The Muscle Building Expert: “Creatine Loading Is a Waste Of Time!”, They’re Lying To You About Workout Hours! Dr Michael Israetel

24:56And a set is a group of repetitions. Correct. So if I do 10 repetitions, that's one set. One set. Yeah. And so your sets have to be sufficiently heavy. Anything between roughly five reps per set and 30 reps per set, where the last few reps are getting close to you, not being able to use good technique and lift the weights, check plus. So there's not a set, a perfect amount of repetitions to do. There is a trade secret. And I'd have to say it off camera to you. And Dada sign. Okay, we're off camera. All right. Great. So it's 17. There is, so there's just tons of tons of contextual nuance kind of stuff.

25:34Some people, some of their muscles will seem to respond better to sets of five to 10. Other folks, even the same person can have muscles in their body that really respond better to sets of 20 to 30 and everything between. But generally you get in the exercise science data, you'll have a group of people training for sets of roughly five reps in another group training for sets of roughly 30 reps. And their change in muscle growth over 8, 12, 16 weeks is statistically undifferentiable, which means if I delay the groups and you don't know which ones which, you can't actually tell me who trained with higher reps or low reps for muscle growth.

26:07It's roughly the same. And that's so crazy. We're using the same weight, I'm guessing. No, different weights, different weights. The weight that is challenging for five reps is much heavier than a weight that is challenging for 30. Okay, so I do wonder this all the time when I get to the gym. I wonder if I should be doing, I'd know, 30 reps of 10 kg on my bicep or I should be doing 10 reps of 20 kg. There are both right answers, no wrong answers there. And they both have the same chance of growing my muscles as long as the strain that I experience subjectively is difficult at the end of those sets.

26:38Okay, interesting. Which is really good news because that's like another thing you don't have to worry about. Which means that I might get any range of weights versus having to get really, really big ones to grow my muscles. As long as they're not so tiny that you're on rep number 45 and you're like, I could just do this for forever. Or they're not so enormous that you're like, I can't really even do two reps of this. Anything between roughly five and roughly 30 reps, challenging is really, really good. How many sets and how often do I have to visit the gym to get this bicep to grow? That answer depends on how much you've been doing before.

27:08But if you're new to the gym, two sessions a week with two to three sets per session for your biceps is something that's going to cause months and months and months of consistent progress. Really? Can you do more? Yes. Do you have to do as a beginner? No. Eventually as a more advanced person, do you need to do more sets and perhaps more sessions to get consistently better results? Yes. But for beginners who have been in the gym very much or at all, the minimal effect of dose is profoundly small. Which is why I can say things like if you work out for 20 minutes, twice a week, you're going to get great gains.

27:44What if I go to the gym and I do six sets on my biceps and I just go to the gym once a week? Does the distance between the workouts in a muscle group have an impact? Yes. Once a week training gives you good results. But twice a week training for the same muscle gives you notably better results. Training three times a week versus twice, training four times a week versus three times, training five times a week versus four times is an exponentially deescalating amount of impressive differences. So one time a week, work, it'll get your results. Two times a week gets you like one and a half times the results.

28:26I way better, better. Three times a week is like another little bit more results still notable. Four times a week is like you got to be training for a while to notice the difference between three and four. Four and five is contextual and nuanced and I can't actually tell you that categorically five days a week is better than four. There are some things I would have to know about your plan and everything else to make that conclusion. So really I want to be aiming at twice a week per muscle group. Twice is our minimum. Two to four times a week is what I say is kind of the best overall recommendation per muscle group.

28:55And if you train all of your muscles together at the same time a whole body workout which most people in the realm of just unbusy and I can't train a lot, it would be all of the major muscles of your body in the same session twice or three three times or four times a week. And that is an awesome beginner fitness plan. What's coming on in my muscles? That's encouraging them and making them grow. And when are they growing? Is it want to go to bed at night? Is it when it do they grow the minute that I curl the dumbbell? What's actually going on? Because sometimes understanding what's actually going on inside helps me to think through and change my behavior.

29:30Yeah. So the primary stimulus for muscle growth is there are molecular machines in your muscles in your muscle cells and they are designed to detect the presence of tension. And when your muscles generate tension the molecular detector machines go, we got tension here and they start seeing to other parts of the cells like, hey, let's get this muscle growth thing started. Start it. Not happening. Start it. It's a stimulus for muscle growth. There are a couple of other mechanisms which might slash probably have an effect and that a couple of them are metabolite sequestration which is a very fancy way of saying the burn.

30:10You know at the end of a set you're like, the metabolites, the byproducts of training, if they accumulate to high levels, it's been shown in tons of animal studies and a few human studies that like mechanistically they might also tell the molecular machinery that grows muscle for you again later to get the muscle growth process. Another one is the pump. So you know, you do a couple sets of biceps and you're like, my God, what's going on here? Baby flash it at some girl. She runs away as usual and the actual cell swelling itself might play a causal mechanistic role in generating more muscle growth.

30:44But we know it's probably at least at least 80 % of the muscle growth anyone will see is because of those receptors for tension. Muscle growth as soon as you leave the gym is a negative because the gym is catabolic. It's a breaks down your muscle. Actually training breaks down more muscle than it builds. However, as you go home and you start eating food, protein, carbs, fats, and you have several meals per day and you're resting. When the food's coming in several hours after training begins, if you measure muscle growth consistently which is really difficult to do, they don't do it super often.

31:22You have to keep people in a laboratory, you have to do radioactive tracers and measure all this weird stuff. If every couple of hours they measure the amount of muscle growth that's going on in the biceps goes up, up, up, up, up, up, and usually peaks about half a day to a day and a half after you lift depending on how hard you went. If it's a pretty easy workout, it peaks a little sooner and drops off about a day or two later. If you train really crazy hard, it'll peak like a day, day and a half later and then half a week later, it'll drop off back to baseline levels. But it's this really smooth curve and you're growing muscle at every single point another curve.

31:58So when you say, is it while I'm sleeping, is it while I'm eating, is it while I'm resting, the answer is all of those except it's not at the gym. You don't grow muscle at the gym, you give yourself a signal to grow muscle at the gym and then you do outside of the gym matter. So some people train really hard, they don't eat right, they don't eat enough protein. Their sleep is total insert bad word here and their stress levels are just totally psychotic. They train hard and then week after week after week they're like, that's seeing any results. Well, the results are actually created when you're resting, when you're sleeping, when you're eating nutritious food.

32:30They're stimulated in the workout, but that's just phase one, phase two, the actual growth occurs outside of the gym and it occurs not at any specific time point, that magic window of two hours after the gym, like that's when all the growth occurs. That's actually when it just starts to go up. It's four days afterwards. If you train twice a week, we train on Monday, you're going a lot of muscle on Monday night, Tuesday and Wednesday. Towards the end of Wednesday, you're just not really growing much more muscle. You go back to the gym Thursday, you hit it hard again, you hit that curve up by Sunday, you're totally relaxed.

33:02During Sunday, you're not growing any muscle, your body's really recovering a lot of that fatigue and then by Monday, your fresh is a pickle and you're ready to go out again. How long will it take me to lose the muscles that I've gained if I don't go back to the gym? So again, focusing on this bicep. I train it, I do two times a week, I get it nice and big. How long before it vanishes? Great question. Two part answer. Part one is within about two weeks of not training it, the first reduction in muscle that is detectable by modern machinery occurs. So if you don't lift for two weeks and we put you in an you're not really losing any muscle yet, you're just going insane.

33:53And so me personally, I'm addicted to lifting so if I don't lift for a week, I'm like, oh my god, I'm going to muscle is gone. There's some kind of intuitive truth to that because when you don't stress your muscles, when you do stress your muscles, they get a little bit inflamed and they bulge up a little bit. So when you're not training for half a week to a week, your muscles look smaller like they've lost weight, but it's really just all water that they lost. You do one gym session thinking like, oh my god, my biceps are gone a week and a half later. You do one session at the end of that, you flex and you're like, oh my god, the biggest I've ever been.

34:25I was just delusion all that whole time because that stuff comes back super quick. After about two weeks of not lifting, we start to lose muscle, but it happens really, really slowly and takes weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. After several months of not lifting, you're going to look considerably smaller in your biceps, but probably not as small as when you started lifting because your muscles have a certain memory if we can call them that. Is that true? That is my true thing. Oh yeah. And so a lot of times when you gain an initial amount of muscle, especially if you've been at it for years, it just never goes back to the same size as when you started.

34:59It's just always going to be bigger until you reach your 80s or something like that. That being said, yes, you will notice reductions in size. So two weeks is the direct answer there and it's going to take weeks and weeks and months and months to receipt. However, here's part two. And this is awesome news. Because of that muscle memory situation, however long it took you to gain the muscles initially, it's going to take you an order of magnitude, a factor of 10 -ish or so less time to get it back. If you've been more jacked before, if you've had bigger muscles, they come back to their old size.

35:38If it took, if you lifted for eight months, you got a bigger bicep and you stopped lifting for three months. And it looks about the same as when you started. If you really careful, it gets a little bit bigger, but really it's just back to square one. Most people think, oh my god, another eight months just to get back to where I started, like forget the gym. The truth is after roughly about a month, maybe as little as three weeks, you're going to have the same size biceps that you did in your peak. Because the degree to which your tissue grows, if it's been a certain size before, especially if it was notably bigger than normal, and you held that around for a few months and a few years, it comes back in a way that is so fast.

36:19If you experience it yourself, it's like you don't believe that it's happening to you. You gain back scientifically test this. Oh yeah, all the time. Yeah, retraining studies, detraining, retraining. Oh yeah, they've done studies where they purposefully like lift for a while and they stopped lifting for a long time and they see how long it takes to get back. There's one study I'm familiar with offhand that there's a group of people that trained consistently for multiple weeks. There's another group of people that trained consistently for a few weeks and then took two weeks completely off in the middle and then just started retraining again for a few weeks later.

36:55Both groups had identically sized differences in muscle at the end of the study. So you're like, so that group that trained consistently never took two weeks off. Could we say that they purposefully like dunked two weeks of their time away for nothing? Uh -huh. Yeah, your body goes right back into regaining old loss muscle so rapidly that this is such great news because look, let's say you lift it consistently most of the year. Holiday season comes up winter holidays. You're not going to jam as much. Maybe not at all. Three weeks later of no gym. You look at yourself. You look a little small or kind of deflated and you're like, oh my god, I'm going to have to restart all this from scratch.

37:38Nope. Two weeks later, you're in the best shape of your life again. If you left the gym for six months, one or two months later, you're in the best shape of your life again. That's how rapidly it comes back. So it's really good news for anyone who hasn't been in the gym and is feeling guilty about it. Go back, get consistent again. You're just going to skyrocket. That is very exciting. Because yeah, we always have, sometimes it's the trough, the couple of weeks off that makes us demotivated because that's crossed my mind before. Oh my god, that took me three months to get there and it's going to take me another three months to get back.

38:08But what about, so if I'm training that bicep, how have I got to think about stretching and warming up before I start, before I get going with my training? There are many ways to do it, but the some research on this recently actually, you don't need much. One of the simplest ways to warm up that we recommended RP and our app has it in the instructions, you want, let's see, you have your final weight already picked out. Like last week, you did 20 pound dumbbells for sets of 15. This week, it's sets of 16 with a 20 pound dumbbells. What you want to do is you want to do very lightweight, maybe the five pound dumbbells for a little bit, everything moving and grooving good techniques, same technique you're going to use.

38:5630 seconds of rest, a minute of rest, you pick up the 10 or 15 pound dumbbells, need you a set of eight reps. It's a little bit more challenging, you're feeling you're grooved a little bit, but your body's already more warm, your nervous system's more active, your muscles are more pliable, you're resting a minute after that, and then you'll pick up the weight you're actually using the 20 pounders, and you'll do a set of two to four reps with them, just to get the feel of that heavy weight that you're going to be doing to acclimatize not just your muscles in your nervous system, but your psychology to like, this is the business way that I'm going to be using.

39:31So 12, 8, 4, rest another 30 seconds, first working set of whatever, 16 reps, you're up. When you have multiple exercises for the same muscle group, you just need to do one set of like four to eight reps in that middle weight range between zero and whatever you're going to do, just to get the feel of the exercise, because you're already generally warm in that area, one little warm -up set, rest, you know, 30 seconds in a minute, and then hit your first set. If you're switching which muscles you're using, like you were training chest, but then in the same session, you start a training back, that first back exercise, 12, 8, 4, the wake was up up up, the reps go down, down, down, just a little bit of time between, and then you hit your first work set and you're good to go.

40:14You don't have to do cardio before, you don't have to get on the treadmill, you can if you like it, you don't have to do some kind of cardio warm -up. You don't have to do any kind of stretching or anything like that. You don't do any kind of weird boasts who ball band around your neck, crazy, potentiation exercises. Just that little ramp up is basically a 98 % of all cases, exactly the only way you need to do. What is a warm -up? What is going on physiologically inside my muscle? Because we all just warm up, and I don't think anybody actually knows what's going on. Yeah, so your muscle tissues, they have physical qualities that can be measured almost in like a fluid dynamics terms, like viscosity and hysteresis and all that stuff.

40:56And so when you're very cold, a lot of times there's kind of a frailty implied there. As you're warming up, you're sending blood to around the muscle. The muscle itself is literally becoming warmer. And a lot of those kind of tight structures that are proteins that are made of kind of stretching material, they loosen up a little bit. And that allows you to go through that full range of motion and training and not actually get hurt. And that's from the muscle perspective. You also get some kind of chemical stuff that happens in certain structures, fill up with chemical, certain structures, chemicals go down.

41:36And that gets you ready to perform super hard work. But that's part of the story. The other part is the nervous system because your nervous system is also getting warmed up in tactical terms. It's called potentiation. When you just show up to the gym and you let's say we said, okay, we re -engineered your tendons when you were asleep, you're not going to get hurt. It's impossible for you to get hurt. Like a car would have to hit you for you to rip your vice up off. You can just go and just hit the curls right away. You wouldn't get hurt, but it would feel really strange and you wouldn't get four or five reps close to where you're supposed to be from last week.

42:11Because your nervous system was like, what the hell is going on? I'm supposed to be doing something so you knew what the nervous system, a part of that is literally like the actual nervous system itself down to the cellular level is flushing all kinds of metabolites through. The connections are getting stronger. You're sort of doing a little bit of kind of mini rewiring of primary motor cortex to say, oh, we're doing curls. This is how you execute this pattern. Another part is technical. Like, oh, this is the technique I'm going to do. Because if you just get in the muscle and just do stuff, like imagine if I told you, like, here's a ball, just like go, go shoot some hoops.

42:44Just hit that three pointer shot. You're like, go go go go. I need a couple shots to remind my body of what it's like to shoot the basketball. Same idea for lifting it or remind your body of what the curl motion is. And if you remind it, a couple sets in a row, by the time you hit that real working set, that fourth set, your body's like, oh, I'm exactly what I'm going to do. Which parts of the muscle I'm going to activate to contract, which other parts of other muscles I'm going to activate to relax and co -contract to make this whole thing happen. What are the other sort of common mistakes people make when they go to the gym or they start training or they start exercising?

43:19So there I've kind of ticked off, not stretching and taking on a heavy load too quickly, but also ramping up volumes and loads too far. So that sort of overstrained before my body is ready for it. Are there any really other sort of common obvious mistakes people make that inhibit their progress? One of them is a failure to pay attention to good technique. There are sort of some universal principles of what is good technique in the gym for muscle growth. One of them is, are you moving in a way that properly activates, stimulates that muscle to actually get it to grow? Because if you do a curl that arcs up, it does a lot of bicep.

44:03If you do a curl that arcs back this way, because the bicep is being pulled one way and pulled the other way the shoulder and the elbow, it ends up doing more of a stabilizing contraction than actually being the prime mover for the movement. So when you see people curling at the gym and they're just kind of doing this, you're like, yes, that is training your biceps, but if you just moved a little bit differently, it would be so much better. Here's another example squatting for your legs. If you squat really far back and not so far down, your glutes get hit, okay, you're lower back and upper mid -back is going to get hit a lot, but because there's not a huge change in your knee angle, you're not getting a ton of quad stimulus.

44:48If you stay more upright and your heels and toes are on the ground, and you allow your knees to go way forward beyond your toes as you stay upright and sink down really low so that your knee goes into one of these. Oh my god, it's all quads all day long. So you want technique that is targeting the muscle. It's very similar rep to rep to rep, and it puts the muscle consistently through a range of motion that isn't at deep, painful, length and stretch position. If you just have all those three, everything else we can say about your technique is just nuances and finer points. Those are really the big ones.

45:24We talked about nutrition earlier as well. So if I want to make my bicep grow and also drop off the weight around the biceps, so you can see it even more, what should I be putting into my mouth? The number one requisite for muscle growth is protein. Foods with lots of protein in them ideally should be consumed three to five times per day at roughly equidistant intervals. Breakfast lunch dinner totally fine, even better, breakfast lunch dinner, evening snack. The average person needs a little bit less than let's say a gram per pound of body weight per day of protein actually considerably less. That's kind of the top limit and a cool aspirational thing to shoot for.

46:12So if you weigh let's say 200 pounds, you should be consuming something like 150 to 200 grams of protein per day and 150 for almost everyone's totally enough. But if you're real serious and hardcore and which just want that insurance policy 200 grams of protein per day. So then if you're eating four times a day, that's, oh yeah, 30, 40, let's say 40 to 50 grams of protein per meal. Can I eat too much protein? And then it becomes fat or something? That's so protein by itself. No. If your protein is so high that your carbs and fats are the same and you jack up your protein super high, but your carbs and fats stay where they are, your calories become excessive, that will cause fat gain over time.

46:56But if you're doing a diet where you did a ton of protein, but you dropped your carbs and fats and your calories are at maintenance levels, you're not going to gain any fat. It's not bad for your kidneys. It's not bad for any other part of your body. Excessive protein as a health malady has been a myth the entire time. And that's one of those notions that people carry with them that too much protein is bad, right? Like yes, if you've had kidney surgery, absolutely. Short of that, you're probably good to go. You'll fart a lot and people will hate you. You mentioned three to five meals a day. A lot of people are now in this camp of fasting, an intermittent fasting.

47:31I'm not eating often. Is it possible to fast, but also to gain muscle mass in the way that you've described? Yeah, totally. It just won't happen as an impressive rate. So you have to make a trade off for yourself. If you want, you know, most jacks, even that you can be three to five meals a day, consistently spread, and almost to an individual competitive bodybuilders eat that frequently and eat high protein. How often do you eat? I eat five times a day, four or five times a day, usually. And do you eat before or after you train? Both. Okay. So before you train, I know if you train a different thing.

48:06A lot of times, I'll train early in the morning. And so I won't train it or won't eat it all. I'll wake up. And I'll have like a protein and a carb mix shake with my training. Totally optional. Super extra credit may not do anything at all if you look at the literature, but I find it a little bit compelling to do a little bit of that. And then afterwards I have my first post workout meal, second meal, third meal, fourth meal, bedtime, wake up, do it again. What do you take to get you going? Do you do pre -workout? No. No. I don't do and it stimulates of any kind. I just kind of cooped up all the time naturally.

48:38So like if you give me stimulants, it's just going to go into the not so pleasant side of fact. Like I'm just going to be like this and way too amped up. Super high anxiety. And my thoughts get to be like I have less fluidity of thinking and stuff. So I just it was just a lot of me, I guess. And so when I wake up in the morning, I don't need anything to get me going. I just go and a couple warm upsets later. I have all the energy I need. That's not everyone. And so some green tea, some black coffee or some pre -workout 30 minutes before the gym is great advice for a ton of people. I feel like pre -workout can't be healthy if you're doing it five, six, seven times a week because some of that stuff is so unbelievably strong.

49:16Like I've had it before, I've got literally like heart palpitations when I've had a pre -workout and you know, you talk about anxiety, that anxious feeling. It can't be, it can't be healthy for people to be doing that frequently. It seems to be quite fine. It seems to be quite fine. Now at the extremes and for some individuals, it's not ideal. But the upper limit dose of caffeine in milligrams per day, at which we can confidently say most people will experience the beginnings of health maladies, is a thousand milligrams. A cup of coffee has depending on which cup 50 to 100. Now some pre -workouts have 250 milligrams of caffeine, some have 500.

50:02Last I checked, Ronnie Coleman's pre -workout has 550 migs of caffeine per scoop or per serving. Isn't that kind of a lot? If I took 550 migs of caffeine, you don't take me to the gym, just take me right to the hospital, put me in the psychiatric ward 36 hours later, I'll be okay. But for some people to get so accustomed to high doses of caffeine, that is supposed not unhealthy for them to consume. Also, they feel quite fine. I would say start with as little as you need to get you going. And if you need to titrate and work out from there, that's a good thing. The other thing I would say is, I would have a compelling case for pre -workout or stimulants.

50:41If I ask you, hey, how much energy do you typically have at the gym? I'm like, well, that's super great. And they're like, should I take pre -workout? I'd be like, no, there's no compelling case for that at all. If you're like, like, are we up in the morning? Some days, I just don't get a ton of sleep. And I need something to get me going. Not every day, but sometimes I'll be like, hey, consider green tea, black coffee, some diet soda, or all the way up to pre -workout if you need it. But some people take it kind of as a a religious thing as a habit, as a ritual. And it's like, dude, you're training your forms and biceps for 20 minutes total at 9 p .m.

51:18You do not need three scoops of pre -workout for that. I don't even know where it's going at that point. So some people get a little crazy with the pre -workout. At the end of the world, I'd say, at best needless. What's your stance on the whole idea of calories and calories out? A lot of people just focus on that as they're sort of their script to lose body weight, lose body fat, and gain muscle. Is that a useful frame to use? And why do so many people fail at it if it is a useful frame? Most people fail at it because they don't consider both the calories in and calories outside of the equation.

51:57And a lot of people fail because they're very bad at estimating food amounts and calories. They'll someone will say like a tablespoon of peanut butter. Steven, if you ever actually seen a tablespoon measuring cup, it does not look like mom's tablespoon where she takes the peanut butter and goes like, that's like four tablespoons. But I'm eating the calories blah, blah, blah. Every time you take people into what's called a metabolic ward, which is a study center where you're not allowed to have visitors that bring you food, the workers only give you the food that you need and all of your exercise and your output is controlled and monitored.

52:33And so as you're intake, no one has ever violated laws of thermodynamics. We give you a certain number of calories and we expect you to lose certain number of weight. There's a variance about that. But you're going to lose the weight that roughly we predict. If we account for all variables, you're going to lose almost exactly the weight that we predict. So calories and calories out is incontrovertible. In among 90 something percent, 98 percent of people who do research in the field and are scientifically literate and educated, calories and calories out is not controversial. It never has been. There are some people who say, well, a calorie counting didn't work for me.

53:06That's probably because you did it wrong or you weren't even concerned about how much protein you're taking in or how many carbs, how many fats. There are other details that matter. Like if you say, I need a V8 engine in a car. That's all that matters. Like, okay, well, there's no steering wheel. There's no pedals. Cool. Okay. I need those things too. So calories and calories out is the very core because about an engine, you're not going anywhere. But what types of foods you're eating matters a little bit. Are you getting enough protein carbs fats? That matters a bit too. So people like to just bash calorie balance and calories and calories out is a wallet.

53:39It's totally method. It doesn't work. No, no, it works great. It's just not always enough to get you in the best shape you can. But if you do it right, as far as net balance weight gain or weight loss, calories and calories out is actually the only thing that matters. Tissue wise, is that gain mostly muscle or mostly fat? Is the loss mostly muscle mostly fat? That has not so much to do with calories. It has much more to do with proteins, carbs, fats, the quality of food you're eating, nutrient timing and all the rest of it. So calories and calories out is amazing, super explanatory, critical. But it's just not the whole picture.

54:12And that's really, I guess, because so many people say they've heard about calories and calories out, but they fail at maintaining it. Now, that's really about motivation and the psychology of doing such a thing. Some people have said to me that our bodies want to defend our weight. So if we start eating less, we'll become a little bit more hungry. If we go for a run after the run, physical exertion, our body will try and make up for it because it's programmed to try and defend its weight, because its weight correlates to our ability to survive. Why do people fail at it? One of the reasons you said is because they're not actually measuring calories correctly, but the psychological reasons that it hasn't worked for some people.

54:51Can you think of many? Because when people talk about calories and calories out, if you look at the comments sections on these videos, people say, I've tried this and it didn't work. Okay. So first of all, I typically don't look at comments sections of videos because comment section is not representative of the population. It's not representative of the people that watch your videos. It's not representative of the hardcore demographic that watches your videos. So just as a statistical artifact, every single claim by people against calorie balance in that comment section could be true for them, but they represent 1 % of the population.

55:23So 99 % of people at works just fine. For 1 % they get into some kind of trouble. Usually that trouble is they didn't count calories properly, they didn't become for macronutrient profile, proteins, carbs, fats, they didn't count for nutrient timing or the kinds of foods that they're doing and so on and so forth. And another one is like you said, sustainability. How long do I have to count calories for? In my life, for me to get the body that I want and keep it is sure shit not going to be forever. So what I do is I'll count calories for a few months. I lose a lot of weight. Then I'll go back to eating on vibes and the weight comes right back.

55:56Absolutely. So better than just counting calories, what we want to do is then still people with good eating habits. If you learn how to construct meals made of lean proteins, veggies, fruits, whole grains, healthy fats, you know roughly how to see how much food you need and how much food looks at least like it's what you eat per day. If you're checking your bodyweight relatively often and when your body weight starts to get a little higher, you kind of clean up your diet a little bit. And when your body weight's nice and low, you could couple cheat meals, couple kebabs, you know burgers and stuff, that's all good.

56:25If you do that and you have those healthy habits, whatever weight you lost on calorie restriction, you can maintain with very, very little work, not counting a damn thing just on good habits. But if you count up calories, you do some weird diet where you only eat like two, five orange slices and protein shakes or something. Yeah, the calorie counting will get you wherever you need to go. But then afterwards you're like to die it's over. You're like, okay, now what do I do? Like good luck. Go out of the world and eating the same diet they got you fat in the first place. That's the big kicker. People might say it takes so much time to count calories.

56:59It leads to an unhealthy relationship with food. I think there's a big movement at the moment trying to get calories off menus because it's said to increase the amount of people have eating disorders and things like that. Is that a conversation worth entertaining in this regard? Sure. Very few people will develop eating disorders based on increases in information they are presented. I would actually call that eating orders instead of eating disorder. Most people who get eating disorders are highly at risk genetically and with a few other social circumstances. Eating disorders are, for example, the most deleterious eating disorders, anorexia nervosa.

57:47Seen not exclusively but almost exclusively in females of reproductive age. Bhanning calories on a menu, doing that. That's something you bring into the table. Usually because you have the genetic proclivity for it. In addition, because you've been in a social and cultural circumstance where not only were you the wrong person to get ridiculed for your weight, but also a lot of people ridiculed you for your weight. And then you go all careening off on this path where no one can even tell you're super skinny and more because you don't believe it. So the idea that you're going to see a much higher prevalence globally in eating disorders from putting menu, calorie labels on things is true by this much at the margins and it's just largely not the case.

58:33Adjacent to that is a side of muscle dysmorphia, which affects a lot of people, but specifically men, roughly 87 % of men that are between 15 to 32 years old that experience muscle dysmorphia, which is what? So muscle dysmorphia generally is for whatever level of jacked that you are, you think you are considerably less jacked, both in reference to yourself and your own desires, and in reference to an ethereal make -belief comparator population in your head. So if you were to ask me like, Hey, Mike, do you feel jacked? And I'm like, nope, you're like, oh, not good, not a good sign, clearly he's jacked.

59:13And then you can ask me Mike, compare to other 40 -year -old Ashkenazi Jewish men, how jacked are you? And if I'm like, I'm probably like, bottom 50 % for sure, probably bottom 25, you'd be like, okay, he's mentally ill, take him away. That is high level muscle dysmorphia, a disassociation from any abjective reality about how much muscle you actually have. Do people overestimate or underestimate their appearance as it relates to their muscles? Dysmorphia is almost always catalogued as an underestimation. But from your experience working with people, do people think they're more jacked than they actually are?

59:49It really depends on the individual. Most people that are in gym culture, that are very invested. If you catch them on their not -so -great days, they think they're substantially less jacked than they really are. And if you tease it apart via conversation, they'll end up being like, yeah, no, no, I know I'm jacked, but I'm just saying like, and then it's aspirational like, for my goals, I'm not as jacked as I would like to be. It's interesting because we typically think of women, I think stereotypically in society, as caring more about their body image. But I've read a lot of stats lately that suggest men care equally about their body image, but just in slightly different ways.

1:00:27And about the correlation between their perception of that body image and their own mental health and the link between the two. Do you see a lot of that? Do you see this link between mental health and male body image? Yes. Huge proportion of psychological proclivities are genetic. The others are very individually acquired. They change through time. It's not as easy as saying upbringing or family environment. So the one consistent thing about how you relate to the world in your own thoughts is genetics. And a lot of the traits tend to aggregate together. So it is true to say on a spectrum, very nuanced, that some people aggregate a lot of negative psychological traits, and some people aggregate a lot of positives.

1:01:10And they're absolutely people, everyone's a mixed bag somewhere in between, but there's a little bit of this kind of, I don't want to use a term for another mental as a bipolarity to the distribution. And so a lot of people that are generally neurotic, they feel consistently unsafe and unsure of themselves, are going to be also the type of people that when they get more jack through lifting, they're still not going to believe that they're as jacked and accomplished and awesome and alpha male as they really are, because they're always like, you know, to use the old Jewish joke stare gently. I'm never going to be big.

1:01:43And it's like, you're already big like, oh, I don't know, it could get worse tomorrow. And a lot of people just bring that to the table. And so when you get neurotic people jacked, they don't think they're that jacked. They're always like, oh my god, it's always going to end. But if you take not neurotic people and make them jacked, you one week of lifting into those people, and they're like, dude, I'm like, do you think I should turn pro and bodybuilding? You're like, get out of here. You're just overconfident. So it really depends on who's doing the thing. Now, cultural stuff, social, who's in your circle?

1:02:11I'll give you a good example. I have a lot of my closest friends have no relation to fitness, whatsoever. A bunch of them actually neuroscientists, just randomly people I knew in college that ended up being my friends for life. And so when they assess their masculinity relative to myself and my bodybuilder friends, they're like, I'm in terrible shape, and I'm not remotely jacked. And they have a weird comparator population that I always remind them like, dude, not everyone looks like this. They go to the store, they go to the school, they go to the bank, and they're like, oh, crap, you're right.

1:02:40I'm actually the most jacked person at the bank. It's just not like Gold's gym where everyone's enormous. So if you happen to be in an environment, let's say you're a university student and you go to the university gym and there's lots of jack people there and you're there all the time trying to do your best, you may, if you're neurotic to begin with more neurotic, start to develop a sense that you're just not nearly as jacked as you should be or could be or whatever. But if you like hang out at an old people home with your grandma and grandpa all the time, you're gonna feel like Superman all the time because holy shit, you're like, you can do real things and move furniture around.

1:03:11And so then go back to the point about weight loss. If I'm trying to lose weight, what are the biggest myths around weight loss that whole people back in inhibit them? One is you have to be perfect. If I'm on my diet, I'm good. If I'm off my diet, not only am I bad, but as soon as I'm off my diet, I have sinned and there is no solace for me. I a lot of people have that falling off the bandwagon thing where they'll eat clean food, whatever that means, diet food for weeks and weeks and weeks. They have one kebab, they have one cheeseburger and they're like, back it. That's it, man. I'm done dieting.

1:03:47I'm not a good person anymore. It's like that whole dichotomizing and kind of a religious approach. That hurts a lot of people because in reality, if you just eat a cheeseburger, your body's like, oh, sweet. Like I got a little bit more carbohydrates stored in the muscle. I recovered a little bit more. My diet fatigue is actually lower because you fed me some food. Tomorrow, I'm back on the diet. I make it even better games than if I didn't have that cheeseburger. I was so exhausted. A lot of people have that approach completely backwards and they're like, I'm either good or I'm bad. That's really tough.

1:04:18Another one is people think that the approach to lose weight is the same as the approach to maintain it. This is really, really, really nasty because so my wife is a board -certified family -med sportsman doctor and she does a lot of work, international Olympic teams, all that stuff. She is looking at these formal recommendations from medical literature. It's like, here's the kind of diet you need to lose weight. Then she followed up with some of the professionals and she's like, what about maintenance? They're like, what do you mean, yep? What are you talking about? That's not the conversation.

1:04:56People think, okay, I'm going to clean up my diet. No more ice cream, no more crisps, no more cheetos. I'm going to eat super healthy. Then when I get to the weight that I want, I continuously super healthy and never have ice cream again. We're in a bizarre world, isn't? And so they'll flop back to the other one with a try for a few months after they've gotten to the weight they like to just eat completely super healthy, clean everything like that. They lose a little bit more weight. They're exhausted. They're tired. They're food -focus -of -drying them nuts. They'll eat some ice cream and they'll go, I'm a sinner.

1:05:28Then ice cream, ice cream, cheeseburger, cheeseburgers, up they go. Then they regain all the weight. A huge myth is the fact that, yeah, when you're losing weight, you've got to pay a little bit more attention to what you eat. But once you've gotten to that weight, you both need some time. Roughly every three months that you die at hard to lose weight, you should be taking about at least two months at maintenance, just maintaining it. So if you weigh 100 kilos, now you're down to 90, after three months, for about two or three months, just stay at 90. Eat mostly the healthy stuff that you were, but throwing a little junk in there maintenance again is much easier than losing.

1:06:03When physiologically, and psychologically, your diet fatigue comes down after those two or three months, you're able, if you'd like, to start dieting really hard again to get to that next goal that you have or just live in balance for the rest. But if we tell you, here's your diet to make you lean and healthy and you're like, okay, how long do I have to do this? And the doctor's like, forever, what am I supposed to do? I'm never allowed to have tear miso after dinner, every weekend. And I want to try not to. That's terrible advice. And not only do medical people too often say that. Most people have it in their heads.

1:06:34And it's a very, very untenable situation. One of the big swiss narratives that I was exposed to for most of my life about weight loss is that 80 % of its diet, what do you think about those ratios? How much of weight loss is determined by diet versus exercise? Yeah. Diet has a bigger effect than exercise. As a heuristic, I'm very comfortable with 80, 20. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is there's the constrained energy hypothesis. It's also called Ponser's paradox based on herman, Ponser's work, and physical anthropology. And so basically, they realize that the amount of physical activity that humans can do has a range.

1:07:20But if you try to get people to like double their physical activity, you say, I'm not going to change my diet. I'm going to work out twice as much as the next guy. Your body becomes so fatigued so rapidly. And your metabolism just itself, your physical activity that's not planned exercise. Like, how much do you get up when someone calls you? Are you still on the couch talking to them? Or how much do you get up and walk around your kitchen a bunch? Your body makes all these adjustments. So if you try to really outwork a bad diet, it doesn't work. And usually you just come back to the same physical activity because you're too exhausted to continue.

1:07:54And then you failed. Whereas with diet, you can make some dietary changes, principled based, like stop eating junk food every day and just eat two pieces of junk food on Friday and two pieces of junk food on Saturday. Just that alone is sustainable. Your body, as long as these are filling foods, a lot of veggies, fruits, whole grains, lean meats, you're not hungry. You're just like, damn it, I want a bag of chips. That's not a reason. That is mostly psychological, it's not physiological. And thus, dieting is just able to take bigger chunks out of your calorie balance equation without completely destroying it.

1:08:30That has limits as well. You can't diet forever. So you have to take it in chunks. Another thing is this, in order to burn a lot of calories to lose a lot of weight, you got to do some serious work. The average personal burn, something like 100 to 150 calories per mile run. Oh my god, you start thinking about it like a donut has 300 calories. How fast? Stephen, can you eat a donut if I time you? Five seconds. I said no problem. Boom. You're going to run three miles after each donut. It's insane. So taking your diet, cleaning it up, reducing the junk, reducing the calories is not that hard. But if you try to fight off the nasty extra junk food calories you're taking in with exercise, it's kind of like a three to one fight.

1:09:21You eat two donuts at your work function after work. You have six miles to run that day. Nobody doing that. And that's why diet is such a huge factor. It's so easy to do, quote unquote, damage with it. And it's much easier to take control of it versus with exercise, the boundary layers are just smaller. And what you would have to do to fight the bad diet is just grow task -ly large and outside of those boundary layers. I think it's a lot because I think people typically assume that the way to lose weight is to go do a run. Yeah. That's typically, you know, you'll see people in the gym and if you ask someone why they're on the running machine, they'll probably be trying to lose some weight.

1:09:54Yeah. It helps a little bit. But if you run and you burn 200 calories extra per day, three days per week, then it's 600 extra calories you're burning through the week. That's good stuff. You can lose some decent weight like that. And you're just going to put them all hungry, though. Off to it. Typically, exercise does not dependably increase your hunger and most people. So depending on the context in the individual, it's not a dependable thing to say that doing more exercise necessarily makes you more hungry, which is kind of cool because usually you're not really any more hungry. And if you stick consistently exercise, but you control your diet, you're good to go.

1:10:33However, is there a psychological component to that web because I've done the run. I now feel like I deserve it. Oh, yeah. That's huge. And some people do have a hunger response. But what you put in your body after that could be really healthy stuff. It doesn't have a ton of calories. It's really filling or it can be like, we're done running pizza and beer. And then that's really bad news. But real quick, so let's say you're burning 600 calories extra per week by running two miles at a time or whatever, whatever you run an extra four miles per week, right? 600 calories per week. So what is that?

1:11:02Well, to burn a pound of body fat, you need to get 3 ,500 calories per week out of your diet or do 3 ,500 extra calories of activity per week. 600's a drop in the bucket to that. You'll never notice. I mean, yeah, after a year, you'll lose like two or three pounds or five pounds or nobody thinks in terms like that. But if they were to simply alter their diet and keep training to keep the calorie burn at a moderate to high level, but take food out of their diet, especially through junk food, the total calories sink deficit they can make for themselves is now in the hundreds of calories per day.

1:11:41Now you're losing a pound of fat every week. Now you're having big results. Is there a preference between doing cardio or strength as it relates to long -term weight loss because I'm thinking if I've got more muscles, then surely my body's going to need more, it's going to burn more calories just by a small margin. Almost unnoticeable. So your body versus my body, you're not burning more calories. How much do you weigh? 90, I don't even know it in pounds, it's about 92 kilograms. Okay, solid. So I currently weigh about 98 kilograms. 222 pounds. So I weigh like two 16 to 220 right now. It's we weigh not too far off.

1:12:22Not too far off, so even though I have considerably more muscle. In your opinion, in my very biased opinion, no, just more of you here. I would be burning a teeny bit more fat or more calories per day because of my higher muscle mass, but it's mostly my absolutely higher weight. So for example, the people in the world that burn the most calories and need the most calories to sustain their body weight are the fatest people in the world. That like lady that weighs 800, 900, 900, 1000 pounds, they're just to keep her the same size. It's 15 ,000 calories a day. And if it was all muscle and no fat, somehow she was a thousand pounds of muscle, we should be sweet to look at.

1:13:02She would be burning like maybe 16 ,000 calories per day instead of 15. And probably even that's an exaggeration. Muscle mass doesn't help you burn tons of calories. So that's not what it's there for. It is incredibly good for your health. It is incredibly good for how you look. Those things by itself make muscle mass an awesome thing to do. But it is neither true to say that cardio reliably over the long term burns lots of weight off. And it is not true to say the gaining lots of muscle burns lots of weight off. What is really, really critical is do you have a well controlled nutritious diet?

1:13:41And do you have an average moderate to high level of daily physical activity? Dancing and swimming and running and having fun and chasing your kids if you're on the higher end of activity, not psychotically high to where he gets super tired, just not being a total like slouch. And making sure you're aware of your body when you're diet, that's what really pays these massive dividends in long term weight control. It's not like if I put on a ton of muscle, that's great for everything else. It makes you super healthy. It makes you look really awesome. It gives you the ability to like, I don't know, like do real world stuff, defend yourself, things like that.

1:14:13That's what muscles, therefore. It's not the greatest calorie sink in the world. I wish it was. I'd be at cheeseburger right now. So in terms of supplements, are there any supplements you suggest that I take if my goal is to lose weight but also to gain muscle mass for the average person? No. There's no supplements. I mean, creating, creatine will not help with weight loss. And for most people, it'll temporarily gain you about two kilos of body weight because it attracts body water into the muscle. It's a cool look, because it makes my creatine right now. Can you know? Yeah, right. So creatine doesn't help you lose weight in any meaningful extent.

1:14:56So I'm aware of no over -the -counter supplements that simultaneously help you burn fat and gain muscle. There are supplements that are not over -the -counter that do that quite well. What if I'm just trying to gain muscle then? What supplements? What supplements would you recommend the average person to be taking? Really regardless of, I guess, goals. If their goal is to be a little bit more lean with their muscle mass, if their goal is to build muscle, is it different types of supplements you'd suggest or... Creatine works to build muscle. It's got awesome cognitive benefits. It's just healthy for you and it's great.

1:15:25So five grams per day for most people of creatine monohydrate. Super awesome. Have you got to load creatine? I'm in a zone. I used to load creatine. That's basically like a corporate scam that's just trying to get you to consume more creatine. So you buy more. Yeah. After if you load your creatine, which is like taking 20 grams per day for a few days, you get to intramuscular creatine stores that are optimal, like in four or five days. If you don't load creatine, you get there in like seven to ten days. And because you're taking creatine either for months or for life, it's just a mood point. So creatine loading is a gigantic waste of time and almost every case.

1:16:02Okay. So creatine works. Way protein, case in protein can be an excellent way to conveniently get protein. So they're more like foods rather than supplements. Those are totally cool but not mandatory. If you talk to me, like you are now for just several hours at a time, let's say we're sitting on a plane together and you're like, I'm just a guy who's trying to get like a little bit more of this what supplements do I need to take is the wrong time to ask that. The time to ask that is like, I want to take a run at a natural bodybuilding show. What supplements do I need? Okay. Then they pay some dividends that are worth noting.

1:16:38But supplements are just not in the conversation for important things that health conscious people should have. And even in their top 10 of important things that you do, the top 10 important things are like getting adequate sleep, managing your stress really well, consistently lifting weights, consistently doing high level physical activity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those are the big rocks. Not supplements. Supplements are insanely overrated as a general rule. The Diroof CEOs brought to you by progressive insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash?

1:17:10Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive .com after this episode to see if you could save progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary not available in all states. What about steroids? They're great. What? Am I allowed to say that? What are steroids? And you said you take steroids. Do you take steroids all the time? And what is the impact? So say if you weren't taking steroids, how different would you look?

1:17:49I know this because I used to not take steroids. And when I wasn't taking steroids, I weighed about at a body fat similar to this. I would have to weigh probably a 180 to 190 pounds. More like 180 and this kind of body fat level. I currently weigh 216 pounds because I'm on a moderate amount of steroids a few weeks ago. Actually earlier last week, I was in higher amounts of steroids and with the same level of body fat, I weighed 227 pounds. So we're talking about 30, 40 pounds of muscle tissue difference between steroids and not steroids. Have you got a picture of before and after before when you didn't use steroids and you trained and then after?

1:18:42Yeah, it's got to be somewhere. We're trying to get it just just for controversial. Sure. Sure. You said they're great. I was kidding. They're great for putting on muscle if you want to jettison your long term health and longevity to some extent. Yes. And some of this medical stuff. It's someone that's never done it. Give me a window into what you do. You inject it somewhere? You can take steroids orally through pills or you can inject it into muscle. So usually you would inject it into your quads. A lot of people do their shoulders and some people if they're flexible enough, do their glutes. And how quickly do you notice a difference and how big is the difference just to give me sort of like your...

1:19:26As far as jackness is concerned. So if I start taking steroids now, how long would it be before I notice the difference and how extreme would the difference be in your opinion? Visually, after a few months, you would be like, oh wow, okay, this is some other shit. After a week or two, you'd be like, I don't know. My workouts feel pretty good. Psychologically, if you're especially introspective and perceptive and you're sensitive to the psychological side effects, which I'm greatly sensitive to, I noticed in 30 minutes of taking steroids. And would I... If I did the same exact workout, but took steroids, would I get different results or would I have to ramp up the workout that I'm doing to see those different results?

1:20:07Both. If you have the same workout and you take plenty of steroids, you can literally double your muscle gain from that workout. If you understand that steroids also allow you to recover faster and better and more completely, you can take your workout and magnify it more sets, etc. More sessions per week. And then you would grow like two and a half times as much muscle. Sounds exciting, but there's always a downside for these things in life. There are a few downsides, yes. What are the downsides that no one's talking about? That no one's talking about. So there's cosmetic downsides. You get an increase in body hair growth.

1:20:43This is especially profound for female, but if you're a male, that's a thing. I have hair that grows on my ears. I have hair that grows on the outside of my nose. I have to shave the front of my nose. Now, a lot of us just be being a Russian Jew and hair just grows out of our eyeballs, but chin happens. You get pimples, you get stuff like that. Over the longer term, you get a substantially increased risk of heart disease. If you're smart, you take blood pressure drugs to kind of rack the blood pressure increase. If you're dumb, you take it on the chin and you have a high probability, much higher of kidney failure later in your life and losing your limbs and your vision or all that good stuff that comes with that.

1:21:20There is an increased probability or severity of cancer. Steroids increase the probability of damn near every disease, kind of central systemic disease that you can have. But that usually happens much later. And so while you're on them, you deal with cosmetic side effects, increased probability of balding and the psychological side effects, which are highly unpleasant. I can get into it a bit. If you're a teenager, there's an entire class of steroids that close your growth plates early. So if you're under the age of definitely 22 as a male and you take steroids, there's a very good chance you will never reach the adult height you were supposed to reach if you just let nature do the thing.

1:21:58So when teenagers take steroids, I think this almost always categorically a super, super terrible idea. Also, they're not intelligent enough yet. Some teenagers are very smart. They're not wise enough yet to be able to make that trade off appropriately. And so that's a huge sort of different topic. But the psychological side effects are a lot of times the things that are the proximately most displeasing part of taking steroids. Some people like them, but they're also mixed back. Tell me about the before we get onto the psychological effects, what about libido? Because I've heard all kinds of things.

1:22:36I've heard it shrinks your balls, you're willy. Something like half of all people will experience testicular shrinkage while using steroids. Your boy got lucky. I should solve the same science. A lot of people roughly half will experience a decrease in ejaculate volume and a profound decrease in fertility that does not mean you're not infertile. I know many people. I know many people's children that were fathered when the people were on steroids. So if some people are like, I'm on gear, I could just bang away and nothing happens. That's not true. Stereoids have never been shown to change the size of your willy.

1:23:11There is no mechanism by which really they can do that. So that's not a problem. But steroids depending on the steroids you take, depending on your own individual biology, depending on the ancillary drugs that you take along with it, steroids can either have no real effect on your libido, have a profoundly upregulating effect on libido, or like hunger, like you would not believe. And for other people, you get an increase in libido, but some steroids, for example, Dekka Dura -Bolen and some people, it's a type of steroid, radically escalates your libido. You turn in just as hungry. And at the same time gives you, in many cases, dependable inability to sustain an erection.

1:24:00So a rack -tile dysfunction risk goes up a lot. That's a real big problem because like you want it, but it's not around, it's not around for the picking there. So there's a lot kind of stuff plays a huge role. And a lot of the other side effects are increases in anxiety, increases in aggression, increases in disagreeableness and probability of confrontation. Stereoids have been shown decently well. This isn't super confirmed to at least approximately why you're taking them, substantially reduce your fluid intelligence. And they may in the long -term reduce your overall intelligence, but it seems that if you stop taking them, you get most, if not all of that back, but maybe not all of them.

1:24:39So they do make you dumber as a general heuristic, that's probably true. Of those psychological implications, which ones have you suffered with the most? Decrease in fluid intelligence, for sure. Radical increases in anxiety, radical increases in aggression. I pride myself on never losing my cool. I've never screamed at anyone. I've never gotten physical with anyone. But the ideas in my head that tell me to do things, tell me to do unspeakable things. Like cool. They're unspeakable. I'd have to speak them. You really want to know?

1:25:22I'm also fucking weird. So just remember that. Most people probably don't have this severity, but I'll read a comment on social media, directed at me, I guess about me. And it's from like, you know, nameless faceless profile. And I begin to fantasize about what it would be like and how much sublime pleasure I would receive in hurting that person at a deep physical and emotional level. Badly, hurting them in such a way that they're never going to walk right again. And they're always going to remember me and how they dared to cross me. Do you know what honor culture is? No. Like the idea that like in the hood, you step on someone's like a gang member's Nike's and he just blasts you away and goes to jail for 20 years over what?

1:26:18steroids. The honor culture comes from mailness. It comes from testosterone and other brain structures, of course, but the more testosterone and steroids are all testosterone like molecules. If you have 10 times the testosterone like action affecting your brain, your proclivity to falling into honor culture like behavioral patterns and thought patterns increases to an enormous extent. Do you tend to take things that are not meant in any poor way as a front? If they're actually meant as a front, you tend to catastrophize them in your head. And like this is the thing like I'll be brushing my teeth in the morning in the shower and like thinking about people in my life that have wronged me.

1:26:55I've never been wrong in a real serious way. And I'll just be like those for a bunch of uncontrollable fantasies of rage and aggression and righteous anger and revenge. I hate that. Like as a philosophical minded person, I just want to hug everyone in the world. Right now I'm not so high levels of steroids. I'm just saying I make jokes with every all -star conversations with random people in the street, no problem. And so when these thoughts consistently enter my mind on higher doses, I'm just like, oh, why? And I'm never like I should be feeling like this. I'm like, this is really annoying and really terrible.

1:27:33So if there are all of these physiological and psychological implications, which you know, you set it basically increases your chances with all of the major diseases from cardiovascular diseases to cancer, to other diseases. But then also there's this ongoing psychological consequence of taking steroids. What's the point? That's a good question. Recently, I've taken probably several year backseat away from competitive bodybuilding precisely because I have a lot of really good things going on in my life. And I'm going to need my brain and my more fluid civility to deal with and best. And for a couple of other reasons.

1:28:21So right now is an interesting time to ask me why I do it because I'm kind of like wanting that down big time. But the real reason is one of the reasons that I started steroids is I was drug -free for a long time. And I was starting to become a kind of educator and fitness and a promulgator of opinion. And a lot of the people who are in the industry at the time, this is not as true anymore. Now drug -free bodybuilding and fitness is exploding, which is a beautiful, wonderful thing. But back when Nick and I came up, to be relevant in the fitness industry, you sort of had to be like super super jacked and super super lean.

1:28:57It's nothing we were going to accomplish drug -free. So we were like, this is where the road leads to being taken seriously as a thinker in the space. Let's do it. Another thing is I really like being, or at least for a long time, liked being enormous and ripped. And just like a like you ever see how a four -year -old looks at like a garbage truck or a tank or an airplane like just that. This is as simple as that. Biology. And I'm at the extreme end of masculinity brainwized to begin with. And so you see a movie where like the Hulk rips off an airplane wing and throws it. Some people are like, whoa, some people are like, I hate this movie.

1:29:39And some people are like, oh my god, I want to just be the of that whole thing. I want that. It just feels good. But you know why? Because have you got any hypothesis to why you versus someone else? Because the average person doesn't have that feeling. So have you been able to figure out in hindsight why you were so taken by being big? I have a few ideas. I'll copy out this idea with the following. Retrospective analysis of why you do things is almost always grotesquely flawed. Most of why we do things is a combination of variables we don't understand and genetics. And so like the whole life story arc, well, I'll start I want a t -shirt on the third grade like that's bullshit.

1:30:22That's a backwards justification you made up. So the following statements are backwards justifications I'm making up as just tentative very not not sure hypotheses. Here's a fun story. This will be fun. When I was a small young, my dad would wrestle with me a lot. And he would always let me win in the end. He's great. He's a great person. And he would always tell me that I was strong and capable. And then in like end of elementary school all the way through the beginning of high school, I was bullied. Honestly, like literally a few times, I think I was just the wrong person to bully because that very temporary state of some franchisement and powerlessness.

1:31:20I'm never going to be bullied again to put it simply. I wish I was logical enough that when like if if I was getting robbed by someone at knife point or not even knife point just like just a guy try to be like, hey man, get out of my way. No. I said get out of my way. I'm going to die here before I move out of my way. You're going to treat me with respect or one of us is either going to jail or the morgue or the hospital. It's a terrible thing to think it's stupid beyond belief. Just be like, sir, my apologies. Please keep going. But what were you bullied for?

1:32:06Nothing. Nothing. Just kid just wanted to bully people. But when I understand the content of what was going through your brain at the time, like what you were thinking in that moment, because I think we can all think back to, well, unfortunately too many people can think back to a time when they were bullied in some way, whether it was a day, whether it was something that was a bit more prolonged, when they started to embody that sort of pain and shame and that feeling of I'm different from these other kids. Some of my best friends have talked. They've been to therapy and their therapists have, I think figured out through some of that retrospective analysis, which obviously a lot of the time is inaccurate.

1:32:41Much of their adult behavior today correlates back to an early experience in such a way where they were made to feel a certain way in that social environment where we're so sort of formative. How did it make you feel? I felt scared and I felt like I wasn't brave enough to stand up for myself. Later I began standing up for myself and that felt very nice. But I felt like I was out of control and a part of my brain that I didn't consent to made me frown and dipped my head down for me. It was almost like musculature in my neck just deactivated. It's an ancestral mechanism that everyone has. Kids all the way up through teenage hidden adulthood sort themselves, male children into dominance hierarchies.

1:33:29It's just the dominance hierarchy sorting itself. And someone confronted me and I automatically sorted myself beneath them. I felt beneath someone. I felt weaker, more inferior, less apt, less capable, less comfortable, less strong. And they didn't even have consent to it. It's not something I chose. Those are beat me up. I had better not. It was totally a subconscious behavior. And looking back on it, I did not enjoy how that made me feel. Do you remember a specific day? Where a specific thing happened? Because I can think back to a couple of specific days when I was younger that I think shaped me in that regard where I was pretty much the only black person in the school.

1:34:09I remember an evening where this particular kid called Sam had like cornered me and called me the N word and everyone was there. And I'll never forget those days. They're like etched into your mind as unforgettable memories of pain, of shame, of that feeling. Do you have those a particular day? Could you share that with me? This is getting deep.

1:34:38I have a few incidents. One probably stands out the most. So as a kid named Darren and he was black, almost certainly fatherless.

1:34:55Peter naturally physically developed for his age. He was 10 so as I. We were just wrestling. I wrestled with everyone. He beat me in wrestling. He was the only person I believed to beat me in wrestling my whole childhood. He was like a 14 year old kid in great shape. I was a 10 year old kid.

1:35:19He beat me in wrestling and that was cordial because I get this wrestling. But he had braces, I think. And he cut himself while wrestling with me and he was bleeding out of his mouth. And then he got really upset about that. And he kind of stood over me. And he was like, you know, you little this and that. You did this to me. I'm going to f you up and all this other stuff. And that's when that mechanism switched. When he did that to me, my whole perspective on the world changed for years. I was like a confident happy kid. And then after that for four or five years, maybe longer, all of my confidence drained out.

1:35:58I became introverted. I am not naturally introverted. And that his presence alone reminded me that I need to keep my head down. And otherwise, I get real scared. And I didn't want to be scared. And so that's how that worked. And it wasn't like he got something like your shit is racial. That's deep, bro. I should not deep at all. It's just two kids. And one of them punctured out. I was just the wrong person for that to happen to. And I remember fantasizing when I was in like sixth grade, I think like a year later, like wouldn't it be great if I brought a baseball bat to school and just broke his legs and just kept hitting his legs to where he'd never walk right ever again because he wronged me that bad.

1:36:47I felt that deep and true. I'm going to keep the statement as contextual as I can with full understanding of respect for the gravity of what I'm saying. When the Columbine people did what they did, I thought it was grigious and terrible. I also understood how you could be pushed to do that. Now in their particular case, I don't even know how they were pushed or whatever, but enough bullying will make you consider doing terrible things to regain your honor. And so that was probably like the most preamble. And I was bullied in other situations. Again, I might have been bullied three or four times my whole life.

1:37:23But it just it just did not sit well with me at all. If for a long time, it changed how I expressed myself to the world. And even right now as I talk to you, I'm getting pretty emotional. I'll say that if I see that guy again in real life, if he's even around, I have a brown belt, Jiu -Jitsu now. I'm almost certainly bigger and stronger than him. Is he safe around me? Probably. Can I guarantee his safety if he brings it up? No. If he watches this and hits me up and goes, hi, I got you a little bitch. If I see him in real life, I might take something from him. Medical science can't give him back within the next five or ten years.

1:38:06What a terrible idea. I'd go to Jiu. I have a lot of really good things going for me. It would be wrong in every single way. It wouldn't even be ethical. Because he never like the crap out of me or anything like that. He would stop like he brutalized me. And my god, like I'm going to see if he was ten. The gravity of how deeply it feels to me even right now at age 40. He's like, man, yeah, that should definitely man something. It's interesting. Because I think for the first, I'm 31 now. So I think for the first 27 years of my life, if you'd asked me why do I do? I would have in hindsight probably told you a story that sounds a little bit heroic.

1:38:44I have this drive and have this motivation. And I had this goal and I went after it. And it was all like self -agency and all that stuff. But the more and more I've learned about, I think psychology generally and how humans as I often say are sometimes driven and they're dragged and it's hard to tell the difference. Like whether something is drive or whether it's like you're being dragged. Compulsion. Like compulsion that you just can't explain. Because of maybe a trauma or an experience you went through or maybe the household you grew up in. I think I'm leaning more now towards the dragged side of things in most areas of my life.

1:39:19Especially where I exhibit a typical behavior. Like what? Like for the fact that I work like seven days a week and I can just and I've always been absolutely obsessed with like achievement and success. So why do you think that is? Because I think I grew up in a context where the thing that invalidated me was that. Like we were the poor family that didn't have things and I was black in an all -white area. And I was just full of shame growing up. And I think I saw that that medicine to the to the shame as being material success. It was the thing that I lied she installed to try and achieve. And you know it's been my orientation for my whole life.

1:39:58I think deep within me is this this story that success and material success and all those things make me enough. And I didn't feel like I'm inside. Yeah. And I didn't feel like I was enough. And it's much as I'm aware of that now it doesn't mean that it's going to stop. Did it so it didn't do you feel like you're enough? Well it's interesting because if you ask me do I feel like I'm enough I'd say yes. I'm very comfortable with who I am. Like I think I have somewhat of an accurate reflection of who I am to some degree. But then I also I contrast that with the fact that why am I still just like obsessively driving towards these other bigger goals?

1:40:35In a way that's really really a typical like not the average person. You know and why does it matter so much to me? You know that's where I go. Okay there's something different in my wiring. It's still an element. This sort of proving my worth to myself or you know proving to the kids back on the playground that you know they should respect me in some way or whatever. Yeah. And it's complicated. And I say this not because it makes me sound great because it certainly doesn't. I just said because I really believe that more honest I can be with myself the closer I can get to everything that I want.

1:41:06Oh sure. You know like the closer I can get to holding the steering wheel not being dragged with with a rope at the back of the car. I'm trying to hold this steering wheel in my life and that starts with like an honest self -awareness and more than that honestly has only come from being more and more confident and caring less about what people think. Like I wouldn't have said this on camera. There's like millions of people probably listening right now. I wouldn't have said these things but myself it sounds icky. Oh I've never told this boy story to anyone but a few people. Yeah. I was like when you brought it up like tell me about when you were bullied in my head I was like holy shit all right like this is where this goes.

1:41:41Well I just think it's everyone I've met. It's not you know you're the same as everyone I've met in that regard. Probably if I had to write that fake back story arc explaining my life the bullying thing is like kind of a little bit minor. I have a really gnarly story about having really severe attention deficit disorder when I was younger. Well at the same time growing up in an Ashkenazi Jewish family for Ashkenazi Jewish Russian immigrants to the US you were either good at school you were worthless and it's not just that my parents thought that. I didn't really think that at a deep level they did believe it at a surface level.

1:42:13I thought that. You can't make fun of someone for being fat if they're cool with being fat. Like yeah I'm fucking big. Hell yeah and you're like not didn't work. But if they believe that being fat is terrible you can be like hey how much do you weigh? That's it everything changes. So for me I believed I had a destiny to be at least competent at school. And up until I was 14 I was like in contention for being the worst student at any single school I intended at any single time. And the bittersweet element was my dad is a PhD in mathematical modeling atmospheric physical phenomena and my mom was a translator of the Russian language or translated English to Russian and got a master's degree in social work in her second language in America a few years after we got in.

1:42:57That's the legacy I'm dealing with. And like I can't do math problems three grades younger than the kids I like I got held back in school a grade. And so I took that not so well. And so later because I was medicated for attention deficit it was a revelatory experience as I came up and sort of grew into the idea that was actually fairly intelligent. I had something to prove. And it's getting better now because I've taken enough IQ tests and you can only write so many books and ban so many podcasts until people are like you're pretty smart and you gotta start believing it unless you're totally irrational at some point that sinks in.

1:43:37So one thing I will say is there are ways of dealing with demons and insufficiencies that you've developed through your childhood. Some of them are just having a real deep personal journey in your own head consistently reinforcing good attitudes not reinforcing the bad ones. Other was are talking to friends family. Other ones are therapy which is excellent for this. But I gotta tell you Steven I'm not sure if this is true. But there's gotta be something to proving the opposite. It's true to doing it all to getting I don't know at the top or whatever but till like no one in the right mind with its point be like this guy is below average intelligence.

1:44:18That would be preposterous to say I've taken the Ravens advanced progressive matrices test and I pegged at scale high. So you know every single question right and so my IQ is above 160 we don't know how high because they don't do standardize a Q test above that. You do that enough times you enough PhD programs book enough teaching awards enough authorship enough all the stuff enough millions and app designs and all the stuff and dealing with otherwise really smart people and they walk away being like fuck that guy's real smart enough of that makes you swim in a warm comfortable sea that heals you in a way that maybe therapy can but god damn there's something to just do and the fucking thing you take a skinny little kid who's bullied you make a Muhammad Ali champion of the world enough title fights later you like hey Muhammad Ali what you gonna do about this you know you flinch come on me so yeah it's nice to say and I think it's true that therapy and self -care and all these things can heal the soul there's something about overcoming and becoming superlative to that thing you used to fear that might heal your soul to a huge extent I think maybe I've witnessed that again maybe this is all just make believe it sounds real nice no I completely agree and it's perfectly what I've experienced in my own life and as you were speaking I was thinking it's just so clear to me that when you're young you get evidence you get like a stack of evidence about who you are and what the world is and what you then have done for the next 10 20 30 years is to counteract that evidence with new evidence I think about it like a library I think everything that I went through and you went through when you're younger just added like one book to this shelf and the interesting context of the library is those books are both informative they're both you know nonfiction books but they're also fiction books and they're also instruction manuals for what you'll do in the future if you think about those first 18 years of your life what you did as you filled this library full of in books stories self stories and this library that you've collected is just a bunch of stories that you believe about yourself now if you want to change some of these stories unfortunately you have to get new books yes so what you did in your life is you pursued hard things that would put new books on the shelf and when a new book comes on the shelf that counteracts another one you have to take the old one off but you can't you can't just sit around willing the it's as you say as an I've experienced in my life the only way I can put books up there is to go and get first party evidence with my own eyes yes something else is true and not just once all over yeah over depending on how stubborn the existing for sure and if they're real stubborn here isn't my question to you do you think that childhood experiences build the kind of books that are hard back Lord of the Rings type of sheds whereas adult experiences that completely countervail childhood experiences are like a little magazine you'd read out a plane I got so in the analogy when you're a child you put books on the shelf very quickly they're all very cheap books because there's nothing on the shelf so you're just grabbing your mom says pigs can fly on the shelf as you get older actually because there's so many books on the shelf already and it's if I just focus on the analogy of pigs flying there's already a book about aviation on the shelf which means it's harder to believe that pigs can fly there's a book already about animals and they're anatomy so you can't add a new one because there's so many counteracting ones are ready so this is why they often say that young kids adopt you know you can't teach an old dog new tricks because there's so much existing evidence there of something else being true so kids throw them on the shelf without much interrogation because there's less counteracting books there already whereas adults they take a little bit more time to add a new one because they've got six other books which might tell a different story yeah and so this is you know we think about neuroscience and neuroplasticity it becomes a little bit harder sometimes for adults to I mean I had a neuroscientist yesterday saying this to me that it becomes after you get to possible to 25 years old neuroplasticity becomes a little bit more stubborn it's still possible up until you die but it's a little bit more stubborn so you just need more reinforcement you need more reinforcement more evidence more repetitions and he he described it as focus yeah focus on the thing what one thing that I found maybe is helpful is my my wife is similar to me she's like an insane super gold driven psychotic person and we have a real trouble taking a step back and telling ourselves like man we're doing pretty well so every now and again like evenings and weekends especially weekends we'll do some like sound super lame but gratefulness yeah discussions depending on you talked I guess to my old childhood bullies that's lame but you know it's really weird to say some of these things out loud to yourself and there's some resistance especially early admitting to yourself like I want I want I want I want I did the thing maybe it doesn't work quite that simply but I think it's good to try because it's a really weird thing to go and be 60 years old and look back on your life and someone's like so what if you accomplish like oh not much I kind of ain't shit like I've seen you on book covers like right oh that's right okay so I accomplished a lot but I don't feel like I have how dare you rob yourself of being able to swim in that beautiful warm sea of self -actualization I think it's worth it for people to focus when you do good let yourself bask in that glow get your time under the sun amen and it's all about subjective progress it's all about like this I was gonna do a post last night I was thinking like so many people spend their lives I was just I was crawling through Instagram and I was I wrote the post and I just didn't post it but so I noticed that so many people go through their lives like looking for an enemy like looking for the person or the system or the government or the political party that's currently wronging them and they commit the whole life to just this this focus of who's wronging me and I need to point them out and call them out and scream at them and I've never I've never fallen into that trap but I do have a competition with myself and I feel like that's very healthy because what I'm actually looking for in myself is some form of progress whether it's how I show up or with my my fitness or with my muscles whatever it's constant search for progress in myself and then when I do discover progress I can celebrate it and I can have that gratitude we talked about and so anyone's progress whether it's when I went from being a university dropout to getting my first investor that is like oh my god and it's only in hindsight and with some aging wisdom that I start to realize that those moments were so unbelievably important they're so motivational identifying your progress and I've done there's two kind of data points that I've really shown a light on this for me is one of them was Sir David Brelsford who took the British cycling team from being down and out and depressed to the greatest team of all time winning all the gold medals and he said yes the marginal gains thing that he's known for that's in the front chapter of atomic habits was key but actually he said to me he went when you can get a group of people or a person to feel like they're going somewhere because they have a sense of progress he goes that's what made us stay in the bike shop till 2 a .m.

1:51:29in the morning and I read another study from Harvard Business Review where they asked people are now in to keep work diaries and then at the end of the study they said point at the day where you had your best day in work and people always pointed in their work diaries today where there was a feeling of subjective progress even small yes and that makes you motivated you feel like you are going somewhere which means you're more likely to do it so gratitude serves the happiness well but also just a motivational one we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for and the question that has been left for you oh crap what is the most meaningful dream brackets nightmare you've ever had in why I don't know if this is the most meaningful dream but Jesus Christ I'm really going to say this fine as I was when I was a young adult I was starting to experience success with the opposite sex and I just did not ever experience that when I was younger or already of age but younger it's just probably like a bit of a hang up you know for most people it's kind of like when you're and when I started experiencing success with women my dreams at night changed and one of them was the following dream has nothing to do with females and sex but it's had to do with power and it had to do with an ability that you can ran out of my childhood home into the street and I it wasn't the street anymore it was just a black empathy void and it became a lucid dream so kind of knew a little bit that it was a dream it was like oh I'm going to do cool dragon balls e stuff you know what dragon balls e is the anime show and I opened up my hand and I wanted to make a fireball and I made an energy ball that was like a singularity size but it was made of people's screams it was like and then I woke up and I was like that was so cool not victim screams just Viking screams and I was like that is a cool shit and I had multiple other dreams in my young adult life after successors of women which were dreams of power and I was like god damn if I can have those dreams every night it'll be super happy that's the most interesting dream I've ever had about following someone losing their virginity I can say I lost my get out of here I still have a lost my virginity I'm gonna get in person doctor Mike thank you so much for your wisdom and your your information and all the work that you've done in your life because it's formed a wonderfully important perspective on a subject that's so many people struggle with I'm gonna ask you I'm gonna leave you with my with my last question which is what is the most important thing that we didn't talk about today as it relates to the subject matter of getting in shape building muscle that we should have talked about is there anything we left off the table there's a lot to this so we left a lot out I have a lot more to say about body dysmorphia and how people do relate to their bodies and how they maybe shouldn't or try to weave their thoughts away from various ideas and how maybe they should try to relate to their bodies better and it's a conversation I love to have I just don't ever get asked about it super often so I think that in in body dysmorphia in general in self -esteem as it relates to bodies of guys that grew up too skinny of girls that grew up too fat I think a combination of getting the body that you want soaking in the sun and really being like I'm the hot girl now this is really happening and how to relate to your body there's a plethora of wonderful conversation around that that if I had a time machine and go back and interrupt you and just be like let's talk about that instead maybe we can say that for another time sure doctor Mike thank you so much where do people find you your YouTube channel is incredible so I'll link that below just YouTube just you to and you've got your app as well which people can go and check out like you know YouTube as well links are for YouTube two apps okay so if I go to your YouTube channel I can find everything boom great Mike doctor Mike thank you so much huge honor and pleasure thank you so much