480 | Update: Healthiest Year Ever | Dean Turner

0:00Hello and welcome to Choose a Fi. Today on the show we have a fun one for a long time now. I've actually wanted to change up the format of the podcast a little bit. And this episode is the first foray into that. You hopefully can expect actually more episodes in the future. So not just the one a week. And many of them will be much more timely. So I'm just sitting down to record. And we basically publish this thing more or less right away where we have a whole host of things, right? It could be a specific update episode on something I've talked about in the past or just one particular segment with someone talking about, I don't know, e-bikes or a five projection software, or maybe another episode on follow-up questions to an episode we did like with social security or an episode with Sean Mullaney about taking your money out before 59 and a half.

0:51So I think this is really going to add to the Choose a Value podcast significantly. And I also honestly think publishing this particular episode will emboldend me to do a lot more of these episodes where I just sit down, record, and publish a shorter episode on a random Friday. So definitely stay tuned. Today's update is actually on health and fitness. And this is part one of hopefully many more on this particular topic, which I think is really critical to all of us, not only pursuing five, but just anyone trying to live a better life. And that's really one of the secret sauces behind what we're doing here.

1:26We're not just working on money. We're working on living a better life. So I had mentioned a while back after having Dominic Cortuccio on the podcast in episode 419, where he talked about your bold move for 2023, that 2023 was going to be my healthiest year ever. And it's been a long, winding journey, and I've learned a lot of things. And I really learned a lot about fitness, muscle building, and strength building. And even though for years I was a member of CrossFit and I've been healthy for probably the better part of a decade now and quite fit, this has, I think, unquestionably been my fittest year ever.

2:01And I actually have my friend and personal trainer, Dean Turner here to join me to talk about what we've done together, building strength and muscle. And we'll maybe dive into some aspects of health and nutrition outside of that, but that certainly will be in parts two and beyond. So I think you're going to enjoy this. And with that, welcome to Choose How Thigh.

2:29Dean, thank you so much for being here. This is going to be fun. Brad, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Yeah. So, okay. Like I set up on the front side, I talked about my bold move being my healthiest year ever. And that is a large undertaking, to put it mildly. and it could have went any which way. And I think I thought I would, I would kind of dabble. And in fairness, I, I did dabble a little bit. I think you can probably dig up dozens of Twitter DMS for me about Dean. I'm going to my DNS doctor today, or I have this my official release thing going on, whatever it is just, you know, I'm kind of making it up now, but I have been dabbling, But what's been ever present for 2023 and now into 2024 is you and the training regimen that you've had me on.

3:20And I actually found you on Twitter. So I was just randomly, like I normally do, kind of just lurking on Twitter. I don't post too often, probably, unfortunately. But I was lurking. You used to. Yeah, there was a time. I need to get back into it. I think my lurking days are just, it's too much fun. But I found you and I found a couple of other guys who obviously there are lots of fitness people on Twitter and you can kind of go down rabbit holes. But I found this group of guys who were talking about muscle building and strength building in a really different way. And there was something about it that just intrigued me.

4:00It seemed like, and I don't mean it exactly this way, but it almost seemed like the 80-20 analysis of muscle and strength building. And that's not to say it's suboptimal because I think you would probably argue and I would argue it's the most optimal way to build muscle. But I viewed it as that from a quick glance as, oh, wow, you mean most people are going to the gym and just killing themselves. They're working nonstop for 90 minutes, never taking a second. Whereas what your gym experience is, is basically a long walk punctuated by maybe 15 minutes of exercise. Pretty much. And that just intrigued me.

4:41And if anybody goes to your Twitter, which is at Dean T Training, and of course we'll have that in the show notes, they can see that your muscle building is going just okay. So you obviously have been doing pretty well for yourself. And yeah, this just intrigued me. So I'm going to throw it to you. Just give me a high-level overview. give the audience a high level overview of what we're doing together. So I feel like the one thing that we've done really, really well is consistency, right? Consistency and adherence are probably at the top of like the food chain in terms of things that you need to get right.

5:14Another thing that we're getting really right is kind of the style of training in accordance with your goal. So your goal is obviously to build muscle, you know, be fit in a general sense. And I feel like we've really kind of honed in on that from a training style perspective. You know, we take the rest between sets, right? Our exercise selection is really high quality. We take sets to the appropriate relative intensity, which is usually close in proximity to failure. We train each body part relatively frequently, you know, usually twice per week on average, maybe not super directly, but at least indirectly.

5:47We get enough rest. We eat our protein. We eat enough calories. And voila, the magic kind of happens. So that's what we've done really, really well. There hasn't been a lot of pitfalls along the way. And I think it's because we've been really set up for success because the expectations weren't like overly lofty, which you talked about. People go in the gym, they kill themselves. They always think more, more, more. And I think one of the things that maybe drew you to me and draws people to me on Twitter is I'm telling people, whoa, chill out. You know, more is better to a point, right? But it's not, you don't want to just go in the gym, kill yourself.

6:21Recovery is a huge, huge, huge thing. So that's something you really need to hone in on if you're going to be successful, at least with muscle building, hypertrophy, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, that's kind of like the overview of what we've done really well. And like I said, no real pitfalls in the last year. So yeah, it's been amazing. It really has. And I think when I kind of said the 80-20 analysis, I think what I mean is it just seems like a smarter approach. And I think that's what intrigued me. I'm always looking for almost like Phi. Phi is like, to me, a superpower. It's like the secret to the universe and your training style seemed like a secret to the universe.

6:58And Dean, I actually sent you this article probably about a month ago. This was men's health, which for a lot of people, that's kind of like one of the preeminent sources of information for fitness, which for better or for worse. And they had an article called the new science of muscle. And interestingly, it was honestly, it was like reading your Twitter. It was as if they went to your Twitter account and just highlighted the absolute best of the best. And it was really some things that a lot of people don't think about. It was about giving yourself a rest. And I think that's one of the hallmarks of the training that we're doing is when I finish a set.

7:36And like you said, these sets are intense. They're not just like, oh, I'm stopping at a number, right? I think so many people go in and they just randomly pick a weight. They randomly say in their hey, I'm going to do 12 reps. And you get to the end of the 12 reps and they just stop. And there's no rhyme or reason to that. It's not like anything happened at the end of the 12th rep to make them stop. They could have maybe done 15. They could have maybe done 25, but they just stopped because that's the number. And I think what we've done is say, you have to get pretty darn close to failure on each set.

8:10And now naturally, like you caveated certainly is, it depends on your goals. It depends on where you are in your training, of course. But for at least the last six months, I've been getting pretty close to technical failure. So basically I stop when my last rep has slowed down to a point where I cannot adequately complete the next repetition with perfect or pristine, as you'd call it, form, to quote Dean. So that last rep, I mean, it's very obvious, Dean, when I stop my set, I'm at the end. I'm basically at, as we call it, zero reps in reserve. And then you have to rest. I mean, there was no world where you can come back and do another set 30 seconds later.

8:54It's impossible. So I literally turn my clock on my phone, set a timer to count up. And when I get to three minutes, that's the absolute bare minimum. Then I start figuring out, do I want to go back and do my next set or do I need a little more rest? Right. And I want you to talk about that in a minute, but just real quick from this men's health thing. So it's give yourself a rest. They say two to three minutes. I think we say three minutes minimum. Embrace machines. Now, this is really surprising for a lot of people who have heard barbell, barbell, barbell. And another caveat is to say, you and I are not arguing that every other style of fitness is bad.

9:31Like we're not wading into any of these religious wars of fitness or nutrition or anything, not at all. We're just saying this type of training works exceptionally well for us and what our goals are. So clearly barbells are fantastic, but to build precise muscle and target those precise muscles using the machines that are built to specifically target that muscle makes a whole lot of sense, right? So that was kind of cool. And then they talk about essentially toning down the volume, which I think is kind of another way of saying like, you need to be really judicious with what you're doing. It's not just going in there and just working like a madman for an hour, hour and a half and stopping.

10:12And because you got sweaty, you think you did something positive for yourself. So it was really cool to see that men's health article. I think that probably opened a lot of eyes. And yeah, I want to throw it over to you to talk about some of those things. So the rest, the machines, I guess those two things specifically, because those are kind of counter to what a lot of people think and believe. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with the men's health article you sent me, it's definitely interesting that that stuff is kind of finally hitting the mainstream now. And I think it's because the mainstream is playing a little bit of catch up.

10:43You know, people get rooted in and get trapped in dogma. Right. This is an exercise based field. OK, it's one flawed theory after another. So basically you have researchers, you'll have bros in the gym, you'll have fitness coaches like myself, and they'll have certain hypotheses about what builds muscle or what builds strength or whatever. right and then they'll go in the gym or the lab or whatever and they'll test that and then over and over and over again they kind of find out what actually works what actually doesn't work and then it takes a little bit of time when one of those theories gets debunked for it actually to get into the mainstream so it was thought for a long time that shorter rest periods were more advantageous for hypertrophy for example as you kind of touched on but the researchers really thought that was due to metabolic stress so they basically thought that metabolite summation which is basically like that burning sensation you get when you're training and kind of the pump that it's usually accompanied by, that that was a direct influence that had a direct influence on muscle growth.

11:40But really over time, they kind of found out, hey, that's not actually the case. It's correlative. So it's correlation versus causation, classic, but it doesn't actually cause muscle growth directly. So it's come out in the research. It's become more and more evident over time that the primary driver of hypertrophy is mechanical tension. It's really the only known driver in all of the literature at this point. Everything else, again, is just at best loosely correlative. So all our focus with the goal being hypertrophy, the primary goal being hypertrophy, is centered around how can we evoke sufficient mechanical tension in the target musculature.

12:13And that's where it comes to machines and where it comes to rest times and all that stuff. So with the machines, the way that I always kind of tell people this compared to barbells for hypertrophy. And again, like you said, like the caveat you said, we're not waging a religious war here against the barbell zeller, whatever. But with machines, right, they're very specific to the tasks that we're trying to accomplish, tasks that we're trying to do, which is, again, evoke sufficient mechanical tension and target musculature. So for example, if you were to compare like a flat barbell bench press with a flat machine press, right, flat barbell bench press has a higher coordination demand, it has less external stability, you're probably more reliant on some ancillary musculature.

12:56Whereas with the flat machine press, you know, lower coordination demand, higher external stability, obviously, it moves in a fixed pattern, lower reliance on ancillary musculature. So what happens is when you go to produce any kind of force, right, or do any movement in your everyday life, you get a signal from the brain. So a signal from the motor cortex. And if you just think of it in units, right, so like you get a signal the size of 100 units. When that 100 units gets sent down to the working muscle or to the working muscles that are going to be doing the movement, doing the exercise, with a barbell bench press, because there's a higher coordination demand, there's a higher reliance on ancillary musculature, lower external stability, which means you have to internally stabilize, you might only get of those 100 available units, 70 of them might go to the target musculature.

13:43Whereas with the flat machine press because of the lower reliance on ancillary musculature, the lower coordination demand, the higher external stability that's present, you might get 90 or 95 of those units, right? So you're going to evoke more mechanical tension, right? You're going to get a sufficient mechanical tension stimulus in the target musculature in a more efficient and effective manner. And all in all, it's just going to go better for the goal. It's more in line with the goal. And then when you talk about the rest times, right, if you don't allow for appropriate time between sets. So it's funny, you mentioned there's no universe where you could do a set and then do another one 30 seconds later.

14:18Well, Brad, there is a universe where you could do that, but the next set wouldn't be very productive, right? Right. I do one round. Yeah, exactly. The reason it wouldn't be very productive is because you have two forms of fatigue. You have peripheral fatigue and central nervous system fatigue around. And you can, this is very consistent in the literature when you kind of split up the studies that show 90 seconds rest or less, and then the two minutes or more studies. Basically, there's something that happens at about the 90 to 122nd-ish mark, where, so like I talked about with the metabolites earlier, there's a lot of metabolite clearing.

14:50So that kind of burning sensation, the pump that you get from an initial set, it kind of dies down a little bit. And the only real lasting fatigue after that, at least in the near term, is central nervous system fatigue. And that will kind of start to wane as the minutes go on. So once the CNS fatigue dissipates. And once the metabolites clear, and some of that peripheral fatigue goes by the wayside, you're kind of ready to do the next set again. And it will be as efficient and effective as it can be, given that some fatigue is still present, though you've allowed it to dissipate to the necessary extent.

15:22It's important to note, you know, piggybacking here, basically, the first set you do is the most productive set you're going to do for the day. Because after that, fatigue sets in and each set after is just marginally less productive. And then you get to the point where there's probably so much fatigue accrued that any further sets that you do aren't really going to do a whole bunch other than add more fatigue that's going to take you longer to recover before the next session. So that's where the kind of the total volume, we need to limit that in a way because when you go to build a great physique or even go to enhance your strength, nobody builds a great physique in one session, right?

15:57Nobody gets stronger in one session. You get stronger when you do successive, really solid training sessions, many in a row for weeks, months, years, decades. That's how you get a lot bigger. That's how you get a lot stronger. So with one session, we just want to do enough to evoke, you know, if our goal is hypertrophy, evoke sufficient mechanical tension. And then it's like, get out before we induce too much muscle damage, too much fatigue, that's going to take time to clear out before we can put together another productive training about two or three days or four days later or whatever. So that's kind of the general gist of what we do.

16:29I know I got a little bit technical there. Hopefully I didn't lose your audience. No, you know, had to answer that question in full. But men's health has seemingly finally picked up on what some of us who are really, you know, in this niche, you know, really dedicated to it because hypertrophy is just basically my, my lone specialty in this niche. You know, I know some other things, but that's my major specialty. And it's good that men's health, you know, a big publication, like you said, for better or for worse, is picking up on this so that the masses can get quality information and they're not being able to miss info anymore with like the short rest times and only barbells all the time and all that.

17:03Yeah, I love it. Thanks for listening to Chooseify and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Chooseify is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at chooseify.com slash cards. I keep this page constantly updated, so it should always be the top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support. So right, hypertrophy for people who aren't in the know, that's essentially muscle building, muscle growth. So that's just a very fancy way of saying that. Nothing more, nothing less. One other thing that we do is basically, I'm working out four times a week.

17:41So I'm doing basically two upper body days and two lower body days. and I'm more or less taking a minimum of two full calendar days of rest between my upper body days and then between my lower body days. The way that it works out, I think it's two days rest and three days or something like that. But like 71 hours on one side and 94, 95 hours on the other side ish, assuming you work out at the same time, which isn't always the case, but basically three days, like a 24 hours time and then 96 on the other between uppers and uppers and lowers and lowers. Exactly. And I mean, there's never been a time where I've been sore or can't go or I'm just so beat down.

18:24I mean, obviously, there are times in a year where I'm a little bit sick or something. I mean, obviously, I'm a human being. Things happen. But it's never been like, this has just crushed me. Even though, I mean, Dean, one of the cool things, and that's why we're doing this update, is like, I mean, the amount of growth that I've seen, both in terms of strength, just pure strength, and just visually, at least my muscle growth has been crazy. Like when I went to, it was funny, when I went to FinCon, I saw my buddy, Nathan Barry, who's the founder of ConvertKit. And he looked at me, he's like, have you always looked like this?

19:01And I'm like, wow, that's a pretty awesome compliment. So, you know, listen, obviously, I think most people, if they're honest with themselves in their heart of hearts, why a lot of people, most of us are doing at least some aspect of why we're exercising is we want to look good. We want to feel good about ourselves. And like, I don't think enough people are honest about that. I really don't. Right. I think it's because it's exceptionally difficult to outclass a lot of people to be in that top 10, top five, top 1%. And I feel like the moment that people struggle to attain that for like an extended a period of time, if it's, you know, they're trying for it for six months or a year, 18 months, and they just can't seem to get there, they're more likely to just like shift their mindset and be like, Oh, I'm actually not working out for that.

19:43I'm only working out for like general health. And it's like, come on, like even athletes that like their number one job is just to perform, right? That's their goal. Patrick Mahomes, he goes out on the football field, doesn't really actually, it's funny, there was a picture of him surfacing on the internet recently in the locker room shirtless. And people were like, he has a dad body back in the world. And it's like, yeah, well, performance and aesthetics don't always go hand in hand. But point being, even athletes, right? Their number one goal is just performance. When Mahomes goes out, he wants to perform.

20:10When LeBron James goes out, he wants to perform. When Mike Trout goes out, he wants to perform. Even they still probably want to look good, right? And somewhat in their training, they're like, yo, like, I'm doing all this hard work. Like, I want to be looking better than most of the people around me. You know what I mean? I want it to look like I work out. I think everybody pretty much wants that in a way. You know, for some people like myself, that's pretty much one of the only reasons I train, like, obviously I want to, you know, longevity matters to me and all that too. And that's something I've put more of a priority, more of an emphasis on recently, but above all, like, Hey, look, I work out and I bust my tail to look good.

20:44Right. And that's a very important thing. I think for most people, if they're being honest, they indeed are working up. If not primarily for that reason, it's a good percent of the reason. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think just one of the hallmarks of a clear thinkers, just like being honest with yourself. And Dean, honestly, like, I think it feels a little like skeezy or I don't know, like for lack of a better phrase, it just, it feels weird to say that, but it, but it shouldn't like, I mean, listen, we all want to be healthy and it's perfectly fine. And I think another aspect of health is, I mean, let's be clear.

21:14Like I'm not like a young guy anymore. Like I'm, I'm 44 years old. I'm going to be 45 in a couple of months, which is still hard for me to believe. I mean, we started this thing. Like when I started choose to buy, it wasn't that far in the distance. I was like 35, you know, and like, obviously years go by, but I think there's like a very natural, there's something called sarcopenia, right? Which is essentially age-related muscle loss. And it's just like a verifiable fact of life that unless you're doing things to reverse this or halt it at the minimum, though I think reversing and halting go hand in hand, you're going to lose X percent of your muscle every single year after a certain year.

21:52And Dean, you can fill in the blanks. I think it's something like 35. It's pretty young, right? Yeah, it might start at 3540. There's a genetic component to it. But you're absolutely on point with that one sarcopenia that will set in if you do not regularly do weight bearing activities, basically is what you need. So yeah, even if you put the vanity to the side, like just for longevity purposes for general health, like doing some resistance training. And this isn't one of those things where I feel like people will be like, oh, he's, he's someone who he resistance trained. So he's biased towards that, that work.

22:23Look, you don't have to do the exact style that I do, but I would go as far as to say that probably everybody on the planet that has the ability to, um, that's healthy enough to, and has access to the necessary equipment should be resistance training at least a couple times a week. It doesn't need to be anything crazy. It doesn't need to be four or five, six hours, but hey, two, three, 20, 30 minute sessions, that can really, really do a lot of damage in a good way for you on the long term, as far as longevity, general health, staving off sarcopenia goes and all that. That's really important. It's so important.

22:57And I think this is something that Dr. Peter Atiyah talks about all the time. He has his, I think the most recent incarnation of it is the centenarian decathlon, or you might call it the centenarian Olympics. It's essentially like you keep saying the word longevity. It's thinking about, okay, I understand I have a lifespan, which is how long I'm going to live, but how can I increase my health span? And I think this is something I've focused on with this healthiest year ever. And it's understanding like, look, this sarcopenia is a biological fact, all right? And I don't want to be 70 years old and not be able to lift a carry-on bag into the overhead compartment, right?

23:37Because what percentage of 70 year olds can't put a bag in the overhead compartment. It's got to be significant. Plenty. Yeah, there's plenty. I don't know the percentage, but there's plenty. And it extends even further than that. A lot of older people, when you know, they get the 70, 75, 80, they experience bad falls kind of regularly. And that can legitimately be, you know, it might not kill you right then and there, but that can basically be a death sentence in a way, because then you become really immobile. You know, you can't move at all, can't get any steps. And then it's like, it's just like a domino effect.

24:05And a lot of that is due to the fact that they don't do any weight bearing activities, which is not a good thing. It's funny. I had a guy who was at the time, he was the oldest guy that I'd ever trained. And he came in, this was an in-person client. And he actually didn't even end up becoming a client of mine. This was just a free trial to see if he was going to sign up, which the gym offered at the time. And I happened to be the guy slated for him. So the 75 year old comes in and I had him do box squats. I don't even think I handed him, I think it was like an 18 inch box, maybe 20 inch box. So he wasn't squatting down very far.