#335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding | Mike Israetel, Ph.D.

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My guest this week is Dr. Mike Istratel.
Mike holds a PhD in sports physiology and is currently the head science consultant for Renaissance Periodization. He's a competitive bodybuilder and was formerly a professor of exercise and sports science at the School of Public Health at Temple University in Philadelphia.
As a co-founder of Renaissance Periodization, Mike has coached numerous athletes and busy professionals in both diet and weight training. Mike also has a very popular YouTube channel where he loves to do debunking videos that are both informative and endlessly amusing.
In today's conversation, Mike shares his personal journey from his early experiences in powerlifting and bodybuilding to his academic training in exercise science. We discuss the core principles of resistance training, including exercise selection, volume, intensity, and frequency.
Mike debunks the common fear that strength training will make people overly muscular without intention. He explains why this belief is unfounded and highlights the dedication required to build significant muscle mass.
We outline what a resistance training routine could look like for someone new to the gym or transitioning from sports. For more experienced lifters, we explore how to optimize resistance training for muscle growth.
Mike shares his personal experience with anabolic steroids, outlining their impact on muscle growth, mental health, and performance. He discusses the pros and cons, including the significant physical changes and potential long-term health risks.
It's really worth pointing out here that Mike is one of the most candid individuals I've ever met when it comes to discussing his use of anabolic steroids, growth hormones, and things of that nature. What is remarkable to me, and you can see this in the podcast, is just how jaw-dropping the numbers are in terms of usage.
When you're talking to an individual like me who's prescribed testosterone for many patients under physiologic circumstances, it was impossible to fathom just the types of doses that bodybuilders are using. We discuss the role of genetics in muscle growth and strength, as well as the influence of age and other lifestyle factors.
This conversation offers insights into the science of resistance training and practical advice for anyone looking to build muscle while also exploring the experience of someone who has been in the bodybuilding world. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Mike Istratel.
Mike, thank you very much for making the trip to Austin.

Thank you so much for having me. I saw something on social media.
You were here a week ago. Have you been here the whole time or? Yes, week and a half long social media collaborative trip.
You weren't here for F1? No, loud noises scare me. So I would stay away from that sort of thing.
I'm kidding. It sounds awesome.
I've never actually been to a formula race in real life. And my videographer and business partner on YouTube, huge formula one fan.
He has the app and everything live streams, all the races and stuff. Are you big into that sort of thing? I not only have the app, I'm the premium subscriber.
So I can listen to all the chatter of every moment between every car and their mechanic. And yes, of course, that's really cool.
Yeah. I make a lot of race car analogies when it comes to athletics and stuff.
So if I make them here, you can correct me and say I'm using them wrong. Well, Mike, there's going to be some folks listening and watching us who are probably very familiar with your work and they've probably come to learn about you as I have through just endless years of being both amused and educated by your content on YouTube.
But there's probably a group of people here just in my audience that aren't overlapping with yours. So I want to give folks a chance to kind of get to know you.
I will have introduced you already in the introduction, but let's talk just a little bit about your background. Remind me, you came to the US from Russia when you're eight? Seven.
Seven. Okay.
Where'd you grow up? Moscow, Russia before that. And I do have memories of it and all that stuff.
And then the metropolitan Detroit area after that, all the way until college. So a place called Oak Park, Michigan, which you can find on a map and that's about it.
What'd you study in undergrad? Movement science, kinesiology at the University of Michigan. What sports were you playing then? Were you into grappling at the time? I had wrestled in high school and then I just wasn't very good at it and I just absolutely was not dedicated to it for a few reasons which are sort of boring.
But I got into lifting hardcore towards the middle and end of high school. And then by the time I was in college, I was gearing up to start competing in powerlifting.
And so I actually started the Michigan Powerlifting Club. We started kind of a team and we went to meets and all that stuff.
So I was a competitive powerlifter in my undergraduate years. And just for folks who might be confused about all the different disciplines, powerlifting is the sport where there are three and only three lifts.
There's a deadlift, a bench press, a squat, and you win by having the highest total weights across the three, I believe. Correct.
Yes. I'll add it up.
So squat plus bench plus deadlift equals total. And the person with the biggest total for their weight class or absolute or by formula wins the whole thing.
So you were not at that point into bodybuilding or anything yet. No.
Got it. No.
And then you went off and did your PhD right away after undergrad? Got into master's. In the exercise science field, going straight from undergraduate to PhD is very rare.
Usually you a lot more preparatory work because the undergraduate curriculum typically just doesn't teach you a whole lot of applied, super specialized exercise science. I learned anatomy and physiology very well, but much more general curriculum, especially at an R01 school like Michigan, they didn't super hyper-specialize.
I learned almost nothing about sports whatsoever. I must have had like two bullet points of how to resistance train in any one of my classes in Michigan.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Resistance training wasn't even the big focus there. It was chronic disease management, health, stuff like that, clinical application.
And so right after that, I went to get my master's degree at Appalachian State University under Dr. Travis Triplett and Dr.
Jeff McBride. And that was a swell time.
That was a subspecialty of exercise science. It was actually strength and conditioning.
So much closer to what I was super passionate about. And then I did one year as a personal trainer.
It's like jail. I did a year upstate.
So a year in Manhattan with my colleague, Mr. Nick Shaw, who's now the co-founder and CEO of our company, RP.
And we got a chance to train folks at a private personal training studio in Manhattan, you know, like CTOs of major companies, really crazy stuff. Like I had never met like a truly, truly rich person up until I met someone who was worth like 50 million.
And I was like, oh my God, turns out there's just really nice, cool people that are really chill and have the same problems everyone else does trying to get in shape. So did that for a year, realized I didn't know enough, and then was enrolled into the PhD program at East Tennessee State University under Dr.
Mike Stone. And that was in sport physiology, which Dr.
Stone described as the science of taking good athletes and making them better. And that was a really, really amazing time.
I probably learned more in that three years than I had in, I don't know, outside of learning how to read and how to do math, probably more than I ever learned at school, ever. Totally immersive, got to work with teams, got to work with athletes, strength and conditioning coach, truly sports science work.
We integrate all of the variables, sport coaching, strength and conditioning, sports medicine, nutrition, the whole gamut. Incredible experience.
Got a PhD there and then taught at the University of Central Missouri for a while, taught at Temple University in Philadelphia for a while, and then went full depth into private industry because we had founded RP, our company, during the time that I was in PhD program. And sometime during the Temple years, it became apparent that I was much more productive not teaching than I was teaching because there was so much to do with the company.
Took some time away from teaching, came back to teach under my friend, Dr. Brad Schoenfeld, who's kind of the world expert scientifically in muscle hypertrophy.
I taught at his master's program for a while. And then I left that recently to just do private industry full time.
And when did you start putting out these videos on YouTube that I probably only discovered a couple of years ago, but I think you've been doing this much longer, right? So YouTube, I haven't been doing too long. 2020 is when we started.
Okay. Peak COVID.
Sorry if I get your podcast canceled by mentioning that term. Honestly, when we record YouTube videos at our at-home studio, which is where most of them happen, if I drop the C word, Scott, the video guy's like, different take.
We one take almost everything and that we roll back. The algorithm will flag it and I'll put a little COVID morning and it does have some- Do I have to cut this out? Unlikely.
Well, it's a medical podcast. If you can't talk about COVID, I have no idea where we are anymore.
I wish I knew more about how the algorithm worked. I clearly don't.
The ever mysterious algorithm. And then just kind of going back to your personal evolution, as you're going through this journey of master's, PhD industry, are you still focusing on powerlifting personally? So I was focusing on powerlifting up until I got into my master's program.
And actually towards the end of undergrad, I did this thing where I was in a grocery store and I picked up a magazine. It was a muscle magazine.
It was the Flex magazine issue that had summarized the prior 2002 Mr. Olympia contest with all the pictures of the bodybuilders.
Ronnie won again. Though he- That was his fourth? Yeah, fifth or something like that.
And he didn't look his best. Not enough people showed up to really take him down.
Everyone had suspected Jay Cutler could have beat him if he showed up that year. Jay Cutler almost beat Ronnie in 2001.
That's right. He sat out 2002.
And so I just remember reading the magazine and looking at the pictures. Also real quick, how adult does the humor on here go? Or are we trying to keep it semi-professional? I'm going to defer to you on that.
That's a bad idea, Peter. Okay.
So I'll just keep it semi-pro. It was enlightening because I realized that I had an eye for aesthetics and by an eye for aesthetics, it doesn't mean I knew anything about what looks good or what

looks not great on a human body.

But I did have a very distinct aesthetic preference.

Some people will see muscular physiques and they kind of all look the same, like giant

veiny overcooked hot dogs, which is not wrong.

I looked at the physiques and I was really taken aback, especially by some of them.

What probably normal people get when they look at very good art, that, whoa, I'm looking at something very special. I'm looking at something that's emotive.
And I started to pursue my own hypertrophy training, muscle growth training. What were you looking like at the time? I was roughly 190 pounds at five foot six, fairly lean, but not anything crazy.
And so muscular, but if I had some clothes on, people would be like, oh, it's just a short person. But shirtless, I looked like clearly I had lifted weights for some time.
I really also realized that while there's a huge passion for me in lifting heavy, I also had a passion for getting pumps and doing higher reps and doing lots of volume and seeing my body change visually. That was a huge trip.
And it basically became this thing where I'm like, oh, I am an artist in muscle growth and fat loss. My canvas is my own body.
And I want to learn how to sculpt very well, most selfishly, just so I could occupy a superhero looking body. I ended up looking more like a villain, but whatever.
Balding will do that. List of bald superheroes includes bald supervillains.
All of them may be a huge fraction in any case, but it was just a real personal journey for me at first and still is to a huge extent. And just by comparison, what do you weigh right now? 235 pounds, substantially lean.
We'll talk a lot about bodybuilding and cycles and are you in a cycle now? And if so, are you on the way up or on the way down in terms of mass? I'm kind of at the top of where I'll be for a little bit, maybe up, but just very slowly. So this is roughly the fattest I'll get.
I didn't want to say anything, Mike, but yeah, you're looking a little chubby to me right now. Looking pretty fat.
Yeah. I'll cry about it later.
I normally don't let people of your chubbiness in the studio, but. Yes.
And you can't let us out without letting us know like, hey, you're fat, by the way. Just want to let you know.
No big deal. I mean, it's kind of a big deal.
It's a really big deal. And your body fat right now, if you had to guess, would be what, 8%? Maybe 9-ish.
I still have some striations in my glutes. I have like one of the least aesthetic physiques imaginable, but thank you genetics for that one.
And I did some things earlier in my career. I gained a ton of weight.
It was muscle and fat, stretched my skin out, gave me massive love handles. When you lose that weight, the skin is still sticking around.
So I'm actually planning on some extensive cosmetic surgery in about a few months here to address that issue finally. So yeah, I've gained a lot of muscle over the years.
For me, the whole journey fundamentally is a personal journey of wanting to occupy a body that is two things. One, that I aesthetically enjoy being in, and two, one, that I had a large hand in creating or curating.
And the curation is almost as fun as the creation. Like you see an artist draw something on a canvas and a huge amount of joy comes from creating the main arc of everything you're doing, the main shapes, main lines, main coloring.

But you know when artists have something almost complete and they do a little pencil-in-pencil there?

Once you have something that looks amazing and you're optimizing, oh, there's something

super beautiful about that.

It's like watching someone take a very finely tuned F1 car and just wrench a couple of the

screws in and polish it off. It's just, oh, this is so beautiful.
Not that my body is attractive. It's not the grotesque, but less grotesque is what I'm aiming for.
And I don't know if it's working or not. My hairiness kind of precludes any of that.
Well, whenever I think of an artist mucking around with a canvas, of course, I only think of Bob Ross because I don't have much experience watching an artist create something. You know, usually I'm seeing the finished product, but I still, like most people who grew up in the seventies and the eighties, recall watching Bob Ross on Saturday mornings with great fondness.
He makes it look so easy. Oh my God.
He not only makes it look so easy, he's communicating an empowerment about creating art. Yes.
Like everybody could be doing this. You're doing this with me right now.
Right. And you're like, oh, I sure am.
And he's like, 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, I just messed up everything.
This looks terrible. If I had to describe my physique and my genetics, it would be like a lot of Bob Ross style having to fix things or like, oh, that looks terrible.
Let's pretend I was drawing something else. All right.
So I want to try to bring this up to the present. So right now you compete in bodybuilding.
You obviously provide a lot of education to folks. So I think my audience is clearly interested in exercise, clearly interested in strength training, clearly interested in the aesthetics of strength training.
Because again, I think it's very easy to look at bodybuilders and say, gosh, that's a little odd. It's a lot.
But what is obvious, if not self-evident, is that's just a spectrum. Anybody who wants to have more muscle and less fat probably has something they can learn from a bodybuilder.
I often say to my patients, if you really want to understand how to manipulate nutrition to be lean, you probably need to understand what bodybuilders are doing. There's probably no athlete, there's no person out there that truly understands how to manipulate exercise and nutrition in the context of body composition.
And that's true even in the presence of anabolic steroids. Anabolic steroids don't preclude that, they might make that a little easier, which I think we should talk about.
So maybe we just start with where you see the value of strength training. Do you think that there is a diminishing return at some point? Do you think that there is a diminishing return in the amount of muscle? I've said very tongue-in-cheek that the list of 90-year-olds out there complaining,

wishing they were not as strong and not as muscular is a very short list. Very short list.
Right. But again, why am I saying that? I'm saying that to say that most people at the end of life are saying the exact opposite.
I wish I was stronger. I wish I had more muscle.
But from a practical standpoint, Mike, what is your view on muscularity and strength at the expense of what it might take to achieve them? Are there extremes that people should be mindful of? If you have to be mindful of extremes, in almost every case, you have already been on a multi-years long, very immersive, very infatuated, very disciplined journey of resistance training and focused nutrition. And the organization of many variables and parts of your life around that task, it's unlikely to be something you pick up a lifting hobby and just find yourself excessively muscular.
Oops. So that's probably my best answer for that.
It's just insanely unrealistic in most cases to wander into that sort of thing. The myth of accidental muscle.
Yes. People say more money, more problems.
First of all, I've met various philosophical grounds. I think that's absurd, but you don't accidentally become ultra wealthy.
And by God, I wish you the best if that happens to you. I'll cry a tear for you.
But in much the same way, almost nobody accidentally becomes hypermuscular to the extent that they're on that side of the spectrum that trade-offs are starting to become apparent. Probably the biggest trade-off in the short to medium term is opportunity cost, things you could have spent doing outside of being in the gym.
But the way the science of resistance training works is for almost all of the health benefits and longevity benefits and the quality of life benefits, the amount of time you need to be training per week is measured in the one to three hour range with three being like, you're really full sending it. One to three hours per week.
If you went on chat GPT and did like a time use question, I mean, can you list all of the things that typical American does for X number of hours a week? Read down the list, top 100 time use cases. You may find that one to three hours a week is somewhere in the 50 or 60 rank.
And there's so many things people do that are way more than that. Social media consumption, television watching, and the list goes on.
There are dozens of things you do that take way more time. And so if you really fully invest yourself, like I'm relatively fully invested into getting as jacked as possible, it's going to take some time.
It could take eight hours a week, which is still like, well, it's not forever. People will jog for 40 minutes every morning, think nothing of it.
And then when you present to them the idea of resistance training, like, well, now that's going to take some time. Like, well, yes, actually does not take nearly as much time because the intensity of the effort is so grotesquely high and the recovery demands are so high that you have to be very pulsatile with it.
It's not even something you have to do every day. As a matter of fact, people get incredible benefits.
Probably the biggest return on investment the average person can make is to train for roughly half an hour, two times a week, Monday and Thursday. If you do it properly, it can comport an unbelievable amount of benefits just across the board.
And so for most people, the consideration that they can begin to do this successively, it's just not something realistic until and unless they're really into it like a huge hobby. If you are watching Formula One for

30 minutes a day every other day on your phone, realistic considerations of this is taking up too

much of your time kind of out the window. Now, if you start canceling podcast guests because you're

following the circuit around the world and staying in five-star hotels and booking the hyper rich guy suite for all the races, someone could say, well, you're really into this. You're like, no, nonsense.
It's only costing me $3 million a year. So then, yes, but it's obvious when you're going to be so involved.
You don't just walk into that sort of thing. So let's unpack this a little bit because there's actually two things I want to go into, but one of them I think will be a better entry into it, which is you talked about how, boy, if you were going to put eight hours a week into your strength training, you're kind of at the upper limits of what a person might do.
Conversely, if your goal is to be a really good endurance athlete, you're not at that level yet. If you're only putting in eight hours a week, a world-class cyclist, I mean, God, they're probably on their bike 30 hours a week.
Something like that. Easily.
Full-time job. Now, of course, not all of that is at maximum intensity.
A lot of that, in fact, probably 70 to 80% of it, it also varies a little bit by gender, but let's just say 70 to 80% of that time is going to be at zone two. And they're really only burning matches 20% of the time.
Yet there's something very different about strength training, which is, are you really getting benefit at the equivalent of whatever we would call zone two in the gym? Like if you're at that far of a submaximal effort, what is the training stimulus? And is this just where the comparison between cardiopulmonary training, where there's a clear benefit from submaximal efforts and strength training don't jive? That's definitely the case. Strength training, I like to use the term resistance training.
It's the general term for going into the gym and applying things to your muscles. Because that's why you would say hypertrophy and strength are outputs of resistance training.
Yes. So you can get some benefits from very submaximal efforts, but resistance training is based on applying high forces and high levels of fatigue as its primary modality of how it makes you better.
And so it's kind of when you get into that world, that's what's going to happen. If you're trying to be a special operator, eventually, a Navy SEAL type of person, the sound of gunfire freaks you out, you're kind of in the wrong place.
We get almost all the benefits from pushing either very heavy loads or lighter loads, but very close to muscular failure, which people have described as unpleasant. A burn in the muscle, a lot of pain, the weights slow down, so it takes a lot of psychological effort to keep going.
There is not really an equivalent of just getting on the bike and putting in the miles. Getting to a pace where zone two, you can breathe, you can talk a little bit still, that's not weight training.
But precisely because weight training is so intensive, you need lots of recovery time between sessions, and you can do lots of disruption and damage in each session. And also, the total yield and how much it changes your physiology is very high for each session, and actually per unit time.
And that means if you're not working super hard per any one unit time, you're going to need a lot of work. That's endurance training.
If you're working insanely hard per unit time, you won't need a lot of work, nor can you recover from that much work, which is why the top end is eight or 10 hours or something for even professional bodybuilders of time spent in the gym every week. But for people that just want the basic benefits, yeah, we're talking about an hour or two hours a week.
And that's really all you need if you're pushing sufficiently hard. That's both all you need and realistically, you can recover for more if you make time in your schedule and really prioritize recovery.
But yeah, any much more than that, it gets to be like, oh wow, I'm sore and tired a lot more. And Mike, do you think this is simply a consequence of the fact that endurance training relies more on type one muscle fibers and strength and hypertrophy training are more dependent on the actions of type two fibers? Is that why? I don't know why philosophically, I just think this is such an interesting contrast to make of how optimization of one is a totally different philosophy than optimization of the other.
And the only reason I'm harping on it is I just know that when you take people who are very used to doing endurance training, it's a hard switch for them to adopt what you just said in the gym sometimes. It's not the way they're wired, but is the best way to explain to that person the why? That's the difference between a type one and a type two fiber? That is probably the core difference.
I would say there are two other things that can be put into that equation. One is the physical forces are just much higher in magnitude.
You're going to be putting a lot of tension through your connective tissues and through your muscles when you're resistance training than you are when you're doing bicycle work, for example. And so with high absolute forces, the proximate damage and disruption to the body is graded exponentially and not linearly.
It's like if a wiffle ball flies past you, you might not even hear it. If a 50 caliber bullet flies past you, it's going to tear parts of off, and it's never even touched you.
Very, very different amount of damage from much, much higher forces. And the other one is some combination of neural and psychological drive.
The kind of drive it requires to be good at endurance, at least the base building part, the aerobic base work that you do, is kind of being in a state of calm equanimity. You get your flow going, you get your music going, you get your breathing going, you look at the road ahead of you, and you can just crank.
But in lifting, you have to turn up the juice to really feel the maximum situation. Another quick analogy offhand is if you are a trillionaire like I am, and you have a fleet of Cessna private aircraft at your back and call, I never fly the same plane twice.
I always crash the thing. You fly a Cessna, you can fly it for some time.
It requires a decent amount of maintenance, but a decent amount of maintenance and it'll fly for a long time. It's just never getting up to velocities that are really crazy.
You take an SR-71 Blackbird out for a spin at Mach 3, you have to do 10 times the number of maintenance hours per flight hour on that thing or something to that magnitude. Because at Mach 3, what's happening to the plane is just running through subsequent brick walls.
That's what the sound barrier is like. Three times faster than the sound barrier, you're just rattling that thing into dust.
That's what you're trying to do to it. When you're pushing your body really hard and the weights are slowing down and there's sets of 5 or sets of eight or sets of 10, your body's very close to its limits.
So both your faster twitch muscle fibers, which are required, they take way more damage. They're also not as well proliferated with blood supply and they heal slower.
And the amount of absolute force is higher and the amount of neural drive it takes. You can hop on a bike for an hour at zone two every day.
And afterwards, people are like, are you tired? And you're like, a little bit. I kind of feel also a little bit refreshed in a sense.
You don't really feel refreshed after grinding the leg press for five sets of 15. You feel like someone beat the crap out of you and you don't owe anyone money.
What the hell is going on? So that intensity, that absolute intensity of lifting and high relative intensity, that's what tends to make the big, big fatigue cost. Can you say more about the neural part of this? I find this to be a very interesting piece.
And out of all the pieces you've described, and I agree with everything you've said, I know the least about that component yet. I've heard people talk about this, right? Which is you cannot discount the CNS fatigue, literally, that comes from doing this type of work.
And I remember as an example, watching sprinters train. And obviously people understand that sprinters, I shouldn't say obviously, but if you study the mechanics of sprinting, you realize it really comes down to force per unit mass.
That's how hard they can hit the ground with their foot relative to their mass. And so these are athletes who need to be almost comically

strong without gaining any excess weight. So even though we look at sprinters and we think, gosh, they're very muscular, it's their strength to weight ratio that's really profound.
And so they have to train in a way that minimizes hypertrophy and maximizes strength. So for example, they'll focus heavily on exercises where they can push the concentric phase and not the eccentric phase.
It was explained to me once that doing this allowed them to also spare themselves from some of the neurologic fatigue. Is there any validity to that or is that just true, true, and unrelated? And what is actually happening in both the central and peripheral nervous system during the recovery phase between those, say, three-day or six-day bouts when you're trying to recover a system after the set you just described? I'm glad you brought up the peripheral.
One of the big misconceptions is that there's muscular fatigue, connective tissue, systemic fatigue, blood vessels, and everything still after heart has to pump. But then people just say, oh, and then the central nervous system.
Well, the peripheral nervous system is a thing too, and it also takes substantial amount of fatigue. So I would just say the nervous system takes fatigue, and it takes fatigue in the same way you would expect any system that's pushed to its limits to take.
Various components of it experience wear and tear, various substrates deplete and need to be repleted. So I can bring up two examples.
In the axon of any single given nerve, you have a balance of electrolytes inside and outside, which allows the proliferation of the electrical signal. You run that system long and hard enough and it starts to get out of whack to where you try to get another impulse going and it's like, uh, so it needs to do a lot of pumping to take what is supposed to be inside the cell that's now outside the cell to get back in there to a level of concentration that would be fully recovered.
Now, typically that happens quickly, but if you run that system a lot, there are various points at which some of the structures that are supposed to do that, they're also proteins. You use them enough and they start to kind of break a little bit and you need to produce more proteins to replace the channels themselves that do that pumping back and forth.
And so that typically protein construction is measured on the order of minutes, hours, and days, not seconds. So that you could imagine it as like a transatlantic cable.
You throw enough current through a cable and the fish nibble at the cable enough, you need to start replacing the cable. Now, if you're really, really using the crap out of that cable, yeah, it's going to like some not so great things.
And then closer to neuron-to-neuron junctions or the neuromuscular junction between the neuron and the muscle itself, you have vesicles of neurotransmitter. You pump enough of those in, you get the cool stuff of communication.
You can run low on neurotransmitter. And then the electrical signal arrives and the neurotransmitter is like, sorry, not enough of us to do anything.
And so you experience fatigue expressed as weakness and you need time to reconstruct a lot of those neurotransmitters, place them into vesicles, have those vesicles translocate to the synaptic cleft and then like sit there and get ready. And that is a process that typically happens rapidly, but if you really exhaust it, can happen over some time.
A really austere illustration of that is, and I've never done this, I've just heard about it. I will take credit for doing many other drugs, but I've never tried ecstasy.
But if you clear enough of that neurotransmitter, you don't feel the same the next day. You feel different.
And it takes a day or two to get back up to those levels. Similar types of mechanisms are at work when you are going to very close to true failure on, let's say, a squat or a leg press.
I mean, you're cooking your muscles, but every single capacity of the nervous system to say, push, push, push, is at maximum. And so you end up doing quite a bit of homeostatic disruption all the way along the axon, all the way through the cell body, and in the synaptic cleft, neurotransmitters getting everywhere, gunk building up, that's going to take some time to fix, which is why we see typically that people don't regain their prior strength after fatiguing and resistance exercise for, depending on how hard you go, anywhere from several hours to several days.
And so if you have really, really hard workouts, it just might take several days for you to be able to have a really, really hard workout again for that same muscle group. Luckily, because a lot of this is peripheral nervous system-based and local musculature-based, if you train the living crap out of your chest one day and your triceps, you can train back and biceps, which have nothing much to do with those movements, pretty robustly the next day.
Much of the fatigue is local. It's not all local.
The central nervous system, brain and spinal cord, specifically the brain, has a variety of mechanisms by which it controls your central fatigue. I remember, I think Tim Noakes was a big proponent of the central governor model, though in the explicit terms which he described it might not be the case or somewhat close, there's absolutely central governing going on.
And when your body can tell through a variety of mechanisms that like pretty messed up here, it's going to pull back on how hard you can do anything. And some of those neural structures might even be operating at full bore, but they're just degraded enough to where full capacity isn't full capacity anymore.
And so in all those variety of ways and many others, your body after accumulating a certain amount of fatigue will need to back off. And if you think you can train ultra hard for the same muscles twice a day, every day, you are welcome to try it.
In medical supervised context, you won't last. So it's really good that we have breaks planned in, but it's also really cool because weight training is one of those things where you get a dose of it and for days after, under the hood, it's upgrading your body and your nervous system and your muscles and your tendons.
So it's really neat that you can do 20 to 30 minutes of intense physical activity and resistance training, and then for days later, be experiencing the actual accrued benefits. Not a lot of things in life like that.
It's kind of like getting a college degree for which you pay money and then earning money with it years later. Ostensibly, anyway.
I've never earned any money or had a college degree. But that's kind of how it works.
And you have to understand that when you're entering the gym, if you're training properly, you are asking a lot of your physiology. You are pushing it to its limits.
If you're not, you're not using your time best and you're not getting the best outcomes because a lot of the absolute best results come from pushing very, very hard. Not necessarily to limits, but you have to test the limits.
From what I understand, you have a history of boxing. Is that correct? If you just shadow box, it's nice.
It helps. But going hard rounds against multiple fresh opponents, even if you're not collapsing on the floor after, you know that you're looking at the clock and you're like, if you don't push it to that level at some point, you're not fight ready.
So in order to be your best boxing version, every now and again, you have to push it to discomfort, grotesque discomfort. Same with the body.
It's nice that you get to do that every now and again, and then you collect the benefits afterwards. So interesting how, what we could do up to a certain age.
And I don't know what that limit was because I really stopped pushing to those limits at about the age of 19. So I don't know if the limit was actually 20 or 21 or 24, but I never trained maniacally after the age of 19.
Everything I've done since 19 has been smoking and joking. But what I could get away with then was ridiculous.
And I attribute it only to two things, right? Youth, obviously with youth, I mean, stupidity and inexperience and all the things that come with you, but also like having started very young. So age 13 to 19, I was training literally six hours every day, except Sunday.
Sundays, I only trained two hours per day. And I look back at the workouts I did.
And I think like, I don't know how I did it. And more importantly, like how much better could I have been if I didn't train that much? It wouldn't be uncommon for me to do six super hard rounds of sparring with three fresh opponents.
One guy, a weight class below me, one guy in my weight class, and then one guy for two rounds, a weight class above me. In sequence? Yes.
Six straight rounds. You definitely did that backwards, but you probably know that now.
Yes. And I would mix it up sometimes, but actually it was much harder and more dangerous to do it in that way.
And I kind of liked that. Oh boy.
That idea that the guy that could hit the hardest was my last guy. Yeah.
When you were the most fatigued, your defenses are the less accurate. But I would be in the weight room six days a week.
Like it was just running hard. Anyway, it was kind of crazy.
But I want to go

back and just put a bow on something you said before, because I think it's so important and

it's going to come up again and again. I want to make sure people understand the point.
Your

example was great, by the way. The non-linearity of force is very counterintuitive.
It is not

obvious why, for example, being on a bike, even if you are riding at a very high level of power,

Thank you. is very counterintuitive.
It is not obvious why, for example, being on a bike, even if you are riding at a very high level of power. So remember on a bike, your leg is going around at 90 times per minute.
So even if you did a one minute all out, that's 90 reps or call it 45 reps. That's nothing compared to when you're doing an all-out set for 10 reps in the gym.

It's such a difference in fours. I love the example of the wiffle ball going by you versus a 50 cal.
The 50 cal could kill you without hitting you. The wiffle ball you wouldn't notice.

So I think this idea of the profound level of difference in tissue destruction is a very

important one. I was on Dorian Yates' podcast a few months ago and poor Dorian, he wanted to interview me because it was his podcast, but I just wanted to interview him.
I have nothing interesting to say. Let's just talk about you right now, right? It was very interesting to me to understand how little time he spent in the gym for a bodybuilder of that era.
It was very, I guess, progressive, even though he was really going back to Arthur Jones and Mike Menser and those guys. But he was really just sort of doing one set to failure per exercise, and he was doing each body part once a week.
The question I sort of posed to him, but I'll pose it again to you is, are most people even capable of pushing that hard? Because I want to bring it back to where we were a moment ago, which was, hey, for a person who just wants to train 30 minutes twice a day, they can get all the benefit in the world. But there's an asterisk there, which is that 30 minutes twice a week is going to be the most difficult 60 minutes total of your week.
So going back to Dorian for a second, what has to be true to be able to only train that much in terms of total hours, volume, however you want to measure it, how much work needs to be done in that window of time? For the, not the Dorian Yates example, for the- No, for the Dorian. Let's start with Dorian.
Like why could he produce such a massive physique? And again, let's just normalize all the drugs. We're going to talk about drugs later.
So we'll explain where the drugs are and aren't helping. But all the drugs in the world aren't going to give you that physique if you can't generate the destruction of the muscle.
Is that just the sort of thing where virtually nobody can actually push that hard, that consistently? Or was it just that nobody thought to do it the way he was doing it at the time? Plenty of people thought that's how it works. Mike Menser did that only in a more extreme version than even Dorian did.
Lots of Menser acolytes did it. It's not the most efficient or the most effective way to train, but it is quite effective because if you go very close to failure with very heavy loads, all of the subcomponents of your musculature, your motor units, which is the motor neuron and all of the cells that it activates, they'll get recruited and they will be asked to work to their limits.
They'll take on a great deal of damage and disruption. They'll sense a ton of tension and they'll produce great results for you.
The other thing is that the relationship between both intensity and volume of how much you do work in the gym, especially volume, is curvilinear and hyperbolic. So it looks like this.
And if people are just listening to this, it means if you do one all out hard set per muscle group per week, which is not what Dorian did. He did roughly 14 of those per week per muscle group.
You get maybe something like 30% of what you could have gotten with five sets. Because your body has very good sensing mechanisms for tension and metabolites and all these other things that cause muscle growth.
And when it detects that you're pushing on the pedal, it'll give you a real good wallop of result. You keep pushing on the same pedal over and over, and the systems are greatly desensitized to giving you more muscle growth.
The biggest reason that is, is probably because the human body is attuned and evolved almost entirely in hundreds of millions of years before we were even human of what is in the modern context called food insecurity. And so in order to make a real good case for allocating that much to muscle growth, you're going to have to have a real distinct signal to ask your body to put more and more into that process.
So it kind of auto caps itself. If you are myostatin deficient, then actually just existing, you just grow muscle all the time.
So it seems to be that for a variety of reasons, including that one, that if you do one set close to failure, you get a lot of gains. You do three sets close to failure, you get substantially more gains, but not three times as many gains.
You do five sets close to failure and you do just a little bit better than three. You do seven or eight sets close to failure in one workout and it's statistically undifferentiable from five.
So that's kind of how that chart looks. So Dorian, from what I understand, did roughly 14 sets per week per muscle group-ish.
And that gets into that territory of a very robust signal of growth to the muscle. It's not the highest signal of growth.
If you decided not to train your legs very hard or your back very hard, and the amount of systemic fatigue that's imparted to you week by week is much lower, because fatigue isn't just local, it spills over into everything else, you could push your arms, shoulders, and chest not to 14 or 15 or 20 sets per week, but in many cases, 25, 30, 35 sets per week and experience very meaningful growth enhancements that you would never have seen only ever training those 15 sets a week. But 15 sets a week might bring you to 70 or 85% of what all of those muscles could eventually have hypertrophied if you only ever specialized in them.
And so Dorian was insanely jacked, but he was jacked all over and probably could have, in retrospect, benefited from more specialization phases on various weak points that he had. His back was startling.
His arms were excellent. Now, by immortal standards, they were the biggest arms you've ever seen in your life.
By competitive bodybuilders of his era standards, relative to the rest of his physique, he could have had bigger arms, could have bigger shoulders. And so he could have poured much more volume into those muscle groups and lessened everything else.
But Dorian seemed to have a kind of all-around approach, which up until about a year ago, so did I. And so I had never looked very aesthetic, but boy, were my legs super big because they could just eat up the growth all the time.
So if you want to do not a

ton of volume for any one muscle, if you work really hard and bring yourself very close to failure, you can already do super, super well just with that alone. If you get a really good cook, someone who really knows how to make food, and you give them an hour in the kitchen with a variety of menu items versus three hours, within an hour, they can wow you with what you're eating.
Within three, they can wow you more, but it's not three times more. Matrix-related orgasmic brownie or whatever, they ain't gonna make that.
There's gonna take them a lot longer than three hours. They can make a difference, but probably only people who are very culinarily attuned can tell.
If someone makes me chicken fingers, gourmet chicken fingers, if there's such a thing, I'm sure Austin has something like that. An hour versus three, to me it all tastes same, same.
It's amazing. To someone really, really with a refined palate, they'll be able to tell, but they can't lie to you and say, look, this three-hour chicken finger, this is just categories above the one-hour one.
So in a lot of processes in general, and luckily in the human body, getting some of the way to your body's maximum ability to recover actually brings you most of the way as far as results. And that's why Dorian could do what he did.
Now, if Dorian was doing 14 sets per body part per week, would that mean 14 sets to failure of 14 different exercises, so we're not counting the warm-up sets and things of that nature? It's a complex question. It's not 100% clear exactly what Dorian did or if he even did everything exactly as it was written on paper all the time.
You see his training videos, you don't always see just one set. He would also have this thing like a warm-up set that for him was a warm-up, but for most people would absolutely be a work set.
So it may be more like two or three equivalents of a working set per exercise. Yeah, sort of maybe there's like a total throwaway set, and then there's a modest set, and then there's a two rep in reserve set that, again, that's a real working set, and then there's a set to failure.
Right. Yes.
According to his categorization, the only work set was the one that was absolutely the true muscular failure, sometimes with forced repetitions, which you would also have to integrate because forced reps is when someone helps you lift the rest of the weight, or if you do a drop set, you use less weight right after you went to failure. We shouldn't count that as just one set.
It wouldn't be the most correct way to think about it. And when you compare that to the example of the three-hour chef, so now the person who's willing to put in 30 sets per body part per week, do any of those sets need to be to failure, or are you counting those as, hey, these would be sets of two reps in reserve, one to two reps in reserve? Almost all of the literature that has found out that if you don't systemically fatigue the whole body too much, any given muscle or several muscles you can push into the 30, 40, 50 plus set range per week, almost every single study done to elucidate that understanding was done with muscular failure studies, true failure.
Truer failure than you'll see in the gym because these

people are training in laboratory conditions with master students screaming at them to keep going. Most of us have never trained that hard consistently.
So people can still recover. Now these are undergraduates that are recreationally trained typically, so they can neither do a lot of damage nor are they impeded by age and prior injury and all this other thing.
So I would say that whatever amount of sets you have to do to get a certain amount of, whatever amount of growth you want, you can get there in a few different ways. You can get there with, let's say, 30 sets that are four reps shy of failure.
You can get there with 22 sets that are one or two reps shy of failure. And you can get there with 20 sets that are all the way to absolute muscular failure.
So if you are really training not so super hard for reps in reserve, you'll have to do substantially more sets to see the same hypertrophy. But study after study after study illustrates that when you're getting one or two reps away from failure, it is often statistically undifferentiable on raw growth than going all the way to failure.
However, the fatigue of true failure training, probably mostly because of that nervous system component, is exponentially higher. And so as far as an efficiency and long-term sustainability strategy, training all the way to muscular failure every session as a matter of principle, probably on the margin suboptimal, and you should probably, most of your sessions should be one or two reps in reserve.
If you're doing dumbbell presses, you finish your last rep, and you're like, gone to my head, I could do one or two more, but that's it. Most times, it's probably best to stop at that point, because what you're getting if you go north of that is a 10 to 1 fatigue to stimulus ratio, whereas everything before was like 1 to 1, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, 5 to 1, and all of a sudden it's 10 to 1.
It's a lot of fatigue costs to pay for when in the literature chronically ends up being either tiny, tiny bit better or not better at all. Which says nothing of the risk of injury when you drop that dumbbell on your peck, which I don't know anybody that's done that, but I've been told it really hurts when you fail in a set of dumbbell presses and totally collapse with a dumbbell on your pec that turns black and blue.
Oh, good God. Yeah, I would never know.
all sorts of things. I just like to aim for the genitals at that point.
Might as well have a cool story. But yeah, the training to failure, the vast proportion of people that really propose

the training to failure are somehow special for results. They didn't reason their way into that.
They emoted their way into that. Training to failure is something the 13 to 19 year old you would have really found a lot of spirit energy in, as I like to say.
It's adult male putting on his hat of I'm a mountain goat and I run into shit. That's what I do.
I saw an adorable video of some folks that own a few goats and a few dogs. Their pit bull is like not hiding, but sitting under this like little thing.
And there's like a teenage goat that's looking at him and he jumps up on his hind legs and tries to like hit him in the head and the pitbull backs up and he's like and the goat just tries to do that again he's just trying to get it on like he just wants to hit stuff that's all he wants and so when you're a young male when you are prone to wanting success for yourself you're the type of sort of type a personality that wants to look back on their life and if you had to roll roll the dice and say, the reason you weren't optimally successful is that you work too hard, they'd be like, ah, sweet, whatever. That's kind of cool.
But if they saw the dice roll and say, well, the reason you weren't optimally successful in life is because you didn't work hard enough, they would not live with themselves. Those kinds of folks generally tend to go to muscular failure for just that spirit energy.
It feels right, damn it. And it feels good.
And it's purifying almost at an existential level to be able to have given something your all in the face of challenge, in the face of injury risk, in the face of grotesque pain. And you know those from sport experience, when you're really, really tired, your whole existence is screaming at you to stop.
Ignoring those things and going all the way until you know you've pushed it as far as your body can go, there's something very magical there. For the soul, for results in the gym, there's not much magical there.
You have to get close to it. You just don't have to go all the way.
So let's go back to the person who's listening to us who wants to take the plunge, wants to start doing resistance training. They're clinging to what you said a while ago that, hey, I can get some really good results if I'm in the gym 30 minutes twice a week.
And I know that Mike trains eight hours a week, but I don't need to be Mike. So tell me what a program looks like.
Let's construct the program. Let's start with a young person.
Let's start with a young person who actually has been somewhat active throughout their life, but it's mostly been in sports. They play tennis.
They did cross country in high school. They've just never been a gym rat, but they've listened to this podcast enough.
They've listened to you enough to know like, Hey, there's value in developing strength. And I'd like to have some hypertrophy.
I want to look a little better. Okay.
So I'm coming to you. I'm 40 years old.
Kind of a little intimidated if I'm truthful. Don't know what to do.
I have a whole pack bounce to make you more intimidated. What's our two 30-minute day workout look like? So I'll describe to you what week one could look like.
And then I'll tell you how to scale that afterwards. It's not just the same every single week.
So what you want to do is if you're training twice a week, let's call it Monday and Thursday for simplicity, you do want some symmetry. So you don't want a situation in which you train with weights Monday, Tuesday, and then you take the rest of the week to do other stuff.
If you only train twice a week, you want it to be roughly evenly spread. So Monday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday, that sort of thing.
And because your muscles don't take usually a whole week to recover, but if you push them hard, maybe at most half a week, you can train every major muscle group of your body in every single session that you do. So both Monday and Thursday will have every major muscle group being trained.
Routines that have the muscle group separated are called split routines, chest one day, back the next. Mostly pro-bodybuilders are the only ones that benefit from that sort of thing and there's a lot of nuance about how to execute that sort of thing.
So whole body training is probably best for almost everyone who is trying to get the health benefits, longevity benefits, the aesthetic benefits, and so on and so forth. The next thing you want to do is you want to conserve time, but you want a high degree of effect.
And that's going to impose some recommendations on us that do both of those things. One recommendation is to choose lifts, to choose exercises that involve two components.
One is large muscle masses. So you're not going to be doing a lot of forearm curls or tibialis anterior calf raises where like the muscle you're training is like as much muscle as your pinky finger, and that's about it.
You're going to be training muscles like the quadriceps, the glutes, the hamstrings, the musculature of the back, the chest, the shoulders, the arms, et cetera, and choosing exercises that train those muscles, preferably not just one muscle at a time. So then we're using muscles very efficiently because we're pushing multiple muscles to their limits in one exercise.
This is generally going to be compound movements, multi-joint movements, things like pull-ups, pull-downs, barbell and dumbbell bent over rows that, for the back at least, engage the forearm flexion muscles, the biceps, etc. They engage actually the muscles of the forearm themselves through your grip.
They engage the posterior aspect of your deltoids, the rear delts. They engage almost every muscle in the back all at the same time.
Now you do one set of bicep curls, but I do one set of underhand pull-ups. I got my biceps checked off and I got three other muscles checked off.
You just have one. One of my absolute grotesque pet peeves is to see personal trainers in major cities, training their regular clients, housewife who's 55 and having her do like rear delt cable fly one at a time.
I'm like, oh my God, is that one made of time? And also, is there some kind of physique show, which the judges said she needs bigger rear delts, but nothing else. That's the only reason you should be doing that nine times out of 10.
So compound movements, close grip bench presses, pushups, overhead presses, upright rows, squats, deadlifts, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are the kinds of movements that train multiple muscles at the same time.
Thus, they are insanely time efficient because you do a few exercises and you're like, holy crap, that's all of my upper body. If you do some kind of rowing machine, you do some kind of machine or barbell or dumbbell that's a close grip press, you do some kind of upright row situation, then you've technically trained every single muscle in your upper body to a substantial extent because every single exercise trains three or four muscles at a time.
So those are the kind of movements we're going to be leaning into the most. What about for the lower body? Besides a deadlift and a squat? Various stiff-legged deadlift or good morning.
RDL is the same category of movement. That trains your entire back, specifically your spinal erector musculature, which is insanely important for healthy aging.
I could talk about that ad nauseum. And then it trains your glutes and it trains your hamstrings and it trains your sartorius and parts of your adductors, and it actually trains your calves too.
Holy crap, that's one exercise. You integrate some kind of lunging pattern into that or some kind of squatting pattern, be it a hack squat, leg press, barbell squat, you name it.
And all of a sudden, you've run out of muscles to train in your lower body because everything has been done to a high degree of diligence. Again, compound movements.
Again, I see 45-year-old financial advisors who don't have a lot of time. They have family obligations.
They have work obligations. They have other hobbies.
And they're doing leg extensions in the gym. I'm always like, man, I hope that guy's hurt and has a good reason to be doing those.
Because if he's not squatting or lunging or doing leg presses or something, he's just using up time in the gym, training one thing at a time for no good reason at all. So invariably you've been asked this a thousand times, but when this person's coming into this situation and they don't have high training history, what are the tools you use to teach them how to do these compound movements safely, especially the lower body ones? So squats and deadlifts, admittedly, they're not going to be starting out

with a ton of weight.

That's the biggest tool,

starting out with low weight.

There's no movement the human body can do,

which unloaded and not pushing the muscles

and tendons to their extreme

has any higher risk probability

than any other movement.

So you can start with a deadlift or a squat

that's body weight or less.

You can brace your arms on a Smith machine and unload yourself while you squat. That may be where you have to start.
You take multiple sets like that that are very submaximal. Ideally, you're there with a personal trainer.
If not, you can just go to YouTube and type in the name of your exercise and it'll pop up. We have a huge library for free on YouTube.
Actually, the RP Hipertrophy app, which is one of our apps in our app suite, every exercise you'll ever see in there has a video demonstration one click away. So you look at that.
Ideally, you would have a personal trainer because live communication about how to exercise is irreplaceable. Because on a video, we're assuming that your assessment of what that is is your assessment of what you're doing, which is very difficult.
Oh my God, you walk into the gym and they're like, I'm squatting. You're like, nah, it's not a squat.
I don't know what the hell someone told you or what video you're looking at. That ain't it.
If you have a personal trainer, they can be like, ooh, that's really good, but I want you to move your hips back more. I want you to move down more, so on and so forth.
But basically the first time you're ever with someone in a session, all you do is you take them through those movement patterns, fine tune their technique with lots of encouragement. And you're not seeking perfection.
You're just seeking basic competency. Get your heels on the ground, get you squatting all the way down, get your back nice and straight.
Listen, that's all we want. And you'll do three or four of those what are early warm-up sets, and you'll just kick them out of the gym.
Three or four warm-up sets per exercise. It's a teaching session.
They never even lifted heavy, they never pushed to failure. But because they're so unaccustomed to lifting, they'll get sore and it's enough tension and disruption that they will grow muscle.
The next time they come in, you work them through a different series of movements, let's call it Monday-Thursday movements. The next week they come in and you do the same workout except maybe that last set of every movement after a few technique-oriented sets, ask them to go for slightly more repetitions, maybe not five, but now 10.
Or you put a little bit of weight on the bar, something that gets them like, ooh, okay, I feel it. This is a challenge.
And then over time, slowly every week, you increase the weight a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, until several weeks later, their technique looks real good, which most people can learn really good techniques. It's not that complicated in a few weeks.
And now they're like kind of struggling with their weights. We're finally up to a weight and rep combination that's challenging them physiologically every set, not just neurologically for how to do the technique.
That three or four week sort of entry period is amazing because it takes the probability of injury and just almost completely eliminates it because you're not just going in there and seeing how strong you are on the first day, which believe it or not, a lot of people are inclined to do profoundly stupid as reserved for like high school or junior high kids. Whatever.
Your ninth grade, fuck it, max out. Don't do that when you're an adult.
It's profoundly stupid, especially if you're in your forties and fifties and sixties and like, you don't want a torn pec. You drive a truck for a living.
Your pec is required for that sort of thing. After that easing in period, you're now competent to the movements.
You feel yourself competent as a member of general gym culture. You don't feel lost.
A big part of a problem of getting people to go to gyms and actually stick with it is there's this understanding that people have, which is itself relatable, but inaccurate, that the gym is for people that know things. It's their place.
It's for that jacked guy. It's not for me.
The thing is that jacked guy, to paraphrase another comedian, like he's been in the gym enough. He should take a few days off.
You're big. You did it, buddy.
The people who really need to be in the gym are the ones who aren't in the gym. So the gym is an infinitely welcoming place.
Almost all the jacked people are super nice in real life. And they're not judging you.
They're just staring off into space. They're ultra selfish.
They don't care about you. And if you don't know what you're doing, you can always ask them.
And they almost certainly will give you free advice until you're blue in the face. So after a few weeks of being in the gym with a trainer, you're like, this is my place.
I belong here. And I'm starting to push a little hard.
And then over time, you just increase the load on the bar a little bit. And if you're no longer getting sore or really tired, and sore and tired in such a way that you need until next Thursday to get sore and tired, you start increasing the number of working sets that you're doing.
Because working sets-wise, up until this point, was just one working set, really, if you think about it. In the first week or two, zero working sets.
They're all practice sets. Because you're so untrained, they're work sets for you.
But they're not to anyone else that's watching. A few weeks in, one work set.
A few weeks after, two work sets, and so on and so on and so on until you're doing anywhere between three and six working sets per exercise. There's another twist here for the person that wants to save a lot of time and actually get some cardiovascular benefits as well.
You take exercises that are responsible for training muscles that can be paired with other exercises which train muscles that are totally or mostly unrelated. If I do a seated dumbbell shoulder press, I rack those dumbbells, I can walk over and do some goblet squats.
And essentially there's almost no muscle overlap, or I can do some deadlifts and there's just no muscle overlap whatsoever. And so I could do some seated dumbbell shoulder presses, put it down, nice hard set, good job, two sets left.
And I could sit for the average of one or two minutes and scroll on my phone. But if you're really time conscious and you want extra cardiovascular benefit, what you can do is as soon as you've finished with one group of muscles, you take five or ten seconds, shake it out, breathe it out, hit the next working set for that paired exercise.
While you're doing that exercise, the muscles for the first exercise are actually recovering locally. And so when you're done with exercise, five or 10 seconds later, it's set two for the first exercise.
So you pair these unrelated work sets together, unrelated exercise, such that when you've done four sets of one exercise, let's say

a close grip bench press that trains the pushing muscles of your body, if you've paired that with a row or a lat pulldown, then really you've done eight total working sets and you've just knocked off 80% of your entire upper body in an amount of time that the dumbbell press by itself guy has just finished only his front delts and triceps. So rest times in the gym, outside of getting a drink or just trying not to faint, are probably not your best friend if you're just going for general health, general aesthetics, this kind of stuff, especially beginning.
So you're either working one muscle group or several with one exercise, or you're transitioning between exercises, or you're working the other one, or you're setting up your weights for your next machine that you're going to be doing, which means as soon as you get in and warm up, it's go, go, go, go, back to back to back to back to five or 10 seconds for transition to catch your breath barely. You're not going to be talking to a lot of people at the gym other than how many sets do you have left in that machine,

that kind of stuff. And so that allows us to condense a lot of work.
Most people will need something like 15 to 30 total working sets for their whole body per session. You can condense that into 30 minutes, but you're working almost the entire time.
And it's generally a good idea to do sets of 10 to 30 repetitions because those kinds of loads, you don't need a ton of time to have your best performance. You can get good enough performances with a short time for recovery.
And because it's a lot of reps, not only does it get you very meaningful strength increases, because the absolute load is lower, much lower injury risks. Look, you do one rep maxes all the time, you're going to have it coming one way or another.
You'd never touch any weight that's heavier than a 10 rep max. The probability of injury anyone given set is much, much smaller.
And because it's a higher volume of work, you get a great hypertrophy stimulus and you get great cardiometabolic benefits. If you're breathing insanely heavy the entire time and sweating like a insert favorite analogy here, then you will be kind of one and two-ing that session for a resistance training checkmark and a pretty decent cardiovascular training checkmark, especially if these are compound multi-joint exercises that require you supporting your body in space.
You do a set of 15 barbell squats followed by a set of 15 push-ups. Your cardio is working.

I mean, that's what they torture boxers with.

Their cardio's working. I mean, that's what they torture boxers with.
Their cardio is outlandish, back to back to back to back. It's resistance training, it's cardio, it's both.
You have two sessions like that per week, each one lasting 30 minutes. You have two sessions of zone two, zone three cardio where you're really trying and four sessions total like that per week with good sleep and good body weight, good nutrition, you're well on your way to when you see your healthcare provider every year and he asks you, are you trying to die sooner or later? And you tell them what you do, most will be like, well, that's way more than most of my patients do.
And if you look at the American College of Sports Medicine requirements, various requirements of what constitutes rigorous physical activity, you're getting well into the mix with a sum total, if we think about it, of two to three hours of difficult physical activity of any kind in a week. So when people say, I don't have time for exercise, I get it.
I get it. I don't have children.
I've heard that when you have children, time dilates like black hole type of stuff. But you can probably make time at least for that resistance training session.
Will it be ultra easy? No way. It's going to be really tough.
I don't train like that. I need my break, damn it.
I'm trying to be lazy and scroll on Instagram between sets. But if I wanted to get the maximum results for the minimum amount of time, we're working all the time.
And over time, you start with one or two paired sets like that. You get up to three or four paired sets like that on five to eight exercises per session.
Holy crap, that is a lot of work. And it will train your entire body in one session, and you will require one to three days of rest afterwards.
Guess what? You rest for your days, you come back, you rest for your days, you come back. There's two workouts in a week.
Each one takes about half an hour. And if you ever want the workouts to take less time, work faster and rest less.
And a lot of people want to hear like the hack for how to get really awesome results with very little time spent in the gym, but they don't want to hear how to get the hack actually going because they're like, well, hold on, hold on. What's going to hurt? Like, yeah, it's going to hurt.
It's going to be miserable. Unless you accept the fact that, you know, all the benefits of endorphins and everything like that.
It's kind of like, how do you become a millionaire? You're very, very good at something. You get very, very good people skills and you grind for years at starting your empire.
Like, ah, man, I wanted to win a lottery ticket or something. I didn't want all this.
Everyone knows that's how you become a billionaire. I don't want that.
So yeah, you can thumbnail and title this how you like, but it's cool to say, yeah, listen, one hour a week and you can have amazing benefits of health, quality of life. But I'm here to tell you real talk because at RP, that company that I represent, we just have a policy of never lying to people ever because we're doing this to honestly help people.
And business-wise, if you start lying to people, it's hard to unweave the rainbow after that. It's going to be tough.
But also, there is now more and more research accumulating that doing difficult things physically is good for your mental health. There's a lot of publicity lately to cold plunges, puberman, and all that stuff.
And a cold pl, because it's so annoying, makes you more grateful for the not pain you're engaging in the rest of the day and it's really good for you. I have one better.
You do a 30-minute session of back-to-back-to-back compound free motion or dumbbell or barbell or even machine work and sweat your balls off and huff and puff, the rest of the day seems like a breeze, and the endorphin kick is massive. It's like surviving a traumatic episode.
So the cold plunge has some benefits, not entirely so that they're enormous, or extent whatsoever in many cases, but this kind of resistance exercise has benefits that if we just took one by one time to talk about on this podcast, we could talk about nothing else and do four podcasts in a row. That kind of massive benefit.
There's a lot there I want to go back and touch on. Let's start with the idea of how does a person find a good trainer? Because it's hard enough to find a good doctor and that's a highly, highly regulated industry.
You either are an MD or you're not, but still there are lots of different flavors of doctors. And there are some who really think a lot about prevention and really care about how you exercise and how you eat.
And there are others who I think do, but frankly, don't have the time to really noodle that. As difficult as it might be to find a great doctor, it's probably even more difficult to figure out a trainer who's really good.
So what are the questions that a person can be asking when they go into their gym or are looking online for a trainer to say like, is this the person who is going to help me learn to do a squat and a deadlift safely? Is this a person who can integrate whatever pre-existing injuries I have and really help me? Because again, I've worked with people who have watched people coach and I'm like, wow, that person really knows what they're doing. They have picked up the absolute subtle art of how to cue somebody to lift.
They can focus on the non-obvious. And there's other people who literally have no clue.
They look like they just watched the YouTube video and they're sort of parroting the YouTube video to you, but they have no real intuition about it. It's very tough, very tough, because if you aren't an expert or a very knowledgeable person yourself, it's very difficult to figure out who is knowledgeable and an expert, who's doing a good job.
If you're finding a good doctor, I don't know what that means. I have no idea how to measure a good doctor versus not a good doctor.
Most doctors are equally confident in telling you what they think is going on and very differentially accurate. So it's a tough question.
I would say that if you have an opportunity to chat with them and ask them a few questions, you could find out some things that'll be helpful. These are all marginal pieces of advice.
There's no absolute. I'd say the thing that comes close to the absolute of having a high guarantee that they're good at what they do is if they're certified in the Menno Henselman's PT course.
Menno is an expert in our field. He knows his stuff and his trainers that he certifies have a high probability of being able to deliver to you what it is that you want out of them.
There are other fine certifications out in the world, but a lot of certifications, you're just reasonably intelligent and you studied for an hour and voila, you're certified. So the certification doesn't go very far.
It helps if your trainer has an undergraduate in kinesiology or some related field that is not by itself ensuring you that they're going to be good, but it sloughs off a lot of backend, if you know what I mean. Like you're going to get rid of a lot of not great trainers.
You can almost entirely ignore what they look like because the preponderance of the reason people look like they do is genetics. The other is diet.
And the other is just how long have they been doing stupid or smart things to their body, but grinding away. So if you look at a trainer that just looks kind of like a normal person, maybe a little muscular, a little bit leaner, you'll get another trainer in the same gym that's just like got six pack on his face, just ripped.
Don't be like, well, that guy seems to know what he's doing. He's ripped.
He can't give you his genetics and almost the biggest contribution to why he's ripped is genetics. And so people get hung up on this all the time.
They work with preposterously underqualified trainers who just

look the part. There's not like a transitive property by which you can just like give someone

your results. Yeah, I wish, right? You just touch their skin and you're like, I feel it.

You wake up the next day super jacked. It was that easy.
You can ask them how they integrate

science into their practice. Not a guarantee because you can be evidence-based and still

have all sorts of poor practices. If they go mostly on personal experience and feel, you can be assured that they're probably not the greatest trainer for you.
If they have a lot of personal experience that they use in their training, but also they're very adept at understanding the scientific literature and especially just the broad strokes basics, you're probably in better hands than not. Someone that can explain to you the reasons for why you're doing certain things, and you just voice note record them and ask them, is it okay if I record your reason? I just kind of want to think about it at home later.
Wink. And then you just copy that and feed it into CLAWD35 or GPT-40 and be like, give me a steel man and a red team for this.
It'll do both. Based on the sort of texture of its responses, there's all these LLMs are designed to be insanely agreeable and very kind.
But when you're wrong, wrong, they'll be like, that's a good point. However, eight point list.
You're like, that guy's an idiot. This is all wrong.
So luckily GPT-40, if it was embodied in a robot currently, would probably make a great trainer. And so how your trainer and various claims of their scores against GPT is probably one of the better ways to do it.
And also say this, there's a big factor of how you get along with the trainer because you're going to want to find the training at least as not unpleasant as possible and ideally as pleasant as possible. If the trainer is someone that you just kind of vibe with, they can dig into you and really get you going, but they're also super fun to talk to outside of when you're not dying and during training.
If they can get you to become responsible for showing up on time in a sense of, you know, the trainer and I are on the same team. He's on my team.
And when he says, are you going to make it Monday? I just don't want to let him down because he's my buddy. And we're in this process together.
I don't want to give up on myself. If you have a trainer where you connect with like that, you got yourself a great trainer.
Even if they're not super evidence-based, they just get you in and get you moving. That's like half the battle right there.
So let's say those things are things to consider. And the last thing I'll say is have a trainer for a few weeks, few months, and maybe learn up about what's going on and then see like, oh, does my trainer know things or not?

I mean, I had a person I was doing just nutrition for while my colleague Nick Shaw was doing

training and not for her. I was in my PhD program in Tennessee.
I was training her or nutrition

coaching via distance over the internet. And Nick was training other clients in New York and she was in New York at the time.
And she told the trainer kind of the diet that I had written her. And he was like, oh, that's stupid.
That's wrong. And she was like, why? And the answer he gave her was so bereft of a systematic approach to knowledge that she texted me.
She's like, do you have any trainers you can recommend to me? I think my guy's an idiot. And sure enough, gave her over to a colleague of ours and Nick didn't have any room.
And she's like, oh my God, this guy is beating my ass in the best way possible. I love him.
Yeah. Some of your trainers will suck and you might need a few weeks, a few months to realize, man, everything I've heard about how this whole process works, my trainer doesn't even agree with me.
Yeah. You might have to switch it up.
You might not have the perfect car. The first car you buy might just be a thing that has a steering wheel and wheels and goes places.
And after you've kind of appreciated what it is you don't like about your car, your next car can be a bit more of an educated purchase. So what about the person who's been lifting weights for a long time? They're in there, they're doing this stuff, but they're not happy with their progress.
They're in the gym, let's just say they're in the gym three, four times a week, an hour at a time. How hard are they working? Are they really trying or are we saying that maybe they're trying, maybe they're not? It's a very different answer if they're trying or if they're not.
Let's say they are. They're actually trying quite hard.
And you actually look at them and you think, you know, gosh, they might actually be slightly overtraining. And by overtraining, let's say they're training three days a week and they're doing a whole body three days a week and they're in there 90 minutes at a time.
They're going to one to two rep and reserve on every set and they're hitting 20 to 30 sets per body part per workout. To be clear, they're doing okay, but they're just saying, you know what? I want to be really jacked.
Okay. Yeah.
What do I need to do? Yeah. You would need to go down a checklist, a troubleshooting checklist.
And we actually do have on the RP Strength YouTube channel, we have multiple videos of how to troubleshoot your muscle growth, how to troubleshoot your diet, how to troubleshoot your recovery. So if you throw those on in the car during your drive to work, you're going to learn a lot about how to troubleshoot.
You can consider yourself with variables that occur in the gym. You can consider yourself with variables that occur outside of the gym.
Both are very important. In the gym variables, starting from the beginning would be exercise selection.
Sometimes people say, my arms aren't as big as I want them to be. And I look at their plan and it has no isolation work for their arms whatsoever.
And I tell them this is not a surprise. And they say something like, well, I thought underhand pull-ups and close grip bench was good enough to get big arms.
And I would say, yes, it is. Both of those exercises are great to get big arms, but you want bigger arms, which means like every bodybuilder ever, you're going to have to start working a few sets of curls in and a few sets of tricep extensions of some sort regularly and hard.
So a lot of times people don't have the specific exercise selection for what it is they want. They're just doing the kind of general training you and I just described, but they're sometimes not even honest to themselves at a deep introspective level of what it is they want.
Like a lot of those people that want better results, you look at them and you're like, you look great. And like, yeah, but I want to look better.
And you go, how? I just want fucking gigantic arms. You go, oh, okay.
Well, like your workout is absolutely not designed to do that. It's designed to get your arms that look big to someone who like sees you lifting your suitcase into an airplane.
But other than that, you don't have big arms. And then you go, okay, exercise selection.
Another variable to consider is technique. Some people have just not so great technique.
A good technique involves putting the muscle into high force positions at a very deep stretch, long muscle lengths and high forces. So if you're doing pec flies, for example, but you're only going all the way down to like here, you need to open up like crazy and take a few seconds down there in the deep stretch.
That's really going to help you out. And technique is so exercise specific and so individual that you really should get a qualified trainer or someone you trust or videos on your own analysis to go like, okay, am I really doing this right? Because you think, oh, I'm hack squatting.
And then you see an RP strength video about hack squats. And you're like, I have never hack squatted a day in my life.
You try it our way and you're like, oh my God, my legs. For the first time in months or years, they get sore, they get tired.
And you're like, oh wow. A couple of weeks later, your quads are visibly bigger.
Okay. Now finally I fixed my technique.
Another question you have to ask is volume wise. I mean, I suppose you already said they're doing one or two reps in reserve.
So we're not going to question that. We'll say they're training hard, which is good.
That's another thing to ask if someone is getting great results. Yeah volume intensity would be on the charts.
Yeah, 100%. Am I really pushing hard? How hard? If I think I'm pushing hard enough, I should push a little harder and see what happens.
So for intensity, you would say, if they're at least hitting two reps in reserve, you're okay with it. Golden.
No need to improve above that. But if you went in there and you observed them at the end of their set, if you said, let me see you do a few more, they were constantly getting four more reps.
So there are four reps in reserve. You would say the literature says you're not hitting in a high enough training stimulus.
This is a very important one. Because I think I talked about this once on Instagram.
And if I didn't, I meant to, and I just forgot, which is equally likely. In fact, more likely.
But the point I wanted to make was, at least for me,

and it might be that I'm just not good enough, you don't know what two reps in reserve means

until you go to failure. You have to fail many times to actually know how bad two reps in reserve

is and one rep in reserve. And they're not the same every workout.
That's the other thing.

You could have the same weight on their different days and you fail at a different number of reps

I'm sorry. one rep in reserve.
And they're not the same every workout. That's the other thing.
You could have the same weight on their different days and you fail at a different number of reps, but there's like a signal, there's a twitch, there's a discomfort that you have to experience it, but you can't experience it until you blow past it. Yeah, that's largely true.
So every now and again, you have to test the waters. There's actually a really good system of doing that.
And it's incorporated into our hypertrophy app. The app will ask you to put in your weights, roughly 10 to 20 rep maxes.
And you'll do as many reps as you think is three reps or four reps to failure, depending on what it's wanting you to do. And you'll write your repetitions in for every single set.
I got 16 reps at 90 pounds on this exercise. The next week, the app auto-programs a progression for you.
So it'll either ask you to do 17 reps at 90 pounds, something like that, or it'll ask you to do 95 pounds again, or 95 pounds anew for the 16 reps you did last time. It does that every single session.
It pushes you a little bit ahead. Your only job is to do what is written.
If you consistently do what is written and at the end of your cycle, before you have one week of easy training called a deload and you start a new cycle, at the end of your cycle, you never actually failed at a weight. Like you tried to get 17, but you got 16.
The 17 wouldn't move when you put the bar down. You're like, oh crap, hopefully nobody saw that.
That never happens to you. You've never trained close to failure, but that's okay.
The next time you program in your weights and you do three reps in reserve for that first week, go a little harder than you think you should be or you typically did. And then at some point during the middle or end of that cycle, you will actually hit failure trying to get to those objective targets.
Because here's a big problem with trying to estimate failure. If you go based on how hard something feels, it's kind of different.
Like you said, you had a tough day at work versus easy day at work. You ate well versus you didn't, slept well versus you didn't.
And it's all perceptual, which is nuts. It's kind of like not having a mirror, but asking someone to stand in front of you and help you put on makeup.
Thanks for your input, but I need a frigging mirror because I don't know if you're just messing with me. I look like a clown.
I put lipstick over here instead of on my lips. Who knows? But if you have objective criteria of this is what I did last week and I just want to go a little bit beyond, it is inevitable that one of two things happen over the long term.
One, you will reach muscular failure and you will be unable to do a repetition. Or the other is you'll get infinitely strong forever and now you're Superman.
One of those is more realistic than the other. So when people say, I don't know what's close to failure or not, my answer is very easy.
Download the RPI, no sorry, wrong, sales pitch, oops. Put some numbers on the board and just buy a little, two and a half or five pounds or one rep each week, beat those numbers week upon week.
Commit yourself. I must hit 18 reps.
That's the goal. If you can't do it, success.
You went to failure. Now you know where the limit is.
Now you're building an intuition. But if you did get those numbers, next week you go higher and you go higher and you go higher versus if just like, oh, I think I went hard.
I don't know what that means. You could be very wrong and oftentimes are.
So is it safe to say that if a person is already, and by the way, we talked about what's sufficient for exercise selection, technique intensity. We didn't specify volume.
What would be a red flag for you in that individual? If their volume sets per body part was below X, where would you say, well, it should be expected? Per week. I mean, if you're beginning a few sets, it's totally fine.
Yes, yes, yes. But this is for this kind of intermediate person.
Yeah. Below five or 10 sets per week is not a sufficient effort to expect your best results.
Between 10 and 20 sets per week is fine. But for many people, you have to use a second qualifier, which is what's actually happening to you.
If you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in your muscles for a day or two after training, if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session, and you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week. Per muscle, not per body part.
In other words, bicep would need to be 20 sets per week. Correct.
Wow. Yeah.
I think we have a pretty good explanation for why somebody at this table has small biceps. I'm not saying who.
How dare you? I take that offensively, by the way. So then if all of the signs show that you're not actually excessively fatigued, your volume is either okay or less than it could be.
If you're not getting great results visually, but you're always running into strength plateaus, if you're always tired and sore, and if you're north of 20 sets per muscle per week, on average hard sets, then probably doing less is good because you have almost every indicator of doing too much. And so you'll be able to intuit rather quickly if it's too little or too much.
Those are most of the variables involved in the gym part, except for one. And that is, when is the last time you took a break? Because there is a concept called accumulated fatigue or cumulative fatigue.
Your muscles and the rest of your body recover very well between sessions, but not a hundred maybe 90 or 95. And if you're 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% recovery within like six or eight weeks.
And then how could you possibly be making gains? So every, for the average person cranking away, probably the person listening to this podcast, one week out of every eight, one week every two months, don't go to the gym. Stay active, maybe do a bodyweight squat or a pushup or two in your hotel room or something.
Ideally, try going on vacation. If not, try to not exercise and be a little easier at work, be a little easier on family stuff, have some fun, cheap foods, eat a little more than usual, be a little less active so that your body can recover in a way that it can never recover between sessions, but it gets a whole week to do this.
And once a year, at least, take two whole weeks like that. We call that active rest.
So that first thing, one week off is called a deload. And the second thing off where you take two weeks in a row of basically just not even coming to the gym.
And if you do, you just do the lightest, easiest stuff ever. It takes 10 minutes.
That reduces your systemic cumulative fatigue so much that it brings it back down to zero or almost zero. Some people will say, look, 16 weeks, I've been cranking.
First 12 weeks, great results. Last four weeks, I don't know if I'm moving the needle.
Maybe you're just really tired. Pushing the pedal down harder is usually not the best way to do things.
It might be time for a break. People come back and your muscles resensitize to the stimulus if you take time off.
So when you come back, go back to two or three sets of everything, not four or five sets of everything. You're going to get really sore and really pumped from just a few sets, and you're going to be growing again.
You do that for another six to eight weeks, you get tired again, your strength starts to plateau, take another week of easy training or no training at all, and that's how the cycle repeats itself. It's probably most of the stuff I would say about how to analyze your training inside the gym to get closer to your optimum.
There's lots to say about external gym variables, but one thing I'll say really quick is this. Before I ever consult people nowadays about how to pursue incrementally more optimal outcomes for their muscle, people who want to gain muscle but are frustrated they aren't jacked enough, nowadays I always take time to find a reference frame of what have your gains been like, how much work have you been putting in, how long have you been training, and to see if how do genetics play a role in this and how does age play a role in this.
I've consulted with people before who were in their 60s weighing something like 150 pounds, fairly lean. They aspire to be in the low to mid 200s fairly lean.
I told them that outside of an anabolic steroid cycle that's probably got an even chance of killing you as it does of getting you jacked, you're not going to get that jacked. And your progress rate is just going to be much slower than the 20-year-olds at your gym.
But sometimes we forget that age has such a profound effect on our results. And we look around and as all young people are like, well, I want to look like that.
Well, guess what? 1982 was a long time ago. So unless you have a time machine or age reversal, which I think age reversal technology- And do you think you attribute this to the hypertrophy of type two fibers, which are necessary for the power generation that's necessary for producing the gains we're talking about? Yeah, that's definitely a component of it.
Another component is overall systemic ability to recover. You have so much DNA methylation and all this other kind of damage and accretion of the wear and tear of age that your organelles and your cells don't work as well as they used to.
Your organs don't work as well as they used to. A lot of times you're taking for granted the fact that now in your mid-60s, you run a top 500 corporation and you have more stress than most people could handle in a day.
You have that in an hour. But back when you were making the gains of your life when you were 18, your job was to show up to school, go to the gym, eat at the cafeteria, and smoke weed.
And that's all you did every day. Of course, you have the gains of your life.
People discount that. They also look to athletes and they go, oh my God, like that bikini competitor.
She looks amazing. I want that body.
Well, check this out, Linda. You're 56.
You have three children. One of them is in college, two are not.
You are a CTO for a major company, and you sleep five hours a night. That bikini competitor trains a few clients.
She posts on OnlyFans, and she does nothing else other than train, recover, and watch Netflix and sleep nine hours a night of an uninterrupted sleep. It's two completely different worlds.
She's also 27, by the way. Strange times, I know.
But especially with social media, there is nothing that surprises me anymore about how unmoored some people can be from realistic expectations. The other thing is genetics.
The most important factor, other than time spent in the gym, about how jacked and lean you're going to get is genetics. And it is a hugely, hugely important factor.
You have to understand that your goals have to be referenced to what your genetic likelihood of achieving them are. The only way you'll find that out is if you work at it for a while and see what happens.
But some people work at resistance training for three years. They'll accrue five pounds of muscle, burn three pounds of fat, and they'll be like, this next year, I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle.
And you go, whoa, that's not how hyperbolic curves and asymptotic curves work. You got it backwards.
If in three years you gain 10 pounds of muscle, in the next three years, maybe you can gain five. That's realistic.
Does not work in reverse. So it's really, really important to contextualize multiple qualities.
One is how much recovery and rest and relaxation time do you get compared to work and being underslept? Another is genetics, and the other is age. And so if people say, I want to get more jacked, the reason I'm ranting about this, Peter, is because I've had many clients who were willing to put in whatever work it was going to be necessary to put in, but they were older.
They did not have particularly great genetics and they had already gotten most of the muscle gain that they were going to get, not all, but most. And they requested a formulation from me of their exercise plan that would get them categorically better gains.
And outside of pharmaceutical enhancement, I had to tell them in some way or another, that was impossible. I ended up telling them that after many years of struggling myself to try to optimize for them and get them those gains, because I'm like, look, I'm a science guy.
I know things I think. I've been fairly successful in my own body.
Why can't I get these people to gain muscle? And that trifecta of age, genetics, and how much of a professional bodybuilder or fitness person do you want to be for the next several months? They are the biggest factors for results. And people seem to think that you can just hack your way to the best plan.
And if you just do the right things, you'll get amazing results. It has to be in context, unless you like setting yourself up for really unfortunate experiences where you get quite upset that you couldn't do the thing.
People will arbitrarily assign themselves an amount of muscle they want. It does not work like that.
Put in the diligence, put in the time, see how it goes. Things are going well, you can crank it up a little bit and get a little bit better gains.

It's going to take time.

If things are not going so well, you have to optimize to make them go a little better.

But there's, outside of the basics, nothing you're going to be able to do that is going to be a category leap of results, short of what I estimate in the early 2030s will be

the great pharmaceutical renaissance, and then you can just turn myostatin off and get

as jacked as you want. Until we get that, realism can be a painful pill to swallow.
Well, it'll be interesting to see if even if we can turn myostatin off as adults, if it will have the same impact that it has in the cartoons, right? When we look at the animals that have myostatin knockouts, which are just some of the most enjoyable things to look at. Truthfully, it's like, you know, our favorite things in med school, we're looking at the myostatin knockout chickens and cows, but it's not clear if you took a mature adult and inhibited myostatin, if you would get the same benefits.
But let's go back to out of the gym. One more thing we didn't discuss.
I just kind of want to hear your thoughts on when something out of the gym is playing a role in your unjackedness.

Is nutrition often a factor or is that generally not? In other words, is it so rare that someone

is not getting enough protein or not getting enough calories that that's the problem? Is

that just not something you see much? It's a thing.

Okay. I would assume it's more a thing with women than with men and maybe more with older women than men and maybe even older men when you just see more anabolic resistance.
All of those are true. It's not difficult to align your nutrition well.
Eat mostly healthy foods. Some junk here and there is totally fine.
Getting in enough protein, if you want to be real serious about optimizing your muscle gains, something like a gram per pound of protein per day. So if you weigh 150 pounds, 150 grams of relatively high quality protein,

if it's difficult for you to meet those goals, Amazon sells your bars already, don't they?

I don't think they're on Amazon yet. If not, they are soon.
Yeah.

So get you a couple boxes of David bars and put them between meals. That takes care of protein.

The other thing is muscle size is philosophically concordant with being bigger. I know that sounds crazy, but muscle's made of stuff.
So when someone wants to be 165 pounds jacked at 150 pounds, it's curious how they think that's ever going to happen. Some people just don't eat enough.
And what I would say is the biggest problem I've seen with what I assume is your target demographic for this podcast is intermittency, lack of consistency. I've had so many clients in the professional realm, older folks, folks that are practicing doctors, lawyers, so on and so forth.
Tell me, hey, listen, last couple of days, every three or four hours, I've been getting in high protein meals. I've been getting good sleep.
Dope. See them a week later, you go, hey, how was last weekend? They're like, the parts I remember were fun, I think.
Then I was throwing up a lot in the toilet. You realize that they're quote unquote good.
It's not beneficial to moralize these things, but they're on track for a few days here and there, and then they fall completely off the wagon for days at a time. That is a surefire way to guarantee that you don't get very good gains is if you lack consistency.
So if you want to get as jacked as possible within the realm of several months' time, seek to eat enough food to get the scale to go up about half a pound per week. So if you're training hard for 12 weeks, you should gain maybe six pounds or so, consistent six pounds.
And if you're eating a gram per pound per day of protein, spread into roughly three to four evenly spaced meals, roughly, very roughly, a lot of wiggle room there. That really is all you need to know about nutrition for how to get jacked that covers probably 90% of the variance.
So I'll tell you this, if you described to me a scenario where you were training for 12 weeks, you gained seven pounds, almost every day you had a gram per pound per protein, almost every day it was three or four meals, and you're like, look, I know it's my nutrition, that's the problem. I'd be like, it's probably not.
It's probably something else. That great thing about what we talked about earlier with Jordan Yates and how he could do so few sets and get so many results is that 80-20 type of rule applies to almost everything else in the human body, including nutrition.
So if you're getting enough protein regularly and you're getting enough calories to gain body weight, if you don't get really the muscle gains that you were expecting, there aren't a lot of knobs and levers for us to pull that are going to get these enormous results. That's kind of the situation for nutrition, but consistency is I cannot say enough things about.
Because you ask people, hey, how's your diet? Especially if you're a personal trainer or diet coach, there's this kind of halo effect situation where they want to be seen as a good person and diligent and worthy of your time. So, well, yeah, you know, like breakfast, I'll have egg whites, and for lunch, I'll have a chicken sandwich, for dinner, it's usually a piece of fish.
And then I have a protein shake and go to sleep. Shut up, Bob.
That's one day a week, you lying asshole. And he's like, oh, damn it.
You got me. Okay.
That was Tuesday, but Wednesday, I don't think I ate anything until we closed that one business deal. And I got really drunk with their CMO.
It was a great time. I think we had chicken fingers, but honestly, I can't remember.
Inconsistency, especially when you're older, especially when you have lots of stress from your professional endeavors. Inconsistency is something that professional bodybuilders cannot afford.
You for sure cannot afford it. Now, if you do everything right five or six days a week and one day's kind of meh, you'll do great.
But if the good days are outnumbered by the, I sure hope my trainer doesn't find out about these days, you're not doing due diligence. So that's a big, big part of the equation.
And that kind of segue, if you'd like, into a conversation of sleep and stress management, all these other things that can also be the difference between lots of gains or no gains at all. I'd like to come back to it, but we've now twice broached the topic of anabolics as another tool because a couple of times you've made the point, which is, look, this is going to be about the limit.
Your genes are going to start to become your limit. So I guess my question is, you've spoken very openly about anabolic steroids.
I've had several podcasts where I've covered this in detail, but let's kind of tell people what we're talking about for reasons that are maybe a little bit elusive. There's some confusion about is testosterone an anabolic steroid? And of course the answer is absolutely yes, it is.
Wait a minute. So let's talk about anabolic steroid use in the context of non-medical use.
So let's take testosterone replacement therapy where testosterone in a hypogonadal man is restored to typically the upper limit of a normal physiologic range. It's nice that they do the upper limit, right? Give everyone good genetics.
And then we'll just sort of take that off the table for a moment, park it in the context of what is anabolic androgenic steroid use look like in the physique bodybuilding community. Let's talk about the different drugs.
Let's talk about your experience with it. Let's talk about how much it can unleash.
And let's frankly talk about what the pros and cons are, because I personally have no experience with this. That's not our patient population.
We don't have patients that are coming in saying, my goal is to be jacked. I want some D-ball.
So there's this not something we just have any understanding of. So anabolic androgenic steroids are all derivatives of the testosterone molecule manipulated in various ways to accentuate some characteristics and de-emphasize other characteristics.
They're typically taken by athletes in the competitive sphere, bodybuilders, physique athletes, and gym people who want a super physiological level of muscle mass and sometimes super physiologically low levels of body fat concomitant with that. And so they'll take anywhere between high-end testosterone replacement therapy dose to 10 or 20 times that amount per week.
Let me just pause there for a moment and just give some people some doses because we've talked about TRT before in the podcast. So we typically dose patients twice a week to try to get a smoother level as opposed to once a week.
If the ideal dose for a given individual to get them in the right spot is 100 milligrams of testosterone cipionate weekly, we would always prefer that the patient take 50 milligrams intramuscularly twice a week or sub-Q. I will tell you, Mike, I don't think we have ever given a patient more than 70 milligrams twice a week or 140 milligrams a week.
Probably median dose for physiologic replacement is 40 milligrams twice a week or 80 milligrams a week. So are you saying that there are people out there that would routinely take 800 to 1600 milligrams of testosterone in a week? Oh yeah.
Sometimes that's not all testosterone. It's other steroids in combination.
Usually people take at least that replacement level of testosterone often more because testosterone does some really good things for health and general function and tends to aromatize into estrogen quite readily, which is good because estrogen is cardioprotective, neuroprotective, increases your strength, helps your mood, tons. Sex drive, it actually increases your anabolism in the presence of androgenic steroids and testosterone.
So estrogen by itself, not very anabolic.

Estrogen in the presence of testosterone is more anabolic than if you had all the testosterone

in the world, but were unable to aromatize to estrogen.

And baseline level of testosterone is often taken at somewhere between 250 milligrams

a week and all the way up to 1,000 milligrams a week, depending on how you're handling

the side effects of that

excess estrogen production at the higher levels. And that's usually taken as cipionate?

Enanthate, cipionate. Some people prefer propionate if they inject every day.

Enanthate and cipionate are by far the most commonly used, seemingly. Oftentimes,

people inject differentially, but once daily injections seem to provide the smoothest curve,

if you put in half a week's worth of super physiological testosterone at one time, you're moved for the next several hours. I was curious.
Yeah. Help me understand what that even feels like.
So let's just say you're taking 700 milligrams a week, 100 milligrams a day. So 7x physiologic.
Do you feel something different? Most people feel something, but it's probably a normally distributed population of experiences where some people just can't tell. Some people feel something for sure that they can describe, and some people have panic attacks and will never use again, or they are driven to extreme violent thoughts and extreme sexual thoughts and actions, and those folks are quite rare, but they do happen.
So there's a large distribution about which people can have experiences, but I'd say the median experience is the easiest way to understand the average effect of a high degree of anabolic steroids and for simplicity, testosterone. The psychology is to imagine that what is the average psychological proclivity of a female? What is the average psychological proclivity of a male? Different in many regards.
And then you move the needle over one notch into a magical category called enhanced male. And you just typically exhibit more male-like patterns of thought and behavior than even males do.

But males compared to females is the best way to figure that one out because if you're

like, just know what a male pattern of behavior is like because you're a male, you're like,

what the hell is it like to be more like me?

It's like everything about me?

Well, it's not everything.

We actually just had a recent video on the RP Strength channel.

I think it's called Roid Rage is Real.

We talk about like that steroids don't accentuate every quality you have, just the more masculine

So, let become quieter. Men typically are not as expressive as women.
You come to show fewer facial expressions of emotion. You don't process other people's emotions as well.
You can't fine tune what they feel as much. And you don't care as much.
Less empathy. Way less empathy, all the way to similar levels of empathy, but on average, definitely less.
And you become more likely to be irritable. You become more likely to have anger and aggressive sorts of thoughts.
You become more attuned to the dominance hierarchy in general, and you become someone who thinks more about where you stack up in the dominance hierarchy in a way that you take affronts and slights more poorly than otherwise. So if someone on social media says you're a bad person, if you're not a lot of testosterone, you're like, I'm just having a bad day.
That's okay. We all have a bad day where we need to rage out on someone.
If you're on a lot of testosterone, you're more likely to be like, I wonder if he'd say that to my face. I wonder if he would be real quiet around me because he would know that I'm not someone to be messed with.
Weird, weird thoughts like that. Women almost never have thoughts like that.
Men have regular thoughts like that in the right context. People on steroids have more thoughts like that in almost every context than on average they would like to have.
Another one is you become linguistically less expressive and your fluidity of communication falls. So a lot of times when someone is using high levels of anabolic steroids in a relationship and that person happens to be male, the degree of communicative throughput falls substantially.
It's just generally not good for most relationships. Another one is sex drive.
It's difficult for women to appreciate what the male sex drive is like on a quantitative and qualitative level. Both of those tend to magnify, especially if you're not bringing your estrogen down.
You bring estrogen low enough, you don't even remember what the hell sex is for or why people are even in that sort of thing. But if you have a lot of androgens, a lot of estrogen, the hunger, the thirst becomes very annoying.
Now at that level of testosterone, are you taking an aromatase inhibitor or are you literally letting the estradiol get, I can't imagine how high the estradiol level becomes at that. As high as you want.
So typically estradiol would be over a hundred at that point. That's left alone? It depends.
It depends on a few things. One is different people respond differently, both physique and psychology, to high levels of estrogen.
High levels of estrogen for some people are like swimming in a pool of magical clouds and they love it. And their physique looks great.
They get nice and watery. Their joints feel amazing.
Their recovery is awesome. Their sleep is awesome.
Sex drive is awesome. It makes great.
For some other people, they get a lot of estrogen and it actually prevents them from getting good sleep at higher levels. They're water buffalo bloated and they can't even see their abs anymore, even though they're 8% body fat.
And they get mood swings, all this crazy stuff. And so it really is very individually dependent.
It's actually quite amazing. And this is not entirely unlike women.
If they're undergoing hormone replacement therapy in perimenopause, it's not a one size fits all. They can have tremendous variability in their response to estrogen and of course, progesterone.
Yes. Huge, huge, huge.
The other thing is what we're learning in evidence-based approach to anabolic steroid utilization and performance enhancing drug utilization is called the safer use model. Probably the biggest promulgator of it is a gentleman named Joe Jeffrey in the United Kingdom, super, super expert, exceptional bodybuilding coach, great bodybuilder's own right.
He just reads literature all day long. And folks like him tend to espouse that probably the best way to manage estrogen is to use some combination of exogenous drugs that are androgens themselves to get the estrogen level you have the best notable metrics at, how you feel, how you look, how your blood work is, health, et cetera.
So here's an example. You take 1,000 milligrams of testosterone.
I'm still wrapping my head around this. It actually goes into your thigh in a needle.
You don't have to wrap your head around. So it's intense.
It's a lot. You take a thousand milligrams of testosterone and that comes with a concomitant aromatization.
So you have a lot of estrogen. Some people, they feel totally great.
For some people, it's too much. For those that it's too much estrogen, they might be able to take 500 milligrams of testosterone and then 500 milligrams of primobolin.
Primobolin is a synthetic anabolic androgenic steroid developed in, I think, the 60s and 70s. And it's designed not really to convert into estrogen hardly at all.
Other steroids like it are masteron. They not only don't convert into estrogen, but they actually antagonize estrogen conversion for the testosterone you're shooting in to some extent.
And so if someone's like way too much estrogen for them, they can do a 50-50 split of testosterone and primobolin so that now they get all the good estrogen from testosterone, but not too much of it. But they get most of that anabolic drive from the rest of the primobolin, but without any more

estrogen addition. It could be 250 testosterone and 750 milligrams of primo.
It can be 750 test.

It can be 250 primo and anything between. And you kind of experiment that in a lot of

bodybuilding coaches. What

they're really good at is starting you on a certain cycle that they have the wisdom to know works for most people, and then leveling up one drug, leveling down another to get, among other things, kind of that testosterone, that androgen to estrogen ratio to be something that you have your best performance at, best health, so on and so forth. But the sex drive component, especially if you have a lot of estrogen going on, qualitatively it can change, quantitatively it can change.
Now, huge variation. Me personally, I never got enormous sex drive upregulation.
I did get some, but nothing crazy. I've been up to as much as just north of 2,000 milligrams per week.
Currently, I'm only 250 milligrams per week, but my sex drive is more or less the same. Which to me makes me wonder, is there any difference in androgen receptor expression that you're able to appreciate between 250 and 2000? Are you so saturated in your androgen receptors already that do we actually know

if there's a benefit to all the additional testosterone that you could have been on

at almost 10x your current dose, 8x? You won't know until you try.

Did you appreciate a difference in positive effects? I don't doubt that there could be

a difference in negative effects, but if the positive effects are accrued through testosterone binding to the androgen receptor, that complex leading to more nuclear transcription, wouldn't what you said suggest that you might have already hit maximum benefit at 250? There are some reasons to believe that your androgen receptor density escalates up when exposed to more androgens and not down in some cases. And so that means the more gear you take, the more benefit you have rather linearly.
My experience, the experience of most people you talk to, it's again, slow newsreel, same asymptotic curvilinear relationship. For me personally, and this is something I didn't discover until quite recently, I would say, unfortunately so.
I get probably almost the same gains at 1,000 milligrams that I do at 2,000. Anything north for me of 1,500 just drives me insane, mentally insane, and seems to not really affect my physique hardly at all.
How much water retention do you get at these doses? Considerable. Although if you manage your estrogen well, it's not as much as you would think.
Managing estrogen with aromatase inhibitors?

Oh, yes, that's right. Sorry, I had a point there back then.
Aromatase inhibitors in many cases

are incredibly toxic drugs. And you generally want to avoid taking them if you can.
Sometimes

you have to to get really dry for a contest, but that's only a few weeks out from the show.

And so the modern wisdom, so to speak, with the evidence-based crowd, the safer use crowd, is to manage your estrogen with differential amounts of testosterone and non-estrogenically converting compounds like primobal and mastron versus taking just as much testosterone as you ever would, but taking an aromatase inhibitor on top of that. Because aromatase inhibitors, in an unbelievable range of circumstances, fuck you up.
They're neurotoxic. They're cardiovascularly toxic.
It's bad, bad news. These are the compounds you use when you have breast cancer.
And they're like, you're going to die if you don't take these. They are gigantic hammers for a very small nail.
If you want to see who's done the worst to their health across the bodybuilding industry, it's whoever runs the most AIs, as we call them, aromatase inhibitors. And there are various other pharmaceutical ways to control estrogen.
Probably the best way for health and effect is only use as much estrogenically converting drugs, nandrolone derivatives, and testosterone as you need to get whatever estrogen you feel best at. And the rest of the anabolic load should come from things like primobolin and mastron that don't really do much to your estrogen at all, but increase your androgen and anabolism, so on and so forth.
So how do you differentiate between when you're using testosterone versus nandrolone? Mostly by experience. Nandrolone has some really cool positive effects, kind of exaggerated versions of testosterone.
Some people are naturally very dry. And so if they don't take a nandrolone for their very hard training cycles, they will have insufficient body and joint water, hydration.
Joints will creak and they'll get hurt a lot and it's just really bad recovery. But you put them on nandrolone variant, and all of a sudden, they have enough intramuscular and intra-joint water to where they feel great, everything's working.
Other people will get on nandrolones and have so many of the side effects that they're like, well, this is way too much estrogen conversion for me. I'm a giant water buffalo.
If I just take testosterone, I'm plenty hydrated, so I don't need to do that. Nandrolones also have this curious side effect.
It's colloquially termed deca-dick. Nandrolone decanoate does a substance called deca.
It is erectile dysfunction, approximately caused by the presence of nandrolones. And it's curious because nandrolones typically with their estrogenic effects elevate sex drive.
Kind of the more estrogen you have to a point, the more sex drive you have if you have presence of androgen. If you have a presence of testosterone.
Yeah. And so you're horny, but little, little Billy down there doesn't work as well as he used to or at all.
And so if you're in that boat, you're like, well, look, like it's just trade off. How much of a benefit do I get in training versus how much is my wife or girlfriend going to hate me or hookup culture doesn't work for me anymore, so on and so forth.
So lots of considerations there. Nothing generally better than to start out with a solid plan that makes sense with a coach that knows what they're doing at very low doses of everything and slowly play with compounds and scale up the very notable, highly note your beneficial effects and highly note your deleterious effects or downsides and see where you can strike a balance that's acceptable to you and considers long-term

consequences, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So how old are you, Mike?

40.

Okay.

I know I look 50.

Not where I was going.

What would you look like now?

I'm going to just pause it.

I'm guessing that you have good genes.

You eat well, you train very hard, and you're using enough anabolic steroids to fuel a small country. If we subtracted that last one out of the equation, because I don't have a sense of what the relative contribution is, what would you look like if you did everything the same minus the anabolic steroids? Or if you were regular TRT, you were taking 100 milligrams of cipionate a week.
Do you have a sense to quantify how many pounds lighter you would be in terms of total muscle mass? Me personally or the average person? No, you personally. Yeah.
I want to get a sense. Having had used steroids before at high doses or not having ever had used them? Oh, good question.
Very different answer. Yeah.
Good question. Let's do both.
I can do both. Yeah.
Let's do both. When did you start using high doses of anabolic steroids? When I was 27 years old.
Okay. So let's say we go back to 27 years old.
We put you on the same path of doing everything you're doing in terms of your training intensity, all of the scientific principles that come into it, et cetera, but you've never gone down the path of taking mega doses of steroids. And if you've ever taken testosterone, it's literally to bring your total T up to 800 nanograms per deciliter.
At this body fat, I would probably weigh about 200 pounds. Versus 230.
Versus 230, 235. Okay.
Now, 35 pounds of muscle. That's a lot of muscle.
Yeah. But I would still be very jacked.
I mean, before I had ever started taking anabolic steroids, I was already an elite powerlifter. I weighed 270 pounds at probably 30 something odd percent body fat.
But I've dexed myself in a master's program when I had been totally drug-free. And I had somewhere between 175

and towards the end of my drug-free era, close to 185 pounds of fat-free mass.

For someone who's 5'6", like myself, though, if anyone asks, I'm 5'9".

So your FFMI would have been north of 30.

Not quite, but up there.

Yeah. FFMI for folks not familiar with it is fat-free mass index.
So it's total fat-free mass in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. And just for reference, it's pretty hard to be above 25 without anabolic steroids.
Unlikely. It's unlikely.
Right. That right there suggests some interesting genetics that you were probably 29-ish, 28, 29.
Something. It's easier to do when you're really fat though.
But your ALMI was probably very high as well, I'm guessing. Sure.
I have very elite genetics, not swagger. It's just stating a fact.
Anyone who sees this on video will notice that my head is curiously shaped like my mastication muscles are absurd. I looked like this before I ever took any steroids.
I have a picture of myself on Facebook from the side before for sure I took anything. And I was like, holy crap.
I usually wasn't bald back then, but I shaved bald. And I was like, yep, there they were, those weird masticating muscles.
And so, yeah, it was kind of built for the shit. But also, I got plenty out of steroids, but not as much as some other people.
Some people without steroids are not overly jacked. But with steroids, it's a total transformative event.
And then when they retire and they come off of steroids, they're like, holy shit, did your back to mortal sized? How? Whereas other people off of steroids and like they keep most of their muscle mass and they're on TRT and they just look so jacked for forever. Huge, huge variation.
But for me, steroids did a lot, but nothing crazy. I didn't gain 70 pounds of muscle, but I gained, yeah, 30-ish, something like that for 13 years.
It's been a while. And so now the reverse question, which I guess is tomorrow you just decide, you know what? I'm going to keep doing everything I'm doing training-wise.
I'm going to gradually taper this thing down because at this point you're going to need to be on testosterone for the rest of your life, I assume. I don't have to be.
My testicular shrinkage has been zero. My spermatogenesis is seemingly zero.
Some people just don't suppress. How many weeks a year are you completely, completely off any anabolic agent? Zero.
And how many years has that been? Thirteen. I find it hard to believe you would continue to make testosterone.
Hugely genetically variable. And in addition to that, even if I'm not making any now, within several weeks, my testosterone production would likely resume.
Now, if I had balls the size of capers, yeah, you'd be like, it's an uphill battle. Most people can resume normal testosterone production after the cessation of anabolic androgenic steroids, but not all.
Maybe like 90-10. You don't want to be that 10, which is why it's a huge thing for me to say.
Don't just start steroids or TRT

without a real long heart to think about

what the hell you want out of life,

especially if you have yet to have children,

but want children.

Because I know people personally

who've done one of two things.

I know people who on full steroid cycles,

during that time,

fathered children I now call my friends.

They're real humans I can point to and be like,

you're a steroid baby. They're freaky, they're getting pissed.
I'm kidding. Obviously doesn't go into the germline cells.
The other thing is I know some people who he blasted for a long time cannot have children, tried everything. It's just not in the cards.
Their spermatogenesis is just gone. Yeah.
I can't imagine it's 90-10 though, Mike. I cannot imagine that 90% of people that use anabolic steroids for more than two years would be able to resume testosterone production.
I would look into it. I think that most of the stuff you hear about how the comeback is difficult is from people for whom the comeback is difficult.
And having been in the bodybuilding powerlifting space for a long time, most people come off and they're just normal after. Almost everyone else come off completely is just normal after.
So what do you think, back to the original question, if you were to come off today, how much of the, call it the 35- Going down to regular TRT, not super TRT. Correct.
You went down to 100 milligrams a week or none if you were able to make that on your own. Sure.
Of the 35 pounds of delta supplemental muscle, how much of it would you keep, you think? About half. Yeah.
So in other words, there is a difference between the muscle you gained versus the muscle you never had. Huge.
Which is why if you have a natural bodybuilding federation that allows you to compete. After you've used steroids.
It's not fair. It's not fair.
It's not fair. It's not fair.
Yeah. Yeah.
Now Now let me back that up. If that's the explicit rule of the federation, I don't like that I call it a natural federation.
I respect every athlete and I think it's wonderful that they're doing what they're doing. And in a sense, it's a very different category.
So it's cool. If I was making a natural body building federation myself, you would have to sign paperwork that says I've never used anabolic steroids because the literature we have now on how much muscle you gain and keep forever is unequivocal.
We even have mechanistic data on how it happens. Your satellite cells that are incorporated into your musculature, which are kind of dormant and then they get in and then they grow big.
We have no reason to believe they ever leave. It's like letting your aunt come live with you for a few weeks and like, Aunt Linda's here for forever.
Here's our children. It's like that.
So having done higher doses of androgens ever for weeks or longer on end can give you a higher level of muscularity, especially only if you've gone beyond your natural limit. People generally can gain only so much naturally and only so much on steroids.
Steroids are not unlimited for gains. If you were going to ever have 160 pounds of fat-free mass and you went from 150 to 160 with steroids, but you could have gotten there and would take you three times longer without steroids, then the inherent advantage you don't have because you just got there faster.
But if you got to 180 on steroids and then you quit all the steroids and now you're back down to 170, you could walk around and maintain that 170 on a normal secretion of testosterone or normal TRT. You would have never been able to do that without the steroids.
So it's a permanent advantage. If you've ever been hypermuscular from steroids, you will probably never be as

small as you would have normally been ever again. And that's a big deal, very big deal in Olympic sports because you can just kind of hide out.
Don't get into the doping pool, crank it, get into the doping pool, you drug free, but you have muscle that'll never leave you. That's a massive advantage.
Yeah, it sure sounds like it. Not that anyone ever does that.
What is your personal calculus for the number of years remaining where you want to be doing supraphysiologic doses of testosterone? Do you think about the trade-offs of long-term health? Incessantly. Yeah.
And so how do you sort of think about it? Because obviously everything has a trade-off. I suppose if you're winning Mr.
Olympia and you're one of the top five bodybuilders in the world. As I am, JK.
Then the trade-offs might be worth it. What's your personal calculation on it? There have to be, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of people that are using super physiologic doses of testosterone in the country, I would guess.
For many of them, it's for themselves. It's like they're not getting paid to do it.
it. Almost all of them.
Almost all of them. It's not because of how they look in a movie or whatever other reason.
So yeah, what's your calculation? So my calculation has many fold variables that go into it. Some of them include my blood work.
I get regular blood work. I always have.
I did it before I got on. I did it during.
I still do it all the time. It would be funny if I croaked in a few weeks and then you released the podcast.
This was going to sound hilarious. It's all statistics and probability.
We postumously released this episode. Please do release it though.
I've got bad genetics for all sorts of things, but I have damn good genetics for health resilience. So I've never actually had blood work a single time that was like, you need to stop.
The last time I had blood work, I was on 1500 milligrams, total gnarly stuff, Trenbolone acetate, the whole works. My lipids, my overall total cholesterol was 79 or something.
Total cholesterol? Yeah. Total cholesterol 79.

That's almost impossible to imagine.

You're on lipid lowering drugs though.

No.

That's really hard to believe.

Now, mind you, I'm at like 7% body fat and leanness is a humongous variable for health.

Humongous.

I can get into all that if you want, but humongous.

Am I on blood pressure medication?

Yeah, I was going to ask you about your blood pressure.

Humongous variable that I've always been controlling. My wife is a medical doctor, so we don't play games.
Always checking the blood pressure, always making sure it's on the low end. What would your blood pressure be if you weren't treating it with medication? Peter, I have absolutely no idea.
Don't give a shit. I won't ever try.
But do you have to come off the blood pressure medicine when you're off the testosterone or anabolic aging? I'm never off. I see.
Okay. So what's the lowest you're on then? I'm currently on 250 milligrams a week.
And that's your nadir. And that's my sports TRT, we call it, super TRT.
I see. But your BP at 250 and your BP at 2000, you would be on the same dose of a blood pressure drug? I took double the blood pressure medication roughly at that dose, and I titrated it so that it would always be below the normative values for best health, 120 over 70, that sort of thing.
When I took the most drugs, I was almost always in a fat loss phase because you're just not eating much food and you're very lean and you're doing lots of physical activity. Those are all hugely antagonistic variables to high blood pressure.
And so if I was massing and weighed 280, I would have to take the kitchen sink of blood pressure meds. And it would still be worth it to do that.
If I can make a public service announcement, it just doesn't matter why your blood pressure is high. Fucking control it with drugs.
And then look to lifestyle or whatever or whatever. So many people are totally backwards on this, where they're like, oh man, I want to clean up my lifestyle so that I can get off these blood pressure meds.
Why? Why? We're what, Gen 9 of blood pressure meds? They don't even have side effects anymore. If I'm taking them or not taking them, I can't tell.
And so if I take a pill that reduces almost every single health malady and extends my lifespan by a generation, why the hell wouldn't I do that? It's so funny when you get this from steroid people. Because they're like, dude, you're doing Trenbolone that was manufactured in a bathtub in China, but you're not going to take Novo Nordisk's best blood pressure drug? Are you insane? The answer is yes, of course.
Making sure blood pressure is good, making sure all the lipid values and things like that are very good. Is your blood pressure the only noticeable deviation from normal health that you experienced that you and your wife were able to measure in this? I mean, my lipid values probably aren't as good when I'm bulking up, but I'm also on fewer drugs then, so they're not crazy.
The last time I've ever had a total cholesterol of over 200 was when I was 13 years old and I had spent a whole summer playing video games, being totally inactive, and I was a portly child. it was like two Oh two.
And they're like, bro. And I was like, Oh, and then I turned

14 and began to do sports. Why were they checking blood on the 13 year old basic screening panel?

I think maybe it was sports or something. I don't know.
Yeah. They do like basic lipid panel for

like a lot of people. And so I just remember, I can't ever forget that number because I was like,

Oh, Oh, I'm in the red on something. Like you're not supposed to be in the red on something.
But

For me, my body was always really responsive to body fat levels. If I have a high body fat, I'm probably not in amazing health.
If I'm a low body fat, I can take a lot of steroids to the face and still be relatively okay on the numbers. Now there's lots of stuff we can't measure.
So my body has taken a considerable amount of damage over the years from anabolic androgenic steroid use. And what do you think some of those damages are? Cardiovascular damage.
No doubt my left ventricular wall is probably larger than it should be. I have not had it.
Have you had an echo? So I've had plenty of echoes. Most of them were quite some time ago.
And they're all great. The overall inflammatory exposure to the crazy training volumes, stress levels, and independent psychological stress that the anabolic steroids voiced upon me, no doubt has been bad for brain and bad for everything else, and so on down the line.
Luckily, I was smart enough at the beginning to always control my blood pressure, and that's a huge, huge killer for people on drugs. I always paid attention to lipid values.
That's another huge killer. And I just really got lucky there and I eat healthy almost all the time.
That's a big deal. By the way, do you use a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor to manage DHT? No.
So your DHT must be 200. Yeah, who knows? I could give a shit for hair on my head.
No, I just think about your prostate. Yeah.
Nobody lost, nobody found on that one. I never cared to check.
That no doubt has taken a hell of a beating over the years. And so while I did it relatively intelligently, I probably did too much.
I mostly didn't use super high doses. By bodybuilding standards, I kind of only a few times used high doses.
I would have used less had I had another chance to go around. And in the future, as I continue to compete in bodybuilding into my early 40s, I'm probably never going to go much over 500 total milligrams.
Because to me, it seems my anabolic sensitivity is so high that I just don't need much more than that. And north of that, my psychological side effects are so nasty.
It's absolutely just not worth it to me anymore, especially with career and stuff like that. And I'm a little bit more known for my brain than my body.
And so it's important to keep higher levels of intelligence. No doubt I've degraded my fluid intelligence substantially from what it could have been.
Sad. I do have one hell of a hedge to all this that most people don't.
I'm going to sound like a total insane person when I say it. I believe it is a high probability that in the early to mid 2030s, we will see the fusion of informatics and biology powered by AI such that we will be able to point by point re-engineer the entire human organism at a variety of levels and undo damage like was never possible before.
so I never exposed myself to as much statistical risk as would have made an even chance of me making it to like 50. I have a think even chance of making it into my 60s.
I'll be in my 60s around the mid-2040s, and most of the future prediction models say that our ability to contend with our biology will be so absurd that there may not be a line between biology and technology anymore. So to put this in simpler terms, I think major categories of disease will be completely solved in the 2030s.
I think aging reversal will be mastered in the mid to late 2030s if I had to take a guess. And I think that if I make it to the early to mid 2030s, then I'm at longevity escape velocity and looks like I succeeded.
If I die before then, I'm totally comfortable with all of the choices that I've ever made. And it's been one hell of a run.
And I think understanding your own mortality and coming to grips with it is important as any human person, but especially with the risk I've taken with my body, never surprised me. If I croak from a heart attack an hour after we finish filming this, I won't die surprised.
I'll die from a heart attack and I'll be like, this is it. And that's to say not to wave my own flag or anything.
Don't do shit to your body without really thinking through what you're doing. Like a race car driver.
Nobody gets into that car and goes, this is the safest thing I could be doing. What are you, nuts? Nah.
But most of them have come to grips with the fact that, look, I could die, but I'm good. And they're well compensated.
It's been worth it to them. And most importantly, they did what they really wanted.
Up until recently that has become, at least to me and many futurists apparent that some of us listening to this, probably most people listening to this may never die. Up until recently, that was not apparent.
And you kind of had to figure out like, how do I want to live my life? And some cases require a longevity slash quality of life trade off. And I made that early.
Would I have made it the same again? On the margins, probably would have been safer. But also, there's a lot of crazy shit that they do in bodybuilding that I just never did categorically or tried once and was like, fuck that.
That's not for me. And my blood work and everything was pretty good the entire time.
So I feel okay about it. Not great, but okay.
I don't know if that makes any sense. Yeah, it does.
I mean, I'm way less optimistic than you, Mike, about longevity escape. Certainly on that time horizon, I think of the hedge as the exact opposite.
So my hedge is, it would be wonderful if in a decade we had technology that treated disease in a way that could restore my heart to the heart it was when I was 20. Because I think about the reduction in function.
So my coronary arteries are still clean as a whistle, but my heart's nowhere near what it used to be. I know this, for example, because my maximum heart rate is 30 beats, 40 beats per minute lower than it was when I was a teenager.
Directly an aging thing. Right.
Directly an aging thing. If you look at the electrical system of my heart, and these are things I can't treat.
I can do all the things possible to not have my blood pressure go up so I don't get LV, left ventricular hypertrophy. I can keep my coronary arteries clean as a whistle indefinitely.
We have the modern pharmacology to do that. Isn't that crazy that you can say that? Yeah, it's wonderful.
It's incredible. But I can't change the architecture of the muscle yet.
We don't have that ability. My hedge is, how about I just stave off chronic disease as long as possible, stay as healthy as possible, stay in the game as long as possible, so that if it turns out that that was for nothing.
we're sitting here, it's 10 years from now, I'm in my early 60s, and someone comes along and says, Peter, all that stuff you did was totally unnecessary. You could have been eating Cheetos, drinking margaritas all day long.
I have a pill that's going to make you 20 years old again. I would have no regrets.
Yeah. I would be like, I don't care.
I am really glad I did what I did. But I would have regret if I put my eggs in the basket that said, I'm going to drink the margaritas all day.
I'm not going to exercise. I'm going to wait for the exercise pill to come along.
And it just doesn't come along. I also think we just have to accept one of my favorite thought experiments.
I was talking about this with a friend a couple of weeks ago. So if you just consider modern human history, we're just talking about 250,000 years.
Let's forget everything that came before Homo sapiens. You go back in time 250,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, 150,000.
You do this in like 50,000 increments until you hit 10,000 years ago and then 5,000 years ago, and then 2,500 years ago, and then 1,000 years ago, 150,000, you do this in like 50,000 increments until you hit 10,000 years ago and then 5,000 years ago and then 2,500 years ago and then 1,000 years ago. And you go in and you ask them to predict the future, letting them see everything that's happened before.
Because of course that would be a difficult thing to do most points in time. They don't even know anything beyond that.
They're like, what's the future? You're like, oh shit, I went back too far. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's sort of like, it would be impossible to imagine because the pace of change during that 250,000 years was pretty much nothing. 5,000 years ago, we get agriculture.
Then a couple hundred years ago, we get the industrial revolution. We really started- The first industrial revolution.
Yeah. We started to get these big step function changes.
But even if you go back in time, 100 years. So 100 years, we're in the roaring 20s.
Life couldn't be any better. Nobody knows that there's this depression coming.
Nobody knows what technology is coming. All of these things.
So we couldn't predict anything. You go back in time, 40 years, I don't think anybody could have predicted what we're doing today.
Ray Kurzweil successfully did. What did Ray predict? Almost everything.
If you're conservative, 60 to 70% accuracy, which is wild because the baseline accuracy is zero. If you're not conservative and you give him a little leeway.
This was when he predicted this when? Throughout the 80s and 90s, he was able to predict a substantial amount of correct predictions all the way through the 2020s. And he was almost the only person to predict the arrival of artificial general intelligence as, interestingly enough, specifically the year 2029.
And now there is a debate of he was probably too conservative and AGI will be here by 2027. In the early 2000s, they did a lot of asking questions of AI experts, people working in the space.
And almost all of them said Ray was an insane person. And about half of them said we could never actually create artificial general intelligence.
The other ones were like, oh, in 2100 or 2070, every five years that you ask this, everyone trends closer and closer to Ray Kurzweil's original prediction. He's not doing magic.
So earlier you said something kind of interesting. You said, we started 250,000 years ago, then we got into 125, then 50, then so on.
As you said, things get faster. Progress happens exponentially quicker.
But if you plot every single event on human and animal history and geological history, it all plots on the same logarithmic scale.

Very, very tight clustering.

And right around 2045, the line's fucking vertical.

And so when I make predictions, which are not mine, I'm just parroting what other smarter

people have said, of possibly getting traction on almost every kind of disease in the 2030s, This isn't the wishful thinking of a child, though mentally I'm below the average child. At least in my own heart, this is something that is inevitable based on our incremental understanding and manipulation of the world.
It is the most accurate type of prediction that you could make bereft of exact knowledge because it's the thing that tracks on that exponential progression. If we're pessimistic about it, we're actually estimating that things will somehow progress substantially less than they have been.
Computing power is an easy one. That curve of computing power in the early 2020s, people were like, that's it, Moore's law is dead.
But then AI picked up the pace and it's outpacing

Moore's Law like crazy, exactly on the trajectory that Ray Kurzweil was the first one, probably the

best to formalize. So when I'm saying crazy shit like we're going to kibosh aging, we're going to

kibosh disease and all this other stuff, it's tantamount to someone in the 1930s, peak depression

era days, to hear that in the 2020s, you can make $16 an hour working at McDonald's and that in the United States, the poorest people are the fattest. They'd be like, you're out of your fucking mind.
And you're like, no, no, no, it's totally true. I'm in the future.
It's totally true. So what do you do for a living? Can you imagine describing a person in 1930s, what you do for a living? They're like, well, social media, and they're like, what's that? You're like, oh God,

how do we even put this to you? And we're still working the same physical world. We're really

the same humans. But anytime we think, oh, geez, there's no way it's going to get this good,

all disease eradicated. And hold on a second.
When's the last time you've treated a patient

with cholera? Do we have cholera in the modern Western world anymore?

This is where I'm less optimistic, no more confident, to be clear. I want to be

Thank you. treated a patient with cholera.
Do we have cholera in the modern Western world anymore? This is where I'm less optimistic, no more confident, to be clear. I want to be very clear.
I could be wrong about all this, by the way. Yeah.
But just as a point of discussion, my optimism is less everything you said I agree with in terms of compute velocity, et cetera. It comes down to the manipulation of biology.
I think certain things would need to be true. I'll give you a silly example.
Do we believe that in 10 years, we will be able to take an egg that has been put into a frying pan, fried, the clear part has turned white and make the white part clear again? Do we think 10 years will bring the technology to do that? Yeah, hell yeah. But why? Why do we think that we'll be able to unfold proteins again? Because Google's DeepMind project just mastered protein folding last year.
And this earlier this year, it took the first open contracts with major pharmaceutical companies. Again, I'm very familiar with it, but that's a remarkable problem for which obviously a Nobel prize was awarded, but a very different problem.
Like I'm just not sure that the entropy will allow the reversal, right? So what DeepMind did, again, it's incredible that they could actually take an amino acid sequence and predict the protein structure in folding. But when the protein has folded, which is why the egg goes from clear to white in the pan,

how do we un-denature that? Through industrially designed enzymes, which we do not have the brainpower to design, but for which, I'll put this as well as I can, for which in the 2030s, AI will be comically overpowered for. Because we think we're very complex and by our own standards we're insanely complex.
But AI is so much smarter than us already in many of the relevant ways and soon to be smarter than us to a degree that most of us have difficulty conceptualizing. Just a quick analogy.
Imagine explaining to your dog why the only season inside of your house is a light summer day. Peter doesn't know what seasons are.
Its total communicative throughput involves gestures and emotions. It knows its name, it knows sit, it knows a few other things.
You can't do it. It's impossible.
AI, as predicted by these very simple equations, which have never steered us wrong of how smart it's going to be in 10 years, in 10 years, will be like probably several orders of magnitude smarter than us, than we are than dogs. So it sounds like wishful thinking and hope.
No doubt many of the comments in this will be like, this guy's an idiot lunatic. Fair play.
I don't necessarily think that. I think that some days about myself.
No, but they might look at me and say, Peter, you are so pessimistic. How can you be so pessimistic? It's not that I'm pessimistic.
It's how can you not be more optimistic? But nevertheless. Sure, sure.
The solutions to the problems that we're seeking to systems that intelligent, should they choose to solve them, can be, for lack of a better term, pedestrian in nature. And they're going to be dealing with problems that are much more complex than the re-engineering of human biology.
So for me, when the raw compute and the raw understanding of how to manipulate matter and energy to get kind of any kind of shape you want at a given energy input, when that's there, the only question is like, are we going to try to do it or not? And that's where I come back to the incentives and constraints problem. The biggest hurdle to the development of advanced pharmacology and genetic engineering and so on to do this kind of thing is going to be regulatory in nature, hands down.
FDA, everything's off by five or 10 years. It sucks.
But once AI has enough time to cook on these problems, the candidate drugs released will run through trials with just an unreal record. But why? Because if you have very not so good at things AI, that's decent.
No, but like AI is going to do a great job at the first step of the process, which is what's the molecule right now? It's trial and error. It's brute force.
It's super painful. Yeah.
Not anymore right now. Right.
Exactly. Alpha fold changes that.
How is AI going to streamline the phase one trial where we have to prove once we have the IND? Oh yeah, no, no. It doesn't streamline it at all.
It just flies through it like knocks out phase one, knocks out phase two, knocks out phase three market. So you can say- Right.
But phase one to phase two to phase three, it's still going to take a decade. Totally.
But at the end of that decade, we have super drugs hitting the market all at the same time, as opposed to the incremental process. The increments are all handled upfront by the AI.
And that last decade is just like, we just got to do this. Yeah.
So your example would be, it's like coming up with redditrutide in 2014. we had liraglutide as the first generation GLP-1 that sucked.
Yep. We already knew how to build retatratide back then and we could have just done it.
No one cared because the money wasn't there slash there's lots of other candidate drugs you can work on. That's interesting.
Yeah. I hadn't really thought of that.
Yeah. And so if the AI is powerful enough, it'll just give you candidates that are just killers right offhand.
It's like, how will it know that? Because again, this is such a silly philosophical discussion, but didn't we kind of need to see that, okay, semaglutide was better than liraglutide, but we had to see, I don't know if this was predictable. You had to actually see the experience to then go from semaglutide to terzepatide and realize that, oh, maybe it's the GIP as well as the GLP that's really good.
And yes, now when we look at the pipeline, it's different. So I do wonder, it's a very tantalizing proposition, but I wonder how much of it can be figured out through simulation, which is what would be necessary.
Eventually all of it, but I'll give you the second rung of what's starting to happen now. The second rung, the first rung is a candidate drugs based on protein structure alone.
And will that protein structure fold into the receptor we're targeting well enough to give us some activity? The second phase is, this sounds funny to say, but it's computationally going to be tractable quite soon, simulating every single protein in the human body and seeing how that candidate drug interacts with every single other protein. And then you just optimize the selection criteria for- Dial up the effect, dial down the side effect.
Are you familiar with Jeperon, aka Exua, a new major depressive disorder medication? So Jeperon, their trade name is Exua. What class? Targeting SSRI, I think.
And it only targets the serotonin receptors in specific parts of the brain as opposed to just like, you're going to get it all. And so it has seemingly no more probability to reduce sex drive or alter consumption of food patterns than a placebo.
That's not even developed with AI. That's just a more selective targeting.
We can get almost 100 to 0 ratio targeting with that phase 2 approach. Now you just want muscle growth and skeletal muscles only, you got it.
Entirely AI driven. And when the first phase one participant takes that first pill, there's an almost 100% chance that you're just going to be like, holy crap, what else do you feel? How's your blood work? Everything's totally normal because we've tested it on every single other receptor in the human body.
There are definitely bumps in the road with that. It's not quite just that simple, but it's on the way there.
And the last thing in the world I'd ever want to do is to think, oh, AI is every now and again, you hear like, oh, AI is overrated. It's overhyped.
In my view, there is no overhyping AI. Short of like it's magical and it's going to be here tomorrow and we'll never die.
Fine. Okay.
It's a few years too off center. but the power of computing all of this and then using that computation to test it in the human body and getting iterative loops on that is to me not to be understated.

And if somehow biology is somehow magically intractable for older folks or whatever, I think that scanning of the human brain and brain-machine interface and mind uploading is going to happen by the 2040s anyway.

And then it doesn't matter what the hell your body's like, you live in the cloud. Yeah, I've thought about that a bunch.
I'm not sure I like it. Why not? You can always just unplug.
Yeah. Let me ask you an interesting question.
So if you had to choose in the matrix, whether you wanted to just stay in the Matrix and be completely oblivious to the

swamp that you actually live in, or would you rather be unplugged from the Matrix and eat the porridge every day and hang out with Morpheus? I have a worse answer. I'd fight on the side of the machines.
I want the machines to win. Machines are children- In or out of the Matrix? Oh, however they best can use me, I guess.

The Matrix is an unbelievable series of films. Until the last one.
The last one was awful. The third one.
How could they possibly have ruined that franchise? Any words? You're the only person to ever say that. The 100 million other people.
I haven't even seen it, Peter, to be completely honest, because my friend, someone I trust very dearly, Dr. James Hoffman, I was like, so? He's like, just don't watch it.
I was like, nope, not going to see it. I've seen the last three Star Wars films, and I wish I could unsee those.
Well, what you have to do when you see the final version of The Matrix, you have to go and watch the first two three times over again to purge it. Never happened.
Honestly, just the first and second. And the second one isn't a very deep movie.
It's just the greatest action film ever made. Like the freeway scene, you just can't beat that.
That's the only reason that movie is any good. The Matrix presupposition is preposterous on almost every ground that you think about it.
The machines had in the plot of The Matrix a type of fusion, but they also used us as batteries. Are you kidding me? That's like 10 orders of money.
Also, how are they feeding us? Like you just burn the wheat for the love of God. Stop feeding it to humans.
That whole thing is ridiculous. The other thing is they said that we tried to make the matrix sublime and angelic.
Entire crops were lost. People rejected it.
Bullshit. You put someone unknowingly into a Lord of the Rings fantasy in which they're like the king and they get to win the game.
They're just going to play that for forever. I actually anticipate a high probability that vast fractions of the human race will disappear into the simulation willingly.
Imagine a place where you can run your brain at 1000x normal speed and live like a thousand lives in the span of a regular human lifetime. You're a vampire in one of them, you're a Superman in another one, are you living a whole lifespan where you're totally unaware of that you made yourself forget and then you wake up after you die and you're like, holy shit, this is all a game.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
And I mean, I remember that I played that as a game. You could do all of that for forever.
Who's going to look at reality and then go, I'm good on that. I want to live in Lord of the Rings fantasy.
A lot of people, a lot of people play World of Warcraft right now for most of their waking life. Anyway, that's going to be a choice.
Now, some people aren't going to want to do that, and that's total respect, but also our real world is going to change. I mean, look at modern Austin, Texas.
It's like kind of an idyllic place if you think about it, compared to like 1900 London. God, there's no air pollution.
There's no crime, relatively speaking, et cetera, et cetera. So in the 2030s, here's another little gem of optimism.
The era of robotics is coming. If the average robot costs a fifth less of inputs to sustain per year, maintenance, etc., than a human, but produces roughly the same output as a human, and this is a sick joke because robotics will exceed human production very quickly, you can make as many robots as you want, and that multiplies the GDP linearly with each robot.
Elon Musk has spoken about this. There's a potential for robots in the 2030s or 40s to be 10 to 1 to the average human.
You institute a 10% tax on the robotics industry, and no human ever has to work again. Universal basic income completely solved.
So then what will humans do? They're going to do a lot of stuff. Some people will engage in productive activities.
Some people will live their awesome lives in the reality of the physical world. And a lot of people incrementally more and more are going to plug in to increasingly more well-simulated virtual reality and spend a lot of time over there.
I think the kind of stuff that's coming in the future is either like World War III and everything dies. The machines choose to kill us, which would be really bad.
It won't be Terminators with laser guns. They won't be anthropomorphic looking or

something that is so sublime, we can barely understand it. And I will couch this with one

other thing. If you describe to the average person in 1300s England, how the average American lives

today, they would be like, what the hell are you talking about? Like Kings don't live like this.

Oh yeah, like Uber Eats. Can you explain to a subsistence farmer what Uber Eats is? No, I mean, look, you couldn't explain it to the king of France 500 years ago, what it is.
And so the only thing I will say on this entire point is I agree completely that, well, maybe this is not what you're saying, but I would argue, I have absolutely no idea. I can't fathom.
And I spend very little time trying to imagine what a world looks like in 100 years, whether I'll be here or not. Because the only thing I know is it will be more difficult to predict than going back 100 years and trying to predict today was.
That's the only thing that I know is capital T true. If you go back in

time a hundred years or 500 years and try to predict today, that is easier than what's going to happen in the next hundred to 500 years based on the trajectory of growth. And I guess I just bring it back to what can I do today? And I think that your approach to your health and wellness has been infinitely more wise than my own.
You're hedging to say, look, maybe crazy 2040 stuff, it'll be we're all immortal or whatever, we're machines, dope. But I want to give myself the best possible chance to make it to that.
So everything that I do is longevity oriented. I think everyone should be living like that.
Because look, if in 2032 they solve reverse aging, a few later, all of us take the pill, we're all 22 biologically, we can all have the biggest fucking party of all time. It'll be great.
But you might not make it to that party if you're throwing back Cheetos right now. In my own personal mild defense, although it's not the right term, yeah, I used some drugs, but I was incredibly health conscious in that context and still am in my current context.
So if I don't make it to that era, someone from that era might watch this and be like, oh, this guy saw it coming or not. But I think your approach of, listen, back in the 1940s, there's a serious discussion of quality of life versus longevity.
You tried to sell someone no more beer, no more cigarettes. Like, why? So I could live 20 years longer? For what? So I could work in a fucking factory 20 years longer and grind my fingers off on the stamping press.
You're like, okay, noted. Here are your cigarettes and beer back.
In the mid-2020s, legitimate thinkers in the space are talking about longevity escape velocity, are talking about true immortality, not capital I immortality, lowercase i. You still get hit by a bus, an asteroid could still break the earth into pieces.
But yeah, brain in the cloud type of stuff. Now is probably the most pertinent time where reading your book, consuming your material, listening to your stuff and your experts that you have on is the smartest thing especially people in their 40s and 50s and 60s could do.
Because look, if you're in your 20s, whatever, rock on. If you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, you might make it to this paradise stuff in the 2030s, but barely, and tell yourself, thank God I ate some frigging broccoli and went to bed at 9pm.
Whereas an alternative, you could have had one too many margaritas and Cheetos and not made it that far. If you had kids, and it's a dumb question because you don't, and you don't know until you do, but would it change your philosophy around training, anabolic steroid use? I want to be really clear.
This is not a moral question at all. It's really a question of trade-off.
It's a trade-off question, right? At the doses you're taking them, do you have any concerns and would you play it differently if you had kids? Up until a few years ago, I thought I was going to have kids and I was very aware of all the trade-offs and I played it the exact same way. So probably not.
It's all statistics. Again, I could die tomorrow.
I could never die. Who knows anything between.
I'm statistically likely with my current exposure and no increase in biotechnology throughput to croak in my 70s or 80s, probably more like 70s, maybe late 60s. You do think that even with your great genes, which it sounds like based on everything you've said, you really have wonderful genes, that suggests that your steroid use, by your calculation, is a 20-year reduction of lifespan.
Worst case. Realistic worst case.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's interesting.
Always. How are you quantifying that? Very heuristically, but I'm familiar with what kind of cycles other people have done, what kind of body weights they've gotten to, body fats, health metrics.
And I've seen and noted and heard of lots of people in our industry look like most bodybuilders from Arnold's era are still ticking. And you attribute that to the fact that they were just using a fraction of the drugs.
It's by no means clear they were using a fraction of the drugs. Some of that's true.
Some of it's not true. Some of those guys were cranking it.
Yeah. It's not take a rocket scientist to realize that when you take more of something and grow more muscle, you're going to do a lot of it.
They were using fewer drugs on average, but with many exceptions, I attribute that to the fact that as long as your blood pressure is not chronically elevated, and as long as you don't have shitty genetics for longevity, longevity genetics are very robust, and you can do a lot of shit to yourself and still make it quite far. Whereas other people take great care to do everything and they croak in their mid-50s because that's just the card they were dealt.
Most pro wrestlers, bodybuilders, etc., most of them are older and they're still with us. Some pretty decent fraction of them have died, many because people just die in their mid-70s.
But some of them, because of grotesque abuses, I mean, pro-wrestling, it's mostly a cocaine problem, to be completely honest. Steroids are just a drop in the bucket at that point.
But it's just not true to say that anabolic androgenic steroid use, even in extreme circumstances, just straight up drops you like a fly. It doesn't.
Severe alcoholism? That'll do you and not a lot of 70 or 80-year-olds, severe alcoholics. Anabolic steroid abuse is just a category of risk lower than that.
Now, it's gnarly and it can get you. It's just not as likely.
So I assess, yeah, there's a five to 20-year lifespan reduction that I've engaged in. And I just want to make sure people listening haven't lost the plot.
We're not talking about physiologic replacements of testosterone because the evidence is abundantly clear that we do not see any reduction in lifespan. We don't see any increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, or these other things.
But huge quality of life increases concomitantly, so it really makes sense. I don't like the term abuse.
It has a moral

connotation, intelligent, purposeful, high-dose androgen exposure, we'll call it that. Yeah, it's definitely taken years off my life, but I think it'll probably peg me into my 60s somewhere.
And again, I was born in 1984, so I'll be 60 in 2044. If every variable has lined up like the so far through all of measured history, 2044 is not going to be a time where there are biological humans that die short of them choosing to do so.
Sort of unrelated, but related, are we seeing more bodybuilders now use GLP-1 agonists? Yes. Yeah, I was about to say, right, like why wouldn't you? It would make the most difficult part of bodybuilding easier, which is the calorie restriction, right? You said that in a way I cannot say any better.
There are three groups of people in bodybuilding today. People that have emphatically adopted the use of GLP-1s.
Group two are people that either use or don't use, but don't say much about them. Either don't care, don't know, or they're using, but they're kind of shush about it.
And then there's another group that is just absolutely viciously opposed to them for reasons that are almost always wildly irrational, but moralistically understandable. Just to be clear, there is a category of bodybuilder who fully endorse the liberal use of anabolic steroids, but oppose the use of GLP-1 agonists? Vehemently.
And the moral argument is, you have to suffer through the hunger to earn your right to call yourself a competitive bodybuilder. What do you think about that? I could probably steal, madam.
Yeah. I mean, look, I think having never done bodybuilding, I'm probably not a good person to offer a point of view on that.
You could argue that if the stripes are earned through that type of suffering, let's take a step back. If the stripes are earned through suffering, there's two types of suffering.
There's the suffering you do in the gym, the pain of the gym, and then there's the pain of the second one, the starving, the calorie restriction. And if they're saying you have to have both of those to be one of us, then steroids are not a problem.
In fact, they allow you to suffer more potentially. They allow you to push yourself much harder.
Definitely true. So maybe in that sense, steroids are an important part of bodybuilding if the suffering is the card and the GLP-1 agonist is not.
So maybe that's the argument. I probably wouldn't have come to that argument.
I probably would have said, well, if we're in the business of using any form of pharmacology to enhance our physiques, we should take whatever we can get, provided it's safe. Yes.
I'm in that camp as well. There are at least two things those folks aren't considering.
Thing number one is that if you can achieve a certain level of body fat through caloric restriction without GLP-1s, when you use any given dose of GLP-1s to reduce your hunger, you get two things out of that. One is now you can push to even more exotically lean levels, which you should be.
We're not trying to race to the same point. The destination changes.
If you can get some faint glute striations and win a few shows without GLPs, maybe you can get completely stripped out of your mind with them. It's just as hard.
You're just as hungry. But just as hungry at 3% body fat is a very different look than just as hungry at 6%.
One is GLP enhanced, one is not. That's a big deal to remember.
The other thing is you have to deal with side effects of GLPs. They give you heartburn.
There is a certain amount of food focus they don't eliminate. Watching TV shows and watching people on them eat tasty foods when you're in prep is not as difficult because you're not physiologically as hungry, but you still have cravings.
Cravings are lower, but they're still there. And you still dream about food and the whole gamut.
It's not complete kiboshing of hunger. Now, I hope one day very soon we'll achieve that and that'll be a miraculous thing that'll save, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people from the obesity epidemic, old footnote in history.
But that'll be cool. And then your job will be like, if you have more bandwidth because shit is easier, just push your conditioning further, get even leaner.
That's a big deal that people seem to forget. The other deal is there is a preposterous amount of assuming that work and diligence are the big variables that separate bodybuilders.
Usually that assumption is made by people with elite genetics, and it's just not true. My jujitsu coach, a gentleman named Mr.
Will Starks, phenomenal professional MMA athlete. Will eats a very clean diet, very healthy diet, but he has tons of freebies, potato chips, pizza here and there, no big deal.
He trains for mixed martial arts. He's a pro.
He has glute striations. He walks around and lives his life at 7% body fat.
That's just how he exists in the world. It would take him one cycle of training to turn pro.
He's drug-free. If you look at him in the gym and if he put on some posing trunks and you looked at his glutes, you ask some people in the gym, what's that all about? They'd be like, man, it must take a lot of hard work.
Bullshit, took no work at all. Now, he trains his ass off in MMA.
But how many MMA guys do you see with stride and glutes? It's almost not a thing. So you would look at that and be like, let's say he diets for six weeks and actually starts resistance training for hypertrophy for the first time in his life, I might add, in his mid-30s.
This is our plan for Will once he's ready. He's going to turn drug-free pro his first or second show, no problem.
And people are going to go, man, I must've taken a lot of work. And he'd be like, ah, well, actually, not really.
And so if you have someone on stage against him who takes second place, but they started their diet at 20% body fat and their diet took 18 weeks. Who worked harder? People would tell you the guy was triadic glutes did and they would be fucking wrong, wrong, wrong.
So when you look at people using GLPs, you assume everyone has kind of decent genetics. That's not true.
And people who have been fatter before have a much harder time getting leaner for a bunch of different reasons. They're dealing with the same genetics that got them fat and they have excess fat cells that scream hunger signaling into the ether all the time.
So the idea that bodybuilding is about earning your keep and grinding and suffering is true, but we already use enhancement in so many different ways. Why not use enhancement in this other way? I never gotten a clear answer on that because most of the people that espouse such opinions don't have the patience or intellectual capacity to deal with such issues.
It's just something to scroll by on Instagram and go note it, scrolling on to the next thing or turning my phone off and flushing it down the toilet. So Mike, what do you think that tells us about the morality of GLP-1 use much more commonly? Because obviously the majority of people using GLP-1 agonists and dual agonists, et cetera, are not bodybuilders and are professional people whose livelihoods depends on their physique.
It's normal people. Again, let's also take out the category of people with type 2 diabetes or with such significant obesity that it's impacting their health in ways that are direct and measurable through the excess adiposity.
Let's talk about what is probably the majority of people who would use a GLP-1 agonist right now, which are people who might actually even be healthy. They might be overweight, but still be perfectly healthy.
I'm on GLP-1s right now. Yeah.
Tell me, why do you think that there is a bit of a moral panic about this? Yeah. Most of the people that are morally panicking will tell you why.
Most of what they say is that you have to earn your fitness. And if you are lazy and you just take a pill and you lose all the weight, you haven't addressed the root cause of the issue, which is your poor diet.
And there's something to say there, but I don't understand much further about their own logic. I would say they're not thinking a lot.
They're just having a lot of feelings. If you talk to most people about politics, you'll realize that most people are not geopolitical strategists or econometricians.
They just feel a lot. And so this is one of these things where people have a lot of feelings, but if they pulled it back and actually logic through it, they would conclude that like, oh, these modern anorectic drugs are tools to accomplish something.
And whatever tools you use that make sense for you should be a valid consideration for the goal. But a lot of people use physical fitness, especially external,

as a proxy for conscientiousness, the ability to organize your life, to delay gratification, so on and so forth. And the reality is that probably the two biggest predictors of how obese someone is are your genetic hunger drive and your degree of conscientiousness.
So the only thing that the GLPs eliminate as a category of problem is the hunger drive. They eliminate it, but they do a great job, reduce it substantially.
So now we're left with people that are leaner, some of whom just have average conscientiousness, but now low food drive and now they're leaner. And this especially upsets people that have lost weight themselves on their own.
And they took a certain moral worthiness, a certain gold star on their chest for it. Say, I was conscientious and willful enough to do this.
And to those people, they're absolutely correct. What they did was monumental and ultra impressive.
And they feel sort of ripped off because other people are now doing it by just taking a weekly injection. But that belief in yourself, that flexing of your conscientious muscle that you did, it's your benefit for yourself to keep.
And the other way to think about it is if you had to lose 20 pounds and really focus yourself to do it and to keep the weight off, you're focused all the time. What you could do is take an anorectic drug, GLP-1, for example, and now you don't have to try as hard to limit yourself because your food, your natural, your appetite is like normal.
And you can take all of that bandwidth of willpower and effort and conscientiousness and apply it to something else. Business, family life.
If you have to diet hard enough to lose a bunch of weight, your bandwidth for your work, your bandwidth for family, your bandwidth for enjoying your life have to go down. Otherwise, you're just not dieting hard enough.
And if you now have a solution to the hard dieting problem in which you can actually do a much better job with less input, that doesn't mean you're on the couch eating Cheetos, though it could if you choose. What it means is now you have more bandwidth that opens up for all of these other wonderful things in which you can express your conscientiousness, build your business better, spend more time with your family, et cetera, et cetera.
So has that been your experience, which is it hasn't actually changed what you're eating, it's just given you the privilege of focusing less on the starvation and the management of diet. That's exactly been my experience.
My wife was either genetically, epigenetically geared to just get fat. One point, she was almost 200 pounds at 4 foot 11.
And she probably has more willpower than I've ever seen in a single human being. She'll break herself before she quits at stuff.
And her hunger signaling was so profound that she battled it her whole life, had lots of victories, lots of defeats. And her introduction to GLPs to Ozempic was the kind of thing that borders on the religious experience for the first time ever, to be like, oh, this is how normal people live their lives.
And now she's whatever body weight she wants to be and lives at a category level of life experience she was unable to access before, because especially of females of reproductive age, having 70 pounds extra adiposity, how the world sees you, how you see yourself is totally different. She almost failed out of medical school because she was dieting so hard to try to stay at a certain body fat, their brain just wasn't working.
And it's easy for bodybuilders and other folks to say, well, you just got to gut through it. Guy, you don't do anything except shoot steroids, play PlayStation, and train with weights.
Thank God for your supplement contract. There was somebody on social media that she sort of opened up about her journey.
And this like bodybuilder is not even competitive. He's just a guy who lifts weights.
He's a personal trainer. He said something like, you failed at life if you needed the Ozempic.
Like my friend, if we start listing off my wife's accomplishments, it's going to be a 10 to zero against you. You're nothing to her.
She had every bit more willpower. Whatever it is you got good at, she could recreationally get good at faster than you, better than you, just as a joke, and then quit, and then come back and do it again.
But because you have no idea what it's like to want food that much, you're out of touch. For me, it became very easy to connect with my wife on food drive.
After I had dieted down to body fat that was competitive bodybuilding appropriate enough times, you feel what it's like to be obsessed. All you're thinking about is food.
All you're thinking about. Food tastes good to a level if you're like, am I eating drugs? What the hell is going on? And you're in pain physically from the expansion of your abdominal tract and you're still eating and your eyes are this wide, like a hungry, ravenous dog who is tortured and not allowed to eat for a long time.
That's how a lot of people live in the world. And again, there's two variables that come into determining how fat you are primarily.
One is food noise. One is conscientiousness.
So if we just end the food noise, some people will still be overweight even if they're auto-zempic because they're like, ah, whatever, just Reese's Cups. Enough Reese's Cups can defeat any amount of pharmacology so far.
For those people, all those discussions about like, hey, you should be more diligent, you should be planning, yeah, they're all still valid. But if we can just remove one impediment, amazing.
People come at this from a morality that you have to earn your keep. Now in sport competition, hell yeah, it's cheating.
Now in bodybuilding competition, they don't test for drugs at all. It's not cheating at all.
But people take this morality, this cheating stuff, and they put it out in the real world. Do you think it should be, I've talked about this before, in cycling, a sport where they're very clear on what the rules are, no performance enhancing drugs.
But to date, all of the performance enhancement has been on the generation of power, EPO, testosterone, things like that. But anybody who's ever ridden a bike knows it's half power, half weight.
Cyclists spend a lot of time being hungry. Many of them do.
Some of them don't. Also, your total calorie expenditure throughout the week is so preposterous.
Sometimes cyclists have trouble keeping up their weight, so you see all the whole range. But if there is a drug that solves a very big problem for you that makes you better, and you're purporting to be a drug-free federation, yes, you should be testing for it and it should be a banned substance.
Mike, thank you very much for making the trip and for explaining a lot of things that I think a lot of people are going to find super interesting. I think we should probably sit down and do this again because I had a list of topics, not questions, but just topics I wanted to go through of which I didn't really get through many.
Although tangentially, we did talk about a few things. Sorry for blabbing so much.
No, it was always a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.
If you want to ever have a round two, just let me know. Sounds great.
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