The Peter Attia Drive - #235 ‒ Training principles for mass and strength, changing views on nutrition, creatine supplementation, and more ｜ Layne Norton, Ph.D.

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

00:00:15.500 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:19.820 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

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00:00:33.320 in-depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level,

00:00:36.920 at the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now,

00:00:41.760 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.100 today's episode. My guest this week is Lane Norton. Lane was a previous guest on episode 163 back in

00:00:56.800 May of 2021 and then 205 back in May of 2022. In both of those discussions, we were never able

00:01:04.300 to fully get through the content we wanted and we knew we were going to have to sit down and do this

00:01:08.580 again. So here we are onto round three. In this episode, we talk about Lane's training and work

00:01:13.320 as a powerlifter. This is in large part because at the time we recorded this, Lane was in the final

00:01:18.260 weeks of training for the World Masters Powerlifting Championship. We focused the conversation around

00:01:23.960 what non-powerlifters can learn about muscle strength and the principles to get stronger in

00:01:28.520 the weight room, even if they, of course, have no desire to ever compete in a powerlifting meet

00:01:32.380 themselves. We also get into a much deeper dive around creatine, which we only lightly touched on

00:01:37.900 in a previous podcast. We talk about fitness and nutrition experts on social media and the importance

00:01:42.140 of being able to change your mind. We talk a lot about nutrition and this includes the three areas

00:01:47.000 of nutrition that Lane has changed his mind about over time. We also discussed some nuances

00:01:52.080 around time-restricted feeding, tracking calories, and more. Now, just a way of quick background,

00:01:57.460 Lane is a bodybuilding figure and physique coach, and in addition to being a natural pro bodybuilder

00:02:01.900 and professional powerlifter. And though we didn't know it at the time of this recording,

00:02:05.320 we now know it as I make this intro, Lane has very recently won the 2022 Masters World

00:02:11.480 Powerlifting Championship in October in a drug-free tested division. So without further delay,

00:02:17.800 please enjoy my conversation with Lane Norton.

00:02:22.080 Well, Lane, we're back for another round of this, but this time we finally get to do it in person.

00:02:30.640 I'm looking forward to this. This will be, I said it'd be a little bit different.

00:02:33.460 So let's talk about your training because right now you are training for worlds in powerlifting.

00:02:38.340 We had a great chance to kind of catch up on some of your training yesterday. I probably won't get

00:02:42.340 into as much detail as you and I got into last night because that might be more detailed than the

00:02:46.780 average non-nerd is interested in. But maybe just briefly kind of explain the sport of powerlifting.

00:02:52.460 There are three lifts, how it works. And then I want to talk about kind of how you're training for

00:02:56.700 that and some of the challenges of that.

00:02:58.080 Powerlifting is a very basic sport. Like you mentioned, there's three lifts, the squat,

00:03:01.160 the bench press, the deadlift, and they go in that order. You get three attempts on each and

00:03:05.760 they're progressive. So for example, once you put in an attempt, like let's say you put in a squat

00:03:11.580 attempt of 550 pounds for your opener. If you miss it, you can't go down. So usually the way people

00:03:18.380 do it is first attempt is a pretty conservative weight, kind of like a last warmup. Second attempt

00:03:24.300 is getting close to something that's pretty reasonable, like RPE nine, nine and a half. And then

00:03:31.300 your last one, you're hoping to get kind of your true maximum. I mean, basically highest total wins.

00:03:38.300 Between the three different lifts.

00:03:39.960 Correct. So at Worlds, they will give medals for individual lifts. There'll be a gold,

00:03:45.300 silver, and bronze for squat, gold, silver, bronze for bench press, and gold, silver,

00:03:48.620 bronze for deadlift. And then there'll be those medals also for the overall. And the overall is

00:03:53.820 just the summation of the total of the number of lifts you hit.

00:03:57.080 And when you do your three squat, three bench, three dead, are you doing them in that order?

00:04:00.880 Or are you going-

00:04:01.540 So it's, you do all three squats go, then all three bench press, then all three deadlift.

00:04:06.540 Typically how much time in between each attempt?

00:04:08.440 It can really depend. The last time I did Worlds in 2015, that was a very, very fast meet. So in

00:04:15.060 our flight, there was only 11 people. So meaning the person who has the lightest squat will go first

00:04:21.120 up to the heaviest squat. And then those will continue to cycle through. Same thing for bench

00:04:26.460 press, same thing for deadlift. And the whole meet took over just, just over two hours. But I've been

00:04:31.600 in meets that have taken as long as three and a half. So it really just depends on your

00:04:38.220 flight, how quickly the spotters- But if I'm doing the math, that means you might only have

00:04:44.280 15 minutes between lifts?

00:04:45.780 Usually you'll get about at least 30 because the way they run it is there's no real breaks

00:04:52.400 for people who are spectating. So they'll have two flights going at the same time.

00:04:56.120 Ah, I see. Okay.

00:04:56.480 So what'll happen is they'll have an A flight and a B flight typically. Sometimes they'll have

00:05:00.760 C flights as well if it's a really, really packed meet like nationals. But at Worlds,

00:05:05.560 it's usually just an A and a B flight. And they just separate those based on opening squats.

00:05:09.740 And usually that B flight will have the top lifters in it. So you have some time. While

00:05:15.700 the other folks are lifting, you're typically warming up, getting ready. And then once, for

00:05:20.660 example, the squats are finished, A flight will start for bench. And then if you're in

00:05:25.280 B flight, you can have time to warm up.

00:05:27.280 So what are you doing between? So let's just say between lift one and two, lift one shouldn't

00:05:33.120 have been that stressful if you did it correctly. Does what you eat matter much? Are you getting

00:05:38.060 any tissue work? Like what do you need to do? Let's just say you have 30 minutes between those

00:05:42.160 attempts. What do you need to do to maximize your odds?

00:05:45.020 Usually between the lifts themselves, like between squat and bench press, we'll have

00:05:48.800 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how quickly things are going.

00:05:53.600 But what about between the squat attempts, like between the first second and second third?

00:05:56.820 Yeah. So between the actual attempts themselves, I mean, I'll take a drink of water. I might throw

00:06:02.560 some candy in or something like that really quickly if I feel like I need it. But for the most

00:06:06.240 part, I'm just mentally trying to get myself in the right zone. And it is a little bit tricky

00:06:11.080 because you can't keep yourself at that really high level of arousal the entire time because

00:06:16.660 you'll just wear out really quickly. So for me, the trick is bringing that arousal down for about

00:06:22.660 five minutes or so so that I can relax just enough and then start to focus back up. And it's almost

00:06:30.240 like, it's like a wave. You're kind of letting yourself come down. And then when the time is

00:06:35.940 right, and really timing is a big thing in this because once the bar is loaded and they call bar

00:06:40.580 is loaded, you'll have one minute to get the down command for squat or bench press or whatever it

00:06:46.500 is. There can be mistakes where like, maybe you come out and you forgot your belt or something

00:06:52.440 happens. So I really try to make it to where when they say bar is loaded, I get out there very

00:06:57.800 quickly so that if there is anything wrong, I can address it and have time. So really timing it and

00:07:04.580 seeing, okay, how many people were in front of me? How long do I need to amp up? Usually for me,

00:07:09.380 I like to have about two or three minutes to really get very aroused and very amped up.

00:07:14.460 And so just trying to time that correctly is kind of tough. But like I said, for the first five minutes

00:07:18.860 afterwards, I kind of let myself come down, but I never like truly relax. I'm still like got my music on.

00:07:24.880 I'm still thinking about what I've got to do, but I'm not like really hyper focusing. And then as it

00:07:30.640 starts to come into the last five minutes for the lift, I'm putting whatever I need on to focus

00:07:34.840 myself, mental imagery, visualization. And then by the end, I'm even doing like breath work. I want my heart

00:07:41.540 rate to be about 160, 170 by the time I go out to hit my lift. Like I want to be very amped.

00:07:48.020 Yeah, I was going to ask you what your heart rate got to. I would imagine your blood glucose is probably

00:07:52.100 about 160 as well. Probably. I've never imagined. Your liver is just hepatic glucose output at the

00:07:57.620 max. Your stress hormones are going to be high. It's really interesting. I was, it's a little bit

00:08:02.580 off topic, but I was listening to a sports psychologist talk about how the differences

00:08:07.720 between excitement and anxiety and anxiousness are almost, you can't almost pick them out. It's

00:08:13.420 just your perception. And I remembered when I played baseball in high school, I would come up

00:08:18.740 to the plate with the thought process of don't strike out. You don't want to look stupid. Just

00:08:23.840 put the ball in play. It wasn't the process of I'm going to drive these runs in. I'm going to do X, Y,

00:08:28.760 Z. And I was watching an episode of the ultimate fighter, probably 13, 14 years ago is where Matt

00:08:35.520 Sarah versus Matt Hughes. And one of the fighters was vomiting before a match because he was so nervous

00:08:42.720 and he was over the bucket going, I can't do this anymore. I hate the way this feels. I can't do

00:08:48.600 this. And Matt Sarah just looked at him and said, what are you talking about, man? That's the feeling

00:08:53.080 of being alive. You care about something so much that your body is reacting this way. And ever since

00:08:58.700 then, it completely flipped the way I looked at competition. And so now before, when I would get

00:09:05.380 nervous playing baseball, I would try to like calm myself down. Like, why can't I feel normal? Why don't I

00:09:09.920 feel relaxed? And now when I feel those nerves start to kick in, I just tell myself, this is a

00:09:16.080 good thing. This is a good thing. This is your body getting you ready. This is you being ready to go.

00:09:21.300 Really like that reframing of things and just accepting and being okay with the anxiety

00:09:26.540 has helped me so much. You know, something like that in powerlifting where the stakes are really

00:09:31.700 high and it's really short. It's not like, you know, in tennis, you can have one bad match,

00:09:38.160 right? Or one bad serve and it doesn't end the entire thing in powerlifting. It can. And I guess

00:09:43.800 the other thing I guess is the stakes are kind of high from an injury standpoint as well, because you

00:09:47.620 are pushing at your limit. Have you ever injured yourself in a meet? Not to the point where I

00:09:52.860 couldn't continue or had really bad pain during, but at the Arnold in 2015, at the Arnold Pro Meet,

00:09:58.820 I had aggravated my back a week out pretty badly. And then the day of the meet, when I hit my last

00:10:07.020 squat, which was 661 pounds, I kind of rotated a little bit coming up. And the next day I could

00:10:14.280 definitely feel it was actually closer to my upper lumbar or lower thoracic. I definitely had quite a bit

00:10:21.080 of pain there. So you typically don't see people get injured at meets. It does happen, but I would

00:10:28.320 say that it's less frequent than during training. I don't have any data on that. I'm just guessing.

00:10:32.720 But I think part of it is you are so focused in, you are so excited. You're very tight. You're very

00:10:39.800 conscious of what you're doing. At the end of the day, it is just one rep where I've tended to get-

00:10:44.360 Yeah, where's the volume when you're training and you're also probably more broken down and more

00:10:48.700 fatigued? When you get ready for a meet, if you've done your due diligence, hopefully you've

00:10:53.820 kind of dissipated a lot of that fatigue through rest and tapering. Whereas when you're in the

00:10:59.040 throes of training and you just have high levels of fatigue, maybe you're just not able to execute

00:11:04.760 the lifts as well because of that fatigue. That's where things tend to happen, especially like if

00:11:09.740 you're doing multiple repetitions, as you get closer to failure, just the opportunity to get out of

00:11:16.340 position or make mistakes, those sorts of things. So it is definitely one of the things that is part

00:11:22.620 of the game. You're just going to deal with pain. But I always tell people too, I'm 40 now and most

00:11:29.360 40-year-olds, 50-year-olds, they have pain anyway. So I'd rather be strong and have pain than be weak

00:11:34.460 and have pain.

00:11:35.420 How many times a year can you peak for a meet? Maybe not necessarily even you, but at the top level

00:11:39.900 of powerlifting, how many really good meets in a year does a lifter have?

00:11:44.500 This is just completely my opinion. It's based on my own experience. But for me, I've done it where

00:11:51.140 I've only, I've done one. I've done it where I've done four high-level meets. Four was way too much.

00:11:57.060 I think probably two is the sweet spot for me. You know, it gives you time to really, I don't think

00:12:03.180 I've ever gone into a meet and just been like, oh, I feel a hundred percent healthy and nothing hurts

00:12:06.960 or anything like that. It's kind of, it's not the same thing as getting ready for like a fight,

00:12:10.900 but in order to be able to execute a heavy lift, you have to lift heavy. And so part of that is

00:12:17.600 you're going to accumulate some dinks and some dunks. Really, it's about getting to competition day

00:12:23.480 with enough fitness level in terms of being able to execute heavy lifts while dissipating fatigue

00:12:29.480 and being in low enough levels of pain that you can execute. And so afterwards, really,

00:12:36.200 it's always been the most dangerous when I feel good after a meet, because then I just tend to

00:12:40.880 like go in like on Monday and say, well, let's get right back into training. And really the smart

00:12:45.980 thing to do is just to take some time, train for fun, keep that core strength, but move more towards

00:12:53.440 accessory movements and things that don't beat me up so much for several months. Then re-enter like

00:12:58.940 more of a building accumulation phase where volume is going up, but the weights still aren't super heavy.

00:13:04.120 And then those last three, four months, four weeks, now it's time to start putting in

00:13:08.820 more heavy weights and starting to ramp up towards by the end of my training,

00:13:13.800 I'm mostly on my competition lifts, just hitting heavy singles.

00:13:17.220 So that's what I want to kind of talk about is what can the rest of us who aren't power lifters

00:13:21.900 learn just about strength? Because if I wanted to frame this for a listener, because people have

00:13:27.160 heard me talk about this, but the two metrics that are most significantly associated with longevity,

00:13:33.360 so if we were to stack up every possible known risk factor, smoking, type two diabetes,

00:13:39.500 high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, end state kidney disease, whatever. And we were to talk

00:13:43.520 about how much of a hazard ratio do these bring to you in terms of all cause mortality? They're quite

00:13:49.680 big. Hypertension is about a 20%. Type two diabetes is about a 30% increase in mortality. Smoking is 50%

00:13:57.560 increase. Being weak relative to being strong is about 250%. Having a very low VO2 max in the bottom

00:14:09.260 25% of the population versus being in the top 2.5% of the population is about 400%. So when you line

00:14:18.020 everything up, the two things that stand out the most are incredible cardiorespiratory fitness as

00:14:24.320 measured by VO2 max and strength. And then a third is muscle mass. But I think when you look at the

00:14:30.840 data, you realize muscle mass is so coupled to strength that that association is tight.

00:14:35.800 Point being is if you're listening to this podcast and thus far into this podcast, your eyes are sort

00:14:40.380 of glazing over as we're sitting here talking about power lifting, it's probably worth pointing out that

00:14:45.080 even if you never once care to do a heavy squat or a heavy bench press or a heavy deadlift,

00:14:50.940 you have to be strong. And in these studies where these associations continue to show up over and

00:14:57.600 over and over again, you know, they're using things like grip strength, bench press, leg extension,

00:15:02.360 things that are a little less technical. But the point remains, anybody who's going to a power meet

00:15:07.500 and crushing a deadlift has pretty strong grip strength. So I think it becomes important for

00:15:12.480 people to understand how to train for power. So let's now talk a little bit about that. So if a person

00:15:17.760 comes to you and says, I want to get stronger, and that's my primary objective in the weight room,

00:15:23.900 it's more so than the aesthetic, because we're going to talk about that later, what are some of

00:15:28.080 the principles they need to keep in mind? What's interesting is the principles are pretty much the

00:15:32.920 same. It's just the level to which they're applied. And I think it's important to point out

00:15:37.580 that there are diminishing returns with strength and turn. Well, I'm sure there are. I don't think the

00:15:43.360 studies are refined enough to pick this out at this point, because it's not like they're getting

00:15:47.240 a population of power lifters and looking at their longevity. But my guess is that at a certain

00:15:53.120 point, you pretty much get all the benefits and just getting even stronger is probably not going

00:15:57.040 to give you more. Especially if it comes at the risk of injury that can later on in life.

00:16:01.560 Sure. And then you also see with like running, there's kind of like a J-shaped curve. Part of me

00:16:06.740 thinks that just the people that take it so far, whether it be power lifting, running, whatever,

00:16:11.180 that it's not that their sport makes them more prone to early mortality, but more so that they

00:16:17.600 probably have other behaviors of being an extremist that probably contribute to that.

00:16:21.440 Yeah. Interesting.

00:16:22.520 But as far as strength goes, I mean, really what we're talking about is progressive overload.

00:16:27.420 That is the most important core principle. It actually really applies to a lot of things in

00:16:32.440 life to be quite honest. But when it comes to lifting weights, a lot of people hear progressive

00:16:36.180 overload and they just think weight on the bar. And that is the most simple way to explain

00:16:41.160 it, right? So if you come in, you've never done some sort of squat movement before and you do 95

00:16:47.240 pounds for five reps. And then the next week you come in, you do a hundred. And the next week you

00:16:52.160 come in and do you do a hundred and five.

00:16:53.720 At the same number of reps.

00:16:54.920 At the same number of reps, right? That is a form of progressive overload. And most people,

00:16:59.100 when they enter the gym, that's kind of their experience. They don't need to increase that number.

00:17:03.600 They can increase the reps, but for the most part, when you first start going to the gym,

00:17:07.760 you're just going to be able to put more weight on the bar pretty much every week.

00:17:11.140 And that is a perfectly reasonable way to progress. And, you know, I know we haven't gotten here yet,

00:17:17.240 but people will say, well, you know, I'm post-menopausal woman or I'm a 75 year old male.

00:17:23.920 It's too late for me. No, it's not. Now is the best time. In fact, when I was at University of Illinois,

00:17:30.920 where I was in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, right across the street in the exercise

00:17:36.000 physiology department, they were conducting a study on frail elderly, people who basically

00:17:41.640 almost couldn't really walk. They could, but it was very tough for them. And they just started

00:17:47.560 progressively overloading them. And that looked like basically squatting to a really high chair

00:17:52.280 to start. And what they saw was incredible. In like 12 weeks, they actually had people who could

00:17:57.780 squat down to like a below parallel chair and come back up, which may not sound like much for the

00:18:05.260 average person. But when you're talking about somebody who's frail elderly, the difference

00:18:10.300 in functionality and their lifestyle is going to be incredible in terms of what they can do.

00:18:16.140 So what I'll tell people is what you can learn from powerlifters is that progressive overload one

00:18:22.760 in terms of weight on the bar, but nobody's able to increase weight on the bar forever. That's just

00:18:27.200 not going to happen. And the longer you get into it, the more nonlinear it's going to be. It's going

00:18:31.360 to be, you're going to go down and come up and go down and come back up. But there's also other

00:18:35.280 ways to progressively overload one being more repetitions and the other being adding more hard

00:18:40.120 sets. So the latter adding more hard sets is really something you only need to get to as you get to

00:18:46.880 be more advanced, because like I said, you're not going to be able to add strength forever and

00:18:50.840 you're not gonna be able to add reps forever either. By the way, this is one thing that from one of

00:18:54.540 our earlier discussions that really started to change my training, I started adding a little

00:19:00.200 bit more set at slightly lower RPE to net increase volume. So I was doing a lot more RPE eight, nine

00:19:09.560 stuff, but you can only get a few sets at that level. Like you're really, really spent. And instead

00:19:15.880 I was saying, well, wait a minute, why don't we do a little more RPE six and seven and add more sets,

00:19:20.940 more volume? One, I feel like it's lowering my risk of injury. And two, as you said, it's really

00:19:26.120 just another way to progressively overload. You're always weighing those two things,

00:19:30.140 kind of your stimulus versus fatigue ratio. So I'm coached by a guy named Zach Robinson,

00:19:34.220 who's doing his PhD in Mike Zordos' lab at FAU, great lab. And he talks about stimulus versus fatigue

00:19:40.580 a lot. And they do a lot of training in that kind of RPE five to six area, which some people call that

00:19:47.600 easy. When it comes to compound lift, I wouldn't really call it easy, but you know, it's kind of

00:19:53.140 like, how can we maximize our stimulus and minimize fatigue? And if you're talking about an RPE nine,

00:20:00.820 for example, how many sets at RPE nine can you get? I don't know about you. I have like one to two.

00:20:07.420 Right. Before you really have to drop the weight down or whatnot. Someone like me, who's not at the

00:20:12.940 level that a power lift is at, like my form starts to compromise. Right. Mike Israel, actually,

00:20:17.400 had a great kind of take on this too, in terms of like training to failure. He's like, if you take

00:20:22.120 a squat, like a free barbell squat to failure for 10 reps, and then you try to do another set with

00:20:27.540 that same weight, how many reps will you get? I know from doing sets to failure of 10 reps,

00:20:33.520 a free barbell squat, I might not even be able to get like two or three reps on my next set because

00:20:39.000 it's just so fatiguing. That is one thing that's important to point out when we talk about RPEs,

00:20:45.200 which is kind of a measure for proximity to failure.

00:20:47.880 We talked about it on a previous podcast. Why don't you tell people how RPE works? Because

00:20:51.020 I think it's really a fantastic system, but you do need to push yourself in the gym to really

00:20:57.660 understand what they feel like.

00:20:59.400 So RPE is kind of, it's been adapted from running to lifting and it's on a scale of one to 10 or I

00:21:08.780 guess even zero, but RPE 10 being you had no more reps left. That was your absolute all out 100%

00:21:16.500 effort. RPE nine is you could have done one more rep, RPE eight, one more rep, so on and so forth.

00:21:22.900 And one of the issues that we know you don't have to train to failure to grow muscle. In fact,

00:21:29.100 it may actually be a little bit counterproductive just in terms of the fatigue that it causes relative

00:21:35.020 to the stimulus. We know that for most movements, you get most of the hypertrophy and strength benefits

00:21:41.960 going within a few reps of failure. So RPE like seven, eight. And obviously if you can do more volume,

00:21:48.120 it may be even more beneficial, but the downside is if you've never actually taken something to

00:21:53.220 failure, like true failure, people are really bad at estimating it. And so beginners and

00:21:59.120 intermediates, they find that they tend to underestimate their RPE by about five, which

00:22:03.800 is pretty incredible. We've seen it in a lab. We'll take somebody in and they'll put a weight on,

00:22:09.720 they'll do a rep and-

00:22:11.720 And you'll ask them,

00:22:12.360 what was that like? And they'll say their RPE and then the research will actually make them take

00:22:17.280 it to failure while they're like yelling at them and encouraging them. And on average,

00:22:21.020 they'll get five more reps than they estimated they would have.

00:22:23.760 I can totally believe that.

00:22:25.060 Whereas when they look at RPE, validity, and advanced lifters, it tends to be much more accurate,

00:22:31.780 much more accurate. I was in a powerlifting meet where they had a Tendo unit on the bar and they

00:22:37.620 were measuring our bar velocity and they were asking us to rate our RPE after every attempt.

00:22:42.760 And they found that RPE, as validated by velocity data, was a pretty good measure in that population

00:22:50.360 of powerlifters because they've taken so many sets near failure. So your point is well taken. You do

00:22:58.540 need some experience going really hard and really close to failure. But once you have that experience

00:23:04.440 and you understand what that feels like, then you can estimate better. You're probably better off

00:23:09.160 staying a few reps shy of failure and accumulating volume that way just because going to failure is

00:23:15.500 just so incredibly fatiguing. So for a person who, again, is not planning to go to a power meet,

00:23:21.360 is there a need for them to go below four reps in training? That's an arbitrary number,

00:23:28.680 but you know what I'm getting at.

00:23:29.680 I would say probably not. I mean, you can get plenty strong even doing sets of 10,

00:23:34.620 those sorts of things.

00:23:35.540 I would have thought you needed to get at least into the fives and sixes sometimes.

00:23:39.160 So you can get really strong doing sets of 10, 15, those sorts of things. Now,

00:23:44.380 you will not be as strong even per cross-sectional area as somebody who trains for strength because

00:23:50.480 strength is a specific skill. And even like myself, my best squat ever is a 668. And when I was

00:24:00.220 six months out from that, I added weight to the bar that I was able to squat. But it's not like I

00:24:05.180 added that much more lean body mass because I didn't. I was practicing the skill of a one rep

00:24:11.620 max, which allowed me to better do the one rep max.

00:24:15.680 And you were practicing at what percent of ultimately became 661?

00:24:19.820 Usually around 90, 95, but not very much at 95, mostly at 90 for like singles.

00:24:26.280 And what was your RPE when you did those singles?

00:24:29.400 They're usually about eight and a half or nine.

00:24:31.520 And so you would do multiple, just doing the math, let's just say that's 620 or something

00:24:35.840 like that. So let's call it 600 pounds. So you would do a 600 pound signal three times in a

00:24:40.940 workout.

00:24:41.740 Something like that. And what you're kind of making gains on at that point is just your,

00:24:47.940 one, it just teaches you how to grind through a lift because a lot of people have never had the

00:24:51.500 experience of really sticking with a lift. And interestingly, the more advanced somebody

00:24:55.740 gets in terms of strength, the slower their one rep max velocity will be. When we see this in

00:25:01.220 research studies all the time, somebody who's kind of new will come in, they will absolutely

00:25:05.440 smoke a weight. You put five pounds on and then they get stapled because it's just-

00:25:10.300 They don't have that grind capacity.

00:25:11.400 They don't know how to do it. And part of that may be psychological, but part of that's probably

00:25:14.720 physiological too, in terms of you just haven't trained your body to recruit all the fibers that

00:25:20.980 it can get. So lean body mass and strength are very closely tied together. But when it gets to

00:25:27.020 those finer levels of strength, it's kind of just practicing the actual one rep max. So when it comes

00:25:35.260 to getting strong, you can absolutely get strong doing sets 10, 15, because you're increasing your

00:25:40.700 lean body mass. Do you need to do sets of three, four? No. But what I would say is like, don't

00:25:46.140 necessarily count them out because a lot of people actually just do really well with variety.

00:25:51.860 Periodization was kind of a big thing for lifting back in the day. And now we've kind of shown that

00:25:57.540 at least in the research studies, it doesn't appear to produce greater gains in lean body mass,

00:26:03.860 maybe a little bit better strength gains, but that's probably just because people peak better

00:26:07.500 when you're periodizing things. But what tends to actually be shown is that people just tend to

00:26:13.740 like periodization better because they're varying their repetitions. They're not as bored.

00:26:18.380 So you never want to kind of poo-poo the psychological effects of those things. I talk

00:26:23.920 about this with diet as well. Adherence is the most important thing, just getting people to come in and

00:26:27.860 do it. So especially for people who are coming into the gym, if they're just trying to get stronger

00:26:33.180 and be healthy, well, for me, if I'm talking to them or coaching them or whatever it is,

00:26:38.820 it's like, well, what do you enjoy? What's going to get you to show up consistently?

00:26:42.600 You don't want a free squat? That's fine. Let's leg press. There's many ways to skin a cat. 0.99

00:26:47.700 You don't want a barbell deadlift? Okay, no problem. Let's do some RDLs, those sorts of things.

00:26:52.980 Slightly less technical lifts that are still going to produce really great gains in terms of strength,

00:26:59.060 lean body mass, those sorts of things. So if you're not going to specifically compete in a strength

00:27:03.640 sport, there's so many paths to roam in terms of getting stronger and increasing lean body mass.

00:27:09.720 Do you think there are some principles, for example, like let's say a person isn't confident

00:27:15.300 that they have the technical ability to execute a squat or a deadlift. Let's look at a hip thruster.

00:27:20.500 Again, you can screw that up too and you could hurt yourself, but it's a lot harder to hurt yourself

00:27:24.920 doing that. Do you think there is still an essential need for some sort of compound movement

00:27:29.900 like a hip thruster, at least as a compliment or a leg press, as you point out?

00:27:33.800 But it's pretty funny. I went through a phase where everything I learned from the magazines,

00:27:39.000 the bro science, I was like, well, this all has to be junk. And now we're actually having studies

00:27:42.980 come out that are validating some of this bro science from like 20, 30 years ago.

00:27:46.540 So there does appear to be like different areas of the leg muscles, the quadriceps, for example,

00:27:51.700 that are better activated by say a leg extension compared to a leg press, compared to a squat.

00:27:56.480 So I do think it is good to have variety. I think it is good to have compound lifts as well.

00:28:02.800 And in fact, there's some interesting data that suggests that you don't have to get as close to

00:28:07.260 failure on compound lifts to still get the same stimulation compared to isolation exercises,

00:28:12.460 where you do seem to have to get much closer to failure to get those benefits. But also just

00:28:18.200 thinking about, again, if we're looking at the longevity or the quality of life piece,

00:28:22.540 what is most analogous to what these people are going to be doing and where they're going to be

00:28:27.840 needing it? Well, if it's bending over and picking something up, that's some kind of hinge.

00:28:33.740 If it's sitting down and standing back up, some kind of squat. Now you can use variations, right? And

00:28:40.780 I would never, I don't want to say never because it's a superlative, but I very rarely would take

00:28:46.840 somebody who's like fresh off the street, put a barbell on their back and say, okay, learn how to squat

00:28:51.060 because it's going to be like Bambi trying to stand up. Ideally, you're probably going to maybe 0.69

00:28:56.120 even start them off with no weight and just teach them how to hinge, how to use their hips, how to

00:29:01.900 use their knees, how to track their legs with their feet and those sorts of things and just balance.

00:29:07.500 Because if you've never put a barbell on your back, it's not a comfortable position. And honestly,

00:29:12.460 to do it well, you shouldn't feel comfortable. You should feel very tight most places. Once they're

00:29:17.820 established with that, then moving to where they're like holding a kettlebell in front of them.

00:29:22.260 And then you can progress with weight with that. And then maybe you progress to something like a

00:29:26.940 safety bar where they're not having to worry so much about hands and whatnot to a box. And then

00:29:32.600 eventually you take the box away. And then maybe then you can progress to a barbell squat.

00:29:36.820 But I would say that the Puritan in me would be like, yes, everybody should barbell squat. But I know

00:29:42.080 that that's not true. I think the biggest thing is just getting something close and analogous to the

00:29:48.040 things that are going to be important in your day-to-day life as you get older, especially if

00:29:52.140 quality of life is important to you. And I mean, when we talk about people who fall as elderly,

00:29:58.500 I think I read something insane, like half the people over age 65 who go in the hospital for a fall

00:30:04.420 never come out. I think it's something of that nature.

00:30:07.200 Sure. I've seen many studies on this. The one that sticks out in my mind was 30 to 40% of

00:30:12.460 people over the age of 65 who break their hip will be dead within a year of that insult.

00:30:17.780 Yeah. Because you got infection and then you have, they're going to have to be immobilized.

00:30:21.680 Right. And then they get pneumonia or atelectasis pneumonia or something like that. So yeah,

00:30:25.620 it's awful. There's a study, and I think I even mentioned this on a previous podcast,

00:30:29.240 but we should link to it. It was an Australian study that took a group of older women. I don't remember

00:30:34.440 exactly how old they were, but they certainly looked like they were in their sixties or above

00:30:37.460 who all had osteo, at least osteopenia, if not osteoporosis. And it put them on a relatively

00:30:43.400 unsophisticated lifting program, unsophisticated in that there wasn't a lot of instruction other

00:30:47.980 than just pickup weights. It was mostly just pickup weights. As I saw the video on YouTube of the PI

00:30:54.740 discussing this. Isn't it fantastic?

00:30:56.900 Yeah.

00:30:57.080 Because they're in this totally old school gym and you've got these old ladies picking up weights, 1.00

00:31:02.760 walking around, some of them getting really, I remember one lady was picking up her body weight. 0.99

00:31:07.940 I mean, she was basically deadlifting her body weight. These are women who had never lifted a 1.00

00:31:11.840 weight before and their symptoms just got so much better.

00:31:15.920 Absolutely. The best thing you can do for bone density is lift weights. So this isn't like a

00:31:21.360 mutually exclusive thing. In fact, people get really focused on the bone density portion of this when

00:31:26.240 we talk about falls and whatnot. So they get very focused on how do we keep them from breaking

00:31:29.880 their hip? Well, what if they didn't fall in the first place? What if they had the strength to

00:31:34.020 catch themselves, the balance to catch themselves? And then again, even if they did fall, if you have

00:31:40.260 more muscle mass, you're probably going to have more bone density as well. These are all things that

00:31:45.300 are going to help. And resistance training is great because you can have these other sort of

00:31:51.180 interventions that can improve lean body mass and whatnot, but they all work way better with

00:31:55.980 resistance training because you're creating the need for the tissue. And that's something I think

00:32:01.200 that has been missed a little bit is the teleological perspective of this, which is you have to give

00:32:08.340 your body a reason to lay down tissue. Muscle tissue is pretty energetically expensive, relatively

00:32:15.100 speaking. So again, I'm kind of speaking philosophically, but the body is not just going to go,

00:32:21.220 oh yeah, we got some extra calories. Let's just lay down some lean tissue. It doesn't make sense

00:32:25.580 because from the body's perspective, the number one thing it's trying to do is keep you alive long

00:32:30.080 enough to reproduce. And then once you've done that, it's just trying to prevent you from starving.

00:32:34.200 The risk of dying from starvation over the course of human history is way, is magnitudes greater

00:32:40.080 than like diseases from too much nutrition. I mean, that's basically a 20th, 21st century problem.

00:32:45.280 So the idea that, oh, well, if I eat some higher protein, I can lay down some more lean body mass.

00:32:51.580 Yeah, you can, but it's going to be really, really minimal compared to what you can build

00:32:56.280 through resistance training. And then when you couple resistance training with high enough protein

00:33:00.300 or any of these other modalities, now you're creating the turnover in the tissue that the body

00:33:06.880 has the requirement to lay down that tissue.

00:33:10.240 What do we know about the peak capacity for strength as a person ages? Does this

00:33:16.360 differ between men and women? And I'm sure there's variability for people, but

00:33:19.820 on a per pound basis, are you stronger today than you were at 20?

00:33:24.760 Yeah, I am stronger today than I was at 20.

00:33:26.920 Are you stronger than you were at 35?

00:33:29.100 No, that's come off my peak a little bit. I don't think that's like a sarcopenia thing. I just think

00:33:33.620 that that's accumulation of injuries and not being able to train the way I used to be able to train.

00:33:38.520 So I used to be able to train much harder than I can train now. My governor is not the work ethic.

00:33:44.400 It's the, okay, how hard can I train before the pain level gets too high?

00:33:47.700 So it's not that you're losing type two fibers, that you're losing some of the 2A or 2B fibers,

00:33:55.060 and that's why you're not quite as strong. Do you believe that on a muscle biopsy basis,

00:33:59.720 you could be as strong now as you were at 30?

00:34:02.280 I think I probably could. If you look at the research literature,

00:34:05.880 you do see differences between young and old, but most of those get ameliorated when you start

00:34:12.100 adding in resistance training. More to your point, you know, the idea, how much strength

00:34:16.280 could I gain? How much lean mass could I gain? Based on what I've seen, so let's take men and

00:34:20.360 women, for example. Women have been shown to gain just as much lean mass as a percentage of their 1.00

00:34:26.480 starting lean mass. Now, keep in mind, it is the relative increase. So for example, if people add

00:34:33.340 10% lean mass, something like that. Well, if you're a male and you have 70 kilos of lean mass,

00:34:39.560 now you're 77. If you're a female, you had 50 kilos of lean mass, now you're 55. So the male 0.89

00:34:44.880 added seven kilos, the female added five kilos, but relative to their start, they added the same. 0.98

00:34:50.080 And that's what the research literature says, is they pretty much can add the same amount as a

00:34:54.860 percentage of their starting lean mass and the same thing for strength. And actually, there's some

00:34:58.780 evidence that women may be able to tolerate higher training volumes than men too. Now, I'm not sure

00:35:05.320 if that's- Is that across all ages, you think? Or is that within a certain age?

00:35:09.260 They've only really looked at it in kind of young adults, 20s and 30s. So it's hard to say. But I

00:35:14.400 wonder if that's just more of a function of they're just smaller bodies handling less weight.

00:35:18.620 My wife would tell you that no one can handle a cold less than me. Because, and I think it's true,

00:35:24.900 I have an insanely high pain tolerance, except for when my sinuses are congested and I have a

00:35:31.260 miserable cough, then I turn into a little baby. So there might be something about women just being 1.00

00:35:35.420 tougher too. I've thought about this quite a bit. Like, let's look at super heavyweight powerlifters,

00:35:39.500 just as an extreme example. And these are guys that weigh over what?

00:35:42.560 Like Ray Williams, for example. So he's one of the greatest drug tested powerlifters in history.

00:35:47.460 First man to raw squat over a thousand pounds. He was a college football player. They dexed him. He had

00:35:52.180 308 pounds of lean mass. And he's probably over 400 pounds of total body weight.

00:35:57.260 How much lean mass?

00:35:58.540 Over 300 pounds. Incredible. Now, like let's say we're talking about working with 80% of a one-rep 0.99

00:36:04.600 max. His 80% is 800 pounds. A female's 80% if she's doing a one-rep max of 300 pounds is 240 pounds. 1.00

00:36:14.340 They're the same percentage. I'm not sure that you can say they're the same thing in terms of what

00:36:18.400 happens with the body. I know very- Because at the end of the day, connective tissue is

00:36:21.820 connective tissue. I know very, very few super heavyweight powerlifters who train the main lifts

00:36:29.900 like three, four times a week. Some of the lighter weight classes do. So I do think there's something

00:36:35.200 about the absolute load. Part of me thinks the idea that women can recover a little bit better 1.00

00:36:40.020 might be that they're just using absolute lower loads. But we'd have to have some more intricate

00:36:45.720 research studies. Now, there's an interesting point about that study because I know the one

00:36:48.160 that you were talking about. And I've heard people use that study to suggest that testosterone is not

00:36:53.400 important in muscle gain. The idea being if women can add 10% to their base and men are adding 10% to 0.98

00:37:01.040 their base, clearly men and women have a log full difference in testosterone. Therefore, testosterone 0.58

00:37:06.280 doesn't matter. But of course, you only need to look at tested versus untested powerlifters and

00:37:12.940 bodybuilders to know testosterone is doing something. So how do you reconcile these?

00:37:17.780 I think part of it is, so if we look at like, let's take the men and women example.

00:37:22.260 One of the main benefits of testosterone is the increase in satellite cell number that you get,

00:37:27.080 which is going to increase your potential for increasing muscle mass. So I don't want to talk

00:37:33.220 about this like it's hard and stone proven, but there's a theory out there I tend to agree with

00:37:37.340 called the myonuclear domain theory. So for those people who aren't familiar with satellite cells,

00:37:41.640 satellite cells are quescent cells that sit on kind of the outside of a muscle fiber. And through

00:37:48.460 various ways, resistance training, testosterone, whatever, you can get those satellite cells to be

00:37:54.820 donated to the muscle fiber. And muscle fiber is the only cells that are multinucleated. And we think

00:38:02.420 the reason is each myonuclei can only control protein synthesis for a certain area. The muscle fiber can

00:38:09.820 only grow as big as it has myonuclei. So the more myonuclei you can donate, the greater your

00:38:15.740 potential is. So one of the things that we think is a reason that men have more lean mass than women

00:38:22.440 is during puberty, because up till puberty, males and females tend to have similar amounts of lean mass. 0.87

00:38:28.640 But during puberty, that's when we start to see these hormonal differences emerge. And that exposure to

00:38:33.020 testosterone increases that myonuclei number and just gives them a greater overall potential for

00:38:40.060 lean mass, which again, makes sense if you think about it as a relative percentage. So now when you

00:38:45.020 talk about taking exogenous levels of testosterone, now you're donating even more myonuclei. And so you

00:38:50.880 can reach a higher ceiling. So I think, honestly, I mean, this might give me a little bit of trouble,

00:38:56.400 but I think that's actually the strongest argument against the crossover of transgender sports of

00:39:02.180 people who previously were male now identify as female is you can't really get rid of the long-term 0.94

00:39:11.500 benefit that's conveyed by the fusion of those myonuclei. So for example, and we see this with

00:39:18.700 like muscle memory, for example. So we know that if you've trained before, but you stopped training,

00:39:24.180 you can gain back muscle much faster than it takes to build it. And they've even shown this in people

00:39:30.060 who have stopped training for years, but they gain it back faster than it originally took to build it.

00:39:35.140 The other interesting thing is they did a study where they looked at giving testosterone to,

00:39:40.040 it was either rats or mice. I can't remember which one. They were able to resistance train them.

00:39:43.720 It's funny to see these rat resistance training setups. I'm sure you've seen them. So one group,

00:39:48.440 they did not give testosterone. The other group, they gave testosterone. Now, of course,

00:39:52.280 both gain strength, both gain lean body mass, but the group getting testosterone obviously

00:39:56.480 gained more. Then they had a complete washout period. And basically for as long as it took

00:40:01.920 for them both to get back to kind of their original lean mass number, then they both had them train

00:40:08.640 again, no drugs in either group. And the group that originally had testosterone just that once

00:40:14.720 gained muscle significantly faster than the other group. And our best understanding is it's probably

00:40:22.040 these myonuclei that got fused through that extra testosterone that confers that long-term

00:40:28.420 benefit. So that's kind of how we think about max potential.

00:40:32.500 Do we think that that's kind of like only during a critical window of development? Or does that

00:40:37.380 happen if you're 40 years old and you're taking exogenous testosterone?

00:40:40.700 See, that's where it gets more tricky. We don't really know. I think part of it may be,

00:40:44.720 there's no data on this, so I'm speculating a hundred percent. But if you have a certain level of

00:40:48.940 testosterone through puberty and now you're an adult and you kind of maintain that, that's just

00:40:53.680 kind of your native natural, let's say you don't get too obese or too underweight, whatever,

00:40:57.960 you've probably fused the amount of myonuclei that you're going to fuse, at least from testosterone.

00:41:02.600 But now if you start taking it exogenously, you've now ramped that up another notch.

00:41:06.920 Now you can fuse more myonuclei, which again, anecdotally would make sense because if we look at

00:41:12.940 the drug use and bodybuilding, it's continued to go up, up, up, up, up. And now we're getting to

00:41:19.060 the point where these guys really aren't getting much bigger because there's just only so many

00:41:24.120 drugs they can take before. And we're seeing it now. Many of them are, I think last year,

00:41:28.220 there was something like a half dozen professional bodybuilders who died. So it's getting to the point

00:41:33.220 where they really can't go any higher in drugs and you're seeing that lean mass start to cap out.

00:41:38.080 And this is why, because you compete in tested or drug-free powerlifting,

00:41:43.280 as good as it is, they make you guys take a polygraph that says, have you used drugs in five

00:41:47.960 years? And that's an interesting window of time, right? Because you'd think like, why would they

00:41:52.240 care if you used performance enhancing drugs five years ago? But in theory, they do care because

00:41:58.300 you may still confer a benefit five years later, even if you've actually been drug-free.

00:42:03.160 That's what we did in natural bodybuilding, when I competed in natural bodybuilding. 0.86

00:42:05.640 In powerlifting, they don't do the polygraph.

00:42:07.700 Oh, they don't.

00:42:08.240 So you just, you cannot test positive. So we are completely underwater. So basically the way

00:42:14.080 the water drug testing works is once you enter the water drug testing pool, so you've qualified

00:42:19.720 for some kind of international competition, you could be drug tested at any time. So you have to

00:42:24.740 provide, you have to use a whereabouts form, you have to provide your whereabouts, all that kind of

00:42:28.540 thing. And if it's during your window and they say, hey, you need to be drug tested and you don't do

00:42:34.220 it, you can get a strike against you and be out of competition for a certain period of time.

00:42:38.940 There's pluses and minuses to both methods. Polygraph obviously is not something that's

00:42:44.180 crazy accurate. I don't think they allow it in a court of law, but just the idea that you are

00:42:50.040 going to be asked that, and it could be something that you fail, probably keeps quite a few people

00:42:54.020 from doing it. And the other thing I tell people is there's just not really any money in this stuff.

00:42:58.080 Are there cheaters? Absolutely. Is it rampant? I would kind of be surprised because there's just

00:43:03.460 not that much money. Now, when you talk about sports where you can make millions of dollars,

00:43:07.160 I would not be surprised if there's rampant cheating because you're talking about millions

00:43:11.120 of dollars. I think the most money that's ever been on the line for me competing was like $2,000 or

00:43:16.180 $3,000. I love to do it. Not being done for the money. No, no, for sure. So with the polygraph,

00:43:22.340 at least it allows you to kind of go back, like you said. Now, interestingly, the data that we just

00:43:28.440 talked about kind of suggests that, well, if it was five years ago, it doesn't matter. You still

00:43:32.580 got an advantage. But they're also trying to balance that with- At some point, you got to let people

00:43:37.160 come clean if they've used in the past. And I actually agree with that point of view.

00:43:41.340 I spoke with a guy who competed in bodybuilding. He's like, you know, I was 17 years old. Some guy to

00:43:47.360 gym gave me something. I was an idiot. I didn't ask what it was. And I got like a bunch of side

00:43:53.260 effects and got bigger and stronger. But he's like, you know, looking back, it was like, I really

00:43:57.620 regret doing that at that age. Well, should that guy be punished for like his entire life and not

00:44:02.420 able to compete in drug-free bodybuilding? I mean, you can make the argument. I understand the argument,

00:44:06.640 but I'm in favor of being a little bit more inclusive in terms of that.

00:44:10.900 You mentioned that as you're getting ready to train for Worlds yesterday, you said to me,

00:44:14.960 you know, your back kind of hurt. You really backed off. Also, this is your first major meet,

00:44:20.280 international meet in about seven years. And a lot of that was due to injuries of which back was

00:44:26.800 the most prevalent. But I think you also mentioned a little bit of knee pain as well.

00:44:30.300 Hip, knee. Yeah.

00:44:31.860 So how do you think about this personally? How much longer do you want to be loading yourself

00:44:39.000 at basically putting cars on your back and lifting cars off the ground, right? Which is effectively

00:44:43.620 what you're doing? Candidly, if I went out and I won Master's Worlds, I'd probably give a real hard

00:44:51.080 thought about, okay, I think I'm done at least competing in this. But the other part of me,

00:44:56.020 I think that part of my problem is I love to train so much. I never really gave myself the time to get

00:45:03.620 pain-free. As soon as I started feeling better, I would just start pushing again. And I do think I've

00:45:11.140 slowly gotten more intelligent because I used to think I was basically Superman.

00:45:16.600 So I think I've just matured a little bit. And even like yesterday, getting to a certain point,

00:45:22.640 warming up on squats and saying, all right, it's not happening today. There's no reason to try and

00:45:26.340 force this. I think previously I would kind of create a narrative in my mind of I'm going to power

00:45:31.560 through this because it's what it takes. And yeah, at some points you have to, I think one of the

00:45:37.160 most important things is knowing when to press the gas pedal and knowing when to back off a little

00:45:41.940 bit. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. And for me, I'm probably a little bit weird

00:45:48.160 in that I would train three, four hours a day because I just love to train. I love the way it

00:45:51.820 makes me feel. I love feeling strong. Part of me, the egocentric part of me probably loves to feel

00:45:57.560 like a badass loading up five, 600 pounds in the gym and whatnot. But I've kind of gotten to the point

00:46:03.460 now where I'm like, all right, if it's there today, we take it. If it's not there, we take

00:46:07.840 what's there. And then we live to fight another day because I've just had so many experiences where

00:46:12.460 I've tried to press on this. And with the way pain works, the more pain you have, the more pain you're

00:46:19.300 going to have because you just end up getting fixated and ruminating on it. And the research

00:46:24.640 actually shows that the more you ruminate on it, the more you think about it. And the more times you

00:46:29.520 trigger it, the worse it's going to get. And so it's like this delicate balance between I kind of

00:46:35.320 know how far I can press something before I'm making it worse. Because the research also shows

00:46:40.880 that you don't want to completely just stop lifting because you detrain. And then when you come back,

00:46:45.440 even if you're pain-free, you're more likely to re-trigger it because you've lost that adaptation.

00:46:49.800 So it's kind of like when you have those pain triggers, trying to find either a weight amount

00:46:55.880 or a movement pattern or something similar to what you're trying to do, but it's low enough pain

00:47:00.820 that you can start to build back from that. So like for example, yesterday, ideally I would have

00:47:06.320 done some squats and deadlifts. Couldn't do them. Okay. I'm going to go in and do some leg press.

00:47:10.740 I'm still going to get some stimulation for my quads, the primary movers of the squat. I'm going to go

00:47:15.040 do single leg dumbbell RDLs. I was able to do those with no pain. Is it loading it as much as I would

00:47:20.600 like? No, but I'm still using my hamstrings. I'm using my lower back. I'm getting in some of that

00:47:25.980 movement pattern and I'm still getting a training effect, some adaptation without further triggering

00:47:33.120 that pain. And then, so what did you do today? Pretty much just cleaning up stuff I missed

00:47:37.440 throughout the week. So I just had some dumbbell pressing. I did some more single leg RDLs and I did

00:47:43.220 some mobility work. Not a whole lot of intensive stuff, but when you consider like what I do,

00:47:49.300 ideally all I would do would be squat bench press and deadlifts because it's completely specific to

00:47:54.920 what I'm going to express on competition day. But those are also very fatiguing movements.

00:48:01.420 And I think part of that too is just when you know how much you can do and you know how much you've

00:48:05.540 done, you kind of have like this anxiety about those movements because it's like you're almost

00:48:10.980 being tested and comparing them to what you've previously done. So sometimes just creating a little

00:48:17.260 bit of a variation of that movement where you're not, you can kind of just let the weight happen

00:48:21.680 and pick your RPE. And if it's not a previous set weight, it doesn't bother you. So I've started

00:48:29.020 using a lot more variations to build that baseline level of strength. And then again, when it comes to

00:48:35.400 the actual competition lifts, I'm mostly just focusing on doing heavy singles and building my volume through

00:48:42.620 other areas. And how many times a week will you do those heavy single workouts?

00:48:47.300 Once or twice, just depending on how I feel. I've often thought there would be a really interesting

00:48:51.060 experiment I'd like to do. I wouldn't do it, but I'd like to oversee it. I'd like to see it being done,

00:48:55.540 I guess, which is you take a power lifter and their entire training cycle, like six months building up

00:49:01.660 to a competition. They have no idea what's on the bar. They have a really good coach and the coach is

00:49:08.040 telling them for every set, how many reps to do or what RPE to go until. So it's completely being

00:49:15.340 programmed, but you eliminate the problem you just talked about, which is you take the psychology

00:49:19.380 away and you don't let the athletes suffer from knowing, oh my God, I should be able to do this

00:49:25.840 many reps. So one day they might get down on the bar and the bar is going to be really light and

00:49:29.200 they're going to be told, I think you're going to get 10 reps here. Let's see it. And they have no

00:49:33.180 idea what percentage of their max it ever is. So it's interesting. One of the top lifters in

00:49:38.560 the world, somebody I competed against multiple times, a guy named Bryce Lewis. So he actually

00:49:43.440 trained an entire training cycle that way. So he would have his girlfriend put trash bags over the 0.99

00:49:48.080 weights. I don't know if he still does that, but he just- So she would load up every set,

00:49:53.380 but she had to be the one to know what every set needed to be in advance.

00:49:56.760 She's a competitive power lifter as well. I think a world champion as well. And so she would kind of

00:50:01.920 look at what his RPEs were supposed to be at, load the weight up, put the trash bags over it,

00:50:06.900 and then he would go do it. And probably just for what you meant.

00:50:09.680 Super interesting.

00:50:10.500 Now for me, it might work, but for whatever reason-

00:50:13.720 You like to control things a little bit.

00:50:15.020 Yeah. There's some people on meet day, they'll tell their coach, don't tell me what you're

00:50:18.540 putting on the bar. Just put it on and I'll go do it.

00:50:20.940 I want to know. I don't know. Maybe it's just part of how my brain's wired, whatever. Because I also

00:50:25.960 have a trust with my coach and all the coaches I've had have been great, honestly. I've worked with a

00:50:30.440 couple of different people and they've all been great. I just had such a good trust in my coach

00:50:35.520 that I just knew if they put something on the bar, they're not going to put something on the bar that

00:50:40.280 they don't think I can do. They know I can do it. It's my job to go and execute. When you have a

00:50:45.000 good meet day coach, that is so valuable because I know they're not going to put something on I can't

00:50:53.940 do. So it's just up to me to go out and do it.

00:50:55.900 So what about nutrition? How does nutrition factor into powerlifting? You're 208 pounds or

00:51:00.680 so right now. That's about the weight you're going to compete at. You once told me that the

00:51:05.160 difference between powerlifting and bodybuilding is in powerlifting, all of your pain is compressed

00:51:09.780 into the gym. In bodybuilding, most of your pain is actually out of the gym.

00:51:14.220 Yeah.

00:51:14.680 Having not done either. I mean, I did some powerlifting growing up, but basically having never really

00:51:18.340 done either of those at a serious level, I can appreciate it just based on the concept.

00:51:22.200 So you've been here now a few days. We've had a bunch of meals together. You're just eating like

00:51:27.120 a normal guy. We're eating whatever the hell we want. Is there anything you will do as you get

00:51:31.680 closer to the meat with your nutrition specifically? Because I know that you'd like to come in two

00:51:37.680 pounds or so below your target, but that's something you can modify in days. Outside of just

00:51:44.240 calories, is there something you're going to manipulate with macros or anything that you're

00:51:48.580 going to be thinking about with respect to more creatine that you're going to be loading or

00:51:52.800 anything that you're needling that way?

00:51:54.740 Not really. I mean, at least for me, because I'm sitting very close to the weight class that I'm

00:51:59.160 going to compete in, I don't really have to make a bunch of changes. If I was sitting at say 215 pounds,

00:52:04.920 217 pounds, then it gets to the point where a weight cut to 205 becomes a little bit untenable

00:52:10.580 because where I compete, it's a two hour weigh in. So if you're cutting 10, 15 pounds,

00:52:15.940 you're not going to be able to rehydrate and refuel quickly enough.

00:52:19.780 Two hours, meaning two hours between weigh in and competition.

00:52:22.680 And lifting, correct.

00:52:23.620 Yeah. Unlike the day before where you'd have a full day to catch up.

00:52:26.020 Right. So there are organizations where you can weigh in a day before. And I think actually one

00:52:29.980 organization had 48 hour weigh in. So there were guys, which actually in a way makes it more

00:52:34.300 dangerous because people will cut way.

00:52:36.260 Really, really cut.

00:52:37.100 Oh yeah. I think Dan Green, who's really well-known untested power lifter, I think he weighed in at 220

00:52:45.040 and then like the next day was walking around at like 255 or something like that.

00:52:49.600 Oh my God.

00:52:50.120 So just incredible amounts of weight these guys are cutting. You'll see them with IVs and all that

00:52:56.040 kind of stuff. So for us, you can cut two, three, maybe 4% of your body weight, but you really don't

00:53:02.280 want to go much more than that because with two hours, you just don't have time.

00:53:05.400 Are you doing five grams of creatine daily right now?

00:53:08.240 I keep my creatine in because I can modify, which is like sodium and modifying fiber a little bit

00:53:13.440 to get some water weight out those last few days. And like you mentioned, I'll usually try to be a

00:53:18.140 little bit under the day before the meet so I can eat enough calories the day before where I don't

00:53:22.940 feel like I'm having to shovel down food because if I have to go pretty aggressive for a Saturday

00:53:28.240 meet Thursday, Friday, now on Saturday with that weigh in, I've got two hours to get food down,

00:53:34.980 but there's also a lot of other stuff I got to do. I got to warm up. I want my brain free to think

00:53:39.360 about the stuff I've got to do, not be like, okay, well, I've got to get down this. I've got

00:53:43.500 to get down that. I'll take some Pedialyte or, or some kind of electrolytes, those sorts of things.

00:53:47.860 But for the most part, I've never really had issues with cramping. I've never had issues with

00:53:52.420 energy on meet day. I think a lot of that is just, I keep myself pretty close to within striking

00:53:56.920 distance. And then the other benefit is your leverages can change based on your weight thickness,

00:54:01.880 the tightness of your belt can change. All that stuff can make a difference in terms of the style

00:54:06.500 of squat you do or how you feel. So just being able to train in a manner that's gonna be very

00:54:12.020 similar to how I compete, I feel like is a little bit of an advantage for me compared to people who

00:54:15.940 have to cut quite a bit of weight. And if you had to guess by DEXA, what would your body fat be

00:54:20.920 at weigh in? I caliper at around 8%. So I would say DEXA is probably like 11 or 12, something like that.

00:54:28.100 Because in my experience, DEXA is usually three, 4% higher than calipers. By most people's standards,

00:54:33.060 still incredibly lean, but not necessarily by bodybuilding standards, of course.

00:54:37.600 Yeah, absolutely.

00:54:38.540 Let's talk a little bit more about creatine. We talked about it really briefly on one of our

00:54:41.780 podcasts, but we were kind of at the end. So I want to kind of go back and make sure people

00:54:45.280 understand that it's one of the supplements we get the most questions about. It's also one of the

00:54:49.340 supplements that we feel the most confident telling patients, this is a supplement worth taking.

00:54:55.220 It's clearly passed test number one, which is it's safe. And it passes test number two,

00:55:00.760 which is it's probably got efficacy. Well, I shouldn't say it's got efficacy. The real question

00:55:05.160 is, are you okay with a little bit of weight gain? Because you're going to pull more water in.

00:55:09.960 So explain to people a little bit about why creatine is so important. And presumably this

00:55:14.680 is something that's really important in powerlifting. I'm guessing going into a bodybuilding meet,

00:55:18.960 you probably don't want creatine for that extra weight, or do you?

00:55:22.540 I think it's actually great for bodybuilding.

00:55:24.240 Okay, great. I want to hear about it. I would assume that you'd have a little more water,

00:55:27.040 but maybe the water's all in the muscle and that's where you want it.

00:55:29.800 So creatine is a high energy phosphate donor. So in muscle, it exists as phosphocreatine.

00:55:36.300 And when you take supplemental creatine, it'll come into the muscle, it'll get a phosphate attached

00:55:41.300 to it, phosphocreatine. And originally the only mechanism we thought of, well, it's a high energy

00:55:46.900 phosphate donor. So people will perform better. But then we saw people increase their lean body mass,

00:55:51.400 increase their strength. And there's even benefits in terms of cognitive benefits appear to be pretty

00:55:57.080 clear that there's some cognitive benefits as well. So as you mentioned, in terms of safety

00:56:02.100 and efficacy data, to me-

00:56:03.580 There's no strikes, really.

00:56:05.040 I tell people, I'm like, I don't even know why we're having this conversation anymore. And it's also,

00:56:08.200 you know, it's gone up in price a little bit recently because of the supply chain stuff,

00:56:12.220 but-

00:56:12.400 It's still relatively inexpensive.

00:56:13.460 It's incredibly inexpensive for what you're getting. You know, when I see people talk about

00:56:17.400 some of these other supplements and they're not even taking creatine monohydrate, and I'm like,

00:56:21.180 you're stepping over pennies, or sorry, you're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies,

00:56:24.500 because this is just the lowest hanging fruit.

00:56:27.520 Even at your size and even at your demand, is there any benefit to taking more than about

00:56:31.880 five grams a day?

00:56:33.880 Some people have postulated there might be. I haven't seen really clear evidence for it yet.

00:56:39.640 You could argue that there's really no downside to taking the extra. The downside might be some

00:56:44.180 GI irritation. For some people, creatine can be a GI irritant, which I think we'll circle back to.

00:56:50.480 But we know it can act as a high energy phosphate donor. So when you are exercising or just doing

00:56:56.140 anything, your energy currency of your cells, ATP, and in order to drive muscular contraction,

00:57:03.300 your ATP donates a phosphate and that liberation of that phosphate to form ADP and a free phosphate

00:57:11.580 is energetically favorable and helps drive these muscular contractions.

00:57:16.780 So creatine can act, or phosphocreatine can act as a high energy phosphate donor to reform ATP

00:57:23.200 and allow you to perform better. But it's also a really powerful osmolite. And so it pulls water

00:57:29.840 into muscle tissue, which in and of itself may actually be anabolic. So just a muscle cell being

00:57:37.420 more hydrated, there's some evidence that that can actually improve the, that it's more anabolic

00:57:43.760 environment. But regardless of the mechanism, we do know that when you take creatine, you see

00:57:49.000 improvements in lean mass. And some people will say, well, that's just water.

00:57:53.220 That's what muscle mostly is, isn't it?

00:57:54.640 But muscle is 70% water. So, and there's actually research to show that even non-contractile,

00:58:01.020 just water, may improve strength and contractibility. So we're not sure exactly how,

00:58:07.280 but it could just be like the volumization of the cell is just a benefit.

00:58:11.560 You could also kind of make up, at least conceptually, a framework that says,

00:58:14.860 a more hydrated cell is more able to carry out its function. So if the function of a myofibril is

00:58:22.060 contractile release, contract release, and it has more water, it sort of seems logical to me that

00:58:28.020 it's going to be better at clearing metabolic waste and recruiting fuel, which should at least be two

00:58:32.480 things that would factor into its ability to do that.

00:58:35.060 The other thing about it is if you look at anything that improves hypertrophy,

00:58:39.900 a big portion of it is water. It's not just all myofibrillar. I think regardless of the mechanisms,

00:58:46.900 I mean, it's pretty clear that this stuff works. It's pretty clear it's safe. I mean, they've done

00:58:52.080 numerous randomized control trials, some of them being well over a year long. Yes, you get an

00:58:57.640 increase in creatinine, which can be a marker of renal function. But I think one thing-

00:59:02.540 Although the data, you know, on this lane, there was a paper that just came out a couple of weeks ago

00:59:06.540 that we were really happy to see. We've abandoned looking at serum creatinine for renal function,

00:59:11.720 because it's just too easy to get fooled by people with varying muscle mass and training volume.

00:59:17.780 So we've completely abandoned it. So every time you order labs on somebody and you see their

00:59:21.860 creatinine, it'll tell you what their estimated glomerular filtration rate is. We just ignore it

00:59:26.220 completely. We only look at cystatin C. So everything we do is based off that. And there was a paper in

00:59:30.860 JAMA a couple of weeks ago that basically said as much, which is maybe we should look more at

00:59:34.800 cystatin C instead of creatinine. So I would even say that hopefully this is a PSA for other docs

00:59:40.940 out there listening and other patients to say, please look at my cystatin C as a way to estimate

00:59:45.820 kidney function. You know, there's some other things that can get a little bit wonky, like from

00:59:49.220 lifting weights, like liver enzymes and whatnot. And I tell people, you have to keep in mind,

00:59:52.900 these are markers. So if you have liver failure or you have kidney failure, it's very, very likely you

00:59:59.220 will have elevated liver enzymes and elevated creatinine. But just because you have elevated

01:00:04.800 liver enzymes or elevated creatinine does not mean that you necessarily have damage to those tissues.

01:00:09.900 So you have to disconnect those two. And I don't think that I feel like correlation versus causation

01:00:15.200 is just not something that's taught very well in school. Cause I even see not really good doctors,

01:00:20.560 but some physicians get so hung up on just, well, this is on the page and this is supposed to be a

01:00:25.600 normal range and it's not. It's like, but just look at the person sitting in front of you who

01:00:30.080 obviously works out, is in good shape. If you're concerned about their kidneys, then do a 24 hour

01:00:36.180 urine collection or an ultrasound or whatever you have to do to verify that they're safe. But I don't

01:00:41.500 worry about that kind of stuff. There's also been some people who have said, well, creatinine can cause

01:00:46.220 hair loss and you've got to be careful about that. I don't think the data on that's very compelling at

01:00:50.220 all. There was a single study that showed an increase in DHT from supplementing with creatinine.

01:00:57.640 One study, 2009, I've never seen it replicated, never seen any follow-up.

01:01:03.020 How much did DHT increase by?

01:01:04.740 I'd have to go back and look. I can't remember the exact amount. It was significant.

01:01:08.080 But the interesting thing is we know creatinine doesn't affect androgen levels. So it's kind of

01:01:14.000 like, where is this increase in DHT coming from? It has to come from somewhere. And like I said,

01:01:19.900 there's no randomized control trials showing that creatinine actually causes changes to hair

01:01:25.320 follicles or actual hair loss. So maybe it does, but I would think that if that data existed,

01:01:32.780 we probably would have seen it already.

01:01:34.920 Do we think that there are significant benefits from supplementation even on non-lifting days?

01:01:40.900 So for example, on hard cardio days, assuming we're not talking about sprints. So clearly there would be

01:01:45.500 a benefit in sprinting because the creatine phosphate system is really lending to that

01:01:50.260 ATP generation during that incredibly high intensity stuff. But if you're out there doing a VO2 max

01:01:56.520 day, which is, that's a really hard day. Those are kind of three to eight minute all out intervals,

01:02:01.440 which is aerobic. It's peak aerobic. Do you still get a benefit, do you think, from creatine?

01:02:06.140 I would guess yes. There was a recent meta-analysis that came out and looked at different ways of

01:02:11.300 taking creatine. And it was useful data, but in some ways it was kind of frustrating because they

01:02:17.440 basically showed, well, if you take five grams a day, you get increases in lean mass and strength

01:02:21.740 and performance. You take more than five grams a day, you also get increases in lean mass and

01:02:25.780 performance. But it's hard to kind of compare them directly based on the way they did the meta-analysis.

01:02:30.800 They also looked at, okay, if we just take them on lifting days, okay, you get benefits.

01:02:34.800 If you take them on non-lifting days, you also get benefits.

01:02:37.380 What I would say is that you probably can get away with just taking it on lifting days,

01:02:42.180 but keep in mind that the benefits of creatine are an accumulation. So you've really got to

01:02:47.820 saturate the muscle cell. That's the key. Because when we were kids, you would load it.

01:02:52.980 I feel like you did 30 grams a day for a week or something crazy. And then five grams thereafter.

01:02:59.360 Of course, this was reading bro science magazines. You would then do that for a couple of months and

01:03:03.720 then you would come off it for a month and then you would repeat the cycle. Am I making that up or is

01:03:07.180 that about- No, no, that was definitely a thing. I will say that the research does show if you load

01:03:11.600 it, you will saturate the muscle cell faster. Now, I always try to tell people like there's no

01:03:17.400 solutions. There's only trade-offs. So the trade-off with this is a lot of people will get

01:03:21.820 pretty bad GI irritation with loading creatine in terms of GI bloating, nausea, those sorts of things.

01:03:31.180 So if you just take- If you're playing the long game, it doesn't really matter.

01:03:34.160 You're talking about getting the results you want in one week as opposed to three weeks. It's really

01:03:38.740 not a big difference. So if you just want to take five grams a day, within a few weeks, you'll be

01:03:43.540 saturated and you'll be getting the same benefits. So it's really, I guess if you were somebody who'd

01:03:47.700 never taken it before and you've got like a big athletic event coming up and you really want to

01:03:52.040 be on it for it, that could make sense. But for most people, I would say just take five grams a day.

01:03:56.880 And when people say, well, you know, what if I just take it on lifting days? Yeah, probably could,

01:04:02.440 but it's pretty darn cheap. It's easier to forget something when you only do it on certain days.

01:04:06.960 Sometimes it's just easier to make it a part of the routine.

01:04:09.460 And what I would say too, is people ask me about timing of creatine, those sorts of things.

01:04:13.880 There's some really small, really tenuous, I really want to emphasize that, evidence that perhaps

01:04:20.720 after a workout might be better than before a workout. But I tell people, just take it whenever you'll

01:04:26.180 take it regularly. So for me, I just get up in the morning and I take it. And that's what I worry

01:04:31.040 about. Now, as far as like the cycling on and off. So there's evidence that you do reduce your

01:04:36.340 endogenous production of creatine when you're on it. There's also evidence that the creatine receptor

01:04:41.160 on the muscle cell does downregulate a little bit. Now, the important thing to keep in mind is

01:04:46.700 that doesn't mean that your intracellular levels of creatine are falling. So they've actually never

01:04:52.620 shown that even far out, that those phosphocreatine levels in your muscle drop.

01:04:58.560 So what I would say is I don't really think there's a reason to come off because they have

01:05:03.600 shown that if you do come off within a month or so, kind of everything goes back to normal,

01:05:08.100 but you lose the benefit of the supplemental creatine. So I would say as long as intramuscular

01:05:12.860 levels of creatine are not falling, there's really no benefit to coming off. It used to be like,

01:05:17.660 I think people kind of just equated supplements with steroids. And so like, well,

01:05:21.440 you're supposed to cycle steroids, so we should cycle supplements. And creatine is not hormonal.

01:05:27.680 It's not the same biofeedback loop. So I would say there's probably no reason to cycle it.

01:05:33.820 So something else that kind of bridges the world between bodybuilding and powerlifting is this

01:05:39.340 question I wanted to ask you about, which is basically one of Newton's laws, right? So force

01:05:43.760 equals mass times acceleration. Let's just say I'm on the ground, I've got my dumbbells or I'm on a bench

01:05:48.560 and I've got my dumbbells and I'm going to press them. One school of thought is press them as quickly

01:05:53.720 as possible because force equals mass times acceleration. The mass of this thing is fixed.

01:05:59.620 So any speed with which I lift it is accelerating because I'm moving against gravity, but the faster

01:06:06.420 I can do it, the greater the force. But of course, at some point, the weight becomes so heavy that you

01:06:14.480 increase the effort more on the mass variable than on the acceleration variable. In other words,

01:06:20.280 we can manipulate mass and acceleration to reach maximum force. Now, an extreme example of that

01:06:27.060 is you doing a one rep max. But as you pointed out, the more elite a powerlifter becomes,

01:06:33.640 the slower that is. In other words, the lower the acceleration is. And therefore, the more they're

01:06:39.620 emphasizing the mass, which is of course what you get scored on. No one's scoring you on the

01:06:43.960 acceleration. How do we think about that in terms of mixing and matching the mass versus the

01:06:50.300 acceleration variable in an effort to optimize force? Because of course, we also don't want to go to

01:06:54.720 maximum force every time because if I did maximum force with a light weight, I'd probably move it

01:06:59.860 too quickly. I could injure myself as well. Do you think about the variation of mass and

01:07:03.500 acceleration when you're moving weight? If you think about what the expression of strength is,

01:07:07.620 it's basically force. So as you mentioned, if it's a very heavy weight, it'll just move slower.

01:07:13.020 If it's a light weight, you can still apply the same force and it will just move more quickly.

01:07:17.240 So this is actually a concept that I heard my coach Zach talk about on a podcast was they do

01:07:24.080 quite a bit of, we'll do a heavy single or double or whatever it is. And then our back offsets are

01:07:31.320 relatively light talking RPE four or five, but trying to move them as quickly as possible.

01:07:37.780 Let's just talk about the concentric now. And then I want to actually come and have the discussion

01:07:40.980 about the E-centric. Yeah. On the concentric. Exactly. Because that is in terms of strength, 0.84

01:07:45.900 that is the closest expression of that. If I'm understanding it correctly, you're saying your

01:07:49.560 coach is saying, look, on the heavy weights, they're going to move slow because they have to,

01:07:53.900 but to keep training strength, I want you to move as quickly as possible as we come down on weight.

01:07:58.300 Bingo. So the idea is, well, we're still applying the same force. It's going to move more quickly,

01:08:03.480 but it's going to be less fatiguing because it's lighter weight. That's kind of the concept behind it.

01:08:08.500 Is that happening with you? So for example, when you did, let's just say your back wasn't hurting

01:08:12.360 yesterday. If you were out there doing, today was an RPE six day. Do you think that your speed

01:08:18.100 would have increased sufficiently that you would have almost matched 90% of the force you'd put

01:08:23.660 out on a one rep max best? It's hard to tell because I've never actually done the calculation

01:08:27.520 of the force. I imagine there's probably a sweet spot somewhere in there where too heavy probably

01:08:32.520 has less force than, but yeah, I'm not sure where that is. As far as like hypertrophy, I think that

01:08:39.360 force is probably less important. I think it's more about just having enough sufficiently hard

01:08:45.600 sets, however you slice that. For example, like the whole idea of time under tension training was

01:08:51.120 very popular. And if you look at some of the initial research, I think there was a study where

01:08:55.760 they had people doing curls and I may butcher the study, so I apologize, but it was kind of like a

01:09:00.860 six second eccentric, six second concentric, and they had them go to failure. And they had another

01:09:07.060 group that just did normal cadence and they had them match the number of reps and found that the

01:09:13.260 group that was doing the slow eccentrics and slow concentrics gained more muscle. People said,

01:09:18.780 well, see, there you go. Well, the problem is they were using like 30% of their one rep max for like

01:09:23.680 10 reps going really slow. Well, if you're going at a normal pace, how many times could you do 30% of

01:09:28.900 one rep max? I mean, you could do 30, 40, 50 reps. So it wasn't, I will say the study was bad. It's not

01:09:34.520 bad. It answered the question it wanted to answer. But if you're going to compare them straight up,

01:09:40.460 really what it needs to be is if you take both of these things to failure, so the same level of

01:09:45.820 intensity or sufficient difficulty, what does the outcome look like then? And so when they do that,

01:09:52.320 they really see very little difference between slow lifting and fast lifting. There was a study that

01:09:58.620 just came out that looked at fast eccentrics versus slow eccentrics and found that there was actually

01:10:04.960 a little bit better outcomes with fast eccentrics compared to slow eccentrics. And that actually

01:10:11.440 relates back to- With respect to muscle mass?

01:10:14.100 Yeah.

01:10:14.600 You mentioned this to me earlier. The only time I've ever done a fast eccentric is on my

01:10:19.280 XerFly machine because you're forced to. It's pulling you down so quickly that you're

01:10:24.400 screaming down and you're coming to a stop. Outside of that, it never occurred to me to do

01:10:29.120 an eccentric quickly. Like if I'm doing eccentric deadlifts, I'm actually almost trying to come down

01:10:34.600 as slowly as I can in my head thinking this is more beneficial because I was thinking it's more

01:10:39.500 time under tension.

01:10:40.780 It's probably partly with the lift too as well. You don't want to take it too extreme. If you're

01:10:45.480 doing a squat and you just dive bomb and there's no tension on the bar, one, that's going to look

01:10:50.820 really bad when you're trying to come out of it. And two, probably not what they're actually

01:10:55.900 seeing in the research.

01:10:57.300 Let's use a bicep curl. It's a safer exercise. So this research suggests that you've take two

01:11:02.380 people that are doing the exact same weight and they're the same people basically. And

01:11:06.380 they're doing the same speed of their concentric. And one of them is doing, let's say it's a

01:11:11.820 two second concentric and he's doing a two second eccentric and the other guy's going two

01:11:16.440 up six down. They're saying the two, two will technically produce more hypertrophy.

01:11:21.400 Might be better. So I say might because it's just one study.

01:11:24.560 If you think about mechanotransduction and the force, the mechanical tension being applied

01:11:30.860 to a muscle, when you're kind of getting to that point where the muscle is stopping and

01:11:34.700 then having to come the other way, if it's fast, that's probably more tension at that specific

01:11:40.660 point. So we just don't know enough about this stuff right now to really be able to say

01:11:44.800 for sure. But I think, and I also don't want to make it sound like there's no benefit to

01:11:48.740 like slow movements, especially for people who have pain or they don't want to go heavy,

01:11:54.660 you know, those sorts of things. Then slowing down a movement, because a lot of times pain

01:11:59.600 can be tied to velocity. If you just slow down a movement, it won't be as painful. So I've used

01:12:04.580 tempo training pretty liberally in some of my training cycles just to make it so I had to use less

01:12:11.020 weight, but still make it pretty difficult. Now, was it as good as me doing my regular

01:12:15.880 movement? Maybe not, but it's still better than doing nothing. So it's always important to keep

01:12:19.760 those things in mind in terms of like, don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. So I do think

01:12:25.800 that like slow movements still have application for people, like I said, who have pain or if they

01:12:31.180 don't feel comfortable with heavy weight, you can make it much more difficult just by slowing down

01:12:35.460 the movement. And at the end of the day, the biggest determinant is just doing enough number

01:12:40.960 of hard sets. However, that kind of looks. Now, there are a couple of patients that I've had over

01:12:46.080 the years whose disdain for exercise is so great that the most I can negotiate them doing is one

01:12:55.980 20 to 30 minute workout per week doing the super slow protocol. You know, they have these specific

01:13:02.300 gyms that have very specific types of equipment and they're going to do, I don't know, maybe eight

01:13:08.560 to 10 different machines. And they're only going to do one set and it's going to be to failure.

01:13:14.440 And the sets are typically titrated to be somewhere between 90 and 105 seconds. So about a minute 30 to

01:13:21.400 a minute 45, the sweet spot, right? So if you're going more than that, the weight's too light. If you're

01:13:26.100 less than that, the weight's too heavy. And they might do like four simple upper body, four upper lower.

01:13:30.820 So there might be a press, a pull, a bicep, a tricep, a leg press, you know, all that kind of stuff.

01:13:35.680 The reason I negotiate that is my alternative is they'll do nothing. And I'm thinking I probably

01:13:41.180 can't get any better benefit in 30 minutes once a week than I can there if it's done right. Now,

01:13:47.360 the challenge that I've realized with that type of exercise, because I've done this many times

01:13:52.780 myself, it's actually really hard to go to failure. At the end of the day, it can be done,

01:13:59.540 but it can't be done often. And I actually think it's really hard to do it eight consecutive times,

01:14:05.060 which is basically what you're asking a person to do in 30 minutes to truly go to failure.

01:14:10.160 So what is your take on the super slow protocols, which clearly guys like Mike Menser have like,

01:14:16.080 there are really famous bodybuilders who have taken these protocols to the limits,

01:14:19.780 but what's your take both on the physiology of it and then the psychology of it?

01:14:24.100 That just kind of shows that there's many ways to skin a cat. And when it comes to hypertrophy,

01:14:28.600 you really have a lot of options. And certainly no one will argue you can't grow muscle that way

01:14:33.680 because you can.

01:14:34.600 It is kind of remarkable, isn't it? To think that these people could do 30 minutes once a week

01:14:38.140 and grow muscle.

01:14:38.920 So a friend of mine, Jeremy Lineke, he's a professor at Ole Miss.

01:14:41.620 Jeremy's been on the podcast. BFR, yeah.

01:14:43.380 Yeah, he's great. My claim to fame is I actually introduced him to BFR.

01:14:46.440 But they actually published a paper where they looked at just flexing, isometric contraction.

01:14:52.600 And we're actually able to show with long isometric contraction, some hypertrophy,

01:14:57.220 which before that we always thought, oh, isometric doesn't actually grow muscle.

01:15:00.480 There's very little benefit to it. So I think, I hate to be the typical tools in a toolkit,

01:15:06.600 but things are tools in a toolkit. We're talking about people who are,

01:15:10.180 they don't want to be bodybuilders. They just want to get some of these benefits

01:15:12.940 from resistance training. It really is, what can we do to get them in the gym consistently?

01:15:19.100 And is it as good as compound movements with free bar and training at a normal pace?

01:15:27.020 Maybe not, but it's a heck of a lot better than them sitting at home and doing nothing.

01:15:29.880 So I think that's really important to understand. And when it comes to the physiology of the hypertrophy

01:15:37.460 response, what's wild is we still don't fully understand how the process of muscle hypertrophy

01:15:44.960 occurs. We know that you need to progressively overload to continue causing the hypertrophy

01:15:50.400 response. We know what things are associated with hypertrophy, but every time they try to get

01:15:55.560 really granular with it, we still have a lot of gaps in our understanding. Now, one of the things

01:16:00.840 we do think matters is metabolic stress. So this idea that you're accumulating these metabolic

01:16:06.600 byproducts inside the muscle as you work it out, hence the BFR, the pump that does appear to have

01:16:15.560 some decent mechanistic data to support it in terms of hydrogen ion accumulation, how that may affect

01:16:22.300 some, you know, signaling, those sorts of things, even right down to like calcium release into the

01:16:27.840 sarcoplasm. So I think when you're dealing with like that super slow protocol, you're kind of pushing

01:16:33.960 a little bit more on that metabolic stress as opposed to like the mechanical tension portion

01:16:38.060 of it. But there still is mechanical tension. I think a lot of people think about mechanical

01:16:43.160 tension just literally as weight on the bar. I think what people don't realize is mechanical

01:16:47.680 tension is kind of cumulative because otherwise, why wouldn't we just load up a heavy single and

01:16:52.340 just do that every time? Because that's the most amount of mechanical tension you can get in terms

01:16:55.900 of a set point in time. So to me, it seems pretty obvious that mechanical tension has to be

01:17:01.120 like a little bit cumulative throughout a set. And so if you're doing super slow, okay, you might have

01:17:06.760 a pretty light weight, but you've also got a really long time that's under that really light weight

01:17:11.680 and you're accumulating the metabolic stress and some mechanical tension. So to me, it makes sense

01:17:17.320 that you would have some of those benefits. What I would say is I think the bigger downside is you're

01:17:22.420 probably not going to get as strong doing that methodology as you are doing a little bit more

01:17:27.980 normal pace and it may have a little bit less functionality than somebody who's done kind of

01:17:34.600 more traditional strength training. That's my bigger issue with it, truthfully, is one, I don't think

01:17:38.900 people really can go to failure. It's hard. You'll get a couple of sets here and there, but it's really

01:17:42.960 difficult. I think it's easier to do an exercise where you don't have to go to failure, but you make

01:17:47.160 up for it on volume. But then your other point here is I think you're really missing out on the

01:17:52.900 reason why we exercise. Sometimes we exercise to be better at lifting. Powerlifting is the only

01:17:57.760 example of that. But outside of that, we lift for life. And I do worry that when we rob people of

01:18:04.420 movements that require more than one plane, movements that require balance and some coordination,

01:18:11.060 we're not giving them the full benefit of the exercise, of the reason to exercise, that is.

01:18:16.240 I would agree with that. And again, that has to be one of those things where-

01:18:20.180 It's better than the couch, as you said.

01:18:21.660 It's better than the couch. And so I think a lot of people, when they get into things,

01:18:26.440 especially now we have paralysis by analysis, I'll tell people like, at a certain point,

01:18:31.740 your paralysis by analysis is actually just your excuse to do nothing. So just go do. Go do

01:18:38.560 something. Go throw something against a wall and see what sticks. But when it comes to people who may

01:18:44.900 have been sedentary, I mean, sometimes the conversation I'll have is, hey, what do you like doing?

01:18:49.840 Like, is there something you like doing? And let's press on that a little bit. Because if the only

01:18:55.280 outcome that we're going for is perfection, well, not a lot of people are going to be able to hit

01:18:59.780 that. So I really do think a lot of it boils down to a conversation of, okay, yeah, this isn't as good

01:19:05.220 as this, but it's still better than that. And I think that conversation is a lot of the stuff that

01:19:10.860 gets lost, that nuance gets lost in a lot of these conversations, especially because

01:19:16.040 you're an optimizer. I love to talk about optimal because as scientists, that's kind of where we

01:19:21.120 live and what we think about. Do people really need optimal to get out of the state we're in,

01:19:26.760 where so many people have type two diabetes and have obesity and are dying from heart disease and

01:19:31.920 cancer? Like, honestly, if we get them to get 50% of the way there, probably see a huge benefit.

01:19:37.420 And that's really the flip side to the stats I gave earlier in this discussion, which were

01:19:41.440 how high VO2 max and high strength were the two biggest predictors of longevity. And that's true

01:19:49.380 by a country mile. But the part that I didn't mention that is now worth mentioning is that when

01:19:55.520 you break people down into quartiles or quintiles of fitness and strength, the biggest jump in the

01:20:03.620 benefit, right? So the biggest improvement in mortality always comes from being in the bottom

01:20:08.860 quintile or quartile to the next one. This is a really important point that shouldn't be lost. So

01:20:13.960 people are sitting here listening to us thinking, look at these two idiots who train all day and love

01:20:18.460 this stuff. Like, that's nice for you to say, no, actually, you're going to achieve the most benefit

01:20:24.840 when you go from being in the lowest 20% of the population to the second 20th percentile of

01:20:32.080 population. And that can't be overstated. So in other words, the curve looks like this.

01:20:35.940 And I think one of the biggest failures of the fitness industry, quite honestly, is convincing

01:20:39.860 people that they need to have a shredded six pack and be really muscular to be fit. No, you don't

01:20:46.200 have to. In fact, I would argue that most people that are that lean probably don't feel that fit.

01:20:51.700 I know that when I was very lean for bodybuilding, I had no energy, no sex drive, thought about food all

01:20:56.380 the time and was a miserable human. So the real sweet spot is probably where you got a little bit of

01:21:02.160 fluff. You're still relatively lean, but even not getting to that point, just moving. I mean,

01:21:10.160 look at the step data. The step data is very, very clear too. Like there is a huge inflection at about

01:21:16.340 8,000 steps per day. You still get benefits by going even up to like 20,000 steps a day,

01:21:21.360 but the vast majority of the benefits, the dip off in mortality, I'm sure you've seen it. It's like

01:21:26.840 going from 2000 to 8,000, it's like precipitous. It's like free falling off a cliff, how drastically

01:21:34.460 that decreases mortality. And I don't think there's anything magic about steps. I just think

01:21:38.840 you're just literally looking at people getting more active. So I think one of the biggest failures

01:21:42.940 of the fitness industry is the messaging that you need to look like this in order for you to be

01:21:49.680 healthy. When the messaging should be, Hey, for you to be healthy, it's really like a very low

01:21:55.400 barrier to entry. Even if you just get out and walk for 30 minutes a day, so much benefit from

01:22:01.480 that, just compared to just sitting down, just doing anything in the gym. People say, Oh, machines

01:22:06.700 are worthless. They're not worthless. Machines are great tools. You're still applying tension to the

01:22:11.200 muscle. Would I argue that maybe a free barbell movement might be more functional? Maybe, but if it's

01:22:18.960 the difference between the 70 year old female who's never resistance trained before getting into the 1.00

01:22:23.980 gym and doing something or not, I'm going to be like, yeah, knock yourself out of machines.

01:22:28.840 So I think that is a huge failure of the fitness industry and the messaging, which is you need to

01:22:34.980 look like this in order for you to have achieved health. On that front, because I do want to talk a

01:22:41.420 little bit about bodybuilding, both in your own personal experience and just, again, the insights that we can

01:22:47.380 gain. I don't think most people listening to this myself included ever want to be 4% or 5% body fat,

01:22:52.760 which is- You don't, trust me.

01:22:53.980 But look, I'm sure somebody who's 25% body fat would like to be 20% body fat. And can they learn

01:22:59.200 something from Bodybuilder? But just picking up where you went, where do you see kind of the general

01:23:04.520 role of fitness experts in social media? How can a person make sense of the never ending sea of

01:23:14.020 experts out there? Man. So a couple of years ago, we had a guy in our podcast named Alan

01:23:19.480 Levinovitz. He's been on Joe Rogan's podcast too, and he's a religious studies expert, but he wrote a

01:23:24.980 book on the naturalism fallacy. And we were talking about how hard it is for people to identify experts.

01:23:31.760 And he said something that I thought was really insightful. He said, what you should look for in

01:23:36.500 an expert is the exact opposite of what you probably think you should look for. If somebody sounds

01:23:41.940 really confident, they're probably not an expert. What you really want to look for is people who

01:23:47.020 sound kind of doubtful. And they say things like, probably, maybe, possibly. When you speak to true

01:23:54.860 experts, usually if you ask them a question, the first thing they'll do is ask you a question back,

01:24:00.720 unless the question is very contextual. So I'll get people who say, what are your thoughts on X?

01:24:06.820 And usually I'll say, okay, well, as it pertains to what? Like hypertrophy or strength or fitness or,

01:24:13.380 you know, I need context in order to be able to answer the question correctly. People ask me like,

01:24:18.320 what do you think about like credentials or snap? Credentials help. If I see somebody has a PhD in

01:24:23.980 a certain subject, I'm probably going to give them a lot more leeway in terms of, okay, if they say

01:24:30.480 something I disagree with, let me see why they said that. Let's dig a little bit deeper. But I've seen

01:24:35.620 some PhDs say some really dumb stuff. I've seen people from Harvard say really dumb stuff.

01:24:41.820 I've probably said really dumb stuff. Like it doesn't stop you. Credentials aren't a,

01:24:48.040 they're a nice thing, but they're not foolproof. So really I try to listen to how people speak.

01:24:54.360 But given that you have such a knowledge background, it's a lot easier for you to look

01:25:00.660 at someone's Instagram account and pretty quickly realize this person knows nothing. They might look

01:25:07.740 good. They might be a great marketer, but they don't really know anything. But the average person

01:25:13.680 doesn't have your knowledge base. What else can they rely on? So clearly that's one great criteria or

01:25:19.400 two. Some sense of credentialing can be helpful. Some sense of speaking with nuance and being

01:25:26.900 comfortable with uncertainty, that's also helpful. Are there any other tools that a person can use

01:25:31.720 to disentangle this world? People who say the magic words, I don't know. That again, sounds

01:25:37.700 counterintuitive. So when I was part of getting my PhD, I had to do what was called a qualifying exam.

01:25:44.840 And so that is a four hour oral examination in front of four professors. And when I was prepping for

01:25:51.620 this, Dr. Lehman, you've had the podcast, he said, they're going to push you in whatever subject they

01:25:57.120 start out on until you don't know. And you need to be able to say, I don't know. They did exactly

01:26:02.580 that. I'll still never forget the way they started off. The qualifying exam was let's talk about

01:26:06.980 vitamins. What's your favorite vitamin D. Okay. Well, where is it synthesized? And they kept pushing

01:26:12.420 until I just didn't know. And I'll still never forget. They asked me like an acid base balance

01:26:16.720 question in the lung. And I started to get up on the wipe off board and I just turned around and said,

01:26:20.260 I don't know this one. It's okay. Move on. And when I got done, they said, you were actually one of the

01:26:25.080 best students we've had the last few years because you knew what you knew and you knew what you didn't

01:26:29.760 know. That division puts such an emphasis on not going outside your lane, not speaking about

01:26:36.100 something, not speculating about something that you didn't know and trying to pass it off like you did.

01:26:41.320 So I think that just got hammered into me. So when it comes to looking at other folks,

01:26:45.880 one, if they're willing to like know their scope and not feel the need to comment on every single

01:26:52.920 thing, that's a good metric. Also, I'm going to paint with a broad brush and there's always

01:26:59.460 exceptions to this, but people who use like tips, tricks, hacks, five things to never do five things

01:27:07.280 to always do the best worst people who use a lot of superlatives. That's not typically the way

01:27:13.760 that experts talk. I say a lot, there's no solutions. There's only trade-offs. There's

01:27:18.440 certain tools that make a lot more sense depending on somebody's goals and where they're at

01:27:22.340 than compared to somebody else and vice versa.

01:27:25.700 But that almost suggests that social media is negatively selecting because a lot of those

01:27:31.560 things that you said, certainty, a flair for showmanship, tips, tricks, and listicles.

01:27:38.420 That's what gets attention.

01:27:39.680 I think the algorithm likes those things because they get a lot of attention. Even if some of that

01:27:43.400 attention isn't warranted. So that adds another layer of confusion to this, which is it is

01:27:48.200 difficult. And even when I scroll through Instagram, I'm amazed at how much it's trying

01:27:53.660 to push to me. I missed the day when all I saw on Instagram were the 40 people I followed.

01:28:00.180 I feel like that was the good old day.

01:28:01.220 And in the sequence of the way things were posted too.

01:28:03.660 It was like, oh, here's what this friend of mine did. Here's what this friend of mine did. Here's

01:28:07.520 what this person who I don't know, but who I respect. And now it's insane. The

01:28:13.140 barrage of stuff that Instagram thinks I want to see. And admittedly, sometimes it's right,

01:28:18.020 but so many times it's just wrong. And it makes me think, well, if that's my experience,

01:28:23.460 that's got to be everybody's experience.

01:28:25.640 And it is. Alan talked about this as information silos. And this is a broader problem,

01:28:31.060 but it is a problem in nutrition and fitness specifically. If you just follow the people you

01:28:36.020 follow and then the accounts that get suggested to you, you're actually not broadening anything.

01:28:41.260 You're sitting in an information silo. And what happens is, or at least what I think is happening

01:28:48.500 is previously 90s, 2000s, 80s, whatever, you'd come across people with differences of opinion to

01:28:56.380 you and you could have a conversation with them. And it usually was, you know, sometimes it could

01:29:03.100 be contentious, but for the most part, I would say like when you can sit down and look a human

01:29:06.760 being in the eyes and talk about your differences, it's usually not as confrontational. Now we have

01:29:11.920 whole generations of people who are not used to seeing opinions different than their own

01:29:16.360 or thoughts or beliefs that are different from their own because they're in those information

01:29:20.600 silos. And when they get exposed to something different, they just don't know how to handle it.

01:29:26.220 Like you see some really like extreme responses, even to stuff like nutrition. I can't name how many

01:29:34.420 times I've been called a shill for XYZ, big meat, big dairy, artificial sweeteners, big sugar, you

01:29:42.300 know, because it's almost like, well, it can't possibly be somebody just has a different opinion

01:29:47.080 based on this data. They have to be a bad person. So I do think it's a real problem. And what you said

01:29:53.560 is very well taken. That is, you almost have to be willing to do clickbait to really get your stuff

01:29:59.580 out there. And so I, as a business owner who does a lot of the business through Instagram,

01:30:05.380 I really have to try to screw it a fine line of, I am trying to get people's attention and not lose

01:30:11.900 the nuance and the context and all those things are important. And trust me, there's days where I'm like,

01:30:18.980 man, I can make so much money if I just, but that isn't how I want to live my life or leave my legacy or

01:30:24.800 anything like that. You're an interesting person because your personality on Twitter and your

01:30:30.640 personality on Instagram are quite different. And your personality in real life is totally different.

01:30:35.900 People who know you, like I know you, you almost don't recognize. Now tell me a little bit about

01:30:40.120 that. Has that been an evolution? Because I have to be honest with you, I quite envy your personality

01:30:44.660 on Twitter. I've just made a decision that I've almost always been able to uphold, which is I'm not

01:30:51.780 going to get drawn into it. I don't really even look at comments on Twitter anymore.

01:30:56.480 Post and ghost.

01:30:57.000 Post and ghost as Rogan has adequately reminded me many times. So, but I'll be honest with you,

01:31:01.900 I see enough negative ones where I just want to spank the living shit out of the person on the other

01:31:08.300 end. I mean, I want to, with words, eviscerate them. And 99.9% of the time I refrain from doing it,

01:31:17.560 but I really get a kick out of the fact that a lot of times you just spank people into the next

01:31:21.520 century. So tell me about that. Is it a conscious decision? Because it never comes across as

01:31:27.600 unhinged. It never comes across as terribly reactionary. It usually comes across as kind

01:31:32.460 of calculated. Walk me through your thinking. I think it probably was a little bit unhinged

01:31:37.140 when I first started. The internet was just in general, like on bodybuilding forums, it's like,

01:31:41.800 you're disagreeing with me. You call me a name. Well, you know, but I think my style is going to be

01:31:46.780 for everybody. Part of it, honestly, if I had to like psychoanalyze myself, probably goes back to

01:31:51.780 like me being bullied as a kid. And I almost view misinformation and people who, especially

01:31:59.920 you've probably noticed, I saved my most, the biggest amount of vitriol for people who

01:32:05.940 is very clearly have a pattern of behavior that's also being monetized. When you're like preying on

01:32:12.760 the desperation and ignorance of people, I'm going to have very little sympathy for you.

01:32:17.360 And part of that evolved too out of my coaching and seeing how many people came to me, quite frankly,

01:32:25.320 feeling broken because they tried so many of these things that were the solution and the cure. And when

01:32:31.840 it didn't work for them, they're just like, you know, something wrong with me. It's like, nothing's

01:32:35.520 wrong with you. You just, you haven't been executing on these principles that work.

01:32:38.640 I really have tried to dial it back a little bit because I think I took it too far at a certain

01:32:44.480 point, but now I just try to like use it to be funny, to get some attention. So what's funny is

01:32:50.440 like my best Instagram posts are all just screenshots of my Twitter. If you look at my, you can go to your

01:32:56.120 insights and you look at my top performing posts, it's 95% Twitter screenshots. One of my top rated

01:33:03.780 posts of all time was Mark Hyman had said something. My response was just stop making shit up. Very

01:33:11.140 like cavalier and funny. And there are some people who would absolutely would turn them off. And I get

01:33:18.280 that. But then I also speak to the people who are like, yeah, I'm tired of like stuff being overly

01:33:22.760 sanitized. And I just wish somebody would tell me how they really feel. It's funny because I've had so

01:33:27.380 many academics reach out to me behind closed doors and say, I love your Twitter. I love just watching

01:33:33.500 you break this stuff down. And the thing is, I'll say to people, it's never just me attacking the

01:33:38.980 person. I'm also providing citations or logic and data and whatnot, but I'm just trying to make it funny

01:33:45.580 and engaging. But I'll always have a conversation with somebody. Like for example, Thomas DeLauer is a

01:33:50.760 great example. So I've done several videos debunking some of the claims he made. And actually one day he

01:33:57.080 just reached out to me and said, Hey man, I want you to know that I actually really respect you.

01:34:02.420 And you've actually made me change the way I think about some of this stuff. Would you want to come

01:34:07.220 on my podcast? Yeah, man, let's do it. Because I really respect anybody who can be self-reflective

01:34:15.040 enough to go, you know what? I might've been wrong. Or just even like wanting to get a different

01:34:20.900 perspective on things. So just another great example of that. I'm actually going and speaking at a low

01:34:26.720 carb conference next year. The joke was, do I need to bring bodyguards?

01:34:30.720 That's so interesting to me. I'm not close enough to any of the dietary communities to know.

01:34:34.820 Obviously, I still get very strongly associated with a low carb ideology, which is funny given 0.93

01:34:39.440 that you see how many carbohydrates I eat. But what is the view about you and low carbohydrate diets?

01:34:45.320 Because I've never heard you say anything that is uniquely anti-low carb other than the stuff

01:34:52.040 we've already talked about on the previous podcasts.

01:34:53.880 What I always tell people is, I'm like, how could I be anti-low carb? If you go to our

01:34:58.240 nutrition coaching app, Carbon Diet Coach, two of the six settings are low carbohydrate. There's

01:35:03.360 low carbohydrate and there's ketogenic. So how could I possibly be low carb or anti-low carb?

01:35:08.980 I think that this is just an example of, I call this the Tim Tebow effect, but it's just like

01:35:15.440 polarization. So you know when Tim Tebow was playing NFL football, my hypothesis was there are very few

01:35:21.480 people in the middle about Tim Tebow. You either love him or you hate him. And the way this kind

01:35:27.020 of comes up is if you watch this guy and you're like, yeah, you know, he's not really that good.

01:35:32.200 He's got weird mechanics. He's more of a running back than he is a quarterback and he's kind of

01:35:37.440 preachy, but you know, he's all right. But then you see all these people saying he's the Heisman,

01:35:42.580 you know, he's going to the playoffs. He's better than your quarterback. Like, you know,

01:35:45.340 this, that, what are you talking about? Like his completion percentage is like 45%. How could

01:35:50.060 you say he's good? Well, then you have the other side, which people like me, I actually was kind

01:35:54.440 of a Tim Tebow fan. Cause I'm like, you know, he seems like a nice guy who works hard, maybe not

01:35:58.380 the best genetics to be a quarterback, but he's been successful. That's admirable. And then you look

01:36:03.540 over here and you see all these people going, he sucks. He's terrible. And it's like, well, he did win

01:36:08.360 a playoff game. So I think this happens with many different subjects. We were talking about this the other

01:36:14.040 day. You're a car guy. I'm not a car guy. So I've posted many times. In fact, when we bought our

01:36:20.580 new house, I'm going to take a picture of me with the car outside the house. It's going to be the

01:36:24.360 greatest picture that ever goes on my social media. Cause I've still got my grad school car,

01:36:28.440 which is a 2003 Alero. And I've just never felt the need to get rid of it. So I got this really

01:36:33.780 dinky old car with me on the hood sitting outside this wonderful big house. And sure enough,

01:36:40.860 like 1500 comments, but some of the comments were, and I was talking about how basically

01:36:46.220 saying, you know, my ability to delay gratification is what got me here. And you can do it too.

01:36:53.500 Like delaying gratification and anything is so essential for success in almost any goal.

01:36:58.660 Cause it's so crazy how in almost anything, whatever provides you short-term relief for happiness

01:37:05.780 almost always makes it worse in the longterm and vice versa. But people would say, why do you hate

01:37:12.060 people who buy nice cars? Why did I say I hate people buy nice cars? I never said that. Same

01:37:17.180 thing with low carb. My messaging has consistently been, usually there'll be some kind of insane claim.

01:37:23.940 Calories don't matter. Or, you know, you can eat as much on low carb as you want, not gain fat.

01:37:28.500 Well, here's citation, citation, citation. Low carb does not appear to be better for fat loss than

01:37:34.680 calorie protein equated diets that are not low carb, but that means choose what you prefer

01:37:41.160 because it's not worse. So by all means, if you like low carb, go right ahead. I don't enjoy low

01:37:47.940 carb, but I know many people that do. And so one of the reasons people get so tribal about this is they

01:37:54.360 find something that worked for them and they then retroactively try to find the evidence to show that

01:38:04.240 it's the best thing that there is. Which of the two landscapes, nutrition and exercise, do you think

01:38:11.000 is more culty? My impression is nutrition. Definitely nutrition. Definitely nutrition.

01:38:16.280 And do you think that that's because of the ubiquity of food in our lives and the fact that we all have

01:38:23.340 almost equally a personal relationship with food, whereas not everybody exercises the same amount?

01:38:29.920 So there's two things, especially here in America, we come from a Puritan background. And I think that

01:38:34.580 this kind of thinking that anything that is pleasurable at all must be bad for you and you

01:38:41.020 cannot have it and you should feel bad about it. So I think that causes people to get a little bit

01:38:45.560 tribal. I mean, I've had people say horrible, like moral judgments because I'll post me eating

01:38:53.280 a bag of Skittles or something like that. Nevermind the fact that I just went and trained for three

01:38:56.940 hours. I think somebody like called me a disgusting sugar addict one time. So that's one part of it.

01:39:03.560 I think it's the smaller part. I think the bigger part is what you just said. It's funny. Whenever I

01:39:08.100 meet new people, I'm always kind of hesitant, you know, if they don't know anything about me to tell

01:39:12.260 them, you know, I have a background in nutrition, PhD in nutrition, because usually one of a couple

01:39:16.380 of things happens. They either clam up real quick, we're out to dinner and they get very self-conscious

01:39:21.320 about what they're eating, which bro, I just ordered the fries like good. Or I get like blitzkrieged

01:39:27.960 with questions, but mostly people wanting me to validate what they already believe to be true.

01:39:35.540 If I sat down and I said, you know, I'm a theoretical astrophysicist. We might talk about space a

01:39:40.240 little bit, but they're probably not going to question my beliefs or my opinions on string

01:39:43.480 theory. But I think because everyone eats and everyone knows something about their body,

01:39:50.680 right or wrong, they have drawn certain conclusions about what they put in their body and what happens

01:39:57.420 to their body. I think because of that, because everybody has an opinion about nutrition, it makes

01:40:02.500 it really tough because people are already just natively have certain beliefs. And we know how

01:40:10.600 hard it is to change people's beliefs. There was a classic study. It was in politics. It was a classic

01:40:17.420 study where they showed hard data. And this was for both parties. They would either refute a preconceived

01:40:26.140 belief or support it. I can't remember what they used for Republicans, but for Democrats,

01:40:32.060 the belief was that I think George W. Bush stopped or outlawed funding for stem cell research or

01:40:39.280 something like that. The reality was he just stopped federal funding. He didn't outlaw it.

01:40:43.140 They showed people these facts. By the way, again, if I butchered that, I apologize to anyone watching,

01:40:48.480 but I think that was it. They showed people these facts and it didn't matter. If they believed that he

01:40:54.520 had outlawed it, even if they showed them the facts that he didn't, it still reinforced their

01:40:59.280 preexisting belief. It actually made their belief stronger. The same thing was true for Republicans,

01:41:03.880 by the way. So I don't think it's a Republican or Democrat problem. I think it's a people problem,

01:41:08.340 to be honest. One of the benefits I had very early on in grad school was Dr. Lehman just absolutely

01:41:18.760 dismantling so many beliefs I had, but doing it in a way that wasn't judgmental or made me feel bad.

01:41:27.760 And what I tell people now is being wrong about something is a beautiful thing because if I'm

01:41:33.820 already right about everything, then I'm already doing everything the best I can and I can't get

01:41:38.520 better. If I'm wrong about something, that's actually awesome because now I have something I

01:41:42.940 can improve on. Now I tell people, I like being right. Like I'll do cartwells in my living room

01:41:47.960 if I'm right. But if I'm wrong, I don't really take that much offense to it because it's just data.

01:41:55.360 There's no ethical judgment. And I've changed my mind about a myriad of things over the years.

01:42:00.680 I was going to ask you, what are three of the most impactful things that you have changed your

01:42:06.180 opinion on in nutrition specifically? And let's make it recent because I know for any of us,

01:42:12.580 if we go back a decade, it's an eternity in terms of our understanding of nutrition science or something

01:42:17.640 like that. But let's pick a narrower window of maybe three or four years. What would be sort of

01:42:23.100 three areas where your opinion has really changed in a manner that actually leads to either a different

01:42:30.820 behavior in you or a different coaching input to your clients? I can think of three things right

01:42:37.880 away. So first thing being LDL cholesterol. So when I got to grad school, the narrative and even out of

01:42:44.680 the lab I was in was, we don't think it's LDL. It's more the HDL to LDL ratio and the particle size and

01:42:52.140 those sorts of things. And I kept that probably until about five years ago, four years ago. And I just saw

01:42:59.120 enough of these Mendelian randomizations come out. It's like, wow, that's pretty powerful. When you

01:43:03.900 look at the mortality rate and it is like linear with the exposure, the lifetime exposure to LDL,

01:43:09.640 I'm like, can't really hold this belief anymore because it's just not supported by the data.

01:43:14.420 And it actually changed my opinion on now I'm a little bit more conscious about the saturated fat

01:43:19.860 I consume. We talked about actually started taking a low dose of a statin. I've never had super high

01:43:25.360 LDL, but I've always been around 150 to 125, even if I reduce my saturated fat, increase my fiber.

01:43:33.800 I eat probably 60, 70 grams of fiber a day. So I think people get that one twisted a little bit

01:43:40.200 because they'll hear things like, well, it doesn't consider HDL. It doesn't consider this. No,

01:43:44.780 you have to understand what an independent risk factor means. It means that all things being equal,

01:43:50.200 are you better off having higher HDL? Yeah. But HDL is more of a marker of metabolic health because

01:43:55.860 we have some drug trials and Mendelian randomizations now where they modulate HDL and it doesn't really

01:44:00.780 seem to make a difference. Whereas if you modulate LDL, so even at high HDL or low HDL in both

01:44:08.100 stratifications, lower LDL is almost always better for cardiovascular disease and mortality.

01:44:15.000 I feel like I need to do a podcast on Mendelian randomization. I write about it in my book.

01:44:19.800 It's very powerful.

01:44:20.480 And I understand why it doesn't get more attention because you do have to really get into the weeds

01:44:27.240 of genetic sorting and the statistical methods that are involved. But I actually, in the book,

01:44:33.320 write about it as one of the five pillars of evidence that we should be relying on as we formulate

01:44:38.680 insights with respect to anything that we do. So that's an interesting one. And obviously it has

01:44:43.860 a parallel piece, which is around your relationship to saturated fat.

01:44:48.360 One of the things to keep in mind is when you're looking at mortality, cardiovascular disease,

01:44:52.920 this is where nutrition science can become so limited. And the power with Mendelian randomization

01:44:57.200 is you're kind of looking at a lifetime randomized control trial. So people will point out things like

01:45:02.660 the Minnesota coronary study, and I think there was another Australian study, and they said, well,

01:45:06.140 look at this randomized control trial where they looked at high saturated fat versus low saturated fat,

01:45:11.040 and there wasn't a difference or, you know, that sort of thing. And one of the biggest problems

01:45:15.720 with those studies is they're two years, which is a really long time for a randomized control trial.

01:45:21.500 But when you're talking about a disease that is a lifetime exposure, two years in people that are

01:45:27.320 in their forties, I mean, you're just not going to have that many incidences to pick up on.

01:45:32.080 So when you're looking at Mendelian randomization, you can get around that because you're looking at

01:45:37.600 people across their lifetimes. And the way I kind of explain, and I don't consider myself a lipid

01:45:42.720 expert, but the way I try to explain like lifetime exposure risks is imagine if you and I start

01:45:49.060 investing and you get in at 8%, we both invest $10,000. You get an 8%, I get in at 6%. If we look

01:45:57.800 after a year or two, I mean, you'll have more, but it won't be statistically different. But if we look

01:46:03.080 at 40 years, you're going to have a lot more. And I don't know how much exactly, but my guess is it's

01:46:07.740 going to be magnitudes of times greater because you're, again, lifetime exposure.

01:46:12.960 Actually, I've done this exercise. It was initially in my book. I actually used this exact analysis.

01:46:18.380 Oh, really?

01:46:18.900 It was $1,000 invested at, I think I chose 6% versus 4%, or maybe it was even 6% versus 5%. It was

01:46:27.060 something that was small enough that at 5 and 10 years wasn't enormous, but at 40, 50, and 60 years

01:46:35.040 was staggering. And that was the exact point, which is the cumulative effect of compounding over a

01:46:41.960 lifetime is so nonlinear that I don't think we are capable of understanding it. Like I don't think we

01:46:48.980 can ever cognitively realize it until we literally just do the calculations and they're staring us in

01:46:54.260 the face. Again, that's one thing I changed my mind on that I have a pretty strong belief about it.

01:46:58.760 It's kind of like, well, how much evidence do you need? We still have LDL denialists out there.

01:47:03.160 I think it's one of the most dangerous things I see, actually.

01:47:05.800 You have the mechanism, the penetration of the endothelium. It's very clear that that happens.

01:47:10.140 We have the animal models that show linear dose independent effects.

01:47:14.320 You have the Mendelian randomization and you have the clinical trials in humans.

01:47:17.240 And you have the prospective cohort studies.

01:47:19.520 And then you have the genetic studies. You have the PCSK9 over and under expressors. I want to come

01:47:24.960 back to Minnesota heart study in a moment, but let's go on and hear the other two.

01:47:29.360 Supplemental branched amino acids. That's another one. I used to be a big advocate for that. In fact,

01:47:34.280 the first supplement company I had five years ago, we sold a product with branched amino acids in it.

01:47:40.140 And then my current supplement company, Outwork Nutrition, we do not have a branched amino acid

01:47:44.640 product because- And that was basically taking the three branched amino acids as an in-workout

01:47:50.260 supplement? As a post-workout recovery supplement. I still do think there may be a small benefit for

01:47:56.740 delayed onset muscle soreness with branched chains that may be outside of just regular protein,

01:48:02.220 but based on the cost and honestly, like the negative impact on taste too, because that's-

01:48:08.040 The leucine is horrible, right?

01:48:09.000 Oh, yeah. I used to spike five grams of leucine into my water during a workout. I mean,

01:48:16.700 it's the most awful tasting. Is there any other amino acid that tastes as bad as leucine?

01:48:21.280 Probably some of the sulfur-based ones, you know, cysteine or methionine. No, it's pretty bad. And

01:48:26.080 the fact, it's also non-polar, so it doesn't dissolve.

01:48:28.660 Yeah, it doesn't dissolve at all. You're shaking it constantly.

01:48:31.160 Yeah, yeah. So I was a big advocate for that. I was sponsored by a company called Salvation for years

01:48:36.460 that had a branched-chain amino acid product. Has the rest of the world caught up to that?

01:48:40.420 Or are BCAAs still a big product? They still are a big product. But most

01:48:44.540 evidence-based folks will say it's not better than protein. In fact, the research tends to suggest

01:48:50.120 whey protein is actually better than branched chains, even when you equate for the dose of

01:48:54.620 branched chains in the protein. So yeah, I just kind of got to the point where I'm like,

01:48:58.380 if I put this in the products, I'm just doing it because I'm tied to branched chains,

01:49:02.580 right? Like people are expecting this from me because my PhD was in leucine and the branched

01:49:08.220 chain amino acid and the metabolism and other effects on muscle protein synthesis.

01:49:12.120 But I couldn't hold that position anymore based on the evidence because it was just too strong.

01:49:16.260 So the other thing I changed my opinion on was intermittent fasting, at least in terms of

01:49:20.540 like your traditional 16-8. Because I used to say, well, I'm worried about the catabolic effects

01:49:26.100 of it, you know, that sort of thing. At least when combined with resistance training and sufficient

01:49:32.840 total protein, the caveat should be that they also, in these studies, they train within their

01:49:37.540 feeding window. There's some really good studies by Grant Tinsley on this. There doesn't appear to

01:49:41.740 be at least not statistically significant differences in lean mass between people who

01:49:46.640 do 16-8 intermittent fasting versus people who just eat continuously. So I used to be like

01:49:52.200 somebody like, well, really every four hours, you should be getting a protein dose, that sort of

01:49:55.980 thing. Maybe if you plot it out over 30 years, it'll make a difference on how much lean mass you

01:50:00.940 gain. So I would still say if you're somebody who is a bodybuilder and you want to absolutely squeeze

01:50:06.720 out every last ounce of muscle that you can get, I still would say like any form of intermittent

01:50:13.340 fasting probably isn't optimal. But for the average person, can you get plenty strong,

01:50:19.040 plenty big, and still do intermittent fasting? At least the 16-8, I would say absolutely.

01:50:25.320 Which is really interesting because I've kind of gone the other way from here.

01:50:28.000 Yeah, you were saying.

01:50:28.780 I used to be a big proponent and then what I was seeing clinically, so this was really just

01:50:35.820 anecdotal, but when you see it over and over and over and over again on so many patients on whom

01:50:41.780 you have DEXA data and was, we were seeing a real deterioration of body composition.

01:50:47.420 Now, were they still definitely getting enough total protein?

01:50:50.180 No, and that's my point. So what I know was happening was they were falling behind on protein.

01:50:57.420 And so the question then becomes one of efficacy versus effectiveness. In other words, the data,

01:51:04.180 which are done under controlled settings, say if I control for total protein, it can be identical.

01:51:10.900 But the effectiveness version of that is in practice, do people make that happen?

01:51:16.300 I guess what I would say is we weren't seeing it. So we still use intermittent fasting in patients

01:51:24.320 as one of the three big levers of energy restriction, but we have a big red caution

01:51:33.600 button all over it that says, if you choose this, instead of caloric restriction or dietary restriction,

01:51:40.320 if you want to choose time restriction as your lever, you're going to have to go out of your way to make

01:51:46.360 sure you are not compromising protein.

01:51:48.900 One of the things I'll tell people is I can do dogmatism over all these different disciplines,

01:51:54.320 including what I like, which is flexible dieting, but people get too hung up on the actual fasting

01:52:00.420 part of intermittent fasting. You're reducing your energy intake. It's a tool. And a lot of people,

01:52:04.400 it works great. Like they say, I'm not hungry. It didn't feel like I was dieting. Awesome.

01:52:08.960 But so people will say, well, is it going to break a fast if I have coffee? Will it break a fast if I

01:52:13.660 chew gum? Will it break a fast if I have a protein shake? And what I'll say is like, why are you

01:52:18.680 fasting? And usually if- And by the way, I'm only laughing because I'm guilty of this.

01:52:23.080 Right.

01:52:23.400 I used to really think about the details of that. And look, I think autophagy is an incredibly important

01:52:30.980 part of our ability to regenerate. I just don't think there's a chance you're getting any

01:52:37.740 meaningful amount of it in 16 hours. And therefore, to your point, we would even tell

01:52:43.360 patients now to have a protein shake outside of that feeding window. In fact, I think you and I

01:52:47.280 even spoke about that idea, which was if it's really all about energy restriction, what's an

01:52:52.500 extra 200 calories outside of your feeding window?

01:52:54.980 Exactly. And actually, if you look at some of the effects of high protein diets, they actually

01:52:58.060 are not dissimilar from some of the effects you get from fasting, at least like liver metabolism

01:53:03.960 and whatnot. So I would say to somebody, well, don't worry about breaking your fast in terms

01:53:09.380 of you're eating something. If you're worried about it, intermittently fast your carbohydrate

01:53:13.660 and fat intake and just have an extra dose of protein in the morning or essential amino

01:53:17.780 acid or whatever you want. Because now you're getting that anabolic stimulus, spreading it

01:53:22.860 out a little bit more. You're making sure you get enough total protein in during the day.

01:53:26.440 And quite honestly, I mean, this is a theory that Dr. Lehman and I had, which was breakfast

01:53:30.680 probably is the most important protein dosing of the day because you are coming off a significant

01:53:36.460 period of fasting. And then if you're extending that out, like how much longer are you extending

01:53:40.680 that out? What does that mean? You know, it's long-term.

01:53:43.000 I think I told you I've officially taken to bribing my 14-year-old daughter. There's now

01:53:47.880 real stakes on the line for her to get that minimum 30 grams of protein. 0.98

01:53:52.520 No pun intended with steak, right?

01:53:54.340 Minimum 30 grams before she goes to school in the morning. I'm like an awful father, Jim.

01:53:58.540 It's interesting how that dogmatism plays out. Like you have the same thing with low carb. People

01:54:04.360 so worried about getting any carbs. Meanwhile, they're like dumping oil on their salad, putting

01:54:10.860 butter in their coffee and eating like loads of bacon or they're being keto ice cream because

01:54:16.360 it's not spiking their blood sugar. But if you looked at the keto ice cream, it's actually

01:54:19.480 more calories than like we're missing the entire point here. And the same thing goes for like

01:54:24.740 flexible dieting. I had people who were like, they were trying to hack the system of how can I eat

01:54:29.560 as much junk food as I want?

01:54:31.420 I'm allowed 3000 calories a day. What if it's all Skittles?

01:54:34.820 So what if I do just protein shake, Skittles and peanut butter? And my point is like, listen,

01:54:41.440 if you take anything too far, it's probably a really bad idea. And one of the things I said about

01:54:45.440 flexible dieting too is like, we know fiber is really important. There are some folks who are kind

01:54:50.500 of anti-fiber now.

01:54:52.100 Oh, really? I've missed this move.

01:54:53.440 Well, the carnivore, the carnivore folks.

01:54:55.360 Ah, okay. Okay.

01:54:56.360 It's funny. Like I was in a debate one time with a carnivore advocate and you know, my research was

01:55:01.200 sponsored by the Egg Nutrition Center, the National Dairy Council and the National Cowboys Beef

01:55:06.400 Association.

01:55:07.220 If anybody should be pro-carnivore.

01:55:08.680 Yeah. And I said, the fact that I'm sitting here defending plants is actually kind of mind

01:55:15.040 blowing to me. And if anything, it should actually increase your trust in what I'm saying,

01:55:19.380 because I am a fan of high quality animal protein. I think it's-

01:55:24.780 What is the argument? Let's talk for a moment about the carnivore diet. Obviously for people

01:55:29.100 listening, it's pretty straightforward explanation. It's a diet where you only eat meat.

01:55:33.120 I've heard some versions now where people eat honey and fruits and whatnot, which I'm not sure how

01:55:37.520 that's carnivore anymore. But in any case, I would say that's a little better. But so the argument

01:55:42.560 against-

01:55:43.460 Or what's the argument in favor of that? What do they propose as the reason to do it?

01:55:46.740 The reason to do it is it's basically anecdotal. People have done this and they've seen this.

01:55:51.580 And of course, you could absolutely lose weight doing something like that.

01:55:54.840 It seems pretty easy to see how you would lose weight only through the lens of dietary,

01:55:58.700 the strict enough dietary restriction is going to ultimately reduce intake.

01:56:02.740 I mean, how much meat can you eat even if it's fatty meat? And the justification is,

01:56:06.020 I still go to the bathroom just fine. It's like, well, that's not why you should eat fiber.

01:56:10.600 I mean, yeah, it helps, but that's the last reason to eat fiber, in my opinion.

01:56:14.340 Some people have said, well, it helped clear up some autoimmune issues. That's hard to quantify.

01:56:19.440 And some people say, well, get lowered by inflammation and my GI problems. So this is

01:56:23.920 one thing a lot of people get mixed up. They'll get bloated or have GI discomfort and they equate

01:56:27.960 that with inflammation. You might have some localized inflammation, although it's probably based on what

01:56:32.540 we know about like IBS and whatnot. It's probably just like marrow sensitivity, but that's not the

01:56:38.040 same thing as like, well, I usually say is, well, did you get your CRP measured? Did you get your IL-6

01:56:42.560 measured? That's inflammation. When we talk about inflammation, that's what we're talking about.

01:56:47.220 Let's assume that all those things are true. Let's assume that I went on a carnivore diet and

01:56:51.580 my actual biomarkers of inflammation improved and my symptoms improved. I don't know what the number is,

01:56:59.400 but if you think of the average number of foods a person will eat in a given week,

01:57:03.840 different foods, let's posit that it's in the tens, maybe a hundred. If you eliminate all but

01:57:10.840 one of them, it's not a good experiment. You haven't really learned a lot. You've learned that

01:57:16.360 something in those 99 might've been the problem. That's a hard way to learn that.

01:57:21.580 So one of the things I've said that I think a lot of people are getting benefits is they're

01:57:24.640 basically doing an elimination diet. For the most part, most people don't have sensitivities

01:57:29.080 to meat. I think many people just not being in tune with their body probably have IBS,

01:57:36.500 FODMAP sensitivities, where they're fermenting a lot of fructans, oligosaccharides, you know,

01:57:41.500 those sorts of things. And that fermentation for people with IBS, even though it's a healthy thing

01:57:47.800 because bacteria getting fuel from fiber is a healthy thing. If it's causing pain,

01:57:53.460 they're equating that with being something negative, which obviously we don't want anybody

01:57:56.800 to be in pain. I still believe that there are a lot of people who have wheat sensitivities that

01:58:00.360 are not full on gluten sensitivities that don't rise to the level of celiac disease.

01:58:04.320 It's possible. So it's one of those things where they eliminate all plants and they go,

01:58:11.020 well, I feel better. Okay. Well now the next step should be,

01:58:14.660 let's start adding things back in one by one and let's figure out what's actually causing those

01:58:20.380 problems. So what I would submit to people is like, still try to include fruits and vegetables

01:58:25.660 and just slowly add them back in and see what works for you. Because I think, and this gets into

01:58:32.120 dietary protein and longevity, I think a lot of this negative perception of animal protein with

01:58:38.720 longevity and health is people who eat high amounts of animal protein. These aren't people

01:58:44.880 for the most part, they're not eating like lean cuts of sirloin and chicken breasts and whatnot.

01:58:50.960 People who are eating high meat are typically eating high amounts of processed meat and they eat less

01:58:57.680 amounts of fruits and vegetables. In fact, there's a really classic study, in my opinion,

01:59:03.640 from Maximoff in 2020, I think it was Quintal. So four different serving amounts of fruits and

01:59:10.960 vegetables and four serving amounts of meat. So lowest to highest. When you look at low vegetable

01:59:17.820 intake, there is like a linear effect of, or sorry, if you look at like going from high to low

01:59:23.680 vegetable intake, linear effect on the incidence of cancer and meat, as you go up in meat, not correcting

01:59:31.060 for fruits and vegetable intake, you have a linear effect of meat on cancer. But guess what happens

01:59:36.320 when you couple the highest quintile of meat intake with also the highest quintile of fruits and

01:59:41.320 vegetable intake? There's no effect. You have the same risk for cancer with high meat and high fruit and

01:59:49.800 vegetable intake as you do with low meat and high fruit and vegetable intake. So to me, that suggests

01:59:56.380 it's less about the meat you're eating and more about what you're eating it instead of. One of the

02:00:03.780 things to keep in mind with nutrition is when we tell people to eat more or eat less of something,

02:00:09.600 usually there's a replacement that happens. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. So to me, if we're

02:00:16.640 talking about carnivore, sure. I like high quality protein. Great. I would argue probably lean cuts are a

02:00:23.760 little bit better option, but for God's sakes, have some fruits and vegetables with it because

02:00:27.680 it's what's going to mitigate your risk. Now you said you're getting about 40 grams of fiber a day.

02:00:31.880 I'm around 60. 60. And that's total soluble and insoluble? Yeah, it's total soluble. And so what

02:00:36.680 are your sources? What's the main foods that are contributing to that? I'll do like a lot of rice

02:00:41.260 cauliflower. I'll do broccoli, some beans. I love apples. So that's kind of my go-to fruit source.

02:00:49.040 How many grams of fiber in an apple? I want to say it's like three or four grams,

02:00:52.220 maybe a little bit less than that. It's not a huge amount, but if you want something a little

02:00:56.260 bit more packed, berries, berries tend to be really fiber dense compared to something like

02:01:00.520 apples. Like a banana is a fruit, but relatively low fiber, all things considered. But even like

02:01:06.260 the higher sugar, lower fiber fruits are still relatively well associated with good health

02:01:11.560 outcomes. And then honestly, people are going to laugh and be judgmental. I love popcorn. So popcorn

02:01:17.460 actually is pretty darn high fiber. More than corn on the kernel per kernel basis?

02:01:22.560 I don't know about that. Because I feel like you could eat more corn than popcorn.

02:01:26.340 Oh yeah. So popcorn is actually very filling. That's one reason I got into eating it during

02:01:30.580 bodybuilding competitions. I would just like air pop popcorn and I'll usually like put a little bit

02:01:35.300 of cinnamon and Splenda over that. And then like a little bit of the butter spray for 50 grams of

02:01:40.560 carbohydrate from popcorn. It'll take you 20, 30 minutes to eat it. So I just found that that

02:01:44.600 helped me control my hunger. And in 50 grams of popcorn, you're getting around

02:01:49.720 six to 10 grams of fiber, depending on the specific brand you're using. I love that as a snack. Is it

02:01:55.600 as healthy as if I had some fruits and vegetables? Probably not. But as far as a snack goes, it's

02:02:00.680 pretty good and very filling. So I do that. And then like just miscellaneous sources throughout the

02:02:05.840 day. But one of the things to really look at is I was in a debate with Paul Saldino one time,

02:02:12.040 and we were talking about fiber. And one of the things he said- And he's a big carnivore advocate.

02:02:15.600 Big carnivore advocate. One of the things he said was, well, this stuff with fiber is just healthy

02:02:20.760 user bias. People who eat more fiber, they just have other health promoting behaviors. Now that's

02:02:25.840 a real thing in terms of cohort studies and cross-sectional data, observational data. It is

02:02:31.100 a real thing. But when you're dealing with something that's kind of a healthy user bias,

02:02:35.920 typically you'll see the data is not consistent. One study will say one thing. One study might have

02:02:42.920 no effect. One study might say a different thing. You see that with meat. You see that with meat

02:02:46.880 longevity. I was just looking at some meta-analysis earlier that one meta-analysis even showed that

02:02:51.240 after controlling for confounding variables that actually animal protein was not associated with

02:02:55.420 increased mortality. But- You don't see it with exercise. You don't see it with exercise.

02:03:00.000 You don't see it with the smoking studies in the opposite direction. You don't see it with fiber.

02:03:04.220 The effect on fiber, at least in terms of cardiovascular disease, cancer, it is a very

02:03:10.680 consistent effect. And it's very consistent even across all the meta-analyses I've seen.

02:03:16.020 So do we have a 10-year randomized control trial of giving people enough fiber versus not enough

02:03:21.640 fiber and seeing health outcomes? No, and we'll never have that. But do I feel very comfortable

02:03:26.280 saying that I think fiber helps reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer based on

02:03:32.440 the data we have? Oh, yeah. I feel very comfortable saying that.

02:03:36.440 What's the RDA on fiber? Is it 30 grams? Not that the RDA matters. I'm just kind of curious.

02:03:41.980 I think it's 20 to 30 grams. I'll be honest. I haven't looked at it in a while. I know they

02:03:45.020 changed the guidelines a while back too. What I tell people a good target to shoot for is like

02:03:49.420 15 grams per thousand calories. I would love to go more, but at some point it just becomes

02:03:55.460 intractable to get that much fiber at that low calories. Now, all the things that you mentioned

02:03:59.460 for fiber, you're eating real food to get it. So how do we think about it in terms of bars and

02:04:04.600 things that seem, I've heard different things about this where, you know, if you look at the

02:04:09.040 incretin effect, for example, it would suggest that the fiber that's in a processed bar is not

02:04:14.240 really contributing the way a fiber is in the way you just described it. If you're actually eating

02:04:19.380 cauliflower or beans or things like that. I try not to fall into the naturalistic fallacy. I get a

02:04:25.300 little bit cringed when I hear processed, unprocessed, because what we do to food now,

02:04:29.440 everything's processed. Processing in and of itself is not-

02:04:32.660 Processing doesn't mean bad. I just mean, and I'm really talking about this purely through the

02:04:36.000 lens of the disruption of the actual kernel and what that actually does at the GLP-1 level.

02:04:41.900 Getting back to that. Yeah. I would say that mother nature's kitchen is probably 1.00

02:04:44.980 better than a fiber bar that's like some indigestible form of glucose or some less digestible

02:04:51.200 form of a starchy carbohydrate, but is it better than nothing? It's probably better than nothing.

02:04:57.160 But if somebody says, well, I'm getting 40 grams of fiber a day and it's because they're eating

02:05:00.260 three protein bars that have 14 grams of fiber, I would argue that, well, it's probably not

02:05:04.860 equivalent to getting six to eight servings of fruits and vegetables.

02:05:08.500 Let's talk about one other macronutrient or subset of macronutrient, which is polyunsaturated

02:05:12.420 fatty acids. This is one of those things. I always tell people there's nothing in nutrition

02:05:17.260 that I'm more confused about than the role of omega-6 PUFAs. So let's go back to that

02:05:22.940 Minnesota coronary experiment that you mentioned. It's a very unique experiment, probably never to

02:05:27.680 be replicated. No, no IRB would ever approve it again.

02:05:30.320 And I'm still trying to track down Chris Ramsden, who wrote the paper that looked at all of the data

02:05:37.440 that were never published in Franz's first study. But I'll retell the study to the best of my

02:05:43.320 recollection, which is super foggy at this point. So this was a study carried out in Minnesota.

02:05:47.680 Please correct me if I'm missing any details. It was carried out in assisted living or mental

02:05:52.380 facility. And it might've been two arms. I can't remember. What makes this special then is that the

02:05:58.900 subjects in this study were fed every meal. So what makes this a really unique study is that it was

02:06:05.380 not a free living study, though it had free living duration. I want to say the average duration

02:06:10.500 was three years. Just over two, I think.

02:06:13.300 Was it? Okay.

02:06:14.120 The study was five years.

02:06:15.460 Yeah, but the feeding intervention was only two.

02:06:17.600 Well, I think because people were kind of going in and out of the facility,

02:06:20.960 the average subject duration was about two, two and a half years.

02:06:23.760 So for this period of time, every meal is being fed and there's,

02:06:28.080 patients are randomized into two groups. Isocaloric, isomacro, but at the fat level,

02:06:36.500 one group was high saturated fat. One group was low saturated fat. If I recall,

02:06:42.100 the reduction in saturated fat was not trivial. It was 30, 18.5 is a number that sticks out in my

02:06:49.400 mind and I can't remember, but- I don't remember the exact number.

02:06:51.900 It was a really big reduction in saturated fat.

02:06:53.500 It was not something that I would say, well, there just wasn't a big enough difference.

02:06:56.440 That's right. I think we can all look at it and say, wow, these guys were getting a lot of saturated

02:07:00.500 fat. These guys were getting a lot of omega-6 polyunsaturated. Was it canola?

02:07:05.260 Canola? What was the dominant form of the oil?

02:07:07.680 I don't remember that actually.

02:07:09.240 It might've been corn oil. I don't remember which one it was, which of the big four safflower,

02:07:13.780 but I think it was canola, but I could be wrong on that. We'll obviously post a link to the

02:07:17.660 original study. So the study goes on and they get all the data. Oh, what was the hypothesis that was

02:07:23.400 being tested? The hypothesis that was being tested was in this really well-designed, elegant study,

02:07:28.600 the group on the lower saturated fat arm should have had fewer cardiovascular events because this

02:07:36.580 was right at the time when the theory initially proposed by Ancel Keys in about 1961 was that

02:07:44.800 saturated fat specifically was the driver of blood lipids. And this was really the connection to the

02:07:51.700 heart, the lipid heart hypothesis. This was supposed to be kind of like the nail in the coffin for that

02:07:55.800 hypothesis in terms of cementing it as legit. That's correct. So the idea was this group on

02:08:00.360 the higher saturated fat, they would have more heart attacks and you couldn't argue these data.

02:08:04.800 This was really clear. You've also had a high power to this study because it was very large.

02:08:10.320 It was like 500 something people.

02:08:11.700 Oh, I think it was more.

02:08:12.600 Was it more?

02:08:12.780 Oh yeah. Yeah. I think it was a stag. I was amazed at how big the number was.

02:08:17.540 And they were old, which meant you were going to see events. You couldn't do a two-year study

02:08:22.660 and 40-year-olds. You see no events in anybody. So I had all these things going for it. 1973,

02:08:28.120 the results come out. There's no difference. The study goes unpublished. It's not published until

02:08:33.500 1989. 16 years later, Franz publishes it. When asked why, he said quite plainly, we didn't like

02:08:41.480 the way it turned out. Now, a guy named Chris Ramsden, who I believe is still at the NIH, though,

02:08:46.100 if you're listening to this and anybody knows him, please tell him I've been trying to reach him for

02:08:49.300 the past two years unsuccessfully, won't return any emails. He comes along maybe five years ago and

02:08:56.440 finds a whole bunch of unpublished data and republishes, I think, one if not two studies in

02:09:03.640 the BMJ. Before we get to what Ramsden's findings are, my interpretation of the study that I just

02:09:12.200 described, my initial representation or my initial interpretation of that 10 years ago was saturated

02:09:18.320 fats not causing heart disease. 10 years later, my interpretation was that study wasn't long enough

02:09:23.900 to see a difference. At the time, they did measure total cholesterol levels. They didn't fractionate

02:09:28.500 cholesterol at the time, so they couldn't measure LDL or HDL or anything like that. But there was about

02:09:32.880 a 30 milligram per deciliter reduction in total cholesterol on the low saturated fat group, which

02:09:40.080 again, now you have a biomarker that tells you this intervention worked. And the majority of that 30

02:09:45.260 milligrams per deciliter was probably LDL cholesterol. Could they have measured it?

02:09:49.480 So then my interpretation turned into two years of an intervention wasn't long enough. If you took a

02:09:54.480 bunch of people and put them on a statin for two years, you probably wouldn't see a difference. You

02:09:59.500 could miss a difference. Now, the PCSK9 trials suggested otherwise. It was really interesting. The

02:10:03.960 Odyssey and Fourier trials in 2015, which were testing the most potent lipid-lowering drugs available,

02:10:10.000 actually did show a benefit in about two and a half to three years. But they were crushing LDL.

02:10:17.240 So again, it's an area under the curve problem. This one was reducing it, but not crushing it.

02:10:22.460 That's sort of where I left it.

02:10:23.460 I think it's important to point out too that the modifications that you can make to cholesterol from

02:10:28.080 diet in some cases can be quite small compared to what you can get pharmaceutical interventions.

02:10:34.180 That's right. Outside of the most extreme, I'm sure if somebody went onto a

02:10:39.060 zero-saturated fat, 12% total fat, calorie-restricted diet, they could probably cut their

02:10:45.080 cholesterol in half, but they'd be doing a whole bunch of harm, I would argue, along the way.

02:10:49.500 In the other direction, you do have some people like in the low-carb community who are

02:10:53.180 bragging about LDL cholesterol levels in the 500s.

02:10:56.260 Well, that's what I was going to say. You can do the opposite much more. It's an unbounded problem

02:10:59.780 above. It's obviously a bounded problem below. Ramsden's data suggest that actually the people in the

02:11:06.440 PUFA group had worse outcomes. Now, that really kind of throws me for a loop, and that's frankly

02:11:11.040 why I kind of want to have him on the podcast, because his data suggests that at least this

02:11:15.760 particular PUFA had a negative cardiovascular effect. Now, to me, that study is probably,

02:11:24.160 if the details of that study are consistent, that would be the most damning evidence against

02:11:32.300 N6 PUFAs in terms of lowering lipids but raising events. And by the way, there is a precedent for

02:11:39.840 that. There was a drug that was approved in the 1960s that actually lowered cholesterol but

02:11:45.020 increased cardiovascular events. That drug was withdrawn. This was back in the day.

02:11:48.920 Do you know what the mechanism was for that?

02:11:50.400 I can speculate. I actually recently discussed this on a podcast. The mechanism that it's believed

02:11:55.940 that this drug worked is it prevented the conversion of desmostrol to cholesterol. That's the final step

02:12:03.280 of cholesterol synthesis in one of the two pathways. And so when you gave people this drug, and the name

02:12:09.020 always escapes me, Triamitrol or something like that, when you gave people this drug, their cholesterol

02:12:15.120 went down significantly. And the drug was approved on the basis of cholesterol lowering, not on the basis

02:12:20.480 of outcomes. Today, cholesterol drugs are only approved on the basis of outcomes as well. But

02:12:25.480 then it had to be pulled from the market because you saw the events. So I don't think they ever

02:12:28.560 investigated it. But I think today we look back and we think that desmostrol acted perhaps as bad,

02:12:35.500 if not worse, than cholesterol in terms of the oxidative process. So you basically lowered cholesterol,

02:12:40.600 but the precursor went through the roof and the precursor was at least as bad, if not more damaging.

02:12:45.200 Interesting.

02:12:46.000 That's the suspicion. The point only being there is there was a precedent for you can lower cholesterol,

02:12:50.380 and worse in events. And so Ramsden proposes a series of mechanisms by which that might be the

02:12:56.820 case with at least this polyunsaturated fat. Conversely, there is a lot of epidemiology that

02:13:04.620 says the opposite, that polyunsaturated fats, whenever you substitute saturated for polyunsaturated,

02:13:10.200 things get better. Nobody's disputing MUFA over here. The data seem unambiguously clear that MUFA is the

02:13:15.940 best of the three fats, both epidemiologically and experimentally. How do you think about

02:13:20.940 the breakdown? Not the breakdown, but what I mean is the distribution of how one should think about

02:13:25.580 distributing their fats. I actually have seen some epidemiology that showed that

02:13:29.800 PUFAs were actually lowering events more. That's what I'm saying. The PUFA data look like

02:13:34.200 it's more favorable than the SFA.

02:13:36.320 Well, even then monounsaturated too. I've seen some of that as well. But again, you're dealing

02:13:41.300 with cohort data and whatnot, and we all know the limitations there. As far as the Minnesota

02:13:45.440 coronary study, it's probably going to sound like a cop out, but I've really gotten to the point

02:13:50.600 after seeing just so many random events and studies where I go, I don't know what one study means,

02:13:55.760 no matter how well done it is. Now, I have seen studies that were so compelling

02:14:01.220 that I swayed my opinion a little bit, but it was usually because there was also other contextual

02:14:08.400 data that made sense. The way this one came about, it's like, we don't really know how to

02:14:14.260 reconcile this. Because even if you look at some of these omega-6 fats, and I think one of the big

02:14:20.180 mechanisms that's been proposed is, well, they're going to increase inflammation because those double

02:14:24.260 bonds can be oxidized, that oxidation causes inflammation. But if we look at the hard outcome data

02:14:29.500 and randomized controlled trials where they give like linoleic acid or alpha-linoleic acid or

02:14:34.120 whatever, you just don't see inflammation go up if they're not increasing total calories.

02:14:39.040 In fact, you usually, especially if you're replacing it for saturated fat, sometimes you see inflammation

02:14:43.800 go down. So this is one of those things where I go, I don't really know what it means. And I think-

02:14:49.800 So I don't feel bad now saying, I just have no clue on this one.

02:14:52.700 I think it's one of those things where it's, you kind of have to look at the weight of the evidence

02:14:56.880 and then couple that with some of the mechanistic evidence and look at the human outcome mechanisms

02:15:03.480 we can see, which is, okay, maybe we can't do a two-year randomized control trial, but 12 weeks

02:15:09.740 is enough time to see differences in inflammation if something's going to cause a difference in

02:15:12.900 inflammation. So we can look at that. I don't know if that was his main mechanism that he proposed

02:15:18.440 for how it was occurring.

02:15:19.540 It was absolutely one of them. God, it's been so long since I looked at his bigger BMJ paper.

02:15:25.260 We'll attach to the paper in the show notes so people can kind of go through it. If I recall,

02:15:29.440 I can almost picture it. There's a figure that kind of nicely walks through what the proposed

02:15:33.480 mechanisms are.

02:15:35.220 The other thing to consider is we just talked about how when you suggest cutting something out,

02:15:39.640 you replace it with other things. And I think in the last 20 or 30 years, the biggest contribution

02:15:46.280 to added calories in the diet is actually added oils. On a per calorie basis, the big demon right

02:15:53.340 now is seed oils. I haven't even done a post about it yet because the anti-seed oil crowd is just so

02:15:58.400 vitriolic and so nuts that I'm like, all right, when do I want to wade into this conversation?

02:16:04.480 And tell me about this crowd. This particular sect is of which religion?

02:16:09.000 They're definitely more towards the low-carb carnivore. There's a lot of people in the low-carb

02:16:13.900 community who've tried to abdicate saturated fat. It's not bad or it's innocuous, you know,

02:16:19.580 that sort of, or even it's healthy because if you look at elderly people, people who have higher 0.97

02:16:24.060 LDL cholesterol live longer and it's like, well, that's because they're probably actually getting

02:16:28.340 in enough food. And when you're elderly, it becomes a wasting problem and not an obesity

02:16:33.660 problem, but that's a separate conversation. I think a lot of it stemmed from, okay, we want to

02:16:38.260 make saturated fat a good guy. So somebody has to be the bad guy. So it's been seed oils. It's very,

02:16:45.180 very powerful belief that some people hold on this. And again, if you just look at top level

02:16:51.060 stuff, it fits a pretty good story, which is we never ate these seed oils 120 years ago. They

02:16:58.000 represented this much of our total fat calories. Today, they're this much of our fat calories and

02:17:03.720 look at all the things that are wrong with the world today. It's got that kind of top level story,

02:17:08.580 which I think a lot of things do. Sugar has the same thing. Like we ate this much sugar in 1900.

02:17:13.640 We ate this much sugar in the year 2000. Look what got worse. So it's important to understand,

02:17:18.880 I guess, how, I mean, I've certainly fallen for that. I've looked at that and gone, yeah,

02:17:24.160 that's got to be the seed oils. It's got to be the sugar. It's got to be that. It's got to be,

02:17:27.000 it's really easy to make a boogeyman. I think when you look through the data

02:17:31.300 and try to be unbiased about it, what you see is like the continuous boogeyman is just energy

02:17:36.640 toxicity. What you're dealing with is just extra energy because people will say, well,

02:17:41.560 we did the food guide pyramid and people did it and everybody got sicker. People kind of did it.

02:17:48.560 They didn't really do it because the food guide pyramid also said exercise and reduce your calorie

02:17:53.560 consumption. They added in more carbohydrates, but they really didn't decrease their fat intake either.

02:17:59.440 And so, yeah, as we added more calories, we had more of these problems.

02:18:04.040 I'd really love to know, because unfortunately we only have food availability and waste data.

02:18:08.880 So we have to use food availability and waste to take a delta to estimate what's happening. And

02:18:14.000 personally, I always found that to be difficult. The other thing I find impossible is to estimate

02:18:18.400 what I eat. I want to actually ask you about how you do it, because I think you're much more dialed

02:18:22.680 into this. If I could tell you at the end of a day within a thousand calories, not a thousand,

02:18:27.760 I could probably do it within a thousand. There's no way I could tell you within a day,

02:18:31.300 500 calories within what I've done. It's just not possible. I can't personally do it. I don't

02:18:35.340 have that infrastructure. So I really believe that we've probably underestimated in the low-fat craze

02:18:42.940 how much fat didn't go down and how much low-fat stuff did go up.

02:18:48.880 Well, think about going to a restaurant. And if you've ever been to a restaurant where they,

02:18:53.580 like go to the Cheesecake Factory, you look at the calories on the dishes, you're like,

02:18:56.680 how do you get that much in there? Well, carbs contribute to that, but the way you densify food

02:19:02.820 is with fat. Fat is what will take something from a 500-calorie dish to a 1,500-calorie dish.

02:19:09.300 So when it comes to estimations... Yeah, last night we were out and you were eating ad lib,

02:19:17.600 but I know in your head the wheels were kind of telling you, like, at some point I think I even

02:19:22.480 asked you and you made some comment, I got about 600 more to go. Is that literally just repetitions,

02:19:27.620 like you've done enough food logging in your life? You can look at a brownie and you can look at a

02:19:31.900 sandwich and you just sort of know what you're getting? I'll tell people. For some people,

02:19:36.200 like, that's not a sustainable way to live, to just keep a running track in their head or whatnot.

02:19:40.680 Let me back up just a little bit higher level view. If you want to lose fat or control body weight,

02:19:45.740 you have to practice some form of restriction. Now, you can pick the form of restriction you want.

02:19:49.680 For me, the easiest thing for me is to be able to eat what I want within reason.

02:19:57.220 What you want, when you want, but just control the amount.

02:19:59.700 Like, bingo. So if you do that, you're going to have to track calories or macros or whatever it is.

02:20:03.680 Or you can restrict time, or you can restrict a certain macronutrient group, or I'm just going

02:20:09.140 to eat minimally processed food. So there's some form of restriction you have to do. Now, what's

02:20:13.860 interesting is none of these forms of restriction seem to emerge as being better than another in

02:20:20.140 terms of adherence across a population level. So it really does boil down to the individual.

02:20:25.420 So I always say, you have to practice some form of restriction, but choose the form of

02:20:30.160 restriction that feels the least restrictive for you. So for me, that's just been tracking

02:20:34.220 macros.

02:20:35.700 Did you play much with the others?

02:20:37.860 A little bit, like clean eating back in the early 2000s, which was, you know,

02:20:41.320 minimally processed foods and high fiber and whatnot. And I actually found that I wouldn't say I developed

02:20:46.120 binge eating disorder, but I did start kind of binge eating. If you look at the psychology of binge

02:20:51.240 eating, it's really interesting. We had Professor Jake Lenarden on our podcast a while back. His

02:20:55.160 expertise is in eating disorders. And he said, really, there's two things that are kind of essential

02:21:02.480 for an eating disorder to emerge. The first is some sort of poor body image perception. That's kind of

02:21:09.240 a prerequisite. The second is hard food rules. So when you create hard food rules, it just does a weird

02:21:16.780 thing in your mind.

02:21:17.980 I'm sorry. Are both of those necessary or sufficient? Or are they necessary and sufficient?

02:21:23.580 Both of those seem to predict. When you look at the vast majority of people, I don't want to say

02:21:28.260 every single person, but when we look at the vast majority of people who develop eating disorders,

02:21:32.480 those are two things that are common. So what I found was that-

02:21:36.980 And sorry for my ignorance, is binge eating defined as, because that obviously doesn't involve

02:21:42.340 purging necessarily.

02:21:43.620 Right, correct.

02:21:43.960 Binging just means overeating.

02:21:46.780 How do we technically define binging?

02:21:48.540 I actually don't know the criteria from what Dr. Lenarden said. It's kind of like

02:21:54.980 periods of really intense food consumption followed by a lot of guilt, like feeling guilty,

02:22:02.920 and with or without compensatory mechanisms. Because sometimes people exercise in response

02:22:06.940 and people will throw up in response.

02:22:08.220 Or deprivation would be another compensatory mechanism.

02:22:10.680 Correct, correct. And usually you're not talking about, oh yeah, I had an extra cookie.

02:22:13.960 You're talking about like, you ate the whole box of Oreos or whatever it is.

02:22:17.960 I'm guessing, but it would probably be on the magnitude of over a thousand calories at

02:22:21.860 sitting unintended. And the other thing is, it can be tied to stress as well. That's another part of

02:22:27.120 it. But for me, I found that I would just kind of go, you know, the bodybuilding magazine said,

02:22:31.860 I couldn't have sugar, can't have this, can't have that. The rules for what was clean seemed to be

02:22:36.660 very arbitrary. But I was young and I didn't know any better. No. So I'm like, okay, well,

02:22:41.240 I won't have these quote unquote bad foods. And the weirdest thing started happening. I actually

02:22:47.380 started eating more of them because when I would get-

02:22:49.880 More of the things you weren't supposed to?

02:22:51.120 Right. Because when I get exposed to it, I wasn't able to moderate it because it was like,

02:22:56.600 I'm in college, buddies bring home a pizza to the apartment. Hey, Lane, you want some?

02:22:59.640 Sure. Or I would try to avoid and it would feel so bad that I'm trying to avoid. But the outcome

02:23:06.920 was the same, which was I would just end up eating way more than I had intended to, or even

02:23:11.500 felt hungry for. But it was like this mindset of, well, this is bad. I'm not going to eat this again.

02:23:18.460 This is my last time eating this because I'm going to be really serious after this. So since

02:23:22.840 I've already broken the seal, might as well just go all the way. I just kept going through this.

02:23:27.260 Finally, I was kind of like, this seems to be really ineffective towards my goals. I wonder

02:23:32.540 if it's the fact that I have pizza or the fact that I'm eating like an entire large pizza to

02:23:37.340 myself, that's the problem. So at that point I was kind of like, well, let's just try this whole

02:23:42.000 portion control thing and see if this works. And funny enough, I was able to modulate my body

02:23:46.260 composition by eating foods I still enjoyed, but controlling portion size. And it was really

02:23:51.880 interesting. I was supposed to debate, this is like seven, eight years ago. I was going to debate

02:23:56.060 a bodybuilding coach at a seminar about clean eating versus flexible dieting, which is what

02:24:02.980 I practice, which is tracking my macros and kind of treating it like a budget.

02:24:07.660 And my opening argument, he ended up bowing out of the debate, but my opening argument was I had

02:24:13.000 gone to his Facebook and looked at his cheat meals and had estimated the calories in his cheat meals

02:24:18.360 in terms of a per week basis. And then put up what my calories were from junk food on a per week

02:24:24.900 basis and was going to show that his was actually higher because in the concentrated amount he was

02:24:29.760 taking in, he was actually taking in more calories from those foods. And so my point was going to be,

02:24:33.860 so you're telling me it's really bad to have a cookie, but if I binge on it, it's okay. As long

02:24:40.360 as I don't have it the rest of the week, because that seems like a really odd metric.

02:24:43.540 My guess is that everyone, if we exposed everyone to all three different forms of restriction,

02:24:49.000 you would have a rank order for any person of what's most effective, both biochemically and

02:24:55.100 also psychologically. It's a min-max, you'd have to find an optimization. What fraction of the

02:25:00.440 population do you think will do best, meaning they'll have the best physical response, and also

02:25:06.780 just psychologically will have the best response to caloric restriction as a tool or flexible dieting?

02:25:12.980 And I say this knowing there's no data, but asking you to think about clients and what

02:25:16.540 percentage. Part of it is some people will be resistant at first and then actually really

02:25:21.360 enjoy it later, which I'm sure you've seen that with fasting as well, or low carb, those sorts of

02:25:26.120 things. But it really just boils down to how willing is somebody to make this part of their

02:25:30.260 lifestyle? All of them have downsides. If you're on a ketogenic diet and you're going out, there's a

02:25:35.680 lot you can't eat, but you can usually make do most places. Might get some funny looks from your

02:25:40.120 friends and family, but you know, whatever. Time-restricted feeding? Hey, you want to go

02:25:44.220 out and join us for breakfast? I can't. I'll sit and I'll drink some water. There's downsides. With

02:25:49.200 flexible dieting, the downside is I've got to account for it. We know the data on reporting for

02:25:54.880 food. People under-report by like 50%, and it's pretty consistent in the studies. And people really

02:26:02.000 take that as like an affront. So I'm not a liar. I don't think that people are lying. I think people

02:26:06.960 are just really horrible estimators of what they eat. If you ever want to be depressed,

02:26:11.020 go weigh out a serving of cereal or weigh out a serving of ice cream or a serving of peanut butter.

02:26:16.960 People, when they do these food recalls, a serving of ice cream is not a bowl of ice cream. A bowl

02:26:23.100 of ice cream is probably three times more than a serving in terms of what people are actually taking

02:26:27.600 in. So it makes total sense as to why people underestimate their energy intake. And one of the

02:26:33.900 things I'll say is even if you don't land on flexible dieting as the tool that you want to use,

02:26:39.940 tracking and weighing every single thing you put in your mouth for a week is an incredibly valuable

02:26:46.280 tool because it will teach you about portion control. And actually, you'll learn more about

02:26:50.140 nutrition in that week than probably doing anything else, to be honest. Now, a lot of people don't

02:26:54.040 want to do it because it's the same reason a lot of people don't want to keep a budget for their

02:26:57.420 money because they don't want to know where it's going because then it's kind of like, here's the

02:27:01.440 mirror and you have to look at yourself and say, oh, where have I been spending my money? Oh,

02:27:05.660 I spent $500 on Uber Eats last month, whatever it is. But then with macro tracking, again, it's very

02:27:12.200 much, oh man, I have had this so many times. People say, I'm eating 1500 calories a day and can't lose

02:27:19.700 weight. It's hard to believe you can't lose weight on 1500 calories. There was a metabolic ward study

02:27:25.160 where they put people on 1500 calories. And there was actually one person who gained just a tiny

02:27:30.200 amount of weight over like, I can't remember the time period, but the vast majority lost weight.

02:27:35.200 I wonder what was going on with that one person, endocrine issue or something like that.

02:27:38.820 I think the point that I would make is that I do think it's useful for people to try tracking for a while.

02:27:46.940 Our app is different than a calorie tracking app because it actually gives you macros to eat based on your

02:27:54.040 dietary preference and your goals. It will adjust them based on how you're progressing. So it's not just a

02:27:58.200 one and done calculation. And a lot of people love that, but they also, people who've never tracked

02:28:02.720 before go, oh my God, I didn't know what I was eating. It has a barcode scanner and all that kind of stuff.

02:28:07.120 So it's much easier. Like when I first started doing this, it was me going to the grocery store with the

02:28:11.900 complete book of food counts and going, okay, where is it? Okay, there it is. But now after having done this

02:28:18.420 sort of stuff for 20 years, like last night, picking up that brownie, I know what- 0.98

02:28:23.140 Yeah. What's the calculation? How did you do the calculation?

02:28:24.740 I don't know what particular brownie that is. And I don't know how they made it or anything like 1.00

02:28:27.800 that. But it's likely that the calorie density is going to be similar to other brownies. 0.95

02:28:32.280 The carb fat ratio might be a little bit different, but the calorie density is probably going to be

02:28:35.880 pretty similar. So I really just try to think about what do I think this weighs? And so last time I was

02:28:41.240 kind of like, it's a little bit denser than normal brownie. I put it about 40 grams. And so I put that in.

02:28:47.600 But hang on, you didn't put it into an app, did you?

02:28:49.720 Oh yeah.

02:28:50.100 Well, you did.

02:28:50.620 I just put it in my app, but I just pulled up some random brownie from Sara Lee or whatever.

02:28:54.920 Okay. I feel a bit better now. I literally thought you were doing this in your head the

02:28:57.640 whole time.

02:28:58.280 Oh, no, no, no, no.

02:28:59.220 God, how is he doing that?

02:29:02.120 The apps now make it much easier.

02:29:04.340 But then the night before when we were out at dinner two nights ago,

02:29:07.040 I didn't see you putting anything in the app.

02:29:08.520 I did it after.

02:29:09.600 But how? How did you remember what we ate? And how would you, like the bone marrow and all that

02:29:14.000 crazy stuff we were eating, how are you estimating all that stuff?

02:29:17.120 So there was an entry for bone marrow that I found. Now, again, the point that I think I'll make is

02:29:22.200 it's very likely that some of these are inaccurate. It's going to be more accurate

02:29:27.800 than just going, well, I have no idea, so I'm not going to worry about it.

02:29:31.940 Do you think that the act of tracking it is what's putting a governor on it? In other words,

02:29:36.540 do you think the fact that you had to enter 40 grams of brownie is what prevented you from having

02:29:40.360 three?

02:29:41.160 At this point, no. But for some people, absolutely. This is one of the most basic laws of science.

02:29:46.040 When you monitor something, it changes. So I've done this so many times with people who have

02:29:52.220 said the following, you know, like I'm eating 1500 calories, can't lose fat. And I've said,

02:29:56.400 listen, I don't expect you to do this forever, but for one week, just one week, everything you put in

02:30:01.460 your mouth, weigh it on a scale and track it. And then come back to me and let's talk.

02:30:05.300 One of two things happen. They go, oh my God, I was actually eating 2800 calories. I go, well,

02:30:11.260 welcome to freedom because now you know that you're not broken. You're actually like,

02:30:14.740 you can modify. Or the other thing happens. They actually eat the amount of calories they said

02:30:18.720 they were eating and they lose three pounds.

02:30:20.440 And they're starving.

02:30:21.440 Exactly. So it's what monitored is what gets changed. And we know that right down on a particle

02:30:27.760 basis, if you monitor it, it changes its behavior. So when you get people to monitor things,

02:30:35.320 they change their behavior. It's like if somebody is like, oh, we're going to do Lane's budget for the

02:30:40.140 month and we're going to put it on YouTube as a video or something. All of a sudden we're like,

02:30:44.280 I want to spend money on this. It's not going to look good. You know, like when we monitor things,

02:30:48.700 it changes, but we know that about behavior and we can use that to our advantage. So if I was getting

02:30:53.040 ready for a bodybuilding show, for example, I would have to change how I do things. I couldn't just go

02:30:58.720 out and just kind of guesstimate like that. I would have to get much more granular. Now the sacrifice

02:31:03.420 might be, okay, maybe I'll still go out to eat, but I'm going to have to take all the ingredients,

02:31:09.320 put them on my scale and then track it, which sucks. But if that's what you're doing,

02:31:15.180 that's what you're doing. That's the price you have to pay to get that good.

02:31:17.880 The other sacrifice that if I want to do a bodybuilding show is, okay, I can't go out

02:31:21.160 with my friends anymore. Or at least in the final.

02:31:23.360 Yeah. And I would say like in the last four weeks, I'm pretty much a hermit.

02:31:26.380 All these different forms of restriction are just tools, but I do think having that accounting,

02:31:31.920 looking through what you're actually having is really educational for a lot of folks.

02:31:37.780 And I would say to people who are listening or who are watching and have never done it,

02:31:42.520 try to do it without judgment towards yourself. Really without judgment, just be curious and say,

02:31:49.000 I wonder what this is. And I think what you'll find is if you just enter it with that genuine

02:31:55.620 curiosity, you'll find some things out that will be really helpful for you. And you'll also learn

02:32:01.680 so much about portion sizes that you'll go, whoa, I didn't realize that restaurants serve such

02:32:07.180 massive portion sizes. It's going to sound bad, but I can't tell you how many times I've been

02:32:11.160 eating something and go, yeah, I'm good. I don't need any more.

02:32:14.360 And are you still hungry when you push it away?

02:32:16.320 You know, being in tune with your hunger signals plus some bit of monitoring is helpful.

02:32:21.900 The one other thing I'll say is being in tune with hunger signals is great,

02:32:25.380 but that's also hard when you're eating processed food, energy dense, hyper palatable food.

02:32:29.580 You know, previously based on our hunger signals, we could auto-regulate what we ate

02:32:34.400 because we're in a situation where food wasn't energy dense enough. You would have to become

02:32:39.800 uncomfortable.

02:32:41.340 Just based on the volume.

02:32:42.380 Just based on the volume of food you were eating. And even like up until the 1950s,

02:32:46.100 we had hyper-processed food, whatever, but you had to walk down to the bakery to get it.

02:32:50.940 You didn't have it in really nice available packaging.

02:32:53.580 And I still think the serving sizes were a lot smaller.

02:32:55.740 Oh yeah. If you look at dinner plates from like the early 1900s, they're like this.

02:33:00.240 And then they're like this. And now you've got dinner plates that are just massive.

02:33:02.740 I think anybody listening to this who's been to Europe will recognize this,

02:33:05.800 but it never ceases to amaze me. No matter how many times I go to Italy or something like that,

02:33:11.180 I can't get over how small the portions are. And it's really wonderful because I'm just a glutton.

02:33:17.720 I think it's part of it is like you grow up as an immigrant kid, you eat what's on your plate.

02:33:22.220 We do not throw out food in this house. And how many times do I get that lecture about those kids

02:33:28.020 in Africa that don't have anything? And it's like, you're going to sit here until you eat that 0.99

02:33:32.840 thing on your plate. And it wasn't like I was being forced to eat bad food. It was liver and

02:33:36.620 spinach and stuff I hated, but the clean plate was just a part of your mindset.

02:33:41.740 Same. Grew up in a lower middle-class family. And so it was very much like we don't waste food in

02:33:45.140 this house. I think there's still a little bit of the, you know, I was joking about it yesterday.

02:33:49.340 Like I eat off my kids' plates now. It's like, what? You're not throwing that out. Give me that.

02:33:54.400 Do you think you'll do another bodybuilding show? Do you plan to do that anymore?

02:33:57.840 Right now, I consider myself on a long off season. Right now, there's just so many things going on

02:34:02.380 business-wise. And I'm kind of in a place where I'm very grateful for that. And I want to get it

02:34:09.880 while I can get it. And hopefully we can get to the point where we're working because we want to work,

02:34:14.800 not because we feel like we have to work. I mean, that's kind of the dream. I love what I do.

02:34:18.280 I don't see myself ever retiring, retiring, but it would be nice to be able to have a little more

02:34:24.320 freedom to go and do the things that I really am super passionate about doing and not having to

02:34:28.720 worry about doing some of the more granular stuff. So bodybuilding, getting ready for a show would 0.62

02:34:33.020 take a significant amount of energy and time. So, and powerlifting already does that. It's just that

02:34:37.200 I can do that without the brain fog and the mood swings and all that kind of stuff. If you look at

02:34:42.000 case studies of bodybuilders by the time they're at show, literally every single case study on natural

02:34:48.860 bodybuilders shows that they're hypogonadal by the time they hit stage. And I'm somebody like my

02:34:53.120 testosterone. I've had it measured probably a half dozen times in the last five years.

02:34:58.060 The lowest it's ever been is 900. And the highest it's been, I think I hit almost 1100. People will

02:35:04.620 say, well, see, he's not drug free or whatever, but I would tell you my LH is normal and my FSH is

02:35:09.200 normal and all that kind of stuff. But when I was competing in bodybuilding, it was under 300 when

02:35:14.520 I was that close to a show. Think about the hungriest you've ever been in your life. And now imagine

02:35:20.220 that feeling doesn't leave you for weeks and the lowest energy. What's the absolute nadir of calories

02:35:26.900 you're consuming at the lowest? So the lowest I've ever been at this level of lean mass was 1900.

02:35:34.760 How many grams of protein are in that 1900?

02:35:36.780 200. 260 grams of protein. So I was like around 100 or under 100 grams of carbohydrate a day and

02:35:41.740 30, 40 grams of fat, if I recall correctly. What does that look like practically? What's the actual

02:35:46.620 foods you're eating? Egg whites, chicken breast, some Greek yogurt, fat-free Greek yogurt. You have

02:35:53.460 to be very careful with your fats when you're that low calorie. Meaning you have to be careful you

02:35:57.220 don't go too low on the fats? That's part of it. At a certain point, you know, the idea is,

02:36:01.260 well, keep your fats high enough and your hormones. Well, at a certain point you're like, all right,

02:36:04.080 yeah, I'd like to have my hormones there, but I also need to get lean enough.

02:36:06.600 Meaning be careful that too much fat isn't sneaking in.

02:36:08.720 Oh, yeah. I mean, just eating something that's like seven grams of fat, which by all

02:36:13.500 counts is a low fat item. I had to be careful about that because it could just sneak up very

02:36:18.340 quickly. You can't have nuts or something like that.

02:36:20.580 Oh, no, no, no, no. So the low energy too, I can literally remember being on my couch. I was

02:36:29.760 probably three weeks out from a show. I had just gotten done training, sitting on my couch and the

02:36:36.260 remote control was probably, I just like sat down, like literally like plopped down. Remote control

02:36:42.180 was probably, you know, five feet away. And the real housewives of some county was playing. I

02:36:49.100 abhor that show. And I sat and watched the entire show because I was not willing to get up to go get

02:36:56.580 that remote because I was that exhausted. And how many weeks in to that degree of caloric restriction

02:37:02.020 do you think you were at that point? That was like 20 weeks in, not at 1900 calories. My calories

02:37:06.960 had progressively come down. Really, it's mostly a body fat issue. I've had clients who were able to

02:37:14.240 eat higher calories and get really lean. At a certain point of body fat level, it just doesn't

02:37:20.560 matter. If you're that lean and your leptin is that low, your testosterone is that low. Eric Helms

02:37:27.780 describes contest prep as like you're circling a drain and you're just trying to delay going down

02:37:33.560 the drain as long as possible, but eventually you go down the drain. So how do you get the energy to

02:37:38.780 get on stage? Is that basically one big push of carbs shortly enough before you go on stage that

02:37:45.520 it's not going to show up in your physique? I will say like there are spurts where you feel okay

02:37:50.340 when you're in those dregs of contest prep. I'll also say that for me to get from like say 15% on

02:37:56.100 calipers to 7% on calipers, it's not difficult at all. In fact, I had gone up a weight class in

02:38:01.240 powerlifting a few years ago and then came back down and it was about a 30 pound weight drop.

02:38:05.500 So 15 to 7, easy from seven to, and I think the lowest I ever calipered was 2%. And to everybody

02:38:12.120 watching, no, I don't think I was 2%. Probably more like five or six, but to go from seven to three

02:38:17.760 or two, which is an absolute lower amount of fat loss was infinitely more difficult. The best way to

02:38:26.300 describe it is like you get a fresh roll of toothpaste to get out some toothpaste, very easy.

02:38:30.720 Then as that toothpaste tube gets emptier and emptier, how much effort do you have to put in

02:38:37.060 to just squeeze out that last little bit of toothpaste? It's magnitudes higher than at the

02:38:41.560 beginning. And contest prep is very much like that. But you do have times where you have energy.

02:38:47.460 Yeah, because you still have to train two or three hours a day.

02:38:49.100 Right. And trust me, like that is actually the part I despise the most of contest prep is at a

02:38:54.360 certain point, I just don't like training anymore. I'm just doing it for energy expenditure and

02:38:58.360 retaining a muscle. I'm not doing it because I'm passionate about training. And I'm somebody who

02:39:02.740 I love to train. It's like my favorite thing in the world, but there will be times we go and you

02:39:08.120 have a little bit better workouts. I did periodize my nutrition. So I would have some higher calorie days

02:39:13.500 on days that were more demanding for training, usually like lower body training days.

02:39:18.100 As far as like getting on stage. Well, one thing is I never cut water for bodybuilding shows.

02:39:23.960 A lot of people do that. I think it's silly because think about a muscle is 70% water and

02:39:30.120 in your native state, you keep more water inside your muscle cell than you do outside your muscle

02:39:34.300 cell. And this is just basically shot the A's principle. If you begin removing more fluid via

02:39:41.600 diuretic or fluid restriction or sodium restriction, well, what happens? Well, sure you remove it from

02:39:48.120 the subcutaneous layer, but you're also going to remove it in the same proportion from the

02:39:52.020 intracellular layer. All you're going to do is just become flatter.

02:39:55.140 In the intravascular layer, you get hypotensive.

02:39:57.160 Exactly. So one thing that helped me is that I didn't cut water. So I felt I never was like

02:40:01.940 dehydrated or anything like that. Didn't cut sodium. And I could go into the physiology behind why I

02:40:06.440 think it's silly to cut sodium as well. I didn't take a diuretic, but yes, during peak week, food went

02:40:12.160 back up because the idea is- Are diuretics even legal in tested?

02:40:16.560 You could take OTC diuretics. So you could take like dandelion root and those sorts of things.

02:40:21.120 It's very funny, like the logic behind why people cut water and sodium. I think it's like somebody

02:40:26.400 just saw a figure of the sodium potassium pump in a book and they were like, oh, see, the cell wants

02:40:32.420 to get sodium out and potassium in. So let's cut sodium and load potassium. And it's like, if you

02:40:36.640 actually look at the physiology, if you get the sodium to potassium ratio too low, it'll actually

02:40:41.680 cause you to retain water as well. You'll actually start reabsorbing water in the distal tubule of the

02:40:45.980 kidney. I think that that helped with my energy and whatnot, but definitely food in the days

02:40:52.120 before the competition comes up. Because at that point, if you're still trying to lose body fat

02:40:55.700 that close, it's probably not going to go well for you. I'll usually in peak week, I'll start feeling

02:41:01.960 better as opposed to worse. And then on the day of the show, you know, I'm usually having three to

02:41:07.700 400 grams of carbohydrates, something like that. It's very interesting because a lot of the dogmas

02:41:13.180 in bodybuilding originated in like wrestling and endurance running. The correlation was kind of

02:41:18.600 like, well, wrestlers cut water and they look really lean. So we should cut water. And I'll

02:41:23.720 always use the example of if you've ever seen George St. Pierre, when he weighed in, he looked

02:41:29.340 gaunt. I mean, just didn't look healthy, not very muscular. And then the day of the fight,

02:41:36.220 24 hours later, I mean, he looks like a bodybuilder. He looks pretty jacked. Well, that will just show you

02:41:41.540 what drinking water, eating enough sodium and carbohydrate will do for your muscle fullness

02:41:47.700 because muscles are 70% water. So I think all that stuff kind of helped me have a little bit more

02:41:53.760 longevity in that sport. And so far as like, I wasn't beating my body up with fluid restriction.

02:42:02.360 So you're 40. Now, when you sort of think about yourself being 60 or 70,

02:42:06.720 how do you think about aging in terms of the reductions in strength, which is obviously an

02:42:14.240 important part of your identity and the change in physique? Do you think that it's going to be a

02:42:19.520 difficult transition? And I'm not suggesting that the alternative to what you're doing now

02:42:23.540 is sitting on a couch all day, drinking beer, of course, but invariably, whether you're Arnold

02:42:28.980 Schwarzenegger or anyone who's really fit, you're not going to look the same when you're 60.

02:42:35.140 I think about this a lot. I bug my wife or not bug her. I just say all the time, I'm like,

02:42:39.560 God, I can't stand my face. Like it's so wrinkled and beaten up from all the sun. And she's like,

02:42:44.360 well, you don't do anything about it. She's like, you could go and see a dermatologist. And I'm like,

02:42:48.220 yeah, I'm just too lazy. I think it's just easy to sit here and sort of gripe about it.

02:42:51.720 Just have these vain thoughts of, well, the older I get, the older I look.

02:42:55.600 I can sit here and say, oh no, I'll be fine. Yeah, of course I'm going to struggle with it.

02:42:59.040 Look at any athlete. That is your identity for such a long period of your life.

02:43:05.140 Now I think I'm fortunate in that I've kind of had multiple identities. So I've had academic,

02:43:10.620 influencer, entrepreneur, powerlifter, bodybuilder, scientist. So I think it'll be a little bit easier

02:43:18.020 for me because I already have other things that I care about. Being a dad, I already have other

02:43:22.840 things I care about, but of course it'll be hard. Nobody who's successful doesn't have any ego

02:43:28.600 whatsoever. And so I'm not going to lie. When I load up a bar with 500 pounds in a commercial gym

02:43:34.440 and I'm squatting that, part of me feels like a badass. You know what I mean? And so, yeah,

02:43:39.460 there's going to be part of me that absolutely misses that. That's why you have the guy who's

02:43:43.140 like, well, when I was in high school, I benched 405 or whatever it is, or I squatted 600 until my

02:43:48.440 knees hurt. My goal is to not be that guy other than if somebody asked me about what I've done to do it.

02:43:54.460 But I think really what's going to be most important for me is just trying to not judge it

02:44:01.340 and just find other things that I can be interested in. And I'll still always lift. I'll always train.

02:44:07.220 I love it too much to not do it. It makes me feel too good. And quite frankly, like if you look at

02:44:11.540 some of the people who've been doing it for a really long time, I got a great compliment the

02:44:14.600 other day because I was in the gym and I just kind of casually brought up, I turned 40 this year

02:44:18.360 and the lady was like, what? And I was like, yeah. And she's like, oh, I would have guessed that you 0.98

02:44:23.240 were like mid thirties. Oh, thank you. I think resistance training, as far as like keeping you

02:44:29.280 young, that's one of the best things you can do. I feel like for both men and women,

02:44:35.080 it is a fountain of youth, both cosmetically and also internally. Looking at some of the

02:44:39.800 bodybuilders out there, notwithstanding like some of the drug stuff, but some of them still look

02:44:44.340 really good into their fifties if they continue to do it. Now there's a lot of guys who get out of

02:44:48.000 it and kind of once that identity is gone, they just go, what's the point of putting energy into

02:44:52.040 lifting. But you know, like Jay Cutler's in his forties. Jay Cutler is my favorite of the

02:44:57.040 recent bodybuilders. He's the only bodybuilder of that group that I follow on Instagram. I enjoy

02:45:02.100 looking at him. He still looks to be in insane shape. If you look at him, he goes trains every

02:45:07.180 day. He still eats really well. He likes that lifestyle and got used to it and it shows. Yeah,

02:45:12.640 it'd definitely be a hard transition. I'm sure I'll find something to bury myself in and who knows?

02:45:18.520 We'll see. Well, we went a little longer than we expected to.

02:45:22.480 As always. We've cut ourselves out of a few extracurricular activities I had planned this

02:45:26.240 afternoon, but maybe we'll have time tomorrow. So anyway, Lane, awesome to sit down with you.

02:45:30.420 Thanks again for making the time. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was fun.

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The Peter Attia Drive - December 19, 2022

#235 ‒ Training principles for mass and strength, changing views on nutrition, creatine supplementation, and more ｜ Layne Norton, Ph.D.

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