DomSuperSliced: Best Way To Use PED’s, GH, Insulin, Training & Avoid Blown Out Stomachs

Dom Super Slice, also known as Dominic Mustachio, a top Olympic coach who's coached athletes like Regan Grimes, Nick Walker, and various women Olympians.

One of the most evidence-based, transparent, and longevity, well-educated coaches in bodybuilding. The future in performance-enhancing drugs is going to be in different myostatin inhibitors.

And I have experience with them with a lot of different clients.

The thing that they not realize that the ones, especially ballostatin, anyone that I put on it for more than three weeks has wrecked all their health markets. Worse than any androgen they've taken.

I would be willing to bet anyone, any amount of money, if you took two identical twins and you had one of them on 1,500 milligrams of androgens a week.

You had the other one on 300 milligrams a week, but one of them was outperforming the other one in the gym by 25 or 30%, that the one that's in the gym, that their performance markers are continuously improving.

I promise you that that person will see more tissue than the person that's running. With GLPs, those have been around for a very, very long time.

But I do know without a doubt, six people that that did the Olympia this year that were all taking retitrutide, and all of them had issues.

And like everyone should have a basic calcium scorer testide, we're achieving non-invasive, and it gives you a good broad spectrum of if you have any calcium or flat buildup.

But anyone that was on any of these GLPs, GIPs in the clinic that was on thyroid medication, on all of them, none of their medication changed, but their TSH was dropping.

And that's essentially because it's slowing the process where food is going into the small intestine. So your body is essentially absorbing more of everything that you're taking.

You can take it year-round.

The problem with what he ran into, he was taking it three times a day, was taking it at times, high doses of anything from eight to twelve IUs a day, but not taking no days off from it.

So I'm talking about if you're taking more than four and a half, five IUs of GH every single day for two years straight, that's when you're gonna run into issues. When would you take a break?

Insulin and HGH work together like peanut butter and jelly do.

And that's why so assessing that data, that shows you that he responds better to doing slightly lower volume and having those compound movements programmed in the beginning of the workout.

And then the way Regan's training is, it changes each week. So week one, he starts his workout, say, with incline Smith Machine Press.
Then week two, that goes to the second.

And then dumbbell press is what he starts week two with. How do you control waist growth during off-seasons?

Hey, bro, how are you? How are you? Good. How are you doing, Doc?

I'm doing good, man. Doing good.
Just

finally like two weeks where I didn't have to travel. So that was good because this year has been crazy to say the least with all the shows.

Yeah, you're traveling all the time because of your clients, right?

Yeah.

Mostly, but next year, there's no way that I'm going to be traveling that much. And to be honest,

I actually think that I could peak most of them better from actually being here in one environment, like a controlled environment than actually physically being at the show, especially when there's multiple shows going on.

Really?

Well, just because you got to think about it, like if you do have, like this weekend, I had like two different shows going on,

different time zones. I mean, you're at a show, you're getting pulled in so many different directions with things that really are not the most like important variables to peaking someone.

Where if you're in like one controlled environment where I'm at my office and when people travel, they travel with like a specific ring light that I give them,

like a black backdrop, like a black sheet. So the check-in photos are consistent.

And they fill out these logs that are like, you know, your weight log, your photos, and like urination logs, where if they're getting me this information. Ah, you got the urination logs going, huh?

A little pee in the bottle type shit. I'm a big like data-driven person.

And like, when you understand the way the body works, like, especially if you're checking things like blood pressure, blood sugar,

it's a hard process if you have all of that data

up. You know, I mean, granted, you could run into

a circumstance where a client is just stressing and they have a cortisol dump. Yeah, and it's a little bit different, but no, I totally agree with you.

I actually really like the data-driven methods for peaking as well. Like, I feel like I've seen a lot of success through like Chris doing

weigh-ins with Jordan, like in between meals, and then making sure you're aiming for that.

Same thing with

Jon Jewett with Sean Clarita. I've just been, and Kyle Wilkes did that with me too last season, and I really like that.
So, working with Patrick, with him not weighing me, was kind of a surprise.

Kind of did things by eyeball more.

He didn't check your weight.

No, not in terms of like

we checked your weight every single morning. Like, I have a log every morning, but in terms of like in between meals or at the end of the day, you know.

I mean, it's

you said the thing is, it's common sense. Like,

number one, to like see what someone's normally fluctuating from the night for the morning.

And then going into like a show, you should, even though like somebody's physique could have 10 different like body compositions at a certain weight, you should know within like a two-pound weight range for that person to come in like nailed where they're, you know,

fully like glycogen-loaded and that they're dry.

So, you know, if you have that information, it just like minimizes the things that can go wrong if you're monitoring all those tangibles.

No, I mean, it makes sense. It makes sense.

I don't know. I was also curious about the whole, um, if he was ever going to like measure out my urination and match that with the liquids coming in.
And I didn't mention anything to him.

And then last show, randomly, he brought it up. He's like, make sure to drink as much liquid as you're peeing out.
And I was like, Oh, there it is. Now it is, now he's doing it.

He's been a really great coach, and um,

it's, I think, more so, it's like uh

like um

slow and steady wins the race. Like, he's starting with the lowest dose cycles with me first, and we're going to continuously titrate up.

Like, for the first show, didn't run any windstrol, any orals aside from proviron. And then we did add a little bit of halo at the end, but you know, I was expecting to do something like windstrow, so

yeah i mean everyone's body is like

i mean winchrill is usually a staple for most people yeah but there are some other like compounds like where people like think that they have to take like trend for every prep that's most certainly like not the case because there is some people that

when their like androgen load is over a certain threshold but it ends up just negatively impacting their body and they actually look better doing other androgens or higher dhds i actually kind of feel that way too with kyle last year and he's an amazing coach but obviously it was our first prep ever right every time you do a first prep with any coach very wild right yeah yeah anytime you're doing a first prep with any coach you're shooting darts at a dartboard in the dark don't have any data but um

i haven't i hadn't really been like much of a like a competitive bodybuilder for many years because i was just getting fucking peeled for social media so I can make some kind of money and make it buy.

And then finally, I started making money. So when he and I actually did a prep,

God, dude, it was by far the wildest and biggest stack I've ever done. And it's not like a, I wouldn't say it's like a massive stack compared to, especially compared to other pros.

But for me, of course, it was like out of the gates, definitely a big one. And I didn't really know.
You know, I was thinking, oh, I'm fucking excited to jump all this on all this shit.

But by the time like showtime came around, like every week that was progressing, I'd be like, God damn, I look so fucking vascular that I feel like it's harder to see the definition in my quads just because I'm like that fucking full and pumped up from the gear I'm taking.

You know what I mean? That kind of look. Yeah.
And that's the point where I was like, I feel like this is a little bit too much for my personal response at the moment.

Like maybe we should have started a little bit lower and then jumped with Patrick and we actually started way lower than that. And I actually felt like we could have had a little bit more in.

But yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, that's always where you should start off like at the lowest baseline and then monitor things and slowly titrate things up.

And usually I'm huge on changing one variable at a time.

Um, so many people, even when I was competing, there were shows I prepped myself for, but the first couple of NPC shows I did, because I was so they didn't know anything about drugs.

I worked with a couple, well, two or three different coaches, and they would just throw the kitchen sink in. And people would be like, oh, like, how do you like this and that?

Well, you can't really tell what's doing what because too many variables.

Exactly. Where if you change one variable at a time, it's easier to identify than the response that you're getting out of it.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I wanted to thank you, by the way, for the advice you gave me at the Steve Carr Classic, because I honestly never knew anything about that. Like about,

and if you don't mind me asking again what the reasoning is behind like the low-dose add-on, like 100 milligrams of Primo or 25 milligrams of Provirin post-show for about 12 days, just so the audience gets like a an idea of like what a conversation was post-show, because that was helpful for me, considering that I'm doing this health phase by myself right now.

Absolutely. And a lot of people

will realize like when they're on PEDs,

they don't have necessarily like some of the

side effects, even like skin and hair usually happens four to five weeks after you get off.

And that's because of the the the shift in the endocrine system that you're that you're giving it because you went from like a pendulum when you go one way it's going to swing back the other and that's why you don't want to just take everything like completely off and that's why to leave in something like a primo or a provirin

do you mind me asking what exactly shifts so drastically absolutely so like the main thing that that shifting is one of your on a lot of like dhds you'll actually start to convert more once you start once you start to come off.

And the other reason why that you're having that type of endocrine shift, it's not only just the drugs, it's also like the food.

Once you start to incorporate higher amounts of food, it's also like exacerbating that whole type of like endocrine-like shift.

And if you're also taking things like anti-estrogens, for people that take like letro, I don't know if you use letro, I try to avoid it, but some people do need it to get like dry to people that have like thicker skin and people that aromatize like a lot greater than others yeah

i know uh darren farrell and both jack eagles they like have like 200 300 tests in their offseason and they have to titrate up their master on or primo up to like a gram because of how much they aromatize

there's another like

with that too um which i've learned from working in the medical field that people are terrified of like of estrogen um when estradiol is actually very important the way that you should assess that is based on the ratios of testosterone so like your estradiol should really be about 5% of what your, what your total testosterone is.

So that's why like if someone sees their estradiol and they're like, oh shit, like it's 75 or 85, whatever it may be, and they start freaking out about it and they start hammering AIs or whatever.

If their test, if their total test is 5,000, that's really actually not that high.

Total test 5,000? If their total test was, but some people,

it is, if they're taking, you know, and it doesn't matter how much you're necessarily taking because everyone metabolizes these hormones differently.

I've seen someone before running 550, 600 milligrams of tests and their total test was 7,000.

500 milligrams and the total test was 7,000? What the fuck is that?

Exactly. It was 7,200 around that range.
That's crazy. But I've also seen the vice versa where there's people doing, you know, 600 milligrams a test and their levels are like 2000

so that's why everything is so individual yeah based

honestly i would have thought that i would have thought that the average would be closer to two to three thousand if you're on like 600 milligrams of test but yeah i mean that case was

that that was a that was a rare case and it was his only second time ever putting any sort of exogenous hormones into his body. So I'm sure that had something to do with it.

Is there a number that you would shoot for? I remember Fuad saying in the podcast that, like, when you're starting off, you would want to shoot for somewhere like 2,000 to 3,000.

With your, your, your total test? Yeah, total test. Definitely not objectives.
Typically, typically somewhere around the 3,200 to 3,500 range. Okay.

Probably a good, a good range to be in. Okay, cool.
It's cool to hear. Good thing that none of my blood work tests ever record above 1,500.

Well, I need to get the other.

Are you? Because you know, if you go through certain labs, they only met

1500 where I go to

I think it's excess labs and I'm pretty sure Lab Corp also tests it over 15. It'll give you the actual number.

Hmm, I should have requested something at LabCorp then because LabCorp is my original lab that I've always gone through for years and they never tested it above 1500.

So it must be something that I'm just requesting. Do you

well, luckily, since I work with Transcend, I just go through Transcend and they cover my blood work. So

obviously

my biggest priorities in the last few years has never been my total test level. It's always been it's always been APOB, LP, little A, just a bunch of the other markers in regards to longevity.
Yeah.

No, definitely. There's a lot of other like health markers and cardiovascular tests that I could tell you that are the most important.
Like everyone should have a basic calcium score test done.

It's super cheap and

non-invasive and it gives you a good broad spectrum of if you do have any calcium or plaque buildup.

But people should also not look at that like they're set in the clear because it doesn't test for soft plaque buildup either.

And typically, if you have a, if you have a high calcium score, usually that means that that cow that was developed from like five years prior. That's usually what that's indicative of.
And

for you to really have a good assessment of that, you need to go for an angiograph. That's like the holy grail of cardiovascular tests.
Yeah, angiograms, you're right.

The angiograms freak me out, though, but not that I'm not going to get them or anything, but because you have to

catheter. Yeah, and like the dye too and shit

and the risks associated, even though it's not really that bad. Like, you know what? You don't have only time to do one of those, like,

typically the steps that you would take is like, if you had a calcium score and it was over 700 or 800, then do an angiogram then. And it's very possible.

I've had people, I had a guy last year that had a 1600 calcium score and had zero blockages. And that's because the calcium buildup was on the outside of the cardiovascular tissue.

Yeah. So that's why calcium score is just a broad spectrum of it.
And this guy, after doing like a little more investigating,

found out that this guy developed this. from taking way too much vitamin D3.

Because if you do take enough vitamin D3, especially without K2,

it'll start, you'll have an elevated calcium score. It'll solidify.

But this guy was taking. But if you take it with K2, normally it's pretty chill, right? Yeah, it's fine.

This particular person was taking this supplement that's made, it's an immune support supplement that's made for like right when you feel like you're getting sick.

And it's like 80,000 I use of vitamin D3. And you're

holy shit. You're supposed to take it for like two days, right? Holy shit.
He was taking it like part of this like everyday supplement stack. Holy shit, 80,000 every day is crazy, bro.

I know, but to people that don't know this,

you know, he could have really fucked himself up. Yeah, it's the weird, that's the fun thing about the fun thing and the weird thing about supplementations, especially if you're doing various diets.

Like my own personal experience back when I was younger, I didn't know shit. I was doing carnivore diet and I was supplementing with either vitamin C or iron that I wasn't supposed to.

And obviously, this gave the doctors a little bit scared that I might have hemochromatosis. It was just a scare.
We got it tested. It was just a scare, but still, it's like, dude,

I don't know. You just

supplementation, you got to be really like careful with and be pretty conscious and aware of.

Yeah, no,

absolutely. Even,

even like where they have, you see, they have EMTs like at the bodybuilding shows.

That, in my opinion, can i know this is sound weird that could actually be more dangerous than it can be a good thing because

if somebody let's say is on a high dose of ldactone they see someone go down and they're cramping

what do they do they put them on an iv and on the iv is usually um potassium chloride well if they're on like a higher dose

And the reason why I brought this up is it happened to someone war where there's been someone that actually died because of this.

And I know that shit, like from the IV, from them feeding him more potassium. He got hypergalimia in it.
Oh, fuck. Holy shit.
But like the paramedics, they don't know.

Yeah.

You know, and I know that there has been, I know Milos has a story that he was at a show overseas and that happened to someone and he stopped them right before they did it. And

yeah,

that can definitely happen. Is there a way to flush potassium out of your system quicker? Say you're you're on potassium

sparing diuretics.

To flush it out faster. Yeah, I don't know.
Just like say that you're running into one of these dangerous situations.

Well, if you're on, like,

are you talking about like a loop diuretic or something like that?

I'm just thinking about like, you know, when someone's, someone has too much potassium in their system because they're on potassium sparing diuretics.

Well, you'd want to do the opposite and you'd want to get in sodium.

Yeah, that's okay.

With sodium, that's really the main thing because the two kind of balance each other

out, yep, yep, okay, that's what I was thinking. Um, anyways, reeling it back real quick because I kind of wanted to ask you a little bit more in depth.

Um, did you happen to have a reasoning for about 100 milligrams of primo or about 25 milligrams of provirin, like in those 12 days post-show? So, that's just like a rough, like

and it should be really contingent on like what your androgen load was.

I mean,

that saying that, you know, it wasn't anything like

too crazy. Like, let's say it wasn't anything over,

you know, 1500 milligrams a week, then, you know,

if it was a little more than that, then you should do a little bit more.

Okay.

Gotcha. That makes sense.

Let's see.

I think mine was about 600 test prop, 600 mass P,

and then 100 milligrams of Tranace a week.

And then

about

it was 10 milligrams of Halo on training days, like three weeks out. And then we upped the Halo significantly just for peak week, up to like three a day.
So 30 milligrams.

But I guess throughout all of prep, it was just like that. And then I added my stroll myself.
The Halo, because I'll tell you, I'm not usually a huge fan of

Halo for. You're more of a Super Joel guy now, right?

I mean, because when you weigh out the pros and cons of it,

I mean, Halo is strictly a performance-based steroid, it's made for powerlifting.

So if you are in a case like the last four weeks where your training just goes to shit, where like you're, where you're performing like at least 40% less than what you normally were performing, then of course, then the Halo would serve a benefit because of course, if your training's going down the toilet, that's going to eventually negatively impact your physique.

But in terms of it structurally, just by itself, it doesn't do nothing to really enhance your physique opposed to something like super droll.

And then if you weigh out like how toxic it is,

you know, you'd be better off than at that point, if you're going to go that route to do something like super droll or something like that. Yeah, I understand what you're saying.

So I got a story for you. So you kind of understand where we're coming from.
And I don't think very many people actually know this story in the podcast.

Some of them know a little bit, but not really my headspace and what I told Patrick when we started. So basically, I agree with you.
Halotessin is great for, you know, the performance.

And that's what Patrick initially added it into. He added it in for my leg days because my leg muscle, you know, the muscle maturity I have in my legs is honestly the youngest.

I just gained leg size in the last like year to two years. And I was always very unproportional.
Now, according to the judges, my legs are great. And they actually want me to bring up my upper body.

So that's cool. But obviously, this was clearly for a performance reason.
That's why he added up specifically just before leg workouts.

But what I told him when we first started is basically I got my pro card in Minsk Vizique in 2019. And the way I did it was

this is when I knew nothing, right? So I guess this is five, six years ago. I knew nothing about gear, nothing about bodybuilding.

And probably one of the main reasons I even started this podcast in the first place is because I went through this experience, basically being with a coach in chicago

i shouldn't have said that

i was with a coach basically who kept trying to push me to take gear and i just kept saying no i don't want to take gear i don't want to take gear and he would keep pushing stuff on me and be like well take this this will make you look better and i'd be saying no but every time i go to nationals as a natural guy i'd get 16 plus place right and when you're starving to death man and just like your your biggest dream is to show your parents that you can be a successful bodybuilder

it starts hurting you. It starts hurting you.
And then at some point, he's like, all right, take these, take these pills. It'll make you drier.
It's not a steroid. I took him.

It was Remedix and Novidix. So I was taking Remedix and Nolvidix as natural.
Continuously to progress, it did kind of like make me a little bit drier, but as we continuously

progressed, at one point he gave me halotestin.

I didn't know what halotestin is. I never heard about it.
I didn't know it was a steroid. I knew about trend and tests and all this stuff, but I didn't know about halotestin.

Talked to one of my friends and he was like, yeah, bro, that's like one of the craziest steroids. And I'm like, no shit.

and he's like yeah and i'm like well

i guess i'm not nanny anymore

to be honest i didn't really care too much i think i just knew inside that like i just want to win at this point so you know if this is an accident and this is meant to be i don't know whatever i'll take some

so i ended up doing a couple more shows started getting better and better and i ended up winning my pro card on halo test and then windstrol So windstroll, I looked pretty dry and I looked pretty good up to the show, but I did remember when we started putting the halo testin, I had no injectables in my body, no test, no anything.

It was just purely Windstroll and me being natural dude on AIs and shit.

When we added the halo testin, it added a level of fullness where I was like, holy fucking shit, I've never looked like this in my entire life. But that was only when I was running nothing else.

So imagining like the change, I guess, in my level of androgens from you know that baseline of just windstroll and adding that halo testin on top yeah i'm sure that's probably what made the change significant.

So after I did that, I told Patrick, like, I look, I do really well with Halo Testin. I want my Procode on Halo Testing, right?

I have a question during that time, though, what was going on with like your performance in the gym? Did that change a lot? I got to be real.

I don't remember at all because that was in 2019 and I was in college. Oh, wait, no.
No, that was right out of college. But yeah,

something like that.

I don't remember the performance wise also because I was eating like 1,200 calories at the time to try to get lean enough. So there was no performance, anyways.
Like, I was starving to death.

Yeah, as far as this last show, the Halo Testin helped when we first put it in, yeah, but I definitely grew with tolerance. And as it grew and grew, I couldn't really feel how much it helped anymore.

And also, in terms of my look, I really don't feel like the look changed very much when I added the Halo Testin.

In fact, I feel like the look changed a lot more significantly when I added the Windstroll in.

So,

listening and talking to you and talking to a lot of other people, like,

what is his name? Um, Prod, who coaches Andy Paretes. Yes.
Yeah, he won like three classic pro shows in a row. And then I think a couple other people.
Oh, John Jewett, too.

All these people are really big fans of doing the Super Droll.

And so I think next time I prep, whether it's a year from now or whatever, or a year and a half or whatever, I'll probably discuss this with Patrick and be like, would you be open to us experimenting with Super Droll rather than Halo Tesson for peak week?

Yeah. And if you do use it, like a strong recommendation, because I will say, like,

there's 30% of people that do take it that do not get a good response from it at all.

Like, um,

didn't you say, like, uh, normally the white dudes tend to like fill out pretty nicely on them? They, they do.

Like, it's really maybe for like those last three weeks when you're like pushing the conditioning hard to try to hold on to that fullness and make sure that you don't potentially like lose like tissue.

It's I could actually show you because I document things like like very closely of just adding that one variable in like the last

like three weeks, like what that did. And technically Super Droll works so fast that you technically don't even need it for three weeks.

But if you are going to do a run with it, you should do a test run with it at some point before you get to like a week out because there are people where they've taken it and then they start to hold like a shit ton of subcontaneous water and it actually like stresses their body out.

And I would say it takes like three to five days before it fully like discharges and they get back down to a baseline.

Do like a test run with it and see how it goes. But typically for most people, it's a really, really good addition to add in at the end.
Okay, cool, cool. I appreciate the advice, man.
Truly.

I guess since we're already discussing post-show, have you ever put a client on thyroid? And if you do, do you normally immediately remove thyroid, taper it, or keep it in post-show?

No, well, like when it comes to any sort of like exogenous thyroid meds, you always want to taper them off slowly.

So typically, like, you know, the first couple of days after the show, keep them on the same amount because typically they're also adding in a bunch of additional food.

They probably ate the two days after. Three bazookas.

Yeah. Fleet coaches and listening.

And then usually start to titrate it down, like cutting it down.

Like after the first week, cut it in half. Like if they're on 25, go down 12.5.
And then I also like to use T4 to kind of titrate it. So when they're tapering down off the T3, use T4 to get them off.

And then once they're...

I'll usually taper them off slowly, depending on how long they were on it. If they were on, say, T3 for six weeks to eight weeks, I would take about two and a half weeks to taper them off.

I would use T4, and then at the end, I would also use,

I have like a natural thyroid restore protocol, which is

iodine, selenium. These are all the things that the thyroid production functions off of.
So you'd use that, and that helps get them back to a baseline.

And that's one thing, unlike other PEDs where you do want to taper that. Gotcha.

um

do you not always put somebody on both t3 and t4

so i'll i i'll tell you like um

t3 is obviously the most important because t4 ultimately is going to convert into into t3

so

typically that's usually your first option to go with so you don't have to run as high of a dose of of t3 that you would have t4 in and in some cases you might not even need much t3 then at all But the only problem is that sometimes, like, sometimes T4 is not converting into T3.

Yeah. Um, where you could have issues like if you're checking like reverse T3, that's something that people should keep an eye on.

Cause if you are stressed and your body's just converting reverse T3, then your body's really not utilizing it. So that's why

T,

that's why T3 is going to be the more optimal that's going to make the biggest difference in terms of dropping body fat.

Okay. Cool.
Interesting. I also like to like,

even though some people have a hard time getting it, like going more with a desiccated thyroid opposed to synthetic, like an armor or WP thyroid. I do love armor.
Yeah.

I do like going more that route if you can, but sometimes like it's harder to get.

And supposedly the FDA is actually going to start to put like restrictions on it where it's going to be really hard to get.

Unless you're prescribed, I guess. I heard that they're going to try to completely eliminate it.
I don't know how true that is, but why?

Because

they want to push more

synthetic routes because most of the time when someone is going on,

somebody can get off of a desiccated thyroid a lot more easier than

a synthetic version. Yeah, absolutely.
Fucking fuckers.

If you pay attention. So fucked.

Yeah, like if you pay attention to medicine, this is what like really opened my eyes when when I graduated college,

everything in the medical field, if their job was just to treat you and cure your problem, they would be out of business.

So if you like pay attention to even all sorts of research that's done, it's all done on creating like retroactive types of treatment that are going to put band-aids on things. Even like

somebody that had a heart valve replacement, your options when you get a heart valve replacement is you do a pig valve or you do the synthetic valve.

The problem is, if you do the pig valve, you have to have it replaced every like eight years or so.

But if you go on the synthetic valve, then you have to be on blood thinners for the rest of your life. So either way, they're staying in your pocket.
So

it's sad that

that's how the world is.

That's why it pays to really take care of yourself and not always just take, you know, a Western medicine or internal medicine practice doctor's word for it.

God, dude, I'm such cocksuckers.

It is. It really is.
It's unfortunate. Well,

I guess I had a thought, but honestly, it was kind of answered. The thought was basically:

isn't the half-life of T4 just significantly longer than T3? Like, it's like a week, and then T3 is like, what, like a day?

It is. T4 is longer.
That's why, like, when you do run T3,

especially if you're over a certain dose, you should break the dose up.

You should do, like, if you're on 25 or 37.5

do

half or say if you're on 37.5 do 25 in the morning like 40 an hour before you eat and then do the other 12.5 later in the day like an hour hour and a half outside of a meal

because the half-life is shorter on on t3 oh i did not know that oh that's good to know But yeah, but the thing is with T4, though, T4 is great, but when you're in prep, unless you are like pulling your labs frequently, you don't know really how much of that your body is really utilizing.

Ultimately,

gotcha. Okay, cool, cool, cool.
Um,

how would you start an off-season to maximize gains without affecting one's midsection?

So, now that we are like coming off of prep, going into potentially a health phase or a rebound, whichever you choose,

what would you do personally?

So, if you're if you're coming out of prep, this is the other thing, like that rebound phase after you get done with PrEP

is the one time where your body from an insulin sensitivity standpoint is a window that you have an opportunity to put on tissue without relying on so much exogenous.

Okay, yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's from the insulin sensitivity aspect alone, where as long as you're not like tanking.

tanking your endocrine system, like meaning like people that would do a show and come off of testosterone too,

Even people that are on, say, like TRT or a little bit higher than TRT, they can still put on tissue during that phase from

just the sheer fact of how insulin sensitive that you are. So I typically, as long as that person

is feeling good, their body's not that beat up.

I would take advantage of that insulin sensitivity window for, you know, those six weeks or however long, however long you could stretch it out.

If they were responding really well in those six weeks, and we were like, hey, we want to stretch this out. When I say stretch this out, even if we had them on, like, say,

350 milligrams of test and say 200 primo, if we wanted to stretch it out more than four weeks, I would send them for labs while they were in this phase, while they were still on,

just to see where everything is from a baseline, and then would potentially stretch that out to take advantage of that insulin sensitivity window. Yeah.

Then go into a health phase. Oh.

yeah,

hmm,

okay.

So, most of the time, you would wait out, like, uh, how many weeks did you say before doing the health phase pose?

It really depends on the person. There are some people, like, most of the people that I had in the Olympia this last year, six people in the Olympia,

most of them had been in prep

a lot that whole year. Like, they had qualified and then they were going right into the Olympia.
So, most of them, I put them right into a health phase.

I'm like, look, like, you know, you qual, you qualified in, in August and you did the Olympia, you know, it's time to take a little bit of a break.

But some people that they didn't have as long of a prep and their bodies are in like a good spot then would take advantage of that that rebound window for,

you know, and you could stretch out that window,

you know, as long as you're, that's why you don't want to just start eating like an asshole. You want to start increasing food.

You want to do it slowly so that you could really take advantage of that sensitivity window. Gotcha.

Who are the six Olympians that you had?

So I had

my fiancé, Amanda, in women's physique. She looks awesome, by the way.
Oh, thank you. Thank you.
She's done well. She's made a lot of progress since we first started together, that's for sure.

I had Missy Truscott. It was her first year in figure.

My female bodybuilder, Levina Barros, she took third. Hell yeah.
She she did very, very well. Um, her progress has been great.

She went from she took, I think, last at the 15th at the Olympia two, two or three years ago.

And she took a whole year off, took an offseason, put on like nine, ten pounds of stage tissue in one year, and it definitely

paid its dividends for sure. That's sick.
Um, so I had her Regan,

um, and and I had a

classic bazique guy, Eric Abalon,

and another women's bodybuilder, and she ended up placing ninth.

Nice.

Yeah.

I had a lot of fun just watching women's bodybuilding up there on stage. I was there Friday for finals.
It's so dude.

They're a lot more artistic with their finals routines. Well, yeah.
Of course.

I mean, I personally love, I love the division.

I mean, there's no difference in terms of that and men's bodybuilding in terms of, you know, they're trying to push their physique to a certain level, but there's way more that goes into it because the female endocrine system

is totally different than the males. And the scary part is there is a lot of,

there's a lot of coaches that are in the female bodybuilding space that are prepping some of these girls like they're men and

have no idea like what they're actually doing to them. Like their androgen are are entirely different

than ours. And with a female, there's no other way to cut this.

Any sort of PED where they're like, is this safe? Is this not? None of them belong going into a female's body, ultimately.

They all could have certain adverse effects. It really breaks down to

the individual. I've had some girls where I've looked at what they were doing and I was shocked that they didn't have any sort of like health issues.

And then I've had some that barely did anything and they've already started to have like adverse side effects from it. It's crazy, huh? It's crazy, bro.
The variance is wild.

That's why when they say the word genetics, genetics doesn't mean like who's got a small waist and round muscle bellies. It also means everything.

How well your body metabolizes these drugs.

That's one of the main, main variables. Yep.
Yep. I was just talking with a friend actually that was literally just telling me about his uh his wife who got her pro card and bikini, but um she

she's been upset because she already felt like her voice slightly lowered and um

because she's very very sensitive to androgens and even just like one milligram of tests when they inject she'd be like oh no, I already feel that um basically she was

10 milligrams of anivar every day was too high for her and she felt like it already lowered her voice whereas that's kind of like an average of the Olympia stage, honestly, for any

so. Yeah, I mean,

the thing with females, the poison is usually in the dose and the duration.

Even certain side effects, like where, like your friend's girl,

the first thing that they'll start to notice is their voice will get scratchy and then they'll have like clitoris enlargement.

But if as soon as they start to notice these side effects, if they switch or drop that compound, most of the time that will end up going away.

You get into trouble. Really?

Right when you start noticing it, which

I know girls too, from even five milligrams of Anabar for like the first week, they'll start to notice that their voice starts to get like scratchy.

And, you know, that's early signs that your vocal cords are getting thicker. But if you went ahead and you were to come off of it right away, then, you know,

chances are that you didn't do any permanent damage. Okay, that's nice.

If they stayed on it, then

the damage is done. Yeah, for sure.
Okay, cool.

As far as starting off that offseason, you know, maximizing those gains, which I'm also happy that I'm just jumping straight into a health phase because I was on prep for 24 weeks, almost halfway.

I noticed because you did, did, what, three shows? I did three shows. The first one was an 18-week prep, and then each show was three weeks in between.
Yeah.

So 24 weeks. That's, that's more.
But in terms of like, um, the offseason, what, like the, the setup?

Yeah, in terms of the offseason, um, but I think

before we go there, I just want to state this to pre-face. before we discuss the offseason because you're talking about where you're putting the health phase.

But previously, I've been experimenting I experimented last year and I was I felt like I was more of a proponent of rebound so I was excited to try the rebound right and

this this year I I think after just talking with so many excellent and smart individuals and very high achieving coaches It just seems like taking a health phase is just a lot more effective because of the fact that like you can only grow so much muscle in a short period of time.

There are those rare occurrences or those rare people that can just blow up in a short period of time, but most of the time you got like this kind of cap where you can only grow so much muscle in a short period of time.

So trying to stack everything on top of each other, like insulin sensitivity, large amounts of gear, large amounts of food all at the same time normally doesn't reap as much benefit as you believe it will versus the side effects, right?

So for me personally, I don't, I did not gain as much muscle last year doing a rebound as I did the previous year, where I took things very slowly with my insulin sensitivity, as well as taking a health phase prior.

So I'm excited for this health phase coming up. Yeah, definitely.

In your case, like the goal. And again, if someone is in a longer prep like that, they go right into, they'll usually go right into a hell phase.

And when I say like taking advantage of the rebound, that still means like taking advantage of the rebound in terms of like androgen load. That could mean that they're just on testosterone

and growth hormone

for like a couple of weeks weeks and then go into a full-blown health phase.

But most people, if they are on a longer prep, anything longer than 12 to 14 weeks, typically it's smart to go into a health phase.

And in your case, I would focus on like staying as lean as possible right now and insulin sensitive as possible.

Because right now, your main focus is you want to set your body up to be in the most optimal place to respond when you go into the next phase.

So, again, like if you stay lean, insulin sensitive, you want to be in a place that you could really start ramping up food

when you go into the offseason, that you're, that you're insulin sensitive.

And then from there, you could really start ramping up the training and you're ultimately then in the most optimal place to grow.

Glad you said that because that's exactly what I'm doing. Yeah.
Definitely trying to stay as insulin sensitive and as lean as possible before the cycle starts because I feel like that'll

provide a little nice nice blow up when we jump on that shit, you know? Absolutely. Where, you know, if people just started

increasing, eating tons of food and they're accumulating body fat and shit weight, then by the time they're about to start their offseason, by that point,

now you can't increase food as much as you would like, because then you're just going to start converting shit weight.

You want to be in a place when you start your off season that you can afford to put on a little bit of body fat in exchange for tissue.

What are your thoughts about utilizing

berberine, metformin, RALA,

chromium,

everything but insulin? What are your thoughts about these, I guess, supplements or medications during this period of time?

Great question. So with metformin,

You got to be careful with it. Again, these are all tools that can be very effective and used the right way at the right time.

So, like with metformin, like if you are, if you are insulin sensitive, if you don't have any like sort of you know, issues with your blood sugar and your insulin sensitivity, you have to remember metformin inhibits mTOR and IGF.

All right. So,

those two things are crucial for a bodybuilder.

Now,

I know, I personally know a couple of bodybuilders that have actually lost a ton of muscle by taking metformin daily, every single day, without taking growth hormone, too.

And these particular individuals,

there was nothing, they were not insulin resistant. They were just taking metformin, but they weren't using like exogenous growth hormone, which that's going to tank your IGF.

Just taking metformin by itself, if you're not using growth hormone. Growth hormone.
Yes.

So

that's going to be kind of counterintuitive to holding on to and building muscle. Yeah, that's nice.

I just got chills because literally the only time I've ever heard of anyone mentioning metformin in bodybuilders is that they've never seen any difference in bodybuilders using it.

And a lot of bodybuilders will use it regularly. Same with Berberin.
So this is the first time I've ever heard an anecdote. I'm going to worry a little bit like off

the air between me and you and show you what

person.

That would blow your mind from it.

And I have their blood work and you could see on, it's actually two people where they were taking, one of them was taking a thousand milligrams of metformin a day and his IGF was like in close to the teens.

It was really, really low.

Yeah.

Wow. Now, the times that it's good to use metformin, because I have on all my off-season clients' plans,

I have, I'll usually give them a half a day to eat as they please, most people. Yeah.
And on that day, I'll have them take metformin only on that day because what is metformin doing?

It's blocking glucose in the liver. Right.

So the metformin will be good because you could have a day where you, you know, you indulge and enjoy yourself and it kind of prevents your glycogen stores from becoming oversaturated so that, you know, it doesn't negatively impact your sensitivity.

And usually the next day after like someone takes like a refeed like that in the offseason, I'll have them do a fast for a certain timeframe, like maybe like 14 hours. 14 hours.

I remember you saying this on a podcast. Yeah.
Yeah.

And then that just helps them get back to a baseline because in your offseason, when you're shoveling in food, and I know a lot of people can relate to this, when they have that day that they kind of eat like off for half the day, the next day it's hard as hell to get your diet food in.

So by doing this, it just helps you kind of get back down to that. baseline and be able to start eating your normal diet food again.

Yeah, I've been a big proponent of the periodic fasts as well, even in the offseason. Because, yeah, you need to regulate shit.

And people in the old days used to just push it super hard because they'd see Lee Priest doing it, not really thinking about Lee Priest's like a fucking genetic anomaly.

I was, uh, I've been, um, Danny Haster was, we were hanging out with Danny Haster for several days this last weekend, and he was helping me with a bunch of posing and shit.

And he said he was Lee Priest's roommate at a period of time. And he said that guy had a myostan deficiency or my, yeah.

i mean i believe it though i mean i i wouldn't be surprised i mean i've seen people that i know bodybuilders in the past that i would guarantee you that they had a myostatin deficiency you can tell just by

just by their muscle bellies like like some of them even like a phil heath um

like they have muscle that almost is growing like on top of muscle on yeah It's nuts, bro.

There are, and

I've had some of those genetic anomalies to where I've seen them, and just their body's response is totally, it's like prepping a different human. Fuck, must be nice.

Yeah.

Maybe we experiment with YK-11 a little bit this offseason. I don't know.
Well, I will tell you that the future in performance enhancing drugs is going to be in different myostatin inhibitors.

Now, they have ones out, and I have experience with them, with a lot of different clients like Folstatin

and some of the newer ones that they're coming out with. But I'll tell you, because I've heard people do podcasts about them before in the past.

The thing that they do not realize, which I will tell you, that

they are absolutely the ones, especially like Follostatin

has wrecked

anyone that I've put on it for more than three weeks has wrecked all their health markers. Damn.

Yeah, like worse than any injury

about that, because that's when I pulled their labs. It wasn't more than three or four weeks, but that's usually like a sweet spot.
They don't get me wrong, they work well. I'm not denying that.

But I do think that they need to come up with a way where they're not so taxing on your health markers in particular. But I noticed one of the people that were taking it, he was a type 1 diabetic.

So it was wrecking his insulin sensitivity even worse.

And

it wrecked his lipids too. So

I'm sure that's some of the stuff that they're working on right now, a way that they're still super beneficial without having some of the adverse side effects. Yeah.

Have you had any experiments with YK11?

I have used it here and there, but not like super extensive experience on it where I could speak on it for sure, like I can like other things. But I have had people add it in at certain times.

Okay.

Have you used it?

I've had a bottle waiting for me. Yeah.
I still have to use it. I think I used it maybe

I think I used it twice, like two different days on a leg day. Just, you know,

my buddy was recommending me experiment with it, you know, just for a little bit push. But I mean, obviously there's no data I can get from two days aside from how I felt that day.
So. Yeah.

The people that I

have used myostatin inhibitors with are people typically that

have been at this for quite some time, usually like master level like pros that have been at it for quite some time that are kind of

getting more so to kind of a plateau

and then adding something like that in. But, you know, for people that

are just starting to compete, they're usually going to respond to a lot of just the basics.

And, you know, a thing that a lot of people overlook too, and I will say that it took me at least like a good six years into my coaching career to really open my eyes to this is the training.

Yeah.

I can show you the craziest tissue transformations probably in bodybuilding.

Some of them are not even my own like clients, but I've actually reached out to them because I'm interested in seeing like, hey, what was it that was really different from here to here?

And the number one thing is

usually their performance markers in the gym from point A to point B. So actually, like recording and progressive overloading properly.

100%. Like I will tell anyone, and I would do this.
I would be willing to bet anyone, any

amount of money, if you took two identical twins and you had one of them, let's say, on 1500 milligrams of androgens a week, and you had the other one on

let's say 300 milligrams a week, but one of them was outperforming the other one in the gym, let's say by 25 or 30%,

that the one that's in the gym, that their performance markers are continuously improving. I promise you that that person will

see more tissue than the person that's running triple the amount of androgens. Yeah.

This is the unfortunate thing about science-based or the quote science-based, which Jared Feather obviously hates that term right now

because of all the teenagers. It's evidence-based boys.

But basically, yeah, yeah, man, out of everything that I've ever experienced, all the people I've talked to and my own personal experiences too, it really comes down to you focusing on progressively overloading.

Like this, I have a lot of people asking me about what I did for legs the last couple of years.

So I even have people reaching out to friends of mine, asking them if they would ask me what Patrick put me on and what Patrick did with me to like grow the legs.

And honestly, all it was was like, aside from doing a little bit of IGF-1 on the leg days and having my hard carpet days on the leg days, I just tracked, I tracked my training.

And every time I would had an opportunity, I would would hit a PR and hack squat, I'd hit another PR and hack squat, and I'd hit a PR in

stretch-mediated hypertrophy leg extensions, and I would hit a PR in GHRs, and I would just focus on hitting those PRs. And

yeah, now, now, now the judges, none of the judges are telling me to improve my legs, which is a good thing, even though I still think they can improve. But yeah, I mean,

and then, you know, I had like upper body tightness in my left side, which was inhibiting me from really doing chest and back properly.

So obviously I'm like, all right, well, I need need to focus on legs, but I don't, I didn't really ever gain strength in those areas. And looking at the

progress pictures, I didn't really gain very much size in my upper body either. So,

how were your performance markers on your upper body? Yeah, I didn't really gain very much progress in those in terms of performance. Like, the strength in my chest presses

didn't come really either as much as it did your last year. No, no, tissue was about the same.
Chest was about the same as last year. Yeah.
Unfortunately, no, I mean, there is a direct correlation.

And again, like

about five years into like coaching on the more like higher level is what opened my eyes when I had clients I've been working with for years, and I'm like, okay, like literally everything is programmed perfectly.

Like, why is this person not responding? So then I had them go back, say, like a person back then that needed to bring up their legs and their upper pecs.

So I was like, look, I want you to tell me what you're doing on incline smit, machine press, and hack squats on your top set.

And then I had them look back to say what they were doing a year and a half, two years ago, and they're doing the exact same. So from there, I'm like,

this is exactly what, what needs to be adjusted. From there, you know, we started setting certain performance markers in the gym.

And remember, like progressive overload doesn't just mean more weight and more reps. Like you could be doing the same amount of weight, the same amount of reps, but moving the weight better.

And that will feel progressive overload. Like if you're doing hack squats for your quads and you're be able, you're able to now to get better knee flexion with the same heavy weight on the top set.

That's still, you're ultimately, you're getting better in the gym. Your performance is improving and that's going to translate.

I totally agree with that, but the fact of the matter is that is just like, that is like 10 times harder. to measure just because it's not quantitative.

And when it comes to hardcore bodybuilding versus science-based bodybuilding, it's the science-based bodybuilders that think that they're progressing because they're doing that.

But the hardcore bodybuilders are the one that are going in there, going as hard as they can and trying to move heavier weight.

And that's why they're getting more progress is they're actually, they're actually getting, they're actually doing progressive overload, right?

Now, whenever the hardcore old school bodybuilding isn't doing, I think what's effective is when they're going in there, getting in heavy weight as hard as they possibly can every time.

and they're not recovering properly by the next session because they're doing a little bit too much.

And that's when it comes down to like monitoring your fatigue and then monitoring and and managing just how much you're recovering so that you're still progressing every time, right?

That's the hard part, I think. Absolutely.

And that's why when I refer back to being a very big data-driven person is because if you have enough information, like where I have some people where they have aura rings where I could track their heart rate variants,

they're giving me information on their workouts. I see, you know, that there might be a week where, you know, their performance markers aren't up.

We're essentially as as coaches, and even in the medical field too,

we are pretty much the same thing as a detective.

We are provided certain information and from that information, that can help you draw the right conclusions, ultimately, if you're just paying attention to the right things.

And that's why I look with bodybuilding.

It's such a fascinating sport because we're in one sport that, you know, there's no rules. So, you know, it's not, you know, this is the absolute best way.

Yes, there's certain things that are known to work very, very well. But ultimately, even when it comes to training, I don't care how experienced the person is.

It's all about creating, number one, creating the exercise selection that works best for you,

especially with like back training, because back training is not one of those things that you can go off of weight and reps all the time.

Because typically, if people are going too heavy on those movements, they're just going to pull with their biceps. Yes.
Thank you. Oh, my God.

Something I was doing for 10 years was just rowing too hard because I wanted to put in as many plates as I could in my college gym because I thought it would look sick. There's a lot of babes there.

Yeah.

A lot of people do that, of course.

But with like, with back,

everyone, like... like take my fiancé for an example she wasn't ever growing her back because she wasn't pulling with the right muscle group she was pulling with back and rear delts.

And some of those movements that she was doing are really good movements, like, you know, whether it was a dumbbell row or a plate load row for like me or you, those could work beautifully.

But for her, once I took her in the gym, I can see, all right, you're not connecting well with these.

And that's why, like, some of the clients that live around here, I'll try to get a workout in with them because from watching them train, I can tell then, what are they connecting the best with um

and you know it could be different from person to person and some people respond better to doing more lower volume red scheme where they get tanked very easily in the beginning of the workout where they have to have certain um movements programmed in the beginning opposed to some people that can handle more volume yeah your partner and i have the exact same experience and so basically i found this out too not by anyone telling me but literally by me training with dr todd lee and i was filming us training.

And then I looked at our form and compared it. And I, bro, made all the sense why everyone always said my rear delts looked amazing.
And I hardly ever did rear delt exercises.

Because all my back workouts, when it came to thickness, not the lats, the lats was always good. But when it came to thickness, man, I was always rowing with biceps and rear delts.

Maybe a little bit of trap, but just, I never did the full Arnold stretch. the full Arnold and Ronnie Coleman stretch and then scapula retraction and contraction.
I just never did.

And it makes sense, too, why

that's probably one of the main criteria the judges want me to improve on is that tiny little mid-back section, just like,

which is insane. It's such a small muscle group, but you really have to use your mind and muscle connection there to make sure that you're hitting it properly.
Otherwise, it's just not going to grow.

Just like isolation. What is it called? Isometric? Yeah.
Isometrically training it by doing the rows that. we were doing is just not enough, man.
You have to move it. Yeah.
No, 100%.

And like that particular area of the back is like where all the details and the density come in there. And it happens to be one of the harder areas to really isolate.

And that's why, you know, really going in the gym and finding out what is the best exercise selection and sticking with that, you know,

sticking with the things that work.

I haven't actually done this exercise yet.

I was thinking about experimenting, but I did like the fact that I just saw Terrence Ruffin doing this, where he actually did an exercise, like probably at the end of his workout, specifically focused on scapular retraction, where his arms were straight and he would just like pull like this.

Yeah. And it's kind of cool to see because like you can see that he's actually trying to focus on that shit.
He knows, he knows that he needs to engage that properly for that to grow.

That takes definitely a lot of.

being able to kind of isolate those muscles because some people, again, for him, that could be great, but for some people, they can end up like pulling it all with like their traps.

So, you know, it really, that's what it boils down to. And I also believe in like training back.
I think utilizing like Versa grips or straps, especially on like your top sets, is smart to do.

Yeah, I agree too.

All right, wheeling it back a little bit from training because we didn't quite finish talking about

insulin systems for any of these supplements. Definitely.

I'm trying to remember. There's a lot that I actually want to go off on here, but I want to make sure that we do it timely.

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

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Literally, every, like, I'd say 40% of my clients are

either sick or have a sinus infection right now. Like, it's definitely going around.
Yeah.

I don't even get sick, actually, because, dude, I can't even tell you the last time I got sick because

I just do a lot of fucking glutathione, and a lot of antioxidants.

Yeah, no, I'm safe to life, but

I don't know. I just have this stupid fucking, I have this stupid fucking,

what is it called? UARS. I have, um,

have you heard of U-A-R-S?

It stands for, um, I don't remember what the U stands for. I'll probably think about it in a second, but it's airwave resistance syndrome.
Upper airwave resistance syndrome.

So basically, it's just very, very thin in there. So the moment I have any like snot or anything hard in there or anything that's blocking it even more,

it just gets so fucking paper thin, bro. I had this damn girl in kindergarten turn to me during class and she was like, can you just stop breathing?

Fucking bitch.

Yeah, no, that sounds frustrating. It's almost like a, I guess it's different than a deviated septum.
It's just that you have a, like a smaller

airway then.

Yeah, yeah.

They said I could get surgery on it, but unfortunately, apparently the surgery doesn't really help for like there's some kind of like reduction in effectiveness after like three years, something ridiculous.

And it's like, makes you feel like it's not really worth it to go through a whole entire surgery. Yeah.
I don't know either if it's like with

other ones where they have to break your nose or not, but it's probably not, as long as it doesn't drive you that crazy, it's probably not worth it. I don't care as much.

I literally just hate it because of this podcast. I feel bad for the audience sometimes having to hear it.
Like I feel terrible, but I'm sorry.

Oh, no, I don't, I've never noticed many of your other previous ones.

It's definitely in there sometimes. I had a podcast with Togi, who was like, um, he's known for gambling and doing drugs and taking

too high doses. Yeah.

Everyone just thought that I was doing yay with him, which is might not be true. Oh, God.
It might be true. It might not be true.
I don't know. Unless it depends if you're my coach or not.

I wanted to thank you, by the way, for coming on this podcast, bro. This is really awesome.
And you're an extremely, extremely fucking knowledgeable person. Oh, thank you, man.

I know people will appreciate this.

I never planned on

like doing this for a living and never would have thought like 10 years ago, my wildest dreams that I would be just mostly coaching like elite level competitors for a living.

It kind of just, it kind of just happened.

Started off like helping four people while I was working at, well, still while I was working at a bariatric center in New York. And those four people just ended up becoming,

they ended up having a lot of success. And then what was your career before this?

So I'm a registered dietitian. Oh, yep, yep, that's right.

So when I graduated, I had to do a certain amount of intern hours, which I did at a bariatric center.

But when I was there, I started getting turned off to Western medicine mostly because, like, a lot of the people that I was working with, most of them were either diabetics or pre-diabetics.

So my job ultimately was to, you know, to try to have them live healthier lifestyles, lose weight.

And a lot of them, I would be able to get off of a lot of these maintenance medications like metformin, jardiance, things like that.

But there was one day, I never, ever forget this, where I was pulled into a boardroom and they sat me down and they had a list of a whole bunch of different medications that are all retroactive medications from statins, metformin, a whole laundry list of ones.

And they said, they said, look, under no circumstances do you take off or recommend any of the patients to get off of any of these medications. And even when I said to them, look,

you have over 90 days of perfect optimal labs, but they technically don't, they don't need to.

But they literally said word for word, you know, the way that the hospital writes up a PL report is on prescription history. So,

you know, pretty much that we're here to just provide maintenance. We don't want to like

cure people. And from that day forward,

left like

a bad taste in my mouth.

Like I said to them, like, you know, I should have went to school to be a pharmaceutical rep.

And dieticians don't make that much money either. So, yeah.
And then from there, I was bodybuilding. I had done my first show natural.

And then once I knew that I wanted to go in the path of like doing NPC shows, I hired a coach because I just didn't know anything about, didn't know much about drugs.

And then when I worked with him, I realized like, man, this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.

Like he was legit like starving me and just telling me like, look, now that you are enhanced,

word for word, this dude says to me, anything you learned in school, you could throw it out the window now. Because

now that you're on drugs, you know,

you're pretty much not going to lose muscle. You could starve, which is not the case at all.
I obviously found that out. Yep.

And then I just realized that, man, there's not too many. Like the industry is lacking, like people to give like proper guidance.
And it still is.

And that, that's the part that more now in the future,

that really where my passion is is to educate other coaches. So like in another year from now, I don't, I don't want to be coaching 142 athletes next year.
Oh, of course. Yeah.

That will be coming to an end where I will, I always have a passion for coaching and I will, but I'm going to take that number down to like maybe between 30 and 50.

And then I have some coaches that work under me.

And then I can mentor those coaches and still mentor all the other coaches that have their own businesses and everything.

But I just give them, you know, accredited information for them to take and put in their toolbox. And they use it with their own style.

And I always tell people that don't, don't cope someone exactly the way that I would or just copy.

take this information and use it to your advantage of what

you would do. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Also, kudos for that, too, because I really do believe that

all the coaches that are most knowledgeable in terms of longevity are always the ones that also make the best coaches for women, for sure. There's just so much you got to fucking pay attention to.
And

what I do, again, like especially since

I don't work in a hospital anymore, so I don't have to renew renew my CUUs.

I still take a certain amount of money every year and I put that into continuing education, no matter how long I've been doing this. And every year I'll do it on something different.

So I know when COVID first, even before COVID, there was a year for like three years that I put strictly into learning more. about the female endocrine system and also how these androgens affect them.

So somebody that's a good, good friend of mine, I don't know if you know her, her name is Victoria Flecker.

She's from Canada and she's one of the only people that I know and are aware of that has a PhD that specializes in specifically women and performance enhancing drugs and how that's cool. Yeah.

And her and I have become like really, really good friends. And

she's been able also to learn a lot because again, with what we do in bodybuilding, when people reference a study, you can't reference a study with what we do because we're not in physiological dosing and there is no studies that really pinpoint exactly with what we are doing.

So, like what her and I will do

with certain clients that are okay with it and that, you know, sign off to it. I'll take all of their blood work throughout their whole career and we'll upload it into an Excel chart.

And then anything that they were taking during that time, the exact amounts, we put it into an Excel chart so we could see the trends from person to person.

And that's really like kind of how you gain, you know, data.

So from her, I have learned definitely a lot of things how to mitigate fertilization effects with like women and how to use progesterone and things like that.

I've learned from her and also I've had an opportunity to work with some really, really good either endocrinologists and the doctors here that we

used to work with at uh this clinic called ageless forever fuck dude this sucks we have way too much to talk about we're not going to be able to get through all of it yeah no so let's talk about whatever like the most important things that you yeah we'll talk about we'll talk about some um we'll talk about women towards the end of the podcast because you got a couple q a's regarding the women too so we'll just go off of those q a's um especially because i'm interested as well and i had a close i had a close person to me that just jumped on testosterone even though she hasn't really had any experience with peds jumped on five milligrams because that's what the clinic we argued to reduce it.

This clinic likes really high levels for some reason.

Um, and yeah, I could tell immediately, which is kind of cool about us being in this space is like, even if you've had experience with mainly men, you can kind of like at least tell symptom-wise, um, when someone is like on too high of, like, say, I don't know, testosterone or too high of like a certain hormone.

Kind of been, it was kind of kind of clear, and then uh, finally got her blood work back, and then test was around 90.

So, which I would definitely, of course, not recommend for someone who's not even bodybuilding right now or about to compete. So,

she's not a competitor. She is a competitor, but not competing at the moment.

And plus, even if you're competing, I agree with John Jewett, like having somewhere like 60 is probably a good range, but anywhere, like, you know, the range is 15 to 50, right?

So, I don't really see a benefit in being twice the amount of someone who's already in a healthy testosterone level.

When did she pin the testosterone?

That's also very important.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We We kind of solved this all out and stuff and made sure that we pinned it at a certain point because her coach wanted to know how high it was shortly after, like pinning the day before.

So he wanted to know where it was at the peak as well.

And yeah, anyways,

we'll move on. We'll move on from the subject, but just wanted to share that with you because it's very interesting.

That's just testosterone alone. I can't imagine like regulating...

estrogen and progesterone and all of these other factors as well as minimizing viralization and every single androgen that you add on top only adds to the potential viralization and then these girls got to get some of these girls don't even like get the fucking um voice the voice analyzer app to so then they just find out later that oh shit like i was on this call and um they couldn't recognize my voice i was trying to say no this is me and it's just not it's not fucking recognizing my damn voice wow so yeah it's rough anyways all right um back to um the um insulin sensitivity especially post-show though so that's what you said about metformin what about what about r-ala chromium berberine any of these other things?

Absolutely. Isn't berberine similar to metformin in that action with NK?

It is in terms of it's going to help prevent glycodeogenes, which is where your liver dumps glucose, which you want to kind of avoid that.

So, yes, it does like similar, exactly what you said, similar to metformin, but you're not having some of the where it's drastically like inhibiting

IgF or mTOR.

It's going to help like

lower your lower your blood sugar, in particular, like in the in the liver, and ultimately increase like your sensitivity.

So if you notice, like if you do take like a good GDA or like berberine, typically if you want to take that about, let's say, 20 minutes before meals, because ultimately what that should help you do is it should help push your blood sugar down.

And it's also going to help

increase your pancreas's production to produce insulin. So that when you do eat a meal, ultimately you want to have your blood sugar below

100. If it's over that, then a big part of the nutrients that you're eating is not being partitioned into the cell, into the muscle cell.
So, like, berberine is great.

Chromium's good too.

What about with MP?

MPK? Like, I don't have

experience using it, actually.

Well, I mean, no, with

doesn't, doesn't berberine also act on mTOR

in a similar fashion to metformin? But I don't, not to the extent of like where it would inhibit it.

Okay, okay, cool. Where it would, to the extent that, like, metformin would.
Okay.

To that extent. Like, um,

metformin is definitely like

berberine, but on like steroids, pretty much.

Okay. So you would normally choose berberine over metformin, then I'm assuming.
100%. But like using the metformin on something like if you're going to have a day that you're going to eat off plan,

then you could utilize something like metformin. If I had to pick between

if you're training on that day. Yeah, what if you're training on that day? Would you still do it? On the day of the refeed? Yeah.

I would still take it just to prevent your glycogen stores from being oversaturated. Okay.

It's not going to, again, if you're taking it one day, you're not going to have any adverse effects from it opposed to like if you're using it every day on a regular base. Yeah.

Like if you want to utilize like

utilize that food for training, I mean, you could probably attest to this. It's usually like the next day that you'll actually feel those benefits from it.

Because it takes longer than people actually think it does in terms of converting carbs into actual like muscle glycogen.

Okay. Gotcha.
What about RALA and chromium?

Chromium is great. Chromium is more so going to

like help your help your pancreas regulate your insulin production of your pancreas. That's why I like when you look at GDAs, it's usually a combination of berberine, chromium, sometimes simon cassia.

Yeah.

Out of any of those, I'll tell you the one that I do like a little bit more that I would be more inclined to using it in

in like a prep phase would be

something like Jardiance.

Okay. So like the difference between those, like Jardiance helps flush glucose out of the out of the kidneys, I believe.
So like it's good to use that. Like, let's say if you had a higher carb day

and then the next day

you would take that and it would help you get into a fat burning zone a lot faster than if you if you didn't take it then say it would take like an extra

extra two or three days

and like with with just like competitor sensitivity, like when you're in a phase, that's why every athlete should have like three main things: a blood sugar monitor, a blood pressure monitor.

Those are like the two main things.

And with your, with your blood sugar monitor, you want to check your blood glucose, both fastened, but also one of the other most important times is about an hour and a half after you eat a meal with protein and carbohydrates in it

to ensure that your pancreas is producing enough insulin to drive your blood sugar down and that you are insulin sensitive.

That that data is is crucial because if you're still running high, then the food that you're eating is not going to the right places, ultimately. Right.
Yeah. And then what about RALA?

I don't really, I don't really use it too much unless it's in any of the other GDAs that I use. Is there a reason for that?

I just, I'm not that experienced or knowledgeable with it.

So I'm only going to use things that I've even read some things that are kind of against the grain when it comes to chromium, saying that that

really isn't as beneficial for people's insulin sensitivity as you would think, that berberine is really the main like staple.

And I'll tell you, in terms of like insulin sensitivity standpoint,

believe it or not, I know this sound crazy, but when I was working at that bariatric center and I had people take chromium and berberine, the thing that would benefit their blood sugar more than anything would be an hour after they ate a meal, if they had

yes,

that would be more

than any supplement that you that you can take.

I love that shit. I just get lazy sometimes, but I still fucking love it, though.
Yeah,

no, definitely. And then,

of course, like

insulin can be very, very effective too.

You know, but with insulin protocols,

you should have an idea of like the best times to do it. Like, I've seen just people just throw protocols at people and they've, they've never checked their, checked their blood sugar.

Um, so that could be indicative on how much, how much insulin that you need to use. The same thing with a type one diabetic, like before they're going to eat a meal, yes,

their body doesn't produce insulin. So they, they're utilizing and taking enough insulin depending on two things,

how much carbs they're eating and what their blood sugar is. So if their blood sugar was 140 opposed to 80, they would be taking a different amount of insulin.

So, you know, like the coaches that put people on insulin protocols or have people using metformin, again, like metformin can be utilized, right?

And I've had, I've had people do their whole prep using metformin, but it was because that they needed it, because they had signs of insulin resistance and

they needed it. It's times when they don't need it where it could have negative effects.
And it's the same thing also with blood pressure medication.

Also, I've seen people that will go ahead and start using

telmasartin and they've never checked their blood pressure. And then they're and they'll usually just say, oh, because my coach put me on,

put Put me on this this protocol and just told me that take it that it was it was good for my health But then you know, they were saying like in the gym I feel very very lightheaded and it's because they're dropping their blood sugar and then their blood pressure

Yeah, that they're depriving their vital organs of oxygen rich blood.

Yep. Yeah.

Yeah, I've seen this too I'm pausing because I just have so many questions to ask you and I just want to make sure that I get through the important ones because there's just so much we could talk about, bro.

Also, I just want to thank you guys also for always listening to the pod and supporting it.

By the way, just I want to insert this in here because it really does mean a lot that you guys have been super supportive recently.

Like, I feel like 95 to 99% of the people that you, of y'all's comments has been really supportive and helpful. And it really does help push the podcast forward so we can get cool guys like Dom.

So I've been learning a lot through this and been able to connect with a lot of people through this. So this has been the greatest blessing.
And it's all thanked to y'all.

We're going to run up those shirts.

But in terms of these, in terms of all of these supplements that you're using to benefit insulin sensitivity, one of the main reasons I was asking this, too, is because I know that post-show and sometimes even during peak week, right, when people are utilizing these,

we really want to manage gut health and our GI tritino digestion properly. So I guess, have you ever run into issues with the GI health or digestion

from

trying

to take advantage of using these insulin sensitive sensitivity supplements and medications? Yeah,

absolutely.

So especially going into the final week and what people will notice and they won't understand why is that like the last day before the show, especially if you're manipulating water or you're using diuretics, there's a chance like once you become dehydrated, the first thing that starts to happen is you do start to run

high blood sugar. High blood sugar.
Yes. I learned this from Stan actually.
Stan told me this. which I really appreciate it.

Which, yeah, no, and he's been one of my clients now for about a year and a half, two years. But a lot of this, too, was when we found out about the whole diabetes stuff that he was going through.

And the first sign that he said, and this is what started us like working together, he's like, man, I have to carb up. I'm not hungry.
And I know he naturally has a fast metabolism.

I'm like, check your blood sugar then, because your appetite, your appetite is a little indicative of your insulin sensitivity and your metabolism.

So, you know, like typically if your blood sugar is low, you're probably pretty damn hungry.

So, when he checked his blood sugar, it was skyrocketed through the roof, like really high in like the 200s. And then I told him, I said, Look,

well, you can't sit there and start hammering carbs. Like,

they're not going to go to the right places, and you're just going to end up holding like a shill, a film from it.

So, I told him then, take as much insulin as you need to to get your blood sugar below 100. Once it's below 100, then go ahead and start eating, start eating your meals.

And I've seen this with like peeking people. And I could show you like pictures of people with the same exact weight.

They ate the same exact meal, but maybe there was one meal where their blood sugar was like 112, and then another meal where their blood sugar was 80.

And you can see, even someone that might not be that experienced with like being around bodybuilders and assessing physique, you could see a clear difference in the person's body composition when their blood sugar was like in the 80s and it was like around 120 120 or so.

That just the lines are a lot more deeper

when their blood sugar was lower. Um,

and you could see like it's a clear day difference. And

these particular like before and afters, it was the same exact meal. The weight was like within like a quarter of a pound of each other.

And the only thing that was really different was where their blood sugar was before they ate the meal. That's really cool to hear, man.

Um, because I've had really interesting experiences experimenting with myself. I should try to make sure that some of these variables are a little bit more consistent, like sodium, for example.

But my experiences with using some of these GDAs and stuff hasn't been as beneficial for me.

Like

they cause like GI issues, like where you're burping them up almost. I've had a lot of GI issues and slowing of digestion, especially with these.
And also, I think maybe

I'm a little bit sensitive to them and I need to use half doses. But like, for example, Friday, no, yeah.

Show was Saturday. Steve Carr show was Saturday.
So Thursday when we were carping up, the first day we were carping up, it was utilizing these. I felt like dog shit the entire day.

And I think my blood sugar was just consistently like a little bit too low throughout the day. I just felt terrible.
Are you checking it at all?

That's the problem. I probably should have brought my monitor with me, but I forgot it at home.
You don't have to check it every single meal, but have it, because I'll tell you the truth.

If your blood sugar is in an optimal range, if it's not above like 98 or 100, then

you don't need to take them.

Okay. Okay.
Like if they're in, if they're in a good range, then

there's no point in taking them at that point. If, you know, if your blood sugar is low and your pancreas is producing enough insulin, then you don't have to take them.

And some people that I start to notice start to have these issues, which it is very common, I'll have them actually not take them, but I will have them pack with them

some short-acting insulin just in case if they are running high,

then to utilize a little bit of short-acting insulin.

You don't ever feel like the insulin use, especially like when peaking for shows, gets like this a little bit more watery look or a little bit more like...

It can, and it also depends on like when, when you're utilizing it. So like if it was two days out,

you don't have to worry about it so much then because in my

opinion, the way that I go about like peaking, two days out should be one of the main days that you're focusing on loading your glycogen stores. And you're still hydrating, you're still

hydrating. Jesus.
Yes. Yeah, yeah.
You're focusing on loading your glycogen stores so that when you wake up

one day out from the show, you want to be in a place that you don't have to play too much catch-up in terms of like loading like glycogen, where you should be in a place then where you can now dry out and start to push out subcutaneous water.

The problem is, is that like if people are in in a place where they're still flat at one day out, and now they have to do both

still fill out a good amount and dry out,

that becomes a little more tricky. Where, you know, if you spilled over a little bit at two days out, that's okay because you have a whole day to dry out then.

So, you know, if you're utilizing it at two days out,

it's totally fine. You don't have to worry about spilling over, holding a little extra water because you have a day to get rid of of it.

Now, if you're one day out, depending on the time of the day it is that you're using it, or if it's like later on and say your water is starting to be restricted and controlled,

once your water is like controlled, say if someone wasn't drinking any water at all, you could send them to a Chinese food buffet and have them eat to the cows come home.

If they didn't drink water, they're not going to spill over.

Well, they wouldn't spill over this, yeah, yeah,

until

they started drinking.

I think Phil Viz had, I don't know if it was his choice, but after his show, he decided to do this 10,000 calorie cheat challenge.

And Phil told him to not drink water so he doesn't blow up afterwards and fuck up his blood pressure and shit. Yeah.
Yeah. So he did that.
And it worked. It worked.
He hardly gained any weight after.

I mean, but eventually he did.

How long did he go without drinking water? I don't remember, but yeah, eventually, obviously he did. Yeah.
And that's why, like, even the morning of the show, the last, like,

the day of the show, the only thing that can change your physique in a short time frame, especially in terms of filling out, sodium and water. So

if you load it properly the three days leading in and your glycogen stores are

loaded, then if you have to fill out, if you pulse a certain amount of sodium and fluids,

that usually will do the trick and

fill you out in a short time frame.

For people like that are the morning of the show that are like slamming all this food, it's really the dumbest thing because, one, that's not going to convert into like actual like lycogen time.

And all that's going to do is distend your midsection at that point.

So,

you know, the day of the show, the thing that's really kind of contingent based on like where that person wakes up at is the amount of, the amount of fluids that they take in that day.

hmm have you ever used even like a quarter of like you know say like a hydrochlorodiazide during show day

so i'll tell you like my opinion on that so when it comes to diuretics i would say maybe 50 to 40 percent i'll use a pharmaceutical diuretic like uh like a diazide

but I usually I'll also some at some have clients have on them

just in case again i can count on one hand how many people i've had actually need needed them to use this have something like um a loop like a like a dimidex like a five or 10 milligram dimidex because with diazide for anyone that's ever taken it you'll notice it doesn't pull right away

it it takes time before it really starts to peak in the bloodstream so that's why you'll have a lot of people that if they do use it they'll actually look better the day after the show, after even a full day of eating and hydrating, because the diazide is still flushing, still flushing, where I typically, unless, unless that the show was a, you know, a long show, like later on in the day, try to stay away from using diazide the actual day of the show, where coaches usually will get themselves into trouble.

A lot of times, a lot of coaches do this.

And again, it could be hit or miss, where if they're going to use it, a coach will be like, all right, yeah, I take a half of a diazide the night before the show.

Well, then you're going to sleep like with your fingers crossed that you got the ideal response and that that didn't flatten you out too much, opposed to if you are going to use it, you're better off starting to microdose it a little bit earlier, whether even if it was for a Saturday pre-judging, doing a quarter or the tiniest amount Thursday night and then Friday earlier in the day so that you could assess how the body is responding and then kind of make adjustments based off of that, opposed to just waiting the night before and boom, take this.

And then it's like waking up Christmas morning, see what you're going to wake up to. Yeah.
Yeah.

Patrick experimented with different times that we were utilizing even just a quarter to a half of diazide for every single show, or not diazide, sorry, it was a HCTZ with TriM turret.

So

I did find, though, interestingly, maybe it's just my personal variance and my personal response, but it did work quicker for me.

Normally, I would be peeing throughout the night, say that I took it the night before, like before, like right before the last meal. And then

I normally,

I'm not flushing things out anymore after pre-judging. Like I'm filling out by the time finals comes around every show.

Okay. I don't know if that's just an individual response.

You would only use it just the night before

um there was one time i just used it just the night before that was half uh for the second show uh for the third show we used it we used half thursday night and then we used half friday night both of them before

the last meal in between the last two meals so the so the things usually too that you'll look at in terms of like monitoring certain variables is let's say like someone your size typically has like a five pound fluctuation from night to morning.

Okay, so someone small.

Well, and it's just,

I am, no, I mean, you're not, you're not, you're bigger than most people, but

some people too, like when I was competing, I would have a 10 pound fluctuation from night to morning, which made it stressful when I had to make weight.

I would identify that person's fluctuation beforehand going into the show. And let's say that fluctuation normally is for someone like five pounds.

Now, you know, a peak is going well the day before the show when you're minimizing that fluctuation, because typically the day before the show, you're eating more food than what you would normally be eating on your baseline diet.

So you know, like if that fluctuation is down by 50 or 60 percent, where instead of you being up five pounds, you're only up like a pound and a half, two pounds.

You know, the peak is going in the right direction because your body is still

flushing fluids while you're loading glycogen because you're eating more carbohydrates.

Now, if you see the weight and it's titrating up more than usual, that's when it's time to go ahead and

either

adjust the food or pulse like a, you know, a micro dose of a diuretic to have the body start to flush. Gotcha.
That makes sense. Yeah.
We did that for, I think, maybe the first show.

He had me take like a quarter. um earlier in the day, like after meal one and before meal two.

And then we pulse another quarter in between the last two meals, just since I think I was a little bit, I wasn't as dry as he was looking for yet. So, yeah, and it helped.
It helped a lot.

First show look was definitely one of my favorites. First and last show,

two completely different looks, though, because the wind show definitely fills you out, bro.

Two pounds heavier.

The

orals, really, too, like the last couple of weeks, those are really the most important, like where the injectables, like the last two or three weeks, are not nearly as important as your orals and your anti-estrogens are.

I literally just had a podcast with Martin and he and Boss pulled out his injectables and his GH 14 days before Olympia. And then they kept it out all the way till Prague.

Bro was on four weeks without any tests in his system. Yeah, and that's why he was so dry and his skin was so thin too.
Yeah.

Because pulling out a lot of, because the injectables are there, they're really kind of irrelevant those last few weeks. It's mostly just the

orals. Right.
Yeah. Yeah.

They also did a really crazy depletion phase. They hit it at zero carbs this time, one and a half to two weeks.
Yeah.

And then filled out at like a thousand grams of carbs plus every single day afterwards. So it was a pretty extreme protocol.
Yeah. But it worked for him.
So that's cool.

Some people can, but there are some people where

if you run them that deep into a hole, you don't fill out.

There's nothing that you do that can fill them out

in time. And that's also related to the diet while you're in prep, too.
So, like, there are some coaches that just put people on a base

diet, whether it's a workout menu. But if you're going long periods of time depleting from one macronutrient group, like say without incorporating a higher carb day once every four to five days,

that's when you're going to be more susceptible to running into those.

Yeah.

i am making generalizations and trying my best not to be racist but um quentin aria and i had that conversation too that it just looks like normally white people or lighter skinned guys tend to have an easier time doing that like depleting out and then filling out and staying hard whereas like darker skinned like black guys like samson and quentin like you can't just push them you just can't keep pushing them lower and lower because they just flatten but they don't really get the the same kind of lines that you're looking for you know yeah and i mean you have to have a little bit more of a balance you have to look at every athlete and see what their

their strong asset their strongest assets are so like a guy like samson he has an unbelievable structure and he's he's a mass monster so you can tell going into the olympia that he went with the approach of i'm going to push the conditioning you know extremely hard this time but by by by doing that to a certain extent he was losing all of kind of his assets, his bells and whistles that

makes him so impressive that there has to become a point where, you know, in bodybuilding, where it's a push-pull, like where yes, you can deplete someone, but our bodies, we're not machines.

We're, we're more like ecosystems. So

eventually like the body starts to adapt. And then you want to have days where, you know, that you are fully like restoring muscle and liver glycogen.
I also like doing this when people are in prep.

I'll also maybe have days where they do a heavy load and don't work out or do anything at all, that you're taking that day just to rejuvenate their body to put them in an optimal place to keep responding.

Yeah.

Yeah. I heard you talking about that on a podcast as well.
And I really like that idea because you don't really know many coaches that will refeed on a rest day. Yeah.

That's more inclined to doing that, especially like in

prep when someone's, when someone's like really, really like. pushing hard and they're like running on fumes.
They need a day to like fully like rejuvenate their body.

And you'll notice, too, when you monitor like all these variables and like weight, you'll see like maybe two or three days after they take that day.

I call it a metabolic reset day, their bodies will start dropping more about 48 to 72 hours after because you essentially like ignited their metabolism.

Yeah, it's cool to hear how you can do that, even if someone's on like a consistent level of thyroid. Yeah, I always, I always wonder like where did this metabolism come from?

But it just happens, I guess. Yeah, no, and like like with

with with thyroid drugs it is something to take in consideration like when you're carving up if somebody is using over a certain amount with certain people i would cut the dose of that down the last three days sometimes yeah yeah

well

so really back to uh health phase and off season since we're discussing gut health and um a lot of these drugs that are affecting gut health what are your thoughts And I'm talking about this now because

if we're just being transparent, it's just,

this is so widely used now in bodybuilding and in the industry. And a lot of guys are a proponent of using this in the offseason as well at a microdosic level.

But what's your thoughts on Reta coming out of a show? Okay, so

great question because this is like the most trending topic are all these new GLPs. Oh, for sure.
So like the first thing to establish is that GLPs have been

have been used, specifically GLPs, for, I know, more than 25 years. Because even when I graduated college at the bariatric center,

it was being used in a clinical setting with,

and I believe back then it was called

trilicity, I think it was called. I might be getting mixed up, but which is essentially the same thing as semaglutide.
All right.

But these newer GL and GIPs, like your retatrutide, Tricepatide, and now they're coming out with some that target four pathways.

On paper,

they look great,

but any of the clinical data that they do have on it is all done pretty much short term. And it's all done on people that

don't work out or do hypertrophy training. So,

you know, the ones that are like targeting like glucagon and things like that,

they don't know necessarily how that is for someone that is doing hypertrophy training. So I'm all about like with bodybuilding, what we do, we're taking calculated risks, ultimately.

These are things that, these are things that are unknown. So, like with GLPs, again,

those have been around for a very, very long time. But I do know without a doubt, I know six people that did the Olympia this year that were all taking

particular GLPs, like Red of True Tide, and all of them had some sort of

GI issues

going into the Olympia and did not come in at their best. Now,

can you say

for certain, you know, it was this one variable? Not 100%, but it just so happens that six of them were taking it and they were also taking it over a certain dose as well.

And do you mind releasing the dose?

The dose was over, it was over about 3.5 milligrams a week,

which in the clinical setting, like, I think 2.5 milligrams of retarchutide is equal to just a quarter of a milligram of semaglutide.

And semaglutide, believe it or not, that is the most strongest GLP out of all of them.

Is actually semaglutide is the strongest one. But

all these people that were taking it, again, there are other things that they're not taking into account with where it is slowing gastric motility down.

But a thing that I noticed from working at the clinic was anyone that was on any of these GLPs, GIPs in the clinic, let's say that was on

like thyroid medication, I noticed on all of them that none of their medication changed, but their TSH was dropping.

And that's essentially because it's slowing the process of where your food is going into the small intestine, where that's where your body is absorbing a lot of this.

So your body is essentially absorbing more of everything that you're, that you're taking. So these are things I feel like not a lot of people are taking into account

going into the show, that the last week before the show,

in my opinion, that the GLP

should be removed that last week

going in. Like if you're taking it the last week, it's smart to take that out the last week.

What did you mean by things are being absorbed more and this isn't being considered?

So saying like when you when you take a GLP, it's slowing gastric motility down, which essentially where your food goes into your stomach and then it goes into your small intestine.

The part of where it's going into the small intestine is where we're absorbing all of our nutrients.

So when it's slowing that process down, we're now essentially absorbing more of what we're taking in. So like the people that were on

like however much desiccated thyroid they were on or whatever at the clinic, their TSH was dropping by like at least 25% every person that was on it, every person that was on it.

And it's because your body is absorbing more of what you're taking in now because it's slowing down that process of when you ingest anything. Does that make sense?

Including your medications,

anything that's being absorbed orally.

I see.

Yes.

And that's why

I never thought about that either, which I should have.

Even certain food sources that people are on,

in my opinion, too, the diets should be taken into account if someone is on a GLP

or not.

So, like some people, let's say that if they're putting like having meals that have fats in them and they're eating a slow glycemic index carbohydrate, I promise you that that will lead to like midsection distension without a doubt.

When you're taking a carb source that's already,

you know, a lower glycemic carb source and adding fat to that, which when you add fats to carbs, it essentially slows the glycemic index down. Slower.
Yep.

It's nice that you're saying this, though, because I think

this gives us reason to at least, you know, if the GI, if our GI is slowing down, to at least reduce protein and understand and like, you know, feel like, okay, well, maybe, maybe some of this will be at least absorbed a little bit more.

So it's okay if I reduce the protein just a little bit so I can prioritize my digestive motility. Plus,

just something that I want to share, and this is just one anecdote, right? Because I don't have clients. It's just me.

But my personal anecdote is Reda did affect my GI tract and how fast I was digesting throughout prep.

So if I ate too much protein above 250 grams, for example, it would cause a little bit of issues, but it was never anything significant. And that's the nice part.

And something I would do is I would micro-dose it regularly throughout the week, maybe say like three injections at minimum.

And then by the time the show came around, I would remove it at least a week before the show.

So that way, you know, half-life is about a week, at least only like half of it maximum is still in my system by the time I'm carping up. And it would always help immensely.

To be honest, the thing that affected my GI tract and my digestion the most was purely just windstrol. Adding that on top of the reta created a lot of problems for me for the third show.

I could tell my waist was a little bit bigger in circumference. And also

Thursday, when I was adding in the uh adding in RALA and metformin and these other things to help with insulin sensitivity while I was on Winstroll and also probably a little bit of Reda was still in my system i was having a pretty i was having a bad time that entire day in terms of digestion in fact i would make sure to like pound at least 300 milligrams of titka like during some of my meals as well to kind of like help with some of this um

digestion were you using like betaine hcl during prep i was using betaine during prep yeah yeah because that's like one of the number one issues that most bodybuilders in prep end up having issues it's it's usually a lot related to to stomach acid and that's probably one of the most important digestion supplements that you could be using and then like it helps so much yeah betane was amazing i had to take at least four pills of i think uh fuck i forgot the dose on the pill but i think it was like 700 each so it was a big it was a big dose yeah

and if you noticed from the that when you started the winstrol that that's what started a lot of the a lot of the gi issues i will guarantee you that you probably

maybe did some damage to your mucosal lining of your gi tract where eventually it can turn into like what you've heard like leaky gut yep um which is common when you're in prep because your

your stomach lining and your microbiome it lacks a lot of the pre and probiotics that you're normally getting in in like the off season because you're eating a lot higher like carbs and pre and probiotic food sources honestly i should have um upped my i should have upped my glutamine dose every day for that because i definitely got some leaky gut because whenever i would take gabba i could start to to feel it more if that makes sense i remember back when like my gut was a lot healthier i would take gaba and i just wouldn't even i would have to titrate up the dose of gabba to three grams and i wouldn't feel it as much

which tells me that like my gut was doing pretty pretty well yeah

you should you should you should take um like oral bpc 157 and tb5 i do that i do i take that orally from APR.

Mike's a good homie. And then I started KPV for the last week.
No, the last three weeks before my last show. And I think it helped a little bit as well.
But

it's a staple to repair your gut lining for sure.

Yeah.

I think overall my gut has been the best it's been

if I compare it to anywhere in the last

three years since I started bulking. Yeah.
But

it was very interesting to see that like even more than Retta, just adding 37.5 milligrams of Winstrel for three weeks and then continuing it at 50 milligrams of Winstrel for three more weeks until the last show made the biggest detrimental effect to my GI health.

Yeah. No, I mean, so that means that typically, like if a client was saying that after like during your recomp phase right now,

I would do something that I would consider like a traditional like

repopulation phase where you're pretty much repopulating like the commensal bacteria, your good bacteria, and repairing the gut lining using things like glutamine, high amounts of glutamine,

soluble butyrate and like the TB 500 and BPC using those. That will help

repair the gut lining. And it's never a bad idea to after to do a GI map.
I think that I highly believe in those.

I think that in a lot of cases, you can learn more from one of those than you can from from from blood work i'm glad you're saying that like as because i continue to do all this stuff like i'm still doing this every single day but like the fucking i don't give a fuck bodybuilder in the back of my head is like dude this fucking prep is over i don't need to take this damn glutamine anymore

i feel like a lot of people are in that position sometimes you know your prep's over and you're just like i don't give a fuck do i really need to take this anymore

it's the it's the the little things that go a long way like that.

The non-conventional bodybuilding things that you wouldn't think of, you know, whether that's, you know, doing breathing exercises or, you know, certain things with certain foods and certain prebiotics that will go a long, long way.

And I know, I know there's at least two or three bodybuilders that didn't do the Olympia this year, I heard, because they had GI issues. I think Raphael Rando, he didn't do the Olympia

because I'm pretty sure he had some sort of GI issue. And, you know, these are things that, you know, you can prevent

when you're going through these phases. Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.

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Code nile at checkout you know what would be an interesting the top thing to talk about what

about

classic physique guys making weight

i know two guys going into the olympia um

that use the np to make the weight and i'm telling you damn

it it costs them um

big time because

again when when you're using certain certain things like that especially um

and you're getting down to the weight early, saying depleting, and because you got to remember something making weight, you only got to weigh that weight for five minutes.

Get on the scale, off the scale. And roughly 76% of a muscle cell is made up of intracellular glycogen, water.

So, you know, and I take a combination of what I used to do when I wrestled and knowing what I know now, where as long as you as, yeah, like you utilizing a rubber suit, exactly.

Um, and the other biggest mistake is using diuretics to try to make the weight. That's a recipe for disaster on so many different reasons.

But the time you'd actually want to use the diuretic is actually after you make the weight and after you start putting fluids back in to make sure your body doesn't like balloon up.

But if you're able to get within 10 pounds of the weight,

even if it's 10 pounds, you can pull that off in a matter of like two hours, two and a half hours by utilizing like a rubber suit with a sauna.

And I'll usually have people alternate between doing a stationary bike and going in the sauna just so that they're not going to be at risk of getting like heat exhaustion staying in the sauna.

And

yeah,

speaking of that, honestly, speaking of that, um, because I feel like it's very related, uh, because you know, at the show with Steve Carr, I was competing against, I was standing next to Stanimal for fifth place for a very long time, especially all through pre-judging.

But I also know that Stanimal prior, he he measured in like at a half an inch below what he normally does. So he had seven pounds and then he had like four pounds to lose to make weight, right?

So you guys had to do this wetsuit and sauna type shit.

Congrats on the most recent show, though, of him getting second place at this last show. That's pretty awesome.
Did you guys end up making your height measurement this time or what was the situation?

Oh, so like going into it, I'm like, you know, you're sure you're at this height. And he's like, dude, like, I'm almost a quarter of an inch above.
like, I got to be 219.

So, I was like, Okay, perfect. He had everything mapped out perfectly.
Yeah, we've eaten two like decent-sized meals. This is before the Steve Carr.
Um, and he was about like two pounds under.

And then he got there and he's like, Dude, I don't know what this is if I shrunk, but there's something like

he's like, I don't, I don't know, maybe I did from like the last few days, but he's like, They said, like, I'm

about like a quarter to a third of an inch too short that now we have to drop to 212. And it was, it was like four and a half, five pounds.

And again, if I would have known this before, then I would have had him at that weight and had everything set up perfect. Yeah.
He's like, shit, they're going to give us, you know, we have two hours.

So I did. I sent him over quickly, go, go back home.
He had a rubber suit just in case. Like I just told him weeks ago, buy one of these.
He got the rubber suit. We got that off in about an hour.

But the part that sucked is then he made the weight at like 630 and at that point he was dehydrated so i had to have him backload water and stan is not someone that use does not need diuretics at all like those will hurt his physique so he made the weight we had to backload water afterwards to hydrate a little bit and then from there we had like a four hour window to try to like to load.

So we were like cramming this food. Luckily, because like he has insulin, so we were able to do that.

but the thing that i noticed about the car is because we had to do that all in that short window i did notice a little bit in his midsection at the steve car

yeah that was a yeah that's something that uh just transparently even though stan looks fucking amazing and bro when i was standing next to him like the day before the show i was like who the this fucking guy dude i didn't i was literally like looking at him i'm like god i'm gonna get 18th place and this guy's probably gonna be in top five because he looks fucking huge like just how much his fucking traps and his rhomboids pop out of his back is just it's fucking nuts man but um anyways um other than the tangent um

i oh fuck me dude what i was i

about the making weight i'm sorry i ruined it i'm sorry fuck i do this all the time god damn it did he make so what happened at the next show so the next show then i'm like look You have to be prepared then.

You have to be, you're not 219. You got to be 212.

So for that show i we pretty much backloaded carbs a lot earlier so right away i told him like look we need to get your glycogen stores depleted by tuesday so we can start putting food back in earlier so

that doesn't that wouldn't make him heavier because he's already carving up earlier

no so we carved up a little bit earlier this time but pulled them back a little bit before and when i say pull them back What I usually do, and this is a mistake that a lot of coaches make when they're trying to have these athletes make weight, they'll go ahead and put them on whatever it is, fish and vegetables, protein and vegetables for three days.

Pro-vegia. And that does absolutely nothing in terms of your muscle glycogen, your triglycerides,

nothing. So pretty much the last like 24 hours where he made the weight, he started carbing up like, I think lightly on like Tuesday or Wednesday for this.
Atlantic Coast show.

But then the last 24 hours, he was still eating a decent amount of carbs, but they were mostly coming from like rice cakes and like almond butter.

Because if you weighed out 250 grams of carbs from rice cakes and say 50 grams of fat from like nut butter, the physical weight of that is like under a pound or under a pound, opposed to if you weighed out, you know, two protein vegetable meals that weighs more than that.

And it's not doing shit in terms of like restoring actual glycogen or intracellular triglycerides.

So I feel like these coaches, I feel like these coaches' mentality, though, is just depleting is further depleting

ever.

It really, really is. And in his case, we were prepared to,

I told him, it doesn't matter if you're 10 pounds over the weight the morning of the show, I'll get it off of you.

But not to make drastic manipulations before, just so you can make the weight.

The biggest mistake is when people are doing extremes days and weeks out to get down to the weight when you have to remember, you only have to weigh that for five five minutes, and your muscle cells are mostly water, so you know, you dehydrate, you're dehydrated for a few hours, and then after you weigh in, then you focus on rehydrating.

But for this next one, it made it somewhat smoother because I knew what he had to weigh, and he went in and made the weight easily where we didn't have to cram like food in those last like four hours.

How did y'all make the weight

pretty much by carving him up a little bit earlier and pulling them back?

Like, where on typically on Thursday for him or most people, two days out, that would be the heaviest carb day on that day, two days out. Yeah.

So we backloaded the carbs a little earlier at like three days out. Two days out was still high, but not as high as it was.

So his weight started dropping.

His weight went up like the first day, and then after that,

it started dropping. Oh, okay.

Did you guys still have to do any sauna suit or or any um sweatsuit and sauna or no he was actually only a he was only like a pound over so he went and and just sat in the sauna like didn't have to do any extremes for like 20 minutes and he was okay

okay nice i see what you're saying now okay okay so he was so for the first show you guys were carving up on yeah okay that makes sense but stan's case though this year

I didn't know if he was going to compete or I actually told him it wasn't a good idea because of what he had went through previously so like he went through a phase where like he ended up getting like getting diabetes that's how me and him started working together yeah he was talking about that that he was with patrick and it wasn't anything that patrick did specifically but stan just wasn't aware of his potential to and it's crazy that it's type one too not type two well i guess his brother had it at 18 right yeah and you we have these things called epigenetics which epigenetics are like pretty much

things that are in our DNA that can be activated depending on your environment. So

with Stan, like when he was doing open, the one thing with him, like usually it's really good when you work with someone and they're super consistent, but he went through a long phase where he was doing growth hormone every single day for like more than 16 months straight.

the extremes of that and also the amount of food that he used to have to consume like when he was in open open

between that and all the growth hormone that's what started to exacerbate this issue

and

he realized it when he was a couple of days out from chicago like where his blood sugar was that high and then there were other things and there's other tests that i wanted him to go for because i suspect that there's more going on with his immune system than just the diabetes, like potentially like Crohn's disease and other things, because I sent him for some other tests,

like a SIG A test, which is essentially your immune system. And it was through the roof, but

there's other tests that he still does need to go for. And he just recently got health insurance.

So when he was wanted to go into this prep, we were at a place where he had to actually put back on all the muscle because he lost a lot of muscle during going through all of this because he was in the hospital.

So his journey was, was crazy. And most people would have not been able to go through it.
But he mentally, when it comes to bodybuilding,

it's everything to him. So, you know, afterwards, when he started this prep, we had to put back on the muscle and then start pushing the conditioning.

So the fact that he was able to get to this point, we were really, really like happy about it.

And now that he'll have an opportunity to take the time, also take the rebound. He'll be in a much better place going into next year.
Okay.

It's been storming and raining in California, which it never does, of course, for the last three, four days. So that's why it's been pitch black.
I feel the same.

It's even been like that here in Vegas.

Damn.

Also,

also, I was considering, like, I think I might move to Vegas next year, honestly. Oh, dude, it doesn't work out.

You should. I mean, I'll tell you, I'm originally from New York City, and I went through like a three-year time span where

I lived all over the country. I moved to North Carolina, opened a chain of like medical clinics for a year.

i moved to florida like the year that i was prepping nick and then i moved here i'll tell you it's i love it out here it's got everything you could need anytime it's got a really really good fitness and bodybuilding community yeah i really like the the bodybuilding community there is so awesome and welcoming and supportive and you know we just know everybody there too so it's really cool And it's a quarter of the price of like living like where I came from in New York City.

It's

super cheap to live here. All right.

Twist Twist my arm, brother. Fuck.
Yeah,

you definitely got to come. Anytime you want to come out here, man, let me know.
Thanks, man. Thank you, bro.

Yeah, I like making trips out there. That's honestly the main reason I did the show in the first place.
I was just, I love going to Vegas and seeing everybody.

Who are all the male Olympians that you've coached as well, by the way? Because it was, you had Nick Walker, you've had Regan. Oh, like

ever. I've had,

I mean, I've had a bunch, like, I've had a couple immense physiques. So for a while, and I still do do this, which this is a part that I'm like more passionate about too.

I do a lot of like consulting with other like coaching teams. So that's cool.

For a while, like I was, uh, I worked with one of my closest friends that he has like one of the top, one of the top men's physique prepping companies called Unchained. So

I worked with him and worked with a lot of his top athletes and some other like coaches, which I really like doing that because I'm able to assist them with their athletes, but not have to deal with a lot of the stress of directly dealing with the athletes.

Like, you know,

oh, I, you know, broke up with my girlfriend and I punched holes in the wall. And, you know, this guy is having this stress.

So I've had a lot too that have helped that way. But now I've had a lot, a lot of

really good male competitors too, like on the men's physique levels, like Emmanuel Hunter, Anthony Gilks, kid Javier Mullins,

um

obviously like Nick Dub one year.

Um, I'd have to go through, but I've had I've had a decent amount, um, but what I've noticed, the biggest trend,

like years ago, I would have a lot of like pro cards, like where I would get like 12 or 14 in a year, but now it's like this last year was probably the least amount of pro cards i had but i had the most amount of like olympians because a lot of the people a thing i

didn't i have a like pretty good client retention where you know the people that turned pro years ago are now starting to do well on on a pro level and that's why like i don't think like a coach should be necessarily

Or even an athlete's performance should be based strictly on placing. Yes, everyone's goal is to win.
but I have had people win pro shows that were not at their 100% at all, to be quite honest.

It's just that they were so good that they could afford, they could come into a show at 85% and still end up winning.

And then you could have the vice versa where people are spot on, nailed on the money, but

they might not win the show. And I think ultimately, when you assess your, if the show is a success or not, is you're ultimately competing against yourself.

And you should look at where you were at your last show and if you improved going into the next show.

That's ultimately the main thing that you should determine if a prep was a success. And then look back at your previous years and making sure that you're making improvements.
Right. Okay.
Cool, cool.

So since we're talking about Stan and GH, what do you feel is the best route of action to take with GH then? It sounds like

you're not really an advocate for doing GH year-round.

So, no, like you can take it year-round. The problem that you run into, like where what he ran into,

he was taking it multiple times in the day.

He was taking it three times a day and was taking it at times at high doses, which high doses give anything from like eight to 12 IUs a day, but not taking no days off from it.

So, I'm talking about like, if you were taking GH, if you were taking more than four and a half, five IUs of GH every single day for two years straight, that's when you're going to run into issues.

When would you take a break? When would you take the days off? What I think is a good way to go about it is if you run it like two to three days on, one day off. I've heard this before.
Okay.

I think that that's typically

the best way to go about it. And again, it depends on how much you're doing.
If you're doing a low amount, if you're doing three IUs, then you're not going to really run into those issues.

You're going to run into them more when you're taking north of six IUs a day. Okay.
Okay.

If you are taking above six IUs a day, though,

I mean, is this all purely just for insulin sensitivity?

Why you would want to take it like all the time?

Taking breaks, say, like once or twice a week?

Mostly, yeah. Mostly

your insulin sensitivity, which is one of the most important things in terms of a bodybuilder for your ability, you know, of course, to grow.

And that's why people that are taking GH, insulin and HGH work together like

peanut butter and jelly do.

They work synergistically together. Great.
And that's why, like,

if you are going to utilize, like, if you want to ramp up GH like high,

that's when you could consider utilizing like a long-acting insulin.

Cause then you don't have to worry about it affecting, you know, your insulin sensitivity as much because

when you take insulin, insulin's not like testosterone, like where we take testosterone and then your hypothalamus and pituitary signal to your testicles, like, hey, you're getting all this influx of hormones, stop producing it on its own.

That's what happens when we take androgens and exogenous tests. Insulin does not not work that way where you're shutting down your pancreas's production.
No, it's actually quite the opposite where

if you utilize a long-acting insulin or

you give your pancreas a break and you could actually have the opportunity if you do it the right way, where you can upregulate your pancreas's ability to secrete insulin on its own.

Okay, that's cool. Yeah.

The thing with the long-acting

that you want to be careful about is if you're taking like a high amount of it

if especially if you're not eating we need you could get fat really easy too yeah yeah for sure

yeah for sure that's my problem with taking insulin is um

i mean i i hardly ever really took insulin we uh we just did uh patrick and i did four i use on leg days on certain leg days and if i'm going to be honest i skipped i skipped a lot of those days just because Sometimes I just like enjoy having a little bit of extra fats before the workout.

And I'm just like, all right, I don't want to take insulin with these fats.

Did you take it pre or post, honestly?

He had two pre and two post, but if I had fats with the pre, I'd just skip the pre and not say anything. But that's two I use, right?

Yeah, I mean, were you taking in a lot of fats? Was it like more than 12 grams, 15 grams?

I don't really, I'm trying to remember exactly. It'd probably be close to 12, I'd say.
Yeah, I mean, probably not more than that.

Two units of insulin, though, isn't going to really, that's not, you're not going to have any sort of negative effect from that. But I typically like to,

the only times like I'll use it like pre-workout on people's plans, it'll usually say, check your blood sugar.

Like if their blood sugar is over like 100 before their pre-workout meal, then I'll tell them like do X amount of tumol just to drive their blood glucose down. But I typically.

don't like taking it too much pre-workout because it's harder to gauge because when you're working out, you know, you're you're blowing through glycogen.

So, you know, yeah, you're probably sipping on intra-workout carbs, but you're more than you have a higher probability of going hypo than where the important time, in my opinion, is going to be post-workout.

And like what I like to do is if someone trains, insulin technically peaks twice if you humilog, you do it the right way. So like if you, let's say you hit eight units of humilog post-workout.

So like 25 minutes later, it's going to start to peak for the first time. And when I say peak, I mean by pushing your blood sugar down.

So after the workout, let's say, boom, you take down 100 grams of carbs with your protein.

Then in about an hour, hour and a half later or so, it'll peak again for the second time where it pushes your blood sugar down.

Where after you take that pre-workout shake with the carbs, if you weren't using the insulin, you'd probably have to wait, you know, two hours hours to eat, where when you use the insulin in 45 minutes to an hour, it's probably pushing your blood sugar down and you're ready to eat again.

Okay, gotcha.

I got an interesting one for you. What do you feel like is the cause of these softer muscles that we're seeing in open that people are discussing a lot?

I think a lot of people are trying to make theories.

Great question. So like when we refer to the word like conditioning, and if you gave me like an athlete too, I could probably give you a better breakdown.

But, when, for an example, when someone refers to the word conditioning, that doesn't just mean yes, you have to be in low levels of body fat.

Yes, but I can tell you right now, I can usually look at a physique and tell the way that that person trains. So,

when you look at a guy like Hadi, for an example, okay, he has that granite, hard type of muscle. He does.

That is typically built from,

you know, obviously, you know, muscle maturity, because, and you'll, you'll notice this too. Like,

usually guys that are in their earlier 20s, they don't start to get that granite, hard muscle until you're at least into your later 20s, earlier 30s.

And usually that's developed over time of training a particular way.

Like a guy like Hadi that's doing a lot of like free weight, heavy compound movements, that's you know, doing heavy, heavy squats, hack squats, um,

you know, training very, very, very intensely. That the training plays a major, major role in that too, as well, the way that you train.

So, I think that the training plays a role in it. If you look at a guy like Martin,

go watch the way that he trains. Um, he trains very, very, very, very hard.
He's training with huge huge loads he's very very strong you don't think derek trains pretty hard

i mean i know even people that have trained with him i think he is has started training like harder now as time goes along but in terms of like taking someone like him or like like nick for an example

nick for years was training where he was you know, dumbbell pressing 200 pound dumbbells. He doesn't squat anymore, I know, but back in the day that he used to.

So that, that's what builds that type of, you know, dense, dense type of muscle.

That's really the main thing I'm trying to push on Regan because Regan does actually better with lower volume rep scheme, and he's very, very strong.

But in his case, he burns out very, very quickly. So with him documenting like his workouts, I noticed on week one,

his incline Smith Machine press was his third or fourth movement on his push day.

And he did 275 on his top set for like 11 reps. Then the next week, it was the first compound, and he did 405 for seven.

So assessing that,

huge. So assessing that data, that shows you that he number one responds better to doing slightly lower volume.
and having those compound movements programmed in the beginning of the workout.

And then, like the way Regan's training is, it changes each week. So week one, he starts his workout, say, with incline Smith machine press.

Then week two, that goes to the second, and then the dumbbell press is what he starts the week two with.

So that, you know, so many people end up burning themselves out on a lot of those feeder sets, you know, where, you know, you really want to put everything into those two balls to the wall working sets.

Okay.

Awesome. Interesting.
I have heard this theory before, but

it was hard for me to, I like the theory because, you know, I like training hard. I like to think that, you know, this one creates hard muscle, but I don't know.

It just was hard for me to get up on, to be honest. Cause

without a doubt, the main factor in all of these things, like, for example, Hadi's front conditioning. versus his back conditioning not being so good, that's genetics, right? Same thing with Urs.

Hadi, like Urs's like front conditioning being so wild and then his back conditioning just it's always hard for him to get in there that's a genetic factor right the fact that my glutes come in peeled

amazingly but then if i do men's physique my abs kind of suck all the time no matter what no matter how lean i get that's obviously a genetic factor as well kind of just like jeremy bundy is

so everyone's fat distribution is a little bit different

yeah and also water i think wherever you're getting water retention at any point can be a lot slightly different as well

and typically like i'm usually against like for competitors to do like dexa scans like going in because they can be very inaccurate and i've also seen it

mess with people's head but in a bad way where they it'll say that they're at like six percent body fat and i'm like dude you still have plenty to pull from walk like your glutes are not in i don't give a shit what that says the judges asked you for a dexa scan report on stage i hate those scans to be honest because i'll have friends coming to me being like dude look I'm fucking 4% body fat.

And I'm just like, you definitely want 4% body fat. Yeah.
No, and I've had them go both ways, but some people too, I'll actually do a skin fold test on them with a skin deck.

Typically, for guys, the last pulse level will go is on their subscapula on their back. And once that pinch gets into a single, it's like single digits, you know that they're getting pretty close.

Gotcha. Okay.
That's cool. All right.
In terms of off-season growth, since we're on this topic,

this might be a little bit hard to answer. And I know it's variant per person, but I guess on average, where would you start someone off PED-wise?

Say that they're just finishing off their health phase.

So saying to like, what level of competitor is this? And like, what is their PED history? Are they like a first-time competitor or is this like a ridden competitor? I know.

This makes this makes a huge difference, right? So let's just say their last off-season was,

let's pick an average, like 500 test, 500 primo. They gained like six to seven pounds in their last offseason.
Okay, and they were

like five I use of GH or something. So I would pinpoint that as like a in between, like a, I'd say like a new pro, maybe, like a freshly new pro.
Would that, would that be accurate? Yeah.

So,

all right. So, yeah, that, that's a, that's a good case study to use.
So, like, if that's what like their baseline was in their last offseason.

So, generally speaking, the first thing I would do is I would send them for labs. When someone does a health phase,

I have them do labs so I could establish a baseline of their health and hormonal markers. And once they're at a certain point,

that's what I use to determine, all right, now we're in a good place to start an off-season once everything is in an optimal range. Cool.

So, a typical, like a good example of a decent cycle to go with, I try to target different pathways too, whether it's a 19-NOR, DHT. Like, a good starting cycle would be doing something like:

say, if their testosterone was at,

you know, 500 or 550, and then they went with either

Primo at 350 or Equipoise at 400, and they also front-loaded the cycle, let's say, with

an oral like Tyrannibal or something like that to front-load the cycle.

Yeah,

I mean, I personally like it because it's not not as toxic as like, you know, your anadrol and some of your other ones

have as much water attention either. But, you know, the water retention like can give you sometimes a false perspective of

how much tissue that person's putting on. So I like to kind of minimize that.

But like, again, so like if you front-loaded that cycle with an oral, like, and again, say if it was T-ball or anivar, say you're doing 50 milligrams of that a day on workout days and then your testosterone somewhere around 500, 550.

And then if it was Primo

300, 350, or if it was equipoise at 400, and then running the using the oral to front load the cycle,

say for the first four or five weeks. And then after the first four to five weeks,

then you're starting to have the other, the DHT derivative start to peak in the bloodstream.

Once that's starting to peak, then you could remove the oral and then you could start walking the dose up of the injectable.

So let's say after we drop the oral, we're going to increase the injectable, but I'll have people increase it instead of just being like, all right, take your test from 500 to 800 and your primo from 350 to 600.

I would have them, I would maybe set their total, like let's say their primo up to 500 and their test up to 700, but I would have them increase it by increments of 50 milligrams each week. Okay.

Bump it up slowly. And then, then possibly adding, if needed,

like a 19 Nor in,

if we needed to, to finish off the last couple of weeks of

the growth phase, like an NPP,

something along something along those lines. And again, it's really kind of contingent on the person, how they're feeling,

are your joints feeling with your training,

you know, and that would be kind of a ideal way to program it.

I kind of like the idea of titrating it up each week, very, very slow at very low doses, obviously as needed, right? As long as they're still progressing properly. Or, well,

I guess the thought would be.

I didn't say that right. So I do know there's some coaches, though, that feel like they shouldn't titrate up a dose if they're not, if they're still making progress.
Absolutely.

I agree with that 100%. Like this is a huge mistake that people make.

If somebody is making progress and it's working, don't fuck with something that isn't broken. Keep it exactly the same.

These are things that you do with like where I'm talking about like titrating the dose up.

You do that like when you're seeing that.

all right like we're hitting certain plateaus let's slowly start to walk the dose up oh gotcha gotcha cool cool i could just if they're progressing and typically the way that it would be set up in the offseason if they're putting on

even if it's a pound

a pound or a half a pound a week okay

that that's that's pretty good you figure you know like at least 60 of it is going to be you know water retention a little bit of body fat so at that rate if someone's putting on you know a pound and a half half to two pounds of muscle a month,

that's pretty good. Yeah.
Okay. Cool.

This is going to be a huge hypothetical, which means like, obviously your answer doesn't mean that it's going to be very accurate because this is just, it's hard for us to answer this.

But I guess hypothetically, how high do you think your dosages would end up going for an athlete like this?

Like in an offseason? In this new offseason. Since the last offseason, there was about like 500 tests, 500 of say Primo or something.

So

it's again, it's one of those questions that's hard to answer because it's really contingent on how the person's body is progressing,

is responding. You know what I mean? So, you know, like I have a, I have a guy right now that's from Brazil that is on only 300 milligrams of testosterone a week, and he is making insane improvements.

And he keeps asking like, do we need to add, and I'm like, absolutely not.

Like, because you're making such good improvements like right now like you know we don't need to try to change anything that you know it's working fine otherwise they may have to up it even further than the next offseason yeah

typically like and this might surprise people but like

in prep

your like androgen load probably doesn't need to be as high as people think that it does opposed to

to in the offseason because when you're in prep like the last 10 weeks you're ultimately just trying to push conditioning without creating metabolic adaptations and holding on to, you know, all of your tissue.

And if you're metabolically in a good spot, I've had a lot of people actually grow, grow into the show.

If they're able to continue to keep getting better in the gym, they're able to, but they don't need like

as much like drugs. It's sometimes in the offseason where they may need a little bit more to continue to keep responding and keep putting on tissue.

And that's why the offseason, my people talk about like health markers. Most people, if they got their blood work done while they're in prep,

I agree. I know what you're about to say.
Their blood work a lot of times isn't that bad in prep. And it's because, one,

you know, you're not carrying all the extra weight that's associated with in the offseason.

You're typically very religious in terms of taking all different antioxidants, health supplements.

Your diet is very on point. So, the amount of like oxidative stress on the body is far, far like reduced when you're in prep, opposed to the off season, where

you're walking around carrying, you know, 40 pounds of extra weight.

You're eating this excess of like food. So, that puts a lot more stress like on the body opposed to like when you're, when you're in prep.

Yeah, I could agree.

Um, the only the only blood markers I had that are skewed and above range and higher than the offseason during prep would normally be the liver enzymes, just because during the off-season, I'm not running any orals.

So

your liver is an organ that can rejuvenate itself at a pretty like rapid rate. It's one of the only ones that can.

So that's typically, that's typically very, very like normal.

You know, you want to keep an eye on like, your other major like health markers, but ultimately, if you're monitoring like the three main things are your insulin sensitivity, your blood pressure, and systemic inflammation, those are the three main things that will cause cardiovascular disease, um, most like terminal illnesses.

If you had to pick the three most important antioxidants that you would choose for someone to reduce their oxidative stress, what would you choose?

Oh, definitely, it'd be uh glutathione, yeah, definitely be one of them. Um, NAC,

and

the the third one, there's like four that it could be, but I would say, in terms of just like

liver health and detoxification, um,

for liver health specifically, obviously, totka, because that's what's going to clear your bile ducts.

But I will tell you, like, um, a methylated vitamin B complex and methyl folate are absolutely super essential. Like, really,

oh,

I just, I never really thought methyl folate would be something to take if you aren't aware that you have a methylation issue.

Absolutely. Those are two that are definitely important.
You're probably thinking of like for people that have like the MTHFR gene mutation. Yep.
Yeah.

But I mean, no, like those are still definitely essential for your body's like own like just regular methylation.

So even taking like a small dose of methyl folate before bed, like even post-show, you find that pretty?

Yes, absolutely. definitely

yeah so those would be like those would be the the staples and i'll tell you like there's a lot of people too that that are mind baffled when they get their partners pregnant and they're in the middle of prep

and i'm telling you it's because of those supplements because even though like the androgens that we're taking are obviously

They're shutting down our natural hormone production and lowering probably your total sperm count however you really only need to have one like healthy swimmer so yeah if the motility and progression which what that pretty much is is the health of the sperm the the power of the sperm that it has to to fertilize an egg if that's really good then you can still get your partner pregnant and that's why there are a lot of people that still have that happen mother rep oh i totally get it that's how i know your boy's been on his health shit because

our streamers are pretty fucking strong. Yeah,

absolutely. Let's run this Q ⁇ A real quick because we're running out of time, probably like 15 minutes.
I always do this to the audience, which is the worst thing is

I just, I'm just so selfish. I steal all the space and then no one gets to get their answers, their questions answered.
Oh, this is funny.

Abe Drake actually asked the same question we kind of already asked, when to titrate up food and PDs in a reverse slash rebound.

I think we kind of already answered that. Yeah, we pretty answered that in depth.
I have a question for you now that I'm thinking about this from his question,

which I think is an obvious answer. But

what would you have to say to Mike Summerfeld saying with more gear requires more food?

Saying that if you're taking more gear, you require more food.

That was on a podcast we had.

There is some truth to that to an extent because most steroids are like fat soluble. So like,

yes, that, that, that is true to an extent, but

it's such a hard kind of question to answer. Just that someone is taking a certain amount doesn't mean that they need a certain amount of food for, for say, I mean, obviously,

you know, when you're in like a growth phase and you're on a certain androgen load, Yeah, it makes sense that you're eating a certain amount of food, that you're, you know, that you are slightly in a surplus, but just that you are eating more food because you're on more gear does not mean necessarily that you're going to grow.

It could work, could work against you if it's one, negatively impacting your insulin sensitivity.

And two, the other thing that's going to drive how much tissue you put on in the right areas is going to be your training ultimately.

Okay.

So if you're titrating, okay, say a guy is plateauing and you guys are choosing to titrate up first the gear, like we were talking about earlier, at these small, small dosages each week, you would keep food at the same first just to keep,

I don't know, maybe minimize variables.

So like I would like to see how they responded to that one variable or maybe we'd titrate it up a little bit, a little bit faster than doing it very slowly instead of doing it, you know, 50 milligrams or whatever, 25 a week.

titrating it up a little bit faster and then i start looking at again like their performance markers so like i had a guy this is like two years ago a good men's physique pro that had everything but his chest development just sucked but if you look at his training all his performance markers would go up besides his

all the pressing movements so believe it or not even though i'm a

i do not like utilizing this too much to get him those performance markers up. We had a short time frame that we utilized

in Oral. I actually had him for two weeks only on his chest days start to use a little bit of Halo to get those performance markers up.
And it did actually work very, very well.

So we were using certain things to kind of help the performance on the lagging muscle group days. Gotcha.
Gotcha. That's cool.
Okay.

That's how I like to utilize food as well, cycling it up and having your on the on the lagging muscle group days. I think that's the most effective.

Definitely worked for the legs, yeah, absolutely, definitely.

And it's a little bit smart to not have the same diet that you're following, you know, every single day to have days where it's a little bit higher and days where it's a little bit lower.

That's where you're going to be able to keep your metabolism in the best place. Cool.

Someone that I feel like you know very well. Um, um,

how do you say your name? Amanda, Amandina?

Yeah, Amandina. She asks,

I'll form this in the form of a question, but

how do you control waist growth during off seasons?

Okay, so good question. So like, in terms of

in the off season, like controlling, making sure that you're keeping the waistline intact, that's also a matter of, that's why I like to, especially if food is at a certain threshold, having a period of time that you give the GI track a little bit of a break, which this can mean giving it a break on anything from

once a week, once every two weeks, where I'll have them potentially for one day do a fast for a certain time frame where they only get in like a certain amount of, or they get a certain amount of food in, but it's in a certain window where you're giving the GI track, you know, a little bit of a break.

And then the most important thing is just make sure that you're taking in all the micronutrients in that you need to support you know optimal digestion, right?

Food variety,

and then if you have a real case, like where you know, like where you have to pull off like inches off of someone's waist,

you can do that. But the protocol to do that involves you having to deplete the liver of glucose, which essentially you would have to get into

ketosis or close to it. And then, once you get in to that point, you would flood the liver with

two different forms of choline and either udka or tudka and what that does is that's going to help like eat like eat visceral fat away um to really bring the waistline down that's like if you really needed to bring the waistline down um

and then yeah in terms of like the off season it's a matter of just having times like where you're giving your gi track you know, giving your GI track a break.

And then you're also like, I'm big on, again, on data. I think everyone should check their measurements once a month.
You should measure both of your legs, because if you have any sort of impingement,

say you had a back injury, whatever it may be,

you might not realize, but on one side of your body, you might not be firing the same way.

If that's why you want to measure both legs, you should measure below the belly button and above, measure your waistline.

and try to keep that within certain parameters to make sure it's not getting too out of hand because it's easy to prevent this stuff from happening.

But then, once the issue gets to a certain point, then it's a totally different ballgame to reverse it. Okay, cool.
Gotcha. Bodybuilding and Buffon

asks, who does he think Nick Snyd's coaches?

People want to walk a driver.

I really, to be honest,

I don't know.

I mean, only like

he could decide that, which my main thing is that he should take some time so that it's not kind of like an emotionally driven decision that, you know, it's something that's well thought out.

And, you know, that's really

what it would boil down to. But I don't know in terms of

because I don't know any of the bigger name guys, like if he would be a good fit for them

in terms of like, well, they're prepping other like top athletes. So,

you know, that's a hard one to answer. Yeah.

Some of these questions are wild.

I'll phrase this in a nice way. Christian Hennessy asks, how good was Nick's Walker, Nick Walker's blood work?

So, I mean,

I mean, I can't sit there and go into people's like medical records, but

I will say that like when

he came to me, surprisingly,

there were things like he was concerned like of keeping keeping his health markers in certain places. And there were certain things that he didn't want to do that he had done in the past.

I will say that.

And that was in the beginning.

He was. And that's why at first I didn't know if it would be a good fit because I'm known as someone that's big on your health.
And I told him before, you know, we can even consider this.

He needs to send me over certain cardiovascular tests and blood work. And I didn't really think I would hear from him again, but he sent everything to me.
And,

you know, every test that I wanted him to go for in the beginning, he did. But then when we got to prep for the Olympia,

his kind of mindset is he thinks it was pointless to do any sort of blood work or test

while on or while being in prep for the Olympia. But, you know, what people understand,

you should be doing blood work both at the end of the health phase and when you are on because you want to see how your body is metabolizing these drugs.

And a thing that I was

big on with him and a lot of other people is showing them that you don't need to nuke your estrogen, you know, 14 weeks out from a show.

A lot of the more serious cardiovascular issues that happen

happen sometimes not even from the steroids. It happens from a lot of the anti-estrogens.

Because when you nuke, you nuke your estrogen,

like estradiol is cardiovascular protective. And then you end up, people don't usually talk about this either, like the importance of the

endothelium. So like that's like the best way I can describe it, it's like a

coating that wraps around all of your cardiovascular tissue. That's almost like a non-stick like pan, like that surface.
What happens is like there's a bunch of things that can

penetrate that wall, like elevated blood glucose high systemic inflammation and a lot of the things we do in bodybuilding can can affect that but like three out of those things two two out of those three things like elevated blood glucose and even like blood pressure you can monitor those from home with a thirty dollar monitor so that's why like every bodybuilder or anyone that takes peds should have one of those gotcha awesome

I think that was really good stuff to cover John Benjamin 98 home of the pod says what asks what PEDs and dosages is pushing the envelope on female competitors to bad side effects?

So, again, with females,

it's so contingent on the person because I've seen girls that have just taken Anivar

and had horrible side effects and then have done consultations with top Olympian women pro bodybuilders that are,

you know,

on a lot

and they surprisingly didn't have

horrible side effects. But even the girls that do handle it well,

a lot of it has to do with the duration and the dose. Like even a girl that responds well to Anabar or pren,

if they're on it for a long enough timeframe, they'll end up getting side effects from it from opposed to even if a girl took something like Tren, which

what about a quick question. Sorry.

I'm sorry for interrupting, but if a girl was on hypothetically like 2.5 milligrams of Anivar, but she was running it for, is there any period of time long that you've ever seen that cause viralization or issues like that?

Absolutely. If a girl was on that, say for five months, four or five months, absolutely.
Okay.

Then the poison is really in the duration, where opposed to like something like Tren, which I don't put any of my female athletes on it, but I'll tell you, I have seen, I have had a female athlete that did take it before in the past, yes.

Um, and that was because, like,

her partner that I also coached to,

um, they wanted to do it. And I said, Look, it's up to your discretion if you want to do it, but you're just not, don't do it more than like four or five weeks.

Because typically, if anything is done at a low dose and it's a short duration, typically any side effects that that happen would go away if it's for a short period of time. Okay.

What about TRT for women? What's the lowest dose that you've ever seen cause a potential cause potential viralization?

Because you know, some of these women are going to be on it for extreme periods of time. Yeah, some of them for life.
And

with that, and it's the same way that we do it like at the clinic.

So, because everyone metabolizes these hormones differently, what you should do is you start off at the lowest dose, whether that was three or five milligrams a week for a woman.

And it should be broken up too into at least

like every three day doses too, so that you're not spiking and crashing your levels.

Then, after you're on it, say for at least three or four weeks, you should go get blood work done about two to three days post-injection.

And then from there, you will be able to tell exactly what the dose needs to be titrated up to or down accordingly.

And there are some women that need to to go up to, you know, 10 milligrams or 12 milligrams a week. And believe it or not, that that barely will get them up to say to 80 or so.
Wow.

That's why it's totally different. Like that, that was, that's the interesting thing with working at the clinic.
Like I could pull up even men. And there are some guys that are on

150 milligrams of tests a week or 125, and they're always at 1100 to 1,500 nanograms per deciliter. And then there are some that were on on 300 and they're barely like north of like 600.
Yeah, yeah.

I think 140.

It's so different. And for women,

the main thing, you also have to look at their, their estrogen to progesterone.

So a big thing that I went through a lot with women in the beginning is a lot of them can complain of like UTIs and getting co-infections.

And that's because their estradiol is getting so low that they end up getting vaginal dryness that ends up turning to a yeast infection. And then when that's not treated, it turns into a co-infection.

Okay, gotcha.

Estrogen and progesterone, though, you didn't, you didn't, what about progesterone and the ratios? Oh, yeah.

So, like, those are things that definitely with women, for sure, even like my fiancé, like a big thing how she put on all that muscle in that offseason, it was actually utilizing exogenous estradiol.

Um, her estrogen was very, very, very low. So, she went on a certain certain amount of,

she originally was on an oral estradiol, and then she switched to a cream, but she was, in addition to that, was taking vaginal estradiol too, which that doesn't absorb systemically.

That's just locally to pretty much make sure that they have, they don't get like vaginal dryness or anything like that.

But all that should be utilized. And with women, too.

Another thing that works very well, I've originally learned this too from Victoria, is if you have a woman, they are competing in PrEP and they're on a certain amount of

you know X, Y, and Z. If you do put them on progesterone, that does help mitigate some of the fertilization effects that they could have.
Oh, wow, that is amazing by utilizing progesterone.

Yeah, yeah,

I mean, I guess that would make sense. How high do you want to see estrogen and progesterone? And obviously, this would be the offseason because I know that prep is an exception for women or

yeah, for women For women? Well,

typically, and again, too, like when you assess blood work on a female,

you also want to look at the labs

based on where they are in their cycle. So

if they're in,

you know, if they're, you typically want them to go in the, in mid

ludal or

luteal.

Yes.

You want them, you want them to go in certain ranges where they're not ovulating so you could get kind of an accurate assessment of

where they are. And then, typically,

again, like it's more so like looking at ratios. You really don't want them to be anything lower than around 50.
And you also have to remember, too, that

estrogen and testosterone, they're red on different scales. So, estrogen is red on, I believe, picograms opposed to

testosterone, this nanograms deciliter. And testosterone is still in women, the most dominant hormone, which most people would think that it's estrogen.
It's actually still

testosterone.

And when you're looking at estrogen, testosterone, progesterone, you want to have good ratios of it, where you don't want to have

the gap between progesterone and estrogen. you don't want the gap to be too big too big right which is something i think we've personally ran into here.
So it's another reason I'm asking.

So, I guess, what are the ratios that you would want to aim for to make sure that a woman is healthy and mentally feeling typically their estradiol, in my opinion, like once they're out of that pre-prep phase,

typically their estradiol shouldn't be much lower than like 30 or 40. Okay, and that's still that still is really like low.
And then, if you do see, like, um,

what would you consider high?

I mean, you could see like it depends again, like the, the phase that they're in, but uh, I think their, their estrobattles at four or five hundred, that's high.

Okay, okay,

then that that would be considered estrogen dominant. Gotcha.
And in that case, then

there's things that you can do, not using like anti-estrogens, but you could utilize from there. You could also see

you could order a more specific estrogen test too and then and then potentially add in something like dim

that that usually will help with with estrogen uh dominance

okay gotcha cool

and i think another good thing to add in too for women because a lot of women lose their menstrual cycle

if they go a long period of time and they don't have it because there's some women that go

long time without having it um they should look into into getting a vaginal ultrasound.

Okay, gotcha. What about progesterone, I guess? Where would you want to, what range would you want to see that in if someone was just not on prep?

I would say, again, like based upon like where they're,

where their estradiol is, like, say if it's at, they're on the higher side, um,

somewhere around like 1.2 or in that range. Okay, okay, gotcha.
Cool. All right, let's just ask this last question really really quickly because we're about out of time but um

tas did hasan wants to he really want to ask you some questions about pctt protocol and who would need it and who doesn't so i guess just going over male pct protocol

recommendations i think the first thing you're going to ask someone like is is fertility a priority at all uh-huh right so

if

If fertility is the most important thing with that,

number one, when would they be looking to maybe potentially consider having a kid if it wasn't for like four or five years?

The most important thing is just that they're periodically re-stimulating the gonads, your testicles, which you could do with ACG at a small dose alongside your cyclerate.

Yep, exactly, is periodically adding that in. Now, when the time comes when you do actually want to say, all right, like I want to try to have a kid suit, or like this year,

then you want to start focusing on restimulating the signaling going from the brain to the hypothalamus and pituitary, which are your like

are in the brain. They're almost like your quarterback to your hormones.
So then you would want to look to come off of, have a period of time that you actually do come off of testosterone.

And that's when you would want to start incorporating like CERNs, like Clomid or endoclomaphene. You would take that with HCG

and HMG. HMG.
They're essentially just exogenous LH and FSH.

So those two are working on your testicles. They're re-stimulating the testicles.
And then the SEM is working more in the brainware to re-stimulate the signaling.

So they're communicating with each other. Yep.
Essentially. So you're re-stimulating that access.

And then the first thing that you would look to start to restore on its own is your own, your LH and FSH.

Because of course, like if you do blood work, anytime you're on, you're going to see your LH and FSH is tanked.

Once you see that your LH and FSH is in a good place,

that's when you would go ahead and consider then doing like a semen analysis.

And then you would check that. And I'll tell you, like, if I would have known about this, like when I started bodybuilding, but you can get your sperm banked.
too for super, super cheap.

So like for guys that are just like getting into this,

it's something to definitely consider because for under, for under like 700 bucks, you can do

it's a semen analysis that you do where it checks your, you know, your, your sperm, your motility, the health of it.

You have to do an STD test too, because to freeze your sperm, you obviously can't have STDs. So, you do want to close.
And then they

bank your sperm. So, then if you go ahead and, you know, whatever it is you want to do, you'll have healthy swimmers on ice salt.

Cool. Okay.
Awesome. I kept you here for three hours.
So I ask every guest one last question at the end of every podcast that you might have heard before.

But if you were to disappear from the world tomorrow and you had one message you could send to the entire world today, what would the message be?

The message would be think about what your future self would want, because I feel like too many people are just focused on short-term gratification and don't think about the long-term.

And that's especially in what we do

in bodybuilding. And it happens with coaches too.

You know, you get so fixated on, you know, the short-term gratification and goal that it ends up taking away from the long-term goal. Yeah.

I don't want to say any personal coaches, but I have heard some women and female friends come up to me telling me that like, They didn't want to push too much more gear because they already noticed their voice getting lower.

And the coach was like, well, you're not running as many, as much as a lot of these other Olympians, and it's only this much longer. I've heard that a lot, honestly.
So, um,

yeah, and I mean, at the end of the day, coaching, a thing that people should always remember because I get this all the time.

I was just doing what my coach told me to do-like, remember something at the end of the day. Like, this is your body, your life.
You have one of those ever, you don't get one back.

So, anything that anybody tells you to do, you should always take that with a grain, uh, grain of salt.

If you are not comfortable with doing something or have any doubts or anything whatsoever, speak the fuck up.

Do not sit back and just keep your mouth shut and just be like, I'm just going to follow everything blindly.

Because a lot of times, a lot of these coaches, they don't have your long-term well-being at heart. It's whatever is going to give them, stroke their ego in the short term.

So like, you always have to keep that in mind in

the back of your head at all times.

That was awesome, brother. Yeah.

We could fucking talk for days, man.

Absolutely, man. That was awesome.
Thank you. Do you have any

platform, anything you would want to promote?

Where can people find you on Instagram? I think it's painfully obvious.

Dom Super Sliced. That name just kind of stuck with me.

I've heard about you for years because of your name. It's just so easy to remember.
I know.

I tried changing it like four years ago and like everyone started freaking out. So I'm like, oh,

that's how people know me. I even walked into like a super professional business meeting one time to meet with an investor.
And this guy looks over. He's like, oh, there's Dom Super Sliced.
I'm like,

I tell you, I'm like, my name is not Super Sliced. It was embarrassing, but it's sick, bro.
It's fucking sick. Yeah.
No, I kind of got that when I was competing because that was the

one I was kind of. Oh, I saw that picture, bro.
It was fucking nuts. The picture I posted for a QA.

Oh, yeah. Dude, believe it or not, that was after I was done.
That was like two years ago, just by going on a regular, like, just diet phase. Jesus Christ, what the fuck? Yeah.

You look like you would have gotten first on stage. The fucking nutty conditioning.
You should compete this and that, but I made a decision like years ago

that I was prepping so many people that it was getting to the point where,

you know, my mind had to be focused on them.

And like bodybuilding is a selfish sport. There's no way to cut it.
Like to be successful, you got to be a little selfish.

So, you know, I had to make a decision and I knew that I was a far better coach than I was like an athlete that, yeah, like, you know,

even like the highest my potential, I wouldn't have done anything like where would have been like placing top 10 at the Olympia. So, you know, not without doing serious damage to my health.

So I kind of had to make that decision.

Well, I appreciate you for coming on, man. This was awesome.
And

I don't really remember the last person who shared this much value, maybe Chris, but it was pretty crazy. So

thank you so much. Absolutely.
I know we'll definitely keep in touch. And dude, you should definitely come out here to Vegas.
Oh, I'd love to. Twist my arm.

I'm telling you. What part of California do you live in? I'm in LA, typical Leno.
Yeah, that's where my

couple years.

But yeah, no, you would like it here. You would fit in for sure.
Thanks, brother. All right, cool.
Well, I'll catch you sometime soon.

Uh, let me know if you need anything, by the way, anything at all.

Absolutely, I will. We'll definitely keep in touch.

All right, sounds good, and you have a good night later, brother. You too, get some food and get some rest.
We'll do, man.