Luke Leaman: Drugs & Training Causing Issues

If you just do mid-range movements and you train as hard as you can, and you have somebody who's prioritizing length and range, and they're training 15% less than you, you're gonna get better results than them.

The co-founder of Muscle Nerds traveled the world teaching for Charles Polkin and has taught thousands and personal trainers and coaches how to get better at their craft over the past 13 years, including our favorite Allie Gilbert.

Drugs amplify this stuff, they amplify everything.

We have Luke Lehman.

We started monitoring her blood glucose with an implant.

We started berberine, myonositol, some other B vitamins, a little bit of bergamot, some extra magnesium, and cut her carbs down.

Now she was hypoglycemic.

So I was at a party and I told my friend, yeah, I'm thinking about maybe doing some testosterone, whatever.

And he goes, why not?

I don't know.

You know, I don't know if I'm ready to do that.

And he disappears, walks back in, and I'm talking to somebody, pulls my pants down and hits me with a shot of testosterone.

He goes, well, you're no longer natty.

So over the last few years, everybody's gotten really obsessed about training their lats.

Everybody is like masturbating to lats.

What are bodybuilders good at?

Moving things this direction.

They're terrible at moving things to the frontal plane, then the transverse plane.

They never tend to do stuff because they're not bodybuilding exercises.

If it is like your lats or Terry's major internal rotators, let's train those at lengthened positions so that they give the joint some space.

It might be on the opposite side.

It could be your shoulder flexors creating joint enclosure early.

So now you have to do something different.

I decided to try, I mean, I was making it, costing me like 40 bucks to make tons of it.

A friend of mine who's a pharmacist figured out how to pull test propionate from cinebex spend 70 bucks and you would have months and months of prope and trim why not just take it up see what happens because nobody else had done a dose like that that i knew of at the time wait what was this dose

before starting this podcast i just wanted to say that ideating steroids for a full show is not widely accepted because it discounts the real work which is the backbone of this sport and unfortunately spreads that an unsafe chemical solution is all you need for results.

Both of these are an antithetical society's understanding of the sport, and while there will always be some that claim that PEDs are all you need, I would like to deliver an honest message of what is required for achieving top performance as well as the dangers associated with this route.

I received this comment from a user named Night Skarrens.

But just as a rock climber, The athletes undergoing this path in the sport are willing to put their life on the line for their passion, just the danger between the two sports is different.

Luckily, we do have safety nets in the sport, such as organ imaging and regular blood work.

But that doesn't change the high risk one must accept in taking on this competitive lifestyle.

By the way, guys, surprise, we have Luke Lehman.

He is the co-founder of Muscle Nerds.

He's traveled the world teaching for Charles Polkin and has taught thousands of personal trainers and coaches how to get better at their craft over the past 13 years, including...

our favorite Allie Gilbert, who a lot of you guys are fans of.

Crazy Allie.

Crazy Allie.

Yeah.

Yeah, she, um, the way that we actually connected is Allie actually shot me a message, um, and she's like, you know what?

Can you, uh, you should definitely have my coach on your podcast because uh, he's really awesome, he uh likes streams and he's had experience with anabolics and PEDs.

And I was like, Wow, that sounds right up my alley, yeah, boy,

PEDs.

Um, but um, we were just discussing some personal experiences with some fun substances.

But going off of that, though, I kind of wanted to ask you:

I listened to some of the podcasts that you were on and some other information.

It's all

really cool.

All the things that you said actually kind of blew my mind.

So I got like a lot of questions that I'm really curious to ask you in general, anyways.

But

where did your interest in bodybuilding originate?

And then when did you first start delving into like PEDs?

Okay.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So

if you go back to the mid-80s, so I'm, it was, I think it was 1984 or so.

It's probably 84 to 86.

I was eight years old and I saw Conan the barbarian and I wanted to be like Arnold.

Like I saw, that's the physique I wanted.

Like I want to look like that.

And in Texas, California's got a pretty big like football, like American football gridiron culture, yeah?

And so, of course, it's Texas.

So every single guy is almost expected to be on a football team, especially in a small town where I'm from.

So the town Mahea is the name of the town.

Less than 7,000 people live there.

So we don't, there's nothing to do.

It's way the fuck out in the country.

So you either, it's like fucking fighting in football.

I mean, that's all you do in your, uh, in your teenage years.

And so we start young lifting weights.

So we started, man, before, before junior high, you'd sneak into the high school or sneak into junior high and start smashing weights.

And then during high school, I started powerlifting.

So I wanted to, I actually wanted to wrestle.

So I was watching wrestling movies.

I thought, man, that'd be really cool.

So I went to the coach, said, Hey, can we start a wrestling team?

And he looks at me and goes, Luke, you're in a tiny, like your high school is like 130 something people in your class.

There's no, there's nobody to wrestle in Texas unless you're like a super 5A school, like a huge school.

I said, okay, what else can we do?

How about powerlifting?

He's like, that sounds cool.

What is that?

Bench squat, deadlift.

Whoever's the strongest.

Awesome.

So we started a powerlifting team and our school actually dominated everybody.

No way.

Yeah.

We just dominated.

Like we had some corn-fed country boys that were just fucking retard strong, right?

Like it was, it's crazy.

Cause again, we don't have anything to do but lift weights and get in trouble and eat.

Did that through high school and then left high school, went to college.

And I'm like, well, I don't want to really want to powerlift anymore.

I didn't have any friends that were powerlifting, but a lot lot of them were bodybuilders.

I'll get into that.

So I started getting into that, did that for a while.

I never competed in bodybuilding, though, because I didn't want to,

I don't know.

You said before we got on, you said you've always had a hard time with public speaking, right?

And so, so, so did I.

I was deathly afraid of that before I started doing the education.

And so.

Like, I couldn't think of anything worse than getting in a banana hammock in front of a bunch of people and have them judge my physique.

The banana hammock's crazy.

Yeah.

And I'm like, you look at that.

It's like, whoa, there's it's almost covering nothing.

And I told a friend, I said, Look, I don't want to bodybuild, man.

My pecker's too small to get on stage in a bikini like that.

And he says, bro, let me tell you something.

Everybody's got a small dick when they're 3% body fat.

You got a point.

But I did that for a while, just like amateur bodybuilding.

Then I got back in the power thing.

And that's when I got my biggest.

So I got up to about 270 pounds.

How old were you at this?

Mid-20s.

Mid-20s.

So I got up to 270

and still fairly lean.

So probably like 15 to 17%.

Like I still had abs.

I was fucking massive.

21-inch arms, 21-inch neck, 21-inch calves.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah.

And I didn't know what the fuck we were doing back then.

We were just like throw some drugs in there, eat 6,000 calories, train.

It was great.

Yeah.

Not very healthy, though.

Everything became an absolute chore.

Like going up and down stairs, forget it.

Like you'd walk up three flights of stairs.

You'd have to have a post-workout shake and a nap.

so yeah did the power team thing for a while again then oh went back into bodybuilding but did been a men's bikini instead so did uh what is it now like men's physique yeah you had board shorts you get up there hated that because you couldn't show your legs wait um how long ago was this oh man that this we're talking like mid 2000s like i was the first i was one of the first competitors for men's fitness men's uh physique i didn't even know i thought men's physique

which association was this because i thought men's physique started this new 2012.

this was was in MPC.

MPC.

Maybe it was.

I got to remember.

Man, I'm almost 47, so sometime I might get the dates.

I was 20.

I was like, yeah, I was in 27, 28, 29.

So it would have been 20 years ago.

So that sounds about right.

Maybe.

I'll have to look back at the dates.

Yeah, yeah.

Because I remember that it was at in Dallas.

What's the big show in Dallas?

It's like

I can't remember what the big bodybuilding show is.

It's massive.

But

BSN did like a model search the year before we did men's physique.

And I called the promoters and I go, look, what are you guys looking for?

Because I'm a big dude.

Like I don't want to come and then everybody's tiny because we're not really looking for anything.

Just come as you are.

I showed up.

I was 235 pounds shredded and everybody else looked like Abercrombie models.

So I was like, this is bullshit.

I'm not doing this again.

And then the next year they did men's physique.

And I started

that, competed in that for a couple of years.

But again, didn't, you know, I get bored of shit really easy.

So it's like going into powerlifting, then bodybuilding, then weightlifting and jiu-jitsu, whatever.

But yeah.

Did they happen to have a weight cap at the time?

It was all height classes.

Okay, it was just height classes, right?

Wait, no.

When did I even ask that?

Classic Physique.

It's the men's board shorts, bikini.

No, exactly.

I don't know why I asked that.

Like, I really, I know that the weight cap was introduced literally like last year.

Yeah.

So, um,

okay, interesting.

I thought about doing classic physique because I'm kind of itching to get back up there.

Yeah.

And I've thought about this for years.

Actually, when COVID hit,

I was actually in pretty decent shape and only a few kilos under where I needed to be to be competitive.

And I was getting ready.

I said, fuck it.

I'll just, I won't tell anybody.

I'll just show up and get on stage and just do it and go home.

And then COVID happened and they shut everything down.

So then I went, oh, fuck.

Gotcha.

The hard part is being in Australia is getting what you need.

So even getting TRT is a massive undertaking.

It's pretty difficult there, right?

Yeah, yeah, I've been told.

Um, dude, I think you should absolutely go back into classic physique, especially if you're feeling the itch now.

I am feeling the itch, yeah, just to see what you can do, right?

Right, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, if you don't do it now, then when, when are you going to, right?

I feel like be the best 80-year-old

bodybuilder in the world.

Hey, I mean, um, one of my buddies, Paul Barnett, he got his IFBB Pro card just like what, last year, maybe.

And

how old was he?

I'm trying to remember.

50s, 60s, 50s, maybe.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

I might be butchering this, but yeah, bro, he looked freaking crazy.

And he got his IFPB pro card in open bodybuilding.

Dude, it was massive.

That's it.

Giant.

I think his stage weight was like, his stage weight was above 250 pounds.

God.

So, man, after gigantic.

After being 270, even above 250, it's just so uncomfortable.

But luckily for classic,

it's only like a hundred, it's like 96, 98 kilos,

which I weigh more than right now, or I have since I got here.

When I got here, I found some TRT Plus.

Nice.

TRT.

TRT Plus.

A couple extras that were just laying around.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It put on 22 pounds since I've been here.

So when did you, when did you start?

I guess

when did you release, let go of your natty card?

I was 21.

21.

21.

Yeah.

So I always said I wouldn't take anything until I did all I could do naturally.

So from eight to 21, I trained really hard.

And I was already, you know, 250 pounds.

I was already a nationally ranked powerlifter.

So I'm like, you know, why not?

How tall are you again?

Six foot.

Okay, gotcha.

Yeah.

Well, as I'm getting older, I'm shrinking, but just we'll just cap it out of six foot.

Like the first time I did gear,

you know the movie Varsity Blues?

I know of it, but

I don't remember it at all.

So I did stunts in it, a lot of the really big stunts.

Like there's a scene where a guy's getting flipped, like the first football scene, that's me getting flipped.

And that was shot in Austin where I lived.

And when I went into the movie, I was 232 pounds, relatively lean.

After a few months filming, I was like 205 and I'd gotten really fat.

At least really fat for what you and I would consider fat for us, which is not that fat for most people.

So I was at a party and I told my friend, yeah, I'm thinking about maybe doing some testosterone, whatever.

And he goes, why not?

I was like, I don't know.

You know, I don't know if I'm ready to do that.

And he disappears, walks back in, and I'm talking to somebody, pulls my pants down, and hits me with a fucking shot of testosterone.

No way, bro.

What?

Yeah, I mean, we were, we were all drunk.

We were fucked up.

He goes, well, you're no longer natty.

So you're like, holy shit, that's fucking crazy.

So then he gave me a couple of bottles and yeah, put on 30 pounds in like six to eight weeks.

And I was like, that shit is great.

Why was I not, why was I being so apprehensive?

This is fantastic.

Yeah.

And yeah, and that's back when we had real shit, real shit steroids.

We were were getting everything from Mexico.

You get a bottle that one bottle might have 12 mils, another bottle have like seven.

It was all dirty.

Like,

I don't know how I never got any infections from it, but it did work.

Damn, that is nuts, dude.

I'm still kind of processing that right now.

Dude, I was at a medical conference, and the same thing happened.

I've never taken growth hormone.

And I told a doctor this, and he was drunk, and he fucking hits me with a pin.

He goes, oh, there's an IU of growth.

And I'm like, dude,

what are you doing?

Why do drunk people always inject me with things?

What is it about you that's giving people this?

I don't know.

This desire.

I think I'm giving up this air that I really want it, and I need somebody to push me there.

So go ahead and jab me with something.

That's crazy.

That's got to be super legal.

So when I tell people I've never done growth, I'm lying.

I've done one, like one IU.

Okay.

That must have made a massive difference.

The replacement dose.

I woke up the next day, like, wow, look how fucking jacked.

Oh, my gosh.

Okay.

Insane.

So what got you started in this, in your, in your coaching situation?

And then I know that I believe you were in a, what is it called?

Maybe like a seminar with Charles?

Yeah.

Okay.

So if we go back again, let's go back to that small town where I grew up.

This is like even before we had the internet, you know, we didn't, we got the internet in 1992 in my hometown.

And so before that,

everything you would learn was either just passed passed down, like from the elders at the fireside and the camp and telling you old stories about bodybuilding.

And so some of it was good.

Some of it was just complete bullshit.

And then we had magazines, obviously like Flex Magazine, Muscle and Fitness and all that.

Muscle media was a big influence.

Muscle media is where I found Charles.

And I started reading his articles.

Okay, what he's saying makes a lot of sense.

And I like studying physical culture history.

And he's basically not reinventing the wheel.

He's just taking all of these these methods that people figured out in the 50s and 60s, 70s and 80s.

And now he's figured out how to systemize it and then how to teach other people.

So I started doing his stuff and I'm like, man, this shit works really well for me.

And then that was in like muscle media.

Then T-Mag came around and he was in that as well.

So I was following him from the age of 14.

And then

fast forward, I think I was 27, maybe, I finally did a seminar with him.

And at that point, I was hooked.

I spent a few days with him.

And then a few months later, I did some more stuff, kept doing it.

And then eventually he asked me to come on to be an assistant lecturer, assistant coach for him.

Oh, wow.

And then eventually he got booted out of the company.

And they brought me on to not really take his place, but to teach a lot of the stuff that he was teaching.

And that was a whole another fucking story, the cluster fuck of that company.

Okay.

Gotcha.

That's fucking crazy shit that was going on in that company.

Damn.

Which they've now lost the company because apparently they're in a massive amount of debt they couldn't get out of.

And yeah, so Pollock and Group no longer exists.

Can you spill some of the crazy shit?

Yeah, I don't give a shit.

Now, I'm going to

I'll I'll talk about some crazy shit that I know and

I'll talk about the stuff that I've heard lately.

I'll talk about that first.

So

just to give people clarity on what was happening, because a lot of people don't understand what happened.

So Charles's name's on the side of the building.

It's his company, but it's actually him and his wife.

It's a third company he had built.

And he was not really good at keeping his dingling in his pants.

And so he got busted.

And she raked him over the coals, like raked, got him, booted him out of the company and sued him and did all this shit.

And

they thought.

They thought that the place was going to be okay without Charles, that the brand was strong enough, but Charles was the brand.

So it's like,

when I showed up, I didn't know any of this.

So I showed up on my first day, packed all my shit into storage, flew to Rhode Island to begin the new job that I've been trying to get this job for like seven years and I finally got it.

I show up,

go to the first meeting.

I'm like, all right, where's, where's Charles?

Like, he doesn't work for us anymore.

I'm like,

okay,

where's Andre?

Which is Andre Benoits, his right-hand man.

Andre quit.

Where's Ryan?

Ryan got fired.

Cool.

So me and Derek, they're like, yep.

I'm like, fantastic.

You could have told me this before I packed all my shit up and flew across the country.

That would have been like nice to not walk in on this.

Yeah.

But

they, yeah, they, they made a horrible decision to do that.

And the company just went downhill after that.

I see.

Like, like, I'm talking millions just gone.

Wow.

It was crazy.

But yeah, there was some crazy shit happening in that company.

Um,

I've got to think about, let me get, let me think about a good

like there was a lot, there's a lot of shenanigans, shenanigans going on.

There are things like, you know, coaches having relationships with the students and sometimes

pretty bad shit.

It was rough.

It was rough.

There are some things I'll tell you off.

I just need to, I need to figure out, is this stuff I could still get sued for?

I don't think so, but I'm going to write a book at one point, change all the names, and I'll spill the beans on that guy because it's fucking wild.

Crazy.

That's dope.

That's good to hear.

We need some more of that, honestly.

Honestly, it blows my mind how much of shit like that goes on.

Bro, the fitness industry is funny.

Like, I don't think if people knew, if people knew all the shit that we all got up to, they'd be like, oh, you guys are health professionals.

You know what I did this weekend.

I'm transparent about that type of stuff.

But most coaches would never tell people.

Like, it's hard enough to get people to be transparent about the drugs that they're doing, like PEDs, much less like recreational stuff

you know but I think I think it's people need to know that stuff it's okay it's okay to do that real quick guys so while I was looking at the YouTube analytics I actually saw that 85% of you guys that watch this channel are not subscribed and I want to ask very little of you guys but if you enjoy this podcast if you find value in it then please do me this one favor and subscribe to the channel because doing so helps me get bigger and greater guests like the guests you are listening to today.

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I was having this thought because Greg Dussette made this video on what top Olympians, like what recreational drugs top Olympians are taking.

Yeah.

Or maybe just Olympians in general, something like that.

And

I agreed with some of the video, but I didn't really agree with all of it because I think it's just easy in his voice to

make generalized statements.

You know, like any of these people who like talk with polarizing methods.

No, you're right.

It's easy to catch on but he just spoke with generalized statements that sometimes it can make it seem like

the whole of this demographic is taking these things which is obviously never true right correct like none of these things are never true you never have an all or nothing type situation everyone's always different everyone always responds differently yeah um but i was having those thoughts it's like When I think of like the bodybuilding industry and even some of even a lot of the fitness industry, because a lot of them just don't talk about shit, like it, I think any drug use, any medication use is like a gateway.

You know, if you feel comfortable using one thing and then you realize that it's working good for you or it's actually helping you in life or it makes you feel good, then, you know, your interest in other substances probably increases.

Oh, no doubt.

But I also hang out with a lot of people who have nothing to do with the bodybuilding industry or the fitness industry and they all have taken a ton of drugs.

So 100%.

You know, it's kind of like hard for me to be like, like, it's only the bodybuilding industry.

It's like, it's just fucking just humans just take shit, you know?

I mean, like a lot of people do, and they don't talk about it, or they do if you're like their friend or something.

But why not do it, you know, especially if it's, if you can do it safely.

The problem is we, it's hard to do it safely because of the lack of access to quality stuff and

no real knowledge other than this stuff is bad.

Yeah.

But for with everything, the dose makes the poison.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of it too, is like right now in the world, we are fighting against that because, you know, not too long ago, we believed psychedelics were incredibly terrible.

Yeah.

We thought psychedelics had a reason to be illegal.

Same thing with marijuana.

I remember when I was a kid, I was in DARE class and they were just talking about how fucking bad marijuana was for you.

Oh man, it's so fucking funny.

And then DARE failed.

It's like weed is bad for you, but alcohol is okay.

Like alcohol is one of the worst things you could possibly put in your body.

But if that's the only choice and you want to self-medicate or you want to have a good time and you lose many friends, well, that's your only choice.

Right.

Yeah.

My girl and my best friend and I, we went to John's summit just like this last he just had a concert at a what is it called it was just like this this one stadium he had like a single single stage concert there just literally this last weekend and like i still use my own substances you know i want to have fun so i took some i took a little bit of shrooms and smoked some weed i haven't drinked alcohol in five or six years but i mean to be honest i had a fucking amazing ass time yeah no hangover No hangover.

Yeah.

Felt pretty positive about shit.

Maybe I got a little bit sleepy at the end because I smoked a little, but like,

then then I got, you know, okay, sleep.

Yeah.

But people have this because people have been lied to about all this stuff.

It's like people think acid.

I remember LSD.

You see the old, like you see the old

dare things of people going crazy.

This is your brain on drugs, cracking a couple of eggs.

And it's so, it's such bullshit.

It's, it's, there's no context.

Like, is this on all the drugs or just a little bit of drugs, just enough to have a good time?

Right.

So like with the story I told you earlier about this weekend, I took some shrooms and usually, you know, two grams, three grams, three and a half grams, I'm pretty good on that.

I can go out and I have a great time.

And unfortunately, we didn't know how much was in what we took.

And I probably took around seven grams.

So I'm in this hotel lobby and I'm like, I'm having a great time.

And then I go, wait a minute.

Uh-oh.

And I told everybody, I got to go to my room real quick.

And I ran to the room and laid in bed and just freaking had the universe like implode in my brain.

And then a couple hours later, I was good.

And I went back downstairs and I went out.

But

it's great.

Wait, how many hours till you went back downstairs?

I spent about three hours.

It peaked.

It was just this fucking light speed, light year,

fucking Millennium Falcon.

And then it was over.

And then I just felt a little bit,

just relaxed and went downstairs and went out to a pub.

But, you know,

people talk about, are you going to lose your mind?

You're going to jump out of a window.

You know, you're going to hurt yourself but like I'm sure if you if you're unprepared for that so you take that type of dose probably not a good idea yeah but taking a couple of grams of shrooms and going out it's it's a great it's fantastic I mean that's how I feel I think that's how most of us feel that at least have some fucking type of awareness about literally any substance like you take tren or you drink some alcohol this shit just exacerbates what's in your mind in your body right now you know if you haven't found peace in yourself or maybe you actually have a fuck ton of hormonal issues that are causing you some crazy thoughts and shit, that's just probably just going to exacerbate it, right?

Especially trend.

Like trend's the one if you like, well, trend, as far as like popular stuff that people would do, trend's the one, if you aren't at peace, don't take trend.

And trend, I tell everybody I talk to about is trend's big boy medicine.

Like put trend in when you actually need it.

Trend's like a, like you get like a half a, half a dozen cycles in you, and then you start thinking maybe some trend and then try a little bit of trend goes a long way.

But people go straight to taking massive hundreds of milligrams of trend.

You don't need that much.

You're going to fuck yourself up.

It's going to make you a royal asshole.

It's going to turn people, it's like drinking.

You know, you have a little bit of booze and you're kind of fun.

You have too much booze.

You have a real big potential for turning into an asshole and ruining your life.

Trend will do that.

I just want to say this for the, for the audience, so they have a little bit of like, anyone who's like listening to the podcast has at least some kind of like awareness of like what

who you are and what you've said and stuff.

But like after listening to your podcast and your speeches and stuff, honestly, bro, like,

I am

very intrigued in our conversation because I feel like you're kind of in the same place as me where you are very conscious about not only your lifestyle and your, you know, your clients' lifestyles as well.

But like, you took so many things into account, including like being sympathetic versus parasympathetic, as well as like people using GDAs and how this is actually affecting the testosterone level because it's affecting

you're still pushing like sugar into the cell that doesn't want it, et cetera.

And I think a lot of people that will just jump on, say, PEDs, that don't have like this long-term plan of being like an Olympian bodybuilder or something, or this long-term plan of living life until they're like 80, 90 years old, don't normally have some kind of conscious thoughts over these things.

Right.

Because

while bodybuilding is simple, our bodies are also super complicated.

So in order to stay healthy or have some type of wellness, every person has like a different fucking program they have to go through because you just have a different chemistry.

It's like if you were doing a computer program and every single program had a completely different code, you know, sometimes you just have one thing wrong, like you have one semicolon that's not there and the whole fucking program doesn't work.

And that's how I see, you know, us working as humans.

So

anyways, tangent short, what was your worst trend experience ever?

Oh, which one?

Okay, so just to be clear, I've never been the type of guy to push things.

I would rather, I was always lower dose, multiple compounds, low dose of each for an extended period of time.

But I did play around with, oh, I wonder what would happen if I crank this up.

And when we were doing, when we first started doing TREN, nobody knew how much to take because

the drug of choice would be parabolin.

But then they discontinued parabolin.

So it got prohibitably expensive and also

difficult to get.

And I reckon you couldn't get it for a long time.

I know a lot of manufacturers in China started making it again, but we used to get those from France and 76 milligram ampoules and you would take one Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and it was just delicious.

So when that went away, somebody figured out, oh, look at these cattle pellets.

It's Phenaplex.

They have trend acetate.

Close to the same thing.

So we start like extracting tren from cattle pellets, but we didn't know how much to take.

So I always always went, well, 76 times three, what's that?

200 and something.

Okay, so I'm just going to dose it just like I would parabolum.

And that would be considered,

you talk to like Dave Lee and some other people, they'd be like, yeah, that's a high dose of trend.

I would actually agree with them.

There was a time where I thought like 225, 250 milligrams of trend is not that high.

Now I look at it as, bro, you probably don't need more than

150 a week, really.

Okay, yeah.

And you can get away with the the two, like 250, and you, you may or may not see any side effects.

But once you start pushing that into the four or five hundred or higher, that's when you're going to get some really weird shit going on.

So I decided to try.

I mean, I was making it.

So it was costing me like 40 bucks to make tons of it.

And then

a friend of mine who's a pharmacist figured out how to pull test propionate from Cinevex.

So Incinevex is another cattle pellet that has both test prope and estradiol.

He figured out how to get the estradiol out.

So you extract that out first, filter it, then extract the test prope.

So we were getting, you'd spend 70 bucks and you would have fucking months and months of prope and

trim.

So I just, why not just take it up, see what happens?

Because nobody else had done a dose like that that I knew of at the time.

And probably the funniest one was when I started crying in a Harry Potter movie.

So

imagine I'm

825, 850 trin acetate, which right now, a lot of people right now don't even bat an eye.

You talk to powerlifters who are taking like a gram of that shit and they don't, they don't, man, the other day I farted and my nose started bleeding.

I'm like, yeah, it's way too much tren acetate.

Way, way, way too much.

I farted my nose.

Yeah, like they've got massively high blood pressure.

All the veins are sticking on that forehead.

Their head is purple.

They can't walk 10 feet without being out of breath and they don't understand what it is.

I'm like, bro, that's too much trend.

Drop the cut that shit by like 75%.

You don't need that much.

So imagine, I think it was a Tuesday, and I was in the movie theater with the girl I was dating at the time.

And luckily, there's nobody else because we're in the middle of the day.

270 pounds.

And Harry is on the beach, and the dementor is like sucking his face.

And I'm just losing my mind.

I'm like crying and shaking, and I'm raging, and I can't, I can't control it.

And then the Patronus comes out and saves him.

And I'm fucking, I jump up, I start screaming, yeah.

And then I sit down.

I was like, fuck yeah.

And my girlfriend at the time looks at me and goes, bro, you need to, you got to cut that.

You got to cut, whatever you're doing, you got to cut that shit out or down.

This is not cool.

But

there's that.

I used to get it stuck in traffic and I hate traffic.

Traffic will make me homicidal.

Oh, bro.

And one day I was in my Jeep and I'm like grabbing my.

my wheel and I'm like, and I'm like punching the wheel and I turned and there's a little kid staring at me.

Like,

hey, so I'm like waving at him and just tried to calm back down and then i realized like man this stuff is it's way too powerful to not take seriously yeah yeah it's pretty intense yeah um i feel like this is where a lot of people's roid rage uh

comes from yeah or the thought about roid rage existing people will say like oh roid rage doesn't exist it's i mean i understand why some people will say that because it's definitely based off of you and your chemistry and your mind, you know.

But I mean, I think no matter who you are, I feel like if you're going to take a gram of trend, it's going to fuck you up somehow.

100%.

And I think like, like you said earlier, it's going to exacerbate what's already inside of you.

So if you are a mess psychologically and mentally, gear is just going to make that come to the forefront, just like alcohol will.

So, and trend is one of those.

It's because it's, it's so much more powerful than testosterone.

Yeah.

And the aggression you get from it is so heightened, it's the one that's going to make that come out, like whether whether you like it or not so for people that want to do trend man get your head sorted first

and try 100 milligrams a week just see what it does because i promise you if you're doing like

let's say you're doing a base of testosterone and maybe you throw some primo or mastron in there and then maybe you throw a little bit of testosterone or trend you're not going to need that much trend you just simply don't need that much um i would so much rather somebody just take more testosterone but everything has a ceiling, right?

There's a yeah, I think that's the most important part to say that people keep forgetting is like when they hear don't take too much or you don't need that much, they think, oh, well, I'll still get more out of doing more.

But it's like, no, no, at a certain point, it starts biting you in the ass.

Every, every single medication, every single drug has a ceiling.

You're wasting money, it's not giving you any more positive benefits, only negative benefits.

And then you end up having to take accessory drugs to try to counteract the negative side effects that you're happening when you could just simply take less.

So, you know, you start taking, let's say, a good dose of testosterone, six milligrams per kilogram.

So if you're 100 kilograms, 220 pounds, about 600 milligrams of testosterone is about the threshold where you've maximized what you're going to get out of it.

And any more than that has to be dealt with some other way because you can't actually use it.

So do we break this down into estrogen?

Now I have estrogenic side effects.

Then somebody takes an anti-aromatase to kind of combat that.

Then they suppress their estrogen too much and their cholesterol gets fucked up.

Like then maybe your blood pressure goes up because of all the drugs and now you're taking something to drop your blood pressure and then that fucks up something else.

Like now you can't get a, you're taking an ACE inhibitor, so you don't can't get a hard boner.

So now you take Cialis to fix that.

Now your blood pressure drops, you take something else to fix that.

Next thing you know, you're on 15 different fucking things that are trying to provide a solution from the fact that you're just taking too much gear.

Yeah.

But people don't bat an eye.

People don't bat an eye.

I used to get people all the time that say, hey, I've been training with this guy.

It's my first cycle.

I just don't feel right.

Can you take a look at my cycle?

Sure, email it to me.

I'd get a list.

This is your first, this is your first cycle?

Yeah.

Okay.

Send me a list of what you're not on because that's a much shorter list.

And it wouldn't make any sense.

Like these are amateur bodybuilders.

They're nowhere near where they need to be to take anything close to what they're doing.

Yeah, bro.

That's one of the craziest things.

I have personal experiences seeing some of my closest friends get a program from a coach.

And I don't want to name, I don't want to name the coach, but I know there's multiple people that do shit like this coach does.

And they'll give them the full-on stack for their first prep ever and their first, basically their first cycle.

Like imagine they're natural and they're going on a prep and he starts giving them a stack.

He'll fucking give them everything, including trend at minimum 300 milligrams, which is mind-blowing to me.

You've just, and it's no wonder that one of my best friends who literally had a Ramon Dino-like physique, who I think had some of the greatest potential, he was like three years, four years younger than me, lifts, is stronger than me in all lifts, has a fucking shoulders and arms and legs like that, I feel like we were almost twice my fucking size.

This kid was just like, so he already had the whole package.

He had the whole package, and he's been running.

gear for a short period of time, but nothing ever crazy.

And then he finally did his first prep and he was like, bro, this isn't for me.

Like my mentals were just not there and I couldn't sleep at the end of the prep.

I just, I can't do it ever again.

And he just quit.

Didn't compete again, which is mind-blowing to me because I'm like, bro, you just ruined this kid who had so much potential because he probably could have just taken less gear or something.

Yeah.

And the thing is, it's like, here's the, here's the, here's the conundrum.

If you start with a low dose, You get less side effects.

Yeah, you're not going to, you're not going to put on the same as if you up it, but you always have the opportunity to add a little bit more.

When it's not working, add a little bit more.

Yeah.

But if you go to the high end it's going to be really difficult to convince somebody to take less

so like i don't i don't coach a lot of people that are on gear i train i do train a lot of people that are on trt

sometimes trt plus but they all know if we're gonna if you're gonna compete whether that's power theme bodybuilding strongman whatever i'm always gonna recommend the least amount of shit to get the job done and anytime they want to take more than that i'm like i'm not cool with that i'll refer to somebody who doesn't give a shit and they'll let you take whatever the fuck you want.

So I'll just pass those clients off.

And it's usually not the drugs that's keeping them from pushing forward.

It's that they train like a pussy, they sleep like a pussy, they eat like a pussy.

Yeah, you know.

But I had a guy in the Netherlands, I put him, he'd never taken anything, and he goes, What do you think I should do?

I go, Well, you know, you're in your late 30s, instead of jumping headfirst into

the shallow end of the pool, let's just take just TRT and see what it does.

Put him on 150, 160 milligrams of testosterone.

He puts like six pounds on immediately.

And I'm like, okay,

that's fucking.

Do you want more?

He's like, yeah, I want, okay, let's go to 300.

He puts on another few pounds.

Then his friend told him, oh, that's not enough gear to get where you want to be.

And this guy wasn't trying to be a bodybuilder.

He just wanted to feel good and look good.

Like, you've already put like nine or 10 pounds on less than 300 milligrams of gear.

How are you going to say it's not working?

And

what do you use for your argument of saying you definitely need more?

Like, if you want more, that's fine because we still have another two or three hundred milligram that we could just bring the test up.

And once we've hit that, now we consider adding something else, add a low dose and bring it up.

But people go straight to everything and straight the trend first cycle, Jesus, you know,

throwing some check drops, throwing some halitest in, see how that works.

Right.

Like some of the ones that'll really fucking make you angry and psychotic.

Something I did in the past is like whenever I was really really trying to hone in on what kind of dose was best for me at a certain time,

normally I would start lower.

And if I felt like it was kind of hard for me to tell whether or not I felt like it was enough, of course.

But what I would do is personally, just for my own sake, I would titrate up, say that I was on test and primo, I would titrate up both either like

25 or 50 milligrams the next week.

So I would bring that up and then see how that felt.

And then if I, if it didn't feel enough, then I would bring it up again.

But almost, most of the time, I noticed the change from going that small enough of an amount.

And then at one certain point, if I kept going up, I would start feeling a little bit more aggression.

I'd start noticing just

a little bit of a change in how I felt.

Because, you know, when you feel more aggressive, your thoughts are a little bit more aggressive as well.

And it wasn't very much, but it was still something that I noticed, like, hey, this is a little different from my normal.

Yeah.

And from that, I would be able to decide whether or or not I wanted to just keep it where it was or if I wanted to tighten it down again, like another like 50 milligrams.

So, for example, like this offseason right now, I started plateauing.

Well, it wasn't really much of a plateau.

I was still gaining weight

because I'm eating enough calories, but

my

weight increase has started to plateau slowly.

And then my coach and I decided to up my doses up by

75 milligrams for both test and primo.

And in the last two weeks, I went up four pounds again.

So that's telling me, like, yeah, like what we literally agreed in a message yesterday was our calories and our dose is good.

No going up anymore.

We're going to ride this wave because I'm obviously making gains that I need to.

And I remember talking to some guests of mine.

And he's one of my boys, so nothing on him, but he was also an open bodybuilder.

So he's got his own methodologies.

And this is what I'm trying to distinctively show that there's differences.

Like everyone doesn't need to just listen to what he says because I'm sure not everyone in my audience is trying to become an open bodybuilder in Olympia.

But when we were talking, he was like, yeah, I was taking a gram of tests.

And when I told him I was taking 500, he's like, bro, those are baby doses.

We call those like dad doses back where I'm from.

Like you need to.

You need to increase your dose way more.

And I'm like, what do you think?

Like, but why?

I'm like, I'm like, what do you think then?

Like,

because he took a gram.

I'm like, maybe like 750.

He's like, yes, start at 750, 750 minimum.

How much do you weigh?

I weigh 193 right now.

Yeah, see, and I'm going to, look, I'm going to say, okay, why?

Like, why?

Like, why not?

I get if you were 250 pounds, we'd have a different conversation.

Like, you're right around 200 pounds.

There's no reason to take an IPB bodybuilder dose until you get to that level.

Right, right.

Like, I'm sure that at some point in my future, maybe I'll be getting there.

But it's like, as of right now, titrating up slowly has been doing me pretty damn well.

And that's the

save that amount for whenever my body's ready for it because I feel like,

you know, like that's the purpose of people coming off and doing TOT in the first place is they want to respond better.

Yeah.

But see, and a lot of times with the mindset of these guys too, they're like, well, just take it up to take it up to a gram.

You're like, well,

what do I do if my blood pressure goes up?

Okay, well, take an antihypertensive.

Okay, well, what do I do when my lipids get fucked up?

Well, just take another drug.

And what do I do about my estrogen?

Take another drug.

My hair's falling out.

What do I do?

Take a drug.

And it's like, man, more drugs are not the answer.

Like what you're doing is working.

So instead, why go to the Wild West and just start shooting from the hip when you know, like, just a small extra puts another four pounds on me?

You know, but it's uh, it's what, and again, like I said, I've done all the weird shit.

Like, I remember when I was younger.

Now I'm older.

I'm like scared shitless, but I don't want to push it anymore because I don't want to,

when you get older, you're not as resilient to the side effects.

So I remember pushing, I pushed susten on once to 10 amps a week.

And usually I'd be in no more than 600 to 750 of test.

And that's being like 250, 270 pounds.

And I pulled it, put it up to 2.25 grams.

And the only difference between 750 to 1000 and two grams was I've never,

drugs never gave me acne.

I started getting Bacne.

I was really oily.

My My hair started thinning.

I was weirdly aggressive, but almost like

almost like female aggression, where it's more like

mopey,

irrational, like not, not like a masculine type of aggression.

It was kind of like a petty, argumentative type of aggression.

And I didn't like it.

I tried Winstroll once at a grandma week.

And that was amazing.

That was amazing.

Like, I don't think people understand how strong Winstrawl actually is when you take enough of it.

But then the side effects aren't worth it.

I lasted two weeks.

And I remember one day I woke up and I was getting ready to brush my teeth and I couldn't close my hands.

It felt like all my joints were made out of glass.

And if I tried to close my hand, my fingers would break in half.

So then I was like, okay, that's too much.

Way too much.

Yeah.

And then that's, you know, the.

crazy amounts of trend, Winstrahl and Sussanon.

You know, I tried all these things and just realized that at a certain point, more drugs are just more side effects and not really more gains

until you get big enough to need that amount.

So I had a thought when we broke to use the bathroom.

Yeah.

It's a weird thing because we know everything has an upper and lower limit.

So like creatine, once creatine is loaded, is taking more creatine going to be helpful?

Right.

I've, and I've actually used this analogy too.

Yeah.

Like, let's say you, let's say,

just to be clear, you don't need a loading protocol.

Is it helpful?

Yeah, because it gets you results faster.

But then once you're loaded, like more than five, seven and a half grams of creatine maintenance, continuing to take 30 every day, you're just wasting money.

You look at calories.

If you want to grow,

you need a sufficient amount of energy.

Taking more than that is going to make you grow faster, but it's not going to make your muscles grow faster.

You're just going to get fat, and then you just have to shred that off.

So

everything has an upper lead.

You drink too much water too quickly, you'll die of hypnotremia.

So, So,

but for some reason, a lot of people think that drugs don't play by these same rules.

So they're like, just take more drugs.

You're not making gains, take more drugs.

And anytime I've put someone,

and I never promote this to clients, they know I'm okay with it, but it's always their choice.

It's always their responsibility to say, hey, I'd like to look at TRT as an option or even performance enhancing drugs.

I'm like, okay, well, if we're going to do this, I'm going to, it's my job to educate you.

I'm not going to get it for you.

If If you can get it for yourself, I'm going to make sure you do it safely.

We'll come up with a strategy for it like we do with training, nutrition, everything.

And everyone I've put on, I put on 160 milligrams of test, boom, they put four, four, five, six pounds on.

They're like, wow, this is great.

And then titrate it up like you said, you and your coach.

That's the logical way of doing it.

Instead of getting really excited and just like premature ejaculation is shooting your load all at once.

And then once you've taken a few grams of shit, where do you go from there?

Yeah.

Because nothing's ever going to feel like that.

Yeah.

So people can get, even though we think steroids aren't physiologically addictive, they can be psychologically addictive because of the way you feel and the aggression and the confidence that you get.

But then a lot of people ignore the side effects and go, okay, I don't like these other aspects of how it's changed my mood, my identity and the way I feel.

I'm willing to deal with that because I love the feeling that I get when I'm on gear.

But if there's, there would have been an upper threshold where you still had that same feeling without needing to take excessive amounts of shit.

Right.

You know,

in terms of growth, I've had I've had two people on my podcast see this exact statement, but both of them have experienced at a certain level that when they titrated the doses upwards enough, they also just started not seeing any improvement in progress.

Like, I mean, of course, the side effects

may increase, but in terms of just rate of progress of muscle growth, they just stopped seeing progress.

And both of them, it was Justin Harris, coach Justin Harris, and then the other one was a Ziegler monster.

They both stopped seeing progress at somewhere roughly around a total of two grams.

And obviously, this is different on a person-to-person basis, but I mean, I feel like that says enough is like if they're stop, if they're not seeing any more progress after that, but then if you titrate the dose even more, it affects your blood work even more.

And

a healthy body is a responding body.

That's right.

So at a certain point, if you start becoming unhealthy because of your blood work, you're going to respond even less.

I just feel like it just, like, why, you know?

What's the point?

Right.

And Justin Harris is a massive dude.

Yeah.

And he's probably one of the smartest guys I've ever met in the industry.

That dude is wicked smart.

I remember being at a seminar in Columbus, Ohio, an an elite FTS seminar.

And I watched, he and Kroc had a bench press competition.

And so they put on like a loose, a loose powerlifting shirt, and they were going at it.

And I think they were fucking repping out like 640 on the bench.

And then they had a dip contest, how many dips they could do in a row.

And it was just, it was hysterical to watch guys that big like doing dips and like doing 50, 60 dips.

After the bench contest?

Yeah.

Fuck yeah.

But it's like, he's right.

I mean, there's a law diminishing returns.

And if we look at even something else that even if you don't do gear, and if you're a bodybuilding coach, if you're in the industry, and especially if you read literature and look at the evidence-based side of avoidance, at least I don't like the word evidence-based because when people talk about evidence-based, they're basically saying paper-based, like 30-person subject pool or meta-analysis of what we think, how we respond to things, what's the most volume, least volume, and all that stuff.

And this stuff's always changing.

But if we look at experience in the gym, and then we also confirm that with the literature, there's a high and low for everything.

So let's look at training, training volume.

If you look at most of the studies on training volume, the 60% of the gains you make is within like the first four to five sets per muscle group.

So it's like, okay,

if you go to, say, 10 sets, you get roughly like a 20, 25% increase.

So you start hitting a law diminished.

Is this per week or per week?

week per week per week so if you were going on on and this is strictly for hypertrophy if we're talking strength development we have a slightly different conversation but strictly for hypertrophy if we look at anywhere from zero to 20 sets per week per muscle groove we know that like the vast majority of all the gains is in the first four or five maybe six sets that doesn't mean that more sets isn't good it just means that you you have to recognize that there is a law diminishing return so the first like four or five sets is like this, and the next five or six sets is like this, and then the next 10 sets is like this.

So

it's not like you're not making improvement, but every category of set volume you go up, you get slightly less percentage of gains.

And then you also have more fatigue.

And you're building more fatigue, right?

But everybody's going to need something different.

If you might, you may be somebody that can grow crazy good on five sets per week.

You might have another guy that does need 20 sets to continue growing.

My genetics says that I have mainly slow Twitch fibers.

I have

muscle performance impairment.

So basically, my fast Twitch fibers, maybe I just don't have as much of those or something like that.

I've not looked into the genetics stuff for that.

But I mean, it is a thing.

It is a thing.

Everybody's built different.

See, I'm on the opposite side.

Like, I'm basically all fast Twitch.

So if you and I did the same training program, we're probably going to get similar, but but very different results.

Like for me, for you, like

five sets of 10 to 12 might be an optimal scenario for you, which is 10 sets of five is going to be better for me.

So if I did a high rep, traditional, you know, bro-tastic bodybuilding workout, I actually just get smaller and weaker.

Wow.

But if I train like a powerlifter, I grow.

Wow.

It's just a difference between people's muscle fiber makeup.

Yeah.

I trained, I did like

sets of, I did sets of like barbell squats when I was younger.

I would just use, I'd just start my leg workouts with basically sets of six to eight on

barbell squats just because I like to put four plates or more on it and have people be impressed by it.

Yeah.

And then

I never feel like I fucking grew my legs.

And then as of recently, I've been training.

I've been like focusing on more leg press movements with more volume.

I've been doing leg extensions with maybe at least 15 reps, slowing the eccentric.

More sets, but less fatigue.

And my legs have grown a lot more.

So I guess it, for me, at least the whole like slow twitch fiber thing, like I can see how I need to actually like vary my training based off of what my genetics are.

Yeah.

Well, and that's the thing that as a coach, you have to recognize because the literature says one thing, but then you start training people or you train yourself and you're like, I'm not actually making that good a gains doing it the way science tells me I should.

So then you try, maybe I try something on one outlier side or the other, and you find that when I move to the outlier side, that actually worked really good for me.

You try the other outlier side, and man, that worked really bad for me.

But anytime we look at like general population,

what's basically an average for everybody, you can look at it like a bell curve.

Most people are going to be in the 70% and the inside of that bell curve.

So if they just follow traditional

or even contemporary evidence-based practices, they're probably going to see really good results.

But you are going to have 15% on one side where that doesn't do anything for them, 15 on the other that needs something completely different as well.

So this is the kind of the argument I have when people go evidence-based stuff.

Not everybody fits into the study.

You're always going to have people on one side or the other that need something that's different, but they've kind of figured that out through trial and error, which is what everybody did in the 50s and 60s and 70s before exercise science was a thing.

And exercise science has never really catered to bodybuilding bodybuilding except for the last 10 to 15 years.

It's just, that's when like, you're not going to find a lot of bodybuilding studies from decades ago.

They don't exist.

Yeah.

And I think the same thing can be said about PEDs, which is why I don't think everyone should keep making some generalized assumptions.

Yeah.

But obviously it's only like in the comments of reels from fucking.

dumbass people that will say that shit.

At one time, the scientists said that anabolic steroids didn't cause muscle growth.

Yeah.

You go back a little over half a century ago, they go, they're pointless.

They don't actually put on muscle size.

And bodybuilders go, well, let's try it out.

And they went, holy fuck, these things do work.

I think that's why it's cool to have like people that are transparent and talk about their experiences straight up, whether it's good for them or not, though.

Cause like you see so many differences, like me, for example.

I like fucking enjoy Halo testing.

Like I feel good off that shit, but I know most people feel fucking crazy when they take that shit.

I love Halo testing.

Oh, yeah.

But I don't want to go to jail.

Like when I was powerlifting, I tried Halo a couple of times and it just made me fucking headbutt a stack of weights.

And I put a gash in my forehead and I'm like, yep, no, I'm not doing this again.

It made me so hyper-aggressive.

Oh, damn.

Yeah.

So I was like, yeah, this isn't worth it.

Yeah, that's what I mean.

Is like, it doesn't make me aggressive.

I mean, I only took it like during peak week.

So maybe I just didn't have enough energy to be aggressive.

You're a pretty chill guy, too.

So I've been told I'm a chill guy.

And so normally like I, at least now, when I was younger and when I first started taking PDs, like I first started injecting myself like maybe I don't know it was like 2021 2020 it was like

yeah it wasn't really too long ago but when I first started injecting myself

I I was having like some fucking mental issues some crazy shit going on but now at this point I'm a lot more calm but for example when I took trend for the first time for this prep because honestly just because I wanted to finally experience what it was like and be able to talk about my experiences titrating from 50 to 100 milligrams i had no effect i didn't feel anything whatsoever um when i titrated up to 150, I did start feeling stuff.

But I think what really hit was when I took it for more than five weeks and it was like towards the end of prep, like peak wheat was coming around.

I think what happened was the fact that I was so low in energy for the last two weeks of prep.

You know, you get really irritable in general.

from being low energy and it's like all these things that are on your plate all these things that are mentally stuff that you have to take care of feels like a fucking i don't know train on your lap yeah and so

uh, I just the trend hit hard, even though it was only 150 milligrams.

I feel like it just made me feel a lot more irritable and aggressive about the fact that,

like, I don't want to do anything right now because all I want to do is lay down, yeah, you know, I just don't want to do anything, yeah.

So, um,

I think uh, maybe for me, I don't know about other people, but 150 exacerbated how I felt at that time, which was like, I have no energy,

and I feel like around

150 is where you're really going to start seeing the results from trend

if you want really noticeable results.

But again, it's also once you start getting that 150 to 250 territory, that's probably where you're going to notice the mood swings.

And like you said, at close to the end of a prep, you're already irritable anyways.

So it's just throwing

fuel on the fire, so to speak.

So like what it felt like.

When I got here five weeks ago, and I haven't been on anything in like five years.

Maybe a little bit of Anivar when somebody says, oh, I've got here, here's 50 Anivar.

Okay, cool.

That's not going to do much.

Or when your doctor decided to stab you.

Yeah, what's that?

When your doc decided to stab you.

But like,

hard to get when I go.

I think I've got, I think I'm going to get hooked up when I go home because I don't want to go back.

Because when I got here, everybody knew that I hadn't been on anything and I was craving to get back on TRT so I feel normal again.

And so somebody brought me some amps and I was on like 175,

I think it was Inethate, 175 per week.

And the first three weeks, I put on 15 pounds.

That's crazy.

So then I talked to the friend, like, oh, I got some shit.

What do you want?

I got some shit laying around.

I've never actually taken Primabolin.

Just for the fact that most,

like traditionally growing up, Primabolin is difficult to find, like real Primabolin.

Yeah.

And do you think in Australia it would be even like, it just wouldn't be pure or it wouldn't be

if you can even find it?

If you can even find it.

I think it's getting a lot better now because because even like you probably, you can find parabolin now.

You can find the powder, at least if you're willing to make it yourself.

Like the Chinese, they're going to, you want it, Chinese are going to make it.

So

they've started making some of these compounds that you wouldn't be able to get for a long time because they just don't make them anymore.

But my friend had some Primo Bolon.

I was like, you don't want it?

They're like, nah, nah, you can have it.

Okay, cool.

So I started 300 milligrams of Primo.

I've never done it before.

And, oh, there's a little bit of trend laying around.

So 105 milligrams of trend a week and a little bit of anivar.

So I went from 15 pounds to 22 pounds.

And now I'm going to go home like, oh, God, I don't want to go back to where I was.

I felt like Schmeagel, man.

I felt like Lord of the Rings.

Precious.

And I told my wife, I said, I'm going to, I'm going to leave Australia at 92 kilos.

Expect me to come home at 102.

And it's like,

I've only been on like the extra stuff for about two weeks.

So I think if you look at that, and that's, that's not a small cycle, but it's not a large cycle either.

And a lot of it's mainly, you know, stuff that's fairly non-toxic, like primobolin, right?

And I've never gone above like 200 milligrams of tests since I've been here.

So a lot of people think that they have to do these massive doses of stuff.

But if you put the right stuff together at low dose,

it's a synergistic effect.

It's one plus one equals five effect.

Yeah, yeah.

It's the same way I like see and take caffeine.

Well, actually, not anymore.

I've been a little bit more addicted to caffeine recently, but the way that I take nootropics and caffeine and other stimulants like alpha GPC and shit is like I'll take it on the day that I feel like I really need it.

So, like, say two, three days of the week, I have podcasts or I'm filming.

Those are the days I take it.

And the base dose is always super effective for me.

So I've never had to titrate up.

And I think it's just the same for all medications.

But

Alpha GPC puts me to sleep.

What?

Yeah.

How?

I don't know.

So my wife is finishing out her degree for clinical nutrition.

So we now have access to all these pharmaceutical level multivitamins or vitamins and minerals and compounding stuff.

So I ordered some alpha GPC powder from a compounding because we're going to start compounding our own stuff at home.

And it's 500 milligrams per dose.

And I was like, sweet.

Took that.

Hour later, I'm almost passing out.

Next day I do it again, almost passing out.

This is really weird.

So I looked it up and it's a small, small percentage of outliers where alpha GPC actually makes you fall asleep.

Damn.

Yeah.

That's kind of awesome.

That's hilarious.

It's wild, though.

Because I didn't know.

I'm like, wow, I feel like shit.

But I took

back in the day, Charles liked big doses of shit.

Like he would tell you to take these massive doses.

And we were taking,

I took like two and a half grams of alpha GPC and I stood up to lecture in Dubai.

And about 45 minutes of lecture, I went, whoa, I got to go, I got to go shit.

And I just ran out of the room, took a shit.

It just like completely, everything in my guts just came.

Damn.

Yeah.

But that's the dose that seems to be best if you're going to train.

But the problem is, if you don't train and you take that amount, it's going to make you nauseous as fuck.

Like caffeine, six to nine milligrams per kilogram.

That's a big dose.

Yeah.

For a guy my size, for our size, it's like six to 900 milligrams.

Cool if you're going to work out.

Don't take that and not work out because you're going to get sick as fuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Damn, bro.

That's crazy.

At least you have a way to clean out your colon now.

That's it.

Yeah.

Colon cleanse, alpha GPC, high dose.

Wait, so are you not going to get back on TRT when you go back?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, you will?

Yeah.

So like Dave Lee has a clinic there.

Okay.

And Primal.

And so he said, okay, let's go ahead and finally get you hooked up so you don't have to suffer because I've got hypogonadil.

And the last doctor, I think it's the second or third doctor I went to,

I was talking to him about it, and he was, I went in for like a throat infection, ear infection thing, and he wanted me to go do labs.

I said, Well, don't worry about writing me a script for it.

I'll just, I'm going to buy private labs because I'm going to order way more shit than you're willing to write for me.

He goes, Like what?

I go, testosterone.

And I went through the whole shtick.

And he goes, Oh, do you have low testosterone?

I go, Yeah.

I said, I've been hypogonadle since I was 36.

And he looks at me and goes,

I don't think you need it.

You don't look like you need it.

Like, bro,

it's not about the muscles.

That's not what I wanted.

It's crazy.

Yeah, it's about the

psychological aspect, mental aspect.

Yeah.

Like a man again.

Who was this guy who said this?

There's a doctor in Australia.

What the fuck, dude?

Yeah.

And I looked at him, I go, bro, you don't, I'm not trying to bodybuild.

Like, that's not what I want.

I'm past all that stuff.

I just want to feel normal.

And like, I've had, I've been on AD medicine, ADD medication since I was eight.

So I was one of the first, like the original ADD kids in the 80s.

Damn.

And I've been on Vivant since like 2011 when it first came out.

It's the one that works for me really well.

When I go to Australia, they wouldn't prescribe it for me.

They're like, your GP can't prescribe it.

You have to get into a psychiatrist.

You have to get re-evaluated and then they can prescribe it for you.

I'm like, okay.

So I've been on this drug for over a decade.

It's the one that works, but I have to go to a psychiatrist to get re-evaluated to see if I can get back on it.

This makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

But that's Australia.

Fucking wild.

Damn, bro.

And the doctors do not want to listen to you over there.

Yeah, that's kind of ridiculous.

I know here they still want you to go to a psychiatrist, but still, like the doctors are not that, like, I feel like that's just kind of ridiculous to look at somebody and be like, yeah, you don't need TRT, or yeah, you do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's insane.

It's, it's, it's, it's done.

Look, man, if, if I was a, if I was a woman and I had, uh, if I was a young woman and I had acne, oh, here, here's some synthetic progestins and estrogens to clear your acne or you don't want to get pregnant, pump you full of hormones.

Oh, you're having hot flashes, pump you full of hormones.

But a man wants to do the same thing for man-related issues.

We can't be having that.

We can't have a bunch of guys on testosterone, Royd Rage, all that.

And this is a big misunderstanding and taboo that surrounds testosterone.

Oh, is that mainly in Australia, you're saying?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Here it's better.

In America, it's not bad.

Yeah, America's changed a lot.

But it wasn't like two decades ago, it was like, no, no, no, no.

Now there's a TRT clinic, a Starbucks, and a 7-Eleven on every corner.

But and now they're, and thank God for Allie and making silverbag because they're now

all the doctors and the fitness professors that go to that are making it a legitimate thing to do and doing what's right, like looking at your symptoms, reading your labs, monitoring that.

Whereas if you went to a TRT clinic even 15 years ago, you'd walk in, you'd fill out a form, they'd go, yep, looks like you need some drugs.

What do you want?

And they would write whatever you wanted.

Now, they wouldn't even take labs back then.

And now to legitimize it, we have to have labs.

We have to make everything legit so that we can keep progressing men getting the help they need and not go back to the dark ages where guys are having menopause and they feel like shit and no one wants to help them.

If you feel like any of the medications that we spoke about today may benefit you, such as BPC-157, GH acreaglogs such as tessamarellin, IGF-1, oxandrolin trache, semiclutide, then you can obtain these from Transent HRT and the link for that will be in the bio.

If you feel like you're experiencing symptoms of low testosterone such as depression, anxiety, lack of motivation, as well as lack of sex drive, then you can get this checked out as well by getting your blood work done at Transcend and they will provide you expert medical analysis.

Transcend HRT has worked with many professional bodybuilders and pro athletes such as Thor Bjornsson, Phil Heath, and Jeremy Bundia.

And if you feel like this podcast has any relevancy to you, I do believe that this clinic will provide of great benefit to you as well.

So reeling it back to when you were talking about training um and you were discussing um four to five sets you start seeing uh what was it 60 yeah about 60 of all your gains or all your gains first those first handful of sets so what do you think about high frequency training and why the science-based community is so hyped about the upper and lower split right now are they

it was full body yesterday now it's upper lower

i mean probably the same thing oh man everybody they all lose the force for the trees um

So if you look at like, how do I lay out a split?

Like, there's no perfect split.

It's perfect for you at that time.

So the first thing is, how many days a week can you train?

Because you have to fit everything in.

So if you're only training three days a week, the only logical thing would be either a full body routine or rotating upper lower.

It's like one week you're doing two upper and a lower, the next week you're doing two lower and an upper.

And that way you're still hitting everything, every body part every seven days, but you can split the, you can split the volume across that.

And people are kind of have gotten away from body part splits, which I think is stupid.

Body part splits are still good.

It just depends, does it fit in your schedule?

Can you recover from it?

How much volume do you actually need?

So let's say somebody, they're training and they find that for and every body part's different too, and every movement's different, right?

If you're doing like you said earlier about you used to do back squats and now you find like hack squats and leg press actually work better for you.

Well, we have to look, one of those is a movement-centric, and one of them is a bit more muscle-centric.

So, if you get like a back squat, there's a lot of things that's happening there.

So, we can't really call that, it's not specific for quads.

It's a lower body specificity, generally specific.

It's a big, it's a movement.

You get a leg extension, now that's more of a muscle-centric action because you're actually mainly just working knee extension in your quads.

So, a back squat and a leg extension, they don't really have a one-to-one ratio for sets because one of them is more concentrated than the other, but one of them is more systemically concentrated than the others.

There's a lot of things to think about there, right?

But let's say we start out with 10 sets a week and we find that 10 sets a week is pretty good.

People are getting good results.

More isn't necessarily getting better.

Less isn't necessarily getting better.

The split doesn't really matter all that much.

It's how can I fit that into the week?

So, you know, whether I'm doing five sets on quads, hamstrings, glutes, calves, abs, twice a week, twice in a seven-day period, or doing that on one day, it probably doesn't matter all that much.

But I'm a fan of high frequency.

And the reason I like high frequency is just from a recovery standpoint and a DOM standpoint, because every workout, you can't just isolate it to that workout.

You have to look at how's that workout going to affect the rest of the workouts that week.

So, if you do, let's say it's a leg day and you do a lot of deadlifting on leg day and you have a back day in two days, is all the deadlifting going to fuck up your back day?

Right.

So, if it is, then we might need to take that and spread your deadlifts out multiple times a week and figure out how many sets you can do without it affecting an upper body workout.

So, there's a lot of, there's a lot of

the way I view program design is a lot more complex.

Like the coach should have a lot of complexity in how they they do things and a lot of thinking, but then the application from the client standpoint should just be really easy.

But there's no wrong, there's no right, single right way to write a program.

It's right at the time that you give it to somebody and it's working.

You see, and the evidence-based crowd or even just the bodybuilding community, they're always looking for what's the best thing.

Yeah.

And it's all

individual, you know?

And it depends on the client because most people aren't just training bodybuilders.

You're probably training normal people too.

Well, if Susie Muffintop can only train three days a week, you can't like body part splits, probably not going to work on her, especially if she's a beginner because it's going to be too much stimulus in each workout.

She's going to be crippled for the rest of the week.

So, you know, if we, if we go back to this, to the saying that like your gains aren't happening while you train, it's when you're resting.

You have to make sure that you can rest and that you're recovered before you stimulate that stuff again.

Okay.

So

hypothetically, say that we're discussing five days of training a week.

Do you think there is any benefit other than what you said to a higher frequency training in order to build size faster for a specific muscle group?

Yeah, 100%.

Like if you like going into a specificity phase.

Yeah.

So if you go into a specificity phase, like let's say you want to, you want your chest to get bigger and you want it to get bigger really fast.

So you might think, well, what's our range, say zero to 20 sets is what we're looking at.

Maybe, maybe you're doing 20 sets a week on chest, chest, but we have to understand that you have to pull from something else.

So, if you're going to do, if you're going to hammer your chest and you want that to be the priority, everything else needs to go on maintenance.

And the trap that people get in, they're like, well, I want my chest to get bigger, so I'm just going to increase everything on my chest, frequency, how many sets per week, but they don't pull away from something else.

And they go, I don't understand why my chest isn't growing.

Well, you've now effectively cranked all of your fatigue and volume up without removing it from something else.

So I even have routines where I have people do the same body part five days in a row, mainly for strength development, but it does work really fast.

So if you look at doing five days a week and you're doing, say, four sets per workout, that's going to be, you know, and you start the day off with that movement or that body part.

You know, that's going to be, you're going to be damn near crippled by the end of the week.

But that's what you're going to have to do to get it to grow faster.

In order to overcome that, you have to take everything else that's secondary and put it on maintenance.

So you just don't want to lose anything while you're prioritizing a muscle, but you'd also don't want to try to make everything grow at the same time if you have a singular focus on one area or you're just spinning your wheels.

Gotcha.

So do you think, say, so for me, for example, right now I want to build my lance and my legs the most.

Do you think it's too much to ask to try to build both of those at the same time in priority compared to my other muscle groups?

The only way you're going to know is if you try it.

Like that's it, right?

And there's going to be, there can be a lot of crossover if you're, if you're strategic about the exercise that you, you use, because there's something like a deadlift.

Does a deadlift work your lats?

A very small amount.

Well, I'd say.

I mean, what happens if you don't engage your lats on a deadlift?

Like you definitely have to engage your lats for sure.

So again, there's some stimulus.

Yeah.

Now,

imagine we take five exercises and you have some stimulus, like five leg exercises or some stimulus to the lats.

So your lats are still getting some work.

And then you go and you do a bunch of lat stuff.

So it's like, okay, at what point have you gone over what you can actually do?

So

I think if you were going to do that, then you'd have to be really intelligent about the exercises to make sure that your lats weren't fatigued from the back work when you do the deadlift because it's going to fuck your deadlift up.

Yep.

Right.

So

there is a way to

finagle all of these things where it makes sense.

Right.

But same thing with arms.

A lot of people want their arms bigger.

In a lot of cases, if you're doing enough pushing and pulling and everything else, your arms are getting plenty of stimulus.

You might only need four or five sets of direct arm work a week.

Sometimes, if you've been training your arms a lot, if you just don't train them for a while, they'll just grow.

Because I think a lot of people...

will do a lot of chest, back, shoulders, like vertical push, pull, horizontal push, pull.

Their arms are probably getting plenty of at least mid-range work.

And then they go and they smash a whole workout with like 15 sets of arms.

It's like, you actually probably don't need that.

Like yesterday, I was at Gold's Gym training with a buddy of mine, and we were doing a lot of chest.

We were doing chest, we're going to do a little bit of shoulders, a little bit of triceps.

So if we're doing, let's say, incline press, if we're doing incline press, some cable press, we're doing it like three different press movements, your triceps are still involved in that, but mainly in kind of that mid-range type of movement.

You're not really getting any short position work or lengthened position work.

So when we went to the triceps on, okay, we've already done mid-range on triceps.

Because bodybuilding, I like positions of flexion style routine, mid-range movement, a lengthened movement, and a shortened position movement.

Let's just go and do something for short position triceps and then finish off with lengthened.

Two sets of each of those, you're good.

You've already hit plenty of triceps with everything else, but people tend to not think about that when they're writing programs.

They go arm day, leg day, chest day, back day, shoulder day.

It's like, okay,

consider all the crossover.

And if you're doing a lot of multiple joints, if you're just doing pec deck, 10 sets of pec deck, you probably need a bit more triceps.

Yeah.

But if you're doing a lot of pressing, less triceps.

That pec deck do hit the biceps pretty hard, though.

They do.

Well, okay, so now I'm going to challenge you on that because when we talked about the deadlift and the lats involvement of that, well, the lats have to keep the bar pulled back.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you are getting that stimulation.

If you're doing a, if you're doing the pec deck, your biceps are getting some because they're stabilizing as well.

They're flexing the shoulder and stimulating the arm or stabilizing the elbow.

But people don't think about that.

They don't.

They don't.

I feel like, well, that's the reason why I said very small or small.

Yeah.

It's because in my opinion,

maybe this is just...

Maybe this is mostly me.

When I do a deadlift, I obviously have to engage my lats, but the amount just seems so insignificant because

compared to something such as like the bicep support needed in order for you to do a pec deck, unless you are bending your arms at a much greater degree angle than you trying to straighten it out, come out, be controlled, not locked out, of course, but you know what I'm trying to say.

No, totally.

Because doing so, you know, you want to prevent your arms from hyperextending.

Whereas for a lat, it's like if I release the lat for a second, it'll throw me a little bit off balance, but my joint isn't going to break.

Yeah.

So it's just the amount of stimulus feels not quite the same.

The joint's not going to break, but you're going to affect T-spine extension, which is

going to affect the lumbar spine.

So if you lose that,

it's not like the shoulder is going to get fucked.

Your lower back is probably going to get fucked if you lose that, right?

So there's, again, there's consequences to everything, especially if you're not paying attention.

But see,

you made a good point with that, where your biceps, and you can fit, you do a pec deck.

Let's say do 10 sets of pec deck and you don't do any biceps.

The next day, your biceps are absolutely fried.

Right.

In gymnastics, because I do a lot of that stuff too.

I don't even do bodybuilding anymore for myself.

It's mainly like gymnastic stuff and Olympic weightlifting.

And that's all I've done for like the last four or five years.

There's, if you look at gymnasts, especially guys on the rings, you're going to see massive, massive biceps.

They don't do a lot of curls.

Most of it is straight arm strength work.

But see, the evidence-based community will say, no,

you're not going to grow.

It doesn't create the right tension doing straight arm work.

You have to actually bend the elbow and get the muscle to contract.

And I can tell you from experience and also talking to lots of gymnasts, like that's not true.

Tension is tension.

I do feel like that's not necessarily true.

Even you can argue that that's not necessarily as true now as well, because of all the evidence around lengthened work too.

Like if you're going to have have so much isometric force and the most lengthened position, how could that not

cause some hypertrophy in your biceps?

And the thing is, it wouldn't also, like, I've got this, uh,

the way I look at like isometrics, right?

So let's, let's, let's, let's define an isometric.

What is an, what does isometric contraction mean?

Hold, hold on.

So you basically, you're tensing the muscle without it changing length.

It's not shortening, it's not lengthening, it's just maintaining the same position, but there's tension being pushed in the muscle.

So if you, a true isometric would be if I pushed on your wall, the wall is not going to move.

And if I'm pushing and keeping the joint from opening and closing, I'm creating isometric tension without, without any joint opening, closing, or muscle length, right?

Or changing muscle position.

Now, if I do a deadlift, people will say, well, you're isometrically working your upper back and your lower back and your spine.

And I would say I disagree because the difference between those two things is when gravity is a constant force and we have to battle our entire lives.

When I go into a deadlift, if I'm not actively concentrically contracting, you're going to fold in the flexion, right?

So

if you take a camera and put it on, say,

high frames per second so that you can slow it down and look at it and post at it, You're not going to see in a deadlift, somebody's back being completely isometrically strong.

You're going to see it wavering.

It's going to go into flexion and then go into extension, flexion, extension.

So it actually is the muscles are changing.

They're not lengthening and shortening too much, but there is like this almost like a wave of flexion extension that's happening and lengthening and shortening in those muscles.

So it's like, if we're going to say isometrics don't build muscle because the muscle doesn't change shape, well, what are we actually considering an isometric and not?

And so if you're doing a pec deck, that's to me, not really an isometric because you have these forces that you're trying to equalize across the elbow joint and across the shoulder joint.

So if you if you're pulling, the weight stack is trying to pull you back to the beginning position.

So there's always this happening.

So you have these little like very small moments of time where you're actually probably lengthening and shortening, but it's at it's at a non-visible rate.

You actually can't see it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Which is funny because I think Jeff Never just posted a video showing like there was not really any difference between doing lengthened partials versus full ROM.

And they were still trying to discuss which one might be different in the future.

But from the experiment, it seemed they were about the same.

So, I mean, it's kind of interesting because like you were saying, you're doing literally microscopic movements of

reps, I guess, in the lengthened position.

It's just not visually, like you can't really see it.

But anybody who's done any of this work will know.

If you're getting sore, something's happening.

Charles used to call it the

Vince Gerona EMG technique.

Do 10 sets of something, and wherever it hurts the next day is probably what you worked.

And I think that's pretty good.

But

look, everybody's always, they're chasing the secret.

They're chasing the secret.

And is it lengthened partials?

Do we do one and a quarter reps in a lengthened range?

Do we hang out and stretch in a lengthen range under load?

And I would say you could throw a dozen things at me and say, do I do this?

And I'm just going to go, yes.

The one thing that people are forgetting is the most important thing is effort.

If you're not training hard, you're just not going to grow that fast.

Like if you just, if you just do mid-range movements and you train as hard as you can and you have somebody who's prioritizing length and range and they're training 15% less than you, you're going to get better results than them, period.

Yeah, I agree.

Before we had exercise science telling us what, what supposedly works and doesn't work, people were getting fucking massive

just going to the gym and fucking doing the work.

There's a lot of variables, I think, when

you're considering trying not to get injured, depending on how hard you're going and how far you're going with your own personal range of motion.

But I think in the end, it's like if most of us decide to change

our type of training, but we are either advanced or have had at least multiple years training, I think we can all sense that we're still going to the same point of failure and we're still exerting the same amount.

So I think as long as we're doing that, that's the most important.

And then the tracking of progressive overload, like we do, is just us making sure that we're not getting fat and we're still being productive.

That's it.

I think for what bodybuilders need to get out of the lengthened stuff is

like 10 years ago when I started Muscle Nerds, we came out in our program design course and we said, look, most of your clients, when they first come to you, whether they're gen pop and sedentary or whether they're an elite level bodybuilder, Most everybody lift in mid-range, mostly in some shortened range position, and they don't really go to a full lengthened position.

So start people's periodization with mostly exercises that reinforce the lengthened position.

Now, there was no research on that being superb for muscle growth.

I was just telling people to do that because we need to take care of our joints.

Everybody goes to the gym, they work their muscles, but they don't think about their joints until they can't get into a position.

And for a bodybuilder, that's important because the more dysfunctional a joint gets, the more you're going to have to work around that.

So it's like, you're like, well, I can't overhead press anymore.

So then, I don't know, maybe I'm going to use a Vulcan press.

Oh, well, now just even that machine hurts.

So now I have to make a compensation.

Pretty soon, you can't get your arm over your head.

Right.

It's like, well, if you can't get your arm over your head without impingement, how the frick are you going to do a double biceps?

And I feel like what we learned from people like Knees Over Toes Guy is to do the exercise that hurts.

Yeah.

Just, you know, less, less weight.

The thing is, like,

try to go full range, not all the time, but try to, try to reestablish that range of motion because the more muscle you put on the stronger you get if you don't work that out it just typically usually gets worse and it's harder to fix it when you have gobs of muscle than if you just did it right the first time

so you know there's like a lot of guys that come to me where they have pathological shoulder issues and i have to have this conversation of look

i'm going to tell you to do something you're not going to want to do you actually need to atrophy a little bit like i've worked hard for this muscle i'm like yeah but now it's fucked your shoulder and you are really close to having something happen to your shoulder where you're going to have to have to have surgery.

So if you don't lose a little bit of muscle right now, and we do some things to reorganize a tissue, like biological tissue change, we need to reorganize this so that you can get, now keep progressing.

If you keep doing what you're doing and you blow your shoulder out, you're going to you're going to be forced to stop training anyways.

Yeah.

And you're going to atrophy to a larger degree.

So let's take two steps back to move five steps forward.

And they hate it, but you know, sometimes that's if they're not taking care of business, that's what we have to do.

Yeah.

It sounds like retraining someone to do the squat form perfectly or more correctly, but how do you biologically with the tissues?

Like what were you, what were you explaining earlier?

Yeah.

Okay.

So let's look at, all right.

So we have like bones, bones.

coming together at

what's what what we i call a joint right so you have a couple of bones or a group of bones that come together.

And in order for those bones to move properly, then the muscle, the brain has to direct the muscles on when to shorten, when to lengthen, how to fire, like motor sequencing of being able to get into certain positions.

If the brain doesn't like what's happening, so let's say you start closing subacromial space in the shoulder, and every time you abduct, abduct, and externally rotate, you get an impingement.

You go into flexion, you get an impingement.

The brain is going to try to do what it can to

retain some type of function.

So it's going to give you some pain so you stay out of those areas and it's going to reorganize the tissue in order to protect the joint.

So by that time,

you've basically taken, you've laid down collagen in a disorganized manner, right?

And a lot of the laying down of collagen is going to be based on stress lines, right?

So if we look at a stress line, like for the biceps, stress line should come through here, right?

Now, if your bones get a little off and get a little bit torque, those stress lines, they start to deviate a little bit.

And so the muscles start, you start getting like a, almost like a twisting contraction, and that's going to alter the positioning of the bones.

So then your brain goes, okay, I don't have enough space here.

I don't like this.

And every time we go to here, that hurts.

So I'm going to cause pain.

So you stay out of that.

And

I'm going to lay down collagen instead of it being like this.

I'm going to lay it down like this to try to prevent some of this movement and motion.

And that's where we build things like adhesions or what people call like knots now you have this tissue where the tissue outside of that knot can kind of sort of function but that knot's not extending and it's not contracting so it's basically like sticking glue in there so to protect the joint from being pulled even further out of where it needs to be right so we you do you can do manual therapy to try to start irritating that and dry needling microcurrent stimulation but the biggest thing is movement so we have to start reestablishing movement which means we have to look at strategies for range of motion.

We have to look at strategies for load management.

And how do we work back into that position so that you can regain that function and then start to progress forward?

What would these strategies be specifically?

Yeah, so I know there's a lot of people out there with shoulder issues.

Yeah, a lot of A, a lot of us figuring out like, okay, what is the actual problem?

So there's a couple of different ways to look at that.

A, most people will look at individual muscles.

So they'll go, okay, like, let's say it's your hip.

You have symptoms of piriformis syndrome, but you don't really know.

Like, that's the most likely culprit, but it could be your piriformis, quadratus femoris, could be your go-go's,

could be your glutamy.

It could be anything in that area or even unrelated, like indirectly related to that.

So instead of thinking about attacking muscles and trying to diagnose what muscle it is, because even physios, a good physio or an osteopath will tell you, they'll do orthopedic assessments.

It's just an educated guess.

We actually have no idea why it's happening.

But one thing we do know is I can either get into a position or I can't.

So if I have somebody go into flexion and they get an impingement, it's less important to investigate what muscle that is.

It's more productive to focus on what's preventing me from getting there.

So it might be a simple length tension issue.

So you might have, you know, something's going on with your lat, maybe Teres major, some internal rotators that's creating lack of joint space so that you can't actually go further.

It could be too much tension on the front side and it's closing that joint early.

So it's in order to start working around that, we go, all right, if it, if it is like your lats or Teresa major internal rotators, let's train those at lengthened positions so that they give the joint some space.

It might be on the opposite side.

It could be your shoulder flexors creating joint enclosure early.

So now you have to do something different.

So you have to stretch the other direction.

But the first thing is you have to go through at least some type of orthopedic assessment and then figuring out, okay, how do we unwind this?

Which is a lot of it is something that people say, the evidence-based crowd will say it doesn't work.

Stretching, stretching could be invaluable here because if I have somebody who can't get their arm overhead, we might actually be able to stretch that enough to then get an extra 15 to 20 degrees of range of motion.

Now I can train in that position.

So let's say this hurts, okay, but this doesn't hurt.

All right.

So landmine presses, not a real bodybuilder thing to do, but if you can't go overhead and you want to go overhead, well, you can find an angle that you can still apply tension without causing joint irritation.

Gotcha.

And then we're going to use stretching.

We're going to use activation work, in-range liftoff.

anything that we can use to free the joint up, but stretching in this aspect is never going to work unless you train as well.

So, we'll have people do the stretching, see if we can get more range of motion.

Now, we need to use work movements, loaded movements, to then make it stick.

And over time,

if I can get the brain to not safety guard that joint, I can actually work on it.

So, then movement is your medicine at that point.

It's like

use low loading, don't lift.

And if you feel pain, stop.

So, it might be like I have a client right now, anything over five kilos, she goes overhead, hurts, but she can, she can lift with five kilos.

Once she hits 10 reps, now fatigue management is an issue because now the joint's fine until she hits fatigue.

So the

prescription for this is stay at five kilos.

When it doesn't hurt at 10 reps, try 11.

When it doesn't hurt 11, go to 12.

So you have to slowly get this stuff better because in a lot of cases, this tissue, it can take months to fix right muscles are really easy you have a muscle issue muscles can repair themselves in 48 to 72 hours if it's a soft tissue injury in the joint like a tendon ligament issue or fascia issue then that's going to take a lot longer tendons can take months ligaments can take about twice as long as tendons so let's say you have a tendon issue could take you three or four months a ligament issue could take you seven or eight months or longer a fascial issue could take you a year or longer gotcha because this stuff doesn't reorganize itself that quickly.

And the older you get, the longer it takes.

Awesome.

Sounds like my left shoulder.

But this is why peptides are great.

Awesome.

Before I came over, I had a talk with a guy who's coming on for training, and he's getting really close to getting his pro card.

And he's having some issues.

We were talking about it.

He says, yeah, I think it's my left hamstring.

He goes, I think it's the medial.

So semi-membranosis tend to know something like that.

And I go, well, hold on a second.

Before you start start dialing in on what muscle you think it is, just keep in mind there's a lot of stuff in that area.

So where you're feeling it could be the issue or it could be something else.

So we keep talking and he goes, yeah, I really feel it when I do, when I do single leg or unilateral leg press.

I go, interesting.

So let's investigate that.

Now, when you do.

unilateral there's two different ways people are going to do this are you putting that one leg in the middle of the sled and doing it that way or are you keeping it off to the side basically doing a bilateral, but removing a leg.

He goes, that's interesting that you asked that because I train at two different places.

When I train at one place, I put my foot in the middle of the sled and it doesn't hurt.

At the other place, I can't do that because the rails are there.

I have to move, keep my leg out to the side.

That's where I feel it.

I go, okay.

So is it a semi-memrinosis tendinosis issue or is it your adductor?

Because that would make sense now that your leg is out there, that it's already being stretched.

And if you have some type of adhesion in that adductor,

there's going to be a reason why you feel it on that one and not the other leg press.

And he goes, should I even think about that?

And I go, well, it's not something a bodybuilder would normally think because it's, it's a 95% sagittally dominant sport.

So what are bodybuilders good at moving things this direction?

They're terrible at moving things to the frontal plane, then the transverse plane.

So they just, they never tend to do stuff because they're not bodybuilding exercises.

So like getting people doing more weighted mobility as some of their, some of their exercise.

And yes, stretching, even though people will, I'll die on this hill where people say stretching doesn't work.

It's just a tool.

It works just as well as everything else if you know how to use it correctly.

So people will tell me,

well, stretching doesn't work because when I stop stretching, I lose my flexibility.

I'm like, cool, then bench pressing doesn't work.

Like, what do you mean?

I go, well, if you, if you built your bench press up to 405 pounds, you didn't bench for three years, you wouldn't be able to bench 405 pounds.

So now if stretching doesn't work because you stopped using it and you lost some of that flexibility, then bench press also doesn't work because you stop doing that and you're going to shrink and you're going to lose size.

So it's a really weird argument.

And people have to stop throwing the baby out with the bathwater and just understanding these are all tools and those tools are going to be appropriate on demand for when you need them.

It blows my mind that some people will say that stretching doesn't work.

That's kind of crazy.

I mean, do you know Coach Christopher Sommer at Gymnastic Bodies?

So he's probably one of the most well-known gymnastic coaches.

He created a whole program about building the gymnastics body and brought scalable gymnastics, calisthenic stuff to the general population.

And 40 years, he was a national coach for American gymnastics.

So I've known him, God, 15 years.

And I was in Phoenix recently.

We went out to dinner.

We were talking about all this.

And I go, I don't understand.

Like

gymnasts do like two to three hours of stretching and then they get on the rings or they do two to three hours of stretching and they go tumble and people go, well, it's going to kill your performance.

And these are the top, the best athletes in the world.

And they can, they're all flexible as shit and also massively powerful.

So it's such a weird thing to say stretching isn't helpful when you have martial artists and you have gymnastics and you have all these people that do tons of stretching.

and still perform at a high level.

But a lot of people have a misunderstanding of what stretching actually is.

And there's more, more ways to stretch than just like sitting in a static stretch.

What are these other ways?

So you got, I mean, ballistic stretching, dynamic stretching, which most people will know, like when they're doing leg swings before workout, right?

And that's a good way to get into like rapidly extending the muscle and yeah, preparing the joint, preparing the muscle for dynamic movement.

But you obviously have static stretching.

You have, I use a lot of PNF stretching.

So basically contract, relax.

So if you look at stretching it's a work it works on a number of things we could look at what we talked about biological tissue change if you hold a static stretch for a long time the tissue because of the tension you're putting through the tissue is going to now change shape biologically right it's that's the adaptation just like lifting weights causes the muscle to either put more sarcomeres in series or sarcomeres in parallel the muscles either get longer or thicker stretching will do the same thing stretching is strength training if you do a hard stretch, let's say you're doing a hurdler stretch on the floor and you start to go forward and all of a sudden you can't go forward anymore.

Why can't you go forward?

So, so for example, can you do the splits?

I can't.

You can't?

Okay.

So I'm going to disagree.

Like you have the potential.

Everyone has the potential to do the splits.

You just have to convince your brain that you can do it.

So if you stood up next to a dining room table, could you put the heel of one leg on that table and like a half split?

Yes.

So then could you put that on the ground, turn around and put the other leg up there and that's a half split?

Yes.

Okay.

Well, there's no muscles that attach your legs to each other.

So if you can do a split with one leg and a split with the other leg, you can do the splits.

The thing that keeps you from getting there is your brain saying, I don't feel safe and secure.

So the brain contracts the muscles and you can't go further.

So there's a neurological component and there's also a biological component as far as tissue quality and its ability to extend.

So if you can get over those two hurdles, you can do the splits.

So PNF stretching, you contract and you create your relaxation in the muscles so do a hard contraction relax you'll get a few degrees deeper do another contract relax a few degrees deeper and then you can do an end range liftoff by pulling yourself down with the muscles that are antagonistic to what you're doing so let's say you're doing a middle split you're going to feel it in your adductors mainly right

Push through the floor, relax, you should sink down a little bit more, push down the floor a little bit more, and you can do this five or six times.

You get 10, 15 more degrees of range of motion.

Once you get to that end range, range, kind of hang out there statically for a little bit of time.

Then try to...

How much time would you say?

I would say a couple of minutes.

Oh, wow.

A couple of minutes.

Oh, damn.

So what about when everyone says like, you know, stretching like 20 seconds max is what's recommended?

They're looking at studies that they're poor, man, they're poorly designed studies.

They're like, okay, if I do static stretching, it's going to reduce power output.

Okay.

So don't don't do excessive amounts of stretching if you're going to do Olympic weightlifting or go like do 100 meter sprints.

But bodybuilding isn't the sport of rapid dynamic movement.

And it's not typically most movements aren't as unstable as like running and doing agility and jumping and things like that.

But like the most notorious study that I know of is the one that almost everybody will talk about.

They did hard static stretching and then they tested their vertical jump and found their vertical jump.

was reduced.

So therefore it reduces power output.

But no one's going to stretch like that and go do vertical jump.

And that effect will dissipate.

So if you did static stretching and then you rested and then you did some dynamic ballistic stretching, your power output goes right back.

So it's silly to think that stretching itself is going to cause this downregulation and power production.

Because we, as long as you

anything you use, any method or technique, your body is going to eventually adapt to.

So, yeah,

maybe initially you do some static static stretching and it's going to affect power output.

But over time, your brain will figure out how to reduce that reduction in power output.

So, and like I said, with physique work and bodybuilding, it doesn't really matter all that much because the weight lifting is just a vehicle to put tension in the muscle.

But you can only apply tension in the positions you have access to.

So if you have partial range of motion, you're not going to get the most out of that movement until you try to unlock more range of motion.

And I remember Charles at one point, because Charles did ART.

He had certifications, ART, acupuncture,

all this stuff.

And he had an IFPB pro, and this is decades ago, who was complaining that he had no peak in his biceps.

He didn't know what happened.

Charles annihilated his biceps with ART, and the guy put on like a half an inch

immediately just by him improving

the tissue quality and getting it to actually extend and contract again.

Damn, that's crazy.

Yeah, it's nuts.

I've heard of stories like that, which is why I always try to get myself into stretching.

But man, that shit's

another job sometimes.

Along with everything else we should be doing.

Exactly.

You already have a lot of stuff to do.

So, in some cases, it's just periodizing what you're doing.

So, you know, if you can't get into a certain position, you may need to consider doing more stretching.

and less weightlifting.

But over time, when you can get into that position without the stretching, then lengthened position and lengthened types of movements will help keep that as long as you don't load it up so much that you reduce length.

How much time would you say, how much downtime would you say is necessary before going back to or receiving the same, having the same power output after stretching?

So if you were to stretch and then go on your workout.

Yeah.

I know most people just try to stretch afterwards, but.

Yeah, from, I mean, from what I've seen, it's like 15 minutes or so, but then you can speed that up with dynamic and ballistic types of stretching as well.

Just do arm swing.

So let's say

if you were going to do dumbbell flies flies today and you've got to the point where you can barely do the fly, like, because maybe you spent the last three years really like stroking your ego and just progressive resistance and used to, you could do a really good fly and now you're here or you have to bend your elbows a lot to get it up.

Okay, well, we've just used this poor loading strategy over time that it's good for tension, but it's also removing your ability to get into horizontal extension.

So, all right, how about this?

Let's take the weight down and start slowly getting into those positions come down slow hold it use a pnf here where i can contract against the weight and then see if i can get more length and just keep doing that until you reestablish that and it's amazing how quickly people grow but i wouldn't i i

i don't want to i don't want people to take me take me out of context it's like it's not like you need to do this crazy stretching protocol and then go train yeah the key is to find the stretches that you can do for a few sets then go train and see if the stretching movements allow you to have new access to old ranges of motion you don't have anymore.

Now I have to just put load in my hands and work through those ranges of motion.

And then the next workout, let's check our range of motion.

Maybe we need to do the stretches again to get more range of motion.

But over time, you'll be able to pull the stretches out and you'll just be able to warm up and go into those positions.

Wouldn't you say it's also just as effective for a bodybuilder to say, just stretch at night before bed or maybe even anytime after his workout?

Yeah, it could be.

It could be.

I think that's a good strategy.

But if you go to the gym and let's say you test your ranges and you're like, I feel really tight, people shouldn't be scared to stretch and then train.

Okay, I see.

What you're saying.

And the thing is, again, if you, let's say you do lower your force output, okay?

Is there a way to work around this?

Yeah, just reduce the load.

Every day we have different amounts of force output anyways, right?

So you might like, you've seen it.

One week you go in, you're feeling really particularly strong that day and you smash it.

The next week you come in and that first warm-up set just doesn't feel right.

And maybe you've lost 10, 10 pounds off your eight to 12 rep max that you're doing today.

Does that keep you from training?

Or do you just finish the workout?

It doesn't keep you from training.

It doesn't keep you from training.

Like you're not, you're not going to go, okay.

I had to take 10 pounds off my, off my dumbbell press.

Fuck it, I'm going to go home.

No, you'd probably still train anyways.

And the next week you come in and you're strong again.

So it's like, even if you have that small reduction in power, bodybuilding is not about that.

Do you think it's valid, though, for people to worry about progressive overload if they do so?

What's progressive overload?

Continuously having stimulus to grow.

Yeah.

Well, okay.

But the way they measure progressive overload is with their, with their load.

It depends if we if we're talking about progressive overload from the traditional sense of trying to do one more rep, add more weight, but progressive overload could be increasing range of motion.

You can swap the concept progressive overload just means

you've progressively improved some aspect of what you're doing.

So I even use this for endurance athletes.

Like what's progressive overload for an endurance athlete?

Well, they're doing their endurance stuff.

They're starting to make more red blood cells.

So I can see on someone's labs where their red blood cells was this number.

And then after three months of endurance training, it's this number and that's improved.

That's progressive overload as well.

But I think it's more important for people to pay attention to their bodies and say, okay, we have to progress and you should be progressing something in most workouts.

If you're not, you're probably doing something's not right.

Like you're either using movements that aren't right for you or

you've tried improving load or improving something a little bit too fast, which you can get away with for a small period of time.

But eventually there's a ceiling where you're not going to be able to push more than that unless you figure out why, like what's the problem.

Too much load, too much volume, too much frequency, not enough rest.

You know, you push it for months, you're going to feel that.

And then you go, okay, well, what's the logical thing to to do?

Do a deload.

Either do a deload for volume or take a week off and let your thing recover.

Do you think there is any distinctive difference in deloading versus taking a week off?

Depends what we're talking about.

If we're talking about bodybuilders,

if you're bodybuilding,

I usually don't use deloads because we try to build that in.

Again, like we have, we have to think about what is weight training to a bodybuilder.

i mean what's the point what is the weight training doing

stimulus to grow muscle right so it's like it you kind of look at it from a goldilust perspective that i can do you know too little work and i'm not gaining it fast enough or i can do way too much work and gain a lot in a short period of time and then the fucking wheels fall off the bus yeah or i can figure out what's good right in the middle like what's a good range that i can stay in and continuously make uh make prog progress without needing to deload or take a week off.

Now, if we're talking about strength athletes, a completely different animal because we're using a lot heavier weight, we're using usually more complex lifts, and you're going to probably need deloads because with a bodybuilder, we're

mainly leveraging a certain amount of volume and enough intensity, enough load to make that volume create hypertrophy.

With a strength athlete, we're thinking about intensity instead.

And now, how much volume do I need with that intensity to now get stronger?

So it's a slightly different way that you would look at it.

We're both using barbell movements.

We're both using machines.

We're both using

external loading to create a stimulus.

But the types of stimulus we're trying to do are completely different.

One of them is more bashing on the nervous system, joint compression, wear and tear,

highly specific to a goal like Olympic lifting, powerlifting, strongman.

The other one is a very generalized, nonspecific thing.

It's only specific to building muscle and putting muscle in the right places.

So I feel like if you have your, if you know yourself and your volume is correct, you can bodybuild and probably never really need a deload unless you really start pushing it really hard.

The closer proximity to failure you get to, the more you're going to need to think about deloading.

But if you're somebody who does, you know, RPE eight, you're doing like RAR of two for all your exercises, and your volume makes sense.

You probably won't need a deload unless you're just metabolically tired and fatigued.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I actually encountered this place.

Um,

I guess I recently found out that I am someone who actually tends to train pretty relatively hard compared to the average.

So I actually needed to take some time off this last week.

Um, but instead of doing, I did a deload for maybe one muscle group, but honestly, the rest of it was just taking one to two extra days off.

And then also on my normal training days, I didn't really push.

I feel like it was maybe 80 to 90 percent of what, how hard I normally train.

And I'm like at this place where I finally feel like I'm not breaking the pieces.

Yeah.

It was at a point where literally like I felt like everything my body was literally breaking down and my left shoulder's issues were just exacerbating to the point that was kind of ridiculous.

And I started having pains almost throughout my body, which was kind of ridiculous because it's like, how the fuck am I having place pains in my left forearm and in my shoulder, but also like

in

you know my lumbar here and all these other areas it just kind of happened all together but i always wonder whether or not like should i be following these programs or what my coach says where i should just be taking like an extra day off or another day off or should i be calculating a proper deload with like 66 of my load or something else you know and say that's the thing it's it's it's hard to answer because everybody's different right so i think probably the best thing to do is listen to your body and don't ignore things.

But then that has a negative aspect too, because right when you start feeling things might be what's going to push you through that next level.

So, it's like it's the timing of starting to overreach so I can slingshot and hit a new level, but then you have to be picky about how long you let that go on.

So, if you see the check engine light, you see the check engine light in your car pop on,

you could probably get away with driving that a little more.

But if you drive it just one day past, your engine blows.

So it's like, okay, I'm starting to feel some joint pain, my mood issues, my appetite, my sleep.

Okay, don't freak out.

Maybe give it a few more days after that and then take a break.

But at that point, I would say either take a full week off, which most competitive bodybuilders fucking lose their minds if they can't go to the gym.

Right.

But, or just go to to the gym and just have fun.

Like, go in there with no plan and just go on some of your favorite machines and just get a little bit of a pump, a little bit of a sweat, but don't take that week that seriously.

Just keep the rust knocked off.

Okay, yeah, I like that.

I like that.

It's a good perspective.

I think that's the thing I've noticed in bodybuilding: I used to be so scientific and like strict with my shit and trying to write everything down.

And I still do, but I've listened a lot more to how I feel and realized that this is actually some kind of

there's a validity in the way that I feel.

And I shouldn't ignore it because sometimes it is true.

So, like, for example, in the past, I always felt like I feel like I respond better to higher reps or higher volume.

I don't know why, but people will tell me they do this and I'm doing too much, but I just don't feel like it's too much.

If I feel like I respond well, I feel like I see results and I feel like I can take it.

I don't feel like it hurts my body.

I can go this

much.

And then I got my testing done and it said the whole thing about like you're an endurance athlete.

That's where you specialize.

You're not, you don't specialize in strength because of your fibers.

And

it run through with me.

I was like, this is exactly how I felt for the last decade.

So I'm just starting to realize that a lot of these things that I'll hear these Olympian coaches speak of, like, for example, if you ever hear Patrick Tor talking on a podcast or

during a speech.

He's very scientific about his approaches, but the way that he explains things is also very artistic in a way.

Like he'll express that you, and you understand this too because I know you have talked about lifestyle factors I know you have talked about stress and how that can literally hinder all the gains and how you yourself have gotten clients to like

get their

their sleep hygiene and their diet in check and all of a sudden their their their power lift will shoot up yep um and this is just something that it's kind of hard to to distinctively communicate through through data or quantities sometimes you just need to get better sleep or you just need to focus on

sleeping a little bit longer, maybe not eating too much food before bed.

I don't know, just so many fucking different variables.

But a lot of things people don't, they don't pay attention.

They just train.

Like you get a coach and you're just training and you put all your trust in the coach.

But like part of that onus is on you to recognize and talk to your coach about how I feel.

Like, man, like my elbow's really starting to not feel great.

Like the coach needs to know that because that's a data point and then he looks back and says well yeah it looks like you've lost some some reps and some strength on say triceps extension like okay something's definitely going on so now i have to figure out is it your shoulder is your hand wrist is your elbow like what's going on

but the what most people will do is they'll just push through it They'll just put some ointment on their arm.

They'll put a sleeve on and they'll just keep fucking training until they get to the point where they can't do anything.

And now we have to figure out like, what have you done to yourself?

But that's what I like about bodybuilding too and powerlifting.

Most of these things that are, they're not team sports.

They're individual.

They're individual journeys.

And it's the growth you get in learning so much about yourself if you're paying attention.

But that's the key thing is pay attention to how you feel and then take that subjective feeling and match it up with the, with the actual data that you're getting in.

Like my performance is dropping or this is happening, my HRV is dropping, my heart rate's going up, my blood pressure is going up.

Okay, what does that tell you?

I've probably pushed it, starting to push it past what I can actually reasonably recover from.

Okay, we need to mash the breakdown.

We've been on the gas pedal too long.

And drugs, drugs amplify this stuff.

One of the probably the.

Amplify what?

They amplify everything.

It's like one of the.

One of the problems I've seen in the past a lot is someone starts taking drugs and they don't understand that most of these drugs create rapid hypertrophy, rapid muscle gain, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's making your joints more robust.

So let's say somebody gets on a cycle of anadrol or D-ball and testosterone, just typical like strength and mass size.

And all of a sudden they're pushing 40 more pounds on their bench and they get really excited and no one's there to tell them, hey, I know you're excited because you hit this big 40-pound PR.

And I know you're like, I want a 60-pound PR, but just keep in mind, your joints are still catching up and they'll keep pushing it and then they tear something.

And it's like now

their new PR is a zero PR because they can't do the movement anymore anyways.

So a lot of people won't pay attention to what's happening.

They won't pay attention to, yeah, I'm growing really quickly in one area, but is there a consequence on another area I haven't thought about?

And they don't think about that until something starts to hurt or they're prohibited from doing a certain movement because they're in pain.

Yeah, I think that's happened to me.

I don't know what's going on with my shoulder right now, but I think

me prioritizing, reprioritizing my training to focus lats over chest because my chest is, I think

my lats is something that I can always improve for the classic physique, but I think my chest is in a good place.

So I can, I'm doing what you said earlier.

I'm repartitioning a lot of my volume into my lats.

And I think doing so has put my left shoulder in a really weird place where I'm having

like stabilization muscles, like

like

overtaking and I'm not sure what exactly is going on whether or not they're trying to overcompensate for maybe tightness in a place that's putting it in a place that's not in homeostasis but I'm I'm in this weird area where it feels like the the

external rotator the muscle in like my back that's kind of close to the lat and close to the rhomboid is extremely tight and i think that's also causing tightness in like the left trap, and then maybe a little bit of weird shit going on with maybe my internal rotator and muscles here around like the chest, upper chest, shoulder area.

And it's just causing this crazy tightness that just feels like it's fucking,

you know, ramming my

arm into my shoulder.

Yeah.

So like you lose that subacromial space we talked about.

So you basically humerus is getting sucked in the acromium.

Yeah.

And now, okay, what runs through through there that's really important for your shoulder?

Supraspinatus.

So you start ramming into that.

Now, the supraspinatus can't stabilize the head of the humerus.

Now your delt has to try to do what the superspinatus is supposed to be doing.

And then it just sucks it in even more, right?

So now you start getting grinding in there.

So your brain goes, I don't like this.

This is all inflamed.

I have no space.

And now it tightens it up.

And that starts to tighten stuff up.

So

over the last few years, everybody's gotten really obsessed about training their lats.

And

like everybody, like everybody is like masturbating to lats.

I'm like, okay,

first everybody was, you know,

it's a bench press bikake.

Now it's lats, right?

And these are all, these are all going to promote internal rotation.

And I don't think people are focusing enough with about their upper back.

Focus more on your upper back because if your lats, if your lats are pulling you into an extension internal rotation, you're going to end up with that watermelon farmer look that people get when they bench press and work lats too much.

Like they're walking through, like they're holding a couple of watermelons in their arms.

It's like then they try to externally rotate and they can't externally rotate anymore.

Then when they try to bench or do anything in this position, fuck, that's destroying my shoulder.

Trying to get my arm overhead, fucks my shoulder.

There's a lot of muscles that people don't normally think about because when we go to the gym, we train what we can see.

So you're going to train your pecs, you're going to train your shoulders, you're going to train your lats.

But what about the muscles that are deep that a lot of personal trainers don't even know about?

Like, what about, okay, people talk about pec minor tightness, but what is that actually doing?

Because that, if you're doing a lot of lat and a lot of direct pec work,

the

pec minor is a, is a tonic muscle.

It's a stabilizer muscle.

So anytime you have a tonic muscle, they are really prone to hypertrophying.

and shortening when the origin and the assertion of the muscles get closer.

So if you're doing a lot of this and you're starting to get that watermelon farmer look, that pec minor sitting at the coracobrachialis or the coracoid process and attached at your ribs, it's going to pull the scapula toward the ribs.

So your scapula is going to start to anteriorly rotate.

It's usually going to elevate and then smash down in your rib cage.

So then when you try to go the opposite direction, it doesn't want to let the scapula move.

Right.

So then you go, okay, this hurts.

This really hurts.

I can't, I feel like my external rotator is really tight.

They're probably at length.

They feel tight, but they're actually just stretched all the time.

So we have to work on getting the PEC minor and I would say anything, well, I call it the coracoid gang.

So PEC minor, coracrobrachialis, short head biceps, work on trying to get those things to calm down with like stretching and possibly manual therapy.

Then train everything on the opposite side so we can try to get this stuff rotated back.

Okay.

That's exactly.

I went to my active release therapist, Dr.

Michael, he does like work for a lot of other people in the industry, including all the guys at Young Elanche.

And

he did active release therapy on the corticoid, just that entire area.

God, it's horrendous.

Oh, yeah, it was painful as fuck, too.

But I mean, it definitely helps.

But it's like, man, now I'm trying to think about like, what do I do moving forward?

What's the best route?

Would you recommend me personally?

I know other people don't need this, but me personally, like just not prioritize only lance.

Like, do I do need to continue hitting, you know, my mid upper back at the same frequency, my chest

at the same frequency.

Yeah,

focus a lot more on the back of your shoulder, a lot more on the upper back, like for sure.

Because it, most nine times out of ten, when somebody comes to me with this type of problem, it's the same thing.

Everything's interrotated, immediately rotated.

The scapula is out of position, and the shoulder is dictated primarily by what your spine is doing and what your scapula is doing.

So, like, it goes spine, spine, scapula, glenarhumeral joint.

So if you're, if you're getting it like traditional typical bodybuilder position to be a little bit extra kyphotic because we do a lot of stuff that's going to promote flexion, not being able to expand the chest, not being able to extend the T-spine, that's going to affect your scapula.

So now if your scapula moves out of position, that's going to affect your glenarhumeral joint and where your humerus is positioned in there.

And so if that's all screwed up, a lot of people try to work directly on the shoulder.

That's probably not going to fix things.

We have to look at it from reverse back to spine and scapula first.

If we can get the spine and the scapula to work better, then it's naturally going to trickle down to the gluonohumeral joint and then you can work the gluonohumeral joint.

Because in a case like yours where somebody has let it go this far, because you're like, I mean, I just came on.

It's a chronic issue.

It's like you woke up one day and all of a sudden you're like, well, that's different.

And then it just started getting worse.

And you're like, I don't actually know what started this, I don't know how to fix it.

So, we have to kind of go back to the past to see how we got there, and then we have to unwind that, right?

But everything tends to go proximal to distal, most everything, right?

So, you have proximal distal sequencing of movement where things are initiated in the core, like spinal, it's like spine to scapula to glennar humeral joint to humerus, forearm, to hand, right?

So, with that proximal signal

sequencing, we usually see distal to proximal dysfunction.

So where it started here and worked its way down here, now it's kind of wound up and coming back.

So

we have to look at it from this area, but also this area as well, which means we might need to change hand position.

We might need to change arm orientation.

We might need to reinforce a different position when we do things.

Like I'll give you an example.

Let's say you're going to do a single arm pull down.

I'll see guys that when this happens, they can't pull down like this.

They'll pull down, they run out of room in the joint, so they scour and they end up pulling down like this.

So what I'll, in rows too, instead of being able to just pull in a shoulder extension, they have to do this because they have no joint space anymore.

So what I'll do is I'll set them up in an externally rotated position.

So instead of doing it here, we might do it pull down here or we might row here.

So we try to get the brain to understand how to get back into external rotation instead of pulling and having to scour out to achieve internal rotation.

But a lot of it has to do with, do I have the available joint space or not?

Gotcha.

If I don't, like you still have to train.

Like if you're getting ready for a show, you can't just take time off and try to rehab a shoulder.

You have to find a way to keep training because you have a date, you have to compete.

But if you keep doing the same thing you're doing, maybe you get injured before you get there.

Or maybe you don't get as much hypertrophy and as much development because you now have to compensate and focus on other muscles that you didn't want to focus on.

So then instead of it being a lat movement, you start becoming primarily biased to, I don't know, Terry's major or something like that.

Now, if we can set it up a little different and put you in a position that reinforces what you want to do, now I can still train.

I'm still working the lats, but I'm working in a position where I don't have to worry about it irritating the joint and then the brain making compensations for that.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

Okay.

This might be a little bit too specific.

Just quick question, though, because we're running about out of time and there's one thing I wanted to ask you

that's actually kind of like unrelated.

But

my shoulder,

I don't have any issues with range of motion now with this, with this shoulder.

I can do overhead presses.

I can do all my lap movements properly and everything.

But whenever I reach up to this guy for my left hand, say that I wanted to do, which I never do, but say that I wanted to do like a clean and...

press and I wanted to bring my hands behind my back.

I do have this pain that happens on my left shoulder when I try to bring my hand behind my head okay um and that kind of happens like right around here and stuff and i'm trying to determine like it's it's an it's a it's a unique place for me to feel pain because i can still overhead press properly it's just like

it's like this sharp pain that shoots right down the middle of my delt when i'm holding it up behind my head so in this area yeah i would say so again like i said superspinatus is one of the most problematic muscles in the shoulder when you see a shoulder issue right and i've had problems with that, like, I think, for the last seven years or so.

Yeah.

And I think most of what you're seeing is like just overly compressed and not able to move the humerus out of the way of other tissue.

And that happens, right?

If you are constantly smashing all the bones together and you have soft tissue between and muscles and tendons between there, those muscles and tendons are going to get inflamed.

When you get inflamed, you draw fluid to it.

So it's going to get thicker, which is going to create more issues because now you have even less space to move in.

Right.

So

I think the

your ART guy is already working on that pec minor.

So that would be that would be a big one.

What I would talk to him about is what can I do if I want to go overhead, especially behind the head, I find that I can't actually get there without feeling some type of impingement, pinchy type thing at the top of my shoulder.

Do you have something I can do for my pec minor?

So he's used to getting in there and like mangling you and making it work.

But you can do, you could do the same type of stuff, not the same exact thing, but you can do something before you train that's going to be helpful.

I would take like a golf ball and put it in that area and then lean into like the corner and just roll it around.

So we kind of do a junkyard dog ART thing.

You're just trying to mangle it so it calms down.

I do a lot of this junkyard dog shit.

Yeah.

It works, right?

Yeah.

Like it's not like you can't say, hey, can you, can you come into the gym with me every time I need to train and work on me?

um so it's like part of it is getting that tissue to calm down so it lets the bones now move right and then and then working on don't think think about it kind of going back to our tonic uh muscle type of thing you have tonic muscles and phasic muscles tonic muscles are kind of your internal stabilizers and the phasic muscles are more of your dynamic mover and gross stabilizers while you're in movement.

Okay.

So if you have these muscles that are connecting the bones together and they're being hyperactive or hyper stimulated, we need to figure out a way to calm them down.

Stretching is a good way and also like just like self-monofascial release is a good way of doing that.

Do that and then try to go overhead, but just remember that if I do release some of this stuff or I fatigue it, I am going to have less stability.

So that means that if I'm overhead pressing 225 pounds, I'm probably going to want to go with just try the bar after that and see how it feels and then start loading it up to comfort because you're not going to be pressing the same amount

if you lose that stability.

And you could try, but you're probably going to open yourself up for injury.

I think the big thing

and not looking at you, I'm just going to make an assumption based on experience of seeing bodybuilders like this, that that scapular issue of the scapula being too anteriorly rotated and not able to posteriorly rotate.

If I bring my arm overhead, this scapula has to get out of the way of the humerus.

So if you go, say, 110, maybe 120 degrees of shoulder flexion, you're going to have joint-to-joint closure.

And then as you come up, you need rib cage expansion and T-spine expansion.

But

that also assumes that the scapula can actually move with all this stuff.

If the scapula is smashed into your ribs and you try to move it, it's not going to go anywhere, which means you're just basically ramming your humerus even further into that tissue.

So almost, almost every time it's just, how do I get something out of the way of something else?

Because if I can't get it out of the way, the body has to figure out a way to move around that.

Okay.

So let's say you move in a position.

There's pain.

You can probably manipulate where the bones are and not feel the pain, but then it might be a completely different exercise.

So like, for instance, if you go like this and you go, okay, that hurts.

You go like this, you go, well, that doesn't hurt.

Okay.

What's the difference?

Well, I've moved the bone into a different position that has more available space so the brain doesn't see that there's a problem.

It doesn't need to alert you by giving you a pain response.

But

I would say if you, because you've been focused on lats, and I'm assuming like the first, first six years, you were like most guys, just benching like crazy, like what most guys do.

Well,

I think we'd be on the same page with some slight differences.

I bench, but like I caused myself a lot of shoulder impingement issues.

So I stopped benching and overhead pressing because of the shoulder issues maybe like seven years ago.

So like the initial jump into it, like all guys bench press and curl.

Bench pressing right.

Bench press and curls, right?

So it's like, all right, so that's creating a lot of tension on one side of the joint.

Okay, we need to equalize that with tension on the opposite side of the joint.

Now, it would make sense if I said, okay, if this was overpowering everything, so lats and chest, internal rotators, and I'm getting pulled in internal rotation.

Well, I'll just, I'll get my external rotation stronger, right?

I'll get shoulder flexion stronger.

I'll get my scapula stronger.

But the problem is, once you've done this for years and you're relatively strong, remember what I said, the stronger you get and the more high perched you get, the harder it is to fix.

So it's not going to be, typically not going to be as productive to just strengthen the antagonist side.

You also need to do something that's going to temporarily weaken the agonist's side.

So if you need to do pec minor stretches, if you need to do self-monifasia release, whatever you need to do.

I think that's the problem i'm running into because i was doing external rotating strengthening exercises as well like i was doing a lot of like front raises and stuff but i think doing so has just completely over

overstimulated both my lat the external rotator and the internal rotator yeah so this entire shoulder has just this entire area has just been fucked for like weeks yeah and i think the stretching the myofascial release going to an art more frequently has been basically a lot of the things that i needed to do in order to solve this Now you just have to be consistent with it long enough and don't like the times you go in to see your ART guy, he's going to do a lot of good work for you, but you have to understand you have to maintain that stuff.

And every time you go into the gym and you don't do that stuff, you're just fighting his treatments that he's trying to do to help you.

So it's like going in and not being afraid to stretch before you train, especially look, if you're going to go do a back workout, if you stretch internal rotators, if you stretch your chest, is that going to have a negative effect on working your back?

No.

It's actually going to make it easier to get a muscle contraction in your back.

It's going to make it easier to get in the range of motions in the positions you want to get into.

So you probably don't want to go and like mangle your chest with a bunch of stretching and then try to bench press.

But you could mangle your chest and then work your back.

And I think, again, for a lot of people that don't put enough emphasis on working what's between the shoulder blades, they're too busy working on the lats.

And that is important.

Like lats also stabilize the spine, stabilize the glonular hemorrhal joint stabilize the hip um

but you know a little bit goes a long way so if people are doing a lot of lat work and they're just they're ignoring the fact that the meat between between their spine and their shoulder blades is what's actually holding all that together and stabilizing it

they're just doing like lat specific this lat specific that and they're not doing anything for rhomboids, middle traps, lower traps, lev scap.

They're not doing anything that's actually attached to the spine and the middle part of the scapula that's going to pull that back and keep it in position.

Yeah.

So I think, yeah, going through a specialization phase where you do work the upper back is probably going to be of massive benefit.

Do you think using a thergy with like a more pointed end or one with like a little surface, less surface area, do you think that's, that's valid?

Yeah, 100%.

So I have a friend that's a physio in Australia, and I was talking to him about it.

And because I, I, I don't do it anymore because I don't have time, time, but I used to do manual therapy, facial stretch therapy, massage, ART, all that stuff.

And he, I had some issues where he was using a Theragun and we were talking about how we like to use a Theragun.

And he, he made a valid point that he uses his Theragun exactly like he would massage, but he, he can do it faster with a Theragun without mangling his own hands to do it.

I was like, okay, that's, that's pretty good.

And he said, just treat it like you're doing a massage.

So if you wanted to use it on, say, your pec minor, right?

You could put it under here and go on the ribs.

You could put it on top and try to get it through there, but don't just hold it.

People will just hold it down and go, or they'll just go like this.

You're not doing anything.

Like get good pressure and work up the muscle.

If we know that muscle is here, we want to work up and down the muscle this way or get onto the ribs and do it that way, right?

Instead of just across the fibers.

Yeah, so just work it up and down the fibers, work it across, do cross friction, work it up and down the fibers.

Because what you're realistically trying to do is create some over-stimulation so the muscle calms down, so it relaxes, right?

So that's a good way of doing it, and then move into your stretch.

So you might even do something like hit it with a Theragun pretty aggressively, then do the self-monofascia release, then do the stretching, then go work your back.

Gotcha.

What do you think about the 10-7,000 unit?

The what?

The 10-7,000.

Do you know that?

Is that a new TINS unit?

Was there an old TINS unit?

Yeah, 10s units have been around forever.

What was the.

I thought

I didn't think 107000 was new, though.

I thought it was me in the 2000s or something.

But yeah, it's a 10s.

Just a 10s unit?

Tens are fine.

Yeah.

It's fine.

I mean, I think

if we're doing what we're thinking about, like 10s, sitting at home, use a 10s unit.

Yeah, I don't use them, but because it's just an extra expensive piece of equipment to use them, right?

But one of my friends bought it for me for like a gift from a birthday.

So that's nice.

I have it.

Yeah.

I mean,

try it.

Yeah.

Everybody's going to get a different response to it.

But like I wouldn't, I wouldn't be going like, I wouldn't go with the Gold's Gym and be sitting there with a tens unit, like hanging out.

Yeah.

But I mean, sometimes I wonder, though, like, is it actually going to help with release or is it really just for pain?

You know, I like to keep things simple.

Like, if I can't fix it with stretching and self-marofashion release and maybe a Theragun,

then it's probably something you need professional help for anyways.

But the only way to find out out is to try it.

And I think the

most productive thing to do is find a number of tools that work

because I did a years ago, I did a cadaver course with Tom Myers from Anatomy Trains.

It was in Boulder, Colorado.

It was five days, eight dead bodies, untreated.

We just got our guys out of the freezer and just started cutting them up.

Right.

And he said some statements

that changed the way I view some of these things.

One of of those is that he says, look, are there 600 muscles in the body or is it one muscle in 600 compartments?

And I was like, okay, so that's interesting.

So what you do in one area of the body is going to affect everything else.

And at one point, he had, he was, I cannot remember what he was pulling in the hip, but you could see the guy's foot moving just from something we were doing in the hip.

And you would never think, like, you would never think that some small muscle in a hip is going to have that much of an influence on the foot, but he would show that.

or like someone have a scar and he'd pull on the scar and you could see it move somewhere else in the body.

So, all these things are related, right?

It's yeah, sorry, I was just thinking about one thing.

I had this tennisivitis issue that's all the way down here to the thumb, but uh, my active release therapist was going all the way up the forearm and even up here just to work on that because it literally goes all the way down.

Absolutely, it was just a thought I was having while you were talking.

You get people with um, what's the what's it called?

Uh, carpal tunnel.

Where do what are they?

Where are they going to fix?

They're going to go in here and they're going to rout it out to give more space

where the nerve is coming through to the hand.

Now, I learned a long time ago that most of people's carpal tunnel has nothing to do with the wrist.

It's usually a tight pronator teres.

So you see it with people that have repetitive flexion and pronation issues, like mechanics.

And nine times out of 10, it's tight pronator teres that's causing the carpal tunnel.

If you send them to an ART guy and they release the pronator teres and they work on more supination, the carpal tunnel goes off.

Sorry, we went way over time.

That's crazy.

My bad.

No, that's a good thing.

I think we went like an hour over what I normally

go for.

That's how you know this shit's good, though.

But I had one last question that I want to ask because I was very curious when I heard you talking about this, but you were discussing,

man, there's a lot of things I actually wanted to ask you.

Fuck.

But you were discussing in one of the podcasts,

I believe,

you know, when we're like, for example, like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter, anyone in their offseason, you start eating a ton of carbs, continuously eating more and more, you get more fat, you become more insulin resistant.

So, what's like the old way of thinking?

Include some GDAs, maybe berberine, meform, whatever.

You do this, and

now that you're still trying to shove sugar in the cell that doesn't want it, you continue to become insulin resistant.

And now you're free, fatty acid resistant.

So, I kind of wanted to know more about your perspective on GDAs because there's a lot of people in the industry, a lot of,

you know, a lot of fitness,

I don't know, fitness athletes, creators, bodybuilders, pros that use GDAs, anything like this, in order to like help prevent this from happening.

So, I mean, do you have a perspective on this?

What are your thoughts?

Yeah, look, GDAs have been around forever, like forever.

And I used to use them when I was younger.

And then I realized it's probably not the best thing to do.

But in order to understand this, you have to look at you have to look at what insulin resistance is.

So people go, oh, insulin resistance is bad.

I'm going to disagree with you.

Like, it's

insulin resistance is kind of a check engine light coming on, right?

It's a protective mechanism that the cell does because a cell

can't handle the amount of energy that's coming in.

So this could be related to a lot of things.

You just have way too much energy coming in, or you don't have the mitochondria to deal with it.

And when you look at the biochemistry, things you really want things to flow in one direction.

But when things can't go one direction, there's always other directions that can go down.

And sometimes, and these are normal, normal, natural things

to happen.

It's when it's done chronically and at a really high rate where it starts to get bad, right?

So,

I'm not going to say instant resistance a great thing because if you've pushed yourself to that position, that means that you've overdone it somewhere and we need to figure out how to not overdo it.

It's like if you can't,

if we think about the food that we eat, that's not really fuel.

That is unprocessed fuel.

Your body has to change that chemically to other things to drive creating actual energy.

We don't run on sugar.

We don't run on fat.

And it's a matter of semantics.

You know, someone could say, oh, well, actually we do.

I'm like, well, you're not wrong.

Like, you're right, but I'm more right.

I could tell you it that way, right?

Because you don't push sugar into the mitochondria.

You break sugar down to make other things to now run the electron transport chain or whatever we're doing, making heat to making energy.

So if you are, let's say you're going to, you look at your labs and your blood sugar is high.

It does kind of make sense, but well, I could take a GDA and clear that, make my labs look better.

But what's the consequence of that?

Because Because you can't get one thing without paying for it somewhere else.

So if we want to look at diabetics, right?

And realistically, you're getting insulin resistant, you're moving more towards diabetes.

Diabetics who use GDAs, maybe they're using metformin, maybe using berberine, alphalopoic acid, whatever.

One of the side effects is a massive increase in hydrogen in the muscle tissue.

They can't actually,

they lose the ability to buffer that stuff out, where the lactate system is how we buffer that out.

But you have a finite ability to move these things.

You're always bottlenecked at some type of cofactor or multiple cofactors or organelles, or there's always something that's going to bottleneck that.

So let's say you are at overabundance and you're eating way more than you need to support training.

You have to do something with that because toxic levels of energy in the bloodstream can kill you.

So if we look at sugar as a form of unprocessed energy, if your sugar gets too high, what happens?

You can go into a comba and die.

If it gets too low, what can happen?

You can pass out.

You could also die, right?

What about your blood lipids?

Your blood lipids get too high.

That has other effects that are not good.

So people need to stop.

What they need to realistically do is stop focusing on trying to gain the most amount of weight in the offseason because what's the point if it's not high quality weight?

Like we were laughing at, you know, about Lee Priest.

Lee Priest is notorious about this.

Lee Priest, guys, he's short as shit, and he would bulk up to like three, close to 300 pounds in the offseason, eating KFC and McDonald's and all this.

And he'd shred it all back down.

He'd get on stage and be shredded.

Like, that's the old school way of doing it.

And we know that that's probably not the best way of doing it.

Every time you bulk and cut,

you're, you're driving inherently unhealthy processes.

And bodybuilding is not about health.

I mean, let's be honest, about winning, right?

But we probably want to try to make this as

healthy as possible, right?

There's always going to be some inherent risks, but we definitely don't want to drive it to being as unhealthy as possible.

So

you start taking GDAs.

You're always going to have a consequence by trying to force the body to do something it actually doesn't want to do.

What do you think?

What would you say those consequences are for the people that don't quite understand?

I don't either, like the increase of hydrogen in the muscle, like what that might result in.

We'll say like this.

Well, the first thing is fat storage, right?

So if the, if,

let's say you have fatty acids and glucose in the bloodstream and it just, it can't be put into muscle cells and stored.

You can't store just glycogen.

You can't oxidize it.

It has to go somewhere because again, if it gets too high in your bloodstream, you're going to die.

So you start pushing that in the fat cells.

Well, now fat cells get bigger.

That's probably what you don't want when you're trying to bodybuild like we're gonna accept that you're gonna you are going to push at the point where you're gaining a little bit of fat but these guys who get like really fat in the offseason like that's not it that's not necessarily a good thing and it's not it's not it's not doing anything productive it's not fat is not going to make you stronger fat is not going to make you contract the muscles harder so we just have to assume that muscle can only grow at a certain rate if you had drugs in there you can amplify that a little bit but even drugs have a limit as well yep and so let's say you go on a massive bulk and everybody's commenting on how big you look.

They haven't seen you with your clothes off.

They just see you in your shirt and you're like, oh man, you're looking big, blah, blah, blah.

And then one day you get out of the shower and you look like a fucking melted candle.

And you're like, fuck, I do not look good with my shirt off.

And now you freak out and you start trying to shred all that back off.

But

the body does have limits.

There's, you know, there's a range of what we can do.

And if we try to push it past that to extremes, the body's going to, it's going to react in a negative manner and something that's not really going to be productive towards the goals that you're looking for.

Do you feel like that could be a result of

including things like GDAs, like increase of fat storage?

Yeah, I mean, look, there's some of the, some of the side effects, like you're going to, like, let's say, again, going back to a diabetic, what is the, one of the top.

What's one of the top side effects of taking metformin?

They'll say lactic acid.

But what they're really trying to say is

it's going to create a situation where you're pushing so much sugar into the cell when the cell doesn't want it, it has to get rid of it, right?

Because again, there's a consequence.

If I'm breaking sugar down in the pyruvate, I'm releasing hydrogen.

Okay.

If I'm pushing a bunch of sugar into the cell artificially with a GDA, you're going to ramp that up faster than you can neutralize it.

So your ability to neutralize hydrogen is going to be based on how much activated niacin you have.

You need enough NAD to now take that hydrogen, bond it to an NAD, grab another hydrogen, and and reduce it with pyruvate to make lactate.

So, like with a bodybuilder, you might notice, you know, I started taking a GDA and yeah, now I prick my finger, it looks pretty good.

But when I train, everything burns.

Like, every time I do a movement and I get in close, let's say, you know, you're lifting and you're getting,

when should you start feeling muscle burn on, say, a 12-rep lift?

Last few reps?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But then you start training like on rep three, your muscles are already on fire.

That is showing me that you're having a failure in that ability to reduce, take, take, remove hydrogen and buffer that out.

That's going to kill your performance, number one.

Yeah.

Right.

So that's a side effect of it.

Okay.

Then if you get to the point where your body goes, no, fuck this,

starts pushing more fat into the bloodstream.

What's another consequence?

Possibly getting fatty liver.

And that's a big thing that people don't address.

Like a lot of people will look at their labs and they go, oh, my liver markers are up because I'm on a

alpha alkylated drug, oral, that is causing some liver discomfort.

They never seem to think maybe I'm getting fatty liver from my last bulk.

And then the doctor looks at this and goes, well, let's just ultrasound your liver.

And you go, oh, God, I've got like early stage fatty liver.

That's not good.

If you let fatty liver go long enough, you get cirrhosis.

Right.

So it's like, you know, instead of taking the GDAs to make your labs look better and then causing another issue somewhere else that you might not even notice until it's too late, How about you just don't eat so much?

And that's the problem of bulking too, is people think they need way more calories than they actually need to grow because they think that, you know, think about your first bulk.

You start eating food and you have a massive jump in your scale weight because more water, more glycogen, more sodium, more fecal matter.

And you go, well, this is great.

I put on five pounds in a couple of weeks, but now I've plateaued.

What are you going to do?

I'm going to add more food.

And then you just keep adding more and more and more.

And then you're plateaued.

You're eating like 7,000 calories.

You're sick of eating and you're not really seeing any, any more positive effects of it.

And now your blood sugar is fucked up.

So you go, well, I'll just start smashing either pharmaceuticals or nutraceuticals to get my blood sugar better.

But like the easiest fix would just cut down your calorie consumption a little bit.

That's super easy to do that.

And over time, what ends up happening is you start getting mitochondrial dysfunction.

So then now you want to go into your cut and you haven't, most people aren't going to do cardio during their offseason.

They go, I don't need to do cardio because I'm trying to grow.

Yeah, but there's other things that are important, like keeping your mitochondria healthy and happy.

Then they start doing a cut and their cut's not going as well as they thought because now they have, they have this small period of time where they have to reestablish good mitochondrial volume and good mitochondrial activity because they've absolutely wrecked that when they've gotten too fat.

So if you look at fat people,

I know we're supposed to say, we're not supposed to call people fat anymore.

Maybe we call them gravitationally challenged or something like that, surface area challenged.

I don't know.

But when you look at fat people, they tend to have really, really

massive mitochondrial dysfunction.

They don't have an issue releasing fat from fat cells.

They have an issue getting rid of the fat because they don't have the mitochondrial power to turn that into heater energy.

So there's a big difference between that and somebody who's about to step on stage.

People who are about to step on stage have the opposite problem.

They can oxidize really well, but they have a hard time releasing fat from fat cells because they're getting to those really low levels of body fat and their body doesn't want to release that.

So then they have to do more and more extreme things to try to influence fat release so they can get that last little bit off their ass

and get nice walnut ass.

And that's the hardest, that's the hardest point to get, like fupa fat for guys and that last little bit on your ass to get a nice grainy walnut butt.

So it's like you have like, it's the same systems, but they're expressing themselves quite differently.

So when you start getting too, too fat in a bulking, you are now pushing yourself to a point where oxidation is not going to be as good.

Your energy is not going to be as good.

You're going to be tired after eating your food.

And that's just, and your training is not going to, it's going to be good until the point where nothing's working well, nothing feels good.

Now your training sucks.

But people will go, well, I just need more drugs.

So they'll throw in GDAs, they'll throw in more steroids.

Throw in some Clin.

Throw in some, oh, I hate Clin.

Albuterol, that's the one.

Stop taking Clin.

Take albuterol.

It's way better.

There was a third one, wasn't there?

Trying to remember what it was called.

I'm just brain fighting today, to be honest.

But okay.

If you can get with one of the research companies and get some liquid albuterol, this is what we used to use.

Like three milligrams right when you wake up, three milligrams at lunch.

The nice thing is the half-life isn't as long as Clin.

So you can still sleep on it you don't get the headaches they don't get all sketched out yeah yeah that's nice yeah i uh i just took clin at like the lowest minimal dose so i didn't have to feel any of the the side effects but and then you kind of wonder like how much is this helping is it even worth taking a drug um but and clin will clin will you'll get desensitized to it really quickly so then what are you going to take some bromocryptine to resensitize you're going to take two weeks on two weeks off without buterol because it's only in in you part of the day you don't tend to have that desensitization as long as you just stick to two doses.

Okay.

Okay.

Maybe we can talk about this another time.

I've had some other guys that wrote like a, uh, their own e-book on Clenn and going through the research credible studies showing that like Clenn, you actually don't desensitize to.

So the whole two weeks on, two weeks off thing is not actually necessary.

But, you know.

Yeah, I'd like to look at that because I, I mean, I can remember like back in the day, we'd start with.

like 20 milligrams of bones a day and the next thing you're taking like 60 to 80 yeah it's not working anymore right exactly i remember that as well and i think um i think basically the ebook and these guys are pressing that that's that's why you don't just listen to the symptoms like the side effects the the whole like this the systemic the the stimulant the feeling of it being a stimulant is not tied to its uh productivity yet in increasing your fat burning but i just i just didn't like it because the headaches and the insomnia yeah

right that just like fights against your productivity anyways but um okay i like that you were talking about this because um one of the the top body building coaches and one of the most hyped coaches in the industry right now, Stefan Kienzel, boss of Outlaw, who has 16 Olympians at this last Olympia, he likes to keep things simple.

And he also says, like, you know, a lot of people will just increase their amount of GDAs or add these anti-diabetic medications.

But the problem is here is like, you're just adding more that a lot of the times, like, these anti-diabetic medications just starts to fuck up your digestion.

And that causes a lot more issues as well, a ton more issues, including, you know, not having a small gut when you go on stage.

So

it's just a lot to think about when people are adding drugs and medications, like how does this affect you?

Because it just affects us all differently.

And I know sometimes, like for me, like I've had some good, some good experiences with berberine, but then when I added RALA, berberine, cropium, like any of these things that should help blood sugar, you know, I've started to feel a lot of issues as well and digestive issues.

And obviously, I just wanted to try these just to see how my body would respond because, you know, you never really know, but

it's a complicated place, you know, being in bodybuilding.

And I agree with you.

The smartest thing is just

to do the dietary needs that you feel like your body needs to stay healthy.

The thing is, like, things like Berberine and metformin aren't primarily GDAs.

The primary goal of taking those is to dampen gluconeogenesis in the liver.

So that's why you have a diabetic, then they have an increased amount of sugar production and release from the liver.

So they do help, they do help somewhat with glucose disposal, but one of the main things they do is try to dampen down the liver's ability to push glucose into the bloodstream.

So that's the main action.

Like my wife, she was having some blood sugar issues.

She's finishing out clinical nutrition.

We have multiple businesses we're running.

Like she's like burning the candle at both ends.

And she was basically borderline borderline diabetic.

And this is one of those cases, too, where people think that you have to be a big fat slob to be diabetic.

That's not the case.

Like my wife is tiny.

She's all of a 120, 125 pounds.

I feel like it's more genetic than everything, isn't it?

Well, it's stress, right?

For her, it's stress, right?

And prioritizing school and work and not prioritizing her own health.

I put her on berberine.

I cut her down to a lower carb diet.

We started a CGM.

so started monitoring her blood glucose with an implant.

And we started berberine, myonositol, some other B vitamins,

I think a little bit of bergamot, some extra magnesium, and cut her carbs down pretty drastically.

And it worked like in three weeks, we're at a point where now she was hypoglycemic.

So it's like, okay, we went too far the other way.

So now we need to figure out what's working, what's not, and how to, what can we remove and what can we add, like adding more carbs and removing some of the

glucose muscle lateness, but the like the berberine for the output of the

liver glucose?

And over time, we've been able, over a few months, we've been able to get her really smooth, really nice area under the curve.

She's not waking up with hyperglycemia anymore.

She's not waking up with hypoglycemia either.

But it took some like strategy to do this.

But with her, you saw the berberine and the gut issues.

She was getting gut issues with berberine, which I don't.

I don't get them when I take it.

So we moved to a phytosomal berberine and that actually worked a lot better because the phytosomal doesn't get, it doesn't affect your gut microbiome like traditional berberine.

How's she doing now?

Yeah, she's good, Matt.

So you guys found like the perfect middle ground?

Yeah, it's good.

It's good.

I think once she's finished with school and that's that big stress off, the first few years of school wasn't difficult for her, but then like the last year, year and a half, she actually has to be in clinics, she has to work with patients.

And

having our companies and dealing with sports nutrition, her views on how nutrition should be is not exact, doesn't exactly line up with her professors.

So it's a constant battle with her of them thinking 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein is enough for people and her going, well, actually,

and showing them data on, you know, 1.8, 2.2, some ISSN stuff.

And they just keep arguing with her that the old shit that extra protein is going to turn into fat and extra protein is going to make you osteoporotic and it's going to kill your kidneys.

It's like all that 20 years old data that we know is not true anymore.

So I was just like, babe, just tell them what they want to hear and just get the degree and then you can do whatever you want after the fact.

Damn, that's insane.

Okay.

Well, cool, man.

That was actually absolutely insane that we're going almost to three hours.

So I just wanted to thank you for coming on the podcast, but where can everybody find you?

Yeah, thanks for having me.

We're at our social media shit.

Every year we say we're going to do better.

2025, that's the year.

Muscle nerds underscore education is our Instagram.

We don't really do TikTok.

And Facebook's pretty much dead.

So that's where, yeah,

Muscle Nerds underscore Education on IG.

And then if you want to, I do a lot of unpolitically correct memes on my personal account.

don't, I just don't talk any

business-related stuff on there.

But if you like, if you like memes that get me in trouble a lot, you can go to mine at Luke Lehman.

It's just Luke Lehman, Elliot, M.A.

That's it.

And every time I see a massive amount of posts, I'm taking a shit.

So you can think about me sitting there taking a shit posting memes.

Fire.

Yeah.

You guys should, I don't know if you guys do this.

You guys use reels?

Do you guys post reels?

We do.

Yeah.

Okay.

We do.

You should just post those reels without any like trade or without any time stamps or trademarks or whatever on um

uh youtube shorts and then tick tock as well if you're not and then snapchat as well also has okay these spotlight basically spotlight where you can basically post your reels on there as well so just the same exact reels but on these other platforms because there's different people on the platforms are really nice yeah we gotta do that because that's the thing i want to do uh 2025 i want to start like long format stuff on youtube and lock that in as well so i'm just just getting man

don't where's the time like where's the time I know, man.

I know.

People were like, dude, you must have like the best life being a creator.

I'm like, you don't really get how time-consuming this is.

No, people have no idea.

Yeah.

It's horrendous.

It's crazy.

Especially if you don't have a team.

Like, if you have a team, it can be like, you have people.

You need a team for sure.

And these days.

That's probably one of the biggest problems is I don't have an assistant.

So, but even then, I still need an editing team for the podcast.

But, anyways, I asked one last question.

But if you were to leave the world tomorrow and you had one message you could send to the entire world today, what would that be?

Ooh.

Oh,

boy, that's a good question.

I've been asked some zingers at the end of podcasts before, but

that's a big one.

I would say

I'm going to get real like conspiracy theorist.

Your government hates you.

Stop trusting the government and the media and just find the truth for yourself.

And stop fighting over stupid shit, especially politics.

Yeah.

I can't.

Oh, my God.

The stuff.

Oh, my God.

I like to get on Twitter, formerly known as Twitter.

And I like to get on there and just look at how crazy people are on both sides of the equation.

Oh, yeah.

It's just nuts.

The extremists is, it's pretty insane.

It's just nuts.

I hate it.

The way that our demographics have been just taking a shift.

Also, how just like...

I probably should be talking about this on the podcast, but how like the right is becoming more masculine, the left is becoming more feminine.

It's just blowing my mind, to be honest.

Just how the world is transitioning but i just i can't believe

as much as we know now i don't understand why people blindly believe the media so it's like and people tend to be in their own echo chamber so if you're if you're on the left you only listen to left news you're on the right you only listen to right news and what people should be doing is listening to both and trying to figure out what's the truth or try to find unbiased stuff but it's just weird the the when i was growing up there was a clearly defined difference in both of these and now like everything shifted and and moved so you don't know what's what anymore yeah things are changing yeah fast it's

well anyways anyways so all right thanks for coming on the podcast bro that was freaking awesome um guys if you'd like to subscribe or you'd like to have the podcast you can by rating us a five star on apple podcast spotify or anywhere you find podcasts subscribe to the youtube channel and click the bell button because that's what gets us sick guys like luke so yeah boy thank you guys for coming on Sorry, I had a hard time thinking today, but this guy literally did all the talking for the last three hours.

So thanks, bro.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

All right, peace, peace, guys.

Fire.