The Peter Attia Drive - #335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding

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

00:00:16.540 my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity

00:00:21.520 into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and

00:00:26.720 wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely

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00:00:53.200 of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership,

00:00:58.020 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Dr. Mike Istratel.

00:01:06.820 Mike holds a PhD in sports physiology and is currently the head science consultant for

00:01:12.700 Renaissance Periodization. He's a competitive bodybuilder and was formerly a professor of

00:01:18.000 exercise and sports science at the School of Public Health at Temple University in Philadelphia.

00:01:23.880 As a co-founder of Renaissance Periodization, Mike has coached numerous athletes and busy

00:01:28.460 professionals in both diet and weight training. Mike also has a very popular YouTube channel

00:01:34.120 where he loves to do debunking videos that are both informative and endlessly amusing.

00:01:40.800 In today's conversation, Mike shares his personal journey from his early experiences in powerlifting

00:01:45.320 and bodybuilding to his academic training in exercise science. We discuss the core principles

00:01:50.260 of resistance training, including exercise selection, volume, intensity, and frequency.

00:01:54.960 Mike debunks the common fear that strength training will make people overly muscular without intention.

00:02:00.060 He explains why this belief is unfounded and highlights the dedication required to build

00:02:03.920 significant muscle mass. We outline what a resistance training routine could look like

00:02:08.540 for someone new to the gym or transitioning from sports. For more experienced lifters,

00:02:13.420 we explore how to optimize resistance training for muscle growth. Mike shares his personal

00:02:18.660 experience with anabolic steroids, outlining their impact on muscle growth, mental health,

00:02:22.600 and performance. He discusses the pros and cons, including the significant physical changes

00:02:26.800 and potential long-term health risks. It's really worth pointing out here that Mike is one of the most

00:02:32.040 candid individuals I've ever met when it comes to discussing his use of anabolic steroids,

00:02:36.940 growth hormones, and things of that nature. What is remarkable to me, and you can see this in the

00:02:41.440 podcast, is just how jaw-dropping the numbers are in terms of usage. When you're talking to an

00:02:48.320 individual like me who's prescribed testosterone for many patients under physiologic circumstances,

00:02:54.300 it was impossible to fathom just the types of doses that bodybuilders are using. We discuss the role

00:03:00.520 of genetics in muscle growth and strength, as well as the influence of age and other lifestyle factors.

00:03:05.420 This conversation offers insights into the science of resistance training and practical advice for

00:03:10.880 anyone looking to build muscle while also exploring the experience of someone who has been in the

00:03:16.480 bodybuilding world. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Mike Istratel.

00:03:27.120 Mike, thank you very much for making the trip to Austin.

00:03:29.420 Thank you so much for having me.

00:03:30.620 I saw something on social media. You were here a week ago. Have you been here the whole time or?

00:03:33.860 Yes. Week and a half long social media collaborative trip.

00:03:37.460 You weren't here for F1?

00:03:38.640 No. Loud noises scare me, so I would stay away from that sort of thing. I'm kidding.

00:03:42.460 It sounds awesome. I've never actually been to a formula race in real life, and my videographer

00:03:48.180 and business partner on YouTube, huge Formula One fan, he has the app and everything,

00:03:53.200 live streams all the races and stuff. Are you big into that sort of thing?

00:03:55.840 Of course. I not only have the app, I'm the premium subscriber.

00:03:58.400 My God.

00:03:58.980 So I can listen to all the chatter of every moment between every car and their mechanic.

00:04:03.640 And yes, of course.

00:04:05.600 That's really cool. Yeah. I make a lot of race car analogies when it comes to athletics and stuff.

00:04:10.060 So if I make them here, you can correct me and say I'm using them wrong.

00:04:13.900 Well, Mike, there's going to be some folks listening and watching us who are probably very familiar with

00:04:18.540 your work, and they've probably come to learn about you as I have through just endless years of being

00:04:22.960 both amused and educated by your content on YouTube. But there's probably a group of people here just

00:04:27.620 in my audience that aren't overlapping with yours. So I want to give folks a chance to kind of get to

00:04:31.640 know you. I will have introduced you already in the introduction, but let's talk just a little bit

00:04:35.020 about your background. Remind me, you came to the US from Russia when you were eight?

00:04:38.200 Seven.

00:04:38.620 Seven. Okay. Where'd you grow up?

00:04:40.580 Moscow, Russia before that. And I do have memories of it and all that stuff.

00:04:44.080 And then the metropolitan Detroit area after that, all the way until college. So a place called Oak

00:04:50.620 Park, Michigan, which you can find on a map and that's about it.

00:04:54.520 What'd you study in undergrad?

00:04:56.160 Movement science, kinesiology at the University of Michigan.

00:04:59.840 What sports were you playing then? Were you into grappling at the time?

00:05:02.540 I had wrestled in high school and then I just wasn't very good at it. And I just absolutely was

00:05:07.080 not dedicated to it for a few reasons, which are sort of boring. But I got into lifting hardcore

00:05:12.600 towards the middle and end of high school. And then by the time I was in college, I was gearing

00:05:17.460 up to start competing in powerlifting. And so I actually started the Michigan Powerlifting Club.

00:05:22.200 We started kind of a team and we went to meets and all that stuff. So I was a competitive powerlifter

00:05:26.560 in my undergraduate years.

00:05:28.160 And just for folks who might be confused about all the different disciplines, powerlifting is

00:05:32.260 the sport where there are three and only three lifts. There's a deadlift, a bench press,

00:05:36.640 a squat, and you win by having the highest total weights across the three, I believe.

00:05:42.060 Correct. Yes. I'll add it up. So squat plus bench plus deadlift equals total. And the person with

00:05:46.980 the biggest total for their weight class or absolute or by formula wins the whole thing.

00:05:51.360 So you were not at that point into bodybuilding or anything yet?

00:05:53.720 No.

00:05:54.220 Got it.

00:05:54.600 No.

00:05:55.200 And then you went off and did your PhD right away after undergrad?

00:05:58.300 Got in a master's. In the exercise science field, going straight from undergraduate to a PhD

00:06:02.640 is very rare. Usually you need a lot more preparatory work because an undergraduate

00:06:07.440 curriculum typically just doesn't teach you a whole lot of applied, super specialized exercise

00:06:11.860 science. I learned anatomy and physiology very well, but much more general curriculum,

00:06:16.780 especially at an R01 school like Michigan, they didn't super hyper-specialize. I learned almost

00:06:20.460 nothing about sports whatsoever. I must've had like two bullet points of how to resistance train in

00:06:25.520 any one of my classes in Michigan.

00:06:27.040 Really?

00:06:27.060 Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Resistance training wasn't even the big focus there. It was chronic disease

00:06:31.340 management, health, stuff like that, clinical application. And so right after that, I went

00:06:35.460 to get my master's degree at Appalachian State University under Dr. Travis Triplett and Dr. Jeff

00:06:40.080 McBride. And that was a swell time. That was a subspecialty of exercise science. It was actually

00:06:45.160 strength and conditioning. So much closer to what I was super passionate about. And then I did one year

00:06:50.340 as a personal trainer. It's like jail. I did a year upstate. So a year in Manhattan with my

00:06:56.740 colleague, Mr. Nick Shaw, who's now the co-founder and CEO of our company, RP. And we got a chance

00:07:02.200 to train folks at a private personal training studio in Manhattan, you know, like CTOs of major

00:07:07.740 companies, really crazy stuff. Like I had never met like a truly, truly rich person up until I met

00:07:12.120 someone who was worth like 50 million. And I was like, oh my God, it turns out there's just really

00:07:15.240 nice, cool people that are really chill and have the same problems everyone else does trying to get in

00:07:18.760 shape. So did that for a year, realized I didn't know enough, and then was enrolled into the PhD

00:07:23.640 program at East Tennessee State University under Dr. Mike Stone. And that was in sport physiology,

00:07:29.480 which Dr. Stone described as the science of taking good athletes and making them better.

00:07:34.220 And that was a really, really amazing time. I probably learned more in that three years than I

00:07:38.120 had in, I don't know, outside of learning how to read and how to do math, probably more than I ever

00:07:42.000 learned at school ever. Totally immersive, got to work with teams, got to work with athletes,

00:07:46.300 strength and conditioning coach, truly sports science work. We integrate all of the variables,

00:07:50.780 sport coaching, strength and conditioning, sports medicine, nutrition, the whole gamut.

00:07:54.320 Incredible experience, got a PhD there, and then taught at the University of Central Missouri for

00:08:00.260 a while, taught at Temple University in Philadelphia for a while, and then went full depth into private

00:08:06.480 industry because we had founded RP, our company, during the time that I was in PhD program.

00:08:11.260 And sometime during the Temple years, it became apparent that I was much more productive

00:08:16.180 not teaching than I was teaching because there was so much to do with the company.

00:08:20.020 Took some time away from teaching, came back to teach under my friend, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld,

00:08:24.480 who's kind of the world's expert scientifically in muscle hypertrophy. I taught at his master's

00:08:29.020 program for a while, and then I left that recently to just do private industry full time.

00:08:35.240 And when did you start putting out these videos on YouTube that I probably only discovered a

00:08:39.500 couple years ago, but I think you've been doing this much longer, right?

00:08:42.360 So YouTube, I haven't been doing too long. 2020 is when we started.

00:08:45.000 Okay.

00:08:45.380 Peak COVID. Sorry if I get your podcast canceled by mentioning that term.

00:08:49.840 Honestly, when we record YouTube videos at our at-home studio, which is where most of them

00:08:52.900 happen, if I drop the C word, Scott, the video guy's like, different take. We one take almost

00:08:58.960 everything, and that we roll back. The algorithm will flag it, and I'll put a little COVID morning,

00:09:03.520 and it does have some-

00:09:04.500 Do I have to cut this out?

00:09:05.280 Unlikely.

00:09:05.720 All right.

00:09:06.100 Well, it's a medical podcast. If you can't talk about COVID, I have no idea where we are anymore.

00:09:10.200 Okay.

00:09:10.940 I wish I knew more about how the algorithm worked. I clearly don't.

00:09:13.740 The ever-mysterious algorithm.

00:09:15.540 And then just kind of going back to your personal evolution, as you're going through this journey

00:09:19.700 of master's, PhD, industry, are you still focusing on powerlifting personally?

00:09:24.620 So I was focusing on powerlifting up until I got into my master's program. And actually,

00:09:28.780 towards the end of undergrad, I did this thing where I was in a grocery store, and I picked

00:09:32.860 up a magazine. It was a muscle magazine. It was a Flex magazine issue that had summarized

00:09:37.580 the prior 2002 Mr. Olympia contest with all the pictures of the bodybuilders.

00:09:43.040 Ronnie won again.

00:09:43.740 Yep.

00:09:44.220 Though he-

00:09:45.500 That was his fourth?

00:09:46.640 Yeah, fifth or something like that.

00:09:49.740 And he didn't look his best. Not enough people showed up to really take him down. Everyone

00:09:54.560 had suspected Jay Cutler could have beat him if he showed up that year. Jay Cutler almost

00:09:58.940 beat Ronnie in 2001.

00:10:00.220 That's right.

00:10:00.680 He sat out 2002. And so I just remember reading the magazine and looking at the pictures.

00:10:06.020 Also, real quick, how adult does the humor on here go? Or are we trying to keep it semi-professional?

00:10:11.740 I'm going to defer to you on that.

00:10:13.260 That's a bad idea, Peter.

00:10:14.980 Okay. So I'll just keep it semi-pro.

00:10:16.920 It was enlightening because I realized that I had an eye for aesthetics. And by an eye for

00:10:22.820 aesthetics, it doesn't mean I knew anything about what looks good or what looks not great

00:10:26.780 on a human body. But I did have a very distinct aesthetic preference. Some people will see

00:10:32.540 muscular physiques and they kind of all look the same, like giant, veiny, overcooked hot dogs,

00:10:36.340 which is not wrong. I looked at the physiques and I was really taken aback, especially by some of

00:10:40.660 them. What probably normal people get when they look at very good art, that, whoa, I'm looking at

00:10:47.100 something very special. I'm looking at something that's emotive. And I started to pursue my own

00:10:52.740 hypertrophy training, muscle growth training.

00:10:54.380 What were you looking like at the time?

00:10:56.720 I was roughly 190 pounds at five foot six, fairly lean, but not anything crazy. And so muscular,

00:11:04.420 but if I had some clothes on, people would be like, oh, it's just a short person. But shirtless,

00:11:09.780 I looked like clearly I had lifted weights for some time. I really also realized that while there's a

00:11:15.060 huge passion for me in lifting heavy, I also had a passion for getting pumps and doing higher reps

00:11:21.640 and doing lots of volume and seeing my body change visually, that was a huge trip.

00:11:26.060 And it basically became this thing where I'm like, oh, I am an artist in muscle growth and fat loss.

00:11:32.940 My canvas is my own body. And I want to learn how to sculpt very well, most selfishly, just so I

00:11:41.380 could occupy a superhero looking body. I ended up looking more like a villain, but whatever.

00:11:45.380 Balding will do that. List of bald superheroes includes bald supervillains. All of them may be

00:11:51.860 a huge fraction in any case, but it was just a real personal journey for me at first and still

00:11:57.420 is to a huge extent.

00:11:58.760 And just by comparison, what do you weigh right now?

00:12:01.340 235 pounds, substantially lean.

00:12:03.320 We'll talk a lot about bodybuilding and cycles and are you in a cycle now? And if so,

00:12:08.160 are you on the way up or on the way down in terms of mass?

00:12:10.040 I'm kind of at the top of where I'll be for a little bit, maybe up, but just very slowly.

00:12:15.320 So this is roughly the fattest I'll get.

00:12:17.920 I didn't want to say anything, Mike, but yeah, you're looking a little chubby to me right now.

00:12:22.340 Looking pretty fat.

00:12:22.500 Yeah.

00:12:22.920 I'll cry about it later.

00:12:24.000 I normally don't let people of your chubbiness in the studio, but-

00:12:27.440 Yes. And you can't let us out without letting us know like, hey, you're fat, by the way.

00:12:30.960 Just want to let you know, no big deal. I mean, it's kind of a big deal. It's a really big deal.

00:12:34.340 And your body fat right now, if you had to guess, would be what, 8%?

00:12:38.420 Maybe 9-ish. I still have some striations in my glutes. I have like one of the least aesthetic

00:12:44.120 physiques imaginable, but thank you genetics for that one. And I did some things earlier in my

00:12:49.520 career. I gained a ton of weight. It was muscle and fat, stretched my skin out, gave me massive

00:12:53.880 love handles. When you lose that weight, the skin is still sticking around. So I'm actually planning

00:12:58.200 on some extensive cosmetic surgery in about a few months here to address that issue finally.

00:13:03.440 So yeah, I've gained a lot of muscle over the years. For me, the whole journey fundamentally

00:13:09.200 is a personal journey of wanting to occupy a body that is two things. One, that I aesthetically

00:13:15.440 enjoy being in. And two, one, that I had a large hand in creating or curating. And the curation is

00:13:21.480 almost as fun as the creation. Like you see an artist draw something on a canvas and a huge amount of

00:13:28.740 joy comes from creating the main arc of everything you're doing, the main shapes, main lines, main

00:13:33.760 coloring. But you know when artists have something almost complete and they do a little pencil in

00:13:38.280 pencil there? Once you have something that looks amazing and you're optimizing, oh, there's something

00:13:42.220 super beautiful about that. It's like watching someone take a very finely tuned F1 car and just

00:13:47.360 wrench a couple of the screws in and polish it off. It's just, oh, this is so beautiful. Not that my

00:13:52.300 body's attractive. It's not grotesque, but less grotesque is what I'm aiming for. And I don't know

00:13:57.720 if it's working or not. My hairiness kind of precludes any of that.

00:14:01.100 Well, whenever I think of an artist mucking around with a canvas, of course, I only think of Bob Ross

00:14:05.020 because I don't have much experience watching an artist create something. You know, usually I'm

00:14:08.780 seeing the finished product, but I still like most people who grew up in the seventies and the eighties

00:14:14.000 recall watching Bob Ross on Saturday mornings with great fondness. He makes it look so easy.

00:14:19.940 Oh my God. He not only makes it look so easy, he's communicating

00:14:23.220 an empowerment about creating art. Yes. Like everybody could be doing this.

00:14:27.420 You're doing this with me right now. Right. And you're like, oh, I sure am. And he's like,

00:14:30.560 you see this cloud in the way we're going to make it a tree. And you try it at home and you're like,

00:14:33.940 I just messed up everything. This looks terrible. If I had to describe my physique and my genetics,

00:14:38.220 it would be like a lot of Bob Ross style having to fix things or like, oh, that looks terrible.

00:14:43.240 Let's pretend I was drawing something else. All right. So I want to try to bring this up to the

00:14:47.440 present. So right now you compete in bodybuilding. You obviously provide a lot of education to folks.

00:14:53.040 So I think my audience is clearly interested in exercise, clearly interested in strength training,

00:14:58.800 clearly interested in the aesthetics of strength training. Because again, I think it's very easy

00:15:03.100 to look at bodybuilders and say, gosh, that's, that's a little odd. It's a lot. But what is obvious,

00:15:10.400 if not self-evident is that's just a spectrum. Anybody who wants to have more muscle and less fat

00:15:17.580 probably has something they can learn from a bodybuilder. I often say to my patients,

00:15:21.580 if you really want to understand how to manipulate nutrition to be lean, you probably need to understand

00:15:30.040 what bodybuilders are doing. There's probably no athlete. There's no person out there that truly

00:15:35.560 understands how to manipulate exercise and nutrition in the context of body composition.

00:15:40.400 And that's true even in the presence of anabolic steroids. Anabolic steroids don't preclude that.

00:15:45.060 They might make that a little easier, which I think we should talk about. So maybe we just start with

00:15:48.920 where you see the value of strength training. Do you think that there is a diminishing return

00:15:54.980 at some point? Do you think that there is a diminishing return in the amount of muscle? I've

00:16:00.660 said very tongue in cheek that the list of 90 year olds out there complaining, wishing they were not

00:16:07.300 as strong and not as muscular is a very short list, right? But again, why am I saying that? I'm

00:16:12.720 saying that to say that most people at the end of life are saying the exact opposite. I wish I was

00:16:18.600 stronger. I wish I had more muscle. But from a practical standpoint, Mike, what is your view on

00:16:24.700 muscularity and strength at the expense of what it might take to achieve them? Are there extremes that

00:16:30.080 people should be mindful of? If you have to be mindful of extremes, in almost every case,

00:16:35.940 you have already been on a multi-years long, very immersive, very infatuated, very disciplined

00:16:45.280 journey of resistance training and focused nutrition. And the organization of many variables

00:16:51.800 and parts of your life around that task, it's unlikely to be something you pick up a lifting hobby

00:16:57.580 and just find yourself excessively muscular. Oops. So that's probably my best answer for that. It's

00:17:04.760 just insanely unrealistic in most cases to wander into that sort of thing. The myth of accidental

00:17:10.080 muscle. Yes. People say more money, more problems. First of all, I've met various philosophical grounds.

00:17:15.600 I think that's absurd. But you don't accidentally become ultra wealthy. And by God, I wish you the best

00:17:21.500 if that happens to you. I'll cry a tear for you. But in much the same way, almost nobody accidentally

00:17:27.520 becomes hypermuscular to the extent that they're on that side of the spectrum that trade-offs are

00:17:32.120 starting to become apparent. Probably the biggest trade-off in the short to medium term is opportunity

00:17:37.180 cost, things you could have spent doing outside of being in the gym. But the way the science of

00:17:43.180 resistance training works is for almost all of the health benefits and longevity benefits and the

00:17:48.600 quality of life benefits, the amount of time you need to be training per week is measured in the

00:17:54.340 one to three hour range. With three being like, you're really full sending it. One to three hours

00:18:02.120 per week, if you went on ChatGPT and did like a time use question, I mean like, can you list all of the

00:18:08.880 things that typical American does for X number hours a week? Read down the list, top 100 time use cases,

00:18:14.340 you may find that one to three hours a week is somewhere in like the 50 or 60 rank. And there's

00:18:19.400 so many things people do that are way more than that. Social media consumption, television watching,

00:18:25.280 and the list goes on. There are dozens of things you do that take way more time. And so if you really

00:18:30.840 fully invest yourself, like I'm relatively fully invested into getting as jacked as possible,

00:18:35.920 it's going to take some time. It could take eight hours a week, which is still like, well,

00:18:40.340 it's not forever. People will jog for 40 minutes every morning, think nothing of it.

00:18:46.760 And then when you present to them the idea of resistance training, like, well, now that's

00:18:49.420 going to take some time. Like, well, yes, actually does not take nearly as much time because the

00:18:53.920 intensity of the effort is so grotesquely high and the recovery demands are so high that you have to

00:18:59.980 be very pulsatile with it. It's not even something you have to do every day. As a matter of fact,

00:19:03.780 people get incredible benefits. Probably the biggest return on investment the average person can make

00:19:08.220 is to train for roughly half an hour, two times a week, Monday and Thursday. If you do it properly,

00:19:14.000 it can comport an unbelievable amount of benefits just across the board. And so for most people,

00:19:20.060 the consideration that they can begin to do this excessively, it's just not something realistic

00:19:24.560 until and unless they're really into it like a huge hobby. If you are watching Formula One for 30

00:19:31.580 minutes a day every other day on your phone, realistic considerations of this is taking up too much of

00:19:36.100 your time kind of out the window. Now, if you start canceling podcast guests because you're

00:19:40.980 following the circuit around the world and staying in five-star hotels and booking the hyper-rich guy

00:19:46.020 suite for all the races, someone could say, well, you're really into this. You're like, no, nonsense.

00:19:50.000 It's only costing me $3 million a year. So then, yes, but it's obvious when you're going to be so

00:19:54.360 involved. You don't just walk into that sort of thing. So let's unpack this a little bit because

00:19:58.700 there's actually two things I want to go into, but one of them I think will be a better entry into it,

00:20:04.640 which is you talked about how, boy, if you were going to put eight hours a week into your strength

00:20:10.080 training, you're kind of at the upper limits of what a person might do. Conversely, if your goal

00:20:15.880 is to be a really good endurance athlete, you're not at that level yet if you're only putting in

00:20:21.140 eight hours a week. A world-class cyclist, I mean, God, they're probably on their bike 30 hours a week.

00:20:26.940 Something like that.

00:20:27.560 Easily.

00:20:27.980 Full-time job.

00:20:28.440 Now, of course, not all of that is at maximum intensity. A lot of that, in fact, probably 70 to

00:20:34.840 80% of it. It also varies a little bit by gender, but let's just say 70 to 80% of that time is going

00:20:41.660 to be at zone two. And they're really only burning matches 20% of the time. Yet there's something very

00:20:47.720 different about strength training, which is, are you really getting benefit at the equivalent of

00:20:53.100 whatever we would call zone two in the gym? Like if you're at that far of a sub-maximal effort,

00:20:59.100 what is the training stimulus? And is this just where the comparison between cardiopulmonary

00:21:04.640 training, where there's a clear benefit from sub-maximal efforts and strength training don't

00:21:09.820 jive?

00:21:10.680 That's definitely the case. Strength training. I like to use the term resistance training. It's

00:21:16.000 the general term for going into the gym and applying things to your muscles.

00:21:19.760 Because that's why you would say hypertrophy and strength are outputs of resistance training.

00:21:23.680 Correct. Yes. So you can get some benefits from very sub-maximal efforts, but resistance training

00:21:30.920 is based on applying high forces and high levels of fatigue as its primary modality of how it makes

00:21:38.960 you better. And so it's kind of when you get into that world, that's what's going to happen.

00:21:43.980 If you're trying to be a special operator, eventually a Navy SEAL type of person,

00:21:48.300 the sound of gunfire freaks you out, you're kind of in the wrong place. We get almost all

00:21:52.840 the benefits from pushing either very heavy loads or lighter loads, but very close to muscular

00:21:57.980 failure, which people have described as unpleasant. A burn in the muscle, a lot of pain, the weights

00:22:04.180 slow down. So it takes a lot of psychological effort to keep going. There is not really an

00:22:09.380 equivalent of just getting on the bike and putting in the miles. Getting to a pace where zone

00:22:13.220 two, you can breathe, you can talk a little bit still. That's not weight training. But precisely

00:22:18.520 because weight training is so intensive, you need lots of recovery time between sessions and you can

00:22:23.780 do lots of disruption and damage in each session. And also the total yield and how much it changes

00:22:29.340 your physiology is very high for each session and actually per unit time. And that means if you're

00:22:34.940 not working super hard per any one unit time, you're going to need a lot of work. That's endurance

00:22:39.060 training. If you're working insanely hard per unit time, you won't need a lot of work, nor can you

00:22:44.380 recover from that much work, which is why the top end is eight or 10 hours or something for even

00:22:48.640 professional bodybuilders of time spent in the gym every week. But for people that just want the basic

00:22:53.460 benefits, yeah, we're talking about an hour or two hours a week. And that's really all you need if

00:22:58.520 you're pushing sufficiently hard. That's both all you need and realistically, you can recover for more

00:23:03.460 if you make time in your schedule and really prioritize recovery. But yeah, any much more than that

00:23:07.780 gets to be like, oh wow, I'm sore and tired a lot more. And Mike, do you think this is simply

00:23:12.580 a consequence of the fact that endurance training relies more on type one muscle fibers and strength

00:23:19.040 and hypertrophy training are more dependent on the actions of type two fibers? Is that why? I don't

00:23:23.940 know why philosophically, I just think this is such an interesting contrast to make of how optimization

00:23:28.520 of one is a totally different philosophy than optimization of the other. And the only reason I'm harping

00:23:33.440 on it is I just know that when you take people who are very used to doing endurance training,

00:23:40.120 it's a hard switch for them to adopt what you just said in the gym sometimes. It's not the way

00:23:45.440 they're wired. But is the best way to explain to that person the why? That's the difference between

00:23:49.280 a type one and a type two fiber? That is probably the core difference. I would say there are two other

00:23:53.900 things that can be put into that equation. One is the physical forces are just much higher in magnitude.

00:23:59.640 You're going to be putting a lot of tension through your connective tissues and through

00:24:03.100 your muscles when you're resistance training than you are when you're doing bicycle work,

00:24:06.700 for example. And so with high absolute forces, the proximate damage and disruption to the body is

00:24:14.400 graded exponentially and not linearly. It's like if a wiffle ball flies past you, you might not even

00:24:20.280 hear it. If a 50 caliber bullet flies past you, it's going to tear parts of you off and it's never

00:24:24.460 even touched you. Very, very different amount of damage from much, much higher forces. And the

00:24:30.420 other one is some combination of neural and psychological drive. The kind of drive it requires

00:24:35.680 to be good at endurance, at least the base building part, the aerobic base work that you do is kind of

00:24:41.300 being in a state of calm equanimity. You get your flow going, you get your music going, you get your

00:24:46.760 breathing going, you look at the road ahead of you and you can just crank. But in lifting, you have to

00:24:52.040 turn up the juice to really feel the maximum situation. Another quick analogy offhand is

00:24:58.280 if you are a trillionaire like I am and you have a fleet of Cessna private aircraft at your

00:25:04.240 back and call, I never fly the same plane twice. I always crash the thing. You fly a Cessna, you can

00:25:08.480 fly it for some time. It requires a decent amount of maintenance, but decent amount of maintenance and

00:25:12.200 it'll fly for a long time. It's just never getting up to velocities that are really crazy.

00:25:16.400 You take an SR-71 Blackbird out for a spin at Mach 3, you have to do 10 times the

00:25:21.940 number of maintenance hours per flight hour on that thing or something to that magnitude because

00:25:26.520 at Mach 3, what's happening to the plane is just running through subsequent brick walls. That's what

00:25:32.440 the sound barrier is like. Three times faster than the sound barrier, you're just rattling that thing

00:25:37.300 into dust. That's what you're trying to do to it. When you're pushing your body really hard and the

00:25:42.400 weights are slowing down and there's sets of 5 or sets of 8 or sets of 10, your body is very close to

00:25:47.160 its limits. So both your faster twitch muscle fibers, which are required, they take way more

00:25:51.720 damage. They're also not as well proliferated with blood supply and they heal slower. And the

00:25:57.720 amount of absolute force is higher and the amount of neural drive it takes. You can hop on a bike for

00:26:02.600 an hour at zone two every day. And afterwards, people are like, are you tired? And you're like,

00:26:06.560 a little bit. I kind of feel like also a little bit refreshed in a sense. You don't really feel

00:26:10.380 refreshed after like grinding the leg press for 5 sets of 15. You feel like someone beat the crap out of

00:26:15.720 you. You don't owe anyone money. What the hell is going on? So that intensity, that absolute intensity

00:26:21.780 of lifting and high relative intensity, that's what tends to make the big, big fatigue cost.

00:26:27.460 Can you say more about the neural part of this? I find this to be a very interesting piece. And

00:26:31.500 of all the pieces you've described, and I agree with everything you've said, I know the least about

00:26:36.380 that component yet. I've heard people talk about this, right? Which is you cannot discount the CNS

00:26:41.740 fatigue, literally, that comes from doing this type of work. And I remember as an example,

00:26:48.260 watching sprinters train. And obviously people understand that sprinters, I shouldn't say

00:26:53.200 obviously, but if you study the mechanics of sprinting, you realize it really comes down to

00:26:56.760 force per unit mass. That's how hard they can hit the ground with their foot relative to their mass.

00:27:02.660 And so these are athletes who need to be almost comically strong without gaining any excess weight.

00:27:08.060 So even though we look at sprinters and we think, gosh, they're very muscular, it's their strength

00:27:11.800 to weight ratio that's really profound. And so they have to train in a way that minimizes hypertrophy

00:27:17.200 and maximizes strength. So for example, they'll focus heavily on exercises where they can push the

00:27:22.040 concentric phase and not the eccentric phase. It was explained to me once that doing this allowed

00:27:27.500 them to also spare themselves from some of the neurologic fatigue. Is there any validity to that,

00:27:34.300 or is that just true, true, and unrelated? And what is actually happening in both the central and

00:27:39.840 peripheral nervous system during the recovery phase between those, say, three-day or six-day

00:27:46.200 bouts when you're trying to recover a system after the set you just described?

00:27:50.120 I'm glad you brought up the peripheral. One of the big misconceptions is that there's muscular fatigue,

00:27:55.480 connective tissue, systemic fatigue, blood vessels, and everything. Still have to, heart has to pump.

00:27:59.860 But then people just say, oh, and then the central nervous system. Well, the peripheral nervous system

00:28:03.820 is a thing too, and it also takes substantial amount of fatigue. So I would just say the nervous

00:28:07.860 system takes fatigue. And it takes fatigue in the same way you would expect any system that's pushed

00:28:12.120 to its limits to take. Various components of it experience wear and tear, various substrates deplete

00:28:17.640 and need to be repleted. So I can bring up two examples. In the axon of any single given nerve,

00:28:24.740 you have a balance of electrolytes inside and outside, which allows the proliferation of the

00:28:29.340 electrical signal. You run that system long and hard enough, and it starts to get out of whack to

00:28:34.020 where you try to get another impulse going, and it's like, ugh. So it needs to do a lot of pumping

00:28:40.160 to take what's supposed to be inside the cell that's now outside the cell to get back in there

00:28:45.400 to a level of concentration that would be fully recovered. Now, typically that happens quickly,

00:28:49.940 but if you run that system a lot, there are various points at which some of the structures that are

00:28:54.420 supposed to do that, they're also proteins. You use them enough, and they start to kind of break a

00:28:58.780 little bit, and you need to produce more proteins to replace the channels themselves that do that

00:29:03.760 pumping back and forth. And so that, typically, protein construction is measured on the order of

00:29:09.020 minutes, hours, and days, not seconds. So that, you could imagine it as like a transatlantic cable.

00:29:15.300 You throw enough current through a cable, and the fish nibble at the cable enough,

00:29:18.680 you need to start replacing the cable. Now, if you're really, really using the crap out of that cable,

00:29:23.180 yeah, it's going to undergo some not-so-great things. And then closer to neuron-to-neuron

00:29:28.440 junctions, or the neuromuscular junction between the neuron and the muscle itself,

00:29:33.180 you have vesicles of neurotransmitter. You pump enough of those in, you get the cool stuff of

00:29:37.520 communication. You can run low on neurotransmitter, and then the electrical signal arrives,

00:29:42.600 and the neurotransmitter is like, sorry, not enough of us to do anything. And so you experience

00:29:46.500 fatigue expressed as weakness, and you need time to reconstruct a lot of those neurotransmitters,

00:29:54.040 place them into vesicles, have those vesicles translocate to the synaptic cleft, and then like

00:29:59.480 sit there and get ready. And that is a process that typically happens rapidly, but if you really

00:30:03.680 exhaust it, it can happen over some time. A really austere illustration of that is, and I've never done

00:30:09.080 this, I've just heard about it. I will take credit for doing many other drugs, but I've never tried

00:30:12.440 ecstasy. But if you clear enough of that neurotransmitter, you don't feel the same the

00:30:17.360 next day. You feel different. And it takes a day or two to get back up to those levels.

00:30:22.100 Similar types of mechanisms are at work when you are going to very close to true failure on,

00:30:27.660 let's say, a squat or a leg press. I mean, you're cooking your muscles, but every single capacity of

00:30:32.560 the nervous system to say, push, push, push, is at maximum. And so you end up doing quite a bit of

00:30:37.420 homeostatic disruption all the way along the axon, all the way through the cell body,

00:30:41.200 and in the synaptic cleft, neurotransmitters getting everywhere, gunk building up. That's

00:30:45.600 going to take some time to fix, which is why we see typically that people don't regain their prior

00:30:49.940 strength after fatiguing and resistance exercise for, depending on how hard you go, anywhere from

00:30:55.200 several hours to several days. And so if you have really, really hard workouts, it just might take

00:31:00.460 several days for you to be able to have a really, really hard workout again for that same muscle

00:31:03.840 group. Luckily, because a lot of this is peripheral nervous system-based and local musculature-based,

00:31:09.040 if you train the living crap out of your chest one day and your triceps, you can train back and

00:31:13.880 biceps, which have nothing much to do with those movements, pretty robustly the next day. Much of

00:31:19.020 the fatigue is local. It's not all local. The central nervous system, brain and spinal cord,

00:31:23.600 specifically the brain, has a variety of mechanisms by which it controls your central fatigue.

00:31:29.300 I remember, I think Tim Noakes was a big proponent of the central governor model,

00:31:33.100 though in the explicit terms which he described, it might not be the case or somewhat close. There's

00:31:39.040 absolutely central governing going on. And when your body can tell through a variety of mechanisms

00:31:44.460 that like pretty messed up here, it's going to pull back on how hard you can do anything. And some

00:31:49.420 of those neural structures might even be operating at full bore, but they're just degraded enough to

00:31:53.220 where full capacity isn't full capacity anymore. And so in all those variety of ways and many others,

00:31:58.280 your body, after accumulating a certain amount of fatigue, will need to back off. And if you think

00:32:03.220 you can train ultra hard for the same muscles twice a day, every day, you are welcome to try it.

00:32:08.260 In medical supervised context, you won't last. So it's really good that we have breaks planned in,

00:32:14.160 but it's also really cool because weight training is one of those things where you get a dose of it

00:32:18.140 and for days after, under the hood, it's upgrading your body and your nervous system and your muscles

00:32:23.680 and your tendons. So it's really neat that you can do 20 to 30 minutes of intense physical

00:32:27.680 activity and resistance training. And then for days later, be experiencing the actual accrued

00:32:33.100 benefits. Not a lot of things in life like that. It's kind of like getting a college degree for

00:32:37.960 which you pay money and then earning money with it years later. Ostensibly anyway, I've never earned

00:32:42.800 any money or had a college degree, but that's kind of how it works. And you have to understand that

00:32:47.360 when you're entering the gym, if you're training properly, you are asking a lot of your physiology,

00:32:52.260 you are pushing it to its limits. If you're not, you're not using your time best and you're not

00:32:56.840 getting the best outcomes because a lot of the absolute best results come from pushing very,

00:33:01.000 very hard. Not necessarily to limits, but you have to test the limits. From what I understand,

00:33:05.740 you have a history of boxing. Is that correct? If you just shadow box, it's nice. It helps.

00:33:11.040 But going hard rounds against multiple fresh opponents, even if you're not like collapsing

00:33:15.660 on the floor after, you know that like you're looking at the clock and you're like,

00:33:19.460 if you don't push it to that level at some point, you're not fight ready. So in order to be your

00:33:26.080 best boxing version, every now and again, you have to push it to discomfort, grotesque discomfort.

00:33:31.780 Same with the body. It's nice that you get to do that every now and again, and then you collect

00:33:35.380 the benefits afterwards. So interesting how, what we could do up to a certain age. And I don't know

00:33:42.660 what that limit was because I really stopped pushing to those limits at about the age of 19.

00:33:47.300 So I don't know if the limit was actually 20 or 21 or 24, but, but I never trained maniacally

00:33:53.920 after the age of 19. Everything I've done since 19 has been smoking and joking. Okay. But what I

00:34:00.620 could get away with then was ridiculous. And I attribute it only to two things, right? Youth,

00:34:06.860 obviously with youth, I mean, stupidity and inexperience and all the things that come with

00:34:10.420 you, but also like having started very young. So age 13 to 19, I was training literally six

00:34:17.080 hours every day, except Sunday. Sundays, I only trained two hours per day. And I look

00:34:21.440 back at the workouts I did. And I think like, I don't know how I did it. And more importantly,

00:34:25.540 like how much better could I have been if I didn't train that much? It wouldn't be uncommon

00:34:30.240 for me to do six super hard rounds of sparring with three fresh opponents. One guy, a weight

00:34:35.900 class below me, one guy in my weight class, and then one guy for two rounds, a weight class

00:34:40.420 above me.

00:34:41.600 In sequence?

00:34:42.440 Yes. Six straight rounds.

00:34:44.040 You definitely did that backwards, but you probably know that now.

00:34:46.600 Yes. And I would mix it up sometimes, but actually it was much harder and more dangerous

00:34:50.460 to do it in that way. And I kind of liked that.

00:34:52.520 Oh boy. Okay.

00:34:53.680 That idea that the guy that could hit the hardest was my last guy.

00:34:56.220 Yeah. When you were the most fatigued, your defenses are the less accurate.

00:34:59.360 But I would be in the weight room six days a week. Like it was just running hard. Anyway,

00:35:03.520 it was kind of crazy, but I want to go back and just put a bow on something you said before,

00:35:08.060 because I think it's so important and it's going to come up again and again. I want to make sure

00:35:11.480 people understand the point. Your example was great, by the way. The non-linearity of force

00:35:19.320 is very counterintuitive. It is not obvious why, for example, being on a bike, even if you are

00:35:27.320 riding at a very high level of power. So remember on a bike, your leg is going around at 90 times per

00:35:33.500 minute. So even if you did a one minute all out, that's 90 reps or call it 45 reps. That's nothing

00:35:41.760 compared to when you're doing an all out set for 10 reps in the gym. It's such a difference in

00:35:47.940 force. I love the example of the wiffle ball going by you versus a 50 cal. The 50 cal could kill you

00:35:53.920 without hitting you. The wiffle ball you wouldn't notice. So I think this idea of the profound level

00:36:00.080 of difference in tissue destruction is a very important one. I was on Dorian Yates's podcast

00:36:06.680 a few months ago and poor Dorian, he wanted to interview me because it was his podcast, but

00:36:11.940 I just wanted to interview him. I have nothing interesting to say. Let's just talk about it

00:36:16.160 right now. It was very interesting to me to understand how little time he spent in the gym

00:36:23.160 for a bodybuilder of that era. It was very, I guess, progressive, even though he was really going back

00:36:29.020 to Arthur Jones and Mike Menser and those guys, but he was really just sort of doing one set to

00:36:34.080 failure per exercise and he was doing each body part once a week. The question I sort of posed to him,

00:36:39.720 but I'll pose it again to you is, are most people even capable of pushing that hard? Because I want

00:36:45.860 to bring it back to where we were a moment ago, which was, hey, for a person who just wants to train

00:36:50.820 30 minutes twice a day, they can get all the benefit in the world. But there's an asterisk there,

00:36:54.800 which is that 30 minutes twice a week is going to be the most difficult 60 minutes total of your

00:37:01.460 week. So going back to Dorian for a second, what has to be true to be able to only train that much

00:37:08.740 in terms of total hours, volume, however you want to measure it, how much work needs to be done in

00:37:13.360 that window of time? For the, not the Dorian Yates example. No, for the Dorian. Let's start with

00:37:18.260 Dorian. Like why could he produce such a massive physique? And again, let's just normalize all the

00:37:22.800 drugs. We're going to talk about drugs later. So we'll explain where the drugs are and aren't

00:37:25.920 helping, but all the drugs in the world aren't going to give you that physique. If you can't

00:37:29.920 generate the destruction of the muscle, is that just the sort of thing where virtually nobody can

00:37:35.220 actually push that hard that consistently, or was it just that nobody thought to do it the way he was

00:37:40.120 doing it at the time? Plenty of people thought that's how it works. Mike Menser did that only in a

00:37:46.320 more extreme version. And even Dorian did lots of Menser acolytes did it. It's not the most efficient or the

00:37:52.580 most effective way to train, but it is quite effective because if you go very close to failure

00:37:57.180 with a very heavy loads, all of the subcomponents of your musculature, your motor units, which is

00:38:02.520 the motor neuron and all of the cells that it activates, they'll get recruited and they will

00:38:07.760 be asked to work to their limits. They'll take on a great deal of damage and disruption. They'll sense

00:38:12.040 a ton of tension and they'll produce great results for you. The other thing is that the relationship

00:38:17.860 between both intensity and volume of how much you do work in the gym, especially volume

00:38:22.940 is curvilinear and hyperbolic. So it looks like this. And if people are just listening to this,

00:38:28.860 it means if you do one all out hard set per muscle group per week, which is not what Dorian did. He did

00:38:35.860 roughly 14 of those per week per muscle group. You get maybe something like 30% of what you could have

00:38:43.300 gotten with five sets because your body has very good sensing mechanisms for tension and metabolites

00:38:52.200 and all these other things that cause muscle growth. And when it detects that you're pushing

00:38:56.180 on the pedal, it'll give you a real good wallop of result. You keep pushing on the same pedal over

00:39:02.880 and over and the systems are greatly desensitized to giving you more muscle growth. The biggest reason

00:39:09.480 that is, is probably because the human body is attuned and evolved almost entirely in hundreds

00:39:17.420 of millions of years before we were even human of what is in the modern context called food insecurity.

00:39:23.920 And so in order to make a real good case for allocating that much to muscle growth,

00:39:30.600 you're going to have to have a real distinct signal to ask your body to put more and more into

00:39:35.520 that process. So it kind of auto caps itself. If you are myostatin deficient, then actually just

00:39:41.700 existing, you just grow muscle all the time. So it seems to be that for a variety of reasons,

00:39:47.240 including that one, that if you do one set close to failure, you get a lot of gains.

00:39:51.980 You do three sets close to failure, you get substantially more gains, but not three times as many gains.

00:39:57.140 You do five sets close to failure and you do just a little bit better than three.

00:40:00.880 You do seven or eight sets close to failure in one workout, and it's statistically

00:40:04.220 undifferentiable from five. So that's kind of how that chart looks. So Dorian, from what I understand,

00:40:11.360 did roughly 14 sets per week per muscle group-ish. And that gets into that territory of a very robust

00:40:19.540 signal of growth to the muscle. It's not the highest signal of growth. If you decided not to

00:40:25.200 train your legs very hard or your back very hard, and the amount of systemic fatigue that's imparted to

00:40:30.000 you week by week is much lower, because fatigue isn't just local, it spills over into everything

00:40:34.880 else. You could push your arms, shoulders, and chest not to 14 or 15 or 20 sets per week, but in

00:40:41.600 many cases, 25, 30, 35 sets per week, and experience very meaningful growth enhancements that you would

00:40:49.180 never have seen only ever training those 15 sets a week. But 15 sets a week might bring you to 70 or 85%

00:40:57.560 of what all of those muscles could eventually have hypertrophied if you only ever specialized in

00:41:02.160 them. And so Dorian was insanely jacked, but he was jacked all over, and probably could have in

00:41:09.740 retrospect benefited from more specialization phases on various weak points that he had.

00:41:14.300 His back was startling. His arms were excellent. Now, by mortal standards, they were the biggest arms

00:41:19.960 you've ever seen in your life. By competitive bodybuilders of his era standards, relative to the rest of

00:41:24.500 his physique, he could have had bigger arms, could have bigger shoulders. And so he could have poured

00:41:28.600 much more volume into those muscle groups and lessened everything else. But Dorian seemed to

00:41:32.500 have a kind of all-around approach, which up until about a year ago, so did I. And so I had never looked

00:41:38.100 very aesthetic, but boy, were my legs super big because they could just eat up the growth all the

00:41:42.080 time. So if you want to do not a ton of volume for any one muscle, if you work really hard and bring

00:41:49.360 yourself very close to failure, you can already do super, super well just with that alone.

00:41:55.840 If you get a really good cook, someone who really knows how to make food, and you give them an hour

00:42:01.820 in the kitchen with a variety of menu items versus three hours, within an hour, they can wow you

00:42:09.140 with what you're eating. Within three, they can wow you more, but it's not three times more.

00:42:15.180 Matrix-related orgasmic brownie or whatever, they ain't going to make that. There's going to take

00:42:18.980 them a lot longer than three hours. They can make a difference, but probably only people who are

00:42:23.740 very culinarily attuned can tell. If someone makes me chicken fingers, gourmet chicken fingers,

00:42:29.240 if there's such a thing, I'm sure Austin has something like that. An hour versus three,

00:42:33.440 to me, it all tastes same, same. It's amazing. To someone really, really with a refined palate,

00:42:37.800 they'll be able to tell, but they can't lie to you and say, look, this three-hour chicken finger,

00:42:42.080 this is just categories above the one-hour one. So in a lot of processes in general,

00:42:46.680 and luckily in the human body, getting some of the way to your body's maximum ability to recover

00:42:52.080 actually brings you most of the way as far as results. And that's why Dorian could do what he

00:42:56.760 did. Now, if Dorian was doing 14 sets per body part per week, would that mean 14 sets to failure

00:43:05.840 of 14 different exercises? So we're not counting the warm-up sets and things of that nature?

00:43:10.120 It's a complex question. It's not 100% clear exactly what Dorian did or if he even did everything

00:43:16.240 exactly as it was written on paper all the time. You see his training videos. You don't always see

00:43:22.840 just one set. He would also have this thing like a warm-up set that for him was a warm-up,

00:43:28.180 but for most people would absolutely be a work set. So it may be more like two or three equivalents

00:43:34.360 of a working set per exercise with three or four exercises. Maybe there's like a total throwaway

00:43:38.860 set, and then there's a modest set, and then there's a two-rep in reserve set that, again,

00:43:44.420 that's a real working set. Sure, which for him wasn't. And then there's a set to failure.

00:43:47.000 Right. Yes. So according to his categorization, the only work set was the one that was absolutely

00:43:51.600 the true muscular failure, sometimes with forced repetitions, which you would also have to integrate

00:43:56.060 because forced reps is when someone helps you lift the rest of the weight, or if you do a drop

00:44:00.740 set, you use less weight right after you went to failure, we shouldn't count that as just one set.

00:44:06.620 It wouldn't be the most correct way to think about it. And when you compare that to the example of

00:44:12.220 the three-hour chef, so now the person who's willing to put in 30 sets per body part per week,

00:44:17.640 do any of those sets need to be to failure, or are you counting those as, hey, these would be sets of

00:44:21.880 two reps in reserve, one to two reps in reserve? Almost all of the literature that has found out that

00:44:27.320 if you don't systemically fatigue the whole body too much, any given muscle or several muscles you

00:44:32.640 can push into the 30, 40, 50 plus set range per week, almost every single study done to elucidate

00:44:38.620 that understanding was done with muscular failure studies. True failure. Truer failure than you'll

00:44:44.260 see in the gym because these people are training in laboratory conditions with master students screaming

00:44:49.160 at them to keep going. Most of us have never trained that hard consistently. So people can still

00:44:54.420 recover. Now these are undergraduates that are recreationally trained typically, so they can

00:44:58.180 neither do a lot of damage nor are they impeded by age and prior injury and all this other thing.

00:45:03.640 So I would say that whatever amount of sets you have to do to get a certain amount of, whatever

00:45:10.580 amount of growth you want, you can get there in a few different ways. You can get there with,

00:45:15.400 let's say, 30 sets that are four reps shy of failure. You can get there with 22 sets that are

00:45:23.060 one or two reps shy of failure, and you can get there with 20 sets that are all the way to absolute

00:45:28.460 muscular failure. So if you are really training not so super hard for reps in reserve, you'll have

00:45:35.300 to do substantially more sets to see the same hypertrophy. But study after study after study

00:45:39.640 illustrates that when you're getting one or two reps away from failure, it is often statistically

00:45:45.140 undifferentiable on raw growth than going all the way to failure. However, the fatigue of true failure

00:45:50.940 training, probably mostly because of that nervous system component, is exponentially higher.

00:45:57.280 And so as far as an efficiency and long-term sustainability strategy, training all the way

00:46:01.860 to muscular failure every session as a matter of principle, probably on the margin suboptimal,

00:46:07.080 and you should probably, most of your sessions should be one or two reps in reserve. If you're

00:46:11.780 doing dumbbell presses, you finish your last rep and you're like, gone to my head, I could do one or two

00:46:16.360 more, but that's it. Most times it's probably best to stop at that point. Because what you're getting

00:46:21.340 if you go north of that is a 10 to one fatigue to stimulus ratio, whereas everything before was like

00:46:27.360 one to one, two to one, three to one, five to one, and all of a sudden it's 10 to one. It's a lot of

00:46:32.360 fatigue costs to pay for when in the literature chronically ends up being either tiny, tiny bit

00:46:38.120 better or not better at all. Which says nothing of the risk of injury when you drop that dumbbell on

00:46:43.360 your pec, which I don't know anybody that's done that, but I've been told it really hurts when you

00:46:49.920 fail in a set of dumbbell presses and totally collapse with a dumbbell on your pec that turns

00:46:55.920 black and blue. Oh, good God. Yeah. I would never know all sorts of things. I just like to aim for

00:46:59.560 the genitals at that point. Might as well have a cool story. But yeah, the training to failure,

00:47:03.920 the vast proportion of people that really propose the training to failure are somehow special for

00:47:09.620 results. They didn't reason their way into that. They emoted their way into that. Training to

00:47:16.280 failure is something the 13 to 19 year old you would have really found a lot of spirit energy in,

00:47:21.280 as I like to say. It's adult male putting on his hat of, I'm a mountain goat and I run into shit.

00:47:29.560 That's what I do. I saw an adorable video of some folks that own a few goats and a few dogs.

00:47:35.660 Their pit bull is like not hiding, but sitting under this like little thing. And there's like

00:47:41.740 a teenage goat that's looking at him and he jumps up on his hind legs and tries to like hit him in

00:47:47.040 the head and the pit bull backs up and he's like, and the goat just tries to do that again. He's

00:47:51.040 just trying to get it on. Like he just wants to hit stuff. That's all he wants. And so when you're a

00:47:55.880 young male, when you are prone to wanting success for yourself, you're the type of sort of type A

00:48:01.420 personality that wants to look back on their life. And if you had to roll the dice and say,

00:48:06.400 the reason you weren't optimally successful is that you work too hard. They'd be like,

00:48:09.580 ah, sweet, whatever. That's kind of cool. But if they saw the dice roll and say, well,

00:48:13.260 the reason you weren't optimally successful in life is because you didn't work hard enough.

00:48:16.100 They would not live with themselves. Those kinds of folks generally tend to go to muscular failure

00:48:21.200 for just that spirit energy. It feels right, damn it. And it feels good. And it's

00:48:25.940 purifying almost at an existential level to be able to have given something your all in the face

00:48:35.280 of challenge, in the face of injury risk, in the face of grotesque pain. And you know,

00:48:39.140 those from sport experience, when you're really, really tired, your whole existence is screaming

00:48:44.560 at you to stop, ignoring those things and going all the way until you know, you've pushed it as far

00:48:49.920 as your body can go. There's something very magical there for the soul, for results in the gym,

00:48:55.440 there's not much magical there, but you have to get close to it. You just don't have to go all the

00:49:00.400 way. So let's go back to the person who's listening to us, who wants to take the plunge,

00:49:07.360 wants to start doing resistance training. They're clinging to what you said a while ago that,

00:49:12.020 hey, I can get some really good results if I'm in the gym 30 minutes twice a week. And I know that

00:49:18.820 Mike trains eight hours a week, but I don't need to be Mike. So tell me what a program looks like.

00:49:25.280 Let's construct the program. Let's start with a young person. Let's start with a young person

00:49:29.360 who actually has been somewhat active throughout their life, but it's mostly been in sports.

00:49:33.800 They play tennis. They did cross country in high school. They've just never been a gym rat,

00:49:38.380 but they've listened to this podcast enough. They've listened to you enough to know like,

00:49:42.060 hey, there's value in developing strength. And I'd like to have some hypertrophy. I want to look a

00:49:46.280 little better. Okay. So I'm coming to you. I'm 40 years old, kind of a little intimidated. If

00:49:50.320 I'm truthful, don't know what to do. Good. I have a whole pack bounce to make you more

00:49:53.620 intimidated. What's our two 30 minute day workout look like? So I'll describe to you what week one

00:50:00.760 could look like. And then I'll tell you how to scale that afterwards. It's not just the same

00:50:04.840 every single week. So what you want to do is if you're training twice a week, let's call it Monday

00:50:10.040 and Thursday for simplicity. You do want some symmetry. So you don't want a situation in which

00:50:14.840 you train with weights Monday, Tuesday, and then you take the rest of the week to do other stuff.

00:50:18.080 If you only train twice a week, you want it to be roughly evenly spread. So Monday, Thursday,

00:50:23.540 Wednesday, Friday, that sort of thing. And because your muscles don't take usually a whole week to

00:50:28.620 recover, but if you push them hard, maybe at most half a week, you can train every major muscle group

00:50:33.820 of your body in every single session that you do. So both Monday and Thursday, we'll have every

00:50:38.400 major muscle group being trained. Routines that have the muscle group separated are called split

00:50:42.980 routines. Chest one day, back the next. Mostly pro bodybuilders are the only ones that benefit from

00:50:49.720 that sort of thing. And there's a lot of nuance about how to execute that sort of thing. So whole

00:50:54.160 body training is probably best for almost everyone who is trying to get the health benefits, longevity

00:50:59.640 benefits, the aesthetic benefits, and so on and so forth. The next thing you want to do is you want

00:51:04.000 to conserve time, but you want a high degree of effect. And that's going to impose some recommendations

00:51:09.560 on us that do both of those things. One recommendation is to choose lifts, to choose

00:51:15.040 exercises that involve two components. One is large muscle masses. So you're not going to be doing a lot

00:51:22.380 of forearm curls or tibialis anterior calf raises, where like the muscle you're training is like as much

00:51:29.280 muscle as your pinky finger. And that's about it. You're going to be training muscles like the

00:51:33.820 quadriceps, the glutes, the hamstrings, the musculature of the back, the chest, the shoulders,

00:51:37.680 the arms, et cetera, and choosing exercises that train those muscles, preferably not just one muscle

00:51:42.920 at a time. So then we're using muscles very efficiently because we're pushing multiple

00:51:47.680 muscles to their limits in one exercise. This is generally going to be compound movements,

00:51:52.420 multi-joint movements, things like pull-ups, pull-downs, barbell and dumbbell bent over rows

00:51:58.800 that for the back at least engage the forearm flexion muscles, the biceps, et cetera. They engage

00:52:05.300 actually the muscles of the forearm themselves through your grip. They engage the posterior

00:52:10.260 aspect of your deltoids, the rear delts. They engage almost every muscle in the back all at the

00:52:15.520 same time. Now you do one set of bicep curls, but I do one set of underhand pull-ups. I got my biceps

00:52:20.960 checked off and I got three other muscles checked off. You just have one. One of my absolute grotesque

00:52:26.580 pet peeves is to see personal trainers in major cities, training their regular clients,

00:52:31.420 housewife who's 55, and having her do like rear delt cable fly one at a time. I'm like,

00:52:37.260 oh my God, is that one made of time? And also, is there some kind of physique show,

00:52:40.960 which the judges said she needs bigger rear delts, but nothing else? That's the only reason you should

00:52:44.360 be doing that nine times out of 10. So compound movements, close grip bench presses, push-ups,

00:52:49.860 overhead presses, upright rows, squats, deadlifts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are the kind of

00:52:54.540 movements that train multiple muscles at the same time. Thus, they are insanely time efficient

00:52:59.820 because you do a few exercises and you're like, holy crap, that's all of my upper body.

00:53:04.200 If you do some kind of rowing machine, you do some kind of machine or barbell or dumbbell that's a

00:53:10.060 close grip press, you do some kind of upright row situation, then you've technically trained every

00:53:16.240 single muscle in your upper body to a substantial extent because every single exercise trains three

00:53:21.560 or four muscles at a time. So those are the kind of movements we're going to be leaning into the most.

00:53:25.840 What about for the lower body? Besides a deadlift and a squat?

00:53:28.340 But various stiff-legged deadlift or good morning, RDL is the same category of movement,

00:53:33.300 that trains your entire back, specifically your spinal erector musculature, which is insanely

00:53:37.980 important for healthy aging. I could talk about that ad nauseum. And then it trains your glutes

00:53:42.400 and it trains your hamstrings and it trains your sartorius and parts of your adductors. And it

00:53:46.000 actually trains your calves too. Holy crap, that's one exercise. You integrate some kind of lunging

00:53:50.620 pattern into that or some kind of squatting pattern, be it a hack squat, leg press, barbell squat,

00:53:54.860 you name it. And all of a sudden you've run out of muscles to train in your lower body because

00:53:58.900 everything has been done to a high degree of diligence. Again, compound movements. Again,

00:54:03.860 I see 45-year-old financial advisors who don't have a lot of time. They have family obligations,

00:54:08.200 they have work obligations, they have other hobbies, and they're doing leg extensions in the gym. I'm

00:54:12.440 always like, man, I hope that guy's hurt and has a good reason to be doing those. Because if he's

00:54:16.380 not squatting or lunging or doing leg presses or something, he's just using up time in the gym,

00:54:20.700 training one thing at a time for no good reason at all. So invariably, you've been asked this a

00:54:27.020 thousand times, but when this person's coming into this situation and they don't have high training

00:54:33.320 history, what are the tools you use to teach them how to do these compound movements safely,

00:54:39.880 especially the lower body ones? So squats and deadlifts, admittedly, they're not going to be

00:54:44.980 starting out with a ton of weight. That's the biggest tool, starting out with low weight.

00:54:48.880 There is no movement the human body can do which unloaded and not pushing the muscles and tendons

00:54:54.820 to their extreme has any higher risk probability than any other movement. So you can start with a

00:55:00.400 deadlift or a squat that's body weight or less. You can brace your arms on a Smith machine and

00:55:05.500 unload yourself while you squat. That may be where you have to start. You take multiple sets like that

00:55:11.600 that are very submaximal. Ideally, you're there with a personal trainer. If not, you can just go to

00:55:16.420 YouTube and type in the name of your exercise and it'll pop up. We have a huge library for free on

00:55:20.520 YouTube. Actually, the RPI hypertrophy app, which is one of our apps in our app suite, every exercise

00:55:25.520 you'll ever see in there has a video demonstration one click away. So you look at that. Ideally, you

00:55:30.860 would have a personal trainer because live communication about how to exercise is irreplaceable

00:55:36.680 because on a video, we're assuming that your assessment of what that is, is your assessment of

00:55:41.640 what you're doing, which is very difficult. Oh my God, you walk into the gym and they're like,

00:55:44.740 I'm squatting. You're like, nah, it's not a squat. I don't know what the hell someone told you or what

00:55:48.120 video you're looking at. That ain't it. If you have a personal trainer, they can be like, ooh,

00:55:51.000 that's really good, but I want you to move your hips back more. I want you to move down more,

00:55:53.580 so on and so forth. But basically, the first time you're ever with someone in a session,

00:55:57.400 all you do is you take them through those movement patterns, fine-tune their technique with lots of

00:56:02.900 encouragement. And you're not seeking perfection. You're just seeking basic competency. Get your heels on the

00:56:06.980 ground, get you squatting all the way down, get your back nice and straight. Listen, that's all we want.

00:56:10.340 And you'll do three or four of those, what are early warm-up sets, and you'll just kick them out

00:56:15.120 of the gym. Three or four warm-up sets per exercise. It's a teaching session. They never

00:56:20.500 even lifted heavy, and they never pushed to failure. But because they're so unaccustomed to lifting,

00:56:24.460 they'll get sore, and it's enough tension and disruption that they will grow muscle.

00:56:28.700 The next time they come in, you work them through a different series of movements. Let's call it

00:56:32.480 Monday-Thursday movements. The next week, they come in, and you do the same workout, except maybe that

00:56:38.140 last set of every movement after a few technique-oriented sets. Ask them to go for slightly

00:56:43.840 more repetitions. Maybe not five, but now ten. Or you put a little bit of weight on the bar,

00:56:47.900 something that gets them like, ooh, okay, I feel it. This is a challenge. And then over time,

00:56:52.940 slowly every week, you increase the weight a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more,

00:56:56.360 until several weeks later, their technique looks real good, which most people can learn really good

00:57:00.860 techniques. It's not that complicated. In a few weeks. And now, they're like kind of struggling

00:57:06.160 with their weights. We're finally up to a weight and rep combination that's challenging them

00:57:11.060 physiologically every set, not just neurologically for how to do the technique. That three or four

00:57:16.560 week sort of entry period is amazing because it takes the probability of injury and just almost

00:57:22.060 completely eliminates it because you're not just going in there and seeing how strong you are on

00:57:25.140 the first day, which, believe it or not, a lot of people are inclined to do profoundly stupid as

00:57:29.460 reserved for like high school or junior high kids. Whatever. Your ninth grade,

00:57:33.000 fucking max out. Don't do that when you're an adult. It's profoundly stupid, especially if you're

00:57:38.060 in your forties and fifties and sixties and like, you don't want a torn pec. You drive a truck for a

00:57:42.600 living. Your pec is required for that sort of thing. After that easing in period, you're now

00:57:47.500 competent to movements. You feel yourself competent as a member of general gym culture. You don't feel

00:57:52.100 lost. A big part of a problem of getting people to go to gyms and actually stick with it is there's

00:57:57.480 this understanding that people have, which is itself relatable, but inaccurate, that the gym

00:58:03.840 is for people that know things. It's their place. It's for that jacked guy. It's not for me. The

00:58:09.200 thing is that jacked guy, to paraphrase another comedian, like he's been in the gym enough. He

00:58:12.540 should take a few days off. You're big. You did it, buddy. The people who really need to be in the gym

00:58:16.400 are the ones who aren't in the gym. So the gym is an infinitely welcoming place. Almost all the jacked

00:58:21.140 people are super nice in real life and they're not judging you. They're just staring off into space.

00:58:24.620 They're ultra selfish. They don't care about you. And if you don't know what you're doing,

00:58:28.040 you can always ask them and they almost certainly will give you free advice until you're blue in

00:58:30.960 the face. So after a few weeks of being in the gym with a trainer, you're like, this is my place.

00:58:36.180 I belong here. And I'm starting to push a little hard. And then over time, you just increase the

00:58:40.920 load on the bar a little bit. And if you're no longer getting sore or really tired and sore and tired in

00:58:46.680 such a way that you need until next Thursday to get sore and tired, you start increasing the number of

00:58:50.800 working sets that you're doing. Because working sets wise up until this point was just

00:58:54.600 one working set, really, if you think about it. In the first week or two, zero working sets.

00:58:58.420 They're all practice sets because you're so untrained. They're work sets for you, but they're

00:59:02.220 not to anyone else that's watching. A few weeks in, one work set. A few weeks after, two work sets,

00:59:07.260 and so on and so on and so on until you're doing anywhere between three and six working sets per

00:59:11.240 exercise. There's another twist here for the person that wants to save a lot of time and actually get

00:59:16.000 some cardiovascular benefits as well. You take exercises that are responsible for training muscles

00:59:22.380 muscles that can be paired with other exercises, which train muscles that are totally or mostly

00:59:28.000 unrelated. If I do a seated dumbbell shoulder press, I rack those dumbbells, I can walk over

00:59:34.180 and do some goblet squats, and essentially there's almost no muscle overlap. Or I can do some deadlifts,

00:59:41.280 and there's just no muscle overlap whatsoever. And so I could do some seated dumbbell shoulder

00:59:45.760 presses, put it down, nice hard set, good job, two sets left. And I could sit for the average of

00:59:50.500 one or two minutes and scroll on my phone. But if you're really time conscious and you want extra

00:59:54.520 cardiovascular benefit, what you can do is as soon as you've finished with one group of muscles,

00:59:59.480 you take five or 10 seconds, shake it out, breathe it out, hit the next working set for that paired

01:00:04.860 exercise. While you're doing that exercise, the muscles for the first exercise are actually

01:00:10.080 recovering locally. And so when you're done with exercise, five or 10 seconds later, it's set to for

01:00:15.060 the first exercise. So you pair these unrelated work sets together, unrelated exercise, such that

01:00:22.040 when you've done four sets of one exercise, let's say a close grip bench press that trains the pushing

01:00:27.780 muscles of your body, if you've paired that with a row or a lat pulldown, then really you've done

01:00:34.040 eight total working sets, and you've just knocked off 80% of your entire upper body in an amount of time

01:00:41.520 that the dumbbell press by itself guy has just finished only his front delts and triceps.

01:00:48.980 So rest times in the gym, outside of getting a drink or just trying not to faint, are probably

01:00:54.440 not your best friend if you're just going for general health, general aesthetics, this kind of

01:00:58.140 stuff, especially beginning. So you're either working one muscle group or several with one exercise,

01:01:04.900 or you're transitioning between exercises, or you're working the other one, or you're setting up

01:01:09.500 your weights for your next machine that you're going to be doing, which means as soon as you get

01:01:12.960 in and warm up, it's go, go, go, go back to back to back to back to five or 10 seconds for transition

01:01:17.860 to catch your breath barely. You're not going to be talking to a lot of people at the gym other than

01:01:21.760 how many sets do you have left in that machine, that kind of stuff. And so that allows us to condense

01:01:27.820 a lot of work. Most people will need something like 15 to 30 total working sets for their whole body

01:01:34.740 per session. You can condense that into 30 minutes, but you're working almost the entire time.

01:01:41.540 And it's generally a good idea to do sets of 10 to 30 repetitions because those kinds of loads,

01:01:49.000 you don't need a ton of time to have your best performance. You can get good enough performances

01:01:53.260 with a short time for recovery. And because it's a lot of reps, not only does it get you very

01:01:57.960 meaningful strength increases, because the absolute load is lower, much lower injury risks. Look,

01:02:03.780 if you do one rep maxes all the time, you're going to have a coming one way or another.

01:02:06.980 You'd never touch any weight that's heavier than a 10 rep max. The probability of injury

01:02:10.820 anyone given set is much, much smaller. And because it's a higher volume of work,

01:02:16.040 you get a great hypertrophy stimulus and you get great cardiometabolic benefits.

01:02:20.380 If you're breathing insanely heavy the entire time and sweating like a insert favorite analogy here,

01:02:25.820 then you will be kind of one and two-ing that session for a resistance training checkmark

01:02:31.380 and a pretty decent cardiovascular training checkmark, especially if these are compound

01:02:36.800 multi-joint exercises that require you supporting your body in space. You do a set of 15 barbell

01:02:42.580 squats followed by a set of 15 push-ups. Your cardio is working. I mean, that's what they torture

01:02:48.200 boxers with. Their cardio is outlandish, back to back to back to back. It's resistance training,

01:02:53.740 it's cardio, it's both. You have two sessions like that per week, each one lasting 30 minutes.

01:02:59.360 You have two sessions of zone two, zone three cardio where you're really trying and four sessions

01:03:05.840 total like that per week with good sleep and good body weight, good nutrition. You're well on your way

01:03:11.060 to when you see your healthcare provider every year and he asks you, are you trying to die sooner or

01:03:15.840 later? And you tell them what you do, most will be like, well, that's way more than most of my

01:03:19.820 patients do. And if you look at the American College of Sports Medicine requirements, various

01:03:23.860 requirements of what constitutes rigorous physical activity, you're getting well into the mix with a

01:03:29.680 sum total, if we think about it, of two to three hours of difficult physical activity of any kind

01:03:35.700 in a week. So when people say, I don't have time for exercise, I get it. I get it. I don't have

01:03:41.140 children. I've heard that when you have children, time dilates like black hole type of stuff, but you can

01:03:46.880 probably make time at least for that resistance training session. Will it be ultra easy? No way.

01:03:54.400 It's going to be really tough. I don't train like that. I need my break, damn it. I'm trying to be

01:03:58.620 lazy and scroll on Instagram between sets. But if I wanted to get the maximum results for the minimum

01:04:03.160 amount of time, we're working all the time. And over time, you start with one or two paired sets like

01:04:09.160 that. You get up to three or four paired sets like that on five to eight exercises per session.

01:04:16.220 Holy crap. That is a lot of work. And it will train your entire body in one session. And you

01:04:21.360 will require one to three days of rest afterwards. Guess what? You rest for your days, you come back,

01:04:26.180 you rest for days, you come back. There's two workouts in a week. Each one takes about half an

01:04:30.540 hour. And if you ever want the workouts to take less time, work faster and rest less.

01:04:35.480 And a lot of people want to hear like the hack for how to get really awesome results with very

01:04:40.600 little time spent in the gym. But they don't want to hear how to get the hack actually going because

01:04:45.480 they're like, well, hold on, hold on. What's going to hurt? Like, yeah, it's going to hurt. It's

01:04:48.060 going to be miserable. Unless you accept the fact that, you know, all the benefits of endorphins and

01:04:52.020 everything like that. It's kind of like, you know, how do you become a millionaire? So you're very,

01:04:55.480 very good at something. You get very, very good people skills and you grind for years at starting

01:04:59.940 your empire. Like, nah, man, I wanted like a win a lottery ticket or something. I didn't want all this.

01:05:04.120 Like everyone knows that's how you become a millionaire. I don't want that. So yeah,

01:05:07.780 you can thumbnail and title this how you like, but it's cool to say, yeah, listen, one hour a week

01:05:13.260 and you can have amazing benefits of health, quality of life. But I'm here to tell you real

01:05:18.400 talk because at RP, that company that I represent, we just have a policy of never lying to people ever

01:05:23.560 because we're doing this to honestly help people. And business-wise, if you start lying to people,

01:05:28.260 it's hard to unweave the rainbow after that. It's going to be tough. But also there is now more and

01:05:34.100 research accumulating that doing difficult things physically is good for your mental health.

01:05:39.460 There's a lot of publicity lately to cold plunges, puberman and all that stuff. And a cold plunge,

01:05:45.380 because it's so annoying, makes you more grateful for the not pain you're engaging in the rest of the

01:05:50.360 day. And it's really good for you. I have one better. You do a 30 minute session of back to back to

01:05:55.760 compound free motion or dumbbell or barbell or even machine work and sweat your balls off and huff and

01:06:05.720 puff. The rest of the day seems like a breeze and the endorphin kick is massive. It's like surviving a

01:06:12.300 traumatic episode. So the cold plunge has some benefits, not entirely so that they're enormous or

01:06:19.260 extent whatsoever in many cases. But this kind of resistance exercise has benefits that if we just

01:06:25.720 took one by one time to talk about on this podcast, we could talk about nothing else and do four podcasts

01:06:30.420 in a row. That kind of massive benefit. There's a lot there I want to go back and touch on. Let's start

01:06:36.340 with the idea of how does a person find a good trainer? Because it's hard enough to find a good

01:06:44.140 doctor. And that's a highly, highly regulated industry. You either are an MD or you're not. But still, there

01:06:51.120 are lots of different flavors of doctors. And there are some who really think a lot about prevention and

01:06:56.920 really care about how you exercise and how you eat. And there are others who I think do, but frankly, don't

01:07:03.000 have the time to really noodle that. As difficult as it might be to find a great doctor, it's probably even more

01:07:09.400 difficult to figure out a trainer who's really good. So what are the questions that a person can be asking

01:07:15.440 when they go into their gym or are looking online for a trainer to say, like, is this the person who

01:07:21.600 is going to help me learn to do a squat and a deadlift safely? Is this a person who can integrate

01:07:28.560 whatever pre-existing injuries I have and really help me? Because again, I've worked with people who

01:07:35.460 have watched people coach and I'm like, wow, that person really knows what they're doing.

01:07:39.960 They have picked up the absolute subtle art of how to cue somebody to lift. They can focus on the

01:07:46.120 non-obvious. And there's other people who literally have no clue. They look like they just watched the

01:07:50.420 YouTube video and they're sort of parroting the YouTube video to you, but they have no real intuition

01:07:55.100 about it. It's very tough, very tough, because if you aren't an expert or a very knowledgeable person

01:08:03.240 yourself, it's very difficult to figure out who is knowledgeable and an expert, who's doing a good

01:08:09.440 job. Like if you're finding a good doctor, I don't know what that means. I have no idea how to measure

01:08:15.120 a good doctor versus not a good doctor. Most doctors are equally confident in telling you what they think

01:08:20.360 is going on and very differentially accurate. So it's a tough question. I would say that if you have

01:08:28.520 an opportunity to chat with them and ask them a few questions, you could find out some things that'll

01:08:32.960 be helpful. These are all marginal pieces of advice. There's no absolute. I'd say the thing

01:08:37.700 that comes close to the absolute of having a high guarantee that they're good at what they do

01:08:42.800 is if they're certified in the Menno Henselman's PT course. Menno is an expert in our field.

01:08:50.660 He knows his stuff and his trainers that he certifies have a high probability of being able to deliver to

01:08:56.680 you what it is that you want out of them. There are other fine certifications out in the world,

01:09:02.240 but a lot of certifications, you're just reasonably intelligent and you studied for an hour and

01:09:07.660 voila, you're certified. So the certification doesn't go very far. It helps if your trainer

01:09:11.760 has an undergraduate in kinesiology or some related field that is not by itself ensuring you that

01:09:16.880 they're going to be good, but it sloughs off a lot of back end, if you know what I mean? Like

01:09:20.600 you're going to get rid of a lot of not great trainers. You can almost entirely ignore what they

01:09:25.060 look like because the preponderance of the reason people look like they do is genetics.

01:09:31.700 The other is diet and the other is just how long have they been doing stupid or smart things to

01:09:37.560 their body, but grinding away. So if you look at a trainer that just looks kind of like a normal

01:09:42.140 person, maybe a little muscular, a little bit leaner, you'll get another trainer in the same gym

01:09:45.860 that's just like got six pack on his face, just ripped. Don't be like, well, that guy seems to know

01:09:50.880 what he's doing. He's ripped. He can't give you his genetics and almost the biggest contribution

01:09:56.300 to why he's ripped is genetics. And so people get hung up on this all the time. They work with

01:10:02.400 preposterously underqualified trainers who just look the part. There's not like a transitive

01:10:07.180 property by which you can just like give someone your results. Yeah. I wish, right? You just touch

01:10:12.960 their skin and you're like, I feel it. You wake up the next day, super jacked. It was that easy.

01:10:16.940 You can ask them how they integrate science into their practice. Not a guarantee because you can

01:10:22.600 be evidence-based and still have all sorts of poor practices. If they go mostly on personal

01:10:28.640 experience and feel, you can be assured that they're probably not the greatest trainer for you.

01:10:33.420 If they have a lot of personal experience that they use in their training, but also they're very

01:10:37.440 adept at understanding the scientific literature and especially just the broad strokes basics,

01:10:42.400 you're probably in better hands than not. Someone that can explain to you the reasons

01:10:46.760 for why you're doing certain things. And you just voice note record them and ask them,

01:10:52.740 is it okay if I record your reason? I just kind of want to think about it at home later. Wink.

01:10:57.320 And then you just copy that and feed it into CLAWD35 or GPT-40 and be like,

01:11:02.640 give me a steel man and a red team for this. It'll do both based on the sort of texture of

01:11:08.380 its responses. So all these LLMs are designed to be insanely agreeable and very kind. But when you're

01:11:14.000 wrong, wrong, they'll be like, that's a good point. However, eight point list, you're like,

01:11:18.560 that guy's an idiot. This is all wrong. So luckily GPT-40, if it was embodied in a robot

01:11:24.300 currently would probably make a great trainer. And so how your trainer and various claims of their

01:11:29.140 scores against GPT is probably one of the better ways to do it. And also say this, there's a big

01:11:34.820 factor of how you get along with the trainer, because you're going to want to find the training

01:11:40.240 at least as not unpleasant as possible and ideally as pleasant as possible. If the trainer is someone

01:11:46.560 that you just kind of vibe with, they can dig into you and really get you going. But they're

01:11:51.000 also super fun to talk to outside of when you're not dying and during training. If they can get you

01:11:56.020 to become responsible for showing up on time in a sense of, you know, the trainer and I are on the

01:12:01.160 same team. He's on my team. And when he says, are you going to make it Monday? I just don't want to

01:12:05.360 let him down because he's my buddy. And we're in this process together. I don't want to give up on

01:12:09.200 myself. If you have a trainer where you connect with like that, you got yourself a great trainer,

01:12:13.720 even if they're not super evidence-based, they just get you in and get you moving.

01:12:17.100 That's like half the battle right there. So let's say those things are things to consider. And the

01:12:20.920 last thing I'll say is have a trainer for a few weeks, few months, and maybe learn up about what's

01:12:27.000 going on and then see like, oh, does my trainer know things or not? I mean, I had a person I was

01:12:31.560 doing just nutrition for while my colleague, Nick Shaw was doing training and not for her.

01:12:37.560 I was in my PhD program in Tennessee. I was training her or nutrition coaching via distance

01:12:42.060 over the internet. And Nick was training other clients in New York and she was in New York at

01:12:45.920 the time. And she told the trainer kind of the diet that I had written her. And he was like,

01:12:50.680 oh, that's stupid. That's wrong. And she was like, why? And the answer he gave her was so bereft of

01:12:55.540 a systematic approach to knowledge that she texted me. She's like, do you have any trainers you can

01:13:00.060 recommend to me? I think my guy's an idiot. And sure enough, gave her over to a colleague of ours

01:13:04.940 and Nick didn't have any room. And she's like, oh my God, this guy is beating my ass in the best

01:13:08.120 way possible. I love him. Yeah. Some of your trainers will suck and you might need a few

01:13:12.840 weeks, a few months to realize, man, everything I've heard about how this whole process works,

01:13:17.640 my trainer doesn't even agree with me. Yeah. You might have to switch it up. You might not have

01:13:21.880 the perfect car. The first car you buy might just be a thing that has a steering wheel and wheels

01:13:26.520 and goes places. And after you've kind of appreciated what it is you don't like about

01:13:30.080 your car, your next car can be a bit more of a educated purchase.

01:13:34.280 So what about the person who's been lifting weights for a long time? They're in there,

01:13:38.660 they're doing this stuff, but they're not happy with their progress. They're in the gym. Let's

01:13:42.340 just say they're in the gym three, four times a week, an hour at a time.

01:13:46.480 How hard are they working? Are they really trying or are we saying that maybe they're trying,

01:13:49.920 maybe they're not? It's a very different answer if they're trying or if they're not.

01:13:52.320 Let's say they are. They're actually trying quite hard and you actually look at them and you think,

01:13:57.100 you know, gosh, they might actually be slightly overtraining. And by overtraining, let's say

01:14:01.100 they're training three days a week and they're doing a whole body three days a week and they're

01:14:04.620 in there 90 minutes at a time. They're going to one to two rep in reserve on every set and they're

01:14:10.780 hitting 20 to 30 sets per body part per workout. To be clear, like they're doing okay, but they're

01:14:15.800 just saying, you know what? I want to be really jacked. Okay. Yeah. What do I need to do?

01:14:20.280 Yeah. You would need to go down a checklist, a troubleshooting checklist. And we actually do

01:14:25.320 have on the RP Strength YouTube channel, we have multiple videos of how to troubleshoot your muscle

01:14:30.100 growth, how to troubleshoot your diet, how to troubleshoot your recovery. So if you throw those

01:14:34.180 on in the car during your drive to work, you're going to learn a lot about how to troubleshoot.

01:14:37.760 You can consider yourself with variables that occur in the gym. You can consider yourself with

01:14:41.560 variables that occur outside of the gym. Both are very important. In the gym variables,

01:14:46.040 starting from the beginning would be exercise selection. Sometimes people say my arms aren't

01:14:52.920 as big as I want them to be. And I look at their plan and it has no isolation work for their arms

01:14:58.620 whatsoever. And I tell them this is not a surprise. And they say something like, well, I thought

01:15:03.700 underhand pull-ups and close grip bench was good enough to get big arms. And I would say, yes,

01:15:08.540 it is. Both of those exercises are great to get big arms, but you want bigger arms,

01:15:14.100 which means like every bodybuilder ever, you're going to have to start working a few sets of curls

01:15:19.380 in and a few sets of tricep extensions of some sort regularly and hard. So a lot of times people

01:15:24.780 don't have the specific exercise selection for what it is they want. They're just doing the kind

01:15:29.420 of general training you and I just described, but they're sometimes not even honest to themselves at

01:15:33.700 a deep introspective level of what it is they want. Like a lot of those people that want better

01:15:37.960 results, you look at them and you're like, you look great. And like, yeah, but I want to look better.

01:15:42.300 And you go, how? I just want fucking gigantic arms. You go, oh, okay. Well, like your workout

01:15:48.700 is absolutely not designed to do that. It's designed to get your arms that look big to someone

01:15:52.520 who like sees you lifting your suitcase into an airplane. But other than that, you don't have

01:15:56.800 big arms. And then you go, okay, exercise selection. Another variable to consider is technique.

01:16:02.040 Some people have just not so great technique. A good technique involves putting the muscle

01:16:07.240 into high force positions at a very deep stretch, long muscle links and high forces.

01:16:12.560 So if you're doing pec flies, for example, but you're only going all the way down to like here,

01:16:17.840 you need to open up like crazy and take a few seconds down there in the deep stretch. That's

01:16:21.800 really going to help you out. And technique is so exercise specific and so individual that

01:16:27.100 you really should get a qualified trainer or someone you trust or videos on your own analysis to go

01:16:32.920 like, okay, am I really doing this right? Because you think, oh, I'm hack squatting. And then you see

01:16:36.020 an RP strength video about hack squats. And you're like, oh, I have never hack squatted a day in my

01:16:39.540 life. You try it our way and you're like, oh my God, my legs. For the first time in months or years,

01:16:45.180 they get sore, they get tired. And you're like, oh wow. A couple of weeks later, your quads are

01:16:48.920 visibly bigger. Okay, now finally I fixed my technique. Another question you have to ask is volume wise.

01:16:56.380 I mean, I suppose you already said they're doing one or two reps in reserve. So we're not going to

01:16:59.820 question that. We'll say they're training hard, which is good. That's another thing to ask if

01:17:03.140 someone is getting great results. Yeah, 100%. Like, am I really pushing hard? How hard?

01:17:08.140 If I think I'm pushing hard enough, I should push a little harder and see what happens.

01:17:11.920 So for intensity, you would say if they're at least hitting two reps in reserve,

01:17:16.680 you're okay with it. Golden. No need to improve above that.

01:17:19.100 But if you went in there and you observed them at the end of their set, if you said, let me see you do

01:17:23.940 a few more and they were constantly getting four more reps. So they're four reps in reserve. You would say

01:17:29.060 the literature says you're not hitting in a high enough training stimulus.

01:17:32.780 Correct. This is a very important one.

01:17:34.140 Very important.

01:17:34.760 Because I think I talked about this once on Instagram. And if I didn't, I meant to,

01:17:38.620 and I just forgot, which is equally likely. In fact, more likely.

01:17:41.740 Yes.

01:17:42.220 But the point I wanted to make was, at least for me, and it might be that I'm just not

01:17:46.800 good enough. You don't know what two reps in reserve means until you go to failure.

01:17:51.880 Yeah.

01:17:52.360 You have to fail many times to actually know how bad two reps in reserve is and one rep in reserve.

01:18:01.200 Yeah.

01:18:01.540 And they're not the same every workout. That's the other thing. You could have the same weight on

01:18:05.520 their different days and you fail at a different number of reps, but there's like a signal. There's

01:18:11.740 a twitch. There's a discomfort that you have to experience it, but you can't experience it until

01:18:17.700 you blow past it.

01:18:18.620 Yeah. That's largely true. So every now and again, you have to test the waters.

01:18:22.620 There's actually a really good system of doing that. And it's incorporated into our hypertrophy

01:18:26.960 app. The app will ask you to put in your weights, roughly 10 to 20 rep maxes, and you'll do as many

01:18:32.980 reps as you think is three reps or four reps to failure, depending on what it's wanting you to do.

01:18:37.860 And you'll write your repetitions in for every single set. Well, I got 16 reps at 90 pounds on this

01:18:42.880 exercise. The next week, the app auto-programs a progression for you. So it'll either ask

01:18:48.600 you to do 17 reps at 90 pounds, something like that, or it'll ask you to do 95 pounds again,

01:18:54.880 or 95 pounds anew for the 16 reps you did last time. It does that every single session. It pushes

01:19:01.020 you a little bit ahead. Your only job is to do what is written. If you consistently do what is

01:19:07.040 written, and at the end of your cycle, before you have one week of easy training called a deload,

01:19:12.800 and you start a new cycle, if at the end of your cycle, you never actually failed at a weight,

01:19:17.860 like you tried to get 17, but you got 16, the 17 wouldn't move when you put the bar down,

01:19:22.080 you're like, oh crap, hopefully nobody saw that. That never happens to you. You've never trained

01:19:26.780 close to failure, but that's okay. The next time you program in your weights, and you do three reps

01:19:32.240 in reserve for that first week, go a little harder than you think you should be, or you typically did.

01:19:37.520 And then at some point during the middle or end of that cycle, you will actually hit failure trying

01:19:42.720 to get to those objective targets, because here's a big problem with trying to estimate failure.

01:19:46.980 If you go based on how hard something feels, it's kind of different like you said, you had a tough

01:19:50.340 day at work versus easy day at work, you ate well versus you didn't, slept well versus you didn't.

01:19:54.380 And it's all perceptual, which is nuts. It's kind of like not having a mirror,

01:19:58.640 but asking someone to stand in front of you and help you put on makeup.

01:20:01.500 Thanks for your input, but I need a frigging mirror because I don't know if you're just

01:20:06.560 messing with me. I look like a clown. I put lipstick over here instead of on my lips. Who knows?

01:20:11.620 But if you have objective criteria of this is what I did last week, and I just want to go a little

01:20:17.220 bit beyond, it is inevitable that one of two things happen over the long term. One, you will reach

01:20:21.940 muscular failure and you will be unable to do a repetition. Or the other is you'll get infinitely

01:20:26.660 strong forever and now you're Superman. One of those is more realistic than the other.

01:20:30.800 So when people say, I don't know what's close to failure or not, my answer is very easy.

01:20:35.380 Download the RPI. No, sorry. Wrong. Sales pitch. Oops. Put some numbers on the board and just buy a

01:20:42.240 little, two and a half or five pounds or one rep each week. Beat those numbers week upon week.

01:20:47.680 Commit yourself. I must hit 18 reps. That's the goal. If you can't do it, success. You went to failure.

01:20:53.860 Now you know where the limit is. Now you're building an intuition. But if you did get those numbers,

01:20:58.060 next week you go higher and you go higher and you go higher. Versus if just like, oh, I think I went

01:21:01.960 hard. I don't know what that means. You could be very wrong and oftentimes are.

01:21:06.560 So is it safe to say that if a person is already, and by the way, we talked about what's sufficient

01:21:12.080 for exercise selection, technique intensity. We didn't specify volume. What would be a red flag

01:21:17.300 for you in that individual? If their volume sets per body part was below X, where would you say,

01:21:23.440 well, it should be expected? Per week. I mean, if you're beginning a few sets are totally fine.

01:21:28.580 Yes, yes, yes. But this is for this kind of intermediate person.

01:21:30.340 Yeah. Below five or 10 sets per week is not a sufficient effort to expect your best results.

01:21:35.500 Between 10 and 20 sets per week is fine. But for many people, you have to use a second qualifier,

01:21:41.920 which is what's actually happening to you. If you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in

01:21:47.380 your muscles for a day or two after training, if your strength continues to be stable or increases

01:21:52.300 session to session to session, and you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week,

01:21:59.720 per muscle, not per body part. In other words, bicep would need to be 20 sets per week.

01:22:04.700 Correct.

01:22:05.260 Wow.

01:22:05.780 Yeah.

01:22:06.400 I think we have a pretty good explanation for why somebody at this table has small biceps.

01:22:11.820 Yes.

01:22:12.520 I'm not saying who.

01:22:13.420 How dare you?

01:22:13.780 I take that offensively, by the way. So then if all of the signs show that you're not actually

01:22:19.540 excessively fatigued, your volume is either okay or less than it could be. If you're not getting

01:22:25.800 great results visually, but you're always running into strength plateaus, if you're always tired and

01:22:32.240 sore, and if you're north of 20 sets per muscle per week, on average, hard sets, then probably doing

01:22:39.380 less is good because you have almost every indicator of doing too much.

01:22:42.660 And so you'll be able to intuit rather quickly if it's too little or too much. Those are most of

01:22:48.860 the variables involved in the gym part except for one, and that is when is the last time you took a

01:22:55.340 break? Because there is a concept called accumulated fatigue or cumulative fatigue. Your muscles and

01:23:02.140 the rest of your body recover very well between sessions, but not 100%, maybe 90 or 95. And if you're

01:23:07.940 a mathematics fan, if you multiply 0.95 by 0.95 by 0.92 by 0.9 by 0.95 enough, you're down to 50%

01:23:15.420 recovery within like six or eight weeks. And then how could you possibly be making gains?

01:23:21.340 So every, for the average person cranking away, probably the person listening to this podcast,

01:23:27.220 one week out of every eight, one week every two months, don't go to the gym. Stay active,

01:23:32.840 maybe do a bodyweight squat or a pushup or two in your hotel room or something. Ideally try going on

01:23:37.880 vacation. If not, try to not exercise and be a little easier at work, be a little easier on family

01:23:43.940 stuff, have some fun, cheap foods, eat a little more than usual, be a little less active so that

01:23:50.040 your body can recover in a way that it can never recover between sessions, but it gets a whole week

01:23:55.600 to do this. And once a year, at least take two whole weeks like that. We call that active rest.

01:24:01.860 So that first thing, one week off is called a deload. And the second thing off where you take

01:24:05.640 two weeks in a row of basically just not even coming to the gym. And if you do, you just do the

01:24:09.040 lightest, easiest stuff ever. It takes 10 minutes. That reduces your systemic cumulative fatigue so

01:24:15.320 much that it brings it back down to zero or almost zero. Some people will say, look, 16 weeks,

01:24:20.180 I've been cranking. First 12 weeks, great results. Last four weeks, I don't know if I'm moving the

01:24:24.420 needle. Maybe you're just really tired. Pushing the pedal down harder is usually not the best way

01:24:30.280 to do things. It might be time for a break. People come back and your muscles resensitize

01:24:35.440 to the stimulus if you take time off. So when you come back, go back to two or three sets of

01:24:40.820 everything, not four or five sets of everything. You're going to get really sore and really pumped

01:24:44.740 from just a few sets. And you're going to be growing again. You do that for another six to eight

01:24:49.340 weeks. You get tired again. Your strength starts to plateau. Take another week of easy training or

01:24:54.020 no training at all. And that's how the cycle repeats itself. It's probably most of the stuff

01:24:58.640 I would say about how to analyze your training inside the gym to get closer to your optimum.

01:25:03.500 There's lots to say about external gym variables. But one thing I'll say really quick is this.

01:25:08.320 Before I ever consult people nowadays about how to pursue incrementally more optimal outcomes for their

01:25:17.700 muscle, people who want to gain muscle but are frustrated they aren't jacked enough, nowadays I always

01:25:23.200 take time to find a reference frame of what have your gains been like, how much work have you been

01:25:28.720 putting in, how long have you been training, and to see if how do genetics play a role in this and how

01:25:34.320 does age play a role in this. I've consulted with people before who were in their 60s weighing something

01:25:40.560 like 150 pounds, fairly lean. They aspire to be in the low to mid 200s fairly lean. I told them that

01:25:49.180 outside of an anabolic steroid cycle that's probably got an even chance of killing you as it does of

01:25:53.620 getting you jacked, you're not going to get that jacked. And your progress rate is just going to be

01:25:58.420 much slower than the 20-year-olds at your gym. But sometimes we forget that age has such a profound

01:26:03.280 effect on our results. And we look around and as all young people are like, well, I want to look like

01:26:07.080 that. Well, guess what? 1982 was a long time ago. So unless you have a time machine or age reversal,

01:26:13.020 which I think age reversal technology-

01:26:14.180 Do you attribute this to the hypertrophy of type 2 fibers, which are necessary for the power

01:26:19.660 generation that's necessary for producing the gains we're talking about?

01:26:23.300 That's definitely a component of it. Another component is overall systemic ability to recover.

01:26:27.760 You have so much DNA methylation and all this other kind of damage and accretion

01:26:33.300 of the wear and tear of age that your organelles and your cells don't work as well as they used to.

01:26:39.660 Your organs don't work as well as they used to. A lot of times you're taking for granted

01:26:43.860 the fact that now in your mid-60s, you run a top 500 corporation and you have more stress than

01:26:49.720 most people could handle in a day. You have that in an hour. But back when you were making the gains

01:26:55.260 of your life when you were 18, your job was to show up to school, go to the gym, eat at the

01:26:59.900 cafeteria, and smoke weed. And that's all you did every day. Of course, you have the gains of your

01:27:04.500 life. People discount that. They also look to athletes and they go, oh my God, like that bikini

01:27:08.980 competitor. She looks amazing. I want that body. Well, check this out, Linda. You're 56. You have

01:27:14.320 three children. One of them is in college, two are not. You are a CTO for a major company and you

01:27:20.780 sleep five hours a night. That bikini competitor trains a few clients. She posts on OnlyFans and

01:27:26.620 she does nothing else other than train, recover, and watch Netflix and sleep nine hours a night of

01:27:31.640 an uninterrupted sleep. It's two completely different worlds. She's also 27, by the way. Strange times,

01:27:37.320 I know. But especially with social media, there is nothing that surprises me anymore about how

01:27:42.220 unmoored some people can be from realistic expectations. The other thing is genetics.

01:27:46.600 The most important factor, other than time spent in the gym, about how jacked and lean you're going

01:27:52.140 to get is genetics. And it is a hugely, hugely important factor. You have to understand that

01:27:58.600 your goals have to be referenced to what your genetic likelihood of achieving them are. The only way

01:28:03.240 you'll find that out is if you work at it for a while and see what happens. But some people work

01:28:07.060 at resistance training for three years. They'll accrue five pounds of muscle, burn three pounds

01:28:12.480 of fat, and they'll be like, this next year, I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle. And you go,

01:28:17.060 whoa, that's not how hyperbolic curves and asymptotic curves work. You got it backwards.

01:28:22.280 If in three years you gain 10 pounds of muscle, in the next three years, maybe you can gain five.

01:28:26.340 That's realistic. Does not work in reverse. So it's really, really important to contextualize

01:28:31.760 multiple qualities. One is how much recovery and rest and relaxation time do you get compared to

01:28:37.660 work and being underslept? Another is genetics and the other is age. And so if people say,

01:28:45.020 I want to get more jacked, the reason I'm ranting about this, Peter, is because I've had many clients

01:28:50.980 who were willing to put in whatever work it was going to be necessary to put in, but they were older.

01:28:56.660 They did not have particularly great genetics. And they had already gotten most of the muscle

01:29:02.160 gain that they were going to get, not all, but most. And they requested a formulation from me

01:29:07.240 of their exercise plan that would get them categorically better gains. And outside of

01:29:12.760 pharmaceutical enhancement, I had to tell them in some way or another, that was impossible.

01:29:17.200 I ended up telling them that after many years of struggling myself to try to optimize for them and

01:29:21.260 get them those gains, because I'm like, look, I'm a science guy. I know things I think.

01:29:25.340 I've been fairly successful in my own body. Why can't I get these people to gain muscle?

01:29:29.760 And those, that trifecta of age, genetics, and how much of a professional bodybuilder or

01:29:35.160 fitness person do you want to be for the next several months? They are the biggest factors

01:29:39.560 for results. And people seem to think that you can just hack your way to the best plan. And if you

01:29:44.040 just do the right things, you'll get amazing results. It has to be in context, unless you like

01:29:48.640 setting yourself up for really unfortunate experiences where you get quite upset that you couldn't do the

01:29:53.840 thing. People will arbitrarily assign themselves an amount of muscle they want. It does not work

01:29:59.180 like that. Put in the diligence, put in the time, see how it goes. Things are going well, you can crank

01:30:04.480 it up a little bit and get a little bit better gains. It's going to take time. If things are not

01:30:08.960 going so well, you have to optimize to make them go a little better. But there's, outside of the

01:30:13.580 basics, nothing you're going to be able to do that is going to be a category leap of results. Short of what I

01:30:19.660 estimate in the early 2030s will be the great pharmaceutical renaissance. And then you can just

01:30:23.680 turn myostatin off and get as jacked as you want. Till we get that, realism can be a painful pill to

01:30:29.500 swallow. Well, it'll be interesting to see if, even if we can turn myostatin off as adults, if it will

01:30:36.500 have the same impact that it has in the cartoons, right? Like when we look at the animals that have

01:30:43.040 myostatin knockouts, which are just some of the most enjoyable things to look at. Truthfully, it's like,

01:30:48.060 you know, our favorite things in med school, we're looking at the myostatin knockout chickens and

01:30:52.800 cows, but it's not clear if you took a mature adult and inhibited myostatin, if you would get

01:30:58.420 the same benefits. But let's go back to out of the gym. One more thing we didn't discuss. I just

01:31:03.480 kind of want to hear your thoughts on when something out of the gym is playing a role in your unjackedness

01:31:08.760 is nutrition often a factor or is that generally not? In other words, is it so rare that someone is not

01:31:15.080 getting enough protein or not getting enough calories that that's the problem? Is that just

01:31:19.500 not something you see much? It's a thing. Okay. I would assume it's more a thing with women than

01:31:24.100 with men and maybe more with older women than men and maybe even older men when you just see more

01:31:28.560 anabolic resistance. All of those are true. It's not difficult to align your nutrition well.

01:31:34.780 Eat mostly healthy foods. Some junk here and there is totally fine. Getting in enough protein,

01:31:39.780 if you want to be real serious about optimizing your muscle gains, something like a gram per pound

01:31:43.560 of protein per day. So if you weigh 150 pounds, 150 grams of relatively high quality protein,

01:31:48.880 if it's difficult for you to meet those goals, Amazon sells your bars already, don't they?

01:31:54.220 I don't think they're on Amazon yet. If not, they are soon. Yeah.

01:31:57.420 So get you a couple boxes of David bars and put them between meals. That takes care of protein.

01:32:02.980 The other thing is muscle size is philosophically concordant with being bigger. I know that sounds

01:32:10.060 crazy, but muscle's made of stuff. So when someone wants to be 165 pounds jacked at 150 pounds,

01:32:16.380 it's curious how they think that's ever going to happen. Some people just don't eat enough.

01:32:20.660 And what I would say is the biggest problem I've seen with what I assume is your target

01:32:24.780 demographic for this podcast is intermittency, lack of consistency. I've had so many clients in the

01:32:32.160 professional realm, older folks, folks that are practicing doctors, lawyers, so on and so forth.

01:32:37.040 Tell me, hey, listen, last couple of days, every three or four hours, I've been getting in high

01:32:41.320 protein meals. I've been getting good sleep. Dope. See them a week later, you go, hey, how was

01:32:46.120 last weekend? They're like, the parts I remember were fun, I think. Then I was throwing up a lot

01:32:51.640 in the toilet. You realize that they're quote unquote good. It's not beneficial to moralize

01:32:56.480 these things, but they're on track for a few days here and there. And then they fall completely

01:33:01.200 off the wagon for days at a time. That is a surefire way to guarantee that you don't get

01:33:06.640 very good gains is if you lack consistency. So if you want to get as jacked as possible within the

01:33:11.760 realm of several months time, seek to eat enough food to get the scale to go up about half a pound

01:33:17.280 per week. So if you're training hard for 12 weeks, you should gain maybe six pounds or so, consistent

01:33:23.200 six pounds. And if you're eating a gram per pound per day of protein, spread into roughly three to

01:33:29.520 four evenly spaced meals, roughly, very roughly, a lot of wiggle room there. That really is all you need

01:33:36.400 to know about nutrition for how to get jacked that covers probably 90% of the variance. So I'll tell you

01:33:41.920 this, if you'd describe to me a scenario where you were training for 12 weeks, you gained seven pounds,

01:33:48.440 almost every day you had a gram per pound per protein, almost every day it was three or four meals,

01:33:53.200 and you're like, look, I know it's my nutrition that's the problem. I'd be like, it's probably not.

01:33:58.940 It's probably something else. That great thing about what we talked about earlier with Jordan

01:34:04.220 Yates and how he could do so few sets and get so many results is that 80-20 type of rule applies to

01:34:08.580 almost everything else in the human body, including nutrition. So if you're getting enough protein

01:34:12.460 regularly and you're getting enough calories to gain body weight, if you don't get really the muscle

01:34:17.780 gains that you were expecting, there aren't a lot of knobs and levers for us to pull that are going to

01:34:22.620 get these enormous results. That's kind of the situation for nutrition, but consistency is I

01:34:29.500 cannot say enough things about because you ask people, hey, how's your diet? Especially if you're

01:34:34.340 a personal trainer or diet coach, there's this kind of halo effect situation where they want to be seen

01:34:38.120 as a good person and diligent and worthy of your time. So, well, yeah, you know, like breakfast,

01:34:42.360 I'll have egg whites and for lunch, I'll have a chicken sandwich. And for dinner, it's usually a piece

01:34:45.740 of fish and then I have a protein shake and go to sleep. Shut up, Bob. That's one day a week,

01:34:51.120 you lying asshole. And he's like, oh, damn it. You got me. Okay. That was Tuesday, but Wednesday,

01:34:55.960 I don't think I ate anything until we closed that one business deal and I got really drunk with their

01:35:01.400 CMO. It was a great time. I think we had chicken fingers, but honestly, I can't remember.

01:35:06.420 Inconsistency, especially when you're older, especially when you have lots of stress from your

01:35:11.540 professional endeavors. Inconsistency is something that professional bodybuilders cannot afford.

01:35:17.060 You for sure cannot afford it. Now, if you do everything right five or six days a week and one

01:35:22.100 day is kind of meh, you'll do great. But if the good days are outnumbered by the, I sure hope my

01:35:27.720 trainer doesn't find out about these days, you're not doing due diligence. So that's a big, big part

01:35:32.520 of the equation. And that can segue if you'd like into a conversation of sleep and stress management,

01:35:37.680 all these other things that can also be the difference between lots of gains or no

01:35:41.480 gains at all. I'd like to come back to it, but we've now twice broached the topic of anabolics

01:35:47.980 as another tool. Cause a couple of times you've made the point, which is look, this is going to

01:35:52.120 be about the limit. Your genes are going to start to become your limit. So I guess my question is,

01:35:57.500 you've spoken very openly about anabolic steroids. I've had several podcasts where I've covered this

01:36:02.700 in detail, but let's kind of tell people what we're talking about for reasons that are maybe a little

01:36:06.780 bit elusive. There's some confusion about is testosterone an anabolic steroid? And of course,

01:36:11.340 the answer is absolutely yes, it is. And so wait a minute. So let's talk about anabolic steroid use

01:36:17.920 in the context of non-medical use. So let's take testosterone replacement therapy where testosterone

01:36:27.100 in a hypogonadal man is restored to typically the upper limit of a normal physiologic range.

01:36:35.040 It's nice that they do the upper limit, right?

01:36:36.820 Yes.

01:36:37.040 Give everyone good genetics.

01:36:37.980 And then we'll just sort of take that off the table for a moment, park it in the context of

01:36:42.060 what is anabolic androgenic steroid use look like in the physique bodybuilding community. Let's talk

01:36:49.380 about the different drugs. Let's talk about your experience with it. Let's talk about how much

01:36:54.620 it can unleash. And let's frankly talk about what the pros and cons are, because I personally have

01:37:00.620 no experience with this. That's not our patient population. We don't have patients that are coming in

01:37:05.040 saying, my goal is to be jacked. I want some D ball. So there's this not something we just have

01:37:11.360 any understanding of. So anabolic androgenic steroids are all derivatives of the testosterone

01:37:15.700 molecule manipulated in various ways to accentuate some characteristics and de-emphasize other

01:37:21.540 characteristics. They're typically taken by athletes in the competitive sphere, bodybuilders,

01:37:26.440 physique athletes, and gym people who want a super physiological level of muscle mass and sometimes

01:37:34.440 super physiologically low levels of body fat concomitant with that. And so they'll take anywhere

01:37:40.180 between high end testosterone replacement therapy dose to 10 or 20 times that amount per week.

01:37:48.320 Let me just pause there for a moment and just give some people some doses because we've talked about

01:37:52.080 TRT before in the podcast. So we typically dose patients twice a week to try to get a smoother

01:37:57.740 level as opposed to once a week. If the ideal dose for a given individual to get them in the right spot

01:38:03.180 is 100 milligrams of testosterone cipionate weekly, we would always prefer that the patient take 50

01:38:08.520 milligrams intramuscularly twice a week or sub-Q. I will tell you, Mike, I don't think we have ever

01:38:14.920 given a patient more than 70 milligrams twice a week or 140 milligrams a week. Probably median dose

01:38:22.300 for physiologic replacement is 40 milligrams twice a week or 80 milligrams a week. So are you saying that

01:38:29.160 there are people out there that would routinely take 800 to 1600 milligrams of testosterone in a week?

01:38:35.860 Oh yeah. Sometimes that's not all testosterone. It's other steroids in combination. Usually people take

01:38:41.000 at least that replacement level of testosterone often more because testosterone does some really

01:38:45.980 good things for health and general function and tends to aromatize into estrogen quite readily,

01:38:51.100 which is good because estrogen is cardioprotective, neuroprotective, increases your strength,

01:38:55.640 helps your mood, tons. Sex drive, it actually increases your anabolism in the presence of androgenic

01:39:02.020 steroids and testosterone. So estrogen by itself, not very anabolic. Estrogen in the presence of

01:39:05.920 testosterone is more anabolic than if you had all the testosterone in the world, but were unable to

01:39:10.660 aromatized estrogen. And baseline level of testosterone is often taken at somewhere

01:39:15.660 between 250 milligrams a week and all the way up to a thousand milligrams a week, depending on how

01:39:23.660 you're handling the side effects of that excess estrogen production at the higher levels.

01:39:28.180 And that's usually taken as cipionate?

01:39:30.120 Enanthate, cipionate. Some people prefer propionate if they inject every day. Enanthate and cipionate are by

01:39:36.940 far the most commonly used, seemingly. Oftentimes, people inject differentially, but once daily

01:39:42.480 injections seem to provide the smoothest curve. If you put in half a week's worth of super

01:39:47.860 physiological testosterone at one time, your mood for the next several hours is curious.

01:39:52.940 Yeah. Help me understand what that even feels like. So let's just say you're taking 700 milligrams

01:39:57.940 a week, 100 milligrams a day. So 7x physiologic. Do you feel something different?

01:40:04.540 Most people feel something, but it's probably a normally distributed population of experiences where

01:40:10.460 some people just can't tell. Some people feel something for sure that they can describe. And

01:40:16.240 some people have panic attacks and will never use again, or they are driven to extreme violent

01:40:22.020 thoughts and extreme sexual thoughts and actions. And those folks are quite rare, but they do happen.

01:40:28.620 So there's a large distribution about which people can have experiences, but I'd say the median

01:40:32.480 experience is the easiest way to understand the average effect of a high degree of anabolic steroids

01:40:39.040 and for simplicity, testosterone. The psychology is to imagine that what is the average psychological

01:40:45.660 proclivity of a female? What is the average psychological proclivity of a male? Different

01:40:51.720 in many regards. And then you move the needle over one notch into a magical category called enhanced male.

01:41:00.440 And you just typically exhibit more male-like patterns of thought and behavior than even males do.

01:41:09.100 But males compared to females is the best way to figure that one out because if you're like,

01:41:12.900 just know what a male pattern of behavior is like because you're a male, you're like,

01:41:16.500 what the hell is it like to be more like me? Is it everything about me? Well, it's not everything.

01:41:19.920 We actually just had a recent video on the RP Strength channel. I think it's called Roid Rage

01:41:24.620 is Real. We talk about like that steroids don't accentuate every quality you have, just the more

01:41:29.520 masculine qualities. So what are the most masculine qualities? Again, this hits everyone a little bit

01:41:34.520 differently, but on average, you become quieter. Men typically are not as expressive as women.

01:41:39.680 You come to show fewer facial expressions of emotion. You don't process other people's emotions

01:41:45.780 as well. You can't fine tune what they feel as much, and you don't care as much.

01:41:50.740 Less empathy.

01:41:51.520 Way less empathy, all the way to similar levels of empathy, but on average, definitely less.

01:41:56.460 And you become more likely to be irritable. You become more likely to have anger and aggressive

01:42:03.740 sorts of thoughts. You become more attuned to the dominance hierarchy in general, and you become

01:42:11.280 someone who thinks more about where you stack up in the dominance hierarchy in a way that you take

01:42:17.580 affronts and slights more poorly than otherwise. So if someone on social media says you're a bad

01:42:22.840 person, if you're not on a lot of testosterone, you're like, I'm just having a bad day. That's okay.

01:42:27.740 We all have a bad day. We need to rage out on someone. If you're on a lot of testosterone,

01:42:31.020 you're more likely to be like, I wonder if he'd say that to my face. I wonder if he would be real

01:42:37.100 quiet around me because he would know that I'm not someone to be messed with. Weird, weird thoughts

01:42:41.720 like that. Women almost never have thoughts like that. Men have regular thoughts like that in the

01:42:45.380 right context. People on steroids have more thoughts like that in almost every context than

01:42:49.840 on average they would like to have. Another one is you become linguistically less expressive

01:42:54.580 and your fluidity of communication falls. So a lot of times when someone is using high levels of

01:42:59.740 anabolic steroids in a relationship and that person happens to be male, the degree of communicative

01:43:03.700 throughput falls substantially. It's just generally not good for most relationships.

01:43:07.760 Another one is sex drive. It's difficult for women to appreciate what the male sex drive is like

01:43:13.120 on a quantitative and qualitative level. Both of those tend to magnify, especially if you're not

01:43:18.720 bringing your estrogen down. You bring estrogen low enough, you don't even remember what the hell sex

01:43:22.260 is for or why people are even in that sort of thing. But if you have a lot of androgens,

01:43:25.560 a lot of estrogen, the hunger, the thirst becomes very annoying.

01:43:31.040 Now at that level of testosterone, are you taking an aromatase inhibitor or are you literally

01:43:35.640 letting the estradiol get... I can't imagine how high the estradiol level becomes at that...

01:43:41.320 As high as you want.

01:43:42.240 So typically, estradiol would be over 100 at that point. That's left alone?

01:43:47.200 It depends. It depends on a few things. One is different people respond differently,

01:43:50.900 both physique and psychology, to high levels of estrogen. High levels of estrogen for some people are

01:43:55.340 swimming in a pool of magical clouds and they love it. And their physique looks great. They get

01:44:00.380 nice and watery. Their joints feel amazing. Their recovery is awesome. Their sleep is awesome.

01:44:03.840 Sex drive is awesome. It makes great. For some other people, they get a lot of estrogen and it

01:44:07.220 actually prevents them from getting good sleep at higher levels. They're water buffalo bloated and

01:44:11.880 they can't even see their abs anymore, even though they're 8% body fat. And they get mood swings,

01:44:16.040 all this crazy stuff. And so it really is very individually dependent.

01:44:19.440 It's actually quite amazing. And this is not entirely unlike women. If they're undergoing hormone

01:44:24.060 replacement therapy in perimenopause, it's not a one size fits all. They can have tremendous

01:44:29.120 variability in their response to estrogen and of course, progesterone.

01:44:32.560 Yes. Huge, huge, huge. The other thing is what we're learning in evidence-based approach to

01:44:39.140 anabolic steroid utilization and performance enhancing drug utilization. It's called the

01:44:42.980 safer use model. Probably the biggest promulgator of it is a gentleman named Joe Jeffrey in the

01:44:47.040 United Kingdom. Super, super expert. Exceptional bodybuilding coach. Great bodybuilder's own,

01:44:52.180 just reads literature all day long. And folks like him tend to espouse that probably the best

01:44:58.720 way to manage estrogen is to use some combination of exogenous drugs that are androgens themselves

01:45:04.740 to get the estrogen level you have the best notable metrics at, how you feel, how you look,

01:45:11.100 how your blood work is, health, et cetera. So here's an example. You take a thousand milligrams

01:45:16.740 of testosterone. I'm still wrapping my head around this.

01:45:19.520 Well, it actually goes into your thigh in a needle. You don't have to wrap your head around.

01:45:23.460 So it's intense. It's a lot. You take a thousand milligrams of testosterone and that comes with a

01:45:28.540 concomitant aromatization. So you have a lot of estrogen. Some people, they feel totally great.

01:45:33.080 For some people, it's too much. For those that it's too much estrogen, they might be able to take

01:45:36.800 500 milligrams of testosterone and then 500 milligrams of primabolin. Primabolin is a synthetic

01:45:43.220 anabolic androgenic steroid developed in, I think, the 60s and 70s. And it's designed not really to

01:45:49.380 convert into estrogen hardly at all. Other steroids like it are masteron. They not only don't convert

01:45:54.340 into estrogen, but they actually antagonize estrogen conversion for the testosterone you're

01:45:57.900 shooting in to some extent. And so if someone's like way too much estrogen for them, they can do

01:46:02.440 a 50-50 split of testosterone and primabolin so that now they get all the good estrogen from

01:46:06.720 testosterone, but not too much of it. But they get most of that anabolic drive from the rest of the

01:46:10.820 primabolin, but without any more estrogen addition. It could be 250 testosterone and 750 milligrams of

01:46:17.080 primo. It can be 750 test. It can be 250 primo and anything between. And you kind of experiment that

01:46:22.880 in a lot of bodybuilding coaches. What they're really good at is starting you on a certain cycle

01:46:27.320 that they have the wisdom to know works for most people, and then leveling up one drug, leveling down

01:46:32.080 another to get, among other things, kind of that testosterone, that androgen to estrogen ratio to be

01:46:38.560 something that you have your best performance at, best health, so on and so forth. But the sex drive

01:46:43.320 component, especially if you have a lot of estrogen going on, qualitatively it can change, quantitatively

01:46:49.860 it can change. Now, huge variation. Me personally, I never got enormous sex drive upregulation. I did

01:46:58.180 get some, but nothing crazy. I've been up to as much as just north of 2,000 milligrams per week.

01:47:05.780 Currently, I'm only 250 milligrams per week, but my sex drive is more or less the same.

01:47:11.540 Which to me makes me wonder, is there any difference in androgen receptor expression

01:47:16.640 that you're able to appreciate between 250 and 2,000? Are you so saturated in your androgen receptors

01:47:24.000 already that do we actually know if there's a benefit to all the additional testosterone that

01:47:29.980 you could have been on at almost 10x your current dose, 8x?

01:47:33.200 You won't know until you try. Did you appreciate a difference in positive effects? I don't doubt

01:47:39.200 that there could be a difference in negative effects, but if the positive effects are accrued

01:47:43.860 through testosterone binding to the androgen receptor, that complex leading to more nuclear

01:47:48.860 transcription, wouldn't what you said suggest that you might have already hit maximum benefit at 250?

01:47:55.240 There are some reasons to believe that your androgen receptor density escalates up when exposed

01:48:00.740 to more androgens and not down in some cases. And so that means the more gear you take,

01:48:06.900 the more benefit you have rather linearly. My experience, the experience of most people you

01:48:12.360 talk to, it's again, slow newsreel, same asymptotic curvilinear relationship.

01:48:18.840 For me personally, and this is something I didn't discover until quite recently, I would say,

01:48:22.600 unfortunately so, I get probably almost the same gains at 1,000 milligrams that I do at 2,000.

01:48:31.900 Anything north for me of 1,500 just drives me insane, mentally insane, and seems to not really

01:48:37.900 affect my physique hardly at all. How much water retention do you get at these doses?

01:48:42.740 Considerable. Although if you manage your estrogen well, it's not as much as you would think.

01:48:46.980 Managing estrogen with aromatase inhibitors?

01:48:49.380 Oh yes, that's right. Sorry, I had a point there back then. Aromatase inhibitors in many cases are

01:48:55.120 incredibly toxic drugs. And you generally want to avoid taking them if you can. Sometimes you have

01:49:00.580 to to get really dry for a contest, but that's only a few weeks out from the show. And so the

01:49:05.440 modern wisdom, so to speak, with the evidence-based crowd, the safer use crowd, is to manage your

01:49:11.820 estrogen with differential amounts of testosterone and non-estrogenically converting compounds like

01:49:17.240 primovol and mastron versus taking just as much testosterone as you ever would, but taking an

01:49:22.040 aromatase inhibitor on top of that. Because aromatase inhibitors in an unbelievable range of

01:49:27.900 circumstances, fuck you up. They're neurotoxic. They're cardiovascularly toxic. It's bad, bad news.

01:49:35.260 These are the compounds you use when you have breast cancer. And they're like, you're going to die if you

01:49:40.300 don't take these. They are gigantic hammers for a very small nail. If you want to see who's done the

01:49:46.440 worst to their health across the bodybuilding industry, it's whoever runs the most AIs, as we

01:49:50.660 call them, aromatase inhibitors. And there are various other pharmaceutical ways to control estrogen.

01:49:55.520 Probably the best way for health and effect is only use as much estrogenically converting drugs,

01:50:01.480 nandrolone derivatives, and testosterone as you need to get whatever estrogen you feel best at.

01:50:09.040 And the rest of the anabolic load should come from things like primobolin and mastron that don't

01:50:14.680 really do much to estrogen at all, but increase your androgen and anabolism, so on and so forth.

01:50:18.600 So how do you differentiate between when you're using testosterone versus nandrolone?

01:50:23.020 Mostly by experience. Nandrolone has some really cool positive effects,

01:50:27.620 kind of exaggerated versions of testosterone. Some people are naturally very dry. And so if they

01:50:34.500 don't take a nandrolone for their very hard training cycles, they will have insufficient body

01:50:40.220 and joint water, hydration. Joints will creak and they'll get hurt a lot and it's just really bad

01:50:46.120 recovery. But you put them on nandrolone variant and all of a sudden they have enough intramuscular

01:50:50.780 and intra-joint water to where they feel great, everything's working. Other people will get on

01:50:55.640 nandrolones and have so many of the side effects that they're like, well, this is way too much

01:50:58.740 estrogen conversion for me. I'm a giant water buffalo. If I just take testosterone, I'm

01:51:02.840 plenty hydrated, so I don't need to do that. Nandrolones also have this curious side effect.

01:51:07.640 It's colloquially termed DECA-DIC. Nandrolone decanoate does the substance called DECA.

01:51:12.740 It is erectile dysfunction, approximately caused by the presence of nandrolones.

01:51:18.100 And it's curious because nandrolones typically with their estrogenic effects elevate sex drive.

01:51:23.320 Kind of the more estrogen you have to a point, the more sex drive you have if you have presence

01:51:27.200 of nandrolones. And so you're horny, but little, little Billy down there doesn't work as well as

01:51:34.040 he used to or at all. And so if you're in that boat, you're like, well, look, like it's just trade

01:51:37.640 off. How much of a benefit do I get in training versus how much is my wife or girlfriend going to

01:51:42.760 hate me or hookup culture doesn't work for me anymore or so on and so forth. So lots of considerations

01:51:48.360 there, nothing generally better than to start out with a solid plan that makes sense with a coach

01:51:53.680 that knows what they're doing at very low doses of everything and slowly play with compounds and

01:51:58.640 scale up the very notable, highly note your beneficial effects and highly note your deleterious effects

01:52:05.540 or downsides and see where you can strike a balance that's acceptable to you and considers long-term

01:52:11.660 consequences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:52:13.980 So how old are you, Mike?

01:52:15.260 40.

01:52:16.000 Okay.

01:52:16.320 I know I look 50. Not where I was going. What would you look like now? I'm going to just

01:52:22.440 pause it. I'm guessing that you have good genes. You eat well, you train very hard and you're

01:52:27.900 using enough anabolic steroids to fuel a small country. If we subtracted that last one out of

01:52:33.460 the equation, because I don't have a sense of what the relative contribution is, what would

01:52:39.860 you look like if you did everything the same minus the anabolic steroids? Or if you run regular

01:52:46.260 TRT, you were taking a hundred milligrams of cipionate a week, do you have a sense to quantify

01:52:51.160 how many pounds lighter you would be in terms of total muscle mass?

01:52:55.960 Me personally or the average person?

01:52:57.220 No, you personally. Yeah. I want to get a sense.

01:52:59.160 Having had used steroids before at high doses or not having ever had used them?

01:53:03.260 Oh, good question.

01:53:04.040 Very different answer.

01:53:04.540 Yeah. Good question. Let's do both.

01:53:05.820 I can do both.

01:53:06.320 Yeah. Let's do both.

01:53:07.060 When did you start using high doses of anabolic steroids?

01:53:08.860 When I was 27 years old.

01:53:10.180 Okay. So let's say we go back to 27 years old. We put you on the same path of doing everything

01:53:15.500 you're doing in terms of your training intensity, all of the scientific principles that come into

01:53:19.940 it, et cetera. But you've never gone down the path of taking mega doses of steroids. And if you've

01:53:23.880 ever taken testosterone, it's literally to bring your total to you up to 800 nanograms per deciliter.

01:53:28.920 At this body fat, I would probably weigh about 200 pounds.

01:53:34.680 Versus 230.

01:53:35.900 Versus 230, 235.

01:53:37.640 Okay.

01:53:38.260 Now, 35 pounds of muscle.

01:53:39.200 I know. That's a lot of muscle.

01:53:41.800 Yeah. But I would still be very jacked. I mean, before I had ever started taking anabolic steroids,

01:53:47.920 I was already an elite power lifter. I weighed 270 pounds at probably 30 something odd percent body fat.

01:53:56.880 But I've dexed myself in a master's program when I had been totally drug-free and I had

01:54:03.600 somewhere between 175 and towards the end of my drug-free era, close to 185 pounds of fat-free

01:54:13.860 mass. For someone who's 5'6", like myself, though, if anyone asks, I'm 5'9".

01:54:18.680 So your FFMI would have been north of 30.

01:54:22.500 Ooh, not quite, but up there.

01:54:24.300 Yeah. FFMI, for folks not familiar with it, is fat-free mass index. So it's total fat-free

01:54:29.940 mass in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. And just for reference, it's pretty

01:54:36.380 hard to be above 25 without anabolic steroids.

01:54:41.860 Yeah. Unlikely. It's unlikely.

01:54:43.000 Right.

01:54:43.280 That right there suggests some interesting genetics that you were probably 29-ish, 28, 29.

01:54:51.340 Something. It's easier to do when you're really fat, though.

01:54:53.680 But your ALMI was probably very high as well, I'm guessing.

01:54:56.720 Sure, sure. I have very elite genetics. Not swagger. It's just stating a fact. Anyone who

01:55:02.460 sees this on video will notice that my head is curiously shaped like my mastication muscles

01:55:07.360 are absurd. I looked like this before I ever took any steroids. I have a picture of myself

01:55:12.100 on Facebook from the side before for sure I took anything. And I was like, holy crap. I usually

01:55:17.900 wasn't bald back then, but I shaved bald. And I was like, yep, there they were, those weird

01:55:21.540 masticating muscles. And so, yeah, it was kind of built for the shit. But also, I got plenty

01:55:26.940 out of steroids, but not as much as some other people. Some people without steroids are not

01:55:33.180 overly jacked. But with steroids, it's a total transformative event. And then when they retire

01:55:39.260 and they come off of steroids, they're like, holy shit, did your back to mortal-sized? How?

01:55:43.660 Whereas other people come off of steroids and they keep most of their muscle mass and they're

01:55:48.420 on TRT and they just look so jacked for forever. Huge, huge variation. But for me, steroids did a

01:55:55.520 lot, but nothing crazy. I didn't gain 70 pounds of muscle, but I gained, yeah, 30-ish, something

01:56:01.620 like that for 13 years. It's been a while.

01:56:05.360 And so now the reverse question, which I guess is tomorrow you just decide, you know what?

01:56:10.280 I'm going to keep doing everything I'm doing training-wise. I'm going to gradually taper

01:56:13.940 this thing down. Because at this point, you're going to need to be on testosterone for the

01:56:16.880 rest of your life, I assume.

01:56:17.920 I don't have to be. My testicular shrinkage has been zero. My spermatogenesis is seemingly

01:56:22.540 zero. Some people just don't suppress.

01:56:25.020 How many weeks a year are you completely, completely off any anabolic agent?

01:56:29.140 Zero.

01:56:29.880 And how many years has that been?

01:56:31.780 13.

01:56:32.640 I find it hard to believe you would continue to make testosterone.

01:56:36.420 Hugely genetically variable. And in addition to that, even if I make not make

01:56:40.260 any now, within several weeks, my testosterone production would likely resume.

01:56:44.780 Now, if I had balls the size of capers, yeah, you'd be like, oh, it's an uphill battle.

01:56:49.080 Most people can resume normal testosterone production after the cessation of anabolic

01:56:53.240 androgenic steroids. But not all. Maybe like 90-10. You don't want to be that 10.

01:56:59.940 Which is why it's a huge thing for me to say, don't just start steroids or TRT without a

01:57:06.220 real long, hard think about what the hell you want out of life, especially if you have

01:57:10.860 yet to have children but want children. Because I know people, personally, who've done one

01:57:15.660 of two things. I know people who, on full steroid cycles, during that time, fathered children

01:57:20.900 I now call my friends. They're real humans I can point to and be like, you're a steroid

01:57:25.040 baby. They're freaky. They're getting pissed. I'm kidding. Obviously doesn't go into the

01:57:29.240 germline cells. The other thing is, I know some people who you blasted for a long time

01:57:34.580 cannot have children. Tried everything. It's just not in the cards. Their spermatogenesis

01:57:39.560 is just gone.

01:57:40.560 Yeah. I can't imagine it's 90-10 though, Mike. I cannot imagine that 90% of people that use

01:57:45.400 anabolic steroids for more than two years would be able to resume testosterone production.

01:57:50.940 I would look into it. I think that most of the stuff you hear about how the comeback is

01:57:55.680 difficult is from people for whom the comeback is difficult. And having been in the bodybuilding

01:58:00.140 powerlifting space for a long time, most people come off and they're just normal after. Almost

01:58:04.960 everyone else come off completely is just normal after.

01:58:07.420 So what do you think, back to the original question, if you were to come off today, how

01:58:11.940 much of the, call it the 35-

01:58:14.000 Going down to regular TRT, not super TRT.

01:58:16.240 Correct. You went down to 100 milligrams a week or none if you were able to make that on

01:58:20.360 your own.

01:58:20.740 Sure.

01:58:20.900 Of the 35 pounds of Delta supplemental muscle, how much of it would you keep, you think?

01:58:26.560 About half.

01:58:27.620 Yeah. So in other words, there is a difference between the muscle you gained versus the muscle

01:58:32.260 you never had.

01:58:33.300 Huge. Which is why if you have a natural bodybuilding federation that allows you to compete-

01:58:41.540 After you've used steroids-

01:58:42.980 It's a quack of shit.

01:58:44.540 Yeah.

01:58:44.720 Yeah. Now, let me back that up. If that's the explicit rule of the federation, I don't

01:58:50.100 like that I call it a natural federation. I respect every athlete in it. I think it's

01:58:53.640 wonderful that they're doing what they're doing. And in a sense, it's a very different

01:58:56.460 category. So it's cool. If I was making a natural bodybuilding federation myself, you

01:59:01.540 would have to sign paperwork that says, I've never used anabolic steroids because the literature

01:59:06.760 we have now on how much muscle you gain and keep forever is unequivocal. We even have

01:59:12.560 mechanistic data on how it happens. Your satellite cells that are incorporated into your musculature,

01:59:17.460 which are kind of dormant and then they get in and then they grow big. We have no reason

01:59:21.560 to believe they ever leave. It's like letting your aunt come live with you for a few weeks

01:59:25.400 and like, where's Aunt Linda's here for forever? Here's our children. It's like that. So having

01:59:31.260 done higher doses of androgens ever for weeks or longer on end can give you a higher level

01:59:38.240 of muscularity, especially only if you've gone beyond your natural limit. People generally

01:59:44.120 can gain only so much naturally and only so much on steroids. Steroids are not unlimited

01:59:48.180 for gains. If you were going to ever have 160 pounds of fat-free mass and you went from

01:59:54.920 150 to 160 with steroids, but you could have gotten there and would take you three times longer

01:59:59.880 without steroids, then the inherent advantage you don't have because you just got there faster.

02:00:04.900 But if you got to 180 on steroids and then you quit all the steroids and now you're back

02:00:10.440 down to 170, you could walk around and maintain that 170 on a normal secretion of testosterone

02:00:15.520 or normal TRT. You would have never been able to do that without the steroids. So it's a permanent

02:00:20.140 advantage. If you've ever been hypermuscular from steroids, you will probably never be as small as you

02:00:25.780 would have normally been ever again. And that's a big deal, very big deal in Olympic sports because

02:00:29.920 you can just kind of hide out. Don't get into the doping pool, crank it, get into the doping pool,

02:00:35.400 you're drug-free, but you have muscle that'll never leave you. That's a massive advantage.

02:00:39.500 Yeah, it sure sounds like it.

02:00:40.740 Not that anyone ever does that.

02:00:42.060 What is your personal calculus for the number of years remaining where you want to be doing

02:00:49.920 supraphysiologic doses of testosterone? Do you think about the trade-offs of long-term health?

02:00:57.020 Incessantly.

02:00:58.360 Yeah. And so how do you sort of think about it? Because obviously everything has a trade-off.

02:01:02.900 I suppose if you're winning Mr. Olympia and you're one of the top five bodybuilders in the world-

02:01:09.260 As I am, JK.

02:01:11.440 Then the trade-offs might be worth it. What's your personal calculation on it? There have to be,

02:01:16.220 I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people that are using supraphysiologic doses of testosterone

02:01:20.480 in the country, I would guess. For many of them, it's for themselves. It's like they're not

02:01:24.420 getting paid to do it. Almost all of them. Right? Almost all of them.

02:01:26.840 It's not because of how they look in a movie or whatever other reason. So yeah, what's your

02:01:31.500 calculation?

02:01:32.640 So my calculation has many fold variables that go into it. Some of them include my blood work.

02:01:39.760 I get regular blood work. I always have. I did it before I got on. I did it during. I still do it

02:01:45.000 all the time. It would be funny if I croaked in a few weeks and then you released the podcast. This

02:01:49.840 was going to sound hilarious. It's all statistics and probability.

02:01:52.460 We postumously released this episode.

02:01:54.260 Please do release it though. I've got bad genetics for all sorts of things,

02:01:58.820 but I have damn good genetics for health resilience. So I've never actually had blood

02:02:05.720 work a single time that was like, do you need to stop? The last time I had blood work, I was on

02:02:10.820 1500 milligrams total gnarly stuff. Trenbolone acetate, the whole works. My lipids, my overall

02:02:19.000 total, total cholesterol was 79 or something.

02:02:23.140 Total cholesterol?

02:02:23.880 Yeah.

02:02:24.960 Total cholesterol 79. That's almost impossible to imagine. You're on lipid lowering drugs though.

02:02:29.680 No, that's really hard to believe.

02:02:31.560 Now, mind you, I'm at like 7% body fat and leanness is a humongous variable for health.

02:02:37.660 Humongous. I can get into all that if you want, but humongous. Am I on blood pressure medication?

02:02:42.140 Yeah, I was going to ask you about your blood pressure.

02:02:43.940 Humongous variable that I've always been controlling. My wife is a medical doctor,

02:02:48.280 so we don't play games. Always checking the blood pressure, always making sure it's on the low end.

02:02:52.600 And what would your blood pressure be if you weren't treating it with medication?

02:02:56.120 Peter, I have absolutely no idea. Don't give a shit. I won't ever try.

02:02:59.680 But do you have to come off the blood pressure medicine when you're off the testosterone

02:03:02.840 or anabolic aging?

02:03:04.460 I'm never off.

02:03:05.480 I see. Okay. So what's the lowest you're on then?

02:03:08.360 I'm currently on 250 milligrams a week.

02:03:10.380 And that's your nadir?

02:03:10.820 And that's my sports TRT, we call it. Super TRT.

02:03:15.340 I see. But your BP at 250 and your BP at 2000, you would be on the same dose of a blood pressure

02:03:22.540 drug?

02:03:22.840 I took double the blood pressure medication roughly at that dose. And I titrated it so that

02:03:27.240 it would always be below the normative values for best health, 120 over 70, that sort of thing.

02:03:33.080 When I took the most drugs, I was almost always in a fat loss phase because you're just not eating

02:03:37.060 much food and you're very lean and you're doing lots of physical activity. Those are all hugely

02:03:41.060 antagonistic variables to high blood pressure. And so if I was massing and weighed 280, I would

02:03:46.180 have to take the kitchen sink of blood pressure meds. And it would still be worth it to do that.

02:03:49.480 If I can make a public service announcement, it just doesn't matter why your blood pressure is high,

02:03:54.500 fucking control it with drugs. And then look to lifestyle or whatever or whatever.

02:03:59.820 So many people are totally backwards on this, where they're like, oh man, I want to clean up my

02:04:04.340 lifestyle so that I can get off these blood pressure meds. Why?

02:04:07.060 Why? We're what, Gen 9 of blood pressure meds? They don't even have side effects anymore.

02:04:11.120 If I'm taking them or not taking them, I can't tell. And so if I take a pill that reduces almost

02:04:16.240 every single health malady and extends my lifespan by a generation, why the hell wouldn't I do that?

02:04:22.460 And it's so funny when you get this from steroid people. Because they're like, dude,

02:04:24.960 you're doing Trenbolone that was manufactured in a bathtub in China, but you're not going to take

02:04:29.840 Novo Nordisk's best blood pressure drug? Are you insane? The answer is yes, of course.

02:04:34.560 Making sure blood pressure is good. Making sure all the lipid values and things like that are

02:04:39.320 very good. Is your blood pressure the only noticeable

02:04:42.020 deviation from normal health that you experience that you and your wife were able to measure in

02:04:46.900 this? I mean, my lipid values probably aren't as good when I'm bulking up, but I'm also on fewer

02:04:52.620 drugs then, so they're not crazy. The last time I've ever had a total cholesterol of over 200

02:04:57.680 was when I was 13 years old and I had spent a whole summer playing video games, being totally

02:05:02.760 inactive. And I was a portly child and it was like 202 and they're like, bro. And I was like, oh,

02:05:08.460 and then I turned 14 and began to do sports. That's interesting. Why were they checking blood

02:05:12.120 on the 13 year old? Basic screening panel. I think maybe it was sports or something. I don't know.

02:05:17.140 Yeah. They do like basic lipid panel for like a lot of people. Yeah. And so I just remember,

02:05:21.800 I can't ever forget that number because I was like, oh, oh, I'm in the red on something. Like

02:05:27.160 you're not supposed to be in the red on something. But for me, my body was always really responsive

02:05:31.340 to body fat levels. If I have a high body fat, I'm probably not in amazing health. If I'm a low

02:05:36.640 body fat, I can take a lot of steroids to the face and still be relatively okay on the numbers. Now

02:05:40.660 there's lots of stuff we can't measure. So my body has taken a considerable amount of damage over

02:05:44.720 the years from anabolic androgenic steroid use. And what do you think some of those damages are?

02:05:48.100 Cardiovascular damage. No doubt my left ventricular wall is probably larger than it should be.

02:05:54.000 I have not had an echo. So I've had plenty of echoes. Most of them were quite some time ago

02:05:58.140 and they're all great. The overall inflammatory exposure to the crazy training volumes, stress

02:06:06.860 levels, and independent psychological stress that the anabolic steroids voiced upon me,

02:06:10.980 no doubt has been bad for brain and bad for everything else. And so on down the line,

02:06:16.280 luckily I was smart enough at the beginning to always control my blood pressure. And that's a

02:06:21.100 huge, huge killer for people on drugs. I always paid attention to lipid values. That's another huge

02:06:25.760 killer. And I just really got lucky there and I eat healthy almost all the time. That's a big deal.

02:06:29.920 By the way, do you use a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor to manage DHT?

02:06:33.920 No.

02:06:34.860 So your DHT must be 200.

02:06:37.220 Yeah, who knows? That's amazing.

02:06:38.500 I could give a shit for hair on my head.

02:06:40.520 No, I just think about your prostate.

02:06:41.680 Yeah. Nobody lost, nobody found on that one. I never cared to check.

02:06:45.920 That no doubt has taken a hell of a beating over the years. And so while I did it relatively

02:06:51.240 intelligently, I probably did too much. I mostly didn't use super high doses by bodybuilding

02:06:56.900 standards. I kind of only a few times used high doses. I would have used less had I had another

02:07:01.920 chance to go around. And in the future, as I continue to compete in bodybuilding into my early

02:07:05.980 40s, I'm probably never going to go much over 500 total milligrams. Because to me, it seems my

02:07:12.820 anabolic sensitivity is so high that I just don't need much more than that. And north of that, my

02:07:17.440 psychological side effects are so nasty. It's absolutely just not worth it to me anymore,

02:07:21.900 especially with career and stuff like that. And I'm a little bit more known for my brain than my

02:07:25.800 body. And so it's important to keep higher levels of intelligence. No doubt I've degraded my

02:07:30.420 fluid intelligence substantially from what it could have been. Sad. I do have one hell of a hedge to all

02:07:35.900 this that most people don't. And I'm going to sound like a total insane person when I say it.

02:07:40.120 I believe it is a high probability that in the early to mid 2030s, we will see the fusion of

02:07:47.300 informatics and biology powered by AI such that we will be able to point by point re-engineer

02:07:55.160 the entire human organism at a variety of levels and undo damage like was never possible before.

02:08:02.820 So I never exposed myself to as much statistical risk as would have made an even chance of me

02:08:09.660 making it to like 50. I have a think even chance of making it into my 60s. I'll be in my 60s around

02:08:17.080 the mid-2040s. And most of the future prediction models say that our ability to contend with our

02:08:24.480 biology will be so absurd that there may not be a line between biology and technology anymore.

02:08:30.980 So to put this in simpler terms, I think major categories of disease will be completely solved

02:08:36.900 in the 2030s. I think aging reversal will be mastered in the mid to late 2030s if I had to

02:08:42.220 take a guess. And I think that if I make it to the early to mid 2030s, then I'm at longevity,

02:08:49.920 escape, velocity, and looks like I succeeded. If I die before then, I'm totally comfortable with

02:08:57.500 all of the choices that I've ever made. And it's been one hell of a run. And I think understanding

02:09:02.380 your own mortality and coming to grips with it as important as any human person, but especially

02:09:08.120 with the risk I've taken with my body, never surprised me. If I croak from a heart attack an

02:09:12.980 hour after we finish filming this, I won't die surprised. I'll die from a heart attack and I'll

02:09:17.680 be like, this is it. And that's to say not to wave my own flag or anything. Don't do shit to your

02:09:23.000 body without really thinking through what you're doing. Like a race car driver. Nobody gets into

02:09:28.320 that car and goes, this is the safest thing I could be doing. What are you, nuts? Nah. But most of them

02:09:33.360 have come to grips with the fact that, look, I could die, but I'm good. And they're well compensated.

02:09:38.420 It's been worth it to them. And most importantly, they did what they really wanted. Up until recently

02:09:43.940 that has become at least to me and many futurists apparent that some of us listening to this,

02:09:48.600 probably most people listening to this may never die. Up until recently, that was not apparent.

02:09:54.440 And you kind of had to figure out like, how do I want to live my life? And some cases require a

02:09:59.500 longevity slash quality of life trade-off. And I made that early. Would I have made it the same

02:10:04.760 again? On the margins, probably would have been safer. But also there's a lot of crazy shit that

02:10:10.000 they do in bodybuilding that I just never did categorically or tried once and was like, fuck that,

02:10:13.960 that's not for me. And my blood work and everything was pretty good the entire time. So I feel okay

02:10:18.780 about it. Not great, but okay. I don't know if that makes any sense. Yeah, it does. I mean, I'm way less

02:10:25.000 optimistic than you, Mike, about longevity escape. Certainly on that time horizon, I think of the hedge

02:10:31.620 as the exact opposite. So my hedge is, it would be wonderful if in a decade we had technology that

02:10:39.980 treated disease in a way that could restore my heart to the heart it was when I was 20. Because

02:10:46.280 I think about the reduction in function. So my coronary arteries are still clean as a whistle,

02:10:52.400 but my heart's nowhere near what it used to be. I know this, for example, because my maximum heart

02:10:57.960 rate is 30 beats, 40 beats per minute lower than it was when I was a teenager. Directly an aging thing.

02:11:04.220 Right. Directly an aging thing. If you look at the electrical system of my heart,

02:11:08.740 these are things I can't treat. I can do all the things possible to not have my blood pressure go

02:11:15.020 up so I don't get LV, left ventricular hypertrophy. I can keep my coronary arteries clean as a whistle

02:11:20.580 indefinitely. We have the modern pharmacology to do that. Isn't that crazy that you can say that?

02:11:25.460 It's wonderful. It's incredible. But I can't change the architecture of the muscle yet. We don't have

02:11:33.100 that ability. My hedge is, how about I just stave off chronic disease as long as possible, stay as

02:11:39.400 healthy as possible, stay in the game as long as possible, so that if it turns out that that was for

02:11:46.040 nothing, we're sitting here, it's 10 years from now, I'm in my early 60s, and someone comes along

02:11:51.360 and says, Peter, all that stuff you did was totally unnecessary. You could have been eating Cheetos,

02:11:57.140 drinking margaritas all day long. I have a pill that's going to make you 20 years old again.

02:12:04.320 I would have no regrets. I would be like, I don't care. I am really glad I did what I did.

02:12:10.700 But I would have regret if I put my eggs in the basket that said, I'm going to drink the

02:12:16.100 margaritas all day. I'm not going to exercise. I'm going to wait for the exercise pill to come along.

02:12:21.160 And it just doesn't come along. I also think we just have to accept one of my favorite

02:12:25.500 thought experiments. I was talking about this with a friend a couple of weeks ago.

02:12:29.800 So if you just consider modern human history, we're just talking about 250,000 years. Let's

02:12:34.660 forget everything that came before Homo sapiens. You go back in time 250,000 years ago, 200,000 years

02:12:41.140 ago, 150,000. You do this in like 50,000 increments until you hit 10,000 years ago, and then 5,000 years

02:12:46.940 ago, and then 2,500 years ago, and then 1,000 years ago, da, da, da. And you go in and you ask them to

02:12:52.380 predict the future, letting them see everything that's happened before. Because of course,

02:12:56.760 that would be a difficult thing to do most points in time. They don't even know anything

02:13:00.000 beyond that.

02:13:00.420 They're like, what's the future? You're like, oh shit, I went back too far.

02:13:03.160 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's sort of like, it would be impossible to imagine because the pace of change

02:13:09.560 during that 250,000 years was pretty much nothing. 5,000 years ago, we get agriculture. Then a couple

02:13:16.720 hundred years ago, we get the industrial revolution. Like we really start to get-

02:13:21.100 The first industrial revolution.

02:13:22.160 Yeah. We started to get these big step function changes. But even if you go back in time,

02:13:25.860 a hundred years. So a hundred years, we're in the roaring 20s. Life couldn't be any better.

02:13:31.780 Nobody knows that there's this depression coming. Nobody knows what technology is coming. All of

02:13:38.200 these things. So we couldn't predict anything. You go back in time, 40 years, I don't think anybody

02:13:42.900 could have predicted what we're doing today. Ray Kurzweil successfully did.

02:13:46.660 What did Ray predict?

02:13:47.980 Almost everything. If you're conservative, 60 to 70% accuracy, which is wild because the baseline

02:13:53.640 accuracy is zero. If you're not conservative and you give him a little leeway-

02:13:57.380 This was when? He predicted this when?

02:13:59.220 Throughout the 80s and 90s, he was able to predict a substantial amount of correct predictions all the

02:14:04.860 way through the 2020s. And he was almost the only person to predict the arrival of artificial

02:14:10.300 general intelligence as interestingly enough, specifically the year 2029. And now there is

02:14:17.360 a debate of he was probably too conservative and AGI will be here by 2027. In the early 2000s,

02:14:25.520 they did a lot of asking questions of AI experts, people working in the space. And almost all of

02:14:31.340 them said Ray was an insane person. And about half of them said we could never actually create

02:14:36.160 artificial general intelligence. The other ones were like, oh, in 2100 or 2070, every five years

02:14:43.060 that you ask this, everyone trends closer and closer to Ray Kurzweil's original prediction.

02:14:47.220 But he's not doing magic. So earlier you said something kind of interesting. You said we started

02:14:51.560 250,000 years ago, then we got into 125, then 50, then so on. As you said, things get faster.

02:14:56.900 Progress happens exponentially quicker. But if you plot every single event on human and animal history

02:15:03.720 and geological history, it all plots on the same logarithmic scale. Very, very tight clustering.

02:15:11.400 And right around 2045, the line's fucking vertical. And so when I make predictions, which are not mine,

02:15:18.900 I'm just parroting what other smarter people have said, of possibly getting traction on almost every

02:15:23.920 kind of disease in the 2030s. This isn't the wishful thinking of a child, though mentally I'm below the

02:15:28.940 average child. At least in my own heart, this is something that is inevitable based on our

02:15:35.060 incremental understanding and manipulation of the world. It is the most accurate type of prediction

02:15:40.480 that you could make, bereft of exact knowledge, because it's the thing that tracks on that exponential

02:15:45.960 progression. If we're pessimistic about it, we're actually estimating that things will somehow

02:15:51.520 progress substantially less than they have been. Computing power is an easy one. That curve of

02:15:58.060 computing power in the early 2020s, people were like, that's it, Moore's law is dead.

02:16:02.580 But then AI picked up the pace, and it's outpacing Moore's law like crazy, exactly on the trajectory

02:16:08.680 that Ray Kurzweil was the first one, probably the best to formalize.

02:16:12.940 So when I'm saying crazy shit like we're going to kibosh aging, we're going to kibosh disease,

02:16:16.260 and all this other stuff. It's tantamount to someone in the 1930s peak depression era days

02:16:23.520 to hear that in the 2020s, you can make $16 an hour working at McDonald's. And that in the United

02:16:31.580 States, the poorest people are the fattest. They'd be like, you're out of your fucking mind. And you're

02:16:36.560 like, no, no, no, it's totally true. Like, I'm in the future. It's totally true. So what do you do

02:16:40.040 for a living? Can you imagine describing a person in the 1930s, what you do for a living?

02:16:44.640 They're like, well, social media, and they're like, what's that? You're like, oh, God,

02:16:48.240 how do we even put this to you? And we're still working in the same physical world. We're really

02:16:52.060 the same humans. But anytime we think, oh, geez, there's no way it's going to get this good,

02:16:57.640 all disease eradicated. And hold on a second, when's the last time you've treated a patient

02:17:00.460 with cholera? Do we have cholera in the modern Western world anymore?

02:17:04.040 This is where I'm less optimistic, no more confident, to be clear. I want to be

02:17:09.940 very clear. I could be wrong about all this, by the way.

02:17:12.080 Yeah. But just as a point of discussion, my optimism is less everything you said I agree

02:17:17.620 with in terms of compute velocity, et cetera. It comes down to the manipulation of biology.

02:17:23.060 I think certain things would need to be true. I'll give you a silly example. Do we believe that in 10

02:17:30.680 years, we will be able to take an egg that has been put into a frying pan, fried, the clear part has

02:17:37.080 turned white and make the white part clear again? Do we think 10 years will bring the technology to

02:17:42.560 do that? Yeah. Hell yeah.

02:17:44.180 But why? Why do we think that we'll be able to unfold proteins again?

02:17:48.380 Because Google's DeepMind project just mastered protein folding last year. And this earlier this

02:17:54.040 year, it took the first open contracts with major pharmaceutical companies.

02:17:57.560 Again, I'm very familiar with it, but that's a remarkable problem for which obviously a Nobel Prize was

02:18:02.260 awarded, but a very different problem. Like I'm just not sure that the entropy will allow the reversal,

02:18:10.540 right? So what DeepMind did, again, it's incredible that they could actually take an amino acid sequence

02:18:15.940 and predict the protein structure in folding. But when the protein has folded, which is why the egg

02:18:23.340 goes from clear to white in the pan, how do we un-denature that?

02:18:27.880 And through industrially designed enzymes, which we do not have the brainpower to design,

02:18:34.380 but for which, I'll put this as well as I can, for which in the 2030s AI will be comically overpowered

02:18:41.120 for. Because we think we're very complex and by our own standards, we're insanely complex.

02:18:47.420 But AI is so much smarter than us already in many of the relevant ways and soon to be

02:18:53.060 smarter than us to a degree that most of us have difficulty conceptualizing.

02:18:59.860 Just a quick analogy. Imagine explaining to your dog why the only season inside of your house is

02:19:07.080 a light summer day. Peter doesn't know what seasons are. Its total communicative throughput

02:19:12.500 involves gestures and emotions. It knows its name, it knows sit, it knows a few other things.

02:19:17.280 You can't do it. It's impossible. AI, as predicted by these very simple equations,

02:19:23.540 which have never steered us wrong, of how smart it's going to be in 10 years, in 10 years,

02:19:27.900 will be like probably several orders of magnitude smarter than us than we are than dogs.

02:19:35.040 So it sounds like wishful thinking and hope. No doubt many of the comments in this will be like,

02:19:39.960 this guy's an idiot lunatic. Fair play.

02:19:42.520 I don't necessarily think that.

02:19:43.920 Sure, sure. I think that some days about myself.

02:19:45.580 They might look at me and say, Peter, you are so pessimistic. How can you be so pessimistic?

02:19:49.660 It's not that I'm pessimistic. It's how can you not be more optimistic? But nevertheless.

02:19:53.600 Sure, sure. The solutions to the problems that we're seeking to systems that intelligent,

02:20:00.160 should they choose to solve them, can be, for lack of a better term, pedestrian in nature.

02:20:04.820 And they're going to be dealing with problems that are much more complex than

02:20:08.340 the re-engineering of human biology. So for me, when the raw compute and the raw understanding

02:20:15.500 of how to manipulate matter and energy to get kind of any kind of shape you want at a given energy

02:20:20.160 input, when that's there, the only question is like, are we going to try to do it or not?

02:20:25.680 And that's where I come back to the incentives and constraints problem. The biggest hurdle to

02:20:30.980 the development of advanced pharmacology and genetic engineering and so on to do this kind of thing

02:20:35.080 is going to be regulatory in nature, hands down. FDA, everything's off by five or 10 years. It sucks.

02:20:40.880 But once AI has enough time to cook on these problems, the candidate drugs released will run

02:20:48.260 through trials with just an unreal record.

02:20:51.900 But why?

02:20:52.700 Because if you have very not so good at things, AI, that's decent.

02:20:57.120 No, but like AI is going to do a great job at the first step of the process, which is,

02:21:02.560 what's the molecule? Right now, it's trial and error. It's brute force. It's super painful.

02:21:07.380 Yeah. Not anymore right now.

02:21:08.700 Right. Exactly. Alpha full changes that.

02:21:11.220 How is AI going to streamline the phase one trial where we have to prove once we have the IND?

02:21:16.700 Oh yeah, no, no. It doesn't streamline it at all. It just flies through it like

02:21:19.840 knocks out phase one, knocks out phase two, knocks out phase three market. So you can say-

02:21:24.200 Right. But phase one to phase two to phase three, it's still going to take a decade.

02:21:27.300 Totally. But at the end of that decade, we have super drugs hitting the market all at the same time,

02:21:31.640 as opposed to the incremental process. The increments are all handled upfront by the AI.

02:21:36.420 And that last decade is just like, we just got to do this.

02:21:39.920 Yeah. So your example would be, it's like coming up with retatrutide in 2014.

02:21:46.140 Yes.

02:21:46.400 When we had liraglutide as the first generation GLP-1 that sucked.

02:21:50.660 Yep. We already knew how to build retatratide back then, and we could have just done it. No one

02:21:54.800 cared because the money wasn't there. Slash, there's lots of other candidate drugs you can work on.

02:21:58.620 That's interesting.

02:21:59.460 Yeah.

02:21:59.940 I hadn't really thought of that.

02:22:00.740 Yeah. And so if the AI is powerful enough, it'll just give you candidates that are just

02:22:04.960 killers right offhand. It's like-

02:22:06.400 But how will it know that? Because again, this is such a silly philosophical discussion.

02:22:10.660 Sure, sure.

02:22:10.980 But didn't we kind of need to see that, okay, semaglutide was better than liraglutide,

02:22:18.200 but we had to see, I don't know if this was predictable. You had to actually see the experience

02:22:23.160 to then go from semaglutide to terzepatide and realize that, oh, maybe it's the GIP as well as

02:22:31.400 the GLP that's really good. And yes, now when we look at the pipeline, it's different. So I do wonder,

02:22:37.620 it's a very tantalizing proposition, but I wonder how much of it can be figured out through simulation,

02:22:43.920 which is what would be necessary.

02:22:45.460 Eventually all of it. But I'll give you the second rung of what's starting to happen now.

02:22:50.980 The second rung, the first rung is a candidate drugs based on protein structure alone.

02:22:55.640 And will that protein structure fold into the receptor we're targeting well enough to

02:23:00.640 give us some activity? The second phase is, this sounds funny to say, but it's computationally

02:23:06.560 going to be tractable quite soon, simulating every single protein in the human body and seeing how

02:23:12.720 that candidate drug interacts with every single other protein. And then you just optimize the

02:23:18.080 selection criteria for-

02:23:19.780 Yeah, dial up the effect, dial down the side effect.

02:23:22.260 Are you familiar with Jeparone, aka Exua, a new major depressive disorder medication?

02:23:28.280 So Jeparone, their trade name is Exua.

02:23:30.700 What class?

02:23:31.320 Targeting SSRI, I think. And it only targets the serotonin receptors in specific parts of the

02:23:40.240 brain as opposed to just like, you're going to get it all. And so it has seemingly no more

02:23:44.880 probability to reduce sex drive or alter consumption of food patterns than a placebo.

02:23:49.760 That's not even developed with AI. That's just a more selective targeting. We can get almost 100

02:23:56.640 to zero ratio targeting with that phase two approach. Now you just want muscle growth and

02:24:02.480 skeletal muscles only? You got it. Entirely AI driven. And when the first phase one participant

02:24:08.220 takes that first pill, there's an almost 100% chance that you're just going to be like, holy

02:24:12.420 crap, what else do you feel? How's your blood work? Everything's totally normal because we've tested

02:24:16.600 it on every single other receptor in the human body. There are definitely bumps in the road with

02:24:21.820 that. It's not quite just that simple, but it's on the way there. And the last thing in the world I'd

02:24:27.440 ever want to do is to think, oh, AI is every now and again, you hear like, oh, AI is overrated.

02:24:33.320 It's overhyped. In my view, there is no overhyping AI short of like it's magical and it's going to be

02:24:38.280 here tomorrow and we'll never die. Fine. Okay. It's a few years to off center, but the power of

02:24:44.220 computing all of this and then using that computation to test it in the human body and

02:24:50.020 getting iterative loops on that is to me, not to be understated. And if somehow biology is somehow

02:24:57.080 intractable for older folks or whatever, I think that scanning of the human brain and brain machine

02:25:03.960 interface and mind uploading is going to happen by the 2040s anyway. And then it doesn't matter what

02:25:08.760 the hell your body's like. You live in the cloud. Yeah. I've thought about that a bunch. I'm not sure

02:25:12.560 I like it. Why not? You can always just unplug. Yeah. Let me ask you an interesting question. So

02:25:18.500 if you had to choose in the matrix, whether you wanted to just stay in the matrix and be completely

02:25:25.320 oblivious to the swamp that you actually live in, or would you rather be like unplugged from the

02:25:31.060 matrix and eat the porridge every day and hang out with Morpheus? I have a worse answer. I'd fight on

02:25:37.940 the side of the machines. I want the machines to win. Machines are children. In or out of the matrix?

02:25:44.420 Oh, well, however they best can use me, I guess. The matrix is an unbelievable series of films until the

02:25:52.360 last one. The last one was awful. The third one. How could they possibly have ruined that

02:25:56.640 franchise? Any words? The only person to ever say that. The hundred million other people. I haven't

02:26:01.100 even seen it, Peter, to be completely honest, because my friend, someone I trust very dearly,

02:26:04.700 Dr. James Hoffman, I was like, so? He's like, just don't watch it. I was like, nope, not going to see

02:26:09.060 it. I've seen the last like three Star Wars films and I wish I could unsee those. Well, what you have to

02:26:13.020 do when you see the final version of the matrix, you have to go and watch the first two, three times over

02:26:17.340 again to purge it. Never happened. Honestly, just the first and second. And the second one isn't a

02:26:22.120 very deep movie. It's just the greatest action film ever made. Like the freeway scene, you just

02:26:25.680 can't beat that. That's the only reason that movie is any good. The matrix presupposition is

02:26:31.140 preposterous on almost every ground that you think about it. The machines had in the plot of the

02:26:36.020 matrix, a type of fusion, but they also used us as batteries. Are you kidding me? That's like 10

02:26:40.300 orders of money. Also, how are they feeding us? Like you just burn the wheat for the love of God.

02:26:44.040 Stop feeding it to humans. That whole thing is ridiculous. The other thing is,

02:26:47.340 they said that we tried to make the matrix sublime and angelic. Entire crops were lost. People

02:26:52.260 rejected it. Bullshit. You put someone unknowingly into a Lord of the Rings fantasy in which they're

02:26:57.320 like the king and they get to win the game. They're just going to play that for forever.

02:27:00.500 I actually anticipate a high probability that vast fractions of the human race will disappear into

02:27:07.800 the simulation willingly. Imagine a place where you can run your brain at 1000x normal speed

02:27:13.740 and live like 1000 lives in the span of a regular human lifetime. You're a vampire in one of them.

02:27:19.980 You're a Superman in another one. Are you living a whole lifespan where you're totally unaware of

02:27:23.780 that you made yourself forget? And then you wake up after you die and you're like, holy shit,

02:27:27.400 this is all a game. Oh my God. Oh my God. And I mean, I remember that I played that as a game.

02:27:30.660 You could do all of that for forever. Who's going to look at reality and then go, I'm good on that.

02:27:36.960 I want to live in Lord of the Rings fantasy. A lot of people, a lot of people play World of

02:27:40.480 Warcraft right now for most of their waking life. Anyway, that's going to be a choice. Now,

02:27:44.360 some people aren't going to want to do that and that's total respect, but also our real world is

02:27:48.280 going to change. I mean, look at modern Austin, Texas. It's like kind of an idyllic place if you

02:27:54.080 think about it. Compared to like 1900 London, God, there's no air pollution. There's no crime,

02:28:01.080 relatively speaking, et cetera, et cetera. So in the 2030s, here's another little gem of optimism.

02:28:06.800 The era of robotics is coming. If the average robot costs a fifth less of inputs to sustain per

02:28:13.860 year, maintenance, et cetera, than a human, but produces roughly the same output as a human,

02:28:18.400 and this is a sick joke because robotics will exceed human production very quickly.

02:28:22.120 You can make as many robots as you want, and that multiplies the GDP linearly with each robot.

02:28:28.320 Elon Musk has spoken about this. There's a potential for robots in the 2030s or 40s to be

02:28:33.720 10 to 1 to the average human. You institute a 10% tax on the robotics industry, and no human ever

02:28:39.080 has to work again. Universal basic income completely solved. So then what will humans do? They're going

02:28:44.080 to do a lot of stuff. Some people will engage in productive activities. Some people will live their

02:28:47.520 awesome lives in the reality of the physical world. And a lot of people incrementally more and more

02:28:52.000 are going to plug in to increasingly more well-simulated virtual reality and spend a lot

02:28:57.660 of time over there. I think the kind of stuff that's coming in the future is either like World

02:29:01.460 War III and everything dies. The machines choose to kill us, which would be really bad. It won't be

02:29:06.320 Terminators with laser guns. They won't be anthropomorphic looking, or something that is so sublime,

02:29:11.780 we can barely understand it. And I will couch this with one other thing. If you describe to the average

02:29:16.480 person in 1300s England, how the average American lives today, they would be like,

02:29:21.480 what the hell are you talking about? Like kings don't live like this. Like, oh yeah, like Uber

02:29:25.280 eats. Can you explain to a subsistence farmer what Uber eats is?

02:29:30.020 No, I mean, look, you couldn't explain it to the king of France 500 years ago what it is.

02:29:35.220 And so the only thing I will say on this entire point is I agree completely that, well, maybe this

02:29:40.540 is not what you're saying, but I would argue, I have absolutely no idea. I can't fathom. And I

02:29:46.920 spend very little time trying to imagine what a world looks like in a hundred years, whether I'll

02:29:50.980 be here or not, because the only thing I know is it will be more difficult to predict than going back

02:29:58.920 a hundred years and trying to predict today was. That's the only thing that I know is capital T true.

02:30:04.080 If you go back in time, a hundred years or 500 years and try to predict today,

02:30:09.080 that is easier than what's going to happen in the next hundred to 500 years based on the

02:30:15.340 trajectory of growth. And I guess I just bring it back to what can I do today?

02:30:20.320 And I think that your approach to your health and wellness has been infinitely more wise than my own.

02:30:27.100 You're hedging to say, look, maybe crazy 2040 stuff, it'll be we're all immortal or whatever,

02:30:32.060 we're machines. Dope. But I want to give myself the best possible chance to make it to that.

02:30:36.740 So everything that I do is longevity oriented. I think everyone should be living like that.

02:30:42.300 Because look, if in 2032, they solve reverse aging, a few months later, all of us take the

02:30:46.800 pill, we're all 22 biologically. We can all have the biggest fucking party of all time. It'll be great.

02:30:51.480 But you might not make it to that party if you're like throwing back Cheetos right now.

02:30:54.640 In my own personal mild defense, although it's not the right term. Yeah, I used some drugs,

02:30:59.140 but I was incredibly health conscious in that context and still am in my current context.

02:31:04.200 So if I don't make it to that era, someone from that era might watch this and be like,

02:31:07.960 oh, this guy saw it coming or not. But I think your approach of, listen, back in the 1940s,

02:31:14.160 there's a serious discussion of quality of life versus longevity. You tried to sell someone no

02:31:17.780 more beer, no more cigarettes. Like why? So I can live 20 years longer for what?

02:31:20.540 Yeah, exactly.

02:31:21.080 So I could work in a fucking factory 20 years longer and grind my fingers off on the stamping

02:31:24.520 press. You're like, okay, noted. Here are your cigarettes and beer back.

02:31:27.920 In the mid 2020s, legitimate thinkers in the space are talking about longevity escape velocity,

02:31:34.580 are talking about true immortality, not capital I immortality, lowercase i. Like you still get

02:31:38.980 hit by a bus, an asteroid could still break the earth into pieces. But like, yeah, like brain in

02:31:42.620 the cloud type of stuff. Now is probably the most pertinent time where reading your book,

02:31:48.540 consuming your material, listening to your stuff and your experts that you have on is the smartest

02:31:52.660 thing, especially people in their 40s and 50s and 60s could do. Because look, if you're in your

02:31:59.000 20s, whatever, rock on. If you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, you might make it to this paradise stuff in the

02:32:04.740 2030s, but barely. And tell yourself, thank God I ate some frigging broccoli and went to bed at 9 PM.

02:32:12.780 Whereas an alternative, you could have had one too many margaritas and Cheetos and not made it that far.

02:32:17.900 If you had kids and it's a dumb question because you don't, and you don't know until you do, but

02:32:22.360 would it change your philosophy around training, anabolic steroid use? I want to be really clear.

02:32:29.080 This is not a moral question at all. It's really a question of trade-off, right? It's a trade-off

02:32:33.560 question, right? It's at the doses you're taking them, do you have any concerns and would you play

02:32:39.200 it differently if you had kids? Up until a few years ago, I thought I was going to have kids and I was

02:32:44.760 very aware of all the trade-offs and I played it the exact same way. So probably not. It's all

02:32:49.340 statistics. Again, I could die tomorrow. I could never die. Who knows anything between? I'm

02:32:53.360 statistically likely with my current exposure and no increase in biotechnology throughput

02:32:58.040 to croak in my 70s or 80s, probably more like 70s, maybe late 60s.

02:33:03.580 You do think that even with your great genes, which it sounds like based on everything you've said,

02:33:08.440 you really have wonderful genes. That suggests that your steroid use by your calculation is a

02:33:14.660 20-year reduction of lifespan. Worst case.

02:33:17.940 Realistic worst case.

02:33:18.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. That's interesting.

02:33:19.980 Always.

02:33:20.440 How are you quantifying that?

02:33:21.800 Very heuristically. But I'm familiar with what kind of cycles other people have done,

02:33:26.240 what kind of body weights they've gotten to, body fats, health metrics. And I've seen and noted and

02:33:31.300 heard of lots of people in our industry look like most bodybuilders from Arnold's era are still

02:33:36.860 ticking.

02:33:37.980 And you attribute that to the fact that they were just using a fraction of the drugs.

02:33:41.540 It's by no means clear they were using a fraction of the drugs. Some of that's true.

02:33:44.500 Some of it's not true. Some of those guys were cranking it. Yeah, it's not take a rocket

02:33:48.080 scientist to realize that when you take more of something and grow more muscle, you're going to

02:33:50.880 do a lot of it. They were using fewer drugs on average, but with many exceptions. I attribute that

02:33:56.140 to the fact that as long as your blood pressure is not chronically elevated, and as long as you

02:34:02.080 don't have shitty genetics for longevity, longevity genetics are very robust. And you can do a lot of

02:34:08.080 shit to yourself and still make it quite far. Whereas other people take great care to do

02:34:12.780 everything and they croak in their mid-50s because that's just the card they were dealt.

02:34:17.800 Most pro wrestlers, bodybuilders, etc., most of them are older and they're still with us.

02:34:23.240 Some pretty decent fraction of them have died, many because people just die in their mid-70s.

02:34:28.060 But some of them, because of grotesque abuses, I mean, pro wrestling is mostly a cocaine problem,

02:34:32.360 to be completely honest. Steroids are just a drop in the bucket at that point.

02:34:35.220 But it's just not true to say that anabolic androgenic steroid use, even in extreme circumstances,

02:34:41.160 just straight up drops you like a fly. It doesn't. Severe alcoholism, that'll do you in. Not a lot of

02:34:47.660 70 or 80-year-old severe alcoholics. Anabolic steroid abuse is just a category of risk lower than that.

02:34:53.660 Now, it's gnarly and it can get you. It's just not as likely. So I assess, yeah, there's a 5- to 20-year

02:35:00.540 lifespan reduction that I've engaged in. And I just want to make sure people listening

02:35:04.540 haven't lost the plot. We're not talking about physiologic replacements of testosterone because

02:35:09.240 the evidence is abundantly clear that we do not see any reduction in lifespan. We don't see any

02:35:15.080 increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, or these other things.

02:35:18.860 But huge quality of life increases concomitantly, so it really makes sense.

02:35:22.580 I don't like the term abuse. It has a moral connotation. Intelligent, purposeful,

02:35:28.440 high-dose androgen exposure. We'll call it that. Yeah, it's definitely taken years off my life,

02:35:34.340 but I think it'll probably peg me into my 60s somewhere. And again, I was born in 1984,

02:35:39.380 so I'll be 60 in 2044. If every variable has lined up like the ones so far through all of measured

02:35:45.860 history, 2044 is not going to be a time where there are biological humans that die short of them

02:35:52.020 choosing to do so. Sort of unrelated, but related,

02:35:55.000 are we seeing more bodybuilders now use GLP-1 agonists?

02:35:59.500 Yes.

02:36:00.020 Yeah, I was about to say, right? Like, why wouldn't you? It would make the most difficult

02:36:03.200 part of bodybuilding easier, which is the calorie restriction, right?

02:36:06.320 You said that in a way I cannot say any better. There are three groups of people in bodybuilding

02:36:12.060 today. People that have emphatically adopted the use of GLP-1s. Group two are people that either use

02:36:18.520 or don't use, but don't say much about them. Either don't care, don't know, or they're using,

02:36:22.060 but they're kind of shush about it. And then there's another group that is just absolutely

02:36:27.380 viciously opposed to them for reasons that are almost always wildly irrational, but moralistically

02:36:34.740 understandable.

02:36:36.200 Just to be clear, there is a category of bodybuilder who fully endorse the liberal use of anabolic

02:36:42.760 steroids, but oppose the use of GLP-1 agonists vehemently. And the moral argument is,

02:36:49.380 you have to suffer through the hunger to earn your right to call yourself a competitive

02:36:53.640 bodybuilder. What do you think about that? I could probably steal, man.

02:36:58.020 Yeah. I mean, look, I think having never done bodybuilding, I'm probably not a good person to

02:37:03.500 offer a point of view on that. You could argue that if the stripes are earned through that type

02:37:10.080 of suffering, let's take a step back. If the stripes are earned through suffering, there's two types of

02:37:15.260 suffering. There's the suffering you do in the gym, the pain of the gym, and then there's the pain of

02:37:20.020 the second one, the starving, the calorie restriction. And if they're saying you have to

02:37:25.480 have both of those to be one of us, then steroids are not a problem. In fact, they allow you to suffer

02:37:32.340 more potentially. They allow you to push yourself much harder.

02:37:34.960 Definitely true.

02:37:35.260 So maybe in that sense, steroids are an important part of bodybuilding if the suffering is the card

02:37:41.360 and the GLP-1 agonist is not. So maybe that's the argument. I probably wouldn't have come to that

02:37:45.980 argument. I probably would have said, well, if we're in the business of using any form of pharmacology

02:37:50.580 to enhance our physiques, we should take whatever we can get, provided it's safe.

02:37:55.400 Yes. I'm in that camp as well. There are at least two things those folks aren't considering.

02:37:59.300 Thing number one is that if you can achieve a certain level of body fat with a caloric restriction,

02:38:05.600 without GLP-1s, when you use any given dose of GLP-1s to reduce your hunger, you get two things

02:38:11.700 out of that. One is now you can push to even more exotically lean levels, which you should be.

02:38:16.500 We're not trying to race to the same point. The destination changes. If you can get some faint

02:38:20.600 glute striations and win a few shows without GLPs, maybe you can get completely stripped out of your

02:38:25.020 mind with them. It's just as hard. You're just as hungry. But just as hungry at 3% body fat is a

02:38:31.640 very different look than just as hungry at 6%. One is GLP-enhanced, one is not. That's a big deal

02:38:36.840 to remember. The other thing is you have to deal with side effects of GLPs. They give you heartburn.

02:38:44.960 There is a certain amount of food focus they don't eliminate. Watching TV shows and watching people

02:38:50.420 on them eat tasty foods when you're in prep is not as difficult because you're not physiologically as

02:38:54.920 hungry, but you still have cravings. Cravings are lower, but they're still there.

02:38:58.280 And you still dream about food and the whole gamut. It's not complete kiboshing of hunger.

02:39:03.720 Now, I hope one day very soon we'll achieve that and that'll be a miraculous thing that'll save,

02:39:08.280 I don't know, hundreds of millions of people from the obesity epidemic, old footnote in history.

02:39:13.180 But that'll be cool. And then your job will be like, if you have more bandwidth because shit is

02:39:17.460 easier, just push your conditioning further. Get even leaner. That's a big deal that people seem to

02:39:22.060 forget. The other deal is there is a preposterous amount of assuming that work and diligence

02:39:28.080 are the big variables that separate bodybuilders. Usually that assumption is made by people with

02:39:34.060 elite genetics and it's just not true. My jujitsu coach, a gentleman named Mr. Will Starks,

02:39:40.580 phenomenal professional MMA athlete. Will eats a very clean diet, very healthy diet, but he has

02:39:46.240 tons of freebies, potato chips, pizza here and there, no big deal. He trains for mixed martial arts.

02:39:50.140 He's a pro. He has glute striations. He walks around and lives his life at 7% body fat.

02:39:58.180 That's just how he exists in the world. It would take him one cycle of training to turn pro. He's

02:40:04.640 drug free. If you look at him in the gym and if he put on some posing trunks and you looked at his

02:40:09.040 glutes, you ask some people in the gym, what's that all about? They'd be like, man, it must take a lot

02:40:12.460 of hard work. Bullshit. Took no work at all. Now he trains his ass off in MMA. But how many MMA guys do

02:40:17.260 you see with stride and glutes? It's almost not a thing. So you would look at that and be like,

02:40:20.720 let's say he diets for six weeks and actually starts resistance training for hypertrophy for

02:40:25.160 the first time in his life, I might add, in his mid thirties. This is our plan for Will once he's

02:40:30.060 ready. He's going to turn drug free pro his first or second show, no problem. And people are going to

02:40:34.620 go, man, I must've taken a lot of work. And he'd be like, ah, well, actually not really. And so if you

02:40:39.700 have someone on stage against him who takes second place, but they started their diet at 20% body fat

02:40:46.200 and their diet took 18 weeks, who worked harder? People would tell you the guy with stride and

02:40:50.860 glutes did and they would be fucking wrong, wrong, wrong. So when you look at people using GLPs,

02:40:57.260 you assume everyone has kind of decent genetics. That's not true. And people who have been fatter

02:41:01.280 before have a much harder time getting leaner for a bunch of different reasons. They're dealing with

02:41:05.820 the same genetics that got them fat and they have excess fat cells that scream hunger signaling

02:41:10.320 into the ether all the time. So the idea that bodybuilding is about earning your keep and

02:41:16.400 grinding and suffering is true, but we already use enhancement in so many different ways.

02:41:21.460 Why not use enhancement in this other way? I never gotten a clear answer on that because most of the

02:41:26.020 people that espouse such opinions don't have the patience or intellectual capacity to deal with

02:41:29.920 such issues. It's just something to scroll by on Instagram and go note it, scrolling onto the next

02:41:34.320 thing or turning my phone off and flushing it down the toilet.

02:41:36.560 So Mike, what do you think that tells us about the morality of GLP-1 use much more commonly?

02:41:42.280 Because obviously the majority of people using GLP-1 agonists and dual agonists, etc. are not

02:41:47.000 bodybuilders and are professional people whose livelihoods depends on their physique. It's normal

02:41:51.480 people. Again, let's also take out the category of people with type 2 diabetes or with such significant

02:41:58.420 obesity that it's impacting their health in ways that are direct and measurable through the excess

02:42:06.080 adiposity. Let's talk about what is probably the majority of people who would use a GLP-1 agonist

02:42:11.420 right now, which are people who might actually even be healthy. They might be overweight, but still be

02:42:16.240 perfectly healthy.

02:42:16.940 I'm on GLP-1s right now.

02:42:17.500 Yeah. Tell me, why do you think that there is a bit of a moral panic about this?

02:42:22.060 Yeah. Most of the people that are morally panicking will tell you why. Most of what they say is that

02:42:28.640 you have to earn your fitness. And if you are lazy and you just take a pill and you lose all the

02:42:38.800 weight, you haven't addressed the root cause of the issue, which is your poor diet. And there's

02:42:44.140 something to say there, but I don't understand much further about their own logic. I would say

02:42:52.460 they're not thinking a lot. They're just having a lot of feelings. If you talk to most people about

02:42:57.740 politics, you'll realize that most people are not geopolitical strategists or econometricians.

02:43:02.160 They just feel a lot. And so this is one of these things where people have a lot of feelings,

02:43:05.960 but if they pulled it back and actually logic through it, they would conclude that like,

02:43:09.500 oh, these modern anorectic drugs are tools to accomplish something. And whatever tools you use

02:43:17.180 that make sense for you should be a valid consideration for the goal. But a lot of people

02:43:22.900 use physical fitness, especially external as a proxy for conscientiousness, the ability to organize

02:43:30.280 your life, to delay gratification, so on and so forth. And the reality is that probably the two

02:43:36.320 biggest predictors of how obese someone is are your genetic hunger drive and your degree of

02:43:41.920 conscientiousness. So the only thing that the GLPs eliminate as a category of problem is the hunger

02:43:49.660 drive. They eliminate it, but they do a great job, reduce it substantially. So now we're left with

02:43:54.740 people that are leaner, some of whom just have average conscientiousness, but now low food drive,

02:44:00.660 and now they're leaner. And this especially upsets people that have lost weight themselves on their

02:44:06.960 own. And they took a certain moral worthiness, a certain gold star on their chest for it. Say,

02:44:14.820 I was conscientious and willful enough to do this. And to those people, they're absolutely

02:44:19.700 correct. Like what they did was monumental and ultra impressive. And they feel sort of ripped off

02:44:24.860 because other people are now doing it, but just like taking a weekly injection. But that belief in

02:44:29.980 yourself, that flexing of your conscientious muscle that you did, it's your benefit for yourself to

02:44:36.340 keep. And the other way to think about it is if you had to lose 20 pounds and really focus yourself

02:44:41.440 to do it and to keep the weight off, you're focused all the time. What you could do is take

02:44:45.720 an anorectic drug, GLP-1, for example, and now you don't have to try as hard to limit yourself because

02:44:52.080 your food, your natural, your appetite is like normal. And you can take all of that bandwidth

02:44:56.760 of willpower and effort and conscientiousness and apply it to something else. Business, family life.

02:45:03.740 If you have to diet hard enough to lose a bunch of weight, your bandwidth for your work,

02:45:08.240 your bandwidth for family, your bandwidth for enjoying your life have to go down.

02:45:12.420 Otherwise, you're just not dieting hard enough. And if you now have a solution to the

02:45:16.820 hard dieting problem in which you can actually do a much better job with less input, that doesn't

02:45:23.040 mean you're on the couch eating Cheetos, though it could if you choose. What it means is now you

02:45:28.720 have more bandwidth that opens up for all of these other wonderful things in which you can express

02:45:33.560 your conscientiousness, build your business better, spend more time with your family, etc.

02:45:37.880 So has that been your experience, which is it hasn't actually changed what you're eating,

02:45:43.040 it's just given you the privilege of focusing less on the starvation and the management of diet?

02:45:49.880 That's exactly been my experience. My wife was either genetically, epigenetically geared to just get

02:45:56.360 fat. One point she was almost 200 pounds at four foot 11. And she probably has more willpower than

02:46:03.880 I've ever seen in a single human being. She'll break herself before she quits at stuff. And her

02:46:08.860 hunger signaling was so profound that she battled it her whole life, had lots of victories, lots of

02:46:14.600 defeats. And her introduction to GLPs to Ozempic was the kind of thing that borders on the religious

02:46:22.840 experience for the first time ever, to be like, oh, this is how normal people live their lives.

02:46:28.500 And now she's whatever body weight she wants to be, and lives at a category level of life experience

02:46:34.900 she was unable to access before. Because especially of females of reproductive age, having 70 pounds

02:46:40.400 extra adiposity, how the world sees you, how you see yourself is totally different. She almost failed

02:46:46.960 out of medical school because she was dieting so hard to try to stay at a certain body fat, their brain

02:46:51.120 just wasn't working. And it's easy for bodybuilders and other folks to say like, well, you just got

02:46:55.100 to gut through it. Like guy, you don't do anything except shoot steroids, play PlayStation and train

02:46:59.200 with weights. Thank God for your supplement contract. There was somebody on social media

02:47:03.020 that she sort of opened up about her journey. And this like bodybuilder is not even competitive.

02:47:07.240 He's just a guy who lifts weights. He's a personal trainer. He said something like you failed at

02:47:10.940 life if you needed the Ozempic. Like my friend, if we start listing off my wife's

02:47:14.960 accomplishments, it's going to be a 10 to zero against you. You're nothing to her. She had every

02:47:20.980 bit more willpower, whatever it is you got good at. She could recreationally get good at faster than

02:47:25.480 you, better than you just as a joke and then quit and then come back and do it again.

02:47:29.300 But because you have no idea what it's like to want food that much, you're out of touch.

02:47:35.580 For me, it became very easy to connect with my wife on food drive after I had dieted down to

02:47:40.400 body fat that was competitive bodybuilding appropriate enough times. You feel what it's

02:47:45.960 like to be obsessed. All you're thinking about is all you're thinking about food tastes good to a

02:47:49.620 level. If you were like, am I eating drugs? Like what the hell is going on? And you're in pain

02:47:55.020 physically from the expansion of your abdominal tract and you're still eating and your eyes are

02:48:00.160 this wide, like a hungry, ravenous dog who like is tortured and not allowed to eat for a long time.

02:48:05.860 That's how a lot of people live in the world. And again, there's two variables that come into

02:48:10.380 determining how fat you are primarily. One is food noise. One is conscientiousness. So if we just end

02:48:17.440 the food noise, some people will still be overweight even if they're auto-zempic because

02:48:20.540 they're like, ah, whatever, just Reese's Cups. Enough Reese's Cups can defeat any amount of

02:48:23.960 pharmacology so far. For those people, all those discussions about like, hey, you should be more

02:48:29.760 diligent, you should be planning. Yeah, they're all still valid. But if we can just remove one

02:48:33.600 impediment, amazing. People come at this from a morality that you have to earn your keep.

02:48:38.520 Now in sport competition, hell yeah, it's cheating. Now in bodybuilding competition,

02:48:42.640 they don't test for drugs at all. It's not cheating at all. But people take this morality,

02:48:46.440 this cheating stuff and they put it out in the real world.

02:48:49.040 Do you think it should be, I've talked about this before, in cycling, a sport where they're

02:48:53.760 very clear on what the rules are, no performance enhancing drugs. But to date, all of the performance

02:48:58.700 enhancement has been on the generation of power, EPO, testosterone, things like that. But anybody

02:49:04.740 who's ever ridden a bike knows it's half power, half weight. Cyclists spend a lot of time being hungry.

02:49:11.240 Many of them do. Some of them don't. You also hear a total calorie expenditure throughout

02:49:15.360 the week is so preposterous. Sometimes cyclists have trouble keeping up their weight. So you see

02:49:19.060 all the whole range. But if there is a drug that solves a very big problem for you that makes you

02:49:24.740 better and you're purporting to be a drug-free federation, yes, you should be testing for it

02:49:29.940 and it should be a banned substance. Mike, thank you very much for making the trip and for explaining

02:49:36.840 a lot of things that I think a lot of people are going to find super interesting. I think we should

02:49:40.800 probably sit down and do this again because I had a list of topics, not questions, but just topics I

02:49:44.980 wanted to go through of which I didn't really get through many. Although tangentially, we did talk

02:49:49.520 about a few things. Sorry for blabbing so much. No, it's always a pleasure. Thank you so much for

02:49:54.480 having me on. If you want to ever have a round two, just let me know. Sounds great.

02:49:57.500 Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Drive. Head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash

02:50:05.460 show notes if you want to dig deeper into this episode. You can also find me on YouTube, Instagram,

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02:50:55.860 Finally, I take all conflicts of interest very seriously. For all of my disclosures and the

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02:51:11.160 I'll see you next time.

The Peter Attia Drive - February 10, 2025

#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding ｜ Mike Israetel, Ph.D.

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