Matt Wenning: DON’T Do This With Training & PED’s

What's up, guys?

We got today Dr.

Matt Wenning.

Most people that start are done within six months to two and a half years.

They're never really going to see the true upper end of their genetic potential unless you stay with it for at least a decade.

I didn't break my first world record until I've been training for 16 years.

Multiple all-time world record holding powerlifter and strength, conditioning, and wellness director for the U.S.

Army, advisor for the NFL, and contractor for the Pentagon, and world-class coach and speaker.

60% of your training should be based around your shortcomings and your weaknesses.

You and Dr.

Mike had a little debate regarding fast versus slow eccentric, right?

He used one of my bench press videos when I was doing 225 for 60 reps to tell people to not move quickly on an eccentric.

And so I'm like, I had a kid that came to bench with us.

This kid had the worst fing genetics in the world.

Within about six months, we had him to 225.

And he is bugging the piss out of me to take testosterone.

His bench in 12-week cycle of running almost three CC's of testosterone a week went to 240.

It did nothing.

I'm in graduate school and I'm taking a pre-med anatomy class.

I was having some shoulder pain.

I'm a phenom going over to Louis's place, and he's like, Well, how much overhead pressure you doing?

I'm like, We do like shoulder presses like once a week.

He's like, Cut out those shoulder presses, they're gonna your shoulder up and beat you down.

If I come into power lifting and my natural testosterone level is 370, so the range is 250 to 900.

If somebody's optimized to like 880, are they taking steroids?

Yes or no?

I say

something I've preached on and on is i greatly believe that hitting the mark on the most optimal training periodization structure and volume for each individual is pretty vastly undervalued especially in bodybuilding i really like how much you emphasize the warm-up and i'm sure many already know it but do you think you can give a really quick rundown on the uh the wedding warm-up so I only ended up mentioning like 574.

I'm about 30 pounds below where the training seemed to

show where I was going to be and ended up leaving with the third highest total of all time, which was amazing for my first raw meet ever.

But I'm driving home and I'm trying to figure out where my training needs to go because automatically, as a power lifter, I'm like, I need to get stronger.

Well, that's a simplistic answer to a complex question.

Because what I started to realize is that maybe my work capacity wasn't high enough because I wasn't doing a lot

pre-competition lift.

So if I was to go in and squat, I would do a little bit of flexibility work, and it was right into the barbell shit.

And so, I'm over in Australia speaking at a SWAT team conference, and there's a lady there talking about post-activation potentiation with rugby players in the professional leagues, and how she's doing these different exercises to get the guys to actually perform better at the multiple lifts.

I'm thinking, well, fuck, I don't do anything before my contest lifts, and maybe this will help two things.

One, I'll get better with my technique and two, I'll get a higher level of work capacity.

So I go, I give a call to Flex Wheeler for the guys that are bodybuilders.

I give a call to Flex Wheeler since we're on speaking terms.

And I'm like, hey, Flex, you know, I'm trying to put on a little bit more conditioning and muscle since I flipped over from equipped to raw.

What are some of the best ways that I can do that?

He goes, I never got bigger or stronger than doing sets of 25.

And I'm like,

man, fuck, I never do 25.

You know, I mean, so you're starting to think it's like a power look.

You're like, well, 25 does a couple of things.

One, it gives me an insane amount of volume.

But two, it also controls my intensity.

Because if I can do it for 25, there's no way it's going to reduce my power output long term.

So long story short,

I started implementing 25 and I start reading my books from Isarin and Mevdiev and Zatiorski.

And they're talking about things at around 40%

or for RPE are still heavily conducive to creating one rep max strength.

So now I have my

percentage or my rate of perceived exertion rate that I need to go at.

So I have the rep range, I have that.

And then I start thinking about doing,

I start reading into

a couple of Isaran and Mediev's books, and they start talking about doing exercises that are warming up, that are that are priming motor patterns.

So I'm like, okay, well, if I'm squatting, I need to do a squat type movement.

And then I'm going to select two different weaknesses based on my structural integrity of where my maxes are showing me that I have certain muscle groups that are not firing correctly or not playing their part in the squat, the bench press or the deadlift.

So I'm like, well, you can never have enough triceps and lats for bench, and you can never have enough hamstrings, glute activation for deadlift, and

never enough core bracing for both the deadlift and lower back.

So a lot of those major muscle groups were also accounted for.

So then I started reading on Alexeyev.

And for those people that don't know, Alexeyev was from the old Russian system and he did a 15-minute warm-up with a 50-pound kettlebell before he would touch a barbell.

And this dude's work capacity was crazy.

So we're talking like 250 kettlebell swings with a 50-pound kettlebell before he touches a barbell.

And I'm thinking, man, this guy's work capacity must be fucking off the charts.

So now I have a time limit.

So now I know, okay, around 14 minutes, 25 reps, select exercises that prime motor pattern, and then also fix two weaknesses and then rotate those.

And so I started plugging them in and I started off very, very easily.

So thinking about this, like I was using 30-pound dumbbells to bench press 600 pounds.

So this is where a lot of people screw up on the warm-up is they go way too heavy.

And so I started playing around with lap pull downs and tricep push downs and bench pressing with these lighter weights.

And I did it in a quick sense where my work capacity was up, my heart rate was around 140.

And then I would rest two to three minutes and I'd go straight into the squats or I'd go straight into the bench press training.

And what I noticed was in about eight months, I went to a full meet and squatted the all-time world record and then benched 606 like an empty bar.

Probably could have done 622 that day.

And that's when I knew I was on to work capacity.

Like I needed to have higher work capacity to get stronger.

And that's where a lot of people screw up because, like, oh, I don't want to do more than 10 or 12 because that's not the hypertrophy range.

Or I don't, as a power lifter, I don't want to do more than five because now it's not strength inducing.

That's all bullshit.

Really, the trick is, is what repetition ranges is your body not seen?

Because we, once you get past beginner gains, it's all about law of accommodation.

So if you get used to a certain program style and say you use it for anywhere from three weeks to three months, at some point in time, that program is going to take away more than it is going to give.

And a lot of it's because you're mastering the movements versus actually mastering the energy systems.

So, what you have to do is you have to start looking at it in a full spectrum scale on things that you may be avoiding in your training, including repetition ranges.

That's the funny thing is like the rep range scheme, I think

I would personally say that

I think a lot of bodybuilders can take heedfulness from professional competitive powerlifters in regards to how structured their training is, like their high focus on warm-up and mobility and exercise variants, because I think that there's a slightly greater focus on longevity and becoming bulletproof when it comes to the powerlifting culture versus the bodybuilding culture.

There's a lot to that because the ligament and tendon density is set at higher volume ranges.

So if you look at a lot of Vorbyev and Mevdiev's work back in the 70s, they knew that higher volumes created more ligament tendon density at moderate to low intensity ranges.

But if you read a lot of stuff on,

like right now, the biggest researcher on hypertrophy is

Schoonfeld out in the University of Kansas.

And he says that there's no difference between doing sets of 10 versus sets of 30.

Yeah.

So he's starting to show that these

go ahead.

Oh, nothing.

I was just recalling that.

That's like a study that I'm pretty sure stan everting always recalls too right yeah so think about it if in your training cycle if you're hitting heavy efforts so we're going to put this in more of a bodybuilding perspective but if you're hitting a heavy efforts around sixes and eights hard as you can go then you're doing stuff at 25 reps which is moderate intensity high volume then you're doing stuff at higher velocities and slower velocities where's the weak link in your training and the answer is none so now it's just optimizing which one your body adapts to the best, which is going to be very considerate of your fiber types.

So some of us have type 2, A, and B differences,

you know, type 1 differences.

But now we know through Chinese research that there's 30 different types of fiber plus.

So now we have all these hybrid fibers floating around that people have different abilities to grow at different rates from.

So, you know, Ronnie Coleman grew really well training really fucking heavy.

Yeah.

Whereas guys like Jay Cutler didn't train as heavy, but grew because he was probably a little bit more type one.

So again, without a muscle biopsy, we don't know this, but you know, it's hard because I think bodybuilding, especially people that are uneducated, they only understand what worked for them.

And so, you know, people like, well, Ronnie, that wouldn't work for me because I'm not Ronnie Coleman.

Well, you don't know that unless you have a fiber test, you know what I mean?

Dumb.

Exactly.

But

something I actually, something I actually advise for people to do, because I totally agree with you.

Everything is so individually, individual-based, especially even when it comes to things like PEDs that people will completely just

brush by.

But I actually got my genetics tested.

Like I got my raw data from 23andMe, and my boy and I placed it into Prometheus to give me a rundown of my genetic predispositions.

And one of them that resonated with me, because I was like, I always just follow what the bodybuilder said or followed what, you know, both bro science and I guess most people will say that you should do.

And I would go between, for example, like the 10 to 12 rep range or so.

And then I started experimenting with high rep ranges.

And then I saw in my genetics that it said I had impaired muscle performance, which means that my gene pair was essentially saying that I would not exceed in a power type movement.

Yeah.

So your type 2x fibers more of an indoor

type 2x fibers are probably not really good.

And if you look at probably 75 to 80 percent of people that even dabble in bodybuilding and get any kind of results, most of them tend to be more slow twitch fiber dominant.

Um, and they grow from doing moderate intensity and moderate volume, um, versus like high-explosive efforts.

But you look at guys like you know, I'm doing a lot of assessments with a lot of different pro teams, and you see a lot of these like running backs, and their legs are giant fucking enormous, and they won't do anything over five or six seconds,

you know, because they're type 2x that's why they're running four 240s you know and so i think it's interesting that you know people will look at who they want to be built like and then think that training like them is going to automatically induce that type of muscle hypertrophy or performance gain and it's it's interesting because the more we start to know the more we realize that that's not true Yeah, I agree.

It just fucking sucks because nobody wants to do 25 plus reps.

No.

you saw a couple years ago when I did, I broke Tom Platt's squat record.

I did 520 for 24 at 42 years old.

And

I was on my ass for about two weeks.

That would be due.

Yeah, it was terrible.

But nobody had done it yet.

And I seen a bunch of people, and I'm like, well, fuck, I do these warm-ups of sets of 25 all the time.

And I'm like, so it wouldn't take me that long.

So literally, I did a three-week wave.

I did 225 for 25, which was just like an intro.

then i did 315 for 25 then i took seven days down and then i did 520 for 24.

um what would you say that your percentage of i mean i guess it's really kind of hard to um kind of hard to estimate but what would you say is like your percentage of your one rep max that you're doing when you're doing these 25 rep sets well it depends um i rotate again for law of accommodation so usually week one they're around three rpe or around 30 percent week two they're around 35 percent and week three they're around 40%.

But I like to base things on rate of perceived exertion because when you read a lot of high-level books, Zatiorski talks about even with high-level athletes, your strength is variable up to 10%,

plus or minus 2% daily due to stressors, hydration, previous training, all this shit.

So when you become a little bit more advanced in training, basing your stuff on percentages, in my opinion, is a really good way to just burn the fuck out too fast.

So if you're basing on RPE, but you're true to yourself,

you know, pushing an RPE of nine should be 90% or roughly that.

But the rate of perceived exertion just allows a little bit more variability in waiving.

You know, I strongly suggest people look up biorhythms.

I think that's another big thing that is a huge factor with how people train.

Biorhythms are something that, you know, we only think that women have menstrual cycles, but men also have cycles of high strength, low strength, high cognitive ability, low cognitive ability that is variable throughout a 30-day process.

And the Russians were dead onto this in the 80s before everything fell apart.

So by knowing that you're going to vary all the time, I think a rate of perceived exertion understanding is much more conducive to a long-term training process.

The problem with bodybuilding and powerlifting, as you well know, people get into it and then most people that start are done within six months to two and a half years.

So they're never really going to see the true upper end of their genetic potential unless you stay with it for at least a decade.

And I'd say that's minimum.

You know, I didn't break my first world record until I'd been training for 16 years.

Hard.

No breaks.

No, I agree.

That's something I say really, really often is

Like you'll see on comments, like, I mean, the comment section hardly really ever matters because most of the people write commenting, especially on like reels and Instagram.

Yeah, don't comment on my fucking shit on YouTube, please.

God,

I'm gonna fucking kill people.

Dude, I like, I even had this guy that I was, uh, what was it?

I think I was buying some food from or something somewhere.

Some, maybe like a coffee shop or something.

And he asked me if I had a, like, a podcast.

And I was like, no way.

Yeah.

You, uh, you followed her or something?

He's like, yeah.

And then I asked if he follows bodybuilding or fitness.

And he's like, no, I, I just, I don't really lift at all.

And I was like, what the fuck?

And I just, I mean, literally, like, TikTok literally just pushes my bodybuilding podcast content to literally people who don't even give a shit about lifting whatsoever.

So I'm like, you know, when you look at these comments, I feel like people should remember to live.

The problem is, is I think people like, and you'll notice this because your following is so much bigger than mine, but you'll, um, you'll look at it and you'll see that even though some people don't like to do it, it's still intriguing to them.

You know, the problem I have is like when somebody doesn't have any either applicable knowledge or schooling knowledge, and then they want to fucking like get on there and tell people they've been doing it for 25 years, you know, and with me with a doctorate and try to like explain to me what I'm doing is wrong, you know.

And I'm like, I have no problem having discussions with people that I feel that are on a similar level, but you know, you click on these people and they got 22 followers, and you know, they look like a mashed up bag of assholes.

I really don't

know what I mean, yeah, for real.

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I think most of the people in my audience, especially the ones that are like, that understand, that do bodybuilding and really like actually care about this, understand that it's really all about time when it comes down to it.

Like not about how freaking hard you're, well, I mean, it is, but not just like how intense you are at a certain moment in time, just not how much,

how big of a dose of PEDs you're on.

It's just literally your time.

Like I always tell people all the time, and I wish I need to make a t-shirt on it, but consistency beats intensity.

You know, if you can go in and train and never miss for five years, you'll be way better off than somebody that goes in, balls the wall, and then has to take two weeks down because they hurt their knee or they pulled their back or they messed up their shoulder, they messed up their elbow.

Like to me, my biggest badge of honor isn't my degrees, it isn't my world records.

It's the fact that I've done this for 33 years with no fucking injuries.

Yeah, that's

more like, but it holds no weight on social media.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

I mean,

on social media, most people want, they want to see the fire, they want to see see the bottle rocket.

They want to see the guy that goes from nothing to insane and then just disappears.

Right.

Yeah, that's

honestly, bro.

That's an insane feat.

And

I think most of the people on the podcast listening will understand how amazing that is and appreciate that, at least the level that I have.

Because it took me,

I've been lifting for about

17 years now.

And it only took me until maybe a couple years ago to actually fucking understand

that I've been doing it too much.

And in some places, such as stretching mobility, I haven't been doing anything.

And that's been causing me, bro, a world of fucking problems.

A world of problems.

Like, I can't even bench press or overhead press with a barbell properly anymore at all because of consistent shoulder impiging.

Are you over in Indiana?

Are you in Purdue?

No, I graduated from Purdue like way back, and then now I'm in LA.

Oh, shit.

I was like, dude, if you're still in Purdue, which is only like three hours from me, man, you need to come over and see if I can fix your technique on shit and see if it can get the pain to go away.

Thanks, man.

Yeah, I'll come out to L.A.

and train with O'Hearn every once in a while, so we'll have to hook up.

Oh, hell yeah.

That'd be awesome.

But yeah, you're absolutely right.

But here's my point.

And I'm reiterating what you're saying.

You didn't learn how to fucking train until you've been doing it for 15 years.

Yeah.

So I don't understand how everybody knows so much only training for six weeks or six months or one year.

It's almost like, you know, and that's the biggest problem i think and i don't know how old you are but my generation i'm 45 is like there wasn't that much information out but there was far less garbage out too so if somebody wrote an article for a big magazine they had to be somebody in the 90s

now anybody can have a voice because of social media and you don't know who's full of shit and who's not so to a beginner it's confusing because you know let's play the opposite sides of the fence you know i'm a big guy i'm not stupid lean, but I'm insanely powerful and strong.

You're super lean and get cut up and do bodybuilding shows.

To the average person, you're going to look like you know more than I do,

right?

Just because just from look, regardless of what, what we know.

And the problem with that is, is like, if you look at a lot of the top level strength coaches and the people that are insanely smart in training, most of them

are very well educated, even probably more so than they know how to train.

Because I mean, I could show you in my library right now, but I have books that I still have to read

chapters and paragraphs multiple times to be able to digest.

And I have a master's in biomechanics and a doctorate in kinesiology.

And I'm like, how can you know all this shit?

You know what I mean?

So

it can be frustrating sometimes.

I think my point being is back in the day, you had to be a Louis Simmons or a Charles Poliquin or somebody like that to have an article in a big magazine.

And now we have all these influencers that don't know shit, but to the mass, to the masses, they know everything.

Right.

And I think part of it too, like going even deeper into what you were saying, is the kind of content that's out these days that, you know, influencers are pushing.

It's not always necessarily wrong.

It's more so that the problem with it is whenever people are creating

polarizing or blanket statements

where people then believe, oh, this is true for literally everybody when that's absolutely false.

I think all the most experienced coaches and athletes that I've spoken to in podcasts or wherever else have always expressed

individuality and

the variance of individuality when it comes to literally like every variable that comes to

these sports.

How we're built is going to change how we probably need to train slightly.

Our age, both chronologically and training age, is going to change how we adapt and also recover from training.

Our natural recovery processes are all different genetically.

Our ability to withstand stress is different.

Our ligament attachments are different.

So, like some people have, like in bodybuilding, for example, some people have a really low tendon insertion and some people have a high tendon insertion that gives their bicep a different look.

That's all genetics.

Some people have wide hips.

Some people have narrow hips and wide shoulders.

All of those things change how you may

produce your training methodology over time.

But I find it interesting that

the people that have stayed in the game for over 20 years with marginal injuries, like guys like me, guys like Stan, when we sit down and talk, we might have small disagreements on how we would apply this shit, but overall, our skeleton model of how we would train is very similar.

I think a lot of it's because we've trained in the, I wouldn't say incorrect, but less, um, less effective ways for longer periods of time to realize that you get to a certain point where you start seeing very similar ideas, maybe being worded differently, maybe being applied differently, but at the structure of itself, very similar.

Um, given that, there's a few things that you've brought up before that I want to discuss that may, I'd say, differ between powerlifting and bodybuilding, but may also have a lot of similarities more than we believe.

But one of them is

stated diversity of training exercise is more important than volume.

Can you explain this?

Well, so volume is

one thing that your body will get to a limit of and it will not be able to respond to more.

You know, this is a lot of the reasons why the Soviets split their workouts into two times a day.

Because they were effectively able to train much longer because there was only an optimal amount of time per workout, which is about 50 minutes.

So, if you train more than 50 minutes, you actually go more catabolic, your hormones are less anabolic, you're actually doing more degradation than good.

So, the Russians started to separate the training into multiple sessions with anywhere from one hour to five-hour breaks, depending on the intensity of the workout.

So, we know that volume parameters are limited in their ability to make the body adapt.

But, what really starts happening is variety starts to play with law of accommodation.

So when you see about 1973, when Mediev and Vorbyev start to apply the conjugate system training, which is various types of movements, in about 73 to 74, the training volume effectively doubled because they were not able to

produce so much damage in the exact same motor pattern.

So if you use the exact same exercise all the time, you're going to get the exact same mileage and wear on a joint.

But if I attack the muscle from a slightly different angle or a slightly different position or a slightly different speed or a slightly different type of resistance like bands or chains, then what I start to find is that my body can accommodate to multiple different types of movements, but the same movement over and over and over again starts to create a mileage problem.

So if we know that there's an upper echelon of volume, what's the only thing we can train or change?

We can only change the variety of the exercise in which we're employing the volume.

That's, that's kind of what that means.

Does that make sense?

No, it makes all the sense.

Cause I think that's,

I mean, for me, my personal opinion is that only becomes more and more important as you become more and more experienced.

And for me, myself, too, I

I ramped up my volume way too quickly after my last prep, like way too fast.

And I just really wanted to grow my lats and my triceps, which I know that coincidentally, you've also said is two of the greatest weaknesses that people have, especially when it comes to benching and powerlifting.

And so I wanted to bring those up a lot.

So

I did a crap ton of like straight arm lat pull downs and then tricep extensions and then also a crap ton of like

I was doing a lot of I've been

I haven't been prioritizing front delts or like, I guess, like overhead pressing because I've had the shoulder shoulder issue.

So I was starting to do front raises.

And so what seemed to happen is I just

I was just overdoing these exact same movements that had the same like internal rotating and external rotating type of motions.

And I ended up having shoulder impingement in both my shoulders.

So

following your point almost to a T,

I get a lot of emails on the website and people that come in for assessments at the gym and they're like, hey, I follow your stuff and I do a lot of lats and a lot of triceps, but I'm getting, my elbows are starting to get inflamed and pissed off.

Do you have any advice?

I'm like, well, what are you doing for triceps?

Well, I do V-bar pushdowns.

V-bar pushdowns with a cable.

Yeah.

Do you use an easy bar with your hand backwards?

Do you use an easy bar with your hand this way?

Do you use a rope?

Do you do it overhead?

Do you do it cross body?

See, so now you start breaking up how can you do the same exact tricep extension with a slightly different variable as soon as they reapply that the elbow and joint pain completely goes away the problem being with bodybuilding and powerlifting both share is the fact that you can train those muscles as strong or as hypertrophied as you want but as soon as that joint gets pissed off those muscles don't mean shit

right yep yep it's like having a thousand horsepower engine in a car with a cracked frame it's not going to go anywhere.

Yeah.

Right.

And so that's what I try to tell people.

It's like most people's training needs to be cognitively protecting the joint and the joint mileage that the training is producing.

And if you can do that with variety, you're going to reduce that injury by probably five to ten fold, which is much of the reason why I was able to stay world class for 23 years.

I have, um, I know I have a lot of the younger audience, a lot of people that are maybe in the age of like being in college as well.

And that's something kind of I want to press is I think most of these people or

at least a lot of athletes are starting to get a little bit more aware of

doing warm-ups and being,

I think, uh, conscious of their bodies and being bulletproof.

But there's still a fuck ton that aren't, just like I was.

And,

you know, man, when I was younger, I fucking thought like, you know, I could literally go in after like a night of drinking and then then go hit a PR on bench press and I like didn't even warm up.

And I would like do that all the fucking time.

And now that I am like really focusing on going to Olympia, but I'm like much, much closer to my 30s.

I have fucking pains everywhere, bro.

And I'm like, I don't think I should be having this much pain at this age already.

And I'm just really.

I'm just glad on my side of the ball.

I didn't break my first world record until I was 28.

So I really didn't start getting any like little small pains until I was 36, 37.

Yeah, and that's fucking insane to me.

Yeah, I started squatting like I squatted over 1,000 pounds at least 16 times in competition, over 1,100 about eight times, and then 1,200 in 2011.

Jeez.

And my knees and my back are fine.

But my point being is I did not use a straight bar squat constantly to build those up.

I used bars that brought out my weaknesses with lighter weights.

So

I'm six foot one, so I'm pretty tall.

So for me to squat those kind of weights, my technique has to be absolutely perfect.

The safety bar made my torso taller.

Therefore, to keep my chest up higher, I use the safety bar a lot.

And it made it, when I put a bar on my back, it felt like I was six inches shorter.

And so I trained with that bar constantly because it brought out my weaknesses, which was my anthropometric height.

So point being is, is like a lot of times the exercises that you suck at and the ones that you avoid because you don't feel like a fucking superhero in the gym are probably the ones that are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck, whether it be muscle hypertrophy or strength.

It doesn't matter.

Yep.

Yep.

Right.

So if you suck at sumo, pull sumo until you at least get proficient at it.

If you're really good at bench pressing really wide and you suck narrow, where's your weakness?

Right.

So if there's anything that anybody takes away from this is 60% of your training should be based around your shortcomings and your weaknesses, whether that be in strength or in size because a lot of times you know when somebody's super strong they don't tend to have a lot of imbalances when somebody's super bodybuilding prepped and they win a lot of shows they're balanced correct so if you have really strong quads and weak hamstrings that's going to show on stage it's also going to show in your squad

make sense so that's where we share a lot of similarities right

For this one, for this muscle group, I have trouble with this one personally, and I know a lot of other people do too.

And I was talking to Stefan Kiensl.

I'm not sure if you know that coach, but

that's the coach of like Ers and Wesley Vizors and Martin Fitzwater.

He said the same thing about Wesley because Wesley's lacking in his hamstrings.

But for hamstring strength and just overall growth.

Is there any like variation of exercises that you would recommend?

Yeah, I mean, you know, we train.

My hamstrings are probably just about as jacked as my quads.

I can actually send you pictures.

Because like at my prime about six years ago, my quadriceps were hanging off the side of my hamstring.

I mean, it looked like from the back end, like full-blown, like Olympia pro-level bodybuilding.

And I was only taking a CC a week of Cipionate, which is nothing.

But my point is, is like, if you want really strong hamstrings, you have to be proficient at glute ham raises.

But I say that proficiency in glute ham raises tends to be much better of a hamstring builder for heavier guys.

So if you're like 200 pounds, you should be able to do fucking hamstrings.

But if you're 300 pounds and you're doing sets of 10 on him on GHRs, your hamstrings are fucking ginormous.

That's that's crazy.

Right?

I was doing like 300 pounds, that would be insane.

Like a failure set on GHRs when I weighed 310.

Yeah.

Right.

So point being is some exercises are going to be better for some people or other other people depending on body weight and size.

But my opinion, if you want a fucking jacked posterior chain and hamstrings, you're going to have to plug in good mornings.

Like to me, my hamstrings never got more jacked than doing safety bar good mornings.

And at my strongest, I was doing 635 for triples when I was delifting 822.

And my hamstrings looked like they would just come off of my glute.

Like, you know, and it really transferred.

but i think that would be very a very good exercise the problem is that a good morning you can screw it up real easy and fuck up your back yeah so again some of the best exercises to use can without professional assistance be some of the most damaging and harmful exercises another one is stiff-legged sumo deadlifts i think they build a lot of mass in the hamstring that in certain areas most people don't have because bodybuilders don't do a lot of shit wide

you know and i I think that can create a huge, a huge advance to your hamstrings as well.

And then also following tempos.

I think I'm a huge proponent, if you're trying to put on muscle mass, to slowing down both the concentric and the eccentric based on removing stretch reflex.

So we can argue all day about when you come up concentrically as strong as possible, which a lot of people talk about, that's awesome, but you're using a lot of stored kinetic energy in the tendon.

And when you're trying to to just put on muscle mass, you want to negate the tendon out of the movement as much as possible.

And the only way to do that is to slow down the contraction.

So again, do your, like people listening, go do hamstring curls on whatever machine you want and do them at your normal speed.

And then I want you to do it at a 3-3 tempo with the same weight.

And tell me how much fucking harder that is.

Yeah.

Right.

So if you're limited on, you don't have a good coach and you, you know, you don't know if you're doing good mornings correctly or you got a bad back, which a lot of people do,

do your shit slower and that'll make your hamstrings grow like crazy.

Um, going off of eccentrics, you and Dr.

Mike had a little debate regarding fast versus slow eccentrics, right?

I don't know what the debate is.

His fucking numbers on

his numbers, his power thing numbers are terrible.

I thought, okay, this guy's going to be like 700 squatter, 700 delifter, you know, 500 bencher.

And it's like, his numbers were equivalent to what I did at 13 years old.

Now, I'm not saying he doesn't know anything about hypertrophy.

That dude is smart as shit, but the reason we had the discussion is he used one of my bench press videos when I was doing 225 for 60 reps.

He used one of my bench press videos to tell people to not move quickly on an eccentric.

And so I'm like, okay, you want to open up these can of worms?

Here we go.

So the point is, is that fast eccentrics actually have a lot of stimulation of type 2x fiber.

So I'm not saying that they will make you more hypertrophy than doing slow eccentrics, but there are places in your annual cycle that you should have faster eccentrics to be built into your training only because the type 2x fibers get heavily stimulated from that.

But as we know, most people are only say 20%

type 2x fiber.

So if you're training mostly to 80% fiber and you're missing that last 20%,

there should be 20% of your year based on being more one more of a fucking athlete and then two training the motor units and the muscle tissue that are not normally trained in a traditional hypertrophy phase that's it's my thought press thought process on that and that includes fast eccentrics

that makes sense i mean obviously especially if you're trying to train with those fast movements as a powerlifter you would want to implement that in your program yeah at least somewhere you're trying to be a bodybuilder why are you going to negate the other 20 of muscle tissue you're never turning on with with slow stuff

you know yeah on on on average moving slower and more controlled eccentric is going to put on more muscle but you still have that other 20 of type 2x that needs fast motion in order to be stimulated tying them all together is a huge advantage to not only powerlifting but also bodybuilding

gotcha gotcha

that's cool yeah i mean you know like i said i i've studied that pretty extensively.

And bands will actually, the real power to band training is that it increases the eccentric speed.

So think about this.

In bands, you don't need gravity.

I can go to outer space and if I have a blue band, it's 200 pounds of tension.

It's 200 pounds of tension with no gravity.

But you attach that band to a gravitational weight like a barbell.

it's going to accelerate how fast it's getting thrown to the ground and now instead of 9.81 meters per second squared

it's going to travel faster, meaning you have to react to it faster.

So the muscles at the spindle, Golgi tendon, and all that shit actually learn how to fire better on band tension under a faster eccentric.

So when the weight goes to normal weight, take the bands away.

Now you have an accelerated ability to control.

a weight that only wants to fall at gravity speed.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

Make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So in regards to to uh

overhead pressing i remember you stating uh a lot of guys did a lot of overhead pressing and then now you're saying that or at least a lot of these guys now can't

wash their hair

yeah um can you talk about that a little bit because yeah i feel like i'm sorry to get there

i did a youtube video on it but um basically and i have i have very detailed video on my patreon but it's a couple of years back and long story short um i'm in graduate school and i've taken a pre-med anatomy class where we got to to work on cadavers.

Well, the retired surgeon was a shoulder surgeon that worked on shoulder replacements, rotator cuff surgeries, and he just didn't want to be a surgeon anymore.

He just wanted to teach.

And I had just gotten back from Louis Simmons and Louis Simmons, I was having some shoulder pain.

I'm 19.

So I'm bench pressing 500 at 19 years old.

You know, I'm a phenom.

I'm going over to Louis's place.

And I'm telling Louie like, yeah, man, my shoulders are just, they weren't, they weren't like pissed, but they were agitated.

And he's like well how much overhead press are you doing i'm like well i come from the old school man we do like shoulder presses like once a week he's like cut out those shoulder presses they're gonna your shoulder up and beat you down and blah blah blah and i'm thinking what the like all the dudes that i knew like ed cohen bill kasmire the guy that taught me timmy smith was a 500 pound bencher at 181 body weight in the early 80s they all did military presses and i all plus you'd think once a week isn't that much right no you know i mean you don't think well he goes well come in the next week, the next week, the next day, which was like, we were there on class on like Wednesday.

He said, come in on Monday a couple hours early and I'll walk you through it.

So I come into the cadaver lab.

He's got a full shoulder fillet with the arm up in the air.

And he's showing me how the actual bone is unstable in its joint.

and it's grinding itself to pieces.

He goes, I have done shoulder replacements and shoulder surgeries on about, you know, 1,500 different people.

And most most of them their jobs required them to have their hands over their head i.e electrical line workers iron workers pipe fitters things like that and I'm thinking these guys are only lifting like a hundred pounds tops over their head on a fairly consistent basis and now we got dudes doing like fucking 315 behind the neck like for reps

the problem is is that The position of your shoulder cannot withstand a lot of pressure in that particular angle.

And some people's joints, again, it's individual, but some people's joints are not structurally designed to withstand that pressure at that angle for very long.

Just because your body can do it doesn't mean you should do it.

And so as I got away from the overhead pressing, and keep in mind, I'm already benching 500 pounds.

Within the next year and a half, I'm bench pressing 550 and my shoulders feel like I'm 14 again.

And I was like, he was right.

And now that might just be transferring over to the bench press.

And I was never trying to develop that full cap shoulder like a bodybuilder would be.

But again, we're talking about extreme goals.

You know, like I think if you want to be an Olympia and you need to do overhead presses to have the best shoulders in the world, dude, I'm fucking all for it.

But just remember that at 50 years old, you're going to pay for that shit.

Right.

Versus.

For me, it wasn't worth the mileage to bench press 600 pounds in a full competition, and I knew I could do without without it.

So I think there might be other alternatives that we might be able to do other than military pressing that might be more

sustainable to the shoulder joint.

But when you see a shoulder completely filleted and you see that that humerus bone sitting in a full upward position, you can see what that surgeon was saying is why would you do compressive movements downward in a position that's grinding basically taking your shoulder and grinding itself to pieces

Some figures recommend doing, if they're going to do overhead presses for their anterior delts, some recommend doing it on like even like a slight incline.

Yep,

you agree?

Okay.

Yeah, because then you're not straight overhead.

You're kind of a little bit more here.

Right.

And that's going to let it work a little bit better, but pure strict overhead, totally against.

And again, I'm not saying that I don't do them maybe once or twice a year, but I think it's important for people to realize it shouldn't be a a part of your annual training cycle on a regular basis.

Gotcha.

Right.

But the point is crazy.

Like I focus mostly on my triceps and my rear delts.

The last time that I did a seated military press just to fuck around, because I had this argument with somebody in the gym that came in from out of town.

I did seated militaries to the chin 405 for free.

So 405 for three seated, and I don't even do them?

So I'm wondering, do people even even need to do them to get better at them?

I don't know.

So, you know, it's interesting, but yes, I would agree that if you're trying to get that upper cap and you don't want the damage of the shoulder, you're better off going on a very steep incline.

I feel like some loaded work in that area,

like you're saying, will definitely help people at least not get injured when they decide to go like, oh, I'm going to max out on a 405 by three reps.

But obviously, like you're saying, I think also part of the problem is it's hard for us to really guess where that

the like level of volume is for us, where it starts affecting us negatively, or at least our structure negatively.

Yeah, yeah, and it's it's a huge factor because, again, everybody's a little bit different and some people might be able to get away with it.

My great friend, Michael Hearn, he does military shit all the time.

He's almost 60 years old, and he doesn't have any shoulder problems.

But I'm here to tell you, most people ain't fucking Michael Hearn.

But that dude's got genetics that are not from this earth.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Honestly, speaking of Michael Hearn,

I listened to some of your Michael Hearn stories

stating why Michael Hearn is clearly on trend.

Those stories are actually fucking insane.

But

I think some of the people in the audience probably haven't heard it.

So honestly, I think I would just like them to hear some of it because to be honest, I didn't even know that he did all those things as a kid.

And to know how he looks so great at this age is kind of unbelievable to me.

The problem problem is, most people have never looked up what Michael Hearn looked like at 16 years old.

He looked better than Jay Cutler at that age by far.

He was also an amazing powerlifter at a young age.

He was also trained by a lot of some of the top powerlifters in the area in the Seattle, Oregon area.

And so he had an amazing background in that.

Plus, he was like you and I.

He's fucking OCD about this shit.

But he's OCD in a way more like you, where OCD not only trickled into training, it also trickled into diet.

For me, I kind of wish that I would have went a different path because I knew at six foot one, I had to weigh 305 pounds in order to break world records.

There was no way I was going to do that at 220 or 242.

With Mike, I think he realized that he was all, he's about an inch or so taller than me.

He realized that powerlifting, his body wasn't going to last for that.

He flips over into doing more of a bodybuilding style training albeit much heavier than most people train for bodybuilding so i commend him for that but um the amount of workload that he does is unbelievable and i've lived with him for a number of weeks and i can honestly tell you the only time i've ever seen him eat a cheat meal was when i went to his 50th birthday party me and ct fletcher were sitting there eating together and mike ate a three inch by three inch square piece of red velvet cake that is the only time i've ever seen him eat something bad where I'm like, holy shit, like totally,

that's totally respectable, but that fucking ain't me, dude.

You know what I mean?

Like, I, you know, I, to get as big as I got and as strong as I got, I had to eat a fuckload of calories.

And there was no way I was going to do that clean.

You know what I mean?

I was eating somewhere around 8,000 calories, but yeah, I mean, he,

we met in like 2001 or two.

I had just won my first collegiate national title.

I come into Venice Beach.

He's standing there looking like a fucking psycho.

And he's like, hey, I know you.

You're that big strong kid from Indiana.

And I'm like, yeah, he goes, you want to squat with me?

I'm like, sure.

So I kick his ass by a plate on the squats.

And ever since then, we've been friends.

But there's some shit he can do that I cannot do.

He can do,

he came to my gym in 2018.

We were running a seminar together and we were doing dynamic speed work, right?

He doesn't train speed work.

And he's like, Yeah, I'll do what you're doing.

You come out to Venice Beach, you do what I do.

I'll come to your gym.

I'll do what you do.

He beat my fucking ass in my own lift.

He bench pressed.

We did 185 with 120 pounds of band and 120 pounds of chain.

I got 29 reps on a burnout set.

He got fucking 33.

Damn, Jesus.

And he's 20 years older than me.

And I'm just like, what the living fuck?

This is unbelievable.

Like, just that's when I realized, you know, nobody can stay peeled for 35 years on that, on drugs like that.

You know, trend is probably one of the most toxic drugs you can take.

It has horrible health side effects to it.

I never even fucked with it because of the side effects.

Nobody can stay on the drugs that would take for him to stay that lean and that strong year-round for 40 years.

He'd already be dead.

Yeah, I'm so glad you say that because, like, I understand the jokes and the memes, but like today, obviously, trend is literally just a meme word for today's normies.

Trend twins, all this shit.

Yeah, man.

Crazy.

Trend is, even though it's super popular, it's amazingly toxic.

And it's probably one of the worst drugs you can take in your system next to probably Anadrol.

You know, Anadrol is highly toxic as well, but

I think it gives

the wrong kind of template for younger kids that maybe are hard gainers and don't want to put in the five or 10 or 15 years and have the patience.

Most people that I know that were at Westside Barbell that fucked around with Trend ended up with horrific muscle tears, horrific blood pressure problems, horrific issues that caused all kinds of injuries.

And they were only taking it for short dosages, like six or 10 weeks.

And I think that that's a huge problem.

And sometimes, too, genetically, some people can take one drug and get extremely jacked on it.

Other people, it just raises their blood pressure and makes them unhealthy.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep.

I agree.

I've been talking with a lot of people too about how some people will like feel fine off of trend and other people, obviously, it makes them go haywire.

And I'm one of those people where like

if I take even like if I take like 150 milligrams of trend, which was the highest I took at this last prep, just because I finally felt up to like trying trend for the first time and I felt totally fine, didn't feel anything until I ramped up the dosage and then was probably on maybe past week six and i started having some pretty aggressive and edgy thoughts it wasn't anything crazy but i just could tell like i was like

like everybody's a fucking enemy yeah you got pretty chill with it and some people like for you it affects it affects your cognitive function for other people it just turns them purple And I've seen, this is no shit.

This is a great, this is a great thing for beginners.

I had a kid that came that used to drive 45 minutes to bench with us.

This was like 10 years ago.

This kid had the worst fucking genetics in the world.

I'm talking like bottom of the barrel, fucking anytime fitness, terrible shit, right?

And this kid weighed like 195.

He came in with about a 160 bench.

So under 60 pounds.

This guy was terrible.

Within about six months, we had him to 225.

And he is bugging the piss out of me to take testosterone.

Oh, man, if I took some gear, I'd get stronger.

If I took this, I'd get better.

I go, dude, I'm not going to help you get any of that.

But if you want to get it yourself, I will tell you what I think is the optimal dosage of about the limit of what you can take and not have problems, which I consider that to be about three and a half CCs a week.

So we're looking at 800 milligrams roughly a week.

His bench in 12-week cycle of running almost three CCs of testosterone a week went to 240.

It did nothing but he looked so purple his back had tons of acne on it he didn't have good receptors for the drug yeah

so i think one of the biggest things that we don't realize is that pro-bodybuilding is mostly set up in your genetic makeup of how sensitive you are to taking chemicals and what they do to your body and then having the immune system and the genetics to not have a fucking kill you yeah um you know yeah for sure um i think that's another thing that's kind of funny about people joking about Mike O'Hearn being on trend is like, you know, I don't like to really,

I know that there's a lot of people like Greg who like to do the whole natty or not stuff.

And it's, it's fun if you're like joking around.

Obviously, it's kind of hard to tell when Greg's joking.

But

I just like

like if

Mike is or ever took any compounds, like it's clear that he just knows what the fuck he's doing.

And obviously he's not taking trend.

Yeah, and you don't see you don't see the traditional drug profile and what I mean by that is you don't see him get insanely bloated and then get insanely lean or then lose a bunch of muscle mass and then put it back

constantly fucking peeled with a shitload of muscle all the time and he stays strong all the time.

That's not drugs.

Like that's just not drugs.

And even if he is taking shit, he's doing it in moderate dosages because he doesn't have any fluctuation.

Yeah.

You know, he always looks lean.

He's never retaining water.

He's always strong.

And so different drugs would require different motives of what they would do.

You know, Windstrawl helps you get a little bit stronger, but actually dries you out.

If he was taking a lot of Windstrawl, he'd get a lot of muscle tears for how much weight he lifts.

Right?

If he was taking a ton of tests, he'd be red.

He'd be as red as a fucking tomato constantly.

Right.

So, whatever he's doing is fucking working because the dude stays strong, peeled, and muscular all year round.

Yeah, it's pretty unreal.

Plus, you know, anyone who like decides to take something like, say that, for example, like hypothetically, you were to take a test and master on, master on, I mean, like a medium dose, so you could look dry and stuff.

After a certain point, like say that it's an anthate after like 16 weeks or so.

Bro, like the dryness, the cosmetic look, it's going to slowly dissipate.

And at that point, it's like, what are you, what's the next move for you you to do?

So it's like,

whatever he's doing is insanely crazy, intricate.

And in my personal opinion, would probably have to be fairly moderate and nothing crazy in order for him to be able to do that.

Like I said, the only thing I can tell you his superpower is.

Yeah.

The only thing I can tell you his superpower is from what I've seen.

And like I said, I've lived with him for two weeks and he never took anything in front of me.

And I'll tell you this.

When somebody only eats a three-inch by three-inch piece of red velvet cake on their birthday once a year,

that's

insane so people can talk about eating clean and go through phases of eating clean this dude's eaten clean for like 40 years

so if you're gonna eat clean for 40 years and you're measuring out your food and you know you're doing everything right i mean the the potential could be you could look like michael earn if you have pretty decent genetics yeah and you're willing to train that hard all the time

you know i don't think i'm the best example but it's obviously the easiest thing i can think of because it's me but when I was a kid, I was like obese and I just looked like crap.

And if you ever see my shirt, yeah, yeah,

if you ever see my family, too, I like they're great and everything, but they're they're they're Asian and they're just stereotypical smart people.

Um, and the you know, like freaking sports and bodybuilding is literally the last thing they'll touch, especially anything regarding lifting.

I mean, it's a labor of love, you know, there's only a handful of us make any kind of money.

I can tell you this, for being a professional powerlifter for 20-something years, I probably made $65,000 in prize money.

Now my sponsors have been pretty decent and some of them I still retain.

But yeah, I mean, if you're doing this for money, there's only maybe

a thousand of us, I'd say, that make enough money to live on, where it's like our, you know, our bread and butter.

That's not a good dice roll as far as 400 million people in this, you know, in this country.

And you're going to base it that a couple of hundred are actually making enough money because it's hard to gauge that because

people show you what they want you to see.

You know, I think you look at dudes like Wes Watson and stuff that are renting these Bentleys and like all these cars and like showing these mansions.

I mean, how do we know that that's not Airbnb and those aren't rentals?

Like, we don't really know.

And I'm not saying that they are, but my point is, is like, people only see what they want you to see.

So I think the people that are trying to pretend that they're making all this money in the fitness industry, I would say half of them are full of shit.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah, probably.

Yeah,

yeah, half.

I'm not being generous, I think, probably half.

Yeah, um,

even if they are being themselves to a degree, there's a lot of uh exaggeration for the camera, you know, there's a lot of pushing.

So, I mean, sometimes it's kind of almost a subconscious thing for some people, especially a younger person who might not have,

you know, you understand the tendencies.

Well, what, yeah, what drives people to do want to do bodybuilding and power thing?

Usually it comes from an insecurity, right?

You were a chubby kid, probably got made fun of.

You know, I was a kid that felt like I was behind all of my peers and I had lost my dad.

And so I wanted to go to the gym to find new father figures.

That was an insecurity that drove me into the gym.

So I'm sure that other people had it way worse than us that created certain types of personalities that we can see this being a problem.

Right.

Right.

And I think that's that's why, even to this day, like back then, and even now, obviously, there are people that live some crazy fucking and unfortunate lives.

And I hear stories about this all the time that I love just sharing.

And I had a podcast with Tony Obyrne, who basically expressed his insane childhood and why he became an Olympian.

But I think given that,

It's hard for us not to say that there are definitely kids out there that don't even care whether or not they die doing something because of what they've been through.

So I think that's

why I think maybe these days with social media being an opportunity, we can see so much of this like right on our phone, seeing people do things that are a little bit less considerate of their health.

And I just don't, one of the reasons why I started this podcast is I don't want that misinformation to be believed as like,

like widespread knowledge that everybody does or should do this.

What I do.

And like then we're all blanketed under the same, the same thought process, which is not true at all.

You know, and I think people don't realize how valuable their time is until you notice that your time is limited.

So the problem is like, you know, yeah, when you're 40, everybody's bulletproof at 20.

But when you're 45, 50, you start looking at time as a different type of currency, right?

You start looking at it as like, you know, I just turned 45 a couple of months ago and it's amazing because I look back and I don't think there's enough money on the table for me to go back to the lifestyle in which it took me to break those world records.

Because I realized like, you know, I'm sure you saw maybe Saul and Dave Tates.

I didn't go to my brother's wedding because I was prepping for squatting 1,200 pounds.

That's the type of mentality I had to have to be that good because I wasn't a genetically gifted dude like John Hack.

I wasn't a genetically gifted person that could miss workouts.

I was so OCD with what I was doing and a lot of that just wasn't worth it.

But at the time, I looked at all this energy and time that I had invested into getting to this point that nothing was going to stand in my way.

And so I think that for the guys that want to be the best they can be in the world, their work ethic overrides everything in their life.

You know, I kind of got a lot of that from watching a lot of documentaries on Larry Bird when I was a kid, because in Indiana, Larry Bird was like fucking Jesus.

And he was not the best athlete on the court, but he outworked everybody.

You know, and that's how he got three MVPs and won a bunch of world titles.

It wasn't because he was the prettiest looking shooter or the best physical capacity basketball player, but he outsmarted and outworked everybody.

And so I had to do that.

And for me to be any good, and

I had to outlast people as well.

And I think that if anybody can take anything away from it, it's like, if you want something bad enough, you can get there.

But sometimes your time parameter is a little skewed.

You know, I like to use this analogy by Charles Poliquin.

He used to say people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in five years.

Right?

I think that's pretty on point.

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I think what all of us need to understand, I mean, most people understand this, I think, listening to the podcast, but I think what we need to always consistently remind ourselves is the faster we go now, or the harder we go right now for something, we're going to have a consequence later on, right?

And in my personal opinion,

even though it's

not as, in my opinion, not as like wholesome

as the other consequences, I think the most

noticeable one that people care about is it hurts your potential.

Like you fucking go super, super hard now, and it can hurt your potential a long time later when you could, you know,

be a world champion in powerlifting or an Olympian in bodybuilding.

Sure.

Well, the big thing is, I try to tell people this all the time, and they can believe it or not believe it, doesn't matter to me.

But 2003 was my peak natural

ability.

I won USAPL Drug Test A Collegiate Nationals, squatted 826, bench pressed 572, and deadlifted 722.

And then I took fucking drugs.

I was already top 20 in the world in my weight class, then took drugs, turned pro, and then became a world champion three years later, not three weeks later.

And the point is, is that everything was slow and methodical and smart.

And again,

Building a natural base and having a natural kind of foundation to your training is super important because in my opinion, the drugs, I think, maybe play a bigger part in bodybuilding than powerlifting, but the drugs and powerlifting, which I can speak on, they only add 10 or 12%.

Well, where do you want that 10 or 12% to kick on when you're benching fucking 225 or 550?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because 12% at 550 is a shitload.

12% at 225, like the dude I was telling you that traveled with us was jack shit.

Yeah.

So again, for those small, quick gains like what you're talking about in the beginning, being impatient really sets you up for failure long term.

That's why I'm always surprised when people say like bodybuilders use way more doses when they first start off and then now they're using less to maintain.

Now, the truth is using less to maintain isn't, is like completely true.

You hardly need as much, not even close to as much to maintain.

But in my opinion, though, every single time when you use something, you end up having to titrate up if you want to have the same response after a period of time, right?

Like we talked in the beginning about training, right?

But there's only so much volume that you can put in, even with drugs, until you have to change the drug.

You have to change the stimulus somehow in order for you to get a different or better result.

And I don't think that really holds any different with drugs.

You know, you can only take so much testosterone until you're going to have to switch over to equipoise or mastaron or primabolin or some of these other designer level drugs in order to get to those different receptors.

The same thing holds true with training.

If you're just back squatting with a straight bar and straight weight constantly, there is a ceiling limit to that because you can't just keep doing more.

You have to do better and different.

Right.

What are some of the dumbest things you've seen athletes do with gear?

On gear or out?

I've seen, actually, this is what's more fucked up.

I've seen more drug-free, free people train like fucking idiots than I have drug people.

I don't know why.

You know, I get in arguments constantly.

Well, you know, Matt, you were on drugs, so that's why you only had to squat twice a week to get world class.

And then you talk to these amateurs and they're squatting like three and four times a week.

And I'm like, how can you recover from that?

Like, how can you really put any intent into the thing?

So I find that.

Not always, but a lot of drug-free athletes actually train dumber than people that are on drugs.

I don't know.

You know, coming from Westside Barbell, it's kind of defining you're dumb.

But,

you know,

I saw

a guy named Jeremiah Myers was one of my training partners at Westside Barbell.

Came in still shit-faced from the night before and pulled 865 deadlift drunk.

Damn.

Like smashed.

Like was like doing this while he was standing, but once he grabbed the bar, he was, he was good.

And I'm like, what the fuck?

I've seen Jerry Obrodovich, which you probably don't know who that is, but he won the Arnold Classic and the bench press in the late 90s.

He did that on a two-week crack bench.

So he ended up getting, I think, some money from a person dying, and it was real sad for him.

It was like his uncle or something.

And he took all that money and smoked crack.

for two weeks straight.

Louis went and got him from the crack house, put him in the car, took him to his house and detoxed him for 24 hours he went to the arnold classic and bench pressed like 770.

damn yeah totally insane i mean that's not really drugs but that's different kind of drugs but that's the type of shit that we saw on a monthly basis at west side barbell you know what i mean

it's crazy

yeah

um

do you happen to have your own like worst experience or mistake uh that you've ever had with PEDs just for maybe anything that might help.

I had the mistake of thinking that growth hormone was going to make me stronger.

It did get me leaner and I did feel better on it, but I didn't gain one ounce of strength on GH.

So that was, in my opinion, at the time, a waste of money.

I was always a very big.

What's that?

Do you remember how many IUs it was?

It's been 20 years ago, but I was taking like,

I want to say 10 IU a day.

Okay.

Yeah.

It wasn't anything stupid, but you know, I just wanted to try it because there was a batch that came through town from a reputable source.

And I was like, well, let's try it and see what it does.

And it didn't really do much for me.

The only other thing was, is I do have a trend story.

I thought that I had gotten a hold of

some echipoise.

It had actually been trimbolone acetate, and the dosage on it was too high.

It was almost like a yellowy color.

So it was high alcohol and I took a shot of it and I about damn near coughed my lungs out.

It was pretty nasty.

But that was the first and only time I mistakenly took Trent and I never liked it again.

So now I hear Trend, I just get these automatic flashbacks of fucking choking my lungs out.

I was always a big fan of just Sipionate.

And then right before meat, I'd run a little bit of D-ball, like six, eight weeks out.

And then right before the meat, I'd run like 20 milligrams of anadrol.

That's really all I ever fucked with.

For me, I felt stronger with less.

And I don't know why.

I think once my body got to a certain level of toxicity, I think my blood pressure got fucked up because we weren't training with those kind of drugs and this doing a pump workout.

We were doing shit where we were popping stuff in our eyeballs.

I would have bruises in my head from

my veins popping on my skull, you know, from squatting a thousand for three or whatever the fuck we were doing.

And I think my blood pressure just couldn't ever counteract.

You know, I think looking back at it now, if I would have gotten a hold of some blood pressure medicine, I probably would have been able to take a little more and sustain it.

But for me, my blood work couldn't be anything much over 950 to 1050.

And I felt like shit.

Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense.

Justin Harris has said the same thing when I had a podcast with him about, you know, you start titrating up the doses a little bit higher and higher and higher.

And regardless of what area you're competing in, you know, powerlifting or bodybuilding, at a certain point, the toxicity, the increased blood pressure,

all of these factors start hurting you, you know, especially like trend and sleep.

I mean, just all of these factors will literally bite you in the ass a lot more.

And that's the biggest thing: is like the drugs, if they affect your sleep, it's too high of a dosage, or it's the wrong type for you because sleep is the number one, in my opinion, growth capacity.

My biggest

secret in the closet in training was the fact that I could sleep 10 and 12 hours a day and it was not a problem for me.

Yeah, once I had my drugs at a certain level, it started fucking with my sleep.

I would get weaker.

Yeah, that's it's fucking crazy, but it's so true.

I'm at the point where I'm, uh, I'm sleeping nine hours and then I

freaking wake up to my alarm and I stop it and then I sleep an extra hour somehow.

So I'm literally even feeling this right now where I'm like, my body needs like over nine hours.

Yeah.

And it's crazy to me because I remember when I was younger, younger, seven and a half was just fine.

Well, the more muscle you put on, the more it's going to take to recover it.

Makes a lot of sense.

So at 305 pounds, which is obviously crazy, like, you know, powerlifting is fucking insane with blood vessels popping in your head.

I'll send you, if you don't know what you're going to do with this podcast, but I can send you some pictures of when I was that big because my fucking back was ginormous.

That'd be awesome.

My quads were huge.

I had veins all over my quads at 305.

Oh, that's fucking crazy.

Yeah.

Well,

at that weight, did you ever do anything to be more risk-averse with your health as possible while competing and being on PDs?

Well, I mean, I was always going to, so we have a world-famous doctor here in town, Serano, that used to do Stallone and Mr.

T's blood work.

And so I would go to him and he would keep me at least at bay with certain things.

But I did that at such a younger age that the health.

parameters really didn't kick in till later.

And as we start doing more genetic tests, we're realizing that my

health issues that I have now are mostly from my genetics and not from my training or my drugs.

So I ended up having some kind of polycystic kidney disorder that is genetic.

So, but that didn't kick in until I was like in my mid-40s.

So

it's a good thing you avoided a trend then.

Oh, yeah, right.

And so the big thing is, it's like,

the only thing I look back and wish I would have changed was being able to eat, do do weigh 305 and be able to eat cleaner doing so?

I think I would have felt better, but I just, you know, a six foot one trying to weigh 305 pounds, you can imagine the amount of calories like doing that on clean food is

all that's impossible.

You know, do you remember how many calories you were eating?

8,500 a day.

How much?

8,500.

Jesus fuck.

I would be eating

1,250 to 1,500 calories five times a day.

Holy crap, bro.

It's a fucking job, man.

I'd like to have half of that money back.

You know,

that's crazy, dude.

Yeah.

So now I'm about 249 to 252.

Now, how was your digestion?

Actually, not bad.

Not real bad.

Did you?

But you know, here's the thing, though.

I graduated high school.

I weighed 250.

So I was already a bigger, stronger, bigger framed kid.

So I had to eat a lot of food in high school anyway, too.

So it wasn't like I wasn't used to eating a lot of food.

It was just towards the spectrum of being the biggest and strongest I could be, it was a full-time job.

I mean, I remember eating somewhere around 60 ounces of ribeye, filet, or sirloin a day,

somewhere around 12 to 15 cups of rice a day.

And that was clean.

And then if I wanted to cheat, you know, pizza was easy.

Hamburgers were easy because they were tons of calories in very small quantities.

But honestly, my digestive system was pretty fucking bulletproof until I was probably 36, 37.

And then I met Paula Quinn and he started helping me clean up my diet.

And then Stan, and I flipped over to vertical and ended up being just as strong at 289, 290 as I was at 307, 308,

and just getting off the inflammation.

Nice.

Fuck you.

I wish I could have learned that sooner, but, you know.

Yeah.

What about a, well you said it it was bulletproof until then did any problems come up with your digestion when you did make the switch no not really you start you just start having like

weird like

i don't know how you'd say it but like you know like your

your shits were just more liquidy and they just started like your digestion just wouldn't hold the calories i started noticing that i was getting gluten intolerant yeah if i got a lot of bread or anything or pizza with a lot of gluten in it my stomach was one bloated for like two to three hours, and then two, it was just a fucking chocolate water fountain.

Yeah, you know, my body would just extreet it as crazy as a mountain.

And then, as I got into my early 40s, that started to be affected by also how much sodium I was taking in.

So, one of my biggest things to do was to go eat at a Japanese steakhouse where they'd cook it in front of you.

Yeah, and I'd

play fried rice, two orders of fried rice, vegetables, but they're cooking it in oil and a lot of butter.

And I started noticing all of that sodium just eventually, my body just wouldn't take it anymore.

But probably for 10 years, it did fine.

Wow.

Dude, isn't isn't that the like weirdest thing that you know you start

it's it's the food variety just like having the variety and like exercise and the high volume and low intensity that yeah literally makes your stomach bulletproof and then you come off of that stuff and the trade-off is like yeah you lose the inflammation you feel better on a daily basis but then it's like bro you go back to eating like a single fucking slice of pizza and you have the fucking shits.

Well, that's what I can always tell with my clients.

Like, you know, I'll get clients like, oh, I want to eat clean.

I need to lose weight.

I want to go on a cruise, you know, the normal classic bullshit or whatever.

And I'm like, hey, have you been eating clean?

I'm like, cool, cool.

You know, they'll come in and train.

I'm like, let's go get pizza.

I'm supposed to be on a diet.

Nope, let's go get pizza.

And so we'll sit down and we'll eat pizza.

And if they're not up, run into the bathroom in an hour, I fucking know they're lying.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because they're not used to that.

They're not used to that that type of food and if you know you get away from that type of food for say 60 days your stomach is screwed yeah when you go back to eating it which becomes in my opinion almost like a defense mechanism to where you stop wanting to eat that kind of food because you just don't feel good after you eat it it's a waste yeah exactly you know and then your cheat meals become hopefully more and more sparse and less and less frequent because your digestive system is telling you to fuck off you know

I'm honestly pretty frustrated that I can't have a lot of the foods I want anymore.

It's honestly been fucking irritating.

But I can say though, my body has felt so much better.

Like, for example, I had a bunch of digestive issues like last week and my weight shot up to 196.

And I just cleared the digestive issues with a little elimination diet and then also picked out some supplements I was worried might be affecting my digestion, such as berberine and other things.

And literally this week, I'm back at like 192.8, but still hitting the same weight, still training under the same weight.

I noticed a big difference.

So, my sponsor, ATP Labs,

they have a pre-biofib, which is fiber with probiotics.

And if I take that every morning, my stomach is so much less bloated and it feels like I absorb way better my food.

So, that's been a big help for me in the last three to five years to getting leaner.

What is the supplement called?

It's called pre-biofib.

Pre-biofib, okay.

It's uh pre-biotics Fiber.

It comes in a white bottle, but it's green.

Okay.

It's called Pre-Biofib.

I feel I'm pretty intrigued in trying that.

I'm always.

Well, let me know.

I can get you a discount code.

I'm sick.

Yeah.

I mean, it's pretty vast because I usually give, on my top-tier Patreon, I give people a 25% off code they can use whenever they want.

Okay.

That's correct.

But it's, yeah, let me know and I can hook you up with that.

Yeah, I'm interested to see what it has in it too, because I take an assortment assortment of different prebiotics and probiotics that help to a certain degree, but I feel like there's always more that

these guys are from Canada.

Okay.

It's probably backwards, but they're Canada,

you may not know this, but you might because you're a big deal in the field.

But in Canada, there's not very many supplement companies because they have to be regulated by Canadian FDA.

So, like in America, you can put a supplement on the market and there's no regulation to it.

In Canada, it's treated like a drug so their strictness of what they do is so much more adherent to proper shit and atp doesn't use anything that's artificial or it's it's high level shit gotcha gotcha i got turned on to them by polyquin okay cool have you ever used colostrum colostrum i've heard of it but i've never used it Okay.

I just had a podcast with Austin Stout, who's, I think one of his specialties is digestion when it comes to like this, this field, powerlifting, bodybuilding, just being an athlete.

But

he even recommended colostrum over glutathione, or not glutathione, over glutamine,

fasted in the morning.

But I think my concern is colostrum is from animals and it basically contains milk.

So I was just curious to ask you because I was wondering

what we all eventually become a little bit lactose intolerant.

Yeah.

And we're not able to digest milk or milk products as easy.

I really, other than certain types of cheese, which is already like cottage cheese,

I'm not really a huge fan of anything dairy, really.

I'll use grass-fed butter instead of like cooking oils, obviously.

But like, I'll eat some Swiss cheese and like provolone and like Parmesan, but that's that's really about it as far as dairy goes.

Um, but I, as far as milk is concerned, I know a lot of people that have digestive issues from stuff made from dairy.

Um, I don't even like like using whey protein that much.

I use a like a hydrolyzed beef protein from beef collagen.

Gotcha.

Because it's actually healthy for your stomach, too.

I'm not saying whey is bad, and some people have different reactions from that.

But me, if I need an extra 60 grams of protein, I can drink two ATP Labs, you know, beef protein shakes, and I have no problems at all eating my normal food or feeling bloated or any of that shit, which is huge for me because there were other supplement companies I would try their whey, and I I just, I felt like a fucking hog.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I know the feeling, bro.

Like, I can drink isolate just fine, especially if it's good isolate.

I just take whatever.

I just take my isolate from my company.

But

every other form of whey, no matter who it's from for some reason, I just, it, it makes me fucking feel sleepy.

And

to varying levels, my digestion gets all fucking weird and gross.

See if your company makes something from beef and try that and see if that helps because I think it will.

Okay.

Yeah.

I've had some beef protein before and I've always felt pretty good on it.

It's just the taste is still a little weird to me.

Yeah, it's fucking wild, dude.

Yeah.

It's different.

It's different.

Whey, if you get a high quality whey, it definitely tastes better.

But, you know, to me, I got six gulps and it's gone.

I don't give a shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you want to do this a Q ⁇ A real quick?

Yeah, sure.

Jacob Meeker asks, when is Matt's book coming out?

That's a great question.

And it's something I don't have a lot of control over.

So

this is crazy.

I'm doing a book with Human Kinetics, which is the number one publisher in exercise science, hands down.

And they asked me about doing a book in 2021.

And so I'm like, okay, I'll start working on it.

And I turned in the entire manuscript in May of 2023.

And just last month, I got back chapter four.

Oh, damn, Jesus.

Year and a half.

So I'm like pissed because I have a certification set up for it already.

Like it's ready to drop, but I can't certify anybody if they don't have the damn study material.

Yeah.

Right.

So, yeah.

Um, so we're hoping 2025, but I have no control over that.

They've had what I consider a finished product since May of 23.

Jeez.

Yeah, brutal, right?

I've heard it's crazy, but not that crazy.

I'm sorry for that.

Well, some of that might have been due to COVID, too, you know.

Yeah.

Excuses.

Right.

Jackson Nordman asks, where can one learn to program for strength for themselves?

That's difficult because it's going to be a long road.

I think the best thing you can do is read

books.

Do not go and look at shit on the internet because a lot of people don't have.

The books that you need are very important.

So, and again, I don't care if you sign up or not, but on top tier Patreon, about every three to five weeks, I post the books that I'm reading in my own personal notes.

That's how you're going to learn how to do it.

But on your own, the problem is, is that

there's just so much false information out there.

But,

you know, following a lot of the old articles from Louis Simmons, a lot of the old powerlifting USAs have a lot of gold information in them.

I'm talking powerlifting USAs from the 80s all the way to, I think, when they quit making it around 2009.

They have tons of articles from Paulaquin,

Herb Glossenberger,

you know, Louis Simmons, you know, a lot of guys that put down the groundwork for where the top athletes are today.

And I think that that's super important.

But if you really want to dig in and learn how to do strength training, and I can condense it down to one book that I can't say mine because it's not out, would be Zat Siorski and Mel Siff's Super Training.

But if you're not heavily educated, good luck trying to figure that out.

Because I opened that book up even to today, and I've had it since 2008.

And every time I open up that book, I pick up something new.

So, again, it's one of those books that was not really written to read from A to Z.

It's kind of chopped up, but the information in it is fucking gold.

Gabe Barad asks, what kind of gear are people competing on tested federations taking?

In tested federations?

Yeah.

well they're going to take testosterone real far out away then here's the other thing is what's tested this is an interesting concept because if i come into powerlifting and my natural testosterone level is 370 right so the range is 250 to 900 if somebody's optimized to like 880 are they taking steroids

yes or no i mean i say

yes and no because under guidelines, they're drug-free.

But in reality, they're taking supplements to be maxed at that level.

So that's going to probably start to change the dial closer to competition where they're going to have to take things that are faster acting, faster half-lives to where it's out of their system when they piss.

So that's when they're going to flip over to Primabolin, Anadroil, Anivar.

things that only have maybe anywhere from hours to days of half-lives to where they're testing clean.

So,

and now we have this whole different situation with peptides.

If you take a peptide and it's increasing your testosterone, is that cheating?

I don't know.

I mean, so I think that you're probably seeing a lot of these drug-free athletes.

They're taking a lot of shit or staying right under the radar.

That would be my thought process on it.

You think you can do it, Asks, tips on getting into personal training in this day and age?

Tips on personal training?

Well, first of all, have something to

try to say how to word this, but have something to sell.

Like

if you're not pursuing a bachelor's degree or a master's degree, or in even some cases, a doctorate degree, you're going to have a hard time getting in to personal training unless you're just selling somebody

like a facade.

And that's the problem with personal training now is people can go to a weekend course and be certified to train, but really know jack shit.

And so what what I would say is be strong yourself, educate yourself, put money, time, and energy into your education and pursuit of understanding how to train and then worry about being a trainer, because then you actually have something of a solid foundation to sell people.

People listen to me because I broke world records and I went to school for nine years.

And that doesn't mean that everybody has to do that, but it helps tremendously.

So, improve yourself before you try to improve others.

If you're you're not good at what you do, that doesn't mean necessarily you should probably be a coach in that area.

You don't have to be the best in the world, you know.

You don't have to be a world record holder.

You don't have to have a doctorate, but you damn sure better have more than the average shithead in the gym, right?

The problem with personal training now is we got average people training average people.

We don't have anybody that's at a higher level that's actually trying to do it right because in reality, personal training these days is a popularity contest more than it is what you know.

I mean, how many people do you and I both personally know that we don't need to name that sell people bullshit products and call themselves trainers?

Definitely a lot.

Yeah.

So again, don't worry so much about your presentation.

Worry about your authenticity and your baseline of education and shit will fall in your lap.

I like that a lot.

Yeah.

I believe credibility is definitely one of the biggest factors to being able to get the most clients or at least

do the best, which is a big reason why a lot of these top coaches, even in the bodybuilding sphere in Olympia, they will literally state like on their bio, like how many, um, how many pro wins, how many pro card wins, how many Olympian wins, etc.

As you just rack it up, it's your resume that just continuously increases.

Sure, big Al says, come to brothers, Jim Greeley.

What's that?

He says, Come to Brothers, Jim.

Brothers, Jim.

Where's that?

I honestly have no clue.

Sounds like Carl Hogan owns it, brother.

Mike Jim mclean asks oreos or chips ahoy what's that oreos or chips ahoy

i i'd say chips ahoy for sure fire

yeah i would say chips ahoy

and it has to be done and shit we just talked about not eating which is milk you know

so i tried it with almond milk and it's close you know what i mean but yeah i don't know i i definitely chips ahoy i hate that is exp that it exposes my weakness but i mean that lactate is actually kind of fire

Fitness Fusion asks, science behind adding weight to the last rep other than being a badass?

Okay, so that's a very advanced way to train.

I'm sure you've seen me do it.

Back in the day, I would start the bar at like 700, add 50, add 50.

So for a three-rep training cycle, I'd go 700, 750, 800, holding the weight.

And the reason that I did that is because I wanted to see if I could sustain technique under fatigue.

And so as the weight increases, your technical capacity must stay the same or improve.

And you're doing that under a heavier load.

So to me, it shows a very high sense of athleticism and concentration to be able to ascend

the weight instead of descend the weight.

So if you strip it down, it makes it easier.

But what do you do when you fatigue rep one and now you have, say, 15% of your energies burnt?

And now you go up another 10% and do it another gun, but your form doesn't break and so that's where I think I hold a little bit of a

little bit of an advantage over even Mitchell Hooper and all these guys that have tried or done the 520 for 24 to beat Tom Platt says if you watch my video which is on YouTube no rep looks any different every rep

Whereas Mitch Hooper at like 16 17 starts rounding his back dropping his head knees start coming in whatever it is but it starts looking really fucking shitty at like 20 and mine's just like click click click click like terminator And I think that that type of ascending sets help that tremendously.

It's maintaining focus under more strain.

Yeah.

Badass, bro.

Dip, Mello asks, constipation issue.

It's not very much of a question, but

I feel like we kind of discussed that in terms of diversity.

Yeah,

your gut's usually a good register of if you're eating the right shit for you.

Yeah.

You know, and I think you might need to play around with, like you're talking about, you take some foods out, you put some foods in, you see how your body reacts, and you do that over a long period of time, and you're going to find a good, healthy medium of shit you can absorb and utilize.

If you do get constipated and you really need some help, like ASAP, Justin Harris recommends, um, what is it called?

Uh, Dulcelex and Mirolax.

But uh, I'd say that that's like a, you know, that's like your little temporary fix and then you should just note that.

I've seen this

three or four years ago, but I have a video on YouTube with me talking about having to go to the ER because I drank drank bad protein and it solidified my large intestines.

And

I about ruptured my fucking gut.

Oh, fuck.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah, you got to go watch that video.

It's funny now, but when it was happening, it was bad news.

Luckily, the doctor was pretty hot.

He was trying to stick fingers in my ass.

Holy shit.

With your grandma sitting right there, too, that drove you there because you can't even drive.

Yeah.

But if you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by like protein was bad?

Like, how was it bad?

So I had this, there was a, back in, when I was in grad school, there was a company called Ironmind.

I think they still exist.

It's like a magazine.

And they made their own protein.

They sent it to you in a five-pound bag.

And so this was graduate, graduate degree year number one.

So year number two, I'm starving.

I have no money.

I'm digging through my desk to find a fucking protein bar or something.

And I pull out the bottom drawer and there's like half of this protein.

And I'm so fucking hungry, I don't even care.

So I take like three scoops of it, boom, boom, boom, mix it up with some ice cold water,

drink it.

No big deal.

So not an hour and a half later, my buddy calls me and goes, hey, you want to go to this bar that has these really good sandwiches?

Fuck yeah, I do.

I was like, but I don't have any money.

He's like, don't worry, I'll buy for you.

So he buys for me and I eat this sandwich.

And then I'm drink like a pitcher of Guinness.

It's like $2 pitchers.

And so I, and again, you know, Guinness isn't that high alcohol, so I'm not, I'm not trash or anything.

But I I go home and I wake up the next morning and usually I have to shit in the morning.

Well, I didn't have to.

And so I'm like, that's kind of odd, but not like I was in pain.

Well, then that night, the Ball State basketball team had won the NIC title, beaten like Kansas and just barely lost to Duke.

And so all of the

local subways gave us free footlong cards if you work for athletics.

So since I'm a GA, I work for athletics.

I get two free footlong cards.

I go and I eat this huge footlong footlong with double meat.

Well, this is like noon.

By one o'clock, I'm starting to dry sweat.

And I don't have stomach pains yet, but I'm something's wrong.

Like I got to, I feel like I have a really bad flu bug.

So I go home and I'm laying down and I can't fucking shit.

And now I'm getting stomach pains to the point that I'm laying on the ground in the fetal position.

And I call my grandma and I'm like, grandma, you got to take me to the fucking ER.

And she's, I fucking knew it.

You were going to get hurt lifting all those fucking weights, blah, blah, blah.

Against my fucking fucking stomach.

I'm not hurt.

She's like, oh, fine.

Well, I'll be there in a minute.

They take me to the ER, they do an x-ray, and I have a two-and-a-half-foot-long white mass solidified in my large intestines, not letting anything move with all of that food backed up in the back.

Oh, damn.

And she's like, if you don't win another hour or two, you just started like perforating your large intestines.

That's crazy.

Now it's like, oh, shit.

I mean, it was bad.

Like, I wheelchaired myself in to the ER because I was in so much pain.

anyway i dude that was a 14 pound shit holy shit i was 288 and when i got out of there i was 274.

what

yeah it's crazy crazy yeah go watch that video dude it's crazy oh my god how do did they say how it solidifies well so the the rotten protein somehow just locked up and turned into a fucking cement so they had to pump me full of this special like soap that breaks down protein and it just dude it it was like a fucking volcano.

That is insane, bro.

It was the worst smelling fucking shit.

I mean,

I've been in some bad places, and this thing would have fucking killed everything.

Oh my God, bro.

Yeah, I mean, this isn't even on bad protein, but if there's anything I learned about like bodybuilding and digestion in the last like fucking 15 years, it's like, don't eat more protein than I know I can have in one sitting.

I know.

But it wasn't pulling out, it was expired.

Well, that's it.

For some reason, it just turned into fucking rock.

Yeah.

And I hadn't eaten anything all day.

So it was like dry on my stomach.

You know, I was thirsty.

I was hungry.

I just got done working like a 10 and a half, 12 hour day in the weight room.

I was dead.

You know what I mean?

So I'm sure that dehydration contributed to it as well.

Damn, it's fucking nuts.

Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah,

I feel like part of it is like.

like the the most like the craziest part is obviously that it just was fucking bad bad protein but i feel like uh part of it too is like whenever i digest extra protein have you ever heard of

a supplement that starts with a B.

It helps you, it increases your stomach acid so you can digest more protein.

Oh, yeah, yeah, bile.

What, what was it?

Is it called like your bile, like your liver bile that helps you digest stuff?

But there's like a supplement that helps increase it that starts with a B.

Yeah, I don't know what it is, but I know what you're talking about.

It's like something with pepsin.

Yeah.

B, something with pepsin.

But anyways, yeah, it helps, helps increase the stomach acid.

So I've noticed that I've like for me personally, like if I consume over 60 grams of protein in one sitting, or if I consume like 50 grams of protein and then like I feel like I need to fit more protein before I go to bed and like I eat another 50 grams within one and a half hours instead of three hours or something, that shit just starts fucking building up, bro.

And then like I got the worst fucking protein farts, man.

The worst protein farts and then it fucks up my sleep.

I'm fucking waking up because of my own farts.

You're waking up gassing yourself, dumbing in yourself.

You're fucking miserable, dude.

Quinn Ferguson asks, what do you look for in a future world-class powerlifter?

Honestly, just work ethic.

I mean, some of it comes down to anthropometrics as well.

I mean, you know, obviously if somebody's built for it, it's going to help.

But I've seen 30 people better built for me than me for breaking world records and just didn't have it up here.

So a lot of it's just focus and lifestyle capacity.

Like if somebody's coming to me and they're working, you know, they're a machinist at a fucking factory working 60 hours a week, they're not not going to be a pro power lifter they're not going to break world records yeah like most people that have that level of capacity also have the lifestyle to be able to do it and recover yeah yeah

um

my personal opinion or my belief is uh the greatest athletes are not the ones that work the hardest but the ones that work the smartest and also the ones that have the best stress and fatigue management and then also they start at the right age right like you could say you want to be a world record power lifter but if you're 35 i mean it's not that it's impossible but it's a lot more difficult than if you're 15.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know what I mean?

I mean, you said something that resonated with me a while back on a podcast.

I think you said Thor Bjornsson, like his basketball coach made him stretch for like 40 minutes a day from like what they did.

From the age of four to 12.

That's like

there's a window in time in which you can maintain or gain in flexibility at your optimal.

And that's the range.

It's like four years old to 10.

You can get more flexible after that, but you won't be as the peak flexibility unless you train it at certain ages so there are certain age parameters which things have to be stimulated okay um last question uh get chopun at time asks favorite holiday song holiday song shit i don't know that's a hard one i like i like watching like the old charlie brown christmas so those songs they sing on that are pretty good

oh shit that brings me back bro yeah i used to play that shit on the piano all the time when i was like six years old um cool i have one last question i ask everyone at the end of every podcast but uh if you were to die or leave the world tomorrow and you had one message you could send to the entire world today, what would it be?

Man, just train smart and enjoy life.

I mean, you know, the thing of it is, it's a short ride.

You got to push hard, but don't leave anything like you wish you could have or should have done something.

Like, I feel like if I had to die tomorrow, I've done almost everything I wanted to do.

That's awesome, bro.

Cool.

Good talking to you, Roseph.

Yeah, man, that was fucking sick.

Thanks for coming on again.

We're going to have to find you.

All right, me anytime.

Where can everybody find you?

uh winningstrength.com w-e-n-n-i-n-g strength.com or i'm on instagram as winningstrong okay fuck yeah

all right thanks guys dr matt winning absolute savage freaking intelligent guy um thanks for coming on bro that was freaking amazing and i know everyone's gonna love the information that's coming out on the podcast so talk to you next time everybody if you like this podcast you can rate us a five stars on apple podcast spotify or anywhere you find a podcast or subscribing to the youtube channel and clicking the bell button because that's what gets us big and awesome fucking savage guests like Dr.

Matt.

So, love you guys.

I'll talk to you guys next time.

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let me know if you guys ever want to see any type of content, if you guys ever want to see any new specific type of guests, comment, anything.

You know, I just love hearing from you guys.

See you guys next time.

Peace.