Justin Harris: Steroids vs. Natural Bodybuilding

Kidneys kill bodybuilders.

I've seen guys with liver AST over 700 and have it come back to normal.

If you have a creatinine level over three, you're done.

A form of competitive bodybuilder, Justin Harris combines science and practical knowledge to help athletes reach their peak potential.

Late 90s, insulin comes out, huge late forward in physiques.

Peptides came out, nothing really changed.

So I think that's an argument for them.

The weird thing about this whole sport is you can be pretty f ⁇ ing stupid with doses and blasting and like stupid.

But if you keep your line, you'll get through it and be okay.

mike summerfeld right second place in classic terrence ruffin right now his split's kind of crazy too and obviously these are both very science-based i think like the way the sport is judged shoulders and arms need to be proportionally larger and they don't have bubble guts because when we see that and they start eliminating things completely even when dried out even when on orals my doses were not limited by any like this is unhealthy or this is too much i would have taken give me everything you got that's what happened was when if i tried to go higher everything fell apart i had no appetite i was so lethargic there's a therapeutic dose of things for a reason what are your thoughts on two high anabolic use destroying physiques

well you look fantastic to me man all right thank you doing well and your chest still looks freaking massive

well I have the opposite problem you do like you're always trying to add size man I was 260 before I even started the sport I mean I was like fat so for me bodybuilding is always just more about not being fat than like it than getting big the adding size is always easy for me.

I think we have the same problem, honestly.

I was a fat ass when I was a kid, too.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like the main reason I started bodybuilding is because I couldn't stop eating like buffets, like Chinese buffets and shit.

I'm like, I need this to go somewhere else other than my gut.

Same.

That's funny.

Yeah.

Well, because when you coach, like, most people like that get into it, we're little, you know, skinny guys.

And so it's like just total, you know, can't add size.

I'm like, oh, eat.

I don't know what to do.

Getting fat's the easy part.

No, for real.

I have like all these homies or well, not homies, but I'll I'll have kids come up to me for advice and stuff just because maybe they've seen my videos or anything.

And I'm younger, so I guess it's easier for them.

They feel like they can relate to me, maybe.

But

primarily, they'll ask me about MK677

and like how awesome it is.

Like, do you like it?

Like, does it work for you?

And like, they'll, they'll just get so excited about it.

And I'm like, bro, I just really, like, I just really don't think it's that great or that.

Yeah, no, you get, I think it's potentially dangerous.

Uh, like, uh, I don't want to cast aspersions or anything, but when Matt Porter

died,

I know he was using a decent dose of it.

And I've known several people who've had pulmonary edema, which is really kind of related to congestive heart failure while using it.

I think it just causes so much water retention.

It's really...

I mean, if you're a thin guy,

low blood volume, it's not a big deal.

But if you're a guy who's already big and probably already on the the verge of high blood pressure and you add that, it's kind of a time bomb.

Yeah, that's what I was assuming as well.

Um, plus, I mean, to me, I feel like the best aspect about it is increasing appetite for those who actually

have hell problems.

Yeah, it works great, yeah, for that.

But yeah, just the and the other problem is the water, like the guys who want to add a bunch of weight, that water weight's great.

They get to gain 20 pounds real quick, but you know, then that's fine when you're like 145, you know, but when you're 245 and you're throwing weight on like that, it's not quite as safe.

I don't want to put anyone on the blast or anything, but there's actually this someone I know that put one of my homies on MK during his cut, and he's been like struggling to cut.

Oh man, that's torture.

Yeah, that's torture.

Bro, what's the, what is the, the logic behind this?

Just seeing if you can torture him.

Yeah, I mean, like,

why not at least just put him on GH so you're not torturing him?

Like, I understand that you.

Yeah, you get the fat burning benefits without the raging hunger.

I think he's out of anyone I've seen, he's been suffering the most and he's not even prepping for a show.

He's just trying to get lean.

Yeah, that's rough, yeah.

I got him like 1600 calories.

Yeah, oh, god, man, yeah, 1,600 a meal I could do.

Anyways, so you've been in the, you've been in the

industry and the space for such a long time.

Um, and I just want to say it's an honor to have you on because I appreciate it.

I'm a fan of that.

I've got so much experience in the book.

You're a fellow engineer, right?

You're an engineer, right?

Yeah, that's a big deal.

Yeah, yeah.

But

I guess

I was thinking about the dating of the intro, but honestly, I'd rather just maybe you just give like a quick rundown on like all your achievements.

I know that you were a top-level competitive powerlifter and bodybuilder in your time, too.

Yeah, so I mean, I started all this for football.

I played, I was, oddly enough, you know, I was a little guy growing up.

And so I puberty hit me like a freight train.

I gained 100 pounds between my junior and senior years or during that time.

So I was was never really good at football.

Then all of a sudden my senior year, I went from like 145 to 245 and I was like, I went from one of the smaller guys on the team to the biggest guy on the team.

But by then it was kind of too late to get recruited.

You know, I got recruited a little bit for baseball, but I really wanted to play football.

So I played just Division III, but I ended up being a two-time All-American.

I just got inducted into the Elm College Sports Hall of Fame just last month, actually.

It was really cool.

Generation Irons doing a thing with me right now, and they were there.

They filmed all it.

It was really cool.

But like you said, after the buffet thing, after football was over, I was still eating like a football player, but without all the practice.

So, my weight started ballooning.

So, that's when I really got into nutrition.

And I was the 2004 Mr.

Michigan.

2006, I won the Junior USAs.

2007, I think I took seventh at the USA's, and that was like my last contest.

It was a whole weird thing.

I just kind of had some, you know, I ended up having celiac, but I couldn't figure out why I had all these like gut issues and stuff.

And I did powerlifting.

I won the 2007 APF Michigan and 2008 APF Michigan and totaled elite both times.

And I think my 2008 total was, it was definitely top 10 in my weight class.

I might have been top five in my weight class worldwide that year.

It was just under 2,400.

And then I went back for physics, got my master's in physics, and then worked as an engineer and then came back to the sport.

But through all of that, I've coached.

You know, I've been a biob, like when I started, it was like the late 90s was when I really first started.

So there was, it wasn't online coaching.

There was no one, you know, like my first people that weren't local mailed me Polaroids because the internet didn't really work for pictures yet.

Yeah, that's fucking crazy.

Yeah, how long.

So I've done that forever.

And then, of course, now I went.

So I went Troponin Nutrition now, which is my coaching business.

And then

Troponin Supplements, my supplement company.

And that's what I'm terrible about talking about myself, but that's kind of how

the journey's gone.

So did well in bodybuilding, did well in powerlifting.

I didn't stay in either very long.

Looking back, I wish I would have done bodybuilding longer, but I have a weird thing where I just get really into new things and then forget everything else existed.

And so for a little bit of time, it was like math and physics.

And then I worked in engineering.

And I worked kind of as a mechanical engineer.

I did a test engineering for four years and then test and controls for like my last 18 months before I left to go back to coaching full-time.

I think engineers make the best bodybuilders, man.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

If you can get an engineering ex-wrestler, you're gold

because they're logical, they, you know, structured, that, you know, they, they're diligent, and then they're willing to suffer through anything.

I went to Purdue University, too, and all my all my homies that were the biggest bodybuilders at our gym were also all engineers, too.

It's funny.

Obviously, we're all also in fraternities at the same time, but...

I mean, that's the Miha culture.

Well, that's funny.

Chaos and Pain did two articles.

This is like 15 years ago on alcohol and strength sports and how correlated they are globally.

And it's really interesting.

I mean, you know, correlation doesn't equal causation.

But if you look at like the countries that have the highest per capita rates of alcoholism, they're also like all the greatest strength countries.

It's really weird how that works.

That's awesome.

I mean, I hit all my PRs in college after a night out.

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, it's weird.

Well, Russia, or maybe not Russia, one of the Eastern blocks, maybe Bulgaria, that whole Eastern Bloc where they were trying everything through the 60s and 70s, they did some studies on high bolus dose alcohol following training.

And the reason was they

thought it would cause a spike in testosterone.

And I think also partly it was an alternative energy source.

So any carbs and protein that were eaten, you know, could basically, they were just there left to be either stored as fat or used for what they needed to.

Because these were like, especially on the super heavies, they didn't care about that.

But the doses were insane.

The super heavies were doing a half a liter of vodka within 30 minutes following their

Olympic lifting sessions.

So they're like just hammered after their workouts.

I mean, talk about a living the dream.

It's government-sponsored funding.

You don't worry about money.

You just train every day and then get blasted afterwards.

I mean, they tried everything back then.

Those Eastern Black countries just, they tried everything.

Reeling back a little bit, but what's the story behind your gut issues?

What came of that?

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's celiac.

It ended up being that I can't, I have the glutens.

Like, I think it's my punishment for making fun of people who had food allergies when I was younger.

But

I just started having like, like for like a year and a half, I had a low-grade fever all the time.

It started out like after a hard workout, I'd get a fever.

And I kind of would joke, like I called a leg fever, like I must have had a hard workout.

And then it turned to like back workouts and then every workout, then every day.

And I like my joints ached.

And I couldn't, you know, doctors, I went to doctors.

None of them thought to check for like a food disorder.

They thought I had like MS.

I got diagnosed with lupus at one point.

Oh, geez, bro.

Yeah.

Well, luckily, I saw a specialist and he was like, you know, you meet all the check marks.

I don't think you have lupus, thankfully.

And then, weirdly enough, going back to alcohol, you know, because I had left the sport because I couldn't train right.

I couldn't, you know, I couldn't eat or I couldn't train.

And the gut was just part of it.

It was like just global inflammation, you know, everything hurt on me.

I hurt so bad everywhere.

Everything hurt.

You know, I had fever.

And then one night I went out with my wife's family, and I think I had like three Miller lights or something.

And I don't really drink beer, but I was so sick the next morning.

I was throwing up and I was like embarrassed.

I was telling my wife, I'm like, this is ridiculous.

I was like, I can drink a bottle of vodka and I'd be fine.

I have three beers and I'm puking.

And something clicked in her brain.

She's a dentist.

So she's got, you know, some medical background.

And she said, I think you have celiac, you know?

And so

I was going to try anything at that point.

So immediately I just stopped eating gluten.

And within like three days, I was good again.

It was the craziest thing.

And it made sense, you know, because when I competed, I never really, you don't eat bread very much, you know?

So I never really ate gluten other than cheat meals or after a contest.

And I would get really sick then, but I just thought, like, well, I ate pizza after a contest.

Of course, my gut's going to be all messed up.

But it turns out, yes, so I removed gluten and I've been fine ever since.

And now I almost wish I had an eating, a wasting disease because

it'd be nice to have a little metal absorption because I absorb everything really well.

It'd be nice to be able to eat more.

I mean, are you trying to, do you have a purpose for trying to get lighter or lose weight?

Yeah, well, well, I mean, I'm trying to, like, being big is just easy for me.

I mean, even when I left and went back to school and didn't work out at all, I never really got below 240.

You know, my body fat climbs.

My parents are all big.

Everyone in my family's big.

So really, partly for health, I don't, it's, you know, it's not good to be over 250 pounds, even if it's muscle.

It's just not good.

And for the supplement company and things like that, I want to be able to look good in photos, you know.

It's just, that's just really hard.

I did some shirtless videos recently, you know, and I was in good shape, but man, it leaves so quick.

You know, I had a plan to kind of get in really good shape leading up to the Olympia.

You know, Generation 9 was filming me.

I wanted to get some graphics, some photos stuff for the website and then after the olympia you know i ate some food in vegas i came home and i spent a week where i didn't really care very much it was like boom just like that i'm i'm not i'm not in shape again but uh but that's really it i just

uh like i'm not

you know when i competed like my last contest i was like 266 at 10 days out so me being 245 not in contest shape even though it's big it's still like you know 30 pounds less than i was at my peak so it's really not very big i'm just trying but i'm trying to be i don't want to look lean.

You know, like, I think Seth Ferrosi's condition absolutely helps his company out, you know, being in that kind of shape really.

No, for sure.

Yeah, I mean, it's just, you know, it's hard to do graphics and commercials if you don't look the part, you know?

Like, why am I buying your supplements if you look like that?

You know, and if in the Seth Rossi case, if you look like that, I'm like, shit, maybe I'm going to try him.

You know, he's in shape.

So, yeah, I know what you mean.

But it's just fucking hard to literally have everything, you know, check off every single box, right?

Like, plus, I feel like,

I mean, I'm not saying anything against Seth Ferrosi because he's freaking amazing, but uh, I feel like your brand or your angle is more of like being the brains behind your programming and all these things as well.

So, I mean,

it's you know, more in place, more dates isn't freaking huge and doesn't have Death Star delts anymore.

Doesn't really need to contribute to that.

Yeah, it's a harder, that's a harder business, though, because visual is easy.

You know,

your average supplement buyer is like a college kid, you know, 18 to 24.

They see someone that looks good, that's easier to convince them.

The good thing with the education stuff is my, the people who follow me are extremely loyal.

I know anything I put out, there's a number of people they're going to buy it no matter what, because they've took the time, they've listened to my stuff.

So you build an incredibly loyal customer base that way, but you know, building a massive customer base is hard with education.

It's the route I have, you know, because it's hard for me to be in shape.

It's way easier for me to talk about stuff.

So it's the route I'm taking, but I think it's a more difficult route.

But the people you get along the way are much more loyal.

So what's your diet looking like now then?

Or I guess are there any foods, any food groups or anything that you have to avoid?

Yeah, I mean, anything with wheat.

But

I call it, there's two things I follow.

I call it pick it, kill it, grow it.

So my diet now is not that structured.

You know, I'm not competing.

So I weigh my food on stuff, but it's not like I'm super diligent.

But, you know, a picket, kill it, grow it means like if you can't pick it from a tree, grow it in a garden or hunt it for meat, don't eat it.

And so that's my base.

You know, I, you know, and people will laugh because they see me, because I eat like things like velveta cheese every once in a while like because a slice of velveto cheese is only one and a half grams of fat and you add that to your chicken and rice it makes the food taste a hundred times better for only a few extra calories but that's so and then the other thing i say is chicken rice repeat or meat rice repeat and that's really what i do i i love rice it never gets old i've eaten rice probably at least three times a day for 20 years uh and i love the texture it absorbs you know seasoning really well absorbs the juice of meat really it just it's great versatile food And so pretty much I just eat

really chicken and rice.

And I've been doing more chicken thighs lately.

And then I'll do lean ground beef, 96 four-ground beef.

And sometimes I'll do like flank steak, but it's chicken, rice, repeat.

And I eat,

this will show you my metabolism.

I eat six ounces of meat and a cup of rice per meal.

Gotcha.

And then really my diet is I try to eat as few of those meals as I can.

Usually I can't get less than five, you know, usually six of those, and I'm still pretty hungry.

But if I'm really busy and maybe I, you know, pop a Zin here and there to kind of cut my appetite

on a day I don't train, I can get down to four meals and that's my goal, like four of those.

And it's, it's weird because this is not what I recommend for my clients at all.

I'm not trying to be a bodybuilder.

I'm trying to be, you know, like a 230-pound ripped dad, functional, good at sports, you know, still strong.

And so that, you know, I'm trying to eat that way, which is pretty, you know, low calorie.

Like the lowest I ever get is when I count it out.

I think the lowest I've been on this like stretch for for the last few months is like 2,100 calories.

I hit a few times, but I'm usually somewhere in the high 2000s or low 3,000s.

I mean, if you're talking about dad, I still think you're a pretty peak dad bought at the aesthetics.

Thank you.

Well, I have four daughters, so

I got to fight for it.

Got to stay in shape.

Three of them are unrelated.

This is totally unrelated, but what is it like having four daughters?

Dude, girls are crazy.

I mean,

it's just so different.

It's so different than, you know, because

all the cliches cliches and stuff, you're not supposed to be sexist and stuff, but they're all there for a reason.

I mean, they're, they're emotional.

They're just different.

They're, they're, I wouldn't even know what to do with boys anymore, you know, like, but they're great, you know, they're, they're loving, they're helpful.

I mean, I have, I have an incredible family.

Like, people joke on my videos because my girls will post reels of them cooking my food.

And, you know, and they're like,

how do I pull that off?

And I'm like, well, technically I pay them, but, you know, but they're just, they're great, you know, like my, we, I've had little things with all of them.

Like my three oldest, my two oldest especially when we were younger i don't even know how this started but we had these things called poopy pants parties where where we would just watch stupid cartoons and really it was an excuse for me to watch like family guy and stuff and you know and we that's what we would do until one time when they were you know they were like eight and my uh my wife overheard them singing prom night dumpster baby from family guy so she wanted so we had to pick slightly better cartoons but we would just we would just have little cartoons and build a fort and it was like you know i mean i would maybe just sit there and take an edible and watch whatever.

I loved it, you know, and they loved it too.

And then

my third oldest, or my second youngest, we do 80s movies.

So we watch everything where on weekends, you know, she's 15 now.

And so what ends up happening is...

At about like age five or six, they just really love dad and they think dad's Superman.

And you get that until about age 12.

And then they kind of get in the teenage years.

And I would joke with my third one.

I'm like, well, you're 12 now.

Our 80s movie nights are going to stop.

And she's like, no, we'll never stop and we did make it to about 14.

uh we watched die hard recently but it's really dropped off and then so now my eight-year-old

we uh

uh i don't even what we do we don't have like a set thing what i do is like we'll do a thing where and mom knows like it's technically her bedtime

But, you know, I'll go like a wink and she'll sneak upstairs and we have like a bonus room and we'll just kind of watch TV and listen to music upstairs.

And, you know, after, you know, even if you let them stay up.

I mean, kids, even if, you you know you lie and tell them it's the wrong time and they still go to bed at the same time but they think they got to stay up late they think it's like the greatest thing ever that's the other thing with with little girls they just think everything's the greatest thing ever you know boys maybe too but they're just more chaotic girls they'll sit there and like play one little thing

like with engineering my my eight-year-old she likes to she's she's taking some class like robotics class and she'll sit there and design like you know because they'll write code but it's not really code it's like these little modules you know like move forward turn 90 degrees.

And she

thinks it's a riot.

And that's the interesting thing because I think boys naturally almost always have like ADD when they're younger.

And I'm like, all my kids, they're so different than when I was a kid, because I'll sit there for six hours doing the same thing in a chair.

Where, like, as a kid, I couldn't sit six minutes anywhere, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like you just have to have a huge level of empathy to have four daughters

to deal with it.

Yeah, that's, I mean, they're great.

It's just they're, yeah, and they're, now three of them are dating age and it's stressful

that's why i gotta stay in shape uh we'll change the topic

uh with uh the diet thing do you think there's something special about red meat that all bodybuilders should utilize red meat in their diet well probably especially anabolic i mean you can i mean everything has a reason red meat probably has the the closest amino acid profile to our own muscle.

I think it does.

And so, like, with any protein you eat, the rate-limiting amino acid is going to be the essential amino acid that occurs in the lowest concentration.

And so like

corn is, I think, technically a complete protein, but it's very, very low in L-tryptophan.

And I actually wrote a paper once in college that

corn-based societies were more likely to be war.

like warring societies because like l-tryptophan is the precursor for uh serotonin which is like the love hormone you know the love neurotransmitter i mean that was not really true, but it was one of those classes where you had to like make an argument.

And so like if you ate corn all the time, technically, I think it's a complete protein, but you're limited in the muscle growth you can have by how much of that rate limiting there is, which is almost nothing.

So red meat has, like, I don't even remember what the rate limiting amino acid is, but it's none of them are low.

All the essential amino acids are in high concentration.

So, and then it has high creatine.

And then really probably the biggest thing is it just has the fat, you know, and so you have extra calories.

So if if you eat six ounces of chicken and a cup of rice and you ate six ounces of flank steak and a cup of rice, you're eating the same food, but you're getting a little more calories with the flank steak and you're getting creative and a slightly better amino acid profile.

And when you combine all that together, you know, it doesn't, because it's not like muscle growth is outrageous.

We don't add very much muscle on any given day.

And people get mad when I do this, so I'll be quick with it.

But if you, if you say someone gained 10 pounds over 365 days, you know, 10 pounds is, what is that like?

You know, because it's five,

roughly 500 grams per pound you know and so if you break that down to grams and then divide by 365 and take the fact that muscle is only about 30% amino acids you're only converting about five it's really like four grams but five grams of amino acids per day to new muscle to gain 10 pounds of muscle a year that's it so eat 500 grams only five of those actually get added to the muscle structures on your body so it doesn't so like we really are playing like the the the you know like the small differences are where all the big differences are you know and so the slightly better amino acid profile, the slightly higher creatine concentration, the slightly higher calorie count is enough to, you know, because if you can go from four grams of muscle protein synthesis to two grams, so only two more grams of protein per day gets turned to muscle, you're 50%

faster rate of growth.

And so that, you know, that, I think that's why it's like, you know, the big differences come in the little things in reality, and that's probably where the red meat stuff comes from.

Right.

Makes sense.

I'm a fan of red meat, but I always have to ask this question because I know there's a lot of debate in this space.

So just,

I guess,

putting aside all the discussions regarding like being on a carnivore diet, because I know that I think looking at your blood work and the results of, say, someone on strictly a carnivore diet versus someone who just eats a lot of red meat is different,

vastly different.

So

what are your thoughts on like eating a lot of red meat as a bodybuilder, but then also having

a bodybuilder that needs needs to be especially watchful with your

cholesterol and your cardiovascular health.

Well, cholesterol is interesting, and I'm not a physician, so I try not to speak out of my lane here.

But the whole cholesterol stuff really never came from strong research-backed data.

It was more, man, my tracker, I should have fixed that.

You know, whatever, hundreds of some years ago, we didn't have MRIs, we didn't have x-rays, we didn't have ultrasound.

And so people would die of a heart attack and they would would do an autopsy and they'd find these blocked arteries, you know.

And so it was theorized, well, this is some kind of plaque that's forming.

So where could that be coming from?

And they say, well, must be the fat that's in the, you know, in the blood.

And so they say, well, triglycerides and cholesterol.

And so it was just kind of decided that it was cholesterol.

But there's never been real, like a a real good correlation between high cholesterol and heart disease or any disease, really, so much so that one real, one 10,000 person study of octogenarians, so people over 80, they tried to do a cholesterol study.

Every single one of them had high cholesterol.

Now, again, you know,

correlation does not equal causation, but it could have been, but basically everyone with low cholesterol died before the age of 80.

It could be that you just always get high cholesterol as you age.

You know, maybe those people didn't have high cholesterol their whole life, and then somewhere in maybe at 70, 75, it started happening.

But every single one of the 10,000 participants had high cholesterol.

And they would, so there wasn't anyone over the age of 80 with low low cholesterol.

And cholesterol is very important for brain function.

And there's some discussion and concern that the increased rates of dementia and Alzheimer's, you know, in recent decades compared to the past, which could also be correlated to the fact that we're living longer.

You know, so you live longer, it's more, you have more years to get Alzheimer's dementia.

But there's some thought that it could be related to lower, the focus on lowered cholesterol foods in the last, you know, 30, 40, 50 years.

And so, and then also cholesterol is a necessity for sex hormones.

You know, testosterone comes from cholesterol.

Right.

Those are the pathways like, I gotta remember exactly, cholesterol to, there's a one step before androstenedione, I think, and then that, you know, there's, there's DHEA, androstenedione, and then testosterone.

So without cholesterol, we don't produce testosterone.

And you talk about like lowered testosterone levels in men, and it's an epidemic, really.

You know, it's really becoming a birth epidemic because it's the fertility rates are plummeted.

You know, people are having way more difficulty getting giving birth than they did 50 years ago.

Testosterone's are plummeted.

And it all kind of, you know, at least correlates.

It doesn't mean they're cause, you know, causal relationship, but they all correlate pretty well with when the low cholesterol diet really started getting pushed.

So, when I, and uh, but the problem is, if you're a physician, you say you're a cardiologist and you have a patient with high cholesterol and other risk factors for heart disease.

If you say, look,

I don't think cholesterol has anything to do with heart disease.

I'm not going to give you lipitor.

I'm not going to put you on a statin.

And then they go and die of a heart attack.

The family sues you, you know.

But if you put them on cholesterol, even if you know the cholesterol causes more problems and they die of a heart attack, the family doesn't sue you because you look like you did everything you could.

You put them on cholesterol meds.

So it's a really weird thing.

When I was at, because I worked at Beaumont, William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan, which is one of the top 10 heart hospitals in the country.

And it was a big topic of discussion among the physicians there in the mid-2000s.

How do we handle cholesterol?

Do we care about HDL?

And that's waffled back and forth.

Most places used to call an HDL over 40 a negative risk factor.

They no longer really do that.

And then now I think more of the kind of what's becoming more the consensus is that we there is high cholesterol is bad, but we've changed that, set the number too low.

It's more, we say total cholesterol over 200 is bad, but what really seems like if you take people, a population and give them zero cholesterol medications,

some segment of the population is going to actually have like a hereditary issue where they have too much cholesterol gets in the blood.

And those people have cholesterols over 300.

And it seems like that's kind of like a stark contrast.

Like you can have a cholesterol over 200, not necessarily be bad, but if you have it over 300, there actually is something going on where there's too much cholesterol and your body's not processing things correctly.

So I think a lot of places now,

and some of the TRT clinics and stuff, are focusing more on that, keeping cholesterol, total cholesterol under 300 rather than under 200.

So, you know, and again, I'm not a physician, so, you know, not that, you know, anyone could read the research studies.

They're not free, but if you have like a.edu email address still that's still active somewhere, you can usually get in to read them.

But yeah, so I don't think, I think from a bodybuilding perspective, as far as blood work and overall health, obviously we should care about like all things, but cholesterol is kind of the least of our worry.

I mean, the other

androgenic changes that come with an androgenic blood profile are probably much more risky.

You know, the high hematocrit,

the typically very low HDL.

Right.

That's, that's, that's, I should have been more specific when I asked the question, um, instead of just saying cholesterol, because that's

good.

We're on a tangent for 30 minutes.

We've already cleared cholesterol, I think, in our, in our society, but um, more of like HDL and LDL ratio, LP little A, APOP, any of all of these markers, right?

Um, I mean, obviously, the latter two vary with, you know, more based on your genetics, but uh,

you know, in the bodybuilding industry, we're like pretty keen on if you have like a high LP little A, then you want to make your LDL lower.

You want to make sure it's lower.

You want to make sure that your LDL doesn't get too high and your HDL doesn't get too low.

All these different things.

And I think all like the new stuff, like the A and B and the apple protein stuff is that wasn't really taught when I was, you know, I went to college for X-ray science almost 30 years ago now, geez, you know, 25 years ago for sure.

And but the other thing I think is we don't know a fucking thing about the human body.

You know, we we know way more than we did 100 years ago, way more than we did 200 years ago, and more than we did 50 years ago.

But we're like when I, my mom went to become a nurse when I was like a teenager.

And when she was in, so this is like early 90s, mid 90s, I remember her studying and being taught that blood pressure of like 150 over 95 or 150 over 100 was when they would treat it.

And when I went to college, we learned like 150 over 90.

Then kind of by the end, it was like 145 over 90.

And then when I was in exercise, as an exercise physiologist or echocardiographer, it would be like 145 over 85, 140 over 85.

And you just see it keep trending down and trending down.

And so things change all the time.

And like all the stuff we know about cholesterol now isn't necessarily what we knew 30 years ago.

And it won't be what we know in 30 years.

So it's really, it's, I mean, I don't know what else you do because you can't be like, you can't be a doctor and be like, look, we don't know what the hell we're doing.

You have to go with what you, what the current knowledge base is, but it just changes so much and so often.

And it changes so much faster than, because obviously we're not evolving that fast.

We're not a different species than 50 years ago.

So it's just like, there's just so much that we don't know.

And I just,

so the cholesterol stuff is, is not something I touch that much because

if the top cardiologists in the world don't know what the hell to make of it, I'm not going to say one way or the other.

So I typically, I like carterine.

Well, that's the other problem is carterine is really good at raising HDL.

Very good.

But it's new and there's cancer risk, you know.

And then, you know, azetamibe is probably much better.

Like, I just, I'm not a fan of the statins.

I'll say that.

I'll say that.

I was going to say the same thing.

It's like the things that probably improved my HDL, well, improved my ratio altogether the most with HDL and only ale was one, being on azetamide, probably the most.

And then two, my diet is a lot of salmon.

I'll eat other stuff.

I'll sometimes eat red meat, but I have a lot of salmon and fish oils in there.

And then I basically just have like olive oil and these other types of oils that aren't going to be detrimental.

And then finally, just some cardio.

See, this is, you summed up what I was saying in 45 minutes and 45 seconds.

That's exactly it.

You know, the healthy omega-3 fatty acids are good for heart health, cholesterol, cardiovascular system.

Zetamibe is probably, I would much prefer that over lipitor.

You know, lipitor is a statin.

And statins, you know, like somatostatin blocks growth hormone.

I mean, statins in general are just like, they're the anti, they're the not, they're the stop stuff in the body that like there's nothing else, you know, like myostatin, you know, stops muscle growth.

Like, another, there's really nothing else where we're like, yeah, let's rate, let's, let's put some statins in this guy, you know, like, and they have so many side effects.

You know, one of the most common side effects,

I mean, people get rhabdo from statins, but one of the most common side effects, people have to stop taking it because of total muscle body, basically

delayed onset muscle soreness throughout their entire body because of the statin.

That's a really common complaint.

And

it's not really even explained very much.

I've had so many clients over the year start telling me that out of nowhere,

they get so sore from their training and

their heels hurt.

The Achilles tendon hurts.

Their joints hurt.

Their muscles are always sore, you know.

And eventually we'll break it down to, well, you know, like we'll realize that they started a statin.

They didn't tell me.

And the doctor didn't really tell them very much what to expect.

So I guess that the long and short of is I'm not a fan of statins.

I think you can, you know, you can do things to raise HDL, like carterine is very good at it.

Fish oil, omega-3 omega-3 fatty acids are really good for improving your ratios and azetamibe if you have ldl too high right what do you think about red yeast rice with coq10 do you think it's strong enough

it used to be they changed i want to say 2008 the way you had to process the red yeast because it used to have statin and naturally occurring statins in it and they had they changed it and so as far as i know unless it's changed again uh red yeast rice the way it's like processed can't include the statins anymore.

So it's, you know, and it's one of those things like it's

because like the like placebo isn't like a placebo is a real thing.

It's a measurable, like, like trackable.

You can like like data, studies that have like placebo effect and X amount of people, if you repeat the study each time, you get roughly the same amount of people that get the, so the placebo isn't, you know, people talk about it like it's nothing.

And it is, it's non, it's, it's, it really is, I guess, psychosmatic, but it's, it's real.

And so like people take Red Yeast yeast rice and their numbers do improve.

Technically, I think the current, the way they process their red yeast rice, it doesn't have the statins anymore, so that really shouldn't improve.

But if it improves, why, how can you say it's, you know, you can't say it's not improving, you know.

So, but that's where I'm at with it: is that it's like, yeah, I don't know because technically the way they process it, it's not supposed to have the stuff that lowers cholesterol, but people take it and it seems to lower their cholesterol.

Okay, yeah, I gotcha.

Um, uh, for bodybuilding diets, do you normally include fruits and vegetables to a pretty good degree?

I mean, not vegetables so much.

And people think like,

it's so weird what we've done with the diet because

if you post a meal, like if I post a meal online without vegetables, everyone in the comments freaks out.

Like half the time you go to that person's page and the most recent video is them drinking beer and eating pizza.

But people think like vegetables are like, I don't know if it's from Popeye or what, but,

you know, the vegetables are high in minerals and vitamins, you know, and fiber.

And it's debatable whether or not the fiber helps us or it harms us, you know, in different cases.

It's more nuanced.

You know, in some cases, fiber can reduce nutrient absorption.

But

as bodybuilders,

in first world countries, nutrient deficiency is not our problem.

50% of our are dying of overnutrition.

You know, the days of scurvy, you know, people don't get scurvy anymore, you know, or people don't have vitamin C deficiency.

And as bodybuilders, we're eating good, clean, unprocessed food six times a day.

The likelihood that we're going to be so deficient in vitamins and minerals that we need to

load up on vegetables to get them is probably pretty slim.

You know,

people in

very poor countries or in Africa, they're not eating six times a week, you know, and they're not dying of vitamin deficiencies or mineral deficiencies.

So I think that, you know, there's, there's, I'm not going to say don't eat your vegetables, you know, but I don't think that they're quite super

necessary.

I do include fruits quite a bit because I do carb cycling, and my high-carb days are really high carb.

And if you stick to just complex carbs, I mean, no matter what, if you're eating, you know, some of my guys are over a thousand grams of carbs on those days.

If you're eating a thousand grams of carbs, it doesn't matter whether it's simple sugar or complex, insulin levels are high all day.

You don't eat a thousand grams of carbs and have any point of the day where insulin is not elevated.

So, what I do is I let people have 50% of the carbs in any meal on high day can come from sugary sources.

And I recommend fruit because I find you don't have to.

And from like a pure macronutrient state, you know,

look, like 50 grams of carbs from Twizzlers and it's just pure sugar and high fruit pressed corn syrup is 50 grams of sugar, which is not, from a macronutrient standpoint, not different than 50 grams of carbs from grapes.

But

I find that the results in muscle growth, glycogen storage, and like the exterior stuff like that seems to be about the same.

But the results, as far as how people self-report, how they feel their energy levels whether they're sore whether they're lethargic on the high days are they report much better for all those those things when they use like fruit and and and natural sugar sources than when than high fructose cord syrup and or you know or sucrose and stuff yeah okay that's cool to hear um because i also want to know your thoughts on uh consuming fruit versus like grains or like rice for the purpose of filling up glycogen storages because i know there's some argument regarding how fructose isn't as optimal for replenishing your glycogen.

Yeah, but yeah, and it is because fructose more preferentially goes to store liver glycogen.

But that's not bad.

Liver glycogen is what keeps us from going hypo.

So there's really like two,

it's all, it's more nuanced than this, but if you just like to make it like separate it so it like makes sense, the liver releases liver glycogen to keep blood sugar levels stable.

And then you release muscle glycogen.

And this is something people always get wrong because they'll talk about like

training upper body and their legs getting flat or something like that.

Or even worse, they'll talk about training upper body while they're carving up to store more glycogen in their upper body.

You burn muscle glycogen from the muscle being used.

And that makes sense.

Like if your biceps contracting and it's looking for energy sources, it's not going to go like get.

glycogen from your calf.

You know, the blood is here, that's contracting.

It's going to use glycogen from that muscle.

So we use muscle glycogen for the muscle actually being used.

And that's actually why people think they lose leg size when they do cardio.

They don't lose leg size.

They're just constantly burning off all the glycogen in their legs because they're doing cardio and that glycogen.

Yeah.

And then they're not replenishing it.

Yeah.

But if you don't replace liver glycogen and you do hard cardio on a low-carb, low-fat diet,

you'll go low blood sugar.

It's because it's, it's remarkable we don't go hypo more often because the average person has six liters of blood in their body.

And so if you if you say they have 100, you know, their blood sugar is 100, 100 nanograms per deciliter, and you do the conversion, you know, that means they have six grams of sugar in their whole body, six grams in their blood.

And if you have a blood sugar of 70 where you're starting to go hypo, that's five grams, 4.8 grams.

So one gram of sugar difference in your blood is enough to make you go hypo.

So it's remarkable how good the liver is at it.

And then also, you know, as bodybuilders, if we're taking orals and we're doing and training hard, because training, the liver process is the byproducts of training.

Your liver enzymes will be always elevated when you're training hard.

If you're doing orals on top of that, so your liver's beat up and it's not as good at keeping stable blood sugar levels, you know, that's that, that'll happen quite a bit.

And so you can go hypo, and this happens a lot.

Guys will go hypo-latent prep and not know why.

And it's like, well, you're doing hard cardio, you're on a bunch of orals, you're training hard, your liver's beat to shit.

It can't, you know, one gram of sugar difference in your entire bloodstream is all it takes for you to feel hypo.

Yeah, so you do need, you know, you need to restore the liver glitch unit.

And actually, interestingly, Chad Nichols, who was kind of everyone known for being, you know, really good and sometimes really bad, but really really good at peaking people like you know like ronnie and paul dulet and flex and cormi and all those guys when they would like really nail it and he he preferred fructose during the carbop actually and it and i think if you kind of look at it you can almost say it gives you a little buffer because it preferentially goes to liver glycogen Once liver glycogen is saturated, it's going to go to muscle glycogen.

But you probably do have some buffer for spilling, man, if you look at it that way, because

you're storing glycogen, storing glycogen, but you're storing it in two different areas, you know, liver and the muscle.

Gotcha.

Cool, cool.

I'm going to run through a restroom real quick and then be right back.

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That's the best feeling, man.

I swear.

Especially when you're trying to drink so much water.

Well, are you dieting for anything right now?

I just finished a show maybe eight weeks ago or something.

Okay, yeah, last show.

So yeah, I'm finally back to like chilling, feeling better.

But man, especially during prep, like I'd be drinking podcasts.

You have to go beef all the time.

Well, and then also, because when you're losing fat, fat is watery, you know?

So when you're losing fat, you're paying extra.

And then when you're drinking so much, man, I remember work that would be the worst when you're the worst and the best.

You've had like two liters of fluid since you last peed, and you can't because you're stuck in something.

And when you finally go, it's like, oh man, this is

so nuts.

Speaking of prepping orals, though, so something I've noticed, I want to know your thoughts on this is after my last show,

obviously come off, came off the orals and then

reversed first, at least for the first couple weeks.

So my, my, you know, my calories, my food volume was still extremely low and i noticed my um

i mean i'm i'm pretty sure this isn't just in my head but my my waist was the smallest i've seen it in a long time in like the couple weeks after the show

i think that's because one my food volume was still low but then i was off the oral so i'm sure my digestion was improved so at one point i think like the whole gh gut from from i don't i think it's more i mean obviously growth hormone is not helping it But if you look at people with acromegaly, you know excessive growth hormone as adults, you know and like if like the French angel I think his name was Maurice Tillet.

I think that's

any

Yeah, but he's a wrestler.

That's like who Shrek was modeled after but you can go and Google acromegaly or acromegalogalics and see what they look like and they don't have bubble guts at all.

They have very wide waists, you know, wide rib cages.

And I think you do see that in guys like pros, like when they're later years, they start widening out.

And instead of their V taper going like this, their waist kind of starts going like that you know okay and I think that is definitely GH related and I think like the whole insulin and visceral fat thing I think is overstated also I think a lot of what the gut is is related to food and then you add in orals and then unfortunately a lot of guys will use like opiates and stuff to kind of like help through the suffering and lower appetite and they're doing fat burners which reduce like the you know mixturation they reduce like the actually they increase it but they dry your gut out

basically long story short is I think your colon gets really dried out.

And you just have months and months and eventually years and years where you're not completely eliminating all your food.

And it starts out as like a little lower ab distension, but then when you when you take in the massive amount of food you were eating, even when we were dieting compared to like an average person, it's a lot of food because it's low low calorie food.

It's not calorie dense food, you know.

And especially in diet and prep, you're looking for, you know, you're eating a whole head of lettuce, you know, anything to take volume up, you know, without a lot of calories.

And I think what happens happens is you just have months and months and years and years of food that's not completely processed and it kind of builds up and stuff.

And then that'll cause watery tension in the interstitial space around there.

And the reason I really believe this is because I've had success many times over the years in clients who have distension.

If we use like a non like stimulatory laxative, not a laxative that causes the smooth muscles of the intestines to contract, but something that increases either mucus production of the colon or water pull to the colon.

So water pull to the colon would be like a propylenethylene glycol, which would be like,

is that

PEG?

That'd be like Miralax.

And that basically would be like the stimulant-based.

It's not stimulant, it's the water-based.

Yeah, so it pulls water in the gut or dolcalax, which increases mucus production of the colon to kind of basically, same thing, lube that whole thing out.

And doing that, I've really been able to redo, because I work with almost almost all my guys.

Either they might not start as super heavies or 250-pound guys, but they get there and so i work with almost all my all my guys are really big guys and i've never had a reputation of anyone having a big gut or gh gut and it's i think that's the biggest reason is because when we see that we implement mirrorlax and docox and they start eliminating things completely even on a low calorie diet even when dried out even when on orals and so i think i i agree with you i think you're correct 100

and so but it's hard because what are you gonna do not to use orals you know because they're really important in prep but i think i recommend if you can serving a mirrorx and you're serving a dunklax every morning,

you'll see your waist stay tight because you're just, nothing's backing up.

You know, if you've ever been constipated late in prep, that's what's happening, you know, you know, and if you go, if you constipate for eight weeks, it doesn't mean you never go, but if you only clear an 80% or 85% of everything each time and you do that for three months, that's enough to change the size of your waist for sure.

Yeah, bro.

I freaking hate that feeling during prep when you're just like, you're hardly eating any food because stuff in your gut and you're like going to trade or train or do something else and so uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Yeah, mirrolex and ducalax, it's like a miracle and it like it'll keep your waist tighter.

How much or how often do you use that?

Or do you guys use that?

Automatically, but the second we either see like some gut developing or they start complaining like that they feel like they're not going properly, then we'll add it.

And like the easiest thing is if that happens to you, just get to like six weeks out and just do, because it's not stimulatory.

There's not, it's not really caloric, it's non-caloric, non-stimulatory.

There's no risk.

It's not going to make you shit your brains out.

It's not causing those cramps and contractions.

It's just, the Dulcilax literally just increases your body's own mucus production.

And then the Miralax just makes sure more water gets pulled in there.

And because you know, like when guys go to the, when the guys switch to carnivore, a lot of people say they get diarrhea right away.

Well, the reason, like when you're eating carbs and stuff, it takes more water into the colon to form.

to form the bulk basically.

And so when you first start eating only meat, you don't have all that fiber and carb.

So you don't, it's really mostly the fiber, but you don't have all that fiber.

You don't need all that water.

But your body doesn't adjust instantly.

So the first couple of weeks is still pumping all that water into the clan, even though it doesn't need to, or you got diarrhea.

And so,

I mean, that's, I guess that's not really that pertinent to what we're saying, but like that, that's like that whole process, if you just, if you make sure there's enough water in there with the Mirolax and then the Dulkalax,

it like solves it every turn.

Gotcha.

So

have you noticed any issues come from using these?

No, because if you look at it, I mean, they're like the Dulcilax is just, it's not, it's making your body make more mucus, you know?

It's really designed for old people to take every day for 30 years.

You know, like old people don't drink water and they, you know, all their stuff doesn't work as well.

And so they get really constipated.

Or a lot of them are on pain pills, which, you know, any opiate or any kind of thing, any sleeping pill, any pain pill, anything that's like not an upper basically will, you know, will dry you out down there.

And and so it's meant for them to take forever mirrorlax probably not quite as much but same thing it's just it's it it it really just it's it's like an os it's an osmolaric laxative meaning it hits there and it changes the blood you know the water flow so that more water flow goes into the in the colon but dolkalax you could take year-round for 30 years i mean old people do it now i only say you should but it's pretty low risk okay gotcha

I'm writing these notes down for myself.

This is my least favorite thing in bodybuilding:

my digestion slows down.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, it's a lifesaver.

It's a lifesaver, the Mirlax and Duncalax.

And if you, if you, what I say, like, when people, if it, if they, like, if it's happened and it's already been happening and you're backed up, start with a double dose of both for like a week until you're regular.

And once you're regular, do a single dose of both.

And then once you're completely regular and you think you're through it all, if you're still in prep, keep one serving your dulcalax in all the way through the show.

And it'll really help for the carb up also, because you won't get distemper during the carb up.

So even if you feel like you've been backed up, like you haven't pooped for like two, three days or something, but like it's not necessarily constipation.

You feel like this is still pretty good.

Yeah, because what you're feeling is like you really are backed up.

It's not like constipated where, you know, like if you

talk radio personality used to always in Detroit, John Drew and Mike used to always talk about the time he got Viking in or something for a surgery.

And he's like, I finally stopped taking that.

And three days later, I shit out a sandpaper tennis ball.

You know, it's like, there's that where you're like constipated and you like nothing can come out.

But then there's like the prep constipation, which is, you're not clearing things fully every time.

And yeah, and so that it's, it's a game changer, I think.

Discussing the off-season, because I know I think some of the audience would be interested in hearing about these things as well, plus obviously me and myself.

But for training, do you happen to have any,

I guess, preferences when it comes to what you would subscribe?

And then also, have you ever utilized any like sarcoplasmic training methods?

Yeah, I have preferences, but that's the thing I think with training is they really are preferences.

And I'll try to be fast with this, but I think,

well, the diet is different because the best diet is just best diet.

There's no emotion.

You don't get to eat.

You don't eat what tastes good.

You just eat what works.

And what works is what works.

But training is a little bit different because you have to exert the effort.

And so I could design a training program that even scientifically is known to be the best training program ever.

But if you hate it and you dread going to the gym, it's not going to be the best program for you.

It just isn't.

And conversely, another program that might be provable as not being as good as this other program, but you're so excited to get the gym that you can't sleep the day before

big workouts.

You're so excited, you're obviously going to get more out of it.

And another thing I'll say is, I think all of us are creating more stimulus for growth with our training than the diet could ever fully fully cover.

And I'll try to like reason this.

I'll say I kind of agree with you actually, but I'm excited to see you guys.

Okay.

Well, because it makes it, because like if it wasn't, then

we would all be doing more sets already.

We'd all be training more.

We'd be training seven days a week, twice a day.

We'd all be doing a hundred.

None of us are not doing, you know, none of us are avoiding the gym because we hate working out.

That's the one thing we like to do, you know?

Yeah.

But I think if you look at logic, if you take a person who's never worked out a day in their life, ever, and you start having them do one set per week for chest, they're going to grow more than they did doing nothing, right?

Obviously.

So if you have them start doing two sets for chest, they're going to grow more than if they did zero.

Three, probably more than two.

But if you start thinking about it, by the time you get to like four, five, six, if you get to have them doing six sets for sets, can you guarantee like on your family's life, you know, can you say like, you know,

my whole family's life is on the line.

I can guarantee that if we do a seventh set, you're always going to grow more than if you did only six sets.

I don't know.

I want to make that risk because I can't, like, can I guarantee, you know, and that's only six and seven sets.

We're all doing more than that, you know?

So like, so if you really look at it that way, it's like, man, geez, by the time I get to like five, six, seven, I'm already not even 100% positive that more sets are absolutely causing more growth.

So we're probably, we're all doing more than that.

So I think whatever the minimum threshold is for maximal, when I say maximum, we might be creating stimulus, but it's more than the diet can cover.

There's only so much good food we can eat without getting fat.

And so with that, I think like, I think for me personally, if I could go back, I think I trained too hard and too much, honestly.

I think a lot of it, after a certain point, you're just taxing your recovery.

But to get back to like the training, I like, I like progressive overload, you know, it's it, but I don't think absolutely that's the best program.

And even more so, I think in some ways it could be not the best because if you look at power lifters versus bodybuilders, like if you take a

power lifter, they're always going to have a thick back and a big chest and usually have weak legs and weak arms.

Well, why?

Because to get stronger in the squat, you don't necessarily need to make your quad stronger.

You need to get more efficient in the movement.

Why on your stance, put the bar low on your back, get more glute involvement, go more adductor involvement.

And with the arms, if you look at it, like progressive overload, if I'm doing deadlifts, say I'm doing like deadlifts with 500 pounds this week, if I had two and a half on the bar and make it 505, I added 1% to the bar.

That's a reasonable increase.

Well, if I'm doing dumbbell curls and I'm curling the 50s, you know, and the next that I next week I want to go up, the nearest weight I can go is 55s.

That's the 10% increase, you know, that's like adding 50 pounds to deadlift every week so what ends up happening is you do and you do progressive overload you go to the 55s but your biceps aren't strong enough for it so to get the reps you swing more and you actually work your biceps less so i think there's like more involved i think like

like a deadlift and i'm not saying bodybuilder should do deadlifts but it's a more easy example a deadlift if you get stronger in the deadlift you almost have to work the muscles of the back more because the hamstrings are a weaker link in the movement you know it's all glutes and back and so to get stronger you almost have to use the correct muscles.

To get stronger in a bicep curl, you don't want to use their bicep.

You want to swing the weight more.

To get stronger in a squat, you don't have to make your quads stronger.

You just need to get better leverages, you know?

And so like, long story short, it's...

I think the best is obviously a mix of sarcoplasmic work because that's probably why bodybuilders look so much rounder than powerlifters.

But then I think also there's some benefit.

I think you can tell guys who are strong.

You know, I don't think like you could tell Ronnie Coleman was strong, you know, you could tell Kyle Green was really strong.

And I think like you could tell Flex Wheeler, I loved his physique, but I think you could tell he wasn't as strong as Ronnie Coleman.

So I think there is benefit to both.

I enjoy this because there's a lot of like arguments over this discussion, but it sounds like you side a little bit more with like Patrick Tour's methodology, who I've discussed a lot in the last like.

four podcasts or so.

But

like when I look at, I mean, obviously this could just be observation, but when I look at like his athletes, for example, I just feel like they're always so much more round.

And I know Fawad has mentioned this as well as what he thinks about Taurus coaching, but we feel like a lot of it is in his training style

because he utilizes a lot of like sarcoplasmic training implemented into the last set of every exercise.

So

if you look at it objectively, only 30% of our muscle size, if you take a bicep bicep out of a person, only 30% of it is contractile tissue, the myofibrill stuff.

So 70% is sarcoplasmic.

So obviously much, more than twice as much of it is sarcoplasmic.

So that's obviously more important from that aspect.

Now, the only, I think the thing that comes into play is how much can we change sarcoplasmic?

You know, we know there's almost a limitless amount for myofibrill.

Obviously, there's only so long we live, and you know, as you get older, you know, you're going to hit a limit, but there's no reasonable, there's no real reason you can't get an infinite number of muscle, you know, size of your muscle fibers.

But if, but muscle is mostly sarcoplasmic, so that's obviously the most important is for total size.

So it just kind of comes down to how much can we actually affect that, you know?

Right.

And how much can we focus on it?

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Um, where a lot of this does tend to feel a little bit more bro-science-y, but I guess do you uh do you implement yourself in like training, like sarcoplasmic training, like uh, like, you know, dog crab training or Patrick Tour's SST training or handy ramba's fst seven sets yeah and it's it's kind of a weird thing because uh i people always think i'm just straight like strength progressive overload and and really and i've kind of leaned into that because that's the kind of training i like and it's good to be known for something you know and and strength stuff is fun for me and that but and that's the only videos i ever post really you know throughout my career no one wants to see the light stuff so you know and i don't have like the round muscles like some of those guys do like i can't carry a video just because of my look i carry the video because i'm moving a lot of weight But you had a freaking crazy physique, though.

I know about not having round muscles.

Yeah, but I'm just like, like some of those guys, you know, like, just, but, but anyway, but like, that's just, you know, like, like me doing T-bar rows with nine plates gets more views than me doing, you know, upright rows with 95 pounds or something.

I don't know.

But that doesn't mean that's all I ever did.

And actually, the way I really trained was

I kind of called it power bodybuilding.

And it's kind of how my books are laid out.

I would go in and basically my main movement would be pure strength focus, but not strength focus in the fact, like not as a power lifter where I'm just trying to move the bar through space using whatever muscle possible.

I was purely trying to get stronger provided that the correct muscles were working.

So like I wanted to get stronger and squat provided that I didn't change my form.

I didn't widen my stance.

I didn't wrap my knees different.

I didn't put the bar lower.

I didn't rest longer between sets.

But after that main movement, I was pure, like, I was pure sarcoplasmic.

I just, all I cared about was the pump.

And people just didn't really see that because the only training video I ever put out was Project Super Heavyweight, which I did with DC training for that reason.

But really, my training was always like, I would go in and I would do deadlifts or barnable rows and I would try to be really heavy on that.

But then I'd go to lap pull-downs and I wouldn't even look at where I put the pin.

I'd put the pin somewhere in the middle and I would just really focus on contraction, getting blood, and, you know, and getting as much of a pump as possible.

So it was like two workouts.

It was my progressive overload at the start.

Not always at the start, because as I got older, sometimes I needed to warm up with the movement before I went to the really heavy stuff.

But I have my really heavy movement, and then the rest of the workout, I was a straight pump bodybuilder.

And I still train that way.

Like, I'll go in.

I mean, I train at home, so I'm limited in equipment.

But like on chest, I go in and like, I'll do bench.

And, you know, and people don't like bench.

And I, you know, it'd be nice to have other options, but it's a home gym.

And I try to lift heavy on bench.

But then I do like dips and flies.

And I'll do sometimes incline push-ups or dumbbell stuff where, and all I care about is a pump.

And I don't even, a lot of times, like today I did chess and I did dips.

And I'll like, I didn't account reps or sets or anything.

I would do probably like somewhere around 15 reps.

And then like the second I felt like I could get, you know, at least 10 reps, I'd jump back on.

I don't even know how many sets I did, but the only goal I had with it was getting as much of a pump as possible.

I didn't worry about adding weight to the dips.

I didn't worry about like rest time or anything analytical.

It was just purely pump.

Yeah.

I used to train purely with progressive overload.

And at one point I implemented like

back when I was like, I don't know, like 10 years ago or whatever, I was a big Jeff Nippard Nippard fan before he started posting a lot of like big time YouTube videos.

I'd be like listening to his ice cream for PRs podcast.

So I would implement like DUP, you know, DUP for like powerlifting, but I'd like included it for like a bodybuilding perspective.

So I'd do like, say, shoulders three times a week when I really needed to grow shoulders, but I'd do the first one at like eight reps, the second one at like four.

12 to 15 reps or something.

And then the last one would be like 20 to 25 reps.

And my shoulders did grow a fuck ton, but I think that's because I was just doing crazy amounts of volume throughout the week and I could take it but now I've been implementing a little bit more of what you have where I don't just skip the pump work I do include that even though I do still focus on

progressive overloading with my main compounds and bro, I enjoy it more and I feel like I leave the gym having been more productive and feeling like I've done more.

And

maybe I don't don't have enough space to say this yet, but I really feel like I've grown the most since I've been doing this training.

I think you'll find, because that's what I found, absolutely, because I went through phases when you're young.

Because 20, 25 years ago, it wasn't the interesting thing right now, is we're kind of going through a training renaissance where people really care about research and training.

There wasn't any of that 20 years ago.

You just had what the reader magazines told you, you know?

Yeah.

And so I think we're going to, we're going to learn because there was none of this like higher frequency stuff or like what Training by JP does where it's like this weird mix of muscles and it was really analytical and thought out.

It was just the only thing there was was the bro split.

And it's hard to argue against it because I don't know that there's been a top Olympia competitor in 30 years who didn't do the bro split for at least the majority of their training, you know?

So it's like, like I like push-pull legs, but it's hard to argue for push-pull legs when every top guy is doing a bro split, you know?

And I think, I think there is reasons.

I think like push-pull legs, I think, gives you the max.

I think when you're younger and growing, I think that gives you the maximal total mass growth because most of the workload is placed on the largest muscles but i think it is difficult i think it's very difficult to get as much shoulder and arm work on a bro on a uh ppl routine as you do on a bro split you know and and i think so you end up like the big muscles really do grow but i think you run the risk of being deficient in shoulders and arms which are disproportionately rewarded in the in the sport you know we think they're not but if you train every muscle like

like technically you know like if you based on like if you did the amount of volume work for how big the muscle is like you did the most volume for legs second most for back next most for chest and then shoulders and arms your arms and shoulders would be small like the size they would be would get knocked down I think like the way the sport is judged we need

shoulders and arms need to be proportionally larger than they would be if we actually worked every muscle equal to the amount of like proportional to the size the muscle is you know because there's so many muscles in the legs and back technically we should you know like those should have their own day but if if you really think, like, for how small the biceps and triceps are, like, do they need their whole, like, to keep things truly in balance, they probably don't need their own day.

But to keep them the size they need to be to be judged, which I think is oversized,

they do need their own day.

Wait, I actually feel like I kind of disagree with you, but I want to know, though, are you talking about, are you taught, which division, though, are you talking about open?

All of them in general.

And I'm not saying

I'm not saying,

like, I'm not, this isn't like as extreme of a statement as I'm saying.

saying.

I'm saying the chest, the legs have the most, like, there's a lot of muscles in the legs, and they take up a lot of space.

And so if you were to design a workout routine strictly on the fact that, okay,

I'm going to say a muscle has this much cross-sectional area.

I'm going to devote this amount of work for that cross-sectional area.

And so you add up all the cross-sectional area of the quads, and you get a big number.

You add up all the cross-sectional area of all the muscles of the back, you get a big number.

You add up the cross-sectional area of a bicep, it's really small.

And so that would be like if you did like 20 sets per week for legs, 20 sets for back, and two sets for biceps, which I think you can make an argument that that would be if you're training like, if you go by, there's X number of muscle fibers, and I'm training each of those muscle fibers.

So every muscle fiber in the body gets an equal percentage of workload.

The legs, chest, and back would get much more workload, and the arms would be smaller.

But I think it's hard even to say that because the sport has been around so long that we really don't even know what a muscle, what a, what a body,

we kind of do.

If you look at guys like in in the 40s before where they did really

specific training and they just did total body workouts, you'll see guys didn't have big arms.

I mean, they didn't have big anything, but you know, like it was a different look.

And so, and I'm not saying like,

and I agree with you, like, like some, some divisions, like classic,

you know, like C-bum doesn't have amazing arms.

I mean, he's incredible, you know.

But I think just in general, like.

His arms are definitely his weakness.

Yeah, yeah.

Out of all of the muscles he's got.

But more what I'm saying is if he did, if he trained each muscle fiber in his body equally, the fact that there's more muscles in his legs, chest, and back would mean they would be much bigger.

It's probably, I mean, it's probably, it's not like a hill I'm willing to die in.

It's like it's probably, it's not like that great of an argument or anything.

But I'm just saying, like, I think

what I was kind of getting with it was I think like the PPL, I think, causes the most overall growth of the body.

But when it ends up happening is I think the shoulders and arms kind of lag behind, where with a bro split, they don't.

I 100% agree with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

For sure.

I think

I actually think that arms have started to become underprioritized in judging in the classic and men's physique divisions now

versus overall bodybuilding the last like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, people had fucking massive arms, you know, all of these bodybuilders that we follow in the back, in the old days.

I always think, like, if you truly look at Flex Wheeler, and I loved his physique, but if you look at his arms and shoulders compared to his back, you know, like if you really look at at it, it's like, man, he was just an arm bodybuilder.

He had great legs too, but his chest wasn't big, his back wasn't big, but his shoulders and arms were enormous.

And it like carried him, you know?

But I do agree with you that the, and one thing I like about Classic and stuff is the way they're really trying to create, they're trying to reward an overall look, I think, better than we did with bodybuilding.

I think bodybuilding kind of

I think you could carry a physique with arms, like how flex did, and then certainly you could carry a physique with back and glutes, really.

And I think for a while it kind of got to where we were like,

it was a back, glute, and hamstring contest.

And I think it kind of like wavered from what the sport should have been.

And I think as a result, you saw like classic came about probably as that at least somewhat related to that.

You know, it was also because of the guts and the physiques were just kind of getting so ugly.

But the reason they were getting so ugly, because everyone looked like they were dragging a trailer behind them with their massive ass glutes and hamstrings and back, you know.

And so I, so I mean, I guess like, I agree with you.

I guess I don't, so maybe my argument's not as valid as I thought.

But but really the point of the argument was like the PPL versus a bro split and how much arms can work for that.

Yeah, I did PPL for quite a while and my arms started getting undersized, but I was also focusing on a men's physique before classic came out.

And so it was a little bit more fitting for the division.

But now I'm like training arms a lot more than I ever have because compared to like my back, my chest, my lats, they're lagging behind.

And I just feel like large legs and large arms have such an aesthetic look.

Man, I just.

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They do.

Go back to Flex Wheeler.

I mean, it looks incredible.

I mean, it really, it really does.

If your arms are as big as your waist, it's hard not to look at that and be like, God damn, that looks cool, you know?

You know, like, and I love, like, Dorian Yates is like, because back then, like, when I was really in there, it was just bodybuilding.

So I kind of always revert to bodybuilding when I talk about things,

which is silly now because it's really kind of, it's the second sport at this point almost.

You know, the prize money is better, probably, but like all the kids want to go into classic now or men's physique.

But like, I love Dorian, but like

his physique, like in a suit, he just looked fat, you know?

Where like Flex Wheeler walking around in clothes looked like, you're like, man, that looks crazy.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Okay, so there's so many things I actually really want to ask you about, but we're starting to run out of time, but I'm trying to make you this quick because I still want to ask about training.

So

Mike Sommerfeld, right, second place in classic, we had a podcast and he discussed how when he grew 60 pounds in four months, obviously he like kept 12 pounds of actual lean muscle tissue, but when he grew that much, he upped the calories like 1,500 calories and also he was doing an upper lower split.

And I know that currently

Terrence Ruffin, who we've had a pod in the past, and we're going to do one next week as well.

Right now, he skipped Olympia so he could close his 17-pound

gap for his weight cap.

And right now, his split's kind of crazy, too.

And obviously, these are both very science-based

Olympians.

But I think Terrence is doing some crazy, like full-body splits, like

kind of an upper-lower type split going on.

And this has got me shocked and surprised.

And I know the science-based community is excited to see this training going on.

I want to know what your thoughts are.

Well, I think it makes sense.

I think it's hard to, like, it's hard to not blur the lines between like building a physique that does well in shows and adding as much size as possible.

And they really are different because most of your, like, if you add a pound to your rear adults, it changes your whole physique, but it's only a pound, you know?

So if you're, if you, if you need to add 30 pounds of muscle, you're not going to add 30 pounds of muscle on your triceps, you know?

You're going to add it to your back, chest, and legs.

It would be sick, though.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love, I think big triceps look the coolest.

I love biceps, but like when guys, like when Rulie Winkler walks around, those things are just flopping around and covering it.

Yeah.

But so I think like that's, that's kind of, I guess that's even a better,

a better way of looking at what I was saying with push PPL is like a lot of times what I'll have guys do is PPL in the offseason because I think you're working the largest muscles the most with the most workload, the most frequency, the most intensity.

And then when we get to like prep, we'll switch to a bro split to make sure the shoulders and arms get the most most work.

But if you need to add 30 pounds, you're not going to add 30 pounds to your shoulders and arms.

I mean, you can, have you ever seen one of those things?

Like, here's what five pounds of muscle look like?

You know, you just put that on an arm and an arm gains five inches, you know?

So you're not adding 30 pounds on your arms.

The only way you're doing that is making your chest, back, and legs bigger.

And so the best way to do that would be train those muscles, you know, more frequently, more, more focused with like an upper, lower split.

Or I think probably who does it the best or I'm sure like that it's evolved since this because the science guys are really getting into it it now but i think trained by jp over in the uk was one of the first guys to really kind of do the upper lower split and

with with serious focus and like not just as like a six-week trial but really basing their whole approach around that and i think you get like a look like that like he you know his arms were never that impressive but he's freaking huge you know his his back is so thick and so dense his legs are so huge and so yeah i agree with it i don't think that's the best i don't think that kind of style is the best for creating a stage look but if you need to add 15 pounds to max out your division, you're not going to do it with arms.

So you do that.

And then once you've added the 15 pounds, I think you go back to the regular training to make sure your arms and shoulders stay caught up or touch back up for whatever they lag.

But to add massive amounts of size, you need to do it to your chest, back, and legs.

Some questions for the audience.

What are your thoughts on

too high anabolic use destroying physiques?

This is a statement that Stefan Kinzel said on our podcast together.

I don't think the anabolics do it.

I think, because I saw some crazy anabolic doses 20 to 25 years ago when GH was really hard to find.

I think GH is ruining physiques.

And I think if you look at the sport,

and it's hard to do.

Higher GH doses.

Yeah.

Well, look at like three to four I use can't.

Well, that's that's what I'm getting at.

If you look at like the sport in the 40s, guys had no muscle, then steroids come out and you get like Arnold and stuff in the 60s.

So steroids come out, huge leap forward in progress.

You know, you get, you know, in the 80s, doses were higher, huge leap forward in progress.

Early 90s,

low growth hormone came out in low doses, huge leap forward in physiques.

Late 90s, insulin comes out, huge leap forward in physiques.

Peptides came out, nothing really changed.

So I think that's an argument for them.

But then what's the other big change?

People always talk about the heyday of bodybuilding.

Guys weigh more on stage now.

Like Dorian and NASA were like 265.

You have amateurs weighing 265 on stage now.

Those were the mass monsters then.

Guys weigh more on stage.

But I think what happens with the growth hormone is, yes, your body weight increases, probably largely because of increased bone density, increased bone mass, increased, because it causes soft tissue growth, you know, everywhere, your face, your hands, your feet.

You know, these guys walking around with size 18 shoes, you know, at five foot nine.

And but what I think ends up happening is

your skin gets thicker over time and your whole frame gets larger.

You get that acromegaly look.

Your waist gets wider, your hips get wider.

You kind of, and eventually you kind of get that thing where the guys start losing their triceps.

They get kind of turnip thighs, probably from the nerve compression, from the water retention from from the growth hormone related similar to like you get carpal tunnel but i think the sport like and i'll focus more on bodybuilding because i think it's a bigger problem there i've been coaching guys from when growth hormone was like a thousand dollars a kit to where it's like under a hundred dollars a kit sometimes so i've seen guys where like taking two i use was a whole big expense to where now taking 20 i use is doable and i think guys are leaner today than they ever were back then i have to get guys in much better shape than i used to but i think the years of high dose growth hormone has kind of thickened everyone's skin.

And so you got these guys with like super strata glutes, and then like, but they don't look that in shape, you know?

And I think the skin just gets thicker.

So I think, yeah, the...

You don't think, you don't think part of the look of the skin getting thicker is also maybe them just being on so much growth hormone that it's like increasing their weight.

Oh, absolutely.

No, yeah, 100%.

That's what I think it is.

So what I'm saying is I don't think, but I don't consider that an anabolic.

I consider the anabolics like your base steroids.

Right.

Because growth hormone really isn't anabolic, which is confusing because IGF-1 is anabolic.

But I think really, I think the better way to look at growth hormone is it does burn fat, you know, increases fat oxidation.

And so, if you have, if you have someone on X amount of calories and you have the same calorie intake, but they have less body fat at that calorie intake, by necessity, they're gonna have more body mass from other sources from fat, you know, which will be like, you know, muscle mass is one of them.

But it's so hard.

How do you tell someone to not to take a lot of growth hormone?

Because when they take a lot of growth hormone, it's easier to get in shape.

They stay leaner, better, they stay rounder, stay fuller, they don't get flattened prep.

It's like, how do you convince someone like, no, long term, this isn't going to to be good for you.

And there are some coaches with monsters that say like they believe growth hormone to be one of the literally the most important compounds in bodybuilding.

Yeah.

Well, if you for adding size, yeah.

I mean, that's why you got amateurs weighing 270 now.

But

with those side effects, though, what, around what dose would you say that those side effects would apply though?

I would say more than around.

I would say what year.

If you look, and I'll go back to bodybuilding because that's where the high doses really started.

Find me a top bodybuilder who kind of, you could tell where something changed and they must have amped up their protocol, you know, at a certain year, track them for 10 years and see what happens.

Ronnie from 96 to 2006, Jay from 2001 to 2011,

a certain bodybuilder that

I don't want to give away what it is, a certain younger bodybuilder who bursts on the scene like 10 years ago who now

may have had some issues.

Basically, it seems like you get about 10 years of high-dose growth hormone before those things really start showing.

The skin really starts thickening, the waist starts widening, you start running, like Ronnie lost his triceps.

You start running problems like King Kamali would have, like they lose their quad sweep, I think from the nerve compression.

So I think you get,

you get about 10 years at the higher doses and higher doses would be like over 10 IUs.

Okay.

That's what I was going to, I was going to say, I feel like it happens around like eight IUs and above.

So cool.

Okay.

Yeah, I think like four IUs is probably ideal, but how do you tell someone who's like doing everything they can to progress and say, look, I know if you jump to 12 IUs, you're going to, you're going to have the best six months of progress ever, but in six years, it's going to suck.

And they'll be like, well, I'll deal with that then, you know?

Yeah.

It's hard to convince people.

I just

upped my GH to four IUs, which is the most I've taken.

So

I was hoping that you'd be on 12.

Yeah, I think that's optimal.

I just think it's just hard.

Because you know, if you jumped on 12 IUs and you need to add 15 pounds, you're going to add 15 pounds way faster on 12 IUs, you know?

So it's kind of like synthol.

Like I can sympathize with the synthol people.

I understand it You put so much work in to build your muscles, right?

And now you have this way where I can already officially inflate my bicep.

And for a little bit, because a lot of guys are doing it, not everyone gets caught.

For a little bit, it still looks real.

But how do you decide it's enough?

No other, nothing else we do do we say, yeah, that muscle's too big.

We're always trying to get bigger everywhere, you know?

So I think that's what ends up happening is guys just start, it's really hard psychologically to say, no, my whole life I wanted big arms, but now I'm not going to make them any bigger.

And I think that it starts snowballing.

And that's what, that's where, and then they don't even realize where they've crossed over to where it starts looking ridiculous.

I mean, I'm, you know, I, I probably don't know that much, but this is just speculation.

But personally, I think that that's what, that's one of the biggest.

I think that's probably going to be one of the biggest differences I'd say in some competing for open versus like classic and men's physique.

Because personally, in my opinion now with the weight caps and classic and men's physique, I think at least any athletes that have the same perspective as I, where I have to, I have 20 pounds of weight to close before I get to the weight cap, which is still a lot.

But in my perspective, I'm like, man, I want to make sure that every single one of those pounds is the most aesthetic pound I can put on my body, right?

Because I only have 20 pounds to play.

And once it's done, it's done.

Yeah, and I think that's where classics is where I think in 30 years, classics is going to be the only real

game in town.

Because when you leave people to their own devices, like open, where it's like anything goes, they're always just going to go to every extreme.

And every extreme isn't always the best.

You're going to start getting uglier physiques, shoulders with no definition, you know what that means, you know, and biceps with no definition, which also means the same thing.

And it just, you get to where, like, the, the sport becomes what it wasn't intended, where classic's kind of got these boundary conditions that's going to, it's going to force that from happening, basically, I think.

I hope.

Yeah, I hope so too.

I mean, the top ones, the top people in classical are pretty damn aesthetic right now.

So well, that's it.

That's what, like, young, like, as a coach, all the young guys want to do classic, you know, and they think it's going to be easier because they think, like, no, classic is more genetic and hard it's not it's harder than open for sure there's no room for error you don't get you classic if you got a blocky look you can overcome it by just being a monster with classic everything's got to be in line you can't your waist can't get blown out no muscle group can get out of alignment you have the weight limit so there's you have to be super precise with every pound you add and people young kids don't they don't see that they see that they think the classic guys are smaller and they think it's gonna be easier and i'm like no it's harder

i definitely think they're both

i partly agree i definitely think they're both extremely difficult just in like completely different areas for sure, though.

Yeah, harder doesn't mean anyone's easy.

No, there's no getting on stage in contest shape that happens easily.

Yeah,

for real.

For any competitors that are, I have a lot of Nashville's that also listen to this show, which is kind of cool.

I was a die-hard nanny for almost 10 years

before I crossed over.

I was never going to, never, never.

Me too, man.

Me too.

Then I crossed over and I was like, man, why did I wait so long?

This is waiting so far.

Oh, shit.

But I guess for someone who's starting, I don't know, let's just assume like maybe they're like 25 years old or something and

we're not

encouraging bad behavior.

But what would you say is like the first

compound and dose that you would recommend for someone if they're in bodybuilding for the long term?

Like they want to create the best physique possible.

And the interesting thing is I think the cycle, the compounds stay the same the whole time.

They just get bigger at the best cycle, but just start a test.

And you'll know, like, it's not going to, it's probably not going to change your decision because once you've gone that far and taken stuff, you're going to keep taking stuff.

But if you, if you're like, going to take stuff to see if you have what it takes to make it in the sport, if you don't completely transform on 400 or 500 milligrams of test a week, you probably don't have what it takes.

Because

like guys that really make it, they do their first cycle 400 test and they, they, everyone at the gym is like, what the hell happened to that guy you know and so that's kind of a good litmus test where like if you and then after that like maybe like 400 tests your first cycle then the next one would be like 500 tests and then you add like 400 of deck or eq or primo primovolin is what i i think the best cycle all things considered in the off season you know contest prep is different because off season you need to build muscle contest prep you need to basically look make the physique look a certain way so they're really different but in the off season i think the best cycle career long is test primo balloon gh and and insulin.

And the reason is, you know, primavolin kind of avoids the need to use AIs.

It's mild, it's very anabolic.

There's minimal side effects.

So it basically lets, because what happens at the end stage, like early cycles are easy.

You just take a cell, you'll feel great, you get strong, your appetite's better.

But as your doses get higher, you start running into cases where like, like test flu, you take too much tests, you feel sick.

Your doses get too high, you start feeling lethargic.

You take orals, you lose your appetite.

So it's not just like when guys say, oh, the pros are on all this stuff.

It's like, no, the pros would be on all that stuff.

They're not choosing not to for any moral reason.

You know, like none of us are like, yeah, you know, I'll take, I'll take gear, but I'm not going to do that.

We would take whatever worked.

But what ends up happening is that you, like, if you're taking a bunch of orals, your test is really high.

You basically, you have test flu.

So you feel like you have the flu, you have a fever, you have, you're lethargic from all the doses, you have no appetite from the orals.

Well, if you can't eat and you can't train and you're tired, you're not going to grow.

Yeah, you're not.

Absolutely.

So that's so like, so test and primo basically allows you to take the most total milligrams per week without running into those side effects and so and then so and conveniently awesomely there are your blood work's going to be the best on those also and then obviously in prep you have to do the harsher stuff the orals the things like trend and restrail you know you kind of have to but that's different because that's trying to make the physique you have look a certain way in the off season you're trying to add new muscle and change the physique not necessarily make it look special on any given day you're just trying to you know you're thinking long-term, like, I need to add muscle.

Yeah, we're all wearing our pump covers when we're on the offseason, so no one really cares.

Yeah, um, uh,

cool, yeah, exactly what I'm on.

I agree, Tesla Primo, yeah, and it got

dogged for so long, and then it's like had a resurgence now, um, which I'm happy for because I think it's it's the best.

I mean, though, that combination really is the best, but it's also the healthiest.

It's like, geez, like, how did this fall into our laps?

You know, we get to take a bunch of stuff and not die, you know.

I i have a i have one caveat to that that i feel like i haven't heard anyone say though is um the whole 400 to 500 milligrams of testing is i'd say if you're not responding or you're not transforming on that i'd say if you are someone that you need to up the dose say like you're you're only responding at like 600 or 800 milligrams but it's not affecting your blood work and you're not experiencing any side effects i feel like that's the one caveat that's a good

no i agree that's a good point and that's one of the big like there's so many genetic factors in the sport and this sports like, it's weird how much we ignore genetics.

You know, no one thinks like in other sports, be like, I'm going to be left tackle for the New York Giants.

I'm going to take steroids.

Like, no, if you're not six foot eight, 340 pounds, you don't get to be an offensive lineman.

You know, in baseball, if you don't throw a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball, you're not a pitcher.

Like, but those same genetics are involved in this sport.

You know, they are.

You know, there's just so many more variances because one of the genetics is response to drugs.

And one of the other ones is

how your health markers are affected by drugs, you know.

And some people take hardly anything and their blood work goes to shit.

Other guys can blast like two grams of gear a week without blood pressure medications, have normal blood work and normal blood pressure.

And I have a couple of clients like that right now.

And that's a big genetic factor, you know.

Yeah.

And like you said, yeah, you could, you could respond, you could, I guess, technically, yeah, you could be someone who doesn't really respond to 400, and then maybe they take 800 and their blood work's perfect, their blood pressure is normal, and then they start responding.

That's, you know, that's a,

you know, but

that's a good genetic feat.

And that, so that kind of ruins my 400 milligram argument.

But for the most part, there's just so many genetic factors.

It's like, do you respond well to low doses?

Can you take high doses without having health effects?

And you don't know that ahead of time, which is one of the other weird things, because in every other sport, you know if you're good in basketball by like the age of 10, you know, you know if you're good at baseball as soon as the first time you play a game.

With this sport, you don't automatically, you don't always know until years down the road.

Yeah, I agree.

That's why I like a lot of the new genetic markers for people to look at is at least you can see some potential and see if you should be a little bit more careful than others or if you're

how often would you say someone should get

scans done?

MRIS.

Yeah, like echocardiograms,

just any MRIs, very scanners.

I think the scans should be secondary.

The scans should come because

your blood work should be primary, blood work and blood pressure.

And if you keep your blood pressure under control,

that covers you like for 95% of the problems.

Because the reason you're going to need an echocardiogram is because you have like septal wall thickening, which comes from high blood pressure, basically.

And so, but

like my rough outline, assuming, because most of most of my people that are like trying to turn pro are already pro.

And so it's like one big show season a year, you know?

So my year is kind of designed.

I think the optimal year is roughly, so you do a contest and then after the contest for four weeks, I don't reverse diet.

I do iRebound where we do high calories for four weeks.

And that's one of my questions I went to ask you, actually.

Yeah, sorry, keep going.

Yeah, so I think you finish your contest and you do like four to six weeks of rebound and then you cruise for four to eight weeks, verify, and then you verify blood work is good done.

And then you do a 16-week main off-season, and then you do another four to eight-week cruise period where you verify blood work is good again before you start prep.

You start your 16-week prep, and then that's roughly a year.

It's like 50 weeks.

And so that's like guys trying to turn pro and they're going to do the USAs or nationals every year.

They do the show,

rebound, blood work, off-season, blood work, prep.

What was your, how long did you say your, uh, the rebound was before the health phase?

I let the client's progress decides.

Usually four weeks.

Sometimes like you'll get six weeks.

And really, really rare cases, if someone's like really primed to grow and they were maybe way overly depleted for their, you might get seven weeks or something, but it's usually like four weeks.

Okay.

I kind of like that perspective as well.

And I kind of like Patrick's, it's kind of similar to Patrick's perspective as well.

But

I mean, obviously, it probably depends on the health of the individual.

But

I do like the thought of at least not just throwing away all the compounds and

keeping the calories.

I don't know.

I just like the idea of taking advantage of the rebound.

Yeah, and it's not like, I think it like,

it's not so unhealthy because

what I do basically is we get off all the prep stuff and we go to your off-season cycle and we do basically 60% of your peak cycle from the previous year.

So it's just it's only it's really like half a cycle.

So the dose, it's testopromane, the dose are low.

But the reasoning is that your appetite is just so high.

And this transforms because as guys like my guys who compete, like my pros, we don't really do a rebound.

Like if you're 265 on stage, we're not going to rebound and add 40 pounds of muscle.

This is more for the guys coming up, you know.

But we like your appetite's sky high.

Typically, especially when you're new and you've done your first couple shows, motivation is sky high.

You come out of that show really wanting to get back in the gym to make progress.

Yeah, appetite sky high, motivation sky high.

So with food that high, you're going to grow and you're going to maximize growth rates with the lowest gear you're ever going to.

So we get to do it on pretty low gear, you know, and then that avoids that whole process after the show where, because if you think you are hungry in prep, wait till you're not in prep, you know, like you're hungry in prep, but your appetite's technically suppressed.

You're on fat burners, you're on stimulants.

You're like, almost as a survival instinct, your body knows food's not available, so it's only sending out so much hunger signals.

You know, what happens after the show?

You eat that first big meal, and you thought you were hungry before, but you're way.

So it's like it's just really hard to reverse, you know, because it's you're so hungry.

So I say, take advantage of that diet.

You know, over the course of the year, we have we're going to be able to eat a certain number of total calories over a 12-week, 12-month period, regardless.

You know, I just front-load them basically.

And then, and uh, and I think it's proven itself time and time again.

I mean, like John Rivas is,

I'm actually doing a guess his weight right now.

You know, he competed at, I want to say, like 224 something, you know, three years ago.

And, and he'll be in the 260s on stage.

You know, Paul Barnett competed at like 170 something, and he just turned pro at like 255 in three years.

David Martina went from 181 to 280 over a three-year period, you know, so 100 pounds of stage weight.

And so all these guys, and the bulk of their progress comes.

And I think it's a little misleading because I think going back into

sarcoplasmic stuff, most of that growth in the rebound is just sarcoplasmic growth.

But that's good.

You know, when else do we get that ability to really affect sarcoplasmic volume, you know?

So, I think what happens is you get this massive supercompensation, and you have all the sarcoplasmic stuff, and then their weight kind of stabilizes after that.

And that supercompensation starts decreasing while the myofibrill stuff for the rest of the year is kind of growing.

And they they lose that excessive fullness and roundness but while that's happening the myofibrillar is coming up and at the end of the year i mean i just

I understand the people who don't like the rebound.

I understand their reasoning.

I just have had so much success with it.

And all my guys jump the weight class year after year after year.

I mean, I have so many guys who have added 100 pounds of stage weight in three or four years.

I've never seen anyone do that without the rebound.

I agree with everything you said.

And I've heard these a lot of times as well.

And I just think that I've just seen so many good gains come out of rebounds obviously this all only applies to enhanced individuals not to naturals but every single time though I mean just so many times

whenever the individual is healthy I think part of the reason is is because so many like so many of the good coaches are pros or have been competing if you're a pro and you're five as a pro you're not going to do the rebound because you're not trying to add 40 pounds you know and so like so it's a different world there's really i call it there's two bodybuildings i call it first bodybuilding and second bodybuilding and first bodybuilding is where you're just trying to add size.

You don't have enough size to do anything at the pro level.

You're not even close.

And so that whole time, your goal is just adding size.

And prep is different too, because first bodybuilding prep is basically just starving.

Prep is just straight.

pure hunger and starvation.

But eventually you get to second bodybuilding where you eat like a bodybuilder year-round.

You never get truly out of shape.

So your prep's easier.

You've got enough muscle.

So prep becomes more about being super, you're hungry, of course, but it's more about being super precise with the diet than just straight starving and doing cardio like your first couple preps.

And when you get to second bodybuilding, the rebound is not really valid anymore because you're already a successful bodybuilder.

You're not trying to completely change your physique.

You're not, you know, like if you, like David Lamartinez

competes at like 280 now, he's not going to have another 40-pound rebound.

You know, no one, no one weighs to 320 on stage.

So when we get to second bodybuilding, I don't do the rebound anymore.

And I think a lot of the people who don't like the rebound are those people because they're past that stage themselves.

And so it wouldn't make sense for them to do it.

So it kind of, it's hard for it to make sense for their clients to do it.

Right.

Gotcha.

Awesome.

All right.

Let's, um, we're about out of time, but I really want to ask these questions that the audience asked, if you're okay with it.

Yeah, for sure.

But, um, so QA, I'm just going to pick as many of these as I can that I think are good questions.

The two people actually asked this question, but Spicy Meatball SBD and Majin Bra.

They both asked about the differences in PED use between powerlifters and bodybuilders.

The main difference is bodybuilder, they both lie about their PED use.

Bodybuilders lie and say that

bodybuilders lie and say they take less than they do.

Powerlifters lie and say they take more than they do.

But powerlifters are probably, they're less precise and analytical and more just fuck it, throw it in there.

I've seen some crazy.

I've seen guys like eating, eating, just pouring a bottle of B-ball in their mouth the morning of a meat, which does nothing.

Jesus Christ.

But like by far the most insane

anabolic steroid doses by far have been in powerlifters.

Bodybuilders are more insulin, and GH is where it gets crazy.

Powerlifters don't, they'll use GH, but it can almost be detrimental, you know, like because you've got GH hands and carpal tunnel, you're not going to hold on to a deadlift, you know.

And then GH also, if you're, if you're a powerlifter that competes in a weight class, GH adds weight,

some weight that's not really contractile

strength, you know, like it adds muscle weight without adding strength.

So that's the worst thing you want.

Same with insulin, kind of, you know, they don't want big round muscles.

They want flat muscles that don't weigh anything if you're in a weight class.

So the biggest difference is powerlifters do crazy anabolic doses and bodybuilders, I guess, do crazy growth hormone doses.

You don't think everyone actually lies, though, right?

Because I feel like there's a lot of

a joke.

It's just like it's just a different, like, it's just like bodybuilders are always like afraid to say what they really take, where powerlifters are like, fuck it, dude, I take 300 milligrams, 300 milligrams of anodol a day the last 10 days.

You know, I was like, Jesus, dude, that's a lot.

No, I totally agree.

Like, I'll freaking, like, I'll feel the same.

Like, I, I will tell everyone whatever I'm doing, but, like, if I'm like on a podcast or whatever, I'll normally just like avoid saying the dose just because I just don't feel like it or I just don't want people to start.

Yeah, the frustrating thing is, like, I wish you could be more open.

Because the truth is, is that most people end up roughly in the same range.

And it's because no one's not like everyone's.

It's based on genetics, too.

Yeah, but guys would take 10 grams a day if that's what worked.

You know, because one of my biggest pet peeves is when a guy who's like a very good competitor will be like, yeah, you know, I took, I take like 200 milligrams of test a week and every third month I do 50 milligrams of Winstroll for a day.

You know, and you're like, it's like, dude, you're really good and you're doing nothing.

If you just did a normal cycle, you'd be Mr.

Olympia.

Like, when I hear that, it's like, I know you're lying.

Just admit it because it just sounds dumb because you're saying I'm taking these baby doses.

Well, then why are you competing?

Because you could be the best in the world if you just took a normal dose.

But the thing is, like, also, no one's like take, no, people aren't taking 10 grams.

And it's not because they want it.

Like, guys are crazy.

They'll do whatever it takes to win.

It's just if you try to take 10 grams, you can't function.

You're knotted up everywhere.

You can't eat.

You can't train.

All you do is want to sleep.

You're so lethargic.

You have a fever, infections, you know, so it doesn't work, you know?

And so what ends up happening is there is like kind of a range, you know, like you know, most guys, some guys are doing really low doses, but most guys are over a gram of total gear per week, you know?

And then eventually, at least, and it's a little different for classic because you have the weight limit.

The guys who are at the weight limit, they have to be more cautious.

But for open, where that doesn't really matter, most guys end up somewhere between like at the highest level.

And I'm not saying like a beginner should do this.

I'm saying like guys that are turning pro or a pro, they end up in their off-season cycles like somewhere between two and three grams of total gear per week.

As soon as talking like, you know, a gram or like 1,200 milligrams of test and like a gram of primer ball, which is a, it's a big cycle.

It is a lot, you know, like, especially if you're doing your first cycle, you're like, fuck the gram of tests, but it's not 10 grams, like some people think.

And the reason guys fall into that is because when they start trying to go above that, all the side effects start piling up.

If you start going below it, they don't get the maximal rate of growth.

And wouldn't you say that this is normally with guys who have already used gear for quite some time?

So they had to titrate up to a given game.

Yeah, a whole gear.

Yeah, a whole grade.

That's like what you peek out at, yeah.

But the reason they don't keep going higher is because once you get to that point,

it just stops.

It stops, you don't get better.

You just feel like shit and you lose progress.

But no one should start there because there is that limit and you're going to hit it eventually.

So if you hit that on your second cycle, what are you going to do 10 years down the road?

you always want to get the maximal growth out of lowest cycle.

And so it's, you know, and you should, you build up, and that's, but that's so hard to explain to kids because they're young.

They haven't been alive that long.

They don't think about 10 years in the future, you know, but you don't really reach your peak in the sport till 40, you know, 38 to 42, kind of, you know, and that's where your skin's thinner.

That's when you've had enough time, you have the most maturity.

And so that's why I'm big on telling guys under 30 not to don't go below low gross growth hormone.

Don't do the 10 IUs.

If you're under 30, never do 10 I use growth.

If you're 25 and you start blasting 10 IUs, you're going to get to 35 and you're like a few years from your peak where you could really start killing it on stage and your physique starts falling apart.

And so many,

that's why the young guys that burst on the scene never last.

You know, because they don't, because their physique starts falling apart.

And so we, so all these young guys that burst on the scene, we never really got to see what they could have done because they fizzle out before they get to their peak.

You know, not playing the long game.

Yeah, but it's hard.

I mean, when you're 18, you don't know what long is.

Yeah.

I think I'm, I feel like I started late later than I could have, but also I think I'm lucky enough that I just didn't know what I was doing.

So I was too scared to take a lot of stuff.

So then I got a coach to help.

I was lucky in that I was from small towns.

So I didn't come across it.

It just, I never ran in.

If 60 year old me, like when I first started lifting, I probably would have taken anything.

Then eventually I went through a thing where I was like, no, I'm a natty for life.

But I never, it was easy because I never came across it.

These kids now, it's everywhere and it's cheap.

Like when I was like starting out, like you'd find a, people would like to sell you a bottle of Decker for like 10, 10 milliliter bottle of Decker for $300.

The tit of growth is $1,000.

You know, so like you had to be, I need to know if it was real.

But these kids now, like it's available, it's cheap.

It's hard for them to, you know, you're 20, like you see it, all these, like, these young guys that like have internet celebrity status, you know, and it's like, man, it sucks because I know what's going to happen in 10 years.

You know, things are going to start falling apart.

And you're only going to be 32 years old.

You're not even at your peak yet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When I was younger, like I'd say like five years ago, I just, there was just a propensity for me to think less about the future or like actually feel emotions tied to thinking about my future versus now.

I'm just like, dude, like I can only be on the stage for so long.

I'm only going to be a bodybuilder and have this physique for so long.

Like this is part of the reason why I started my podcast now at this age versus like after my career, because I know that, like,

what else am I going to have to sustain my

nine to five job?

So that's smart.

And the thing is, there's so much money in the industry right now.

It didn't used to be like that.

Like, when there were the weeder magazines, that was your only chance.

We'd have signed you for a contract or you got a supplement contract.

And these supplement contracts are shit.

You know, I mean, they're just not that much money in it for everyone to be.

you know, living high off the hog.

But when you're in charge of your own stuff, the social media and monetizing your own content, yeah, it's smart, man.

You're going to be

setting yourself up now.

I mean, there's so much money in podcasting and stuff.

Not necessarily podcasting, but the peripheral stuff,

selling merchandise, advertisements.

I mean, yeah, it's awesome.

And you got such a big following already, too.

Thanks, man.

I hope it sticks.

Gabriel Hordes asks, are there any long-term benefits to getting stage leading, even if you're not competing?

That's a loaded question.

Benefits for your physique?

Yeah.

Benefits for like health?

Probably not.

But yeah, yeah, because the thing is, is

and she's female, I think, but it's an easier concept, I think, to grasp for males.

But you're optimally

optimized for growth at certain body fat levels.

And so for a man, that's probably around 8 to 12%.

It's basically like anybody who's been in prep knows, like, you can tell when you're watery or not from day to day.

You can tell when you're holding extra water.

If you ever get so fat that you can't tell when you're watery, you know, like your abs aren't sharper, dry or sharper or washed out from day to day, you're too fat.

What happens is in that like 8 to 12% body fat range, testosterone

levels are maximized.

Now, if you're taking tests, that's a little different.

But more importantly, in that range, aromatization levels are lower.

Insulin sensitivity is higher.

When you start getting above like 12, 14, 15% body fat, you aromatize more of your testosterone to estrogen.

More of your testosterone will be bound.

You have less free testosterone.

Your insulin sensitivity decreases.

So all these things that are important for for hypertrophy start really getting battered as body fat gets higher.

And so if you get contest lean, it's not really necessarily optimal for growth, but that gives you the maximum length of time where you can have an off-season before you get too fat to be optimal for growth.

So yes and no, you know, but I always say the best way to guarantee the biggest you at some point in the future is to get very lean right now.

And if you've noticed, like, how many permabulcers never change?

Everyone goes through the perma ballker stage.

We're like, I'm not ready to compete yet.

I'm not ready to compete yet.

What happens when you start competing?

The next three years are the biggest progress of your life because you periodically get really lean.

A couple of Olympian coaches I talk to have the same perspective and that are just like, yeah, like if you need to gain 20 pounds, for example, like we're not going to do that in two years.

We don't want to do that in two years straight.

The ideal would be to do it in like, say, two contest preps where we at least take a break and somewhere in between.

That's a better way to look at it, actually.

That's actually, I should, I should, I'm going to steal that.

Like, you know, if people like, you know, like I have my kids,

like, I always used to say something happens in two days.

My kids say in two sleeps.

But, like, yeah, that's a good way.

Like, if you need to add size, you should look into how many preps it'll take to get to that size because that's the best way that's going to happen.

You're not going to add 20 pounds.

If you're 14% body fat in the middle of the offseason, you need to add 20 pounds.

It ain't happening.

You can say, I'm going to take a year off and add size.

No, you're not.

If you want to add that 20 pounds, now do a prep, you know, do a couple preps and you will get to that 20 pounds.

Dude Man asks, the new influencer trend saying you don't need a caloric surplus to grow.

Well, I mean, define grow, you can't add body mass without a calorie surplus.

You know, added body mass means more calories, more energy is stored on the body.

But

you don't need a huge calorie surplus to add muscle tissue.

And in some cases, the best transformations you'll have, and this is why guys always think like when they want a diet, they lower the dose or go off.

Your highest doses should always be when you're dieting.

Your lower doses should always be in the off season because you have the food to support growth with lower doses.

But in prep, you get this kind of Goldilocks phase where you, even in a strong calorie deficit, the

blood androgen levels are so high, and especially when they're climbing, that it creates the state, a body composition state in your body where it will build muscle even in a deep calorie deficit.

No, so no, you don't need a surplus to

grow,

but you're not going to add 50 pounds.

Because if if you add 50 pounds of muscle mass

at any given calorie intake, if the calorie doesn't, calories don't increase, you have to lose 50 pounds from something else.

So, yes,

to some extent, you can burn fat, replace those calories with muscle growth, and not technically in a surplus, but it's not the most efficient, and you're not going to get massive rates of growth.

Okay, gotcha.

Poly fucking DS, what's the craziest cycle you've ever taken?

I did three bottles of tests a day.

I honestly don't know.

I think probably the most would have been like before I was even a good bodybuilder.

I know I did

part of the reason why I say like I say two grams so much is because there was a couple times I tried two grams of tests and couldn't make it past like week two.

It was like just felt terrible.

I had the like flu, like

so lethargic.

I mean, I don't, I won't lie, I'll tell you what I did.

Like when I, when my off-season before the USAs, 2007 USAs, was 1,200 milligrams of test and a gram of EQ and five I use of growth when I could get the growth hormone and then insulin on my high days.

And that was

really my goal.

I mean, I didn't compete much longer after that or at all after that.

So that was, but that was like kind of my, and that was really what started forming my two to three gram range is because I realized like once I broke that two gram mark, progress seemed to still be accelerating.

But anytime I tried to go above that, like if I tried to go to like 1,500 milligrams of test and like 1,200 milligrams of EQ, i just don't start feeling like shit lost my appetite and progress stalled when i you know so but that was i don't i never i never had a crazy see like that crazy cycles weren't a thing back then it was so hard to get shit the china wasn't a thing underground labs weren't a thing you got to find some dude in romania who would ship you like ampules and a cassette tape you know it was a different world

Yeah, you're the second person I've heard say that, actually.

Ziegler Monster came on my podcast and said the exact same thing about how he was taking like, I don't remember exactly, maybe 1.2 to 1.5 grams or something.

And then when he went to like 2.5 to 3 grams or whatever, he just realized like there was no, the rate of progress was like about the same.

Yeah, and you followed shit.

Yeah.

And there was no moral reasoning behind it.

I would have taken back then, I would have done, I mean, bodybuilding was all I cared about.

I didn't have a family or anything yet.

You know,

I would have taken 10 grams if it worked, if I could find it.

It was harder to, it really was harder to find stuff.

But there was no, my doses were not limited by any like, this is unhealthy or this is too much.

I would have taken, you know, give me, give me everything you got.

I just, that's what happened was when if I tried to go higher, I just like, everything fell apart.

I had no appetite.

I was so lethargic.

You know, my injection sites would hurt.

And it was so weird with the injection sites too, because it was like, I could do like that, like that 2,200 total milligrams per week.

And I wouldn't even remember where I pinned the next time.

I'd be like, was it, you know, this gluten, nothing hurt.

And I'd go a little bit higher.

And then suddenly it was like my body couldn't process it.

And I was like sore everywhere.

Every site, every shot lumped up, and it was miserable.

And I mean, that's probably another generic factor.

I'm sure there's people who can push the doses higher, but for me, and for most people, you know, I've coached for 20 years.

I know that most people are in that range also.

Hardly anyone can get above three grams of total gear a week and not feel like shit.

Most people can get to two grams and feel pretty good, but somewhere between that two and three grams is when the wheels fall off for

at least a full standard deviation of people.

Gotcha.

Juicy K asks your take on metformin for easy gainers if they are prone to gain fat during off-season phase.

Yeah, and

I use it, yeah, because it's kind of a weird thing because metformin works through C-A-M-P, which is technically like anti-hypertrophy.

You know, it's like anti-inflammatory.

But, and I've used this analogy before, you know, yes, it's technically anti-hypertrophy, but if you're on PEDs, it's like it's like adding a deck chair to the Titanic.

You know, you know, it's like technically it weighs different, but it's, you know,

but then also you have to think like there's nothing more anti-hypertrophy than high blood sugar.

It really is.

You know, if you look at like diabetics, type 1 diabetics before invented insulin, they died basically

from like tiny.

They died from wasting.

They were extremely lean.

The weird thing is, this high blood sugar is great for getting low body fat.

It's just at the expense of muscle tissue.

Still keep it basement, says you're the goat.

Is that from me training in the home gym?

Zay George asks, how influential was Dante Trudell early on in his development via trading and nutrition?

Yeah, good.

I mean, it's a mixed bag.

Like, I don't want to downplay at all, you know.

By the time I met Dante, I mean, I had my own training philosophies and I think they, and they mixed really well with him.

The interesting thing with Dante is we got off on the wrong foot completely.

His famous thread, Cycles for Pennies, that everyone kind of knows about, like around 99 or 2000, people were on it and they were trying to bash it.

And I went on and I was like, guys, it's not rocket science.

He's saying, eat more food, get stronger, and you'll grow.

Dante read it as a slam against him, like it's not rocket science, it's dumb or something.

And so he DM'd me and he's all pissed.

I was like, dude, dude, no, I'm on your side.

I'm saying, yeah, it makes perfect sense.

You're just telling people to eat more and train harder, get stronger.

So, so, you know, and so I did DC training for a little bit.

Like,

so it's like a mixed bag.

I don't want to downplay at all because Dante was a really good friend for a while.

He still is.

I don't talk to him much as much anymore.

And I love what he's done with his business.

I think that's

very, because he's been able to do it without kind of almost on the sly, which is like any business owner's dream, I think, because so much with business today, you have to be out in the public.

Cause I'm an introvert.

And so it's really hard for me.

Like to grow the business, I have to get my face out there where it's hard for me to do that.

He was able to do that somehow without doing that.

But, you know, like, yeah, I mean, and I see it at his house a bunch of times.

He's a really good guy, you know.

But like the influence thing is kind of a hard thing because I had already, you know, I was, I was in my mid-20s.

I had already had my training philosophy by that time.

So it wasn't like he, it was more he, it was awesome that he kind of agreed with my training philosophy.

I mean, I didn't do DC, I didn't have DC, but like the progressive overload, I kind of stumbled on that my own way.

And then he had like a really refined version of it, which I really liked.

And I trained that way for a while.

Right, right.

Right now, my training is basically

both of yours combined in a way.

It's like progressive overload, but then on the last set of the exercise, I will implement

that set to failure, then 20 second rest, and then do the same weight again, pick it up to failure, 20 second rest.

Dude, I feel fucking amazing.

I get both progressive overload and I have a sick pump.

Yeah, that was my favorite way.

I kind of wish I could go back because when I felt like I really dialed in my training philosophy was kind of when I was already, because I left the sport for a while and left, like, it wasn't really social media, but I left like the business aspect of it.

And so I feel like I never really got to explain what I really like, finally dialed in.

And it was more like that line.

And I think that's like, man, because you get all the benefits of progressive overload and then all the sarcoplasmic benefits.

And it's fun to train that way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nick King asks, what level results are you looking at most importantly when it comes to your cycles?

Renal.

Yeah.

Kidneys kill bodybuilders.

All the other stuff, like high hematocrit's not great, you know, but, and

high cholesterol and liver values aren't that great.

But you can have, I've seen guys with liver AST over 700 and have it come back to normal.

If you have a creatinine level over three, you're done.

It's not coming back.

You know, so like, you know, like the liver is really regenerative.

You can bring blood, you can give blood to get your hematocrit down.

You can improve your cholesterol.

You got, you have kidneys and they do not regenerate.

And what, what, like, what happens to every bodybuilder that's died over the last 20 years?

What do we hear about right before they die?

Oh, yeah, you know, I just talked to him.

He said he had like a chest cold, but he thought he was getting over it.

Or yeah, yeah.

I mean, I just talked to him last week.

I know, I mean, I knew he had pneumonia, but he thought he was getting better.

What is that?

Well, you get, your kidneys get blown out you get into renal failure you start you stop filtering fluid as well and you start holding water you get swole edema swollen

yeah yep and so that stresses the heart

attacks yeah

and even worse like you get you end up getting dilated this is why it ties to pneumonia you get dilated cardiopathy the heart stops filtering even more you get fluid build up throughout the body even more what's the end stage of that fluid buildup in the lungs pulmonary edema and that's when they die so that's like it's like god it kills me because whenever i see a guy who i know has looked really big or watery for a while and you hear him mention on social media that he thinks he has pneumonia or he's getting over pneumonia and like i mean if i don't want to name names but you can go back to anyone who's died young uh maybe other in boston llloyd because his is more acute but uh

they all have that same story and all their friends are like oh yeah i mean i know he had a chest cold but he said he was getting better it's like no it wasn't good it was that was the end stage of renal failure i see it's always what it is so how how can someone catch that and also like what is the best preventative measure um i know that like a a lot of people take astragalus or astrologers root, but how effective is that?

It is effective.

That's why

we sell renal restart with astragalus.

And I wish it sells well, but it's like pisses me off it doesn't sell better because I'm like, guys, this is the one thing that's going to keep you alive.

At what dose would you recommend?

1500 grams minimum, three grams better.

We have three grams.

Six grams better.

Yeah, and then up to six grams.

But the thing is, is it's...

Astragalus isn't isn't like,

I mean, it's weird because it helps the kidneys, but it's not entirely, it's actually contraindicated for chronic kidney disease, stage three, and above.

So it's not one of the, like, taking 10 grams isn't helpful.

That's, that can be harmful for the kidneys.

So, like, it's one of those things you want to be in that, like, three is probably optimal,

maybe five or six, but three is probably optimal, and more is not better.

But even more importantly,

it takes like eight grams or something right now.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's like, that's because we're bodybuilders, more is better, right?

And it's like, there's a therapeutic dose of things for a reason.

Like, you know, like, things weren't decided upon because it's like, yeah, man, whatever, do that.

More, more would be better, but we just won't tell them that.

You know, like there's a reason, you know, like everything is like it has a dose curve.

And a three gram is probably right in the middle.

But even more importantly, just control your blood sugar and your blood pressure and your blood sugar.

Those are what kill your kidneys.

If you, and the whole thing, the weird thing about this whole sport is you can be pretty fucking stupid with doses and blasting shit.

And like, stupid.

And a lot of young guys are.

But if you keep your blood sugar in line, you keep your blood sugar in line, you'll get through it and be okay.

But those are the two things.

And then on blood work, you're creating.

How do you feel like for blood sugar?

How do you feel like consuming sugar in your diet not

along with fats differs from just having no sugar in your diet?

Do you think that has a significant effect?

I mean,

I'm not going to argue that sugar is good in any way, but

it's...

you know, it's more complex than just like avoid sugar or, you know, but and because it's calorie related, you know, you can eat a low-sugar diet, but if you eat a fuckload of calories,

it's going to eventually raise your blood sugar, you know.

So, and I used to be really big on the blood sugar stuff, and I used to use blood sugar management quite a bit in peaking.

And everyone misread it wrong because they thought, then they started using it, and they thought they would be able to gauge whether or not they were full by their blood sugar.

It's not, blood sugar reading basically tells you if you're too dehydrated.

Because if you get too dehydrated, you can't store glycogen, and so your blood sugar will start climbing.

It doesn't mean you're full at all.

You might still have a ton of room to store glycogen.

It means you don't have enough water and sodium to form glycogen with the sugar that you have.

And that's actually why you'll have elevated blood sugar after a contest.

For like a month after contest, you basically be a diabetic.

And so many guys go and get blood work and then they panic because their doctor tells them they're diabetic.

They're not.

What ends up happening is, and it's counterintuitive because after a show, you're holding so much water.

It's like, how can I be dehydrated?

But your blood is technically dehydrated.

There's so much storage ask of your body to move blood to the extracellular space into the muscle that there's never really enough blood enough.

And sodium levels in the blood are so high.

So your blood has to stay at 0.9% sodium.

So if your body's retaining sodium like crazy, it's always trying to get above that.

And so your body needs that water.

So if you have just enough water to keep you at 0.9 sodium and your blood sugar is climbing, you can't pull water from that and raise your blood sodium higher.

So you get this weird state where even though there's all this water in the body, technically you're dehydrated in the case of glycogen storage.

Sorry, that was a tangent.

No, yeah, it it was a good tangent though.

Okay, cool.

So

I mean, is there any supplements that you ever recommend for blood sugar?

Like, do you ever recommend like R-A-L-A, chromium?

I know you mentioned berberine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we, but the problem with berberine is if you don't take it every two hours, it doesn't work, you know?

And so like, and I hate to keep pushing my supplements, but like.

These came from my own research.

These came from a want from my clients to be better.

But our products, Suppressor Max, we add a permeability enhancer called sodium caprate it's a it's a 10 carbon chain fatty acid and it increases the permeability of berberine across the small intestine in the blood so you take berberine and berberine works amazingly the problem is is by hour two it's almost back to baseline levels well so if you add sodium caprate with sodium caprate berberine blood levels at hour six our our suppressor max if at hour six post-dose your blood levels of berberine will be higher than berberine alone at hour two

and that's so that's the problem with berberine is getting it to be to in the blood and and keep your blood levels high because it breaks down so quickly but yeah berberine is berberine is i you could even argue it's better than uh metformin because berberine it works through a cascade reaction with igf-1 you know it's like well

igf-1 is great isn't that what we all want you know yeah yeah okay cool um last question i ask every person at the end of every podcast but if you're gonna leave the world tomorrow and you had one message you could send to the entire world today, what would the message be?

Oh, man.

The honest truth is like,

like, you ever like stumble upon like, uh, like a cheesy, like,

this, the reason I thought of this is because just the other, like, last night, I was just flipping through YouTube and that song Home.

I can't remember who makes it, but it's like, there's a second version of it that's like a trending

sound on TikTok for years, you know, and it's, if, if you've heard it, it's just, but it's just really like heart, like, it's just a really heartwarming song and a sound.

And all the comments were like, you could tell like people had been drinking or whatever people just broke up and everyone's like really emotional and and everyone's just like you know you know be nice to each other and and and you read through that it's like you know like at first if you're sober you're like dorks but but like really that's what it is like you're like we're here for such a short time you know like do you know your what's your uh great uh your great-grandfather's middle name um

yeah no exactly you're in two generations your own family will have no idea you existed and that's all of us so all we have is like this little bit of time with each other you know we're all dicks to each other we're jerks to each other we try to backstab you it's just insane you know so like if i could leave one thing it's like man like if you have family you have loved ones you have people close to you make sure they know that they're close to you make sure they they know how much they mean to you you know and don't don't it's you know like it's hard especially as a man to say that sometimes but like it's easy for me because i got all girls and so it's let's let's it's less wimpy to do that but yeah you know like this is all we have and you know two generations your own family won't know you existed none of this bodyman stuff matters.

So the people around you, the people you love, and really peripherally, because if you, if you, you know, there's like 7 billion people, 8 billion people in the world, you know, like you'll know a thousand people in your life.

They'll know a thousand people.

You're like, you're only two or three people away from knowing everyone on earth.

You know, so we like, just, just like, I wish we were all just like not assholes to each other.

And it's hard because I'll get off this and you'll go be an asshole to someone.

But that's what I'd say.

Make sure your loved ones know that you love them.

And I don't think any of us do that as often as we should.

I love that, bro.

Thanks, man.

Yeah, that's a good one.

All right.

Where can everybody find you?

Troponinutrition.com or troponinsupplements.com or troponinutrition on Instagram or any social media.

Or if you want to email me at boo boo tittyfuck69 at hotmail,

I'll kill you.

If you just, if you, I usually just say Google search Justin Harris, but some dude named Justin Harris killed his whole family.

So

if you Google Justin Harris bodybuilding or carb cycling, I'll come up also.

Awesome.

Thanks, bro.

That was freaking awesome.

Thanks, guys.

Raise us a five-star in Apple Podcast, Spotify, anywhere you find podcasts.

Subscribe to the YouTube channel, clicking the bell button because that's getting us sick guests like Justin.

So, thanks for coming on again, man.

Thanks for having me, though.

That was awesome.

Catch you guys next time.

Peace.