The Peter Attia Drive - #163 - Layne Norton, Ph.D.： Building muscle, losing fat, and the importance of resistance training

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to the drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay,

00:00:47.740 here's today's episode. I guess this week is Lane Norton. Lane is a bodybuilding figure and a physique

00:00:54.860 coach along with being a natural pro bodybuilder and professional power lifter. He has an

00:00:59.780 undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a PhD in nutritional science from the University of

00:01:04.280 Illinois. In this episode, we talked at length about his background. And while I initially thought

00:01:08.560 we'd spend a few minutes on it, it turned into quite a lengthy discussion, but I encourage you

00:01:12.460 to listen all the way through because not only is it interesting and it paints a picture of a really

00:01:16.800 interesting and determined guy who, to be completely honest with you, demonstrated to me,

00:01:21.560 not someone who's as naturally gifted as I would have assumed he is from the images of Lane that

00:01:27.040 I'm familiar with, but really a guy who's, if anything, his superpower is commitment, dedication,

00:01:32.660 determination. And that commitment, dedication, determination that he brought to his powerlifting

00:01:38.840 and bodybuilding have really carried over into his obsessive need to understand everything as it

00:01:45.440 pertains to training and nutrition, both in the spirit of improving body composition,

00:01:50.360 addition, adding muscle mass, understanding the metabolic benefits of that, along with the health

00:01:55.880 benefits. We go into some really deep stuff here and most of the time we're pretty good and we take

00:02:00.800 a step back and we get into, this is what actin is, this is what myosin is, and this is how muscle

00:02:05.400 protein synthesis works. The show notes I think will be helpful on some of those things. I learned a lot

00:02:10.240 in this myself. We had a very interesting discussion around IGF, growth hormone, cortisol, a number of

00:02:16.540 hormones that play a role here that, again, I think there's some misgivings and misunderstandings about how

00:02:21.160 these things work. We also, frankly, don't get to as many things as I had hoped to. This podcast is a little

00:02:26.540 bit long and despite the length, there are probably about five or six topics that we didn't get to that I

00:02:31.740 suspect we're going to discuss several months from now. Lane has graciously already agreed to be back on and

00:02:37.500 we'll be able to revisit a number of these topics at that time. So, without further delay, please enjoy my

00:02:44.060 conversation with Lane Morton. Hey, Lane. Awesome to be sitting down with you today, at least virtually.

00:02:55.680 I've been looking forward to speaking with you for actually about two and a half years. I know Dom

00:02:59.720 introduced us a long time ago. We were trying to do this in person at some point and then one thing

00:03:04.640 led to another. It became COVID and then all of a sudden I realized you don't have to be in person to

00:03:08.340 a podcast, though I do wish we were in person because I suspect this will be a really long

00:03:13.340 discussion and a great one. You know, first off, I just want to say one thing that I think people

00:03:19.720 sometimes assume is that people like you and I have so much in terms of viewpoints that are vastly

00:03:25.940 different. And, you know, I spent a lot of time reading your material and watching your videos and I

00:03:31.500 followed your work for quite some time. And I would actually say that there are very few things that I

00:03:36.420 think you and I don't see eye to eye on and maybe some of those things will come up today. I think

00:03:39.940 they'd be very interesting. But I also think the level of nuance and sophistication you bring to

00:03:44.160 this subject matter is exciting, which is why I want to talk with you about so many things. But I kind

00:03:49.760 of want to start by letting listeners understand a little bit about who you are and why I think you're

00:03:54.620 qualified to speak on so many subject matters. So, I mean, let's just talk about, you grew up in

00:03:59.140 outside of Chicago, if I recall? Actually in Southern Indiana. So I'm from Evansville originally. So 20

00:04:04.980 minutes from Illinois and five minutes from Kentucky. Oh, impressive. That's not often you can straddle

00:04:11.400 that many borders, right? What kind of sports did you play growing up? Baseball was my primary one.

00:04:17.380 I played since I was five and I lettered in high school, but it was, I would never say that sports

00:04:23.600 came naturally to me. It was definitely something I really had to work at. That may be apparent for my

00:04:28.740 baseball aficionados out there. I was a five foot 10 right-handed first baseman. So that's not your

00:04:35.400 prototypical first baseman, but I really enjoyed baseball and it kind of stoked my competitive fire.

00:04:41.740 I also did run cross country in high school as well, which definitely not the sport that you would

00:04:48.340 pick as the precursor to strength sports and bodybuilding. But those were at the time kind of

00:04:54.740 like the ones that I sucked the least at, I guess it's the way I'll put it in terms of natural 0.56

00:05:01.840 ability. Baseball was my real passion though, growing up. That's what I really enjoyed.

00:05:07.080 Was it during baseball and learning to get conditioned for baseball that you kind of discovered

00:05:11.900 the weight room and your talents in the weight room?

00:05:14.520 So I would actually say, no, that was more. So I was very, very much picked on. And I would say like

00:05:22.880 borderline, like emotionally abused by my peers growing up. I was a nerdy kid. I had ADHD. I was

00:05:29.500 talkative. I was goofy. All that stuff can help you when you get older because being different is 0.92

00:05:34.940 good when you're older, but when you're young, being different is not so much fun. So I got picked on a

00:05:40.760 lot. Didn't really get much attention from girls. And just to be quite frank, I started lifting weights

00:05:45.080 just to hopefully have people stop picking on me and get some dates and lifting weights didn't do either

00:05:51.080 of those things. But I developed a passion for weight training. And I wouldn't say it was something

00:05:57.040 that like really, really came naturally. I was never like a hyper responder or anything like that,

00:06:02.640 but I just, I really, really enjoyed it. And I'd always been somebody who in my scholastics,

00:06:09.060 I wouldn't say things really came that easy to me either because probably a little bit because of my

00:06:14.900 ADHD. But I was able, I did find at a young age that through sheer volume of work, I could overcome

00:06:22.640 a lot of that stuff. And so I really appreciated lifting weights, I guess, from the perspective of

00:06:29.900 the work investment to the payoff compared to how much talent was needed seemed to be a lower

00:06:37.860 threshold. If you're 5'10", right-handed, and you're trying to pitch in the big leagues,

00:06:46.200 I mean, you'd be pretty limited, you know. Now, certainly there are limitations in terms of like

00:06:51.300 hypertrophy and strength building. But for me, it felt more fair, I guess, in terms of the level of

00:06:58.200 work you get in versus what you see. And then in terms of, I think the other thing is, it's very

00:07:04.880 measurable. If you lifted a certain amount today, and in two months you go in and you're lifting,

00:07:10.520 you know, 10% more than that, that's a very hard outcome. There's no, oh, I think I'm getting better.

00:07:15.800 It's like, no, I am getting better. And so I appreciated kind of that black and white to weightlifting.

00:07:22.200 You know, I can sort of appreciate so many of the things that you just said. And among them is sort

00:07:26.780 of an early discovery for training. For me, it was more boxing that was the thing that kind of drew me in

00:07:32.760 young. But in parallel to that, strength training and endurance training both became supportive

00:07:37.680 pillars to boxing. I was fortunate, I think, in that I found great mentors that introduced me to

00:07:44.300 powerlifting when I was young. They were older men that trained in a gym at the university that I

00:07:49.200 trained at when I was 13 and 14 years old. Did you find mentors like that who kind of took you under

00:07:55.080 their wing to keep you safe and also explain the sport and, you know, give you some common sense around

00:08:00.620 training? I would say the first few years, no. Actually, when I, I always joke that we didn't have a lot of

00:08:07.140 money growing up. You know, Southern Indiana wasn't really a hotbed of fitness information. And I'll go

00:08:13.260 ahead and date myself. I'm 39 years old. So when I started was in the late 90s. I mean, basically what you

00:08:19.540 had was bodybuilding magazines. And I really couldn't afford a subscription to those either. So I actually, the

00:08:25.500 first thing I ever did when I got into weightlifting was I walked down to my local library, literally

00:08:30.540 walked down to my local library and checked out books on weight training. Do you remember some of

00:08:34.880 the books you checked out? Oh man, I wish I did, but I don't. And actually I would say like what I do

00:08:43.440 remember, especially for one particular book, which was, it's kind of like basics of strength training or

00:08:48.900 something like that. It wasn't that bad, actually. We have really advanced our understanding of weight

00:08:54.000 training, but you know, the basics, progressive overload, that sort of stuff is still, still

00:08:59.740 relatively similar. And I remember the book did talk about periodization, which at that time kind

00:09:03.920 of was not a new concept in athletics, but for weightlifting was a new concept. So anyways, like

00:09:09.700 that, that was kind of like my first few years was a little bit self-guided or when I had lifting

00:09:15.160 classes, they did offer a class on lifting in high school. It was kind of just doing what, whatever the

00:09:20.180 football team was doing basically. But obviously I still got stronger just because if you're

00:09:23.920 consistent, you will get stronger regardless of what you're doing. And then at 19, I entered my

00:09:29.600 first bodybuilding competition as a teenager. And just by pure serendipity, I wanted to compete in

00:09:38.300 drug tested bodybuilding. I always have to give this caveat, you know, I've always been drug free

00:09:43.480 in terms of anabolic steroids, growth hormones, you know, all that kind of stuff, no performance

00:09:48.300 enhancing drugs. I don't have any problem with anybody who does it as long as they compete in

00:09:53.560 untested organizations. That's my, my caveat. I always just chose to compete drug tested because

00:10:00.380 I just never felt called to be Mr. Olympia or anything like that. And I, you know, again, I

00:10:07.220 don't, this is my own personal ethos. I'm not judging anybody who's ever done performance enhancing

00:10:11.640 drugs. I just wouldn't have felt good about myself. That's the only thing I can say. And I'm not saying

00:10:16.580 that anybody who's done that shouldn't feel good about themselves. I just knew I wouldn't feel good

00:10:20.820 about myself. So with that out of the way, I was doing a drug tested bodybuilding show and

00:10:26.000 pretty much the only natural bodybuilding evidence-based natural bodybuilding coach

00:10:32.120 lived in my hometown. And his name was Dr. Joe Klimczewski. And I reached out to him because he

00:10:38.860 wrote for the natural bodybuilding magazines and he helped prep me for the show. I won the teenage

00:10:44.600 division and the novice division. And I was hooked, of course, but also Dr. Joe wasn't right about

00:10:50.600 everything, obviously, but the crux of his information and being so focused on being

00:10:57.520 evidence-based and not necessarily buying into dogma, that sort of thing, that definitely did

00:11:04.140 help me. And just listening to him talk about the physiology of, you know, for example, a water

00:11:11.240 depletion is something very common amongst bodybuilders. And the first meeting we ever had,

00:11:16.780 he's like, yeah, I don't do that because I don't think it's a good idea. And he listed

00:11:20.680 out all the physiological reasons why he didn't think it was a good idea. And it made a lot

00:11:24.800 of sense. So, but I remember listening to that thinking, man, I don't know any of this stuff.

00:11:30.200 Like I would love to know more about this. And so I think meeting Joe, that was part of the

00:11:36.560 reason that I really wanted to learn more about the human body and push more in academics.

00:11:43.280 And he had a PhD. And I think that was kind of like the first seed of maybe I want to go even

00:11:50.500 further than just like an undergraduate degree or something like that.

00:11:53.560 So there are actually several things in there that I want to go back and revisit.

00:11:56.540 I'll start with the latter. You mentioned ADHD. Was school kind of hard for you? And was this a big

00:12:03.060 step forward to think, hey, not only am I going to go to college, but I'm probably going to want to

00:12:07.840 do a PhD to follow in this guy's footsteps. Not necessarily to follow in his footsteps, but to

00:12:11.360 really go deep into something scientific. I think by the time I got to college, I had developed

00:12:18.460 really good study habits. Let me back up. Yes, school was difficult for me. It was very difficult

00:12:24.440 for me to stay focused. But just through sheer effect of my parents basically beating into my

00:12:30.700 head from a young age, you are going to college and you are going to get an education, you know,

00:12:35.480 that sort of thing. I don't want to sell it like it was an overbearing parent sort of thing.

00:12:40.580 It was just they were very committed to my education, but it was never like, oh, you need

00:12:46.320 to go be a doctor or you need to go do this. You need to go that. It was just we want you

00:12:50.860 to get educated. And I wanted to get educated, too. I was the first person in my family, even

00:12:55.920 like my extended family, ever to even go to college. So I think the ADHD made it tough at

00:13:01.620 first. And I never got bad grades in school, but I struggled in terms of the teachers would

00:13:09.400 really complain about my lack of attention, my lack of focus, those sorts of things. And

00:13:15.100 I found for me when I had to study, I really had to spend a lot more time than most of the students

00:13:25.480 my age were doing. So I took, for example, advanced chemistry in high school. And I'll never forget

00:13:31.660 this conversation. We had a test coming up and I had studied for probably a total of like 15 hours,

00:13:39.520 I'd say, for this test, which in high school is a lot for a test, at least for me, it seemed like a

00:13:44.100 lot. And I remember talking to a friend of mine who got the same grade I did on the test. And he was

00:13:51.380 like, yeah, you know, I studied a little bit last night. And I was thinking, man, if I studied just

00:13:57.120 last night, I would have failed this test, you know. So it did seem like I had to do more work.

00:14:02.700 And it might not even been more work. If I tried to sit down for like eight hours, I remember my

00:14:09.020 roommate my freshman year in college, great guy. He was the head of medicine at Naples General for

00:14:14.520 several years, but he could sit down for eight hours straight, have complete silence and just study

00:14:20.180 the whole time. If I tried to do that, I'd get about 30 minutes of productive studying in. So I had

00:14:26.200 to learn to kind of break things up. And I'm not saying this works for everybody with ADHD, but for me,

00:14:30.320 it worked. So I, I would get distracted so easily that I just stopped trying to fight that. And I

00:14:36.160 allowed myself to get distracted, but I'd always come back. So I would do 30, but no more than 45

00:14:42.360 minutes at a block. I would do that. And then I would take 15 minutes and I would let myself

00:14:47.400 browse the internet or, or read something else or watch some TV or something like that. But I would

00:14:52.260 always put a timer on and I would, I would go back when it was time. And that seemed to really work

00:14:57.760 personally for me. So by the time I got to college, I kind of had figured out what worked for me

00:15:03.000 studying wise. And I went to a college called Eckerd College, which is a private school in St.

00:15:09.980 Petersburg, Florida, which was on the ranking. It was very selective and a high quality school, all this

00:15:16.240 kind of stuff. And so I was petrified because I'm this kid from Southern Indiana. I've never been

00:15:21.720 anywhere really. And I have no idea how I'm going to stack up against students from other places like,

00:15:28.940 you know, the Northeast and that sort of thing. So I was so petrified. I studied so hard. I,

00:15:34.080 I got A's. I still remember this. I got A's on my first 11 tests I ever had in college because I was

00:15:39.660 so petrified about failing. So I think by that point I had already had good study habits. You know,

00:15:46.680 I did take like Ritalin and Adderall growing up. And I do think those helped a little bit.

00:15:52.040 The only, I always joked, like the only problem with like Adderall is whatever I was doing when

00:15:57.220 it kicked in was what I was going to be doing for the next eight hours. You know? So if I,

00:16:00.460 I remember one day I was, I was looking up fantasy football rankings. First year I ever played fantasy

00:16:06.920 football and that I did that all day, all day when it kicked in, I went from worst to first in fantasy

00:16:14.360 football that year. Anyways, but by the time I got to grad school, I was kind of able to

00:16:19.120 wean myself off that. I think the last time I ever took any medication was 15 years ago.

00:16:24.280 And I think a lot of it, well, you know, I don't judge anybody who takes medication for it because

00:16:28.120 like I said, I think it did help, but I think I just got to the point with my study habits where

00:16:32.600 I didn't really feel like I needed it. I just think the fact that I had to struggle a little bit when

00:16:38.780 I was young actually really helped me and kind of like carterized me in terms of like being able to

00:16:45.840 deal with some adversity. And I think that's what really helped me when I went to college and then

00:16:50.520 grad school. So I'm going to put on the back burner for a moment, some of the stuff I want to come back

00:16:54.860 to with respect to your training history and continue down this sort of academic thread.

00:16:59.640 Talk to me a little bit about the decisions you made to then pursue higher education beyond

00:17:04.220 a bachelor's degree and how you decided to, for example, pick a PhD and then further decide what

00:17:10.600 area you wanted to study. So this is just like one of those things where you look back and you go,

00:17:16.440 wow, I really stumbled into doing some of the right things, having no freaking concept of what I was

00:17:23.000 doing at the time. So when I originally went to school, I went to Eckerd because I wanted to study

00:17:28.460 marine science. When I was growing up, I wanted to be a shark biologist. That was my passion was sharks.

00:17:32.980 I still love fishing and I still love going out and being in the wild with sharks and that sort of

00:17:37.220 thing. In fact, one of my goals is to dive with a great white shark at some point.

00:17:41.080 Did you see that Nat Geo special? It was based on something that happened in Hawaii,

00:17:45.240 I think two years ago, where that whale came ashore. They took it, this was off Oahu,

00:17:49.740 they took it five miles out and they went out there to study the tiger sharks that would be feeding

00:17:55.140 off it. And lo and behold, like the largest great white ever came up upon it.

00:17:59.740 Oh, I didn't see that.

00:18:00.620 Oh, you must see this. We'll link to it in the show notes. This is one of those things where one

00:18:04.920 day I was walking through the playroom and my kids were fixated on it. And I sat down for two

00:18:10.060 minutes to watch it. And then an hour later, I'm still watching it. Couldn't stop, but I won't spoil

00:18:15.600 it for you then. I'll just leave it at that and say, you will go bananas watching this thing.

00:18:21.600 Cool. Yeah. I think I watched Jaws about 8,000 times when I was a kid. So I probably will enjoy it.

00:18:27.080 I still get excited for shark week whenever it comes up. So anyway, I went to Eckerd for that.

00:18:31.960 I remember I interviewed at Florida Institute of Technology as well. And one of the professors

00:18:36.160 there actually studied great white sharks. And I'm very thankful for this guy. I can't remember his

00:18:41.340 name, but he said, look, I'm not telling you not to do this. I'm just going to be honest with you

00:18:46.760 about what I do. He said, I've got a job that maybe one in 10 people in the entire world have.

00:18:53.560 I don't get paid great for it. And it was really hard to get. Now I'm not saying you can't get that,

00:19:00.120 but what I would recommend to you is if you're truly passionate about this, go do a degree in a

00:19:06.000 more general science and then go specialize when you get to graduate school. He said, because if you

00:19:12.480 start general, you'll still have the base that you need for grad school. And if you're still really

00:19:17.980 passionate about this, you're going to need the grad school education anyway. And I thought,

00:19:23.220 okay, well, that's not a bad idea. And so I actually went, instead of marine science,

00:19:28.040 I started in biology. And then my first year, I had a general chemistry professor named Chris

00:19:33.520 Schnabel. And I actually still keep in touch with him to this day here and there. And we were in lab

00:19:39.660 one day and I think he really liked me, like just my attitude. And he said, Lane, come here.

00:19:47.280 He's like, I know you're doing biology. He's like, what you need to do is biochemistry.

00:19:52.600 And I was like, well, why do I, I'm, you know, I'm a freshman. I have no idea what I'm doing.

00:19:57.240 Like, why do I want to do biochemistry? He said, well, let me put it to you this way. He's like,

00:20:01.520 if you decide that you don't want to go to grad school and you have a biology degree,

00:20:05.320 you look like a pre-med who didn't get into med school when you go to get a job. He said, but

00:20:10.560 if you get a degree in biochemistry, the world is your oyster. You can get any job that you'd be

00:20:15.920 able to get in biology. You can get with biochemistry and then some. And if you want to go to grad school,

00:20:21.240 you have that option, this and that, by the way, I'm not slamming on biology students out there.

00:20:25.860 If you love biology and that's what you want to do, no worries. This is just what he said.

00:20:30.360 I was like, okay. So I switched to biochemistry. My second year, I took organic chemistry and I had

00:20:37.520 a great professor for organic chemistry. It was very hard. He was not easy, but he was firm,

00:20:44.520 but fair. And I, my, if I look back, my best mentors were always firm, but fair. And I got to

00:20:51.280 be in the class, but at the end of the semester, he asked if I wanted to come do research with him

00:20:56.700 over the summer. And I was kind of like, well, why do you want me? I, you know, I got a B. He's

00:21:01.800 like, you asked a lot of questions. You were engaged. He said, grades matter. But at the end

00:21:07.160 of the day, I want students who are passionate and work hard. And I saw how hard you worked.

00:21:11.680 So I went and did research with him over the summer. That was my first kind of foray into research.

00:21:18.460 Didn't get anything done because, you know, it's 10 weeks and it's my first experience in research.

00:21:24.080 So I got to deal with a lot of frustration and stuff not working, but I got to do research with

00:21:28.660 him for two years over the next two summers. And when I got to my junior year of college, I think

00:21:36.140 having that idea of, okay, what happens next? I had started writing articles for bodybuilding.com.

00:21:44.120 Again, that's another whole nother conversation of serendipity. And I knew I was really passionate

00:21:49.780 about bodybuilding because during that time, like I said, I'd gotten into competing and whatnot.

00:21:54.080 But I was thinking, well, I don't feel like I'm going to be a professional. I don't feel like I

00:21:59.880 really know anything. I had crested the Dunning-Kruger and I was down in the valley, you know?

00:22:06.020 By the way, that's such a great point to make. Why don't you explain to people who don't understand

00:22:10.060 what the Dunning-Kruger curve looks like and what it means?

00:22:13.300 Yeah. So if you look at any subject, I'm generalizing very much. So if Dunning or Kruger

00:22:20.180 listens to this, I apologize if I butcher it. But essentially, so the Dunning-Kruger curve is

00:22:25.120 basically perceived knowledge versus actual knowledge. And the really interesting thing is

00:22:30.780 when we start in a subject, since we are aware that we have no knowledge, our perceived knowledge

00:22:36.340 pretty much aligns with how much knowledge we have, which is none. But pretty quickly,

00:22:41.580 our perceived knowledge skyrockets. It goes very, very high, usually after about six to 12 months

00:22:48.860 of, you know, being involved in a particular subject. And we get to this, some people never

00:22:55.300 get to this inflection point where it starts to come back down. But eventually, if you keep learning

00:23:00.160 and keep learning and keep learning, you realize, oh, wow, I didn't know as much as I thought I did

00:23:06.080 because I thought I knew that. But then this contradicts it. And so you start having this like

00:23:11.640 downward turn, even though you're learning more, your actual knowledge is going up,

00:23:16.460 your perception of your knowledge starts going down. And I would say my third year of graduate

00:23:22.220 school was where it got to the very bottom. This is where it got to the very bottom. And interestingly,

00:23:27.240 if you look at the Dunning-Kruger effect, I have a friend named Jeremy Lineke. He's a professor at Ole

00:23:32.360 Miss, and he always says, once you drink from the fountain of knowledge, you will thirst for the

00:23:36.700 ignorance you once had. Your perception of your knowledge, if you continue learning, will never

00:23:41.580 reach that initial crest that you had that first six to 12 months where you thought you had kind of

00:23:46.720 everything figured out. I just can't agree with that more. Bob Kaplan often says, and I'm sure he's

00:23:52.720 paraphrasing somebody, that the further you get from shore, the deeper the water gets. And again,

00:23:59.420 it's a slightly different way of saying basically the same idea. And what I thought I knew about

00:24:04.880 nutrition 10 years ago relative to what I know today, in absolute terms, I know infinitely more

00:24:10.180 today. But in relative terms, i.e. the perceived terms, it's basically to the point where I pretty

00:24:18.460 much think I know nothing. Now, I know that's not true, but there are days when I think I actually

00:24:22.940 don't know nothing. Because to your point, you're constantly looking for the example that contradicts

00:24:28.080 your belief system. And so you have a belief system, which is, well, under this condition or

00:24:33.620 this condition or these set of conditions, this must be true. There's always going to be an exception

00:24:38.120 to that. There is something else though. I mean, I think unfortunately, social media has created a lot

00:24:44.520 of people who shout really loudly from the top of the Dunning-Kruger, that initial peak of the

00:24:51.040 Dunning-Kruger curve. And I'm not sure if it's just blind stupidity, willful ignorance or what, 0.99

00:24:57.660 but I think there are a lot of people who have no interest in moving forward. And that's unfortunate, 0.99

00:25:03.140 but I think that makes it very difficult for people who want to learn because it makes the signal noise

00:25:09.320 problem very difficult. For example, nobody really wants to hear uncertainty. If someone's in the market

00:25:16.940 for knowledge, do you want to hear it from that person whose absolute knowledge is high,

00:25:22.980 their perceived knowledge is perhaps low, and they caveat things that they talk about? Or do you want

00:25:28.720 to hear that person who's nine months into their resurrection of knowledge and speaks like they

00:25:35.420 know everything? We tend to gravitate more towards that person. So I find this phenomenon very interesting,

00:25:41.760 and I just had to make sure we spent the moment on that based on your reference.

00:25:47.160 We had a guy named Alan Levinovitz on our podcast, who's a professor of religious studies.

00:25:51.660 Not to get too far down the rabbit hole on that, but he's done a few books about naturalism and how we

00:25:56.960 kind of, even without evidence, default to believing that something that's natural, even though he talks

00:26:03.040 about how we can't really define that, is better. And one of the things he talked about was,

00:26:08.000 if you want to look for people who know what they're talking about, and it is difficult,

00:26:12.340 as you said, because there's this sea of information out there, look for people who seem unsure. He's

00:26:19.520 like, it's a complete paradox. Another friend of mine, Greg Knuckles, said, he said, what we're,

00:26:24.480 people are really good at when they talk to somebody quickly, they can determine whether or not that

00:26:29.260 person knows more about a subject than they do. What we're really bad at is if two people 0.98

00:26:34.660 have more knowledge on a subject than we do, and they're in disagreement, we have a lot of

00:26:41.640 problem picking out who is more knowledgeable of the two. We tend to just default to whatever our

00:26:45.380 bias is. Which, by the way, is why debates tend to be a very unhelpful forum. 0.96

00:26:50.300 I always tell people, debates favor people who can speak well. And at the end of the day, I mean,

00:26:57.260 it doesn't matter what it's talking about, religion, politics, nutrition, 95% of the people are going

00:27:03.240 to go with whatever their perception was before the debate. And then that little 5% of the

00:27:08.940 independents are going to make their decision usually based, not necessarily off evidence.

00:27:13.540 Because, I mean, if you don't have a PhD in something or an advanced degree, if two people

00:27:19.460 are citing studies, who do you go with? You know, it's very, very difficult. So, yeah. So just all

00:27:26.060 that to say, you know, I didn't feel like I really knew anything is three years into my biochemistry

00:27:30.260 degree, even though I was getting good grades and didn't know what I wanted to do with my

00:27:34.400 life. I knew I wanted to be in the fitness industry. Like I was very passionate about

00:27:38.900 bodybuilding, but I had no idea how I was going to make a living doing that because at that

00:27:43.580 time, this is circa 2003, the people who made money in the fitness industry, either you owned

00:27:48.860 a supplement company, you owned a gym, you were a personal trainer, or, you know, you wrote

00:27:55.420 for a publication or something like that, you know. And I didn't have the capital to start

00:28:00.300 a supplement company or the wherewithal to do that. And I didn't really want to be a

00:28:04.980 personal trainer. And so I just kind of was like, well, if I go to graduate school, I'll

00:28:10.940 learn more. Maybe I won't feel so stupid. And I can delay the real world a little bit longer, 0.99

00:28:17.760 figure out what the heck I actually want to do. And hopefully I won't be in the unemployment

00:28:21.880 line if I have a master's or PhD. And that was literally my logic.

00:28:27.440 Now, how did you toggle between, because I could see at that moment in time, you choosing

00:28:32.160 between two paths, right? You could have gone very deep down the exercise physiology path,

00:28:37.380 and you could have gone very deep down the nutrition path. You chose the latter, of course,

00:28:42.560 curious as to how you thought about it at the time.

00:28:45.420 Probably the magazine shaped some of my bias. There was a lot of focus on nutrition as opposed

00:28:50.060 to training. And even to this day, this could be a little bit of selection bias, but I get a lot

00:28:56.440 more questions about nutrition than I ever do about training. And even like me, like people were like,

00:29:01.200 I hear, well, it's 80% nutrition, 20% training. And I'm like, listen, I have a PhD in nutrition.

00:29:05.960 I will tell you, training is the most powerful thing for your health and body composition that

00:29:11.320 you can possibly do. Any other protein you want, you can do all these modifications with your diet you

00:29:16.460 want. If you don't train, the changes to body comp are going to be pretty minimal, you know, in terms

00:29:23.300 of you can lose fat, but you're also going to lose a little bit of lean body mass with it when you,

00:29:26.480 when you diet. And you can gain lean body mass, but you're also going to gain body fat with it.

00:29:31.180 Resistance training specifically is the most powerful tool you have to change your body composition.

00:29:37.300 And I would actually argue your overall health as well. But at the time, I was very focused on

00:29:41.740 nutrition and specifically had just started kind of reading studies on muscle protein synthesis.

00:29:49.580 Just, I was always a skinny kid growing up. You know, I wasn't a fat kid. I was, I was a skinny

00:29:53.740 kid growing up. And so I was mostly focused on how do I build more muscle? How do I maximize muscle

00:29:59.300 building? I wasn't really focused on how do I get super lean? That goes back to a question I wanted to

00:30:03.340 ask you earlier, Lane. We kind of glossed over the fact that at 19, you win a drug-free amateur

00:30:09.320 bodybuilding contest, which happened to be your first. When did you start lifting weights seriously?

00:30:14.620 How old were you? I started and stopped because I got my first girlfriend. So I started when I was

00:30:19.640 like 15 years old, stopped when I was 16 because I got my first girlfriend. And then I picked it back

00:30:25.180 up when I was 17, almost 18, and then never dropped it after that. Okay. So when you go to that second

00:30:32.780 pickup, give me a sense of your height, your weight, your body comp, and then contrast that with what you

00:30:39.180 looked at, what you looked like at 19. So I actually remember exactly how much I weighed.

00:30:47.020 I was right under five foot 10. I'm now five foot 10 and a half. So I essentially was pretty much

00:30:51.580 stopped growing. And I was 152 pounds. And I remember that because the day I picked back up

00:30:57.660 weight training was in November of, I want to say 1998. No, 1999. And it was at a bigger, faster,

00:31:08.040 stronger seminar that came to my school because I decided to get back into strength training because

00:31:13.160 my girlfriend had dumped me very shallow reasoning. And they weighed us at the bigger, faster, stronger

00:31:20.340 seminar. And for whatever reason, I always remember that. Now, when I started originally,

00:31:24.880 I was 140 pounds as a freshman. I started lifting some weights, but at this, when I picked it up and

00:31:29.820 never dropped it, I was 152 pounds. And then for my first show, I had peaked in the off season.

00:31:36.200 I guess it would have been two years later at 200 pounds. And I competed at 175 pounds,

00:31:44.780 probably something like that. By that time I had grown an extra half inch and was five foot 10 and

00:31:49.080 a half. And yeah, so I guess it would have been about two and a half years later when I hit that

00:31:54.640 mark. By the end of my high school career had gotten to be like one of the, I want to say bigger

00:32:01.920 guys in the class, but a little more muscular than other people, but other people had started to

00:32:06.020 notice. But specifically my upper body, because my legs were still terrible because for the first

00:32:11.260 year, I didn't really train them because, you know, leg training sucks. Although now I love it.

00:32:16.200 Was there a point when you just discovered you had a gift of strength? You know, I remember

00:32:21.880 talking to Mark and Chris Bell and on the podcast with them, I talked about these brothers that were

00:32:28.940 around when I grew up, they were, they were an age above me. So they weren't my peers, but

00:32:33.380 by the time I was a teenager, they were in their twenties and they were always in the gym when I

00:32:37.680 was there. And there were four of them and they were freaks of nature. Now they were also all of them

00:32:43.200 taking Herculean doses of anabolic steroids, but I saw them both on and off steroids and the steroids

00:32:50.260 simply took their God given abilities and made them out of this world. But I mean, I'll never forget

00:32:56.680 one of the brothers who at the time was in residency, he was doing his residency in emergency

00:33:02.080 medicine. So he was very, he was, his training volume was a fraction of what it was when he

00:33:07.320 was in college. He would still come into the gym between shifts, narrow grip, 315 for 12 cold,

00:33:16.280 like it was nothing, you know, on his way to squatting 505 for 12, like unwrapped by the way.

00:33:24.160 And like, there was just a genetic gift that these guys had. And I sort of assumed like,

00:33:30.060 yes, they train very hard, but pretty early on they knew that they were strong. And it was clear

00:33:35.660 just based on the hereditary nature, your best totals nearly 1800 pounds, correct?

00:33:40.960 Yeah.

00:33:41.960 So again, I don't want to, for a moment, take away from how hard you work because I know how hard you

00:33:48.180 work, but was there something that clicked in and said, I'm way better at this naturally than I will

00:33:55.640 be at baseball?

00:33:57.080 I would say actually, no, it never, it never clicked at that time because I never had like

00:34:03.020 a period of time where my gains were just crazy. I never really had that. What happened was I saw

00:34:10.600 that when I was very consistent and very steady, I had very steady increases. And so it was never like,

00:34:16.500 oh, I put 50 pounds on my bench press in six months. It's like, oh, this is the thing I'm doing

00:34:22.660 now. It was just a very steady progression. And I think that was actually good for me, honestly,

00:34:29.480 because I think if I'd had a lot of success right out of the gate, I might not have pushed as hard

00:34:34.680 or been as consistent because it's kind of this weird paradox with me. The harder something is,

00:34:41.840 the more I want to do it. And I do see this is it comes naturally to people and they don't have

00:34:47.860 that kind of resistance early on in terms of having to overcome like plateaus and frustration

00:34:55.120 and setbacks. And I encountered all those pretty early on. And I think having a little taste of that

00:35:02.840 enabled me to push through much bigger setbacks in the future. So honestly, I can't think of a time

00:35:10.280 when I ever was like, wow, this is now I will tell you when I got to college and was training

00:35:17.720 consistently and able to really eat consistently, because even though, you know, it's calorically

00:35:23.500 dense food, I was trying to build muscle like that. I wasn't really concerned about the fact that

00:35:27.520 I'm eating more calories because one, I was using them. And two, I just wanted to be bigger.

00:35:33.780 Like I didn't care if I put on a little bit of body fat. So there was a point when I got to

00:35:38.140 college where I was like, you know what, maybe, maybe I can do this because I would look at I'd

00:35:42.780 search online to try and find any like teenage bodybuilders, you know, and I look at it, come

00:35:47.380 to find out partly delusionally, because people on stage photos always look way less impressive

00:35:52.840 than they actually look in person. Wait, way less or way more? Oh, way less. So if you see an actual

00:35:58.880 like competitive bodybuilder in person compared to how they look on stage in the photos,

00:36:03.780 usually way more impressive in person in terms of their girth or definition, muscle size,

00:36:12.080 muscularity, everything. Oh, that's so that's counterintuitive to me. I don't really follow.

00:36:16.840 I mean, basically, I think the last bodybuilder I sort of paid any attention to was, God, well,

00:36:22.980 let's see, maybe Lee Haney when I was a kid growing up, right? I mean, I paid attention to Lee Haney

00:36:27.540 and Dorian Yates, probably after Dorian Yates, I stopped paying attention to bodybuilding.

00:36:31.060 And I've never seen someone of that stature in person. Yeah, it'll blow your mind. It really,

00:36:37.380 it really does. Obviously, it's extremely impressive in magazines. And some of the gym photos that they

00:36:43.380 take with a lighting is set up really well. You can look at that and go, okay, that's crazy compared

00:36:49.660 to even the stage photos. But yeah, I'm looking at these other guys that are about my age. And I'm

00:36:54.840 like, you know what, he's a little bit better than me, but I'm kind of there. You know, I'm kind of

00:36:59.200 kind of right there. Now, again, take my legs out of the equation because my legs were awful at the 0.99

00:37:03.200 time, but my upper body was there basically. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe this thing,

00:37:08.180 maybe I could be good at this, right? And, you know, come to find out, I'm sure genetics are just

00:37:13.920 as important in hypertrophy as they are with hitting a baseball or shooting a basketball, whatever have

00:37:19.240 you. But at the time, my mentality was, this is more about work ethic and translates better.

00:37:25.340 And so I was more committed to putting that energy into it. And as far as like strength goes and where

00:37:33.480 I felt like I might have a gift, honestly, I think that a lot of my gift was, and again, this could be

00:37:42.720 just hyperbole on my part. I think a lot of the gift was, I'm just really stubborn and I could tolerate

00:37:50.640 a lot of training volume. I actually today went back and looked at what I was doing before I went

00:37:56.780 to the IPF world championships, which is essentially like the super bowl for powerlifting. And that was

00:38:02.380 in 2015. And I was able to get a gold medal in the squat and actually set a world squat record at the

00:38:09.420 time, which was a 668 pounds. And I weighed in at 201 and a half pounds when I hit it. And I tallied up

00:38:18.240 how many sets I did that week with over 500 pounds between squat and deadlift. And it was 34 sets

00:38:26.260 the week you hit that. And well, sorry, in the two weeks before that. So I was kind of in my

00:38:32.100 overreaching phase. And I just remember looking back at that and thinking like how bad I wanted that

00:38:37.720 and just how much volume of work I did. And I think, again, I think I was just able to tolerate some

00:38:43.900 really insane style training. And I think my body was a little bit more resilient. I think my mind

00:38:50.160 was a little bit more resilient. I think that helped me a lot because there was a lot of there's a lot

00:38:53.860 of setbacks along the way. And that was, you know, obviously I was in my mid thirties when I did that

00:38:57.680 compared to being a teenager. But there was never like a year where my squat just went, you know,

00:39:01.840 it was always just kind of a slow, steady progression. And this was from the kid who had skinny legs.

00:39:07.180 You know what I mean? But I had, you know, endured, I had two herniated discs in my neck.

00:39:13.360 I had multiple herniated discs in my lower back. I had hip injuries, you know, everything you can

00:39:19.660 imagine of lifting heavy weights and still managed to be able to go do that. But I think the fact that

00:39:25.680 I endured some of those setbacks really early on in my career actually really helped me be able to

00:39:33.460 deal with it. Cause one of my big rants I get off on is everybody's like, have more confidence in

00:39:39.220 yourself. And I'm, what I always tell people is like, you can't build confidence out of nothing.

00:39:42.920 If you failed at everything you ever tried in your entire life, why would you have confidence? Right?

00:39:47.500 So I, I try to tell people like, look, start small, just like, say, I'm going to show up to like,

00:39:54.120 if it's exercise, I'm going to show up every day this week, you know, regardless of how I feel,

00:39:58.020 I'm going to go do it or five days, whatever, pick, pick your number. Okay. You do that.

00:40:04.020 There's a, just a tiny smidgen of confidence you get from that. And then you, you build that over

00:40:09.160 time. Okay. Well, I'm going to squat 200 pounds. Okay. And then you hit that. And then maybe you

00:40:15.080 get some aches and pains. Okay. Well, I'm going to rehab this. I'm going to go through this. And then

00:40:19.080 you get through that and you get stronger. Right? And so if you do that over time, every little thing

00:40:25.420 that you go through might feel insignificant in terms of what it means to you at that time.

00:40:31.620 But when you look back, you can draw on that. And I think, you know, I always tell people,

00:40:37.600 I don't think I would have had the success I did in business or social media or academia if I hadn't

00:40:45.400 done weightlifting, because that taught me so much about other things in life. So I realized I went

00:40:49.520 down a big rabbit hole there, but I think that's important for people to hear.

00:40:52.840 I think that makes a ton of sense. And, um, I get asked sometimes,

00:40:56.780 what's the most important lesson I learned growing up with respect to ultimately being successful

00:41:01.740 academically. And I was not successful at all in school until my last year of high school,

00:41:07.680 because I didn't actually plan to go to university. I wanted to become a professional boxer. So

00:41:12.300 obviously there was no need to go to university, but I think like you, I had an unusual gift for

00:41:19.360 tolerating a lot of training and a surprising lack of confidence in myself, which is what drove the

00:41:25.760 training. It was sort of an insecurity that that's like the other guy's going to train three hours a

00:41:30.240 day. I'm going to train six hours a day. But when I finally did decide to go to college, it actually

00:41:35.900 seemed really easy compared to getting up at four 30 every morning and running 10 miles and going to

00:41:41.360 the gym this many hours and sparring this many rounds every day and doing 400 pushups before bed

00:41:45.800 every night and all of those things. If you have to go from doing that to just studying four hours a

00:41:50.820 day, you already have the, what I call that kind of the habit infrastructure and the

00:41:55.660 discipline infrastructure to do that. And I do think that translates. So that's why I think

00:42:00.020 personally, I just, at least with my own kids, I'm delighted when they take up an interest in

00:42:05.260 something, whether it be, you know, my daughter's case, music and sports, even if you never end up

00:42:10.200 being a professional athlete or drummer or whatever it is, it's really building and wiring a discipline

00:42:17.060 around that, which obviously you've, you've demonstrated. Give me another sense of just in terms of,

00:42:22.800 I'm still, you have to forgive me, but I just, most people who don't lift won't appreciate the

00:42:29.140 magnitude of the numbers you're talking about, right? Like a 700 pound squat when you are 200

00:42:34.460 pounds and you are drug free. That's the thing we have to keep reemphasizing. And, and I appreciate

00:42:40.060 the way you've talked about this. I've read a lot of what you've talked about with respect to

00:42:44.240 the use of performance enhancing drugs. And at least to me, it's never come across as haughty

00:42:49.160 or holier than thou. It's been, Hey, look, this is my choice. And your only real pet peeve is people

00:42:54.820 who cheat and basically enter drug free bodybuilding competitions while using drugs, which is, you know,

00:43:01.860 in a sport like bodybuilding where you truly have a choice that strikes me as nonsensical,

00:43:06.180 but let's go back to when you're 19, how much could you squat deadlift and bench? And I don't mean

00:43:13.040 bench where you're bouncing it off your chest. I mean, under clear guidance and rules.

00:43:17.480 So the interesting thing was I was a really good bench presser in high school. And as a competitive

00:43:22.540 power lifter, 15 years later, bench press was my worst lift. So I peaked early. I hit a 300 pound

00:43:31.000 bench press in high school. Now that was not with a pause. If I'm thinking about what I could pause

00:43:36.660 probably would have been like 285 or something like that. 280. My squat. So I didn't really train

00:43:44.620 squat that much because legs hurt. So my body type, I have a very long femur to shin ratio as well as a

00:43:54.200 shorter torso. And essentially what that's going to mean is when you squat, the bar must stay over

00:43:59.420 your midfoot if you're going to not fall forwards or backwards. And so that means that I have to lean

00:44:04.380 forward quite a bit when I squat. And so it's not, it's not a pretty squat when I was, especially when I

00:44:10.060 was in high school. I didn't know how to use hinge correctly and use my hips and whatnot. So, I mean,

00:44:16.000 basically I was able to squat 315 folded over as a high schooler. So, I mean, that's pretty strong

00:44:22.520 for a high schooler. It was barely to depth if that, and definitely not the way you would teach

00:44:28.260 it to somebody. And as far as deadlift, I didn't really deadlift in high school. I'm trying to think

00:44:34.260 about if I ever actually deadlifted. I think maybe sporadically, maybe I could have hit three

00:44:39.820 plates, but I'm not sure. I do know that I kind of started doing it in college. And I think I hit

00:44:45.480 like a 405 pound deadlift before I left college. And I think I want to say that I hit like a 385 pound

00:44:54.640 squat when I finished college. So there's no, again, you can see like, it's not like, okay.

00:44:59.380 That's amazing. Those are very mortal numbers, right? That's a very slow and steady trajectory

00:45:07.660 to obviously where you are now. And it probably reflects kind of muscle maturity and also technique

00:45:14.260 maturity. You mentioned earlier in passing that you had a couple of herniations, both cervical and

00:45:19.060 lumbar. Did any of them require surgery? Full disclosure, I'm not a pain expert or an orthopedist.

00:45:25.860 I think I got some really good advice to not get surgery by the initial person I saw for my neck.

00:45:33.760 And actually, so Dr. Joe, my coach, he was also a physical therapist. So the first doctor I went to

00:45:40.420 when I had my disc herniation, I played rugby in college and that's what I got it from.

00:45:44.560 I had two disc herniations and I had lost, basically I had a stinger and I couldn't even pick up a chair

00:45:50.920 with my left hand in my dorm room without slipping out of my hand. I lost about 40% of my strength

00:45:55.760 on this left side. And I mean, the first doctor I went to was like, yeah, you probably won't get

00:46:01.800 back all the strength that you had. And I remember thinking, why don't you just stab me in the heart 0.97

00:46:06.580 instead? You know, like it'd been easier. But, you know, I talked to Dr. Joe and Joe was like, 0.99

00:46:11.680 listen, you know, you have to understand these doctors are used to dealing with your average person

00:46:17.440 who's not going to do the rehab, who's not going to do the work, who's not going to push themselves.

00:46:21.540 He said, that's not you. You will get back. You will hit PRs in the future. You know, this is,

00:46:28.180 this is not a death sentence for your lifting career. I was like, okay. And sure enough, six

00:46:34.120 months later, I was, you know, I did the rehab and I was, I was hitting PRs again. And then my

00:46:38.760 lumbar herniations, I actually saw Stu McGill, who's one of the more well-known experts on lower back pain.

00:46:47.060 And, uh, you know, he did an in-person assessment of me and he basically said, listen, you know,

00:46:51.460 you've, yeah, you've got, you've got some herniations, but so do about 60% of all people

00:46:57.660 who are over the age of 30. Did you have any loss of strength going down your legs? Did you have any

00:47:02.680 true sciatic pain or? I never had radiating pain. I was very localized, but I mean, when it flared up,

00:47:08.720 it was like 10 out of 10, could not get up off my floor. I mean, I, I, I tell people at my lowest

00:47:16.060 point, I went from literally not being able to move off my side on my floor to squatting 668 pounds

00:47:23.740 at a point later in time. What was the delta between those time periods?

00:47:28.500 With my lower back, it's, it has kind of been a little bit of an ongoing issue. So the first time

00:47:33.700 it really hit me was in 2015. The first really bad incident I had was actually a week out from the

00:47:41.740 Arnold pro. And I had been crushing weights in training. I mean, I was, I was very convinced I

00:47:48.660 was going to squat like 680 or 690. I had hit 600 for five in training on squat. I had hit 675 deadlift

00:47:58.120 for four. I mean, I was smashing weights and the last heavy training session before the Arnold. So

00:48:04.540 I was going to compete on the Friday of the Arnold classic. And the Friday before was my last heavy

00:48:10.320 training session. And I finished my squats. I went to go do bench press. And I still remember

00:48:15.760 like I laid down, I was like, Hmm, feel a little tight. That's weird. And it kind of progressively got

00:48:20.700 worse through the day to the point when I woke up the next day, I couldn't move. And I was like,

00:48:26.680 Oh my God, I have to pull all this meat, you know, this and that. Once the initial kind of

00:48:30.960 inflammation went down, you know, a few days later I went in, I was like, all right, basically three

00:48:35.740 days before the meat, I said, I'm going to go in and try to hit my openers. And if I can't hit them,

00:48:40.340 then we're just going to call it. And I hit them. I went and did the meat. I actually won. 1.00

00:48:45.780 Just so people know what we're talking about. This was a bodybuilding meat, not a powerlifting

00:48:50.340 meat. No, this was powerlifting. So this was powerlifting.

00:48:52.620 Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I went in and hit a long story, but I actually ended up tying the world

00:48:58.100 record at that meat due to an error by my coach in terms of attempt selection. No hate towards my

00:49:03.520 coach. Everybody makes mistakes. But in any case, I actually did end up winning the meat and squatting

00:49:08.420 661 pounds at that meat. But then that lower back issue kind of dog me. It was never as bad as it was

00:49:15.780 the, as the initial time, but I had, so that was the Arnold's that was in March. I had the world

00:49:22.120 championships coming up in June and that injury kind of dogged me on and on through my training.

00:49:31.440 And I got to a point where I had to take four weeks off, off squatting and deadlifting.

00:49:35.120 And I, I got, I started back squatting and deadlifting with four weeks to go

00:49:39.560 for the world championships. And again, I don't want to belabor too long, but

00:49:45.840 essentially I was missing weights early on in that training, that, that final training cycle

00:49:52.040 that were like a hundred pounds less than what I needed to squat at worlds. But I thankfully again,

00:49:58.340 had so many setbacks early in, in my lifting career that I just kind of convinced myself that,

00:50:06.160 okay, well, we're just going to keep showing up. We're going to see what happens and ended up going

00:50:10.560 in and hitting a world record on squat and actually got a, got a gold medal in squat,

00:50:15.120 got a silver medal overall. And, you know, obviously did really well. And then a couple of years after

00:50:21.140 that, during training, this was during a very stressful period of my life. And actually they've,

00:50:26.060 they have shown that like stress, lack of sleep, all that plays into your level of pain sensitivity.

00:50:32.440 I hurt my back and had some other things happen. And I mean, that basically got to the point where I

00:50:40.720 couldn't move for a couple of days. And that's when I kind of took it. This is in December of 2017.

00:50:47.280 And I took a step, I had to really take a step back. I took pretty much nine months off of any kind

00:50:52.480 of spine loading, probably excessive, probably didn't need to go that long, but then built back up. And in

00:51:00.240 2019 hit a 666 pound squat and a 727 pound deadlift at nationals. So I think a lot of people get

00:51:07.900 injuries, especially like these soft tissue injuries. And they, you know, hear doctors or

00:51:13.080 people that are operating off of pain science from decades ago say, well, just stop lifting or just

00:51:20.040 stop doing whatever, you know, athletic thing that you do. I don't think it's a death sentence for most

00:51:26.280 people. I mean, if you look at, especially with regards to back injuries, I mean, if you go MRI 100

00:51:31.720 people that are over the age of 35, about half of them will have herniated discs that they don't even

00:51:37.360 realize because they're asymptomatic. Let me ask you this question. In your case, do you have a sense

00:51:43.460 what it was about the lifts that was specifically causing the pain? So sometimes you can actually

00:51:52.100 identify what the issue is in the individual that is through an axial loading pattern driving the

00:51:59.560 pain. So it could be one of my favorite examples is right. People who can't generate enough

00:52:05.160 intra-abdominal pressure or who can't create, you know, who might have too much lordosis in the spine

00:52:11.720 when they're under an axial load, or they can't, they can't generate enough articulation between L1 and

00:52:18.760 T12, right? So they don't have the segmental control within the spine. So they tend to,

00:52:24.860 they tend to generate disproportionate load at hinge points. Like, were you able to look at

00:52:29.600 yourself and say, okay, well, like presumably I'm hurting, I'm making this up, right? But I'm saying

00:52:34.060 presumably I'm hurting myself under the high, you know, when I'm over 500 pounds, I'm not really

00:52:39.200 hurting myself when I'm doing 405 for 10. And this is how my form changes when I go from doing 405

00:52:46.540 to 595. And I think that's what it is. That's precipitating this injury. And I'm going to work

00:52:53.380 on not just rehabbing the injury, but modifying the form. I mean, was there, were you able to do

00:52:58.300 some sort of an analysis like that? I mean, lumbar flexion definitely was kind of a triggering for

00:53:03.660 the pain. But if we look at like the biopsychosocial model of pain, it gets really murky because,

00:53:12.360 I mean, they've shown that you can have tissue damage and no pain, and you can have pain with

00:53:17.100 very little tissue damage. So I think part of it was just, I had that initial injury to the disc,

00:53:25.220 but then I probably didn't give myself enough time to desensitize myself to that pain and just kept

00:53:31.200 hammering at it. And the research, it's interesting. The research actually shows that one of the best

00:53:36.620 things you can do for low back pain is resistance training. Like that's actually one of the best

00:53:39.780 things you can do. But if you're doing it with a load that increases that pain,

00:53:47.100 then it's going to make it worse. So I think that what people probably need to take away is that if

00:53:54.720 you're having pain, and again, this isn't my area of expertise. I take this from people I've learned

00:53:59.840 from, but modify the load and see if that reduces your pain, modify the tempo, modify the range of motion,

00:54:09.760 and then if none of those things do, then try to modify the exercise selection. And my problem

00:54:15.320 was I was so dogged about, I need to do squat, bench press, and deadlift. I need to work through

00:54:21.080 this pain. And I made it worse for a period of time. Now, you know, I like to think I'm a little

00:54:26.800 bit wiser in my old age. Now, I don't just try to work through it. I say, okay, you know, if I'm

00:54:32.840 having a great example is I had some hip pain that I'd been dealing with for about six to seven

00:54:39.580 months. And the way it finally got better was I said, okay, I'm going to stop doing full range of

00:54:46.340 motion squats, full speed. I want to try and take it back to what can I do with kind of a minimal

00:54:51.340 amount of pain, like a two or three out of 10, right? Something that doesn't cause pain, but I can

00:54:56.560 still get some work in. And for me, that was like above parallel pin squats. So basically I'd bring

00:55:02.500 it down nice and slow, pause at the pins, and then come up. And I started out doing those.

00:55:09.080 And then the next week I'd either increase the load or I would lower the pins. And I did that for

00:55:17.300 probably about six weeks. And then I got to the point where, okay, it's not hurting as much.

00:55:22.440 I'm going to try and do without the pins above parallel regular squat with tempo, like three

00:55:29.400 second descent, right? Taking that speed away from it. I did that for like three, four weeks.

00:55:35.920 Pain went down and then basically got to the point where I could do a full squat with no pain.

00:55:41.560 And so again, I'm not, you know, I don't have a randomized control group to compare this to.

00:55:47.000 It could be like if I would have just done nothing, I would have gotten the same benefits. Who knows?

00:55:51.540 But I think just because you have pain doesn't mean you can't do something. And I, based on what

00:55:58.500 some of the pain specialists have said, you're probably better off doing something than nothing

00:56:02.960 if you can, because if you just take time away from training, you end up detraining. So when you

00:56:08.180 come back, you're not as practiced at the lifts and you might end up hurting yourself again. So

00:56:13.160 that's kind of the approach I take is modifying those variables. And it seems to be, seems to be

00:56:19.000 working. Okay. I'm, you know, I always tell people like this stuff's like a puzzle and I'm still,

00:56:23.040 I've spent the last few years working through some injuries and just trying to figure out, okay,

00:56:27.480 how can I make this puzzle work so that I can compete as an athlete again?

00:56:31.760 Yeah, I agree with that completely. I think the worst thing one can do under virtually any

00:56:35.660 circumstances completely stop the activity. I find that moving from two legs to one leg becomes a

00:56:42.060 great tool in my toolkit when I'm hurting. So moving to much more split squat, single leg

00:56:48.740 activity. I mean, even something, even if you look at something like a leg press, right? So,

00:56:52.020 you know, you're sort of an inverted doing a leg press. That's an exercise where you can load up

00:56:55.520 stupid amounts of weight. If I'm feeling anything that's not right there, I'll happily go to a single 0.95

00:57:01.020 leg where you're going to typically use not half, but a third the weight at a single leg. And all of a

00:57:07.500 sudden, those things that were hurting when you were doing it with two legs kind of stop hurting.

00:57:12.240 In my opinion, you're getting virtually the same benefit, potentially more because you're evening

00:57:16.740 out anything that wasn't right there. And I've noticed that I think I can say without exception,

00:57:22.940 things get better. Again, for me, it also requires a very careful examination of what the root problem

00:57:27.840 was. I guess the last question I have for you on this very specific topic before I get into a whole

00:57:32.800 bunch of other things that we're going to talk about is the overlap and or detraction between

00:57:39.080 powerlifting and bodybuilding. So you've competed at such a high level in these two sports that have

00:57:44.460 a very clear overlap, but also have a pretty different point of optimization. I mean, bodybuilding

00:57:51.100 is a very subjective sport where it's about how you look. And at the end of the day, nobody cares how

00:57:57.540 strong you are when you're standing on that stage. Conversely, powerlifting, which of course,

00:58:02.800 requires a lot of strength. Nobody really cares how you look. So both of those athletes pay

00:58:08.520 unbelievable attention to how much weight they lift, but they're serving a very different purpose.

00:58:14.660 You're one of the people who has excelled at both. I've met people who are excellent at one or the

00:58:19.840 other, more on the power side, I should say, than the bodybuilding side. So I'm curious as to

00:58:25.180 what some of the trade-offs are that you have to make and sort of a hypothetical lane.

00:58:30.080 What would be the closest length of time you could have between the two if you wanted to be at your

00:58:37.740 best in each? Great, great, great question. So I think the overlap is that the obvious one

00:58:48.360 is that to look muscular, you have to have a lot of muscle and contractile tissue is what's needed to

00:58:55.680 move weight, right? So the more, there is a little bit of debate about this, but the consensus is,

00:59:02.560 is that hypertrophy does matter for strength training. So the more muscle you have, the more

00:59:06.580 weight you're going to be able to lift. I think that the trade-off is that bodybuilding is a much

00:59:11.820 more forgiving sport insofar as you can skin the cat a thousand different ways. If you don't want to

00:59:20.220 squat, you can hack squat. If you don't want to hack squat, you can split squat. It is simply about

00:59:26.240 creating tension on that muscle, getting the requisite volume in, and progressive overload.

00:59:32.820 Now people hear progressive overload and they think weight, but progressive overload takes many forms,

00:59:39.780 and the major one of which is volume, in particular volume load, which is basically,

00:59:45.160 for all intents and purposes, number of hard sets, number of sets that approach failure.

00:59:50.700 So you can do that many different ways. If you're hurting on a certain exercise,

00:59:56.220 hey, change it up. Try something different. Find something that you can do without pain,

01:00:00.940 or find something that you really enjoy, right? There's a lot of different ways to skin a cat.

01:00:05.700 When it comes to powerlifting, you can do some accessory movements and whatnot, but you still have to do the

01:00:12.040 major lifts. You still have to be very well trained at the major lifts. Otherwise, you're not going to

01:00:18.100 perform your best on meat day. And so, I think that bodybuilding, in a way, is a little bit more

01:00:25.960 demanding mentally, because if people out there listening, if you've never been, like, insanely shredded,

01:00:35.420 you cannot imagine the levels of hunger and low energy that these people go through, and that I

01:00:43.320 have been through. I'm talking about so hungry that you literally think about it from the moment you wake

01:00:50.420 up to the moment you go to sleep, and then it wakes you up at night. I'm talking about such low energy

01:00:56.820 that I can remember one time I was, like, I had finished my training session. I was probably a few

01:01:01.200 weeks out from a show. I was sitting on my couch, and the remote control was probably five feet away

01:01:07.620 from me. And there was a terrible show on that I did not want to watch. And I watched the entire thing

01:01:14.400 because I did not feel like getting up to get the remote. And that kind of serves into, like,

01:01:20.640 metabolic adaptation and reductions in non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

01:01:25.260 And just give people a sense, Lane, of how many calories a day you might be ingesting during that

01:01:31.160 period of your training cycle, and for how long that would last.

01:01:35.220 My last show I did, I competed as a pro natural bodybuilder in 2010, so it's been a while. And I

01:01:43.320 won the IFPA International, the heavyweight division, and then I ended up doing the IFPA World

01:01:49.660 Championships and placed top five in the heavyweight division. And it's difficult because it's like,

01:01:56.680 the amount of calories you start on is not going to be what you end up finishing on.

01:02:00.060 I think the lowest my calories got was just around 1900. Now, that may not sound that bad,

01:02:09.060 but keep in mind, you know, we're talking about somebody who is probably over 185 pounds of lean

01:02:15.540 body mass, you know, quite a bit of lean body mass. And training how many hours per day?

01:02:20.600 Two hours a day, you know, minimum. So, I mean, that was pretty much all I had energy for. You know,

01:02:25.460 I'd go in the gym and train for two hours, and that would be all she wrote, you know, and I'd muster

01:02:32.520 up. I can remember going in and doing a cardio session one night. I got on the elliptical. I started

01:02:40.060 going, and the only way I can describe this is it felt soul sucking. And I went for what I felt like

01:02:47.940 must have been 40 minutes. And I looked down at the clock and it said three minutes. And I just

01:02:54.120 remember thinking, how can I do this? Or even like I would stand up and I would get lightheaded because

01:03:00.960 my blood pressure was so low. Bodybuilding is very difficult in that that doesn't leave you,

01:03:06.440 right? Powerlifting is difficult in that it beats your body up. But once you're done at the gym,

01:03:12.060 other than your like rehab work and some other stuff, I mean, you can kind of leave it at the gym.

01:03:16.020 So, they're really difficult sports, but for slightly different reasons. You know, again,

01:03:20.400 bodybuilding is more forgiving in that it doesn't really matter what exercises you do as long as you

01:03:26.660 get in enough. And you can kind of skin that cat multiple different ways. I mean, we've seen

01:03:33.420 bodybuilders be successful through every different methodology. You know, Dorian Yates never squatted.

01:03:37.960 I mean, he talked about it. He only did leg press, right? Leg press and leg extensions.

01:03:41.700 Whereas Ronnie Coleman squatted tons of weight. So, I think that the appeal for me for bodybuilding

01:03:49.140 was that mental challenge, you know, basically how much could you suffer? And then the appeal in

01:03:56.620 powerlifting was, this is not subjective. I mean, it is a little bit subjective because you can argue

01:04:02.640 squat depth is subjective. You can argue that deadlift lockouts are subjective.

01:04:06.640 Right. But far, far less subjective.

01:04:08.720 Far less subjective. And I mean, I've had that, you know, the order of the competition is you get

01:04:13.640 three attempts on each lift and it goes squat, bench press, deadlift. And it's progressive, meaning

01:04:19.040 if you pick a weight and you miss it, you can't go down. So, you can only go up. But I've been in those

01:04:25.020 big meets where it comes down to the very last deadlift. And it's like, either you pull it or you

01:04:30.420 don't. And that determines if you win or not. I mean, I've had that experience. It's unbelievable.

01:04:36.120 And so, to me, I probably preferred that only because I'm doing what I trained to do, right?

01:04:44.380 Like in bodybuilding, I'm doing something different than I trained to do. What I needed to do to get to

01:04:50.400 that bodybuilding stage is way different than what I'm going to do on stage. Whereas powerlifting,

01:04:56.420 I'm just doing what I've done, right? Like this is just a showcase. So, now to your question,

01:05:03.720 how far apart could you do well in them?

01:05:07.860 And let me add one more question, which is what order would you pick?

01:05:11.760 You get to pick the order of which you do the two contests and what the minimum space is to

01:05:16.880 optimize both. So, that's going to be so individually dependent, right? Because for me,

01:05:23.640 at my weight class in powerlifting, 93 kilograms or 205 pounds, I'm pretty lean at that body weight.

01:05:30.680 So, what I would say is that I would probably, if I was going to do this, I would do a meet.

01:05:37.320 I maintain this body weight with some level of effort, but mostly pretty easily.

01:05:42.320 I would do the meet and then I would start prepping for a show.

01:05:47.220 And how much longer would you need after that meet? How long would it take for you to be stage

01:05:52.660 ready? It depends on how hard I wanted to push it and what level. If I was wanting to really

01:05:59.880 maximize lean body mass retention, I'd probably want six months, I would say. Because what people

01:06:08.480 don't realize is we look at like, we look at these diet studies and we see how much lean body mass

01:06:14.000 gets lost versus fat mass. And people don't realize that a lot of this depends on how much body fat

01:06:21.820 you're starting with. And then it changes, the curve changes. So, if you're somebody who's overweight

01:06:26.880 or obese, you don't really need to worry about losing too much lean body mass because you have such

01:06:31.400 a reservoir of energy to pull from that your body doesn't really see the need to start pulling from

01:06:37.420 lean body mass. But if you're somebody who's at, I'll use my caliper measurements. For all the

01:06:42.640 internet experts out there, I realize that the numbers I'm going to give you are not the true

01:06:47.280 numbers, but I don't care. It's what I'm referencing. I'm just using it as a reference point. I always have

01:06:52.000 to qualify this when I give body fat numbers. So, I can go from 15% body fat to 7% body fat and it's

01:06:59.480 extremely easy. No problems. I lose very minimal lean body mass. From 7% to 5%, now I'm

01:07:07.400 probably losing 20% to 30% of that weight as lean body mass. When you get down to the shredded area

01:07:14.340 where you're literally trying to squeeze off that last little bit of body fat, you might be losing

01:07:20.720 just as much lean body mass as you are fat mass. So, for me, what I would do, and I didn't do this

01:07:28.680 years ago because I didn't even know about this tool, is I actually implement a lot of what's called

01:07:34.280 diet breaks. So, those would be periods of eating at maintenance. So, basically, a level of calories

01:07:40.720 where you're not going to add back fat tissue, but you can eat more than you did previously.

01:07:47.320 So, I had pretty good success with this the past year because I dropped 30 pounds. I went up a weight

01:07:52.520 class in powerlifting and then came back down. So, basically, I would diet for two or three weeks

01:07:57.700 pretty aggressively, try to lose like a pound and a half, two pounds each week, and then I would take

01:08:04.500 one or two or three weeks and eat just at a maintenance level of calories, which for me is about

01:08:09.380 32, 33, 3400. And that worked extremely well for me, extremely well for keeping my strength.

01:08:17.020 And so, if I was getting ready for a bodybuilding show, I probably wouldn't use those too much if I was

01:08:21.640 like coming down from a higher body fat. But as I approach, as I would be approaching that lower

01:08:28.380 level of body fat, I would be starting to put these in more and more frequently. So, that's why I would

01:08:33.200 give myself so much time, even though I'd only need to drop about maybe 12, 15 pounds from where I'm at

01:08:38.860 right now. I would probably spend more time at maintenance than I did in a deficit because

01:08:46.340 when you get to those low levels of body fat, the best way I can describe it is like if you have a

01:08:52.460 wet towel. When you start squeezing, water comes out very easily. This is actually almost a perfect

01:08:58.460 example of adipose tissue because if you take somebody who's overweight, obese, what do you have?

01:09:04.700 You have a lot of free fatty acids getting released into the bloodstream. You have very, very expanded

01:09:10.640 fat tissue. So, when you start, you start wringing that rag out. It comes off very easily. But then

01:09:18.360 when you get down to the ends and you're just trying to get that last little bit of water out,

01:09:22.380 to get the same amount of water out, you have to put in monumental levels of effort compared to what

01:09:29.160 you did at the beginning. So, I guess that's kind of a huge qualifier of why I want so much time to be at

01:09:34.720 my best. I mean, the one thing that you said, Lane, that actually surprised me, and I want to

01:09:38.660 think about this through the lens of some examples because I thought we could use examples of people

01:09:43.840 like, you know, kind of people that hypotheticals or patients of mine. I was surprised that you said

01:09:49.840 going from 15% to 7% body fat could be done without much loss of lean tissue. That is really impressive.

01:09:59.520 Yeah, for me. Is that just a function of how hard you're training at the same time? Is that just

01:10:05.340 something that you would attribute to your genetics? Because it's, you know, it's not

01:10:09.220 due to exogenous testosterone, which would obviously be one tool that would enable that

01:10:14.240 kind of lean mass retention. Yeah. So, I think the first thing is,

01:10:18.160 it probably depends a lot on what your body fat set point is or settling point. So, for those who

01:10:25.080 aren't familiar, body fat set point theory is essentially that you kind of have this relatively

01:10:31.840 tight range of homeostatic body fat that your body will defend. And once you start to drop below that

01:10:39.320 range, you really start to feel the negative effects of caloric restriction in terms of your hunger goes

01:10:45.820 up, your BMR drops, your non-exercise activity thermogenesis drops, your libido drops. You start to

01:10:53.540 have those negative side effects. For me, I would say that my, again, on calipers, that the low end of

01:11:00.740 my body fat set point is probably around 7% and the high end is probably around 11.

01:11:07.300 And how does that correlate with DEXA for you? Do you know how the caliper numbers correlate with DEXA?

01:11:13.380 Probably about 3% more on a DEXA, I would say.

01:11:16.940 So, kind of 10% to 14% is your DEXA sweet spot?

01:11:20.980 Yeah, something like that.

01:11:22.500 And in a show, by the way, you're below 4%. Is that what I would infer from what you said earlier?

01:11:28.200 On calipers, the lowest I've calipered, it was like just over 2% body fat.

01:11:34.540 So, call it 4% to 5% by DEXA, potentially.

01:11:37.580 Eh, probably, maybe 5% or 6%, yeah, something like that. And again, that's something I don't

01:11:41.920 really, I let the internet worry about that because at the end of the day, it's just about

01:11:45.760 the visual aspect, right?

01:11:47.440 Although I would guess, I would guess below that lane because as recently as 10 years ago,

01:11:52.860 I was 7.1% on DEXA. I mean, repeatedly, like 7.1 to 7.8 by DEXA. And I still remember what I

01:12:00.040 looked like then. Nothing like what a bodybuilder looks like. So, I would easily believe that by

01:12:05.440 DEXA, a bodybuilder could be 4%.

01:12:07.740 Possible. I just, I remember, so there was a guy, he's another natural bodybuilder named Alberto

01:12:13.040 Nunez. And if you ever saw pictures of this guy, like I'm talking like visible vascularity

01:12:19.900 in his glutes, right? So, like that, that level of weakness.

01:12:23.360 Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy.

01:12:24.600 And he was going, he went and got a DEXA done. And I remember he was asking people, he's like,

01:12:28.240 what do you think I'm going to be? And people were like, oh, 2%, 3%.

01:12:31.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:12:31.680 And he was 6%, you know, on a DEXA.

01:12:34.080 So, the question is then I'd have to ask how much of that was visceral versus subcutaneous?

01:12:38.500 Possible. The other thing is people don't, people need to appreciate is the level of

01:12:43.000 error that's in those measurements. You know, there is an inherent level of error in those

01:12:47.060 measurements.

01:12:48.400 But yeah, that's counterintuitive for that level of what you describe in terms of vascularity.

01:12:52.920 Yeah. So, who knows? But I think if you are somebody who your body naturally likes to be

01:12:59.760 at a little bit of a higher body fat percentage, you may see some lean body mass loss at a similar

01:13:07.220 body fat to what I am able to retain more at, right? So, now this is me just completely

01:13:13.000 speculating because there's so little data on this because studies are just so restrictive

01:13:18.840 in terms of what you can actually measure. And I think that this is another point that people

01:13:23.840 don't fully appreciate is that, you know, scientific studies are really big blunt instruments.

01:13:30.860 You are really, if you're doing a scientific study, you're only supposed to modify a couple

01:13:35.420 of variables, if that, because otherwise you just have no idea if what you're observing is due to

01:13:42.220 the variables that you want to test. Otherwise, you might as well just go to observational data.

01:13:47.600 And so, they're just, when it comes to this kind of stuff, there's so little data out there.

01:13:52.660 And so, this kind of is pulling from my opinions based on some randomized control trials I've seen,

01:14:01.060 some case studies I've seen, and some mechanistic data, some animal data. You know, and I always like

01:14:07.740 to tell people when I'm kind of going out on a limb because I don't want to state it as fact if I'm not

01:14:13.460 sure if it's fact. But I would say that the differences we see in how much people can retain

01:14:18.660 with lean body mass, I think part of it's due to what their natural body fat set point level is.

01:14:23.760 Because as we exit that lower end of our body fat set point, if the body likes to keep a certain level

01:14:30.900 of body fat, then it makes sense that it might start pulling a little bit more energy from lean

01:14:36.520 tissue compared to fat tissue if it's starting to defend that body fat. Now, there are quite a few

01:14:43.980 things we can do to overcome this, like resistance training, right? Like, that's a big one. And I

01:14:48.700 think some of the decrements we see in lean body mass with dieting is, one, a lot of these studies don't

01:14:55.820 do resistance training. Or when people are dieting and they're starting to feel worse because they're

01:15:00.820 lower energy, they're training volume drops, they're training intensity drops. And that's

01:15:05.800 probably part of it. And I think the other thing is too, like, I will say going from like 15% to

01:15:11.000 seven on calipers, I did lose some lean body mass, but you know, my relative strength didn't really

01:15:16.380 change. So what's likely is, you know, a lot of people don't realize lean body mass is not the same

01:15:22.640 thing as muscle mass. Lean body mass is all nonfat tissues. That's skin, bone, organ weight,

01:15:30.820 all that stuff, and including your body water. And a lot of I think what we see with lean body mass

01:15:36.880 loss is water, gut tissue, liver, those tissues shrink in response to caloric restriction.

01:15:45.180 Yeah, I think most people don't appreciate the glycogen, the amount of glycogen you can lose and

01:15:49.940 how much water tracks with glycogen. So you lose, let's say you lose half your glycogen volume,

01:15:56.700 you take the mass of that, multiply it by three to four, that's the total mass that's lost given

01:16:01.140 the water as well, not to mention the plasma loss that comes with plasma contraction.

01:16:06.400 Yeah, I mean, we see that like in ketogenic diet studies, like Kevin Hall's study, you know,

01:16:10.000 there was a loss of lean body mass, but even I, you know, me, I'm very critical of

01:16:14.500 zealots and nutrition. And so when I've criticized, you know, ketogenic diet stuff, I've even still said,

01:16:20.080 you know, in this Kevin Hall study, well, that's, most of that is probably water. Because if,

01:16:24.800 like you said, if you lose glycogen, you're losing quite a bit of water with that.

01:16:29.400 Well, I wonder if you would agree with an observation that I have found for which I haven't

01:16:32.800 found data to support, but truthfully, I haven't been on a huge hunt for it, but it's been very

01:16:37.700 empirical for me. So I've gone through various different phases of fasting where I'm doing it

01:16:42.680 for different purposes, right? So I'm not doing it for body composition or anything other than

01:16:46.900 ramping up autophagy. So basically kind of periodic fasting for health benefits.

01:16:51.020 And the thing that I've noticed is, and let's just use, I would typically do like a seven day,

01:16:57.040 five to seven day water only fast each quarter. And what I noticed was provided I did resistance

01:17:05.040 training every single day during that fast. So I dramatically changed my training because I would

01:17:10.220 normally be alternating between cardio and resistance. But if on those fasting days, the only thing I did

01:17:16.040 was resistance training. And specifically I focused on the biggest lifts possible. So deadlift is my

01:17:21.880 favorite lift. So I would even deadlift every other day and mostly just focus on the biggest muscles.

01:17:28.120 I had to go a lot slower. So I had to take, I needed much more rest between sets, but I could actually

01:17:34.860 still move the exact same amount of weight. So I didn't get any weaker. It seemed to minimize the loss

01:17:40.640 of lean mass, certainly muscle. I shouldn't say that I lost water weight, but I did not appear to

01:17:46.820 lose muscle mass. My thinking was that, that I was at least counter balancing the effect of mTOR

01:17:55.500 reduction that was coming through the nutrient pathway through a different stimulus. Does that,

01:18:01.240 and again, we're going to talk a lot about mTOR because of course your work in leucine ties right

01:18:05.160 into my interest around nutrient sensing. Does my observation fit with your observations and your

01:18:10.380 experiences? I always try to put things in context, right? So I think if you're looking at losing actual

01:18:18.640 contractile tissue, once you've built it, what it takes to maintain muscle tissue is very minimal

01:18:26.140 compared to what it takes to actually build it. So it does not necessarily surprise me, especially

01:18:33.240 because this gets into kind of like power of suggestion, placebo, your own personal feelings about stuff

01:18:38.500 because you view fasting as such a positive that you wouldn't have a reduction in strength because

01:18:44.820 you probably really haven't lost contractile tissue in that period of time. Now, if I take somebody,

01:18:51.660 now it's important to point out that you are a, I would say a well-trained person, but not somebody

01:18:56.440 who pushes the, like your goal isn't to push the upper limit of hypertrophy. Would I be correct in that?

01:19:01.860 Absolutely. Nor strength for that matter. Yep.

01:19:03.980 Right. So, and this is where some of the misinterpretations come from what I say to

01:19:08.440 people. So I had this the other day. I'll say, okay, do I think that somebody could build strength,

01:19:15.420 maintain it, doing that sort of thing? Absolutely. A lot of that just comes down to boils down to being

01:19:20.760 really consistent with your resistance training. If somebody says to me, I want to be the most muscular,

01:19:27.240 strongest human I possibly can be. Do I think that that is still the best thing that they could do?

01:19:34.480 No, I do not. But again, it's important to qualify both those things because I realized that one

01:19:40.260 audience, even though I have more of that audience is a very small specific subsection of the actual

01:19:46.200 number of people. But when I say that, what people hear is Lane says, you can't get strong fasting.

01:19:52.680 And I have to always say, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. You absolutely can. Do I think that you

01:19:59.880 could get as big and strong doing that as someone who is consuming nutrients regularly? I don't think

01:20:07.220 so. But we probably will never get a randomized control, lifelong randomized control trial on that.

01:20:12.840 So I can't say for certain. Well, actually, I agree with you on that. And in fact, when we turned into

01:20:17.640 the new year, this year, you know, I went and got a DEXA scan and looked at myself in January of this

01:20:23.060 year. And I was like, God, I'm kind of amazed over the last decade, how much muscle mass I've lost.

01:20:30.400 So I am on January 4th of this year, I weighed the exact same amount that I weighed 10 years ago in

01:20:40.680 May of 2011. So for all intents and purposes over a decade, my body weight was unchanged. I'm embarrassed

01:20:47.280 to tell you how much my body fat went up, right? It went from about 7% to 16% over a decade.

01:20:55.540 So you can do the math, right? Like it's pretty straightforward. I got fatter, I lost muscle.

01:21:00.960 Now I'm not going to beat myself up too much. A lot has happened in a decade, right? I used to train

01:21:05.720 four and a half to five hours a day. I now train maybe 90 minutes per day. I have very different

01:21:11.260 priorities. My goals are totally different. But, you know, I talked about it with Beth Lewis,

01:21:16.020 who I work with. And I was like, look, and she was like, look, we got to get some more muscle on

01:21:19.800 you, dude. It's kind of getting pathetic. So her first thing was no more fasting for a while, 0.99

01:21:24.660 right? That was basically her first suggestion, which is like, we got to take a break from the

01:21:28.780 monthly fasting because that's probably not helping your lean tissue. And if we want that to be a goal,

01:21:35.660 which is, is there any reason we shouldn't be able to put five pounds of muscle on you in the next

01:21:40.320 year? Her view is, I think we can do this, but you can't be fasting every month for three to five

01:21:45.600 days. So I think that's completely in line with what you're saying, which is an optimization issue.

01:21:50.740 And I've heard you talk about this with respect to plant versus animal protein, and it gets always

01:21:54.600 taken out of context. Yeah. I just had this discussion the other day. Yeah. So again, I'll let

01:21:59.700 you state the argument again, because you'll probably do a better job stating your own words than I will

01:22:05.280 stating your words for you. Yeah. So I kind of had this discussion with somebody who was saying,

01:22:11.000 well, if you look at the randomized control trials, plant versus animal, it just doesn't make a

01:22:14.640 difference if total protein is equated. And what I've said to people is, okay, I understand that

01:22:21.740 randomized control trials are the gold standard. If we are looking at resistance trained individuals,

01:22:27.700 eight weeks in terms of looking at actual muscle mass is such a short period of time.

01:22:35.280 Okay. Now I understand my bias is I did work in leucine. I was funded by the egg and dairy

01:22:41.580 councils, all that kind of stuff. So I'm sure that any conspiracy theorists out there will have a

01:22:46.500 field day, but I would never tell somebody you can't build muscle with plant protein. Of course you

01:22:52.300 can. Just go look at the, there's plant-based bodybuilders you can look at who have extremely

01:22:57.420 impressive physique. So obviously you can do it right now. Can you build just as much muscle with

01:23:03.900 plant protein? I think you can. However, it's probably going to require more planning on your

01:23:09.760 part and just a little bit more attention to detail because of the factors of limiting amino acids,

01:23:15.900 low leucine content, those sorts of things. Do I think all things being equal, animal protein is

01:23:21.820 probably a superior form of protein. I do. That being said, that is a small sliver of what actually

01:23:29.720 contributes to hypertrophy. Consistent resistance training and progressive overload is by far the

01:23:35.740 most dominant factor, but we can barely oftentimes not even pick out differences. We know volume is

01:23:44.400 important. We know volume weekly set number is important. We can't even pick out differences

01:23:49.720 in hypertrophy sometimes with different volume protocols. What makes you think we're going to

01:23:55.920 pick out differences in actual hypertrophy in eight weeks from protein sources where calories and

01:24:02.880 total protein are equated. And so what I've said is, I think the studies are probably a little bit

01:24:08.240 underpowered and shorter on time to actually show the differences we want to show. Now that being said,

01:24:14.200 I'm not saying they're bad studies. I'm just saying this is a limitation. That's all.

01:24:19.080 Yeah. So I actually, I was going to say that a second ago, but I didn't want to interrupt you when

01:24:22.660 you were talking about the limitations of these, some of these RCTs. And I was going to add the

01:24:27.020 limitation you just mentioned, which is it's hard enough to control the variables. But the other

01:24:31.740 thing is the tighter you put the grip on controlling the variables by definition in a real world, the

01:24:38.820 shorter the study must become. So you look at Kevin Hall's studies. Well, Kevin is doing studies at the

01:24:45.580 highest level that they can be done. So these are patients that are inpatients. And I know this very

01:24:51.760 well. I'm very close friends with Kevin. I have a very clear understanding of how the board runs

01:24:57.140 both his ward at NIH and also several others around the country. I've even spent time inside the

01:25:02.920 metabolic chambers personally to experience this. And yeah, we're talking about the highest level of

01:25:09.140 precision inside a chamber that does indirect calorimetry. The reality of it is you can't put

01:25:15.720 somebody in this situation for a year. And so when it comes to going back to exercise, if we think

01:25:23.160 that the difference in a person over six months might be two to three pounds of muscle mass under

01:25:32.080 perfect conditions, it's going to be very difficult to tease that out in eight weeks. The other thing I

01:25:38.240 would say going back to protein that I've always struggled with, and I want to actually get your

01:25:41.680 opinion on this because this is something that I want to know how much this matters both personally

01:25:46.360 and also professionally for my patients, is I have to suspect at least when it comes to leucine,

01:25:52.900 timing must matter. And in a moment, I'll come back to why I've been curious about this,

01:25:58.660 just based on what we now understand about how leucine and Sestrin-2 work in triggering mTORC1.

01:26:05.260 So there becomes this whole other variable, which is when we talk about plant versus animal,

01:26:09.880 does it matter where in relation to training we're taking that? Does it matter meal timing

01:26:15.820 specifically, training timing, and all of those other things? So let's actually maybe use this

01:26:21.000 as an opportunity to now talk about kind of your work in graduate school and what it's taught you

01:26:25.040 about muscle protein synthesis and the importance of leucine. Because I think even the most casual

01:26:30.860 observer of bro science has heard of a branch chain amino acid. And if you click one level below a

01:26:36.220 branch chain amino acid, you'll know that there are three of them. And one of them happens to be

01:26:39.780 called leucine. And people, I think, would gather that somehow taking those things is good for muscle.

01:26:46.840 But my guess is that's about the level at which most people stop understanding it.

01:26:51.360 So let's talk about what is muscle protein synthesis? What is the role of leucine? And I also

01:26:57.340 want to even dive deeper into that, which is how does the body preserve leucine? What do leucine levels

01:27:02.480 look like during the course of a day in response to a meal, a fast, et cetera?

01:27:05.720 Muscle protein synthesis is basically what it sounds like. It is the synthesis of muscle proteins

01:27:12.500 from amino acid substrates. And you can separate it in terms of like what you look at in research.

01:27:20.700 You can do what's called mixed muscle protein synthesis, which is what we did, which is where

01:27:25.400 you're literally taking the entirety of a muscle and you're grinding it up and you're homogenizing it.

01:27:31.180 And then you're basically using, in the studies, we use stable isotopes to assess this. We use D5

01:27:37.360 phenylalanine, which is basically a deuterated, one of the hydrogens on the phenylalanine is deuterated.

01:27:42.920 And you can, basically you're looking at how much of that label gets incorporated into the mixed muscle

01:27:49.720 versus how much is in the precursor pool, which is the intracellular fluid. And that rate divided by a

01:27:56.900 time factor will tell you what the rate of muscle protein synthesis is. And on a kind of a more

01:28:02.840 broad level, protein synthesis starts in your DNA because your DNA codes for those proteins that are

01:28:12.080 going to be synthesized. So for example, let's say you go and you would do a resistance training session.

01:28:16.960 We know that in response to resistance training, you have an increase in muscle protein synthesis.

01:28:21.000 That resistance training is triggering something. It's probably a cascade of things that are telling

01:28:29.280 your DNA, we need to adapt to this stressor. So we are going to increase the transcription of these,

01:28:38.360 you know, specific DNA sequences to the messenger. And I'm really, really abbreviating this because

01:28:47.000 you can get introns, extrons, mRNA degradation, all this kind of stuff, but it gets transcribed to an

01:28:53.280 mRNA sequence, which is then read by a ribosome. And that ribosome based on the mRNA is going to bring

01:29:02.300 amino acids in and hook them together to build these new proteins. So in the case of, you know,

01:29:08.420 let's say you go and you do resistance training, you know, myosin, actin, these contractile proteins,

01:29:14.220 you're going to need those as part of your adaptation to that stressor. And so those are

01:29:19.460 going to be some of the things that are going to be built during muscle protein synthesis.

01:29:22.860 Now, my work specifically was in animals, and I'll tell you why, and you kind of alluded to it earlier.

01:29:30.480 So we actually, I have a research review that's going to be coming out on my website. One of the

01:29:34.840 things I'm very proud of is we have a 50 page guide on how to read research, and we have a Venn diagram

01:29:40.540 in there. And in the Venn diagram, we have highly controlled, high subject number, long duration.

01:29:50.780 And what you find is the only way you can get all those to overlap is if you do animal studies.

01:29:56.320 So if you want, if you want tightly controlled and a high subject number, it's going to be really short

01:30:01.240 in humans. If you want long duration and tightly controlled, it's going to be very few subjects.

01:30:08.260 If you want, you know, you can kind of get the gist of it. So for, I decided I wanted to do animals

01:30:15.240 because I was more kind of interested in finding out the mechanisms of this stuff. And so one of the

01:30:22.440 reasons I liked using rats was one, they're a good model for human protein metabolism. A lot of the

01:30:26.620 stuff in rats has then been validated in humans. There are some differences, but I can teach a rat to

01:30:33.180 meal feed, meaning they eat discrete meals. I can get them to eat what I want them to eat. And then

01:30:40.520 I can measure what I want to measure. And I can poke and prod them and do all that kind of stuff,

01:30:44.440 as long as it's okay with the IACUC, which is basically the IRB for animals. And so what we were

01:30:50.760 interested in was what you kind of talked about, like how important is leucine? Because at that time,

01:30:56.060 you know, the mid-2000s, there had been quite a bit of work done by my advisor, Dr. Don Lehman,

01:31:01.820 as well as the Penn State group, which was Leonard Jefferson and Scott Kimball, looking at, okay,

01:31:08.040 we know if we give purified solutions of leucine, they increase mTOR activity and we see an increase

01:31:14.600 in muscle protein synthesis. But one, what does that mean for complete meals where you have protein,

01:31:21.240 carbohydrate and fat? What does it mean in the context of different protein sources?

01:31:26.960 And then what does it actually even matter for tissue weights, right? Like you actually see

01:31:32.220 differences in actual tissue. And so some of those work we did was one, we looked at the duration of

01:31:39.600 muscle protein synthesis in response to a complete meal. And that was really interesting. Actually,

01:31:44.900 that was one of the things I was dead wrong about what I thought I was going to see versus what I

01:31:49.060 actually saw. And so we saw like, even with weight, so whey protein, which is thought of as a fast

01:31:56.020 protein, basically we saw an increase in muscle protein synthesis that peaked at 90 minutes post

01:32:01.700 meal, and then by 180 minutes or three hours had gone back down to baseline, which has since been

01:32:06.500 validated in humans. That's about what we see in humans as well. Now, Lane, let me just ask you a

01:32:11.380 question there for a second before you go further. Do we have a sense of after the training stimulus ends,

01:32:18.000 how long that transcriptional stress is in place to continue muscle protein synthesis provided enough

01:32:26.420 substrate is available? In other words, when do we become substrate limited? So this is really

01:32:31.320 interesting because it's so hard to assess. So part of the reason that this stuff is so hard to

01:32:37.140 measure is in humans, you basically have to have a steady state in order to measure muscle protein

01:32:45.780 synthesis. Because there's certain assumptions you have to make about the isotope that you're using

01:32:52.000 to assess it, the precursor pool, and the actual protein bound label. And so that requires what we

01:32:59.580 call a nutritional steady state. So if you want to assess a muscle protein synthesis in response to

01:33:05.460 exercise. Yeah, but let's say you could give somebody an intravenous infusion of all amino acids.

01:33:12.180 So I guess there'd be two questions, right? We start with one question, which says, we don't care

01:33:16.400 which amino acid is, but we'll give you enough of all of them so that you're not going to be limited

01:33:20.680 by a given amino acid. And then we're just going to give you an IV infusion. So the second you finish

01:33:26.220 the highest stress workout, we just keep running it out. And then we're tracking over time muscle

01:33:31.540 protein synthesis. That would be one experiment that would be interesting. And then the second one

01:33:36.040 would be playing with which amino acids are the most important there. Does that kind of make sense?

01:33:41.160 So we kind of have a pretty good idea of like the time course of muscle protein synthesis in response

01:33:47.460 to an exercise bout when it comes to mixed muscle protein synthesis. Okay. So, so I'm going to make

01:33:53.520 a very important caveat here in a second. So the peak, so that the change percentage is about,

01:34:00.080 it increases, it's different from study to study, but about a hundred to 150% increase in muscle protein

01:34:06.220 synthesis. That peak is about the same for trained versus untrained, but the untrained duration lasts

01:34:15.460 much longer. So it, it's still not back to baseline in studies by 48. Well, some studies, it's back to

01:34:22.960 baseline at 48 hours and other studies, there's still a statistical difference at 48 hours. So we think

01:34:29.000 basically in untrained people, it's about 48 to 72 hour response. The interesting thing is in trained

01:34:36.000 people, that initial robust response comes back down about 10 to 12 hours. And at 24 hours is basically

01:34:47.640 not different from baseline. Now that's for mixed muscle protein synthesis. Now here's the rub

01:34:53.140 for myofibrillar protein synthesis, because you can separate that out during your analysis. So we're

01:34:59.420 talking about actual contractile muscle proteins because mixed muscle protein synthesis included,

01:35:06.080 includes all cytoplasmic proteins, mitochondrial proteins, all these sorts of things. The myofibrillar

01:35:12.700 protein synthesis, they actually don't know how long it lasts because they've only assessed it up to 16 hours

01:35:19.740 post. And so far, neither group has returned to baseline, although they have assessed the area

01:35:27.020 under the curve and it's, it's greater area under the curve for untrained versus trained. Now the rub on

01:35:32.500 that is if we look at, I know you're asking about nutrient availability and I promise I'm going to

01:35:38.040 keep going with this point though. The rub on that is none of these are addressing the other side of

01:35:45.480 protein balance, which is protein degradation. Now what's really interesting is during the first

01:35:52.420 approximately six weeks of resistance training, you don't see much hypertrophy in people who are

01:35:58.320 training. You see strength improvements, but you don't really see hypertrophy. And what's really

01:36:04.360 interesting is in the initial phases of training, you have an increase, a robust increase in muscle

01:36:12.480 protein synthesis, but you also have a very robust increase in protein degradation. And so the thought

01:36:18.560 process is because this is such a big stressor, a massive stressor, if you've never resisted train

01:36:24.160 before, I mean, everybody knows like the first time they went and did a leg workout, you couldn't walk

01:36:28.140 for like a, you know, a few days after that. It's almost like your muscles doing a complete overhaul of

01:36:32.900 those proteins. And so you have such a robust degradatory response because there are so many damaged

01:36:40.000 proteins or proteins that need to be, I guess, improved that it's almost like you're, you're

01:36:47.680 doing this protein turnover, futile cycle kind of remodeling. And then what we see is at the end of

01:36:54.240 six weeks, that increase in degradation goes way down. And that's actually, I mean, again, I can't say

01:37:01.260 for certain, but that coincides with when we start seeing the big improvements in hypertrophy.

01:37:06.460 So Lena, all things equal, if a person is consuming roughly the same amount of protein during that

01:37:11.840 phase and their training volume and intensity is roughly the same, is it safe to say during that

01:37:19.060 first period you described, they are going to be in a negative nitrogen balance versus a neutral

01:37:23.840 potentially nitrogen balance? Like if you were evaluating them with a nitrogen cart, like how are

01:37:27.880 you, would that show up as a nitrogen excretion in that first phase or are they recycling it?

01:37:33.400 Probably not. It's probably going to be pretty, they're probably going to be nitrogen positive

01:37:38.280 a little bit, but here, here's where this stuff gets so, so complicated because we know that in

01:37:46.460 muscle protein synthesis, about seven out of every eight amino acids used to create a new protein

01:37:53.100 are recycled from degraded proteins. So when we look at, okay, exogenous amino acids or exogenous dietary

01:38:02.660 protein and we think about as muscle building, I think most people think about, okay, I'm eating

01:38:07.800 this protein and this is going to get incorporated into my tissue and that's what's going to make me

01:38:13.760 big and strong. Eh, it's a lot more complicated than that. If you look at somebody who added 50 pounds

01:38:22.140 of muscle tissue in a year, right, that's a ton of muscle. Even for somebody on steroids, I think we can

01:38:29.600 agree that's a ton of muscle. When you account for the fact that muscle tissue is about 70% water and

01:38:34.960 about 30% protein, you're basically looking at about 10 grams of amino acids deposited in muscle

01:38:41.100 per day. It's very underwhelming. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry. That'd be for about 25 pounds of muscle a year,

01:38:46.320 I think. Still extremely impressive. Sure. But there are two different points there that I want to get

01:38:51.160 at. The first point is the one you're making, which is no matter how much muscle mass you put on,

01:38:55.440 it's never going to be impressive relative to the amount of amino acids you took in.

01:39:00.460 There's a second point you're making, which I find even more interesting potentially,

01:39:05.220 which is the actual fate of the ingested amino acid and how much is being recycled versus not.

01:39:11.680 So the analog here, but you're going to love this lane. I didn't even think this would come up and I

01:39:16.280 know you're going to love it. You want to know my favorite thing that drives me nuts about people when

01:39:21.920 they just rave about a ketogenic diet is the differentiation between re-esterification,

01:39:31.000 lipolysis, and fat oxidation. So here's the example, right? If you're on a ketogenic diet and

01:39:37.820 you're mainlining fat, you can very easily gain weight because if you're ingesting so much fat that

01:39:47.760 it exceeds your ability to oxidize fat, regardless of where that fat source is being oxidized, meaning

01:39:53.300 endogenous versus exogenous, it doesn't really matter. And in fact, a ketogenic diet can still

01:40:01.040 produce a ton of fat oxidation without oxidizing the endogenous source that you want to oxidize in

01:40:08.840 the first place. And by the way, a lot of the triglyceride contained within the adipocyte

01:40:14.220 gets recycled so it can be liberated as free fatty acid and then be re-esterified with glycerol back

01:40:21.640 into it. So actually it becomes kind of a nice analogy here. I just don't think I knew it was

01:40:26.500 true on the amino acid side as well. Yeah. So you're making an analogy that is, I don't know if I've

01:40:32.380 ever used it before, but it's bang on. I mean, there's differences of course, but I think a lot of

01:40:37.360 this boils down to people think of metabolism as like on and off switches. And it's like,

01:40:44.480 that's think about like dimmer switches. People think like when you're losing fat, that means that

01:40:52.020 fat burning is ramped up and you know, fat storage is all the way down at zero. No, you are always

01:40:59.980 burning and storing fat simultaneously. Same thing. You are always synthesizing protein and degrading it

01:41:08.000 at the same time. Now it's the relative rates of each that are going to determine if you deposit

01:41:14.160 versus lose fat or protein. So let me then bring it back to that analogy. Cause I just did a podcast

01:41:20.940 on this with Bob Kaplan recently, and we talked about it in terms of fat flux. So we talked about

01:41:26.880 three states, a person who is in neutral fat flux. So they are neither gaining nor losing fat tissue,

01:41:34.280 negative fat flux and positive flat flux. So you're either gaining fat mass, losing fat mass,

01:41:38.240 or maintaining the same. And we talked about it through the lens of de novo lipogenesis,

01:41:44.640 re-esterification, lipolysis. Nope. None of that says anything about oxidation that's happening outside

01:41:50.240 and that can feed into substrate pools. What we then talked about was how many hormones are regulating

01:41:56.040 these different steps. So what happens when insulin goes up and down? What happens when epinephrine goes

01:42:02.140 up and down? When norepinephrine goes up and down? When hormone sensitive lipase goes up and down?

01:42:06.940 When cortisol goes up and down? Testosterone, lipoprotein, lipase, et cetera. So in other words,

01:42:12.680 these are all regulated hormonally, some of them outside the cell. So insulin obviously is acting

01:42:18.280 outside the cell. LPL is outside the cell, HSL inside the cell, et cetera.

01:42:23.360 Tell me about the hormonal regulation on the same unit of muscle. The most obvious difference,

01:42:31.060 of course, is that testosterone works inside the cell, right? So let's start with testosterone, 0.89

01:42:36.120 but then I want to talk about all of the hormones that impact this. Specifically,

01:42:39.960 I want to make sure we at least touch on cortisol and estradiol at some point,

01:42:43.760 but let's start with testosterone because it plays such an important role in that transcriptive drive.

01:42:49.160 Yeah. So I think the one thing I want to say before we, before we start on this is keep in

01:42:53.480 mind that when we're talking about all these hormones and this goes for fat tissue or muscle

01:42:58.000 tissue, what you are seeing on the surface in terms of the actual outcome is the result of the

01:43:05.100 summation of all of those signals, right? So people get hung up on say insulin or they get hung up on

01:43:12.700 leucine or they get hung up on, you know, one particular thing. And then they get confused when

01:43:17.820 they see a paradoxical outcome, right? So a great example of that is Kevin Hall's study on

01:43:24.640 fat loss, looking at where they showed that insulin was 26% higher, but those people actually ended up

01:43:30.980 losing like, I would call it a non-significant greater amount of actual fat mass than people

01:43:37.360 who are on a ketogenic diet. People say, well, how can that be true? Right? And it's like, okay,

01:43:42.820 well, you got to remember that insulin is just one input. It's not the only input. And the same

01:43:48.260 thing goes for building muscle and muscle tissue. So with regards to testosterone, what's interesting

01:43:54.100 about testosterone is I actually reviewed a study recently where... Yeah, the study by Stu Phillips

01:44:01.340 that looked at androgen receptor density. Yeah. So that's... Which by the way, I still don't understand

01:44:06.840 something, which I'm hoping you can explain. Why would androgen receptor density be higher in someone

01:44:13.640 getting exogenous testosterone? You would think that someone taking exogenous testosterone would 0.99

01:44:19.620 have a paradoxically negative response and that they would down-regulate androgen receptors.

01:44:24.160 I'll let you maybe go back and explain it from the beginning because the listener might not be

01:44:27.820 familiar with the thesis of the work. Yeah. So essentially, you know, when you have... When

01:44:32.260 testosterone gets into the cell, it's converted. And then that end product binds with the androgen

01:44:38.880 receptor, and then it can attach to the DNA, increasing transcription of different proteins.

01:44:45.900 So basically, you're ramping up your capacity for, amongst other things, increasing muscle proteins.

01:44:52.440 That's different than how leucine acts nutritionally because leucine is a signal also that happens inside

01:44:58.800 the cell, but it's more of a short-term signal. Now, to answer your question specifically,

01:45:05.600 what I've seen proposed is that when you have enough testosterone available, what tends to happen

01:45:11.380 is the androgen receptors upregulate to meet the demand for metabolizing that testosterone.

01:45:19.580 And that the regulation of the excess testosterone, think about the negative feedback loop,

01:45:25.600 functions more so on, like, luteinizing hormone and the gonads and that sort of thing, right?

01:45:31.820 Yeah.

01:45:32.000 If I had to hazard a guess, that would be my guess that the regulation in terms of trying to tamp that

01:45:40.560 down... Because think about if you're not getting exogenous testosterone. If you're not getting

01:45:46.020 exogenous testosterone, then there's probably not that same negative feedback regulation loop.

01:45:51.900 And so I always hate it when people go, well, it makes sense because there's tons of stuff in

01:45:57.640 metabolism. We say, well, it makes sense and then it ends up not working out in the study. But

01:46:00.860 to me, it would make sense that the muscle might increase its androgen receptor density to meet that

01:46:06.640 testosterone load or that free testosterone load. So long as you're not having so much testosterone

01:46:13.160 that's not negatively feeding back to the gonads and limiting or reducing luteinizing hormone or

01:46:21.360 increasing aromatization, those sorts of things. And I will straight up say, I am not a testosterone

01:46:26.860 expert. So I could be getting this stuff dead wrong. But I think more to the point of Stu Phillips' work

01:46:33.320 is that muscle growth appears to be mostly intrinsically regulated. And I think in the late

01:46:42.960 90s, early 2000s, what people were really focused on was systemic, what they thought was systemic

01:46:49.040 regulation of muscle growth, right? Your systemic levels of testosterone, IGF-1, and even like the

01:46:56.440 acute responses. Like we know, for example, resistance exercise will increase testosterone, you know,

01:47:01.840 for 30 or 60 minutes. And it used to be thought, well, that is what's driving these responses of

01:47:08.800 hypertrophy. And through a few elegantly designed studies, a lot of them by Stu Phillips, we know

01:47:14.800 that that's probably not the case, that this is probably an effect of tension. Now, what's interesting

01:47:21.860 about muscle growth is if we're going to have that tension that's driving muscle growth, there has to be

01:47:28.000 a translation of that contractile force into a chemical signal. So we call that mechanotransduction.

01:47:36.620 And so this is where I know you, we had talked about it a little bit earlier, mechano growth factor

01:47:42.120 probably comes in. So IGF-1, systemic IGF-1 and growth hormone are not anabolic to skeletal muscle.

01:47:50.040 People don't realize this.

01:47:51.460 Let's pause here because this is, I want to make sure people understand what we're talking about.

01:47:55.320 And this is such an important topic. I don't want to rush it. So let's, let's go back to the

01:48:00.780 beginning and assume that the listener here doesn't fully understand where growth hormone comes from,

01:48:05.540 right? And where it, what it does in the liver, what IGF does. So let's go back and explain the

01:48:12.540 endocrine versus, well, we'll get to the endocrine versus autocrine function of IGF, but just back up

01:48:16.780 two steps with where you are lane. So we know that like growth hormone increases in response to certain

01:48:21.720 things like fasting, resistance training, exercise in general, sleep potentially.

01:48:28.060 Sure. Sure. All those things. And people kind of looked at that as, okay, well, we should be

01:48:32.140 aiming to increase growth hormone for these things. And we know that growth hormone increases the liver

01:48:35.940 production of IGF-1. And IGF-1 has always been thought of as kind of like the master hormone that

01:48:41.960 is increasing muscle mass. When they look at studies, even where they give exogenous growth hormone,

01:48:48.180 what you see is you see an increase in lean body mass, but not an increase in skeletal muscle mass.

01:48:54.440 So the increase in lean body mass is completely accounted for by an increase in body water

01:48:59.780 and connective tissue. So now you can argue that might be some benefits to connective tissue and

01:49:04.640 that sort of thing. And I would argue organ weight as well, right? I mean, we see liver hypertrophy and

01:49:09.960 other things like that as well. So when it comes to growth hormone, I actually had an article about

01:49:16.520 this years ago on my site about how growth hormone wasn't anabolic. And I got a lot of bodybuilding

01:49:20.460 dogma people getting really upset about that because they don't understand, and this is

01:49:25.360 pervasive, even amongst scientists, people who don't understand the concept of a localized response

01:49:31.380 versus a systemic response, or people who don't understand an acute response versus a chronic response.

01:49:38.080 We're going to talk about this with respect to cortisol as well.

01:49:40.300 And mTOR signaling, I'm sure. So growth hormone, not anabolic to skeletal muscle, and the growth

01:49:48.740 hormone response to exercise appears to be mostly substrate driven. That growth hormone probably

01:49:55.980 increases as a response to exercise to increase lipolysis to liberate free fatty acids for use

01:50:03.380 as an energy substrate. Now, here's where people get confused. The autocrine IGF-1 that is released by

01:50:12.160 the muscle tissue itself in response to mechanical tension is very anabolic.

01:50:19.900 Let me just explain for a moment to people the difference between endocrine, paracrine, and autocrine.

01:50:24.820 So the endocrine function of something is when a hormone gets released, and its effect is all throughout

01:50:32.840 the body. So insulin is a great example, right? So the pancreas, the beta cell releases insulin,

01:50:37.660 insulin goes and acts on all sorts of cells in the body. Paracrine is when something, when a hormone

01:50:43.080 gets released, and it only impacts the cells right next to it. And autocrine is on itself, as you would

01:50:49.720 guess. Now, going back to what you said earlier, the one way we explain this to patients is IGF-1 is the

01:50:56.960 integral of growth hormone. So if you want to get a sense of how much growth hormone is floating around,

01:51:03.080 to a first order approximation, you get a sense of how much IGF somebody has, you get a sense of how

01:51:08.300 much IGF is being produced by the liver. And to your point, that's all systemic, or what we would

01:51:14.280 really think of as an endocrine IGF. Now, what you're about to talk about is something that,

01:51:20.260 you know, frankly, never really gets talked about.

01:51:22.020 Yeah. So IGF-1, autocrine or paracrine IGF-1 that gets released by the muscle tissue itself

01:51:30.040 is also called mechano growth factor. And that is very anabolic to muscle tissue. But again, it's a very

01:51:38.380 localized, intrinsic response. And it makes sense from, to me, again, here we go, it makes sense.

01:51:47.180 From a teleological perspective, if you place a stress on a particular muscle tissue, like your

01:51:55.560 legs, it does not make sense to me that your arms will grow. Because you may not need your arms.

01:52:02.700 Like if you're, if you're a, I don't know, if you're a tribe and you're having to climb something

01:52:07.700 in the, whatever, you know, you're using your legs much more than your arms. Muscle tissue

01:52:12.560 is an energetically expensive tissue to maintain. It takes more energy, more ATP, more calories. It is

01:52:20.640 a futile cycle, meaning that to maintain it, you actually have to increase synthesis and breakdown

01:52:26.240 because you're having more proteins that are misfolded and whatnot that need to be broken down.

01:52:30.320 That whole thing takes more energy. And so that's why we tell people, if you want to be able to eat

01:52:35.400 more calories, hey, build some more muscle because to maintain that takes more. So it does not make

01:52:41.360 sense from a evolutionary perspective because evolution doesn't care if you're jacked. It cares

01:52:46.400 if you can live long enough to pass on your genetic material. It does not make sense that you would

01:52:52.820 build a different tissue in response to a localized effect of training. We see that. We see that if you

01:52:59.860 train your legs, your arms don't get bigger. We know that. And if you train one leg, the other

01:53:05.460 one doesn't get bigger, right? In fact, some of the best resistance training studies are where they use

01:53:10.380 unilateral training and the person's non-trained legs serves as the own individual's control

01:53:16.600 because you're accounting for genetic variations by doing that. So yeah. And then we have another

01:53:22.440 probably component of mechanotransduction is probably phosphatidic acid. So phosphatidic acid

01:53:27.940 is stored in the Z-disc of the skeletal muscle, which if you look at a... All right, let's back up.

01:53:34.860 Yeah. Let's remind people how actin, myosin work, and then where the Z-disc fits in because

01:53:39.320 I forgot you and I got so into the weeds. It was my bad. I should have reminded us that we should go

01:53:44.860 back and... That's good. This is fun for me. So the contractile unit of a muscle tissue is what's

01:53:50.620 called a sarcomere. And if you look at a sarcomere, you kind of have these two ends,

01:53:56.020 which are called Z-disc. And in between you have actin and myosin, which overlap. And then

01:54:01.740 for lack of a better term, when you contract, it's basically actin and myosin hooked together

01:54:08.500 and pulling. Okay. Now I'm, again, I'm really generalizing and I'm sure there's an exercise

01:54:14.460 physiologist out there who's going to throw up their lunch hearing me describe it that way.

01:54:18.600 But for all, I feel that that's a reasonable comparison. Now, each sarcomere is separated

01:54:26.040 by the Z-disc. Okay. The Z-disc is where something called phosphatidic acid is stored. And if you were

01:54:35.580 going to try to transfer a mechanical signal to a chemical signal, it makes sense that you would

01:54:43.520 store this stuff in the Z-disc, because that is where a lot of that mechanical tension is going

01:54:49.040 to be felt. So in response to that mechanical tension, again, based on mechanistic studies,

01:54:54.340 we believe what happens is that causes phosphatidic acid to be released. And phosphatidic acid is a

01:55:00.780 stimulator of mTOR. So we think, again, that these two things are some of the more major regulators

01:55:09.740 of mechanotransduction in terms of how muscle actually gets built. And then, of course, we have

01:55:16.260 other regulators. Testosterone doesn't really regulate mTOR that I'm aware of. It works more

01:55:21.300 on the transcriptional level. We have things like insulin affects mTOR, although it doesn't seem to

01:55:26.580 be a powerful enough signal to actually impact muscle building if insulin has an effect. It's

01:55:31.040 probably more so on the protein breakdown side of things. If you look at studies looking at

01:55:36.060 carbohydrate ingestion, we don't really see increases in muscle protein synthesis. So if

01:55:41.020 you just give pure carbohydrate, even up to like 100 grams of glucose, even though you get a pretty

01:55:46.000 good rise in insulin, it doesn't seem to affect muscle protein synthesis. But it does seem to

01:55:52.880 inhibit protein degradation. In fact, there was a study in resistance training, I think out of Bob Wolf's

01:55:59.000 lab in like 2004. And they did what's called AV balance. So arteriovenous balance is where basically

01:56:07.800 you're infusing a stable isotope. And you're looking at essentially how much of that label is going into

01:56:14.180 the muscle and then how much is coming out, right? And so you can determine the net balance. And if you

01:56:19.820 take a biopsy as well, you can determine the fractional rate of protein synthesis. And then by

01:56:24.820 basically subtraction can determine what breakdown is. So what they saw was when they gave a large

01:56:30.240 amount of carbohydrate to people who had resistance trained, they went from having an increase in muscle

01:56:35.420 protein breakdown to basically back to baseline in muscle protein breakdown and synthesis didn't

01:56:39.920 change. Now, Lane, if you did that in combination with protein, would that be a better strategy to hit

01:56:45.540 it at both ends where you would reduce degradation and increase synthesis? And is that an argument for

01:56:52.380 combining carbohydrate and protein after a resistance training, as opposed to just protein?

01:56:59.460 So here's where it gets very complicated, because there probably is some degradation that is needed

01:57:04.880 in order to remodel and actually make things better. However, really, we need to go to the kind of the hard

01:57:12.940 outcome studies. So there's only really two studies I know of that examined like a protein and calorie

01:57:20.820 equated low carbohydrate diet versus a protein calorie equated non low carbohydrate diet. And it was ketogenic.

01:57:30.220 So they measured blood ketones and saw they went up. And this was, I think, 12 weeks. Vargas was the

01:57:35.860 author. And they did see less lean body mass accrual in the ketogenic diet group. Now, they still increased

01:57:46.480 lean body mass. That's important to know. But the group that was getting carbohydrate or more

01:57:51.520 carbohydrates had more lean body mass. Now, the caveat to that is carbohydrates have make you store

01:57:57.460 glycogen. So was it just water or was it contractile tissue? Now, in the second study, they did see a

01:58:04.900 difference in like one rep max squat, and I think bench press as well. So that kind of suggests that

01:58:12.380 perhaps there is something different in terms of actual contractile tissue. But this is an area

01:58:18.820 that's going to need to be studied a lot more. And again, I don't want anybody to straw man what I'm

01:58:22.040 saying. I'm not saying you can't build muscle on a ketogenic diet. You absolutely can. You can probably

01:58:27.120 build a really good amount of muscle. But can you build as much as if you're including carbohydrate?

01:58:32.120 Possibly not. And it may have something to do with carbohydrates effect or insulin's effect

01:58:37.200 on blunting muscle protein breakdown. The other thing I'll add to that,

01:58:41.420 again, based on my experience, and you've probably talked about this with Dom,

01:58:45.580 is I think one of the challenges of studying ketogenic diets is the length of time it takes

01:58:50.040 to adapt to them. I went on a ketogenic diet in May of 2011 as an experiment, and I was committed to

01:58:57.340 doing it for 12 weeks. And I mean, five weeks in, I was so miserable. My wife was like,

01:59:03.700 what are you doing and why? And, you know, all the standard mistakes I was making. And the first

01:59:10.260 being I made no reduction in training volume, and I was already training at the level of a maniac,

01:59:16.940 right? So, I mean, ridiculous training volume, and I made zero reduction in it. And I was,

01:59:23.300 I mean, just staggeringly and upsettingly miserable. And at 12 weeks, I finally crested the first hill,

01:59:32.680 which was the aerobic hill. So, at the time, it was cycling and swimming were the two sports.

01:59:38.320 And I, at 12 weeks, I just got to the point where I could get my aerobic base back to where it was 12

01:59:45.360 weeks earlier. But anaerobically, I was nowhere near what I was 12 weeks earlier. I won't put you

01:59:52.820 on the spot and make you guess, but if I were going to make you guess, how long do you, well, first of all,

01:59:58.120 I decided to stay with the diet because I became so interested in the physiology of it. And I wanted

02:00:03.860 to see, like, what is it going to take to return back to my previous level of anaerobic fitness?

02:00:09.100 It took 18 months. And I want to be clear, this is 18 months without one day of deviation.

02:00:16.780 I would end up staying on this diet for three years with one day of deviation. My wife's birthday,

02:00:24.360 I ended up having a bunch of cake. But for three years to stay on this one incredibly restrictive

02:00:31.620 diet, it took half of that period of time just to get back to where I was anaerobically.

02:00:37.580 So it speaks to how difficult I think it is to study any of this stuff. And by the way,

02:00:44.860 was I perfectly controlling my exercise during that period of time? No, it's quite possible that

02:00:49.580 some of those changes had to do with other variables. So I don't know. Sometimes I just

02:00:56.260 think this stuff is so complicated. We should focus on the biggest picture questions and try to get at

02:01:02.180 them. But then there's times when we get into discussions like this and I'm like, no, these details are

02:01:06.460 the most interesting part of this, right? Especially on this side of the equation,

02:01:09.860 because this is an area I know so little about. That's why I was very excited to discuss it with

02:01:13.760 you. For the majority of the audience, I think that, and that's why I try to provide so much

02:01:17.780 context when I talk about this stuff. And I don't talk about the ketogenic diet study and also not

02:01:22.560 say, hey, you can still build muscle on it, right? Because I don't want people to take away,

02:01:26.260 Lane said you can't build muscle on a ketogenic diet. And then they go out and they see somebody who

02:01:29.760 built a bunch of muscle and they go, okay, well, this doesn't make sense, right? So I think that's why

02:01:34.100 the nuance is very important. Like you said, we're in the details, right? Because that's what's

02:01:39.000 interesting to us because we kind of hopefully know some of the major things. It's the same as

02:01:44.400 testosterone, right? You could say the same thing. You'd be like, do you need to take exogenous

02:01:48.020 testosterone to be a bodybuilder? Nope. Look at all the examples. But if your goal is to be the biggest,

02:01:54.820 the strongest, I have news for you. Go and get yourself some testosterone cypionate and get ready to

02:02:01.060 start smacking a thousand milligrams every single week. I mean, that's the reality of it. And again,

02:02:06.880 that's spoken without prejudice. It's simply biochemistry.

02:02:10.740 And anecdote plays into this. And anecdote is important. And I'm about to discuss yours a

02:02:16.000 little bit, but I always tell people like, just be cautious with anecdote. I'm not saying that your

02:02:20.460 anecdote doesn't matter. But what I am saying is everyone knows somebody who smoked every single

02:02:24.280 day of their life till they were 90, right? And lived to a ripe old age. Does that mean that it's okay

02:02:29.740 to smoke? Or do we think that's the best thing for longevity? We certainly do not, right? So when

02:02:34.880 we're making broad recommendations, we're doing that based on the consensus of the evidence.

02:02:41.240 But we also need to understand that there will be outliers that fall outside that. And that's where

02:02:46.420 individualization comes in. So I think one of the things that we really are struggling with right

02:02:52.000 now, and I kind of challenged the low-carb community on this a while back, because one of my pet peeves

02:02:57.740 is I'm not saying that there's not such a thing as ketogenic adaptation or fat adaptation that may

02:03:02.940 take longer. What I'm saying is we need a hard metric for it. We really need some kind of hard

02:03:08.420 metric to explain this. Because if we look at things like, okay, let's look at blood ketones.

02:03:13.720 Yeah, it's clearly not blood ketones. It's not lipolysis.

02:03:16.460 Right. And we see fat oxidation. Fat oxidation within six days is already maxed out.

02:03:20.940 No, no. It's none of the things that we understand. I mean, my biggest regret about the experiment I did,

02:03:25.880 because I'm never going to be repeating it, is I wish at the time I had the thought and

02:03:32.220 wherewithal to have taken muscle biopsies and collected ample amounts of tissue for all the

02:03:40.020 future proteomics, metabolomics, every omic you can think of to have been done down the line.

02:03:45.740 It still would have only been an N of one. But to me, if that 18-month transition was something

02:03:52.260 beyond psychological, and let's be honest, it could have been psychological too, right?

02:03:56.640 If it was anything other than psychological, I suspect the answer is far deeper than in any of

02:04:02.860 the things that typically get talked about. Yeah. So I think if I was going to explain your

02:04:07.240 kind of 18-month to get back to anaerobic. So first off, I think it's important to note that

02:04:12.420 when it comes to exercise, there's some diverging information in terms of the ketogenic diet or low-carb

02:04:18.720 diet, whether or not it's bad for exercise. I think we can pretty conclusively say that for

02:04:23.860 ultra endurance, there doesn't seem to be a downside to it. It also doesn't seem to be superior.

02:04:29.240 It kind of boils down to personal preference and what the person likes. When it comes to aerobic

02:04:34.080 exercise, at least from what I've seen, if you're under 60% of your VO2 max, you're probably safe in terms

02:04:42.160 of getting the most out of your exercise after you're fat adapted. When it comes to over 70%,

02:04:48.100 that's where we start to get into where it becomes much more difficult to perform well

02:04:52.380 or as optimally as you can on a ketogenic diet. And of course, yes, if you, like somebody sent me

02:04:57.900 something and said, well, look at Sean Baker, he's deadlifting 500 pounds for nine reps and he's 50

02:05:02.940 years old. You know, like, how do you explain that? And I said, okay, again, this is why we have

02:05:08.700 randomized control trials because I'm not saying that he's not strong and I'm not saying that you can't

02:05:14.080 get strong and that you can't do some heavy weights for higher reps. What I, the question

02:05:19.180 you need to ask yourself is, is he as strong as he possibly could have been if he was doing

02:05:26.280 something different? Because just the sheer magnitude of resistance training consistently

02:05:31.340 for a long period of time, you will get very strong. It doesn't matter what diet you're on.

02:05:35.100 You will get strong or relatively strong for what you started at. So the question always has to be,

02:05:41.040 are we talking about, can you do something or was this the best thing that you could possibly do?

02:05:48.220 Because those are two different questions, right? It's like when people talk about how much protein

02:05:51.760 do I need? Well, you only need about 50 grams a day. If we're talking about preventing you from

02:05:56.700 being in a negative nitrogen balance, but what's optimal for health or lean body mass. So that's a

02:06:03.280 very different question, right? So I think that when, I guess if I could implore the listeners,

02:06:09.340 just always remember that when you, when you see something that you think contradicts or you,

02:06:14.620 that you think is, it doesn't fit. What is the person saying? Are they talking about optimizing or

02:06:20.400 are they talking about, can you actually do this? Because if somebody says, well, you can't get

02:06:23.360 strong on a ketogenic diet, I'd say, well, you're, you're an idiot. Of course you can, right? I mean, 1.00

02:06:27.320 look at Dom. Dom, I've seen him deadlift 700 pounds multiple times with no carbohydrate intake,

02:06:32.960 right? So it's obviously not true.

02:06:34.980 The other thing I always encourage people to think about on this front is the relative to

02:06:40.300 what comparison, which is a slight variation on what you said. So I know you had a great video

02:06:44.860 out there, which we'll link to on critiquing the documentary game changers, which unfortunately I

02:06:50.160 just think was such a horrible, horrible piece of propaganda. And I say that not as someone who's

02:06:56.740 against a plant-based diet, I think much like you, but someone who is very much against disgusting

02:07:02.120 science. And I found that to be a demonstration of utter nonsense. But you know, when we wrote 0.92

02:07:07.180 something about this, one of the points we tried to make was one of the biggest challenges of studying

02:07:12.920 nutrition in general is what are you comparing it to? And if you compare diet X to the standard

02:07:18.340 American diet, almost by definition, diet X is going to look amazing because the standard American

02:07:24.280 diet is such an awful diet. And, you know, I thought it was such an insincere attempt to talk

02:07:31.820 about a form of nutrition that obviously has many benefits, but when it's done in that way,

02:07:37.300 it's pretty bad. And we probably won't have time to go into it today, but you, I thought did such a

02:07:41.780 great job of going into some of the real challenges of that at a level that most people didn't, right?

02:07:46.440 Like a lot of the criticisms of that movie are so obvious and easy, but you actually went deep in

02:07:50.800 them. So we'll make sure people go and look at that. I want to change gears for a second and come

02:07:54.840 back to this cortisol thing. Cause I think this is a very misunderstood hormone. And I know you've

02:08:00.300 written about this and I think it's worth getting the listener up to speed on cortisol. We tend to look

02:08:05.820 at this very black and white. So let's give the extremes. So there's something called an Addisonian

02:08:11.960 crisis, right? Someone gets a bad infection. They have an injury to their adrenal gland. They can't make

02:08:17.580 cortisol acutely. They're going to die. They are hands down going to die. The only way to rescue that

02:08:23.960 patient is to give them massive doses of hydrocortisone or hydrocortisone equivalent. And that very much

02:08:30.620 speaks to the medical necessity of cortisol. Let's look at the other extreme. Let's look at Cushing's

02:08:36.720 disease. So you can have Cushing's disease or Cushing's syndrome where either at the pituitary gland or at

02:08:42.740 the adrenal gland, rampant amounts of cortisol are made and nobody would dispute the pathology of

02:08:48.720 that state. This is a person who develops basically a ball of fat on the back of their neck. That's

02:08:55.200 basically the size of a basketball, excessive fat accumulation, all sorts of metabolic dysregulation.

02:09:01.320 Again, nobody would dispute that, that that is a problem. Fortunately, very few people are in either

02:09:08.200 of those states. So let's now talk about physiologic levels of cortisol and their impact on muscle

02:09:16.880 protein synthesis and something you said earlier, which I found very interesting, which was tolerating

02:09:23.220 pain, pain threshold, training resilience, and things like that. You can take that in any order you want.

02:09:29.460 That's a lot. Yeah. So we have to think about the function of cortisol at its root, which is a stress

02:09:35.060 hormone, right? So you're, you're secreting hormone, cortisol in response to some kind of stressor.

02:09:41.620 Again, so this is, this is a great example of acute versus chronic. Okay. When it comes to somebody

02:09:49.760 who's getting very low sleep, overall unhealthy lifestyle, smoke, whatever, they're going to have

02:09:55.780 high levels of cortisol and that can be problematic from the, or very like high levels of stress.

02:10:00.820 Because now I think about what stress used to mean stress used to mean, oh crap, there's that thing

02:10:06.340 that's going to kill me. I need to run. And so your body would produce cortisol for a myriad of 0.89

02:10:11.180 different reasons. A part of that was just a fuel mobilization response. It mobilizes glucose,

02:10:16.380 free fatty acids, those sorts of things. It's just trying to get as much fuel in the bloodstream as

02:10:20.980 it can. Now, when it comes to Cushing's, for example, because, or at least my best guess is,

02:10:28.340 and there may be studies on this, I haven't looked super in detail on it. My best guess is

02:10:32.500 it's not necessarily that you're accumulating fat, you're redistributing it, right? Like it's going to

02:10:38.700 weird places. That's right. The legs become incredibly thin, the abdomen and the upper back

02:10:44.700 become incredibly full. Right. So you actually see this in like people who have liposuction.

02:10:53.760 So liposuction, if you, if you, so your adipose doesn't just sit on nothing. It sits on the

02:10:59.100 extracellular matrix. If you do liposuction, it destroys that matrix. And so people go, oh, well,

02:11:04.260 you can't gain fat back. You can't gain it back there, but you start, if you regain it,

02:11:10.820 you start gaining it in very odd places. And so what you're looking at is a redistribution

02:11:16.200 because cortisol, going back to cortisol, if you have high cortisol, because you're stressed

02:11:21.240 constantly and your, your body is still operating on genes from, you know, a million years ago,

02:11:27.180 that's telling you we're stressed, must be something coming to kill us. So we're going to

02:11:33.100 liberate a bunch of energy into the bloodstream. Well, well then it's still got, if you're not going

02:11:37.640 to use it, if it doesn't get used, it's got to be put back somewhere. Right. And so now you can

02:11:43.080 have it started to be deposited in strange places possibly. Now, when it comes to exercise

02:11:49.100 specifically, it's a stressor. Exercise is a stressor. It makes sense that it would increase

02:11:54.700 your cortisol, but people have kind of taken this say, well, we need to limit cortisol as much as

02:11:59.940 possible. So remember there used to be the old, I don't know if you remember this, but it was like,

02:12:02.480 don't train more than an hour because at that point, cortisol starts to go up, starts to spike.

02:12:08.160 There used to be kind of that. I missed that entire memo and school of thought, fortunately.

02:12:14.640 So interestingly, so we've referenced Stu Phillips a few times now. He did the study,

02:12:19.400 I want to say 10 years ago and looked at different hormones and how they associated with actual

02:12:26.760 hypertrophy. So he looked at, so the post-exercise increases in systemic hormones. So he looked at

02:12:33.720 testosterone, IGF-1, growth hormone, cortisol, and I think that was it. Guess which hormone was most

02:12:42.220 closely associated with hypertrophy? Absolutely cortisol, hands down. But of course, I'm familiar

02:12:46.580 with the paper, but yes. Right.

02:12:48.500 The interpretation is, again, is it that cortisol is producing hypertrophy or is it cortisol is in

02:12:54.260 response to the stress that is producing hypertrophy? Again, this seems paradoxical because people see

02:13:00.460 an association, they automatically think, well, there must be a cause there. Not necessarily at

02:13:05.060 all. These two things are happening in parallel. So what it means is the resistance training

02:13:12.000 session that is going to produce the most amount of stress, the most amount of adaptation is probably

02:13:20.560 going to produce the most cortisol and possibly the most hypertrophy if it's repeated, right?

02:13:25.660 So cortisol, like we know that it will impede muscle protein synthesis. But again, that is

02:13:32.220 cortisol acts transcriptionally like testosterone. It is actually a steroid hormone. In fact,

02:13:39.300 people get confused because they're like, well, he got a steroid injection before his, you know,

02:13:43.820 tennis match. And people are like, they're not in test, just not injecting it with testosterone.

02:13:47.760 They're giving him cortisol so he can go out and play because it reduces inflammation in that

02:13:52.200 particular area. Well, cortisol is more of a long-term hormone. It's acting transcriptionally.

02:14:00.060 What you need to be worried about are long-term low-level elevations in cortisol. And people make

02:14:06.880 this mistake with anything. They make it with mTOR. A lot of the vegan doctors get all up in arms about

02:14:12.840 mTOR, you know, getting stimulated by leucine and that's going to give you cancer.

02:14:16.680 You don't understand tissue specifics and you don't understand acute versus chronic.

02:14:22.740 I just want to make a funny comment there. I was at a, at a meeting and a very famous vegan doctor,

02:14:28.900 who I obviously won't name, came up to me and chastised me for the idea that I would ever suggest

02:14:36.540 someone ingest five grams of leucine during a workout because of its negative effect on mTOR

02:14:44.560 and how that could be bad for a person's health. And I just had to sit there and smile. And I just

02:14:52.580 don't have it in me sometimes to tell people to shut up. A lot of this is really reductionist

02:14:56.740 thinking. You know what I mean? And this happens for all different, all different, if I can switch

02:15:02.180 gears just a little bit, because I think this is really important for people to hear.

02:15:04.800 People want to isolate out nutrients as being good or bad. And I would really implore people that

02:15:14.440 nutrients are not necessarily good or bad. Context matters. And what really matters is lifestyle and

02:15:23.260 overall eating patterns. That is what matters. You cannot possibly think that in a diet where there

02:15:33.720 are thousands of different nutrients that we ingest, that it's one thing is causing all the problems that

02:15:42.080 we're having, right? And this, whether it's leucine or sugar or whatever, because when you isolate out

02:15:48.940 these things, you can find mechanistic data to support almost anything you want.

02:15:54.780 But even things that we think we know, like I remember when I got to grad school and I was like,

02:15:59.320 high fructose corn syrup, independently fattening, it doesn't matter the calories, anything like that.

02:16:04.620 And again, do I think high fructose corn syrup is good? Absolutely not. I think it's hyperpalatable.

02:16:09.340 I think people overeat it. But if you look at the studies pretty closely,

02:16:12.520 it seems to mostly be an energy thing, that it just provides too much energy. Now,

02:16:19.660 people hear that and they think it's a dismissal, like I'm condoning it or something like that. And

02:16:25.240 I'm not condoning it. I'm just saying that if you isolate it out and you keep people's calories the

02:16:30.280 same, it doesn't seem to have the same effect. But do people who eat a lot of high fructose corn syrup

02:16:35.160 keep their calories the same? Of course not. They eat more calories than other people. They also usually

02:16:39.720 eat more processed foods, more fats, you know, all that sort of thing. So a great study that I think

02:16:47.600 came out a couple of years ago that I think really highlights this point was a study where they looked

02:16:52.800 at cancer incidents from any form of cancer. It was in Canada, 100,000 people cohort. And they looked at

02:17:00.340 low meat intake versus high meat intake. And I think it was in quartiles. So four different levels.

02:17:07.080 And I mean, we know this. If you do that, what you tend to find is that meat is meat intakes associated

02:17:13.520 with cancer. Now, the problem is people who eat high amounts of meat tend to have an overall unhealthy

02:17:19.160 lifestyle in general. They're less likely to exercise. They're more likely to smoke. They're more likely to

02:17:24.100 eat processed foods because most of the meat is coming from fast food, that sort of thing. But what was cool

02:17:31.260 about this was they also compared it with the lowest to highest quartiles of fruit and vegetable intake.

02:17:37.500 And what they found was that at the highest level of meat intake that also consumed the highest level of fruit

02:17:43.800 and vegetable intake, they had the same risk for cancer as the lowest level of meat intake.

02:17:50.220 So basically what that tends to suggest is that to me, we need to look at eating patterns much more so

02:18:02.820 than we look at individual nutrients. And that if you're looking for one nutrient to explain,

02:18:10.720 you know, disease incidents, this sort of stuff, you really need to look at the whole diet.

02:18:15.740 And people who eat sugar, like when I say that sugar isn't inherently bad for you,

02:18:22.860 I mean from a purely mechanical, if I take 50 grams out of somebody's diet of, you know,

02:18:28.700 starchy carbohydrate and I just put sugar into it or the same equal calories from fats and I just put

02:18:34.700 sugar in there, do I think anything bad's going to happen? Probably not, but that's not how people eat.

02:18:41.620 So I'm talking mechanistically and people think I'm making a recommendation.

02:18:48.000 So all that to say, it's really important to understand how limited nutritional studies are.

02:18:54.560 And you mentioned it, when you're talking about trying to pick out these really granular details,

02:19:00.160 you're talking about a study that's so restrictive, it's really hard to generalize the results to the

02:19:07.120 average person. So when you look at studies that are generalizable to the average population,

02:19:13.200 you can't control that many variables because it has to be free living. And if it has to be free

02:19:18.960 living, I mean, it's very hard to pick out differences because dietary adherence tends to be so low.

02:19:24.820 So I know I went off on a really big divergent rant, but, you know, acute versus chronic,

02:19:31.980 localized versus systemic, you know, people just don't understand the differences.

02:19:36.720 And these are, and this includes scientists. I mean, even like inflammation, God, I,

02:19:41.360 a great example of this is on the Joe Rogan game changers debate where John Wilkes was talking about

02:19:47.060 inflammation. He said, if you're training for exercise, you know, and you're having higher

02:19:53.820 levels of inflammation from that, and then you go and eat meat afterwards, like now you're compounding

02:19:59.220 that inflammation. And I just remember thinking, you just don't understand the difference between

02:20:03.780 acute versus chronic. These aren't even the same types of inflammation.

02:20:06.720 Your acute inflammatory response from exercise means nothing. Well, it actually doesn't mean

02:20:13.320 nothing. It's beneficial actually. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the crazy thing about exercise. If you

02:20:19.160 were an alien and you didn't know anything about exercise, but you knew about human physiology.

02:20:24.120 And I told you, Hey, I'm going to make you do something that increases your blood pressure,

02:20:31.120 increases your heart rate, increases your free radical production, increases your inflammation,

02:20:35.620 all these different things, you would go, that's horrible. Don't do it. But what is exercise?

02:20:42.720 exercise? It's almost like a vaccine. You give a small, you give a controlled dose of a stressor and

02:20:50.420 your body adapts to that stressor by getting better at handling it. So what do we see in people who

02:20:55.580 exercise regularly? They have lower resting heart rate. They have lower blood pressure.

02:20:59.820 They have lower levels of inflammation, you know, those sorts of things. And, you know,

02:21:05.200 nutritionally, I question like these studies that look at inflammatory response and response in terms of

02:21:10.480 post meal injection. I really go, how much does that actually mean? Yeah. I think this stuff means

02:21:15.120 absolutely nothing. I think that, you know, when you think about the time course of something and you

02:21:21.460 tell me that you measured somebody's IGF one or IGF six an hour after a meal and in two hours, I, yeah,

02:21:28.320 I agree with you completely. It's totally nonsense. And by the way, your point about exercise,

02:21:31.820 I think comes back to what you said when you were making that decision between nutrition science

02:21:37.880 and exercise science, which was look, exercise probably is the best drug we have. I agree

02:21:44.400 emphatically with that. I think that when you think about the hormesis that comes from exercise,

02:21:51.240 like I don't believe we will ever be able to develop a drug that is that remarkable. It is

02:21:56.780 simply unbelievable what it can do. Almost any dietary intervention, unless you're okay with just small

02:22:03.720 improvements. To see big improvements, you pretty much got to lose body fat. That's what the crux of

02:22:08.680 it is. With exercise, you get massive improvements with zero loss of weight. You can see big improvements.

02:22:17.560 You know, I just implore people, one of the, and this goes for like kind of the two opposing ends,

02:22:22.120 like plant-based kind of really emphatic supporters and then like low carb supporters. I'll hear a lot of

02:22:28.860 people, they'll spend so much time, you know, on these granular details of diet and they say,

02:22:34.060 well, I don't, I don't resistance exercise. I don't have time for it. And I'm like, you got time to stress

02:22:39.060 over your diet on Twitter, on Twitter for two hours, but you don't have time to go into the gym or just do

02:22:45.300 some pushups at home. Like you are missing out on the most powerful tool you have to improve your health

02:22:51.840 body composition. And even like, um, there was a, a study by Wolf looking at a longevity over age 65

02:23:00.220 and found a direct association. The most powerful predictor of longevity after age 65 was how much

02:23:09.760 lean body mass you had. That was the most powerful predictor of who lived the longest after age 65 was

02:23:15.620 your level of lean body mass. Yeah. And there are lots of studies that go beyond just the sarcopenia

02:23:20.200 and look at like grip strength and things like that. So yeah, I completely agree. And I love the

02:23:24.960 idea by the way of in between Twitter feuds over your nutritional views, you have to do some pushups.

02:23:32.940 That's, that could be the solution here to this problem. I want to talk a little bit about,

02:23:37.420 I'm sorry, we're just, I keep saying we're going to wrap this up and we're not, but I'm sorry,

02:23:41.320 we're going to wrap this up at some point. One thing that I've been really impressed with in

02:23:45.340 following you lane is the deliberate nature with which you approach things. So I've seen pictures

02:23:51.660 of you where I think like he doesn't even look like a human being. He's so ripped and shredded.

02:23:56.800 And I've seen pictures of you where you look kind of chubby and you've been very clear and said,

02:24:01.220 I'm going through different phases. I'm very deliberate about what I do. This is a phase where

02:24:06.480 I am adding a ton of lean mass and with it comes some body fat. And right now I'm taking it off,

02:24:13.360 but one, you're very deliberate. So nothing's haphazard. And two, you really emphasize the

02:24:19.700 importance of consistency. So how do I stay consistent? Because it doesn't take nearly as

02:24:27.060 much work to preserve muscle mass once you have it, but you, and I talked about this with Alex

02:24:33.820 Hutchinson on a previous podcast. One of the things I fear the most for my patients as they age is any

02:24:39.740 sort of injury or illness that takes them out of exercise because the deconditioning that occurs

02:24:45.020 when someone doesn't do anything for a month is devastating. So can you put some numbers to that?

02:24:50.720 Cause I believe you've spoken about this, which is what is the effort required to maintain?

02:24:56.120 And I'm not talking about show like 4% body fat on a stage I'm talking about. And again, we'll use your

02:25:02.360 numbers as an example. You happen to be great to begin with, but you know,

02:25:06.600 for you to stay at 13, 14% body fat is not the end of the world. It's not a huge sacrifice,

02:25:12.840 but it requires being diligent still. What does that mean to you? And how do you advise your clients

02:25:17.880 around that? So there's a few layers to this when it comes to resistance training. I mean,

02:25:23.540 this is really just anything in life. Resistance training taught me so much about just life overall.

02:25:28.760 So the same people who come up with biohacks of how you can like get to your goal in 12 weeks or

02:25:34.500 whatever. In the financial world, they're the same people who are like, Hey, join my pyramid scheme

02:25:39.940 and earn six figures from home doing one hour of work a week. Most reasonable people know that

02:25:46.740 that's not how you acquire wealth, right? You acquire wealth through, if you're Thomas J. Stanley's,

02:25:52.880 I use fiscal examples because I just find it's easier for people, but 80% of millionaires are first

02:25:58.280 generation self-made. And most of them got there not through getting lucky, but the fact that they

02:26:06.300 saved more money than they earned. They were consistent and they did that for a long period of

02:26:10.700 time. Now that is the granular mechanistic way of doing it. Kind of like how we talk about calories

02:26:16.920 in calories out, right? But what it takes to get that consistency is modification to behavior,

02:26:23.780 right? Because for the same reason that somebody binges on whatever donuts, chocolate, cakes,

02:26:31.640 cookies, whatever, is the same reason that somebody who also knows, Hey, in order for me to save money,

02:26:37.160 I need to earn more than I spend still goes out and blows 1500 bucks on a shopping spree after a 0.84

02:26:44.700 stressful week, right? Because they have a habit and an association with something. And so I think

02:26:53.340 people need to understand that consistency is the most important thing, but to create that

02:27:00.360 consistency, you have to change your habits. You have to create habits. I read a review,

02:27:07.360 systematic review by a gal named Marie Shpreckley. And I'm going to give myself a pat in the back here

02:27:12.200 for a second, because she actually said that she went back to school after reading my book,

02:27:15.900 Fat Loss Forever. And it's what inspired her to do her PhD work, which is pretty awesome.

02:27:19.420 And she did a systematic review of looking at people who lost weight and kept it off.

02:27:26.480 So some of the commonalities of that. And a lot of it was what you expected. Consistency,

02:27:33.720 ability to embrace challenges rather than running from them or viewing challenges as part of the

02:27:39.260 process. I think a lot of people, when setbacks occur or challenges occur, they feel that that's

02:27:45.080 abnormal as opposed to embracing it as part of this process. But then something that was in the paper

02:27:51.220 that I hadn't thought about before, that I think is so critical to developing that consistency and making

02:27:57.840 a change, forming a new identity. So the people who lost weight and kept it off said that they had to form

02:28:07.920 a new identity. And I really chewed on this for a while. And do you know Ethan Suplee?

02:28:15.060 No, but I was just about to say, James Clear is the first person who made that point clear to me,

02:28:21.420 no pun intended. And of all the things in James's book, that one actually appealed to me the most,

02:28:29.180 which was, it's not about this. Well, I always knew it wasn't about discipline and willpower

02:28:36.240 because those things are going to fade over time. But this piece around, and let's use exercise as

02:28:42.160 the example, it's going from, oh, I have to do this thing. I have to do this thing too. I'm a person

02:28:48.120 who exercises. I'm a fit person. That's the transition that makes it easier to do day in and

02:28:55.860 day out. And that's probably why I've never struggled with exercise. I struggle with the

02:29:00.480 opposite. I really struggle to take a day off. I think to be completely transparent, I'm always

02:29:04.940 going to struggle with food a little bit. I haven't had the full identity switch in food,

02:29:10.760 but I think I was born with, or at least it was etched in my brain when I was so young due to my

02:29:16.340 insecurities around exercise. So I think you said something very poignant there. You just put in

02:29:22.520 your mind, this is what I do. This is what I do. This is part of who I am. And so Ethan Suplee,

02:29:29.420 he's an actor and he was in, you probably, if you've seen the movie, remember the Titans?

02:29:33.720 Oh, yes, yes, yes. I know. I know who you're talking about now. He lost a staggering amount

02:29:37.340 of weight, like almost an unrecognizable amount of weight.

02:29:40.020 So I talked to him pretty frequently.

02:29:41.360 Yeah. Yeah.

02:29:42.280 And he has a thing he puts on his Instagram. He say, I killed my clone today. And I asked him about

02:29:48.740 that because I read Marie's paper. And then I made this connection because I always wondered

02:29:52.580 what he meant by, I killed my clone today. And I said, is this what you mean? That you formed a

02:29:58.080 new identity? That you killed the old person that you were? And he said, that is exactly what I mean.

02:30:03.500 Because you cannot create a new life and you cannot have a physical and overall change in your life

02:30:08.240 while still dragging those behaviors behind you. Let's take a basic example, an alcoholic.

02:30:13.380 If you decide, if an alcoholic decides tomorrow, I don't want to be this anymore.

02:30:20.300 You have to change everything. You can't just, okay, I'm going to stop drinking. No, no. Your

02:30:25.040 entire identity has been around. I go to a bar. I hang out with my friends after work. They probably

02:30:30.040 drink. My family probably drank growing up. That's where I learned it from. Now you've got to change

02:30:35.780 everything. You are not going to be able to be this new person while still dragging your old

02:30:42.720 behaviors behind you. And I think a lot of people try to do that when it comes to nutrition

02:30:46.500 and maybe even exercise. It's, well, I want things to change, but I don't want to give up my,

02:30:53.320 you know, three glasses of wine a night, or I don't want to give up this, or I don't want to give up

02:30:57.140 that. But I always tell people, it's like, listen, the great thing about nutrition is you get to pick

02:31:02.820 what you sacrifice. Okay. So for me, what made it easy for me, and I always tell people, you should pick

02:31:10.640 the form of restriction that feel feels easiest to you. I don't care what anybody else feels like

02:31:16.480 for me. If I'm able to eat whatever foods I want, as long as I control portion size and track my

02:31:25.200 calories and macros and whatnot, that feels easy. That is not difficult for me to maintain like a lean

02:31:31.680 physique and athletic. But for other people, that may be extremely tedious, difficult. It may feel

02:31:39.940 labor intensive. To me, it doesn't. What feels labor intensive to me is saying, okay, Lane, you can't

02:31:46.020 have processed food ever again, or you can't have carbs, or you can't have fats or whatever. But for

02:31:52.940 other people, some people, I hear it all the time, say, I did X diet, ketogenic diet, and it felt easy.

02:32:02.100 I did intermittent fasting. I was never hungry. It felt easy. Cool. Great. Just don't assume that

02:32:08.700 what was easy for you is going to be easy for everybody else. Because this, you know, I thought

02:32:14.240 flexible dieting was going to be the solution for everybody because it was easy for me. So I arrogantly

02:32:18.480 assumed that it'd be that way for everybody else. I think everybody goes through that. That sort of

02:32:22.680 like, you know, you seek out your own echo chamber sort of thing, right? And you find these people who

02:32:27.960 had the same experience as you, and you just assume everybody's like that. It turns out, no, no, people

02:32:32.440 are quite different. So find the, you get to pick the type of restriction. Find what feels easiest.

02:32:39.540 And try not to get too caught up in, well, this diet increases fat oxidation and insulin and like all

02:32:48.660 these little things we talk about. Because at the end of the day, if you've ever lost weight and then

02:32:52.620 regained it, why did it happen? It didn't happen because you didn't get your macronutrient ratio

02:32:58.300 perfect or your nutrient timing wasn't down. It happened because you stopped being consistent with

02:33:03.480 the behaviors that you implemented. That's what happened. And the same thing goes with exercise.

02:33:08.860 People tell me all the time, like, man, Lane, I wish I was motivated like you. I'm like, ha!

02:33:13.500 I would say that I love lifting weights and that makes it easier to be motivated. I acquired that love

02:33:22.220 through years. But I don't always love it. Just like I'm not always happy with my spouse, right? Like, some

02:33:30.300 days we fight. Doesn't mean I don't love her overall. It just means some days we get annoyed at each other.

02:33:36.500 Some days I'm unhappy with weightlifting. I don't want to do it. However, I always tell people, and I'm not saying you

02:33:43.180 can never take a day off, of course. You know, if you need a day off to reset, whatever, that's fine.

02:33:47.800 You just got to be careful that that doesn't turn into weeks and months and years, right? And here's

02:33:52.720 the comparison I use. I don't have to be motivated to go into training. It's part of what I do. Just like

02:33:58.440 I don't have to be motivated and pump myself up to brush my teeth. Do you know why? Because it's a very

02:34:03.560 simple equation. If I don't brush my teeth, they're going to go to crap. Just like if I don't exercise, 0.99

02:34:09.840 my body's going to go to crap. So it doesn't, it is not for me, it is not a question of motivation.

02:34:15.840 It is a question of what do I want and what are the actions that are required to get what I want?

02:34:22.760 And if my actions do not line up with what is needed and the amount of work that is needed,

02:34:27.720 it's very simple. I'm not going to get what I want. And it's on a fundamental level, it's that simple.

02:34:34.160 But getting people to one, buy in and two, get past the stage where you start and you've got

02:34:42.560 that honeymoon phase and everything feels good. You're like, yeah, I'm going to do this.

02:34:46.320 And then you hit your first challenge or your first setback or your scale fluctuate. Actually,

02:34:52.200 during the systematic review, participants talked about how seeing the scale fluctuate was a difficult

02:34:59.140 thing to get over. And some people would quit because they would gain three pounds when in

02:35:04.400 reality, they probably just had a bad weigh-in day. That's why, this is why I actually tell people

02:35:08.300 weigh in every single day and take the average because the average is not going to fluctuate that

02:35:12.960 much. So anyways, the point of this all is that consistency is the fundamental. You could have any diet.

02:35:22.020 You could have any training system. If you're consistent, you're going to see results.

02:35:26.340 I use this comparison and I'll throw it back to you on this one. If I said to you, Peter,

02:35:32.580 I want you to go out and become the best three-point shooter you possibly can be.

02:35:37.820 You cannot get any instruction. You can't read any books. You can't get a coach, nothing. But if all

02:35:45.620 you did every single day for three hours a day for 10 years was go out and shoot three-pointers,

02:35:51.800 three-pointers. You probably wouldn't be in the NBA, but I bet you'd be pretty damn good at shooting

02:35:56.860 three-pointers. You know what I mean? I would agree with that. Hopefully better than I am now

02:36:02.300 because right now I'm not joking. My 12-year-old daughter is probably the same as me at shooting

02:36:09.660 three-pointers, which means by the time she's 13, she might be better than me.

02:36:13.960 Well, I think that's the other thing for people to keep in mind is

02:36:18.160 use other people's stories for inspiration, but be very careful about comparing yourself

02:36:24.280 because what you need to ask yourself is, can I get better? Try not to ask yourself,

02:36:34.340 can I be like X person? Because the answer might be no, but here's the rub. You'll never know unless

02:36:41.900 you put in the decade worth of work, right? Like when I started out, I had people tell me,

02:36:46.640 why are you lifting weights? You're skinny. You'll never be jacked. And then even when I got into

02:36:52.300 powerlifting, people were like, look at how long your legs are. Look at how you squat. You will never

02:37:00.160 be good at this. If I would have listened to that, I never would have set a gold medal in the squat.

02:37:05.340 I never, I never would have done that. Now that world record got broken and I may never get it

02:37:11.860 back. Very good chance. I'll never get it back, but I got a lot farther than I ever could have imagined

02:37:19.660 just through sheer consistency. I did a lot of stuff wrong, but sheer mass effect of work and

02:37:27.920 consistency can make up for a lot of shortcomings. And I think a lot of people out there have paralysis

02:37:34.740 by analysis and they never just start because they're so intimidated by all the information

02:37:40.680 that's out there. Lane, we actually got through a third of the stuff I wanted to talk about today.

02:37:46.740 And I'm going to make a, I'm going to make an on the field decision that we're going to probably

02:37:51.100 have to sit down again because I want to talk about a lot of things. I want to talk about creatine. I want

02:37:56.680 to talk about katsu or occlusion training. I want to talk about really nuanced stuff around the

02:38:03.140 differences between the size of a muscle, the strength of a muscle and the metabolic function

02:38:08.180 of a muscle. There are a lot of other things I want to go into with you. And I also wanted to go

02:38:12.240 a little deeper into the sort of leucine signaling stuff. Yeah. We didn't really get to even touch

02:38:16.960 that, did we? I know, I know. And to go, to go into that stuff superficially now, it doesn't do it

02:38:20.900 justice. So why don't we just agree to do this again at some point? Sure. All right, man. Well,

02:38:26.800 listen, this has been a ton of fun for me. I hope it's been enjoyable for you and thank you for making

02:38:32.560 the time. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Thank you for listening to this

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The Peter Attia Drive - May 24, 2021

#163 - Layne Norton, Ph.D.： Building muscle, losing fat, and the importance of resistance training

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