there's a lot you can't eat but you can use the
Do most places like get some funny. Looks from your friends and family but you know, whatever time. Restricted feeding. Hey, you want to go out? Join us for breakfast. Can't I'll sit and I'll drink some water. There's downsides with flexible dieting. The downside is, I've got a count for, we know, the data on reporting for food, people under report by like 50 percent. And it's pretty consistent in the studies and people really take that as like an affront. So I'm not a liar. I don't think that people are lying. I think people are just really
horrible estimators of what they eat. If you ever want to be depressed, go away on a serving of cereal or way out of serving of ice cream or serving, a peanut butter people. When they do these food recalls, a serving of ice cream is not a bowl of ice cream. A bowl of ice cream is probably three times more than a serving in terms of what people are actually taking in. So it makes total sense as to why people underestimate their energy intake. And one of the things I'll say is even if you don't land on flexible dieting.
As the tool that you want to use tracking and weighing every single thing. You put in your mouth for a week is an incredibly valuable tool because it will teach you about portion control and actually, you'll learn more about nutrition and that week than probably doing anything else. To be honest. Now a lot of people don't want to do it because it's a lot. The same reason why people don't want to keep a budget for the money because they don't want to know where it's going. Because then it's kind of like, here's the mirror. And you have to look at yourself and say, where I've been spending my money, I spent five hundred dollars on Uber each loss.
A month, Whatever It Is. Well then with macro tracking again, it's very much. Oh man, I have had this so many times. People say, I'm eating 1,500 calories day in can't lose
weight. It's hard to believe. You can lose weight on 1500
calories. It was a metabolic, Ward study, where they put people on 1500 calories. And there was actually one person who gained just a tiny amount of weight over. Like I can't remove the time period but the vast majority lost weight.
I wonder what was going on with that one person. Endocrine.
She or something like that. I think the point that I would make is that I do think it's useful for people to try tracking for a while. Our app is different than a calorie tracking app because it actually gives you macros to eat based on your dietary preference and your goals. It will adjust them based on how you're progressing. So it's not just a one and done calculation and a lot of people love that, but they also people who have never tried before. Go oh my God, I didn't know what I was eating. It has a barcode scanner and all that kind of stuff, so,
Much easier. Like when I first started doing this it was me going to the grocery store with The Complete Book of food counts and going. Okay, where is it? Okay, there it is. But now, after having done this sort of stuff for 20 years, like last night, picking up that brownie, I know
what your, what's, the calculation, how did you do? The?
I don't know what particular brownie that is. I don't know how they made or anything like that, but it's likely that the calorie density is going to be similar to other brownies. The carbs. Fat ratio might be a little bit different, but the calorie density is probably going to be pretty similar. So I really just
Try to think about what do I think this ways. And so last time I was kind of like it's a little bit denser than roll more brownie. I put it about 40 grams and so I put that in but hang on. You didn't put it into an app, did you? Yeah. You did I just put my app but I just pulled up some random brownie from Sara Lee, or whatever.
Okay, I feel a bit better now. I literally thought you were doing this in your head the whole time. Oh, no. How is
he doing that? Ha ha ha the apps. Now, make it much easier,
but then the night before we were out at dinner two nights ago, I didn't
you putting anything in the app
and I did after. But how, how did you
remember what we ate and how would you like the bone marrow and all that crazy stuff? We were eating, how are you estimating, all that stuff?
So there was an entry for bone marrow and I found. Now again, the point that I think I'll make is, it's very likely that some of these are inaccurate. It's going to be more accurate than just going. I've no idea. So I'm not gonna worry about it.
Do you think that the act of tracking it is? What's putting a governor on it. In other words, do you think the fact that
Ready to enter 40 grams of brownies, what prevented you from having three
at this point. No. But for some people, absolutely. This is the one of the most basic laws of science when you monitor something, it changes. So, I've done this so many times with people who have said the following you like I'm eating for two hundred calories, can't lose fat. And I've said, listen, I'll expect you this forever but for one week, just one week, everything you put in your mouth, wait, on a scale and track it and then come back to me. And let's talk one or two things happen. They go.
Oh my God. I was actually eating 2800 calories ago. Welcome to freedom because now, you know that you're not broken. You're actually like, you can modify or the other thing happens. They actually eat the amount of calories. They said they were eating, and they lose three pounds starving. Exactly. So it's what monitored is what gets changed. And we know that right down on a particle basis. If you monitor it, it changes its Behavior. So when you get people to monitor things, they change their behavior. It's like if
Somebody's like, oh we're going to do Lanes, budget for the month and we're going to put it on YouTube as a video or something. All of a sudden, we like to spend money on. This is not going to look good, you know, like, when we monitor things, it changes, but we know that about Behavior, we can use that to our advantage. So, if I was getting ready for a bodybuilding show, for example, I would have to change how I do things. I couldn't just go out and just kind of guesstimate like that. I would have to get much more granular. Now, the sacrifice might be, okay, maybe I'll still go out to eat.
But I'm going to have to take all the ingredients, put them on my scale and then track it, which sucks.
But if that's what you're doing, that's what you're doing. That's the price. You have to pay to get that
good. The other sacrifice that, if I want to a body like shows, okay, I can't go out my friends anymore,
or at least in the final.
Yeah. And I would say, like, in the last four weeks, I'm pretty much a Hermit, all these different forms of restriction are just tools, but I do think having that accounting looking through what you're actually having is really educational for a lot of folks.
And I would say to people who are listening or watching and have never done it, try to do it without judgment towards yourself. Really without judgment, just be curious and see, hmm. I wonder what this is. And I think what you'll find is if you just enter it with a genuine curiosity, you'll find some things out that we really helpful for you and you also learn so much about portion sizes that you'll go. Whoa! I didn't realize that restaurants serve such
Massive portion sizes, it's going to sound bad but I can't tell you how many times I've been eating something and go yeah I'm good I don't need anymore
and are you still hungry when you push it
away? You know, being in tune with your hunger signals. Plus some bit of monitoring is helpful. The one other thing I'll say, is being in tune with Hunger, signals is great but that's also hard. When you're eating processed food, energy dense, hyper palatable food, you know, previously based on our hunger signals, we could Auto regulate what we ate because we're in a situation where food wasn't
Energy dense enough you would have to become uncomfortable, just based on the volume, just based on the volume of food you were eating and even like up until the 1950s. We had hyper processed food, whatever, but you had to walk down to the bakery to get it. You didn't have it in really nice available and I still
think the serving sizes were a lot smaller.
Oh yeah. If you look at dinner plates for like the early 1900's there like this and then like this and then now you got dinner plates or just
masking anybody listening to this who's been to Europe will recognize this, but it never ceases to amaze me.
Me, no matter how many times I go to Italy, or something like that. I can't get over how small the portions are and it's really wonderful because I'm just a glutton. I think it's part of it as like you grow up as an immigrant kid. You eat what's on your plate? We do not throw out food in this house and how many times do I get that lecture about those kids in Africa that don't have anything and it's like you're going to sit here until you eat that thing on your plate. And it was like I was being forced to eat bad food, it was liver and spinach and
Stuff I hated, but The Clean Plate was just a part of your
mind. Same grew up in a lower-middle-class family and so it was very much like we don't waste food in this house.
I think there's still a little bit of the I was joking about it yesterday like I eat off my kids plates. Now. It's like what? You're not throwing that out. Give me that look. Do you think he'll do another bodybuilding show? You plan to do that anymore
right now. I consider myself on a long offseason right now. There's just so many things going on business-wise and I'm kind of in a place where
I'm very grateful for that and I want to get it while I can get it. And hopefully, we can get to the point where we're working because we want to work, not because we feel like we have to work. I mean, that's kind of the dream. I love what I do. I don't see myself ever retiring retiring, but it would be nice to be able to have a little more freedom to go and do the things that I really am. Super passionate about doing and not having to worry about doing something more granular stuff. So, bodybuilding getting ready for a show would take a significant amount of energy and time. So in powerlifting already does that. It's
Just that I can do that without the brain, fog in the mood swings and all that kind of stuff. If you look at case studies of bodybuilders, by the time they're at show literally every single case study on natural body. Builders shows that they're hypokinetic. By the time they hit stage and I'm somebody like my testosterone. I've had it measured probably a half dozen times in the last five years. The lowest it's ever been is 900 and the highest it's been. I think I hit almost 1,100, people will say was he's not drug-free or whatever but
Tell you, my LH is normal in. My FSH is normal and all that kind of stuff, but when I was competing in bodybuilding, it was under 300. When I was that close to a show, think about the hungriest you've ever been in your life. And now, imagine that feeling doesn't leave you for weeks and the lowest energy. But what's the absolute
nadir of calories? You are consuming at the
lowest of the lowest I've ever been at this level of lean mass was
1900. How many grams of protein or in that 1900?
260 grams of protein. So I was like, around 100 or under 100 grams of carbohydrate today and 30 40 grams of fat, if I recall
correctly, what does that look like practically? What's the actual Foods? You're
eating? Egg whites chicken breast. Some Greek yogurt, fat-free Greek yogurt. You have to be very careful with your fats. When you're that Locale, meaning you
can be careful. You don't go too low on the
fats, that's part of it at a certain point, you know the idea as well, keep your fats high enough in your own well at a certain point. You're like all right yeah I'd like to have my hormones are but I also need to get lean enough
meaning.
I feel that too much fat isn't sneaking
in the oh yeah, I mean, just eating something that's like seven grams of fat which by all accounts is a low-fat item. Id be careful about that because it could just sneak up very
quickly. You can't have nuts or
something like, oh no mmmm. So the low energy to, I can literally remember being on my couch was probably three weeks out from show. I just got done training sitting on my couch and the remote.
Roll was probably I just like set down, like, literally, like, plop down remote control was, probably, you know, five feet away. And the Real Housewives of some County was playing. I abhor that show and I sat and watched the entire show because I was not willing to get up to go. Get that remote because I was that exhausted. And how many weeks
in to that degree of caloric, restriction, do you think you were at that
point that was like 20 weeks in? Not at 1,900 calories by Callie
To progressively come down, really? It's, it's mostly a body fat issue. I've had clients who were able to eat higher calories and get really lean at a certain point of body fat level. It just doesn't matter if you are that lean. And your leptin, is that low your testosterones, that low Eric Holmes describes contest, prep is like you're circling a drain and you're just trying to delay going down the drain as long as possible but eventually you go
down the
drain. So how do you get the energy to get on stage? Is that basically one big push of carbs shortly enough before you go on stage that it's not going to show up in your
physique? I will say like there are spurts where you feel, okay? When you're in those dregs of contest prep. Also say that for me to get from like say 15% on calipers to 7% on calipers. It's not difficult at all. In fact, I had gone up a weight class in powerlifting a few years ago and then came back down. It was about a 30 pound weight drop. So 6:45
Easy from 72. And I think the lowest I ever calipers was 2% and to everybody watching, no, I don't think I was 2%. Probably like five or six, but to go from 7 to 3 or 2, which is an absolute lower amount of fat loss was infinitely more difficult. The best way to describe it is like you get a fresh roll. Toothpaste to get out some toothpaste, very easy. Then as that toothpaste tube gets emptier and emptier. How much effort do you have to put
It into just squeeze out that last little bit of toothpastes magnitudes higher than at the beginning and contest prep is very much like that but you do have times where you have energy
because you stopped the train two or three
hours a night and trust me. Like that is actually the part. I despise the most of contest prep is at a certain point. I just don't like training anymore. I'm just doing it for energy expenditure in retaining a muscle. I'm not doing it because I'm passionate about training and I'm somebody who I love to train. It's like my favorite thing in the world. But
Will be times. We going. You have a little bit better workouts. I did period eyes my nutrition. So I would have some higher calorie days on days that were more demanding for training usually like, lower body, training days as far as like getting on stage. Well, one thing is, I never cut water for bottling shows. A lot of people do that. I think it's silly because think about a muscle is 70 percent water and in your native state, you keep more water inside your muscle cells and you do outside your muscle cell. And this is just
Basically shot the A's principle. If you begin removing more fluid via doretta, core fluid restriction, or sodium restriction, will what happens? Well, sure you remove them from the subcutaneous layer but you're also going to remove it in the same proportion from the intracellular layer. All you're going to do is just become flatter
on the intravascular, you get hypotensive?
Exactly. So one thing to help me is I didn't cut water. So I felt I never was like dehydrated or anything like that didn't cut sodium and I could go into the physiology behind why I think it's
Because sodium as well. I didn't take it to Redick, but yes, during Peak Week food went back up because the idea
is diuretics, even legal in Teske,
take OTC diuretic. So you could take like, dandelion root and those sorts of things. It's very funny like the logic behind why people cut water and sodium. I think it's like somebody just saw a figure of the sodium potassium pump in a book and they're like, oh, see the cell wants to get sodium out and potassium in. So let's cut sodium and low potassium and it's like if you actually
Look, the physiology. If you get the sodium to potassium ratio, too low, it will actually cause you to retain water as well. You'll actually start reabsorbing water in the distal tubule of the kidney. I think that that helped my energy and whatnot, but definitely food in the days before the competition comes up. Because at that point, if you're still trying to lose body fat that close, it's probably not going to go well, for you all usually in peak week, I'll start feeling better as opposed to worse and then, on the day of the show, you know I'm usually have
Three to four hundred grams of carbohydrate something like that. It's very interesting because a lot of the dogmas and bodybuilding originated in like wrestling and endurance. Running the correlation was kind of like well wrestlers cut water and they look really lean. So we should cut water. And always use the example of if you've ever seen George st. Pierre, when he weighed in, he looked gaunt. I mean, just didn't look healthy, not very muscular and then the day of the fight 24 hours,
Slater. I mean, he looks like a bodybuilder. He looks pretty jacked. Well, that will just show you what drinking water, eating enough sodium and carbohydrate will do for your muscle fullness because muscles are 70 percent water, so I think all that stuff kind of helped me have a little bit more longevity in that Sport. And so far as like, I wasn't beating my body up with fluid restriction,
So you're 40 now when you sort of think about yourself being 60 or 70, how do you think about aging in terms of the reductions in strength, which is obviously an important part of your identity and the change in physique? Do you think that it's going to be a difficult transition? And I'm not suggesting that the alternative to what you're doing. Now is sitting on a couch all day drinking beer, of course. But invariably whether your Arnold Schwarzenegger or anyone who's really,
You're not going to look the same when you're 60. I think about this a lot. I bugged my wife or not Bugger, I just say all the time I'm like, God, I can't stand my face. Like it's so wrinkled and be enough for all the Sun and he's like, well, you don't do anything about it. She's like, you could go and see a dermatologist and I'm like, yeah, I'm just too lazy. I think it's just gonna sit here and sort of gripe about. It just have these vain thoughts of. Well, the older I get the older, I look,
I can sit here and say, oh no, I'll be fine. Yeah, of course, women struggle with it. Look at any athlete that is.
Your identity for such a long period of your life. Now, I think I'm fortunate in that I've kind of had multiple identities. So I've had academic influencer entrepreneur, powerlifter, bodybuilder, scientist. So I think it'll be a little bit easier for me because I already have other things that I care about being a dad. I already have other things I care about, but of course, will be hard. Nobody who's successful doesn't have any ego whatsoever. And so I'm not gonna lie like when I
At the bar with 500 pounds and the commercial gym and squatting that like part of me feels like a badass, you know what I mean? And so, yeah, there's going to be part of me that absolutely miss that. That's why you have the guy who's like, well, you know, when I was in high school, I benched 405, or whatever it is or squatted 600 till my knees hurt, my goal is to not be that guy other than somebody asked me about what I've done to do it but I think really what's going to be most important for me is just trying to not judge it and
Just find other things that I can be interested in and I'll still always left. Always train, I love it too much to not do. It makes me feel too good and quite frankly like if you look at some of the people who've been doing it for a really long time, I got a great compliment the other day because I was in the gym and I just kind of casually brought up. I turned 40 this year and lady was like, why I was like yeah she's like Holly I would have guessed. You were like mid-30s. Oh thank you. I think resistance training as far as like keeping you young that's one of the
I agree. And do I feel like for both men and women? It is a fountain of youth, both cosmetically and also internally
looking at some of the bodybuilders out there notwithstanding like some of the drug stuff but some of them still look really good into their 50s if they continue to do it. Now there's a lot of guys who get out of it and kind of wants that identity is gone. They just go. What's the point of putting energy into lifting? But you know, like Jay Cutler's in his 40s and
Jay Cutler is my favorite of the recent. Bodybuilders is the only body builder of that group, that I follow on Instagram. I
Enjoy looking at them, you still looks to be an insane shape.
If you look at him, he goes trains every day. He still eats really well. He likes that lifestyle and got used to it and it shows, yeah, I'm definitely a hard transition. I'm sure, I'll find something to bury myself in and who knows. We'll see.
Well, we went a little longer than we expected to. That's always cut ourselves out of a few extra curricular activities. I had planned this afternoon, but maybe we'll have time tomorrow. So anyway, Lane awesome. To sit down with you. Thanks again for making the
time. Yeah.
Thanks for having me, it's fun.
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