E095 - Build an AESTHETIC Physique in 90 Days (Complete Transformation) | Greg O'Gallagher

0:00Okay, I want to put together my fitness approach to the world. People wanted to look like movie stars. How do you look like a movie star without living in the gym and eating out of Tupperware? And so I realized like the void in the market was that... Fitness YouTuber, Keno Buddy, a guy called Greg O 'Gallagher. Greg O 'Gallagher. Greg O 'Gallagher. Let's see, let's Google him. Oh, yeah. This dude looks like he could bench press my entire apartment. Hey, if you want to look really, really good, we got to get you strong. We got to increase your incline bench, your weighted pull-ups. We got to build up your strength.

0:28If you get stronger, you're going to build that muscle density. people would look at me or you and just assume oh well to be able to achieve that it means i have to go to the gym every day i probably have to spend two hours in the gym and life is just going to suck right which in reality that's not the truth no my brand and my philosophy looking like a movie star training three days a week not having to like suffer being able to eat like a king and being strong what have you learned the most from starting a supplement company um now before we jump into today's episode, I just want to mention that this podcast is brought to you by me and everything that I've built to help you guys level up.

1:05If you want to transform your physique, build muscle, lose body fat, build strength, then you have the thirst app. This has everything inside that you could possibly need to get yourself in shape to hold yourself accountable as well. I also have the digital playbook, which is a step-by-step guide to help you guys build a following, monetize the following, and also build a strong personal brand. This is everything which I have done over the past nearly 10 years to allow myself to live a life of financial freedom and also geographical freedom. I can basically do whatever I want. Life is good. And I also have my newsletter, which has been revamped, where I'll share exclusive podcast insights, my raw thoughts on business, fitness, and much, much more.

1:46So if you're interested about any of those, check out the description, you'll find the links to all of them. Let's get cracking with the episode. What's up, guys? And welcome back to First Things Thirst. We are in Miami, and we're with the one and only grego gallagher aka kino body how you doing dude i'm doing great man good to see you again you too yeah last time we saw each other was randomly in uh barcelona wasn't it yeah in barcelona with some with a little network group there that was sweet yeah you you're traveling quite a lot all the time a lot you know miami's my main base then in the summer i'll do a little little europe a little spain yeah you actually said in one of your videos i think you said you uh you see yourself moving to spain or doing like half the year yes the problem with spain is every time i go there like the spanish mindset is too chill way too like hey mañana mañana and they're all just having their siestas in the afternoon and every time i go there like the quality of life definitely goes up for sure but productivity goes down the number one thing i heard in spain it's like impossible impossible it cannot be done you know you book a yacht and then you it's at 2 p.m but then they need an extra hour and a half like everything is just they're on their own schedule yeah and they everybody is taking the day off on sunday and even in the afternoons people just like to close for a couple hours so yeah that's a little bit frustrating but maybe later on like when i've done the things which i've needed to do raising a family maybe i'll get like a home out there i think for sure yeah the dubai plus europe is like an epic combo yeah why do you like miami so much um it's amazing for my business like this amazing networking i love the weather the beach um great restaurants and i actually first came to miami when canada was in this non-stop two-year lockdown everything was shut down restaurants and like miami was wild open so i came to miami in 2021 and it was like uh paradise you couldn't go out to a dinner go to the gym you could barely leave your house in canada and i came to miami everyone was having having dinner i was like posting on my story people were like holy shit like it's so i have a soft spot to miami because like during the lockdown it was just wide open and then there's so much money coming to miami you know a lot of people are kind of migrating so i like it as a base and la is so far on the west coast so i kind of like like the the miami is well run yeah have you still got like your your home and your headquarters in I have a little bit of headquarters in Canada, but like, honestly, I'm pretty much only in Canada a couple months a year now.

4:18Yeah. I bet it's really damn cold in the winter. Oh my God, dude. It is freezing. Like it is. I love getting my steps in. I do a ton of steps every day. And like in Canada, it's like January, February. There's not enough clothes you can put on where you're good. Like it is that cold and it gets dark super early. You don't want to leave your house in Canada. When I was in, I was in, just before I moved to Miami, I was in Canada for like a month, two months. And I was like, I was like, what do I do here? Like it's freezing. I was playing call of duty at night for a couple hours. Yeah. Yeah. It's no, it's, it's not, Canada's is very, very, very cold.

4:55So how did you get into the fitness and everything? I want to know a little bit about your, your background. Yeah. It's probably a similar story to you, but like when I was a kid, I wanted to be big and strong. I wanted to work out. I had action figures. I'd watched the Van Damme movies and I was just so enthralled with strength and muscle and fitness. So I was doing like pushups as a six year, as a six year old. And my father got a weight set when I was like, I think I might've been 11, 11, 12 years old. He had a weight set and I couldn't wait to like curl this weight and I'd curled I'd curl a dumbbell and when you're 11 you don't really know what the pump is like when you're 10 11 you know what a pump is and so I'd curl it and I would swear I swear to god my arms got bigger yeah and so I was just hooked I loved so it was like a seed was planted so young and then at 13 I started to actually like follow like a workout program I'd follow like a workout program that I read online in a book and it was just like it was just kind of in my blood to train was it like an old school bodybuilding program you know what i i was kind of into a little bit of martial arts so i'd kind of read i'd do these programs that were kind of geared towards like martial artists and fighters i'd be doing more bodyweight training and some interval training when i was like an early teenager and then i kind of got more into like you know um bodybuilding and strength training and stuff like that yeah You must have started at like 14?

6:26No, for me, I think I was 16. Okay, nice. Because I was playing so much sport. Right. There just wasn't, first of all, it wasn't time. And I didn't have the energy to actually go lift weights. Yeah. Because I was practicing rugby every single day. And then on Saturday and Sunday, I would play the games. So Saturday, I would play for my school. Sunday, I would play for the club. So I was either like recovering or just didn't have the energy to go to the gym the first place so i remember always being i had the pace i had speed and i was always shredded but i didn't have the size oh wow and i was uh like a late developer because my my birthday is in august so i was the youngest of the year that makes a huge difference yeah so at one point i was like one of the best on the pitch and then as everybody started growing i wasn't growing so that was a disadvantage so i was getting knocked about all over the place and then rugby sucked for a couple you know what that happened to me with hockey i remember being like one of the top kids on my hockey team and then one year everyone had a growth spurt and i didn't yeah everyone hit puberty and i and i like it didn't hit yet and these guys were like six inches bigger than me and then i went from like just being the best to being middle of the pack which kind of sucks and uh and then i kind of fell in love with working out and martial arts was it ice hockey or ice hockey i was playing competitive ice hockey in canada but it was like i started young i was playing hockey at six and And then by like 12, 13, I stopped playing.

7:53Yeah. Okay. And then how did you kind of figure out what sort of approach in the gym was working best for you? Because I know you had the, was it the Kino approach or something like that? Yeah, the Kino approach I started to like put together when I was like 19, 20, 21. I tested a lot. So when I was 13, 14, I did some, you know, weight training, had a family friend that taught me some bodybuilding. Then when I did martial arts, I got really into body weight training. So I was doing like, you know, working up to doing one arm pushups, doing lots of chin ups, weighted chin ups. And so I got strong on body weight training.

8:31I think when I was 16, I was at my, we had a family summer house and I set up a pull-up bar between two trees. I'd get like a backpack. I'd get like bags of sand. I'd be doing weighted chin ups in the summer. And at one point I got up to doing, um, which was insanely hard, a one arm chin up. so I was like pretty advanced as a teenager and then I started to like get into like a little bit of bodybuilding I do some bodybuilding and I tried I did I ran a lot of different programs I did starting strength which when I was like 16 that was like one of the programs that everyone was doing starting strength we do squat bench dead three days a week I did that and funny enough like I got a lot stronger on my squats but my bench didn't get much stronger my physique didn't get much better um and then i i just tried many different programs i i did i was very drawn to athleticism as a teenager so i found myself doing kind of workouts designed for like football guys i was following a guy named joda franco i was following this coach um that trained you know boxers and mixed martial artists on strength and conditioning ross animate and then i got then when i turned 19 i kind of was like okay i want to put together my fitness approach to the world and like what like what is not out there that i want to create and so i realized like the missing the void in the market was that people wanted to look like movie stars how do you look like a movie star without living in the gym and eating out of tupperware and so my brand and my philosophy was focused on looking like a movie star training three days a week and then also not having to like suffer right be able to eat like a king and being strong and so that's kind of when i really focused on that angle.

10:11And I started playing around with intermittent fasting, helped me lean down. That became a huge part of my program. And for me, it was getting very clear on, hey, if you want to look really, really good, we got to get you strong. We got to get you strong. We got to increase your incline bench, your weighted pull-ups. We got to build up your strength. If you get stronger, you're going to build that muscle density. Yeah. And I think it's funny because still to this day, people would look at me or you and just assume oh well to be able to achieve that that means i have to go to the gym every day i probably have to spend two hours in the gym and i'm not allowed to eat things that i want to eat and life is just going to suck right which in reality that's not the truth no how often do you work out you do like four or five or now like i've been speaking to people about this and i reckon to maintain where i'm at now yeah i could probably get away with training three to four times a week yeah because i've done the hard work where i've built myself up i think that's probably the hardest because you have to be in some sort of a you know a calorie surplus for a very long period of time where we're talking about years not massive surplus but just like there needs to be enough food coming in to obviously add add some mass and you're like 210 yes so that well 94 kilograms or whatever yeah 94 yeah about i think that's about 210 yeah so that's the point where i like to basically stay at um Yeah, but now, just from the experience which I've gathered over the past 17, 18 years of training, it's like I know how hard to push myself.

11:40I know which exercises are going to be best for me to focus on a specific muscle group. And I know how to recover outside of the gym, what to eat. It's actually not that hard. I think the biggest things that set you back, for me in particular, is the alcohol number one. unfortunately like alcohol is like one of the biggest things which will disrupt my sleep my training session the next day and also just body composition i can be shredded on alcohol yeah but i will lose size yeah i used to be able to drink and i was fine i would hit prs i would get stuff done i would drink but i would still sleep a lot um but since i hit 30 i cannot drink anymore i cannot like i can have two two two maybe three and then it's then it's like hey this this workout is not happening yeah it's a shame because i like i like to be drunk let loose but like there's too much it's too much going on like for us to just feel sorry for ourselves in bed yeah no i i i but when i was 28 27 i could go and drink six margaritas one night wake up have some coffee fat hit it hit a workout and hit prs it was nuts yeah yeah the body after 30 doesn't process alcohol call the same way no it's it's much harder i noticed you don't have any tracking devices on you it's no ring no woo i have um i have an aura ring okay at my um at my apartment i just put it on when i go to sleep and so i do a little bit of the tracking and then i just like for like how many calories i'm burning each day i can just i can eyeball it i can just estimate really really well what about for those people who have never really done it before because it's probably safe to say that they are not going to be very good at eyeballing or even understanding what is it like they look at a place right food they won't know the protein carbs fats or total calories yeah so i like to have a framework for myself and my clients so if someone is not very good at eyeballing then you want to track the calories in the beginning so if you're you know having i do two meals a day and little snack some maybe a little extra fruit but you want to calculate your calories at first.

13:46And then once you've estimated it, my advice that doesn't fail is just eat the same thing every day. It's so much easier to get lean. If you find a meal you love, you know, you know, you like having steak, potatoes, and broccoli, just keep your diet as simple and streamlined as possible. The more you try and change things up and I'm going to have pasta this night and this thing of this, it just makes it more complex. So every single time I've gotten like hyper lean, I had ate the same thing. I may maybe rotated a couple different meals and just got chiseled. And so if you eat the same thing every day, you don't have to really use a calorie tracker.

14:21You know, I actually did track my calories for three years straight. I use an app to track my calories and it just, it became almost like a crutch. And I just preferred to just not think, you know, like it gets to the point where you're like these potatoes are 400 grand or 420 grams and I need to do 400 something slice off a little bit of a potato like it just it gets too neurotic yeah and it's and like if you eyeball it you know you can just get close enough and it it works really well yeah I I think if if especially if somebody is struggling like if they come to me and they're like Mike no matter what I do I can't lose this extra bit of body fat first thing I'd say is well okay tell me your numbers and they're like oh well I don't track I'm like well yeah okay well at least put in a bit of effort for it doesn't have to be forever but just a couple of weeks so that you first of all understand it a little bit more and you're more than likely going to adhere to some sort of plan but i do the same thing as you when i'm in dubai where i spend the majority of my time i will have my favorite meals which i just have on rotation smart i mix it up a little bit obviously to add a bit of variety but there's probably like five to ten of my favorite dishes which i'll just get delivered to me awesome and then i have uh this like spreadsheet which i made for myself so i put the numbers in each uh meal yeah and then i as the day goes down i do a drop um drop down menu just tap them all and then i can see the totals for each day so i'm not like trying to hit an exact number but it's just to it's more so for me hitting the protein right because you don't accidentally hit like 200 grams of protein like i've got to make sure that i'm probably eating at least like four meals in order to do that right yeah i'm wondering how you do it with two um so i don't go crazy high in protein i do about 150 grams of protein per day um and so my first meal usually i'll have a big serving of greek yogurt i'll put in my collagen protein i'll mix that up that's like 50 grams plus i'll have sliced banana you know an extra snack and so that's usually 50 grams.

16:25And then for dinner, I'll do a pound, like 16 ounces of 400, 450 grams of steak and some potatoes and veggies. And so the big feast for me is like a hundred grams. And my first meal is like usually 40, 50. So I've played around with different protein levels and I like more of that moderate protein, like 0.82 grams per pound, or, you know, that might be, you know, I don't know kilo conversion. So I don't, I don't go crazy high. I do like moderate protein. Yeah. I think there's been more studies coming out that the need for such a high amount of protein is unnecessary. Yeah. Yeah. The, the research I've seen is pretty much like, you know, a gram per pound of body weight, you know, was usually the standard.

17:11Some people would go a lot higher, but 0.82 grams, you're pretty much getting, you know, everything you need. If you want to go a bit higher you can but um when you're keeping your calories low the challenge is you know if you get go too high in protein then you got to cut your carbs and fats down and i i definitely find that um when i cut my carbs and fats i i feel it so i like to kind of i like to go just go more balanced for me yeah and how did you uh come onto the scene back in the day on social media because i remember the first few videos that i would see of you was like these kind of dramatic edits the view and the big house like your movie trailer style ones yeah so i was like doing blogging i was blogging workout articles when i was 19 and then i started to put some videos on youtube teaching you know ab workout intermittent fasting you know i'd be teaching different different things i'd almost be documenting what i was doing and my results and then around 22 23 i got a good rhythm on on youtube i was just i was just doing lots of teaching fasting reverse pyramid training and then and then i was building this audience and i remember when i was 24 um i had thousands of people doing my greek god my warrior shred program it was really building and i was getting all these new sort of eyeballs and i wanted to create a video where if someone just saw this one video this three minute video they understood my approach to fitness which was very against the grain.

18:42And so I, I put together a script going through like a monologue of my, of, of the way I train. I train three days a week, um, for, you know, amazing recovery. I fast every day. This increases fat mobilization. And I would, I would go through sort of my routine and, um, you know, I always do the heaviest set first and I put together this monologue and, and I kind of, I went like a little bit, like I leaned into it with the mansion and Lamborghini and that was 2015. And it just hit, it hit the algo and it hit millions of views. And, um, and then my sales skyrocketed, like the, the business just skyrocketed.

19:22And we actually had a guy on my team. Um, and I told him run this video as an ad on YouTube and we ran it as an ad on YouTube. And at the time, like advertising on YouTube was hype. yeah it was just me and ty lopez yeah and uh because i saw a tie with these ads i'm like i should probably try this and just running that one ad no like targeting just running it to everyone um got a really strong return and it was like it was just there was one point where like you know you're just getting hit with the bruce wayne ad yeah doesn't matter who you are like if you're if you're 70 years old or 10 years old you're getting the bruce wayne yeah i think you you always seem to be quite naturally good at marketing yourself yeah yeah where's that come from it's um it's you know i'm i was always very passionate about movies i have a very infectious personality if i like something i want to share it like i have three brothers and so when i was getting into like working out i would like want to work out with my brothers i want to share if i'm liking something i want to share something um and then for me marketing has always has just been doing exactly what would work on myself.

20:35What would get me to be excited about something? And so I almost just focus on just marketing to myself and then things just kind of fall into place. Do your brothers also like to work out? I don't think I've seen them before. No, they're pretty low key, but yes. So my oldest brother kind of, he works out. He's not like crazy consistent, but he works out. um my middle brother who's younger than me bryden um he's he's really into the health and fitness and he's in biotech and he's he's pretty serious about training and then my youngest brother um was sort of kind of on and off i think when he was he used to be a bit more overweight and then when he was like 16 he was like he asked me he's like hey i want to get fit you know which was like i was all it was very adorable you know he's you know my younger brother was like wanted to get in shape and it's it's kind of it takes some vulnerability to to ask for help especially from my brother you know so um i got him fasting i got him to i told him exactly what to do and and the thing is is like the best coaching especially if someone's younger is tell them as little as possible to get a result yeah so i would literally just tell him okay just fast till lunch eat this for lunch have whatever the homemade cooking is for dinner and then you can have one ice cream bar as a dessert.

21:56So, cause he liked, you know, he liked treats. And so he did that. He lost a pound every, every week. He was going from zero chin-ups to one to 12 chin-ups. But then he kind of was falling off and now he's great. Now he's getting like really in shape. And the cool thing I've noticed is that there's, there's people that have genetics, which would probably be like me and you, or when we start training, we see results really fast. Like we gain strength, the muscle comes on. there's some people where it's a slower start but then after a couple years of consistency their physique really starts to pop so don't like you know i have like advice for a lot of people it's like don't be discouraged that the results don't come super fast sometimes it's just like it takes a little bit more time for someone else but now my younger brother's like pretty damn jacked yeah i remember there'd be a lot of people who come up to me and they would not be in great shape yeah i'd be like right okay this is going to take some time like you can't just transform yourself in like six to twelve weeks like this is probably going to take like a year or two years and that can be quite daunting for some of them because most people really they just want fast results right but if they've got themselves into a situation where the starting body composition is pretty terrible.

23:11It's, uh, yeah, it's more of a daunting task to think about the journey ahead. And that's why it's important to enjoy it as much as you possibly can do. Yeah. You got to love, you got to love the process. And I mean, even when I was like, I started lifting at 13 when I was, you know, 18, 19, I actually was more chest dominant, crazy enough. My shoulders were never really popped. And then, you know, over a long enough timeframe, you keep putting the stimulus, keep putting the stimulus, your body will start to like transform so it's um it's patience you know is really really powerful and so there's like a there's a whole you know thing where even even like as a natural your your genetic peak some people can hit their genetic peak faster someone else it could take them 15 years to get to get to their genetic peak i'm not much different than when i was you know 24 27 um but some people you know it takes them takes them shorter faster yeah and you've you've stayed natural you've not been tempted to go down the never i've never been tempted when i was um 18 i hit like a 300 pound bench i was 180 pounds and and at 19 i just didn't care about getting bigger you know i had the size i wanted it was always about being lean being chiseled so my goal the whole time was almost being like 170, 175 and very, very lean.

24:33I didn't want to get like that massive, that massive look. Yeah. And I think one of the main reasons why some guys want to get that massive look is because they think it's going to help them get the chicks. Yeah. Realistically, chicks don't really care about you being massive. No. As long as you got some sort of a resemblance of an athletic physique, like that's, that's enough. Then you can start working on other areas of your life. yeah you don't need to be as big as as a lot of people think so um doing the the gear going on anabolics doesn't really doesn't really help that much you know and and a lot of guys get like brutal side effects of losing hair getting acne getting pimples it can completely down regulate fertility where you know i've seen people that have that have done a lot of anabolics and they can't their they're infertile yeah they can't they can't um have kids and so that's like like opposite of what most people would want i think it's a lot more accepted now particularly on social media the thing that concerns me is just the age at which some of these guys are hopping on stuff right they're in their late teens early 20s and just frustrated they're not as big as the guys who are in their 30s and they're literally willing to do anything sacrifice their lifespan in order to just you know pack on the pounds yeah it's it's uh that's like a very i mean there are people that do it when they're 16 i think it's um i think there's people like in high school that are going and getting it and it's just like it's not good to mess with your body at that point yeah you've done a lot of research into optimizing your test levels yeah yeah what are some of the things which people can do yeah so um i mean the craziest thing right now is that testosterone levels have dropped a ton so you know parents generation in the 70s and 80s the average man had 700 testosterone nanograms per deciliter and so now the average is 400 to 500 for you know a 25 35 year old so it's dropped about 40 percent um so the number one thing for having higher testosterone is sleep 70 of your testosterone is produced during sleep and that's usually the the deep sleep stage which happens earlier in the night and so having the sleep dialed where you're falling you know you're getting into a deep sleep the room's cold blackout getting your eight hours is going to be like the biggest foundational step um second one is is really body fat so every inch your waist is bigger um your testosterone levels go down so the bigger your waist is the lower testosterone that you have when you have excess body fat you know we hear about all these um all these microplastics all these hormone disruptors, they actively get stored in fat tissue.

27:27And when you have more body fat, you increase the conversion of testosterone to estrogen. So being lean and getting good sleep is really two of the most important. Lifting weights, getting steps, getting outside, getting sunlight, managing your cortisol. I mean, you can do blood work and you see your cortisol levels. So if your cortisol levels are too high, testosterone levels will dip. If you have too much inflammation, testosterone levels will dip. To actually have very high healthy testosterone levels, you got to be pretty healthy. It's hard to have health issues and things going on and high stress and inflammation while producing a good amount of testosterone.

28:04So you just need to be healthy and you want to eat balanced. So, I mean, you see a lot of people that go super low fat. We know that's not great for testosterone. Going super keto can raise your sex hormone binding globulin, which can bind to your testosterone so you have less free. So kind of like what I tell people, it's kind of like grandma's cooking, like just a balance of veggies and lean meat and potatoes. That kind of diet is going to be most conducive for testosterone. And then as far as the training is heavy lifting, weights are great. Too much exercise though can actually lower testosterone.

28:46So, I mean, I had a period when I was training a lot and I was lifting weights all the time. I was doing lots of cardio and I never felt my peak. So when you train a little bit less, you take a couple more rest days, you do, you know, you know, maybe three days, heavy weights, you get a better, a better increase in testosterone. And then really, as far as supplementation, supplementation can be very, very powerful. There's three minerals that are really vital in testosterone production zinc and magnesium are really important and for athletes you're training you're sweating even if you were to have sex you're depleting these minerals so zinc and magnesium are really important and a lot of i think 40 of the population just isn't getting i think 70 actually 70 of the population isn't getting enough magnesium and and like a big chunk of them are just downright deficient so zinc magnesium um boron actually is really powerful because even if someone has 600 total testosterone, which is actually pretty good, people's free testosterone has also been dropping, right?

29:50So you might have healthy testosterone, but because of all the hormone disruptors, all the stress on your liver from different microplastics, from alcohol, if you drink alcohol, you put stress on your liver and then your sex hormone binding globulin raises up and that binds and locks up your testosterone. so even if you have pretty good um total um boron's very good at at um lowering sex hormone binding globulin it also is anti-estrogenic and then those are like the three kind of go-to and then if someone wants to go even further tongatoli is really powerful at increasing testosterone it can do it can increase testosterone by 100 points just tongatoli um and then and then forscalize another um good herb for increasing testosterone yeah it's funny you mentioned about the training because i have my uh my fitness app and the maximum number of days that i recommend people doing is five yeah like five is the peak amount you can do for any split that you choose yeah seven is crazy i have so many people say well where's the what where's the six day split where's the seven day split i'm like look if you have the energy to do that then you're probably not going to be training hard enough during your sessions right the only way you could maybe get away with doing that as if you were to pull back on the volume that you're doing daily right so let's say for example if your sessions were only 30 minutes to 45 minutes and you capped a certain number of sets then maybe you can get away with training more frequently which if that works for you that's fine because i'm the type of person that i like i like to train every day and when you go you like to go hard probably yeah so one of the i don't know when i started to figure this out i think might have even been in my early 30s um because i used to be a personal trainer i was literally working inside of a gym yeah when you're there like so easy to get it yes i've got two hours spare let me just go and shift some weights or even if you're gonna have a rest day you got your friends saying oh come on join in on the session and i remember just being wiped out all the time and my strength actually started to go down and even like physically i wasn't looking my best you know when you just look depleted usually that was just because i'd been pushing myself too hard yeah no that makes sense and even if you like love going to the gym i love going to the gym by like forcing yourself to just rest you appreciate the gym more yeah you know taking those couple rest days then you're like you feel completely recovered i mean i i would i used to train a lot more and then around 20 i experimented training do you want to work out rest day workout rest.

32:23I trained essentially three days a week, but I always have a rest day between workouts. And I just hit PRs. My body really responded to that. I was stuck on all my lifts. And then just the extra rest days, I would come into the gym and I'd feel so strong. And so I've always been kind of doing that sort of that schedule. And sometimes what I'll do is after a few months of hard training, I'll take four to five days, pure rest, no weights, like four to five days, pure rest and the the day i go to train i look better like my body has utilized those days of rest and i come to the gym i feel powerful like it's it's i'll do that probably about four times a year every three months i can just feel it i'll take four or five days of rest and i'm like damn like i feel like great yeah it's kind of like a i guess you class that was a day load maybe yeah Yeah, I guess that could be like a, I never really enjoyed like the traditional deloads of having to like lift submaximal weights and stuff.

33:24It's hard to do that. It's hard. It's hard to do that. I'm like, what am I doing? So I just like to take like four or five days pure rest. And sometimes I do it on accident. Sometimes, you know, I'm traveling and then, you know, I miss a workout. And then I'm just like, you know what? Let me just take a couple more days rest and just hit it hard. Sometimes I kind of, it happens just a little bit organically. But three, four times a year, I find it actually is, it's a good, for the person that's training all the time, it's a good test, experiment. Try taking four days in a row off, come back, and you might actually be very surprised.

34:04I mean, there was a bodybuilder called Tom Platz who had the massive, he had the massive legs and he would train with Arnold. and Tom Platz, you know, he was a bodybuilder. He was on anabolics and he would train with Arnold and he didn't get stronger. He didn't grow with Arnold. He was, Arnold would do these two to four hour workouts a day. And he took, he said he took two weeks off the gym, just two weeks off the gym. He was so discouraged. He hadn't made any gains. He's like, screw this. He just turned his mind off of bodybuilding for two weeks, came back to the gym and he was stronger on everything.

34:36And then he started to experiment with more rest days. So there's, there's, it's not even just naturals. there's people that are on anabolics that have found that um having the couple more rest days is is crucial i mean mike metzer was a huge proponent of that um dorian yates was very big on like no he did like four sessions a week 45 minutes that was it yeah it was crazy you know and he he was lifting like monstrous monstrous um loads i mean you know those guys with all those anabolics and and building that much size and lifting that much weight like it's it's it's not good for longevity yeah you know joints the joints and ronnie coleman just you know you got to be careful at a certain point with with um with like i don't even do any heavy squats and deadlifts no no the biggest thing for me is how can i continue to do this for as long as possible like the thought of not being able to do this because of some injury which i've given myself is scary so i don't know what else i'll do and i was i was messing around with heavy squats and deadlifts as a teenager and i had some it is it's it's um it's risky right um so yeah i haven't seen very good case studies like if you're a serious lifter it's easy to get up to doing a 350 400 pound squat you can if you're serious about lifting like i've gotten up to doing 350 pound bench press for three reps.

36:02So if I was to get serious about squatting, I could, I could do, um, at least, you know, four 25 for some reps that haven't seen a good case study of people in their forties, you know, lifting really heavy on squats and deadlifts. They're in pain. They're driving the car for two hours and their back hurts. They're sitting down. There is, there's a lot of spinal compression that's happening. Um, and I have had a, um, some low back injuries, um as a teenager and they they're dormant but like when i start pushing those squats deadlifts they come back but i mean you've built like tremendous legs what are your go-to for me it was frequency so i've noticed twice a week on yeah my body doesn't like to have big legs like it's inefficient right so um i feel like in order to get them to the size that i'm happy with pretty much whenever they're recovered it's time to train again so it works out to me maybe every five days and then the big game changer for me was uh there's the whole concept of tension so i would do a lot of compound exercises but it was like let's just move the weight from point a to b not thinking about how i was going to do it so it was optimizing either exercise selection or just thinking about controlling one specific muscle so that was doing the majority of the work and when i stopped doing the barbell squats and a lot of the free weight stuff when i was using the assistance of machines particularly pendulum squats hack squats that really allowed me to build up the quads and then doing a lot of movements which i would shy away from so like hip thrusts right uh or like a romanian deadlift i was like oh i don't want to really want to do these and i realized that like that hip hinge movement was the the thing which i needed yeah i noticed that too when i would a lot of people do squats they say they feel in their quads whenever i did squats and i you know i was at one point was doing 315 for reps and i never felt sore from in the quads from squats it was always the the hamstrings and the butt like inner thighs when i learned to do squats very young i i was very on the heels i'd sit back i'd activate my posterior chain and so i never built i never found the quads um grew from from squats but yeah all those machine movements are much better at hitting the quads for sure and of course like just wearing short shorts all the time that helps yeah that's that's i'm wearing a pair of shorts right now of course that's actually right there that's actually the perfect cut like if i wear um swimsuits i have to get swimsuits that are like right here yeah if i wear um swim trunks down to here it's just the legs look tiny but if you can because i have pretty good i mean i have much better size here than down here so it's like the like those style shorts make the legs pop and then it it motivates you to train the legs that's why i the moment that i moved from the uk to a warmer place when i was in dubai it's like okay every day i'm probably going to be topless at some point right whether i'm by the pool or by the beach so there's that added motivation to just say no to eating too much or eating that dessert because being leaner and walking around with abs beats everything else.

39:22Have you ever done a DEXA scan? Yes. Yeah. I did one in London in 2000 and it was 18 or 19. Now when I did that, I was probably not at my leanest. Right. So that came out i think 17 it was between 15 and 17 body fat yeah you know what sometimes i've seen dexa scans completely overshoot people um because you know but i was not as lean as i am now but okay but that i did a video because i was curious to know the amount of people that would ask me about what is your body fat percentage i was like i don't know the exact number right like that first of all second of all why he's so obsessed right why do people think that like having this one perfect number is the the thing to shoot for right it's more complicated than you know just saying someone is a particular percentage it depends on where the body fat is distributed or is it going to be like around the organs or is it going to be more you know nearer the skin like people like when i do dexa scans i'm actually usually impressed i'm like oh that's actually lower than i thought based on my abs because my legs don't store any fat and so it can make like if you can store more fat in your legs you can have very very lean abs um i think that's why i have right i store a lot like in my lower back yeah my back in general and then thighs right like for mine for my legs to get really cut i have to get really lean and then i've got like paper thin skin or on my abs which is a good thing like that's good no it's actually better is that you can store a bit more fat in legs because then you can have a chiseled six pack without having to get crazy lean but but like you know what i've one of the best tests i've seen for do you have under 10 body fat is do you have veins on the lower abs yeah that's like the low ab veins is that's like the best sign of like and even super lean i don't get that very often you don't no oh really no no like i can get to that level yeah but it usually it requires either a restriction of calories right which i don't often know it tends to be just like crazy amounts of walking yeah on back-to-back days so usually when i travel and i'm probably not eating as much as i usually eat but i'm just like literally walking everywhere and then after a couple days i'm like what the fuck is and then they pop out that's a good that's a good thing i find in europe i tend to when i go to europe and i follow my schedule of the fasting and the and you know my eating structure i usually just lose a couple pounds a week in europe yeah it's it's not because i'm doing 18 000 steps a day what do you think of those uh the body compensation machines that you stand on and then you hold the handle the handles yeah because everybody shows me those uh reports and i'm like i won't get too caught up yeah those ones are i mean so there's a there's a scale that does um like bioelectric impedance so the scales are usually always bullshit um any scale that measures your body body fat, at least a few years ago, all it was doing was looking at your height and weight and guesstimating your body fat based on height and weight.

42:28Because I would play around with it. If you make your height taller, it automatically will put your body fat lower. It doesn't even measure your body fat. The one with the handles, the in-body, I think it's fairly accurate. I think it's like within three, four percent. I've seen some people do it and it's usually decently accurate i mean the body fat is really hard to nail down perfectly i've done the underwater body fat i've done the bod pod when i did the bod pod and i was pretty lean not my leanest it gave me 4.8 so see the body you're barely alive i'm barely the bod pod tends to underestimate like a lot of the nfl does the bod pod and there's always some guy that's ripped that gets like four percent body fat but it underestimates um and then the the dexas i like the dexa because it can tell you where you gain muscle yeah you know did your arms get bigger it could tell you your fat storage and your so when i'm like i had a lot more muscle on like one side of my leg because i realized i think this was from when i used to do athletics whenever i would take a jump off uh my leg to do the high jump or long jump you jump off your it's always it was always the left leg i would bounce and with all that training it hasn't caught up fully yeah and well that's the thing because i obviously am doing a lot of heavy weight with these compound movements and i was getting a little bit of back pain and i was like i shouldn't really have this it was like a subtle but consistent annoying little bit of pain and i went to do an x-ray and my spine was not straight so what they figured out was that every time i was taking a step i was putting a little more of my body weight onto one side of my legs and then the same thing when i was lifting weights so that meant that over time me pushing more on one leg i think is slightly tilted my spine yeah holy shit yeah that's crazy yeah but i think there's no uh they were saying this nobody has or a few people have a perfectly symmetrical spine usually it's like off by a little bit but that's one thing that loads of people come to me about is the imbalance so like why is like one side bigger or stronger than the other and that's either from it could be from exercise selection but it's usually down to like a maybe a tightness on one side so whether it's at the shoulder or the hip if one side is tighter than the other that means that you'll get slightly more range of motion on the uh looser side and then you usually have a bit more muscle on that side and then over time you're putting more of your weight and more of the resistance on one side so you're just further increasing this imbalance in this issue which yeah if you don't address it then you're just going to continue doing it and maybe injure yourself 100 it's also good yeah it's good to um just film your form yeah because you're you can catch things in a video you don't see when you're lifting like i i know some people that maybe they play a lot of sports their right hand so much stronger so when they do a bench press they use more tricep on the right and the left one's flared so they're doing like this kind of press yeah you got a shield and think you know um but yeah that's important especially if you're just going for if you're going for aesthetic and balance keeping those sides pretty pretty even yeah all right guys quick pause here i've got a question for you how is your summer physique coming along we're only a couple of months away before you will be gracing the beach, the pool.

45:56Are you in shape? Are you not in shape? Is there work to do? Most likely. If so, I have the tool for you, which is going to help you out massively. It's the thirst app. This is something which I personally use myself when it comes to my training and my nutrition. I have all the programs in there, which I use on a regular basis. And for those who are just looking to lose a bit of body fat, the same thing goes for women as well. A lot of people don't realize that I used to coach for a large chunk of my life. So all of my coaching experience has been put inside of this app. I want you to learn as much as possible about how to get yourself in shape.

46:29There's exclusive videos in there telling you how to do it, how to execute exercises properly, the foods which I eat, and a newly added nutrition section where you can track your meals and your daily macros. It is pretty much this pocket-sized version of myself, which I'm going to carry around with you all day, every day. So if there's something which might interest you, which it definitely will do, I highly suggest to check out the link in the description, head over to the Thirst app, get it downloaded. You will not regret it. Let's crack on with the episode. So if we go back to the, obviously the early success that you had selling your programs.

47:05Yeah. What happened after that? Do you continue to push the programs or I think you've gone into supplements as well now? Yeah. So when I did that Bruce Wayne video, I was 24. Business just skyrocketed. And, you know, we had, I think by the time I was like 26, 27, we had 300 ,000 customers that bought one of my programs all over the world. 300 ,000. So it was, it ripped. We had a massive influence. If I went to a gym, if I was walking on the street, even to this day, people would be like, oh, I did your Greek God. I did your warrior shred. So we had a massive influence. And then when I was 27, I had some partners and then we started to work on really cool supplements.

47:44So we did a Keno Octane pre-workout, which I really liked because a lot of the pre-workouts I tried in my early 20s, I couldn't sleep, right? Yeah, I couldn't sleep. I mean, you had a really good video about the pre-workouts. You get so jacked up, but you can't recover, right? So I made just more of a smooth, chill pre-workout, all natural ingredients. I'm not a huge beta alanine guy because I just when you take beta alanine fasted you feel like you're crackhead you're gonna rip your skin off and so you know I used the ingredients that I really was that I really liked um because there's benefits to l-citrulline l-thenanine and so he put something together and it was just awesome and then um you know every year we kind of worked on something new and then um so now um now we have the the supplement brand has really really um skyrocketed and the mojo has kind of been that at the core of it it's been very cool because we've had thousands of guys use mojo and it's i've had people is that taking from austin powers the name yeah yeah yeah well you know you know what it was it was like i was i wanted to do a testosterone support supplement and a lot of the stuff on the market is like testro 1000 alpha this and i'm like look it's a it's a natural supplement you're not you're not 10xing your testosterone most guys if you're at 500, you'll get up a couple hundred points.

49:05And so what are you really feeling? If you go from 500 testosterone to 700, you're going to get some benefits with gaining muscle, with losing fat, but you're not going to get massive because you increased your testosterone a couple hundred points. What you really regain is this like confidence. You feel this confidence, you feel this increased libido, you wake up, you feel this je ne sais quoi. And so really it was like the mojo, it's, you're going to get better. You're going to have more tenacity in the gym, but like really you're just getting that mojo back and i i found i came up with mojo i was like damn that's awesome and uh yeah we've had we've had um thousands of guys use it take blood work and this stuff really works i mean i remember when i was researching into improving testosterone a lot of the evidence-based community thought okay well if someone already has if someone's very low in testosterone then taking zinc and magnesium to help increase it but if someone already has healthy testosterone, they're at 580, they're at 680, then, you know, taking magnesium and Tonga-Dali, it's not going to increase it.

50:04And, and then, you know, Andrew Huberman was doing a lot of cool content and he was having a lot of people testing different things and he found the opposite. He found, I know you get a hundred, 200 point increase in Tonga-Dali. And so I started playing with this stuff. I started having my clients take it and it worked. I was blown away. I was like, Oh my God, this is working better than I expected. And sometimes these were people that were already lifting weights they were already eating well they were already pretty lean because if someone is overweight not working out bad sleep then obviously if you improve that it's hard to attribute what came from what right and so even myself um i did my testosterone test about five times in my 20s the highest i ever had was 660 um but usually it was like 600 620 with bad sleep my testosterone was 515 i did a um a blood test with derek after three days in miami and i had very bad sleep they were doing a lot of construction and i'm freaking my sleep has to be so good um and so it went down about 100 points from from bad sleep and then now in my 30s with using this stuff in mojo um i had a test at 840 so i had 840 total which was pretty cool because 20s is technically when you're supposed to be the highest so my testosterone is 200 points higher and i'm in my 30s and i've kept my training my eating very similar so you can actually get very good results with this stuff why do you do the blood test with derek um so he put something out on social media talking about um how to prove if someone's natural this is derek more place he posts something on on instagram and i think he was exposing someone he's like hey if someone actually wants to prove they're natural they should do this and i just and i saw it and i saw it in real time and i just commented would love to you know and at the time you know i was 30 i wasn't really getting most of the steroid accusations i got was actually when i was 24 um but i i said let's there's still some sort of doubt and i said absolutely let's do it he dm me and um and then i said let's as soon as possible and he sent me um basically uh like whatever the form is and the clinic to go to and i went to the clinic they must have done like 12 vials of blood fuck and i you know i was i kind of wanted to do the test i kind of want to wait a few days because i like i was not sleeping well but it would have looked bad if i'm like oh no can we change the test yeah that'd be like let me get some shit i was like i really wanted to get a good sleep but i'm like no i just gotta go and i told him hey man i you know i'm on five hours here and he's like yeah just your blood work will look worse but if you're naturally natural i'm like great so we did it and then um went through all the blood markers and i actually learned something very very cool i actually learned something that was very valuable where my body had elevated levels of homo saistein and very low folate.

52:49So I have a genetic, it's a genetic polymorphism where my body doesn't convert folic acid to folate very well. My family has it, my mom has it, and that can disrupt your mood. So it's linked to depression. Having elevated homo saistein is like not great for your health. Increase your risk of, you know, later in life, if with combined with certain things it's just not good we can increase the risk of you know heart disease and stuff and so um even even like gum health if you're low in folate it's very important for gum health it's just vital and i found out i was deficient and so i've been taking um and i would also find sometimes i would just fall into these little dips of mood where i just feel a low level depression right that would kind of come and so a lot nutrients can fix a lot yeah you know even even And vegans, vegans have higher level, higher rates of depression because most vegans are lacking B vitamins.

53:47They're lacking, you know, zinc. They're not getting like steak is rich in creatine, carnitine, eggs, choline. There's so many of these nutrients that are vital for your brain development, your mood that vegans, unless you're just taking a ton of different supplements and blood tests and getting it dialed, you're just going to end up in a suboptimal state. so no vegans have high levels of depression yeah even for me i i assumed that with everything that i was doing so a few years ago that blood work would be perfect yeah and then when i this is when i first started uh get my blood work done with bionic who i'm now a partner of this was in 2021 i think i got the results back and like there was a lot of things which were way off like either things were above optimal and there was a lot like vitamins and minerals this was all all the vitamins yeah mostly things were above optimal there's a lot of things that uh that were really below optimal particularly copper and i realized even though i was eating a relatively healthy diet there was no organ meat anywhere right and it kind of made sense because i mean i'm not i don't make food at home i'm not going to go out and buy organ meat and prepare it so one of the additions which i've made now on top of the uh the customized supplement which bionic give me is that i have the organ meat on top of that and capsules yeah that's helped quite a lot yeah no it's interesting if you look at the hunter-gatherer um diet right they would they would take advantage of the entire animal they wouldn't just eat the delicious rib eyes and chip loins you know so yeah the organ stuff has got a rich amount of amount of nutrients so yeah it's very it's very um it's it's very interesting you know certain deficiencies that um how often are you getting your work done now um i'm doing it now i think twice a year is probably good so um that's gonna be my plan maybe i'll go three times a year if i'm testing things right if i'm experimenting with um with different stuff i might do it a bit more often but once or twice a year i think is is great and i um yeah i'm right now pretty much almost everything is pretty optimized so the the blood work is is really good and then uh the sleep man i honestly the sleep is so powerful yeah you know so i'm just right now i'm kind of dialing in you have the or you use the sleep tracker whoop yeah what would you know what your um what your deep sleep and rem is the average is about three hours of total yeah total deep and combined yeah yeah so if you can get an hour and a half deep hour and a half rem that's really really good um but like unfortunately over the past few weeks uh my average sleep which was just above seven has now dipped to six and a half right um i think that's well first of all the jet lag holy shit that got me good the first couple of days i was going i remember when i was with uh i was training with christian in his gym uh this was about this was the day after i arrived so it was around 4 p.m but in dubai time it was like 2 3 a.m so my body was like thinking it was 3 a.m but i was doing a workout so it took me like a week to balance things out a little bit and then more so the it's the environment obviously which you mentioned is the most important thing like is it dark is it cool i can't have bed sheets that are too thick because there's traps all the heat you get an eight sleep mattress right they hooked to meet up with one um at some point last year and i'd heard of it but i was never like i'm gonna go and go out my way to buy one because they're not cheap but um holy shit like it's a game particularly you know if you're in the bed with someone else and yeah they're the type of person that likes to hug on to you all night like that would be my worst nightmare i get the worst sleep ever yeah dude i i'm on a i'm a psycho with temperature i i do like i mean my place in this air conditioning is most most powerful air conditioning i've ever had in my life okay like this thing can go to 50 now i put it to 58 and like when it's when it's like 58 59 60 i'm asleep in 10 minutes if i'm trying to sleep at like 66 is it is torture to me six some people think 66 is cold that's that's hot in europe it's hard to find a hotel that has good air and if they have it it's like it's like working overtime i've walked into hotels but can you show me a room in here check the ac this won't work lucas let's go somewhere else but um uh you know when i'm in the room they're like you're a fucking psychopath why is this cool me and my team we go check out inspect hotels before we but um but you know one little tip for deep sleep it sounds crazy but there's research on this is that um grounding if you can put your feet on grass sand if you can ground it actually improves the amount of deep sleep you can get and deep sleep is when you produce the most testosterone you build the most muscle and so grounding can help lower cortisol and when you get your your stress levels down you can get better deep sleep who's is his name paul is it paul sadino yeah i saw a video of his house he's building in costa rica yeah and i think he's linked his bed to like a copper i saw the copper wire into the ground he's got that yeah Yeah, so you can create that setup on your bed with a grounding sheet.