The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)

25:32Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted by nutrition. So let's start with fat and lean. If I want to be lean like you and I want to have low body fat, where does one begin? What happened with me and what I always advise people to do? His start just by looking at global leave from 30 ,000 foot view, what do you know you're doing and like not well right now? Like are you drinking excessively? Do you end every night with a pint of ice cream? You know that you're doing some things wrong. So you make one pass at the obvious stuff and you just do it for a couple weeks.

26:15You know, when you see how you progress and what will normally happen is usually those are the most Offending the biggest offenders when it comes to nutrition that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it What do you think of some of the offenders that we don't realize are offenders? I've had so many in my life. He's not ketchup and yeah, I thought white rice was great Yeah, I mean white rice is actually there's a place for carbohydrates and people's and people's diets, I believe but You have to have a healthy respect for them because they're the most likely to be overeating Like the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us like you're but you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some or pasta and then some because they're they're they are much more chemically pleasing to the body so I think people need to be cautious of Overconsumption of carbohydrates and they're not aware portion sizes really impacting them because they'll say no I had I had rice and and pasta and and I would say I have rice and pasta too every day.

27:15But like I probably don't eat as much as that person does. So portion sizes when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness about. The kind of hidden offenders, I mean, there's sugar and a lot of things that is used just to make these things more appealing, especially, you know, like yogurts, right? People will have, you know, fruit on the bottom yogurt, but it's like loaded with sugar. Or my first experience was oatmeal. I was reading the bodybuilding magazines and my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in the morning. So of course I was buying quaker oats, but I was buying those little packets and they have brown sugar in the bottom and it's like they were loaded with sugar.

27:53They were not the equivalent of quaker oats from a camister. And so here I'm thinking I'm doing something right, but I'm not because there was more sugar in that than there wasn't a bag or a bowl of tricks cereal. What you look for on the package? I always look for sugar and fat. That's what I look for. So, but dietary fat, there are nine calories per gram of fat versus four calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate. There are much more calorie dense foods. So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or form, calorically, the dish is going to increase pretty quickly. So you have to be mindful of them.

28:37If you want to lose weight and achieve a hypochloric state to get there, you're going to have to take in fewer calories than you're burning. That's why I would look at fat content. But sugar is just really not necessary. It's just one of those things that our bodies do not need and tends to be too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating sugar. So I think that's one of the fastest ways to get yourself on track is to try to minimize the sugar content and the food. And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate you.

29:21So if you're eating a higher protein food, you're likely going to find yourself feeling satisfied and full faster than if it's just a carbohydrate -based meal. So those are the three things that I look at every time I turn a label around protein, sugar, and fats. And what does your diet look like? I eat breakfast in the morning and I have usually again, I'll give you the typical meals. I have oatmeal. I've been put like some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself. So I can't pumpkin just for some additional vitamins and minerals. Protein shake. and some maybe some egg whites. So I get good amounts of protein.

29:57And for lunch, I'll have like a grilled chicken wrap. Again, I'm trying to prioritize protein at every single meal. And I'll try to have a Greek yogurt with that has limited sugar in it. Then I'll have a protein shake usually after work. Only because I know that when I get done with work, usually at six o 'clock, I come home, the kids are there, they wanna play. I wind up just having something to tie me over realizing that my dinner is going to occur later at night after my workout. What happens though is that workout occurs at around 10, 30 to 11 o 'clock at night. So dinner happens at around midnight for me.

30:32That's always again based around a protein first, so usually chicken or steak or fish. And then fibres carbohydrates. So it's going to be something like I like at a mame. It's, you know, has good protein in it. And I'm not fearful of the soy protein that's there, especially in that limited amount, broccoli. And then I have my starchic carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is sweet potatoes. So I'll have sweet potatoes or pasta or both. I'm still shocked that you were eating dinner at midnight. Yeah. And that, so what time do you train? So I train around 10, 30 or 11 until around quarter to 12 or so.

31:11Is that suboptimal? It's only optimal because it's when I can consistently do it. If I could change that, I would probably work out at 5 p .m. You know, but I always find that there's still work going on. People still need me at that point in the day. Why not the morning? I have a very difficult time waking up on one of those people that act like a zombie for probably 50 minutes before I'm feeling ready to go. I'm very much the same. I probably eat a bit too late. I train a bit too late, et cetera. And as I'm listening to you, I'm almost listening to myself. And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Stephen, if you went to bed earlier and you ate earlier, then you'd wake up and you'd go to train in the morning.

31:54Well, how do you feel when you wake up? Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up? Or do you feel? No. I'm very similar to you. I wake up late. And if I wake up late, then I feel fine. But if you try and wake me up at 7 o 'clock, the chances are that I went to bed maybe at midnight, at 1am, so there's not enough sleep taking place there, but having worn this loop for a while, who responds, so I'm a investor in the company, hashtag out that hashtag ASA. One of the things I came to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep, my body isn't actually asleep, because I could see my resting heart rate so high through the night, so my body's actually just working on the food, so it's not restoring my body, so one of my goals for this year is to trying not eat after 9 p .m.

32:39I think it's a good goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or time to go to bed because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep, the routine of sleep is what's most important, I believe. Even in cases of lower sleep totals. There's actually 27 % of people report sleeping less than six hours a night and 20 % of people sleep four to five hours. I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because I get the bed late and I get up around seven o 'clock each morning. Do you sleep track? I don't sleep track.

33:25I did for a while. I don't sleep track. I actually, I've tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished. Now there is, and I hold on to this as a possibility, but I haven't tested myself. There are two genes that are actually responsible for short sleep or syndrome. In other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it optimizes gene expression for wakefulness and brainstorm activity that allows you to wake up easier. And the downside to that is that only one to three percent of the population has that.

34:06So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be playing a game that I ultimately can't win. But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep totals than others. On this point of being lean, one of the things people are most obsessed with getting rid off is lower belly fat. This stubborn belly fat that occurs right there. Right there on our little mannequin here. You don't have a pouch. That's what we call it me and my friends, we call it a pouch. We can be very lean elsewhere, but still have a little bit of a pouch there. Some people think doing sit -ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat.

34:49What level of strictness of nutrition. And I mean, level of strictness is not just in the foods that you choose, but the consistency with which you choose them. So how long can you sustain this really clean diet? I hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean, it's actually the first thing. It's a red flag, but they don't. But I think it comes from having a sustainability to eat in a very restricted way when men put on body fat. That is the first place to go on in the last place to come off. And one of the biggest areas for that, you mentioned that I don't have one, but I mean, as ridiculous as this is going to sound, when I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it's right there.

35:36And it's because that is the absolute first place to go on. This shamedfulness of how your body does this and what it does to us is that it kind of works from this top down approach. You lose fat first from here and then it goes down and the last place is here. So it works in this top down approach. By the time you get all the way down there, you've lost the fat in your face, you've lost the fat in your neck. Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like, man, you're gone. I hate the way that my face gets caved in. But it's sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining meaning a lean physique, especially naturally because that's how your body starts to lose fat and especially the age you start to lose collagen and skin thickness so it looks even more of a challenge.

36:20But this top down approach is sometimes good because it allows you to start to see like the upper row abs underneath the chest or so when you start to get into better shape, you might have noticed this yourself, you start to see like my lower chest isn't as saggy anymore. It's actually starting to take some shape. Well, what's cool is that's actually that little spark of motivation. They like I want to keep going. I can see the top half right. I can see the top half. There it is. I can see I have them. You know, I actually have them. You know, I got a two pack, but I have them. Well, you continue down that path.

36:52Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more. Sometimes you take one extra night of, you know, socializing or drinking out of the schedule. And you start to see it, you know, go even lower and you start to get that second row of abs. Then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue. And what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue? And that's the caveat that I always say I mentioned early on. Like, is it that important to you? Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12 % body fat, you're going to look amazing. And you're going to look better than 98 % of all men.

37:29So whether you had that little tiny area fat around your waist, you're still going to have your abs, you're still going to have defined shoulders and arms and some veins popping out in other places. Like, is that good enough so that you experienced the health benefits you already would be there? Asthetically, you're probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you came from. And you still get to live a life that's not as filled with sacrifice to get there. And that's the battle people have to have to wage and ask themselves, what is, how worth it is it to me? Is the game of weight loss basically calories and calories out?

38:09I just need to have less calories than I've ever. Yes and no. So to lose weight, you're going to need to be in a calorie deficit. it. But if you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let's just say eight twinkies in a deficit, you're not going to get the same outcome because the type of weight lost is going to vary depending upon what you ingest. So if you don't ingest enough protein, you're just eating twinkies. You might lose weight, but you're also going to lose muscle in the in the process. So if you want to deter the loss of muscle and and maximize the retention of muscle.

38:49And maybe again, even slightly build in that deficit, then you're gonna wanna prioritize protein. So it's not just the calories and calories out that will get you to lose the weight. But when you ultimately, I think people aren't just talking about weight loss, they really wanna make sure that they're maximizing lean muscle at the same time of losing weight. If they wanna look a certain way, function a certain way, it's gonna matter. What are the big misconceptions we have about abs to get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff. Like that doesn't work. You know, I think that's probably the biggest misconception.

39:21I was your member, Laszlo. Laszlo was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor when we were building it. He would come up to me. Just he was like the typical male, right? He was in pretty decent shape. He worked every day active. He's like, I gotta get in shape, man. And I was like, well, you know, how many days of week do you train? He said, well, I don't really train. I just, you know, do a couple push -ups and stuff. I said, well, you're gonna have to probably train. What do you do for your nutrition? I kind of eat what I want. And I was like, all right, but he wasn't really overweight, you know, but it's the typical.

39:51And he goes, just tell me what I could, I just want to know what I can do for this. What's the good exercise I can do for this? He's pretty fun. For the belly fat. And it's just pointing at his stomach. And it's like, there's still that belief that there's just an exercise or two that you need to do for that. That's not how it is. Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise. it's always about nutrition. It's always, but nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else. Now, when you get lean enough, if you're not doing any type of ab training, you'll probably have less defined abs because you won't have the development of that muscle.

40:27There's nothing different about the abdominals than the biceps or the quads. There's still muscles that can be developed. And because of the anatomy of the abs, there's that line down the middle and the tax, right? That's just caused by a suturing down of something called linear alba, it's just a tendinous sheath. When you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training, right? Even weighted ad work is helpful in this case. The muscles are just growing, just like a bicep would grow. And as they grow, you can't change the suturing down of the tendinous sheath, so they're sort of growing out more prominently from that area.

41:02So you get more visible abs, but that's the only way to really do that is through training to hypertrophy of the abs, but you're not gonna get there if you don't first attack the body fat that's over them and that's only gonna come from nutrition. You know, sometimes you see older bodybuilders, like former bodybuilders, and they kinda look a bit bloated. What is that? And that's usually anabolic steroid use that causes that or growth hormone that doesn't generally come from natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that. I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within the abdomen, not just in the ingotal groin area, that could cause some of that distension in the ass, but not that global bloating that you get there.

41:50That's really usually a telltale sign of growth hormone use, something that they've abused that causes the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distention pushing out of the belly. That's the organ's green. Yeah, it's actually a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it's not a healthy thing to have. And there's always a lot of repercussions to going down that path. They might look short -term the way they want to look. And I would argue that even in those cases, you know, the large, super large, Mr. Olympia look, I don't even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even a lot of people, but it definitely leads behind a lot of damage.

42:39And people do that at a variety of different ages now. I think even people that aren't training to be bodybuilders, I can think of several people that are I'm aware of who have started taking like TRT and growth hormones pretty young. And I'm actually seeing a little bit of that same body shape. I don't even know what it is. But yeah, I mean, I think it look at TRT is becoming such a prevalent path for people. I don't like that that's the prevalent path. I don't want to come across as somebody who is anti -TRT because I've been reminded of that and that on some of the videos I've made about it that look Jeff There's a lot of cases where people have extremely bottom out testosterone levels and there's nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone that's not being made I completely appreciate that but as you've noted the rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation of people Talking about their use of it and and how you know they it's it's physically changing them and they're doing it at a rate like it's becoming option one.

43:51Like, what about maximizing your natural potential first, you know, before declaring yourself as low testosterone, even at levels like a 400 and 500 and then going and using testosterone. Like, you're going to be on that for the rest of your life if you pursue that path. You know, once you decide to replace your body's own natural testosterone level with exogenous testosterone, you're going to have to rely on that for the rest of your life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body's ability to produce testosterone, but that's not a given. So be prepared that once you go down that path, that's when you're going to have to be on for the rest of your life.

44:26Have you ever taken teotie? No. No. Would you ever? If it's proven down the road that it's something that could be beneficial and safe, I want to say I want to I'm aching to say 100 % safe because that's what I want. then maybe I would if I felt like I was really suffering from, you know, the loss or the change that my body was going through. Because I don't want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can. But up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that it feels most rewarding because I haven't had to do anything. So I feel like I'm most inspired by my ability to keep going.

45:05And I'm not going to be 50 this year. What about let's do living long then? And when we think about longevity and what it's going to take for me to be live a long time, but be strong into my late years, what areas do I need to focus on training and staying strong? And where do I need to invest my energy in time? So this is where I think when I say if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an athlete because like the hallmark of their training is that it's multifaceted. So you can't just have one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one dimensional, I'm not doing this to say this to put them down, but one dimensional as an arm wrestler, right?

45:47They can have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength, you know, to be able to actually turn somebody over. But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep, poor recovery, they're likely going to lose, especially because your neurological output in grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover. If you don't have more than one element developed, you're not going to be your best. So when people are looking, the general population is looking to become healthier and feel better, it's not going to be one thing. First and foremost, I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes is the building of muscle, so hypertrophy and strength building is going to be really important because we are going to, again, like I talked about before, you're going to naturally lose strength every passing decade, you know, up to 8 to 10 % per decade as you pass the age of 50.

46:50So you need to make sure that you are doing something to stay that off. You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to maintain muscle recruitment, because that's, again, neurologically, your neurons start to fire at a slower pace. You need to train these things, reactivity, reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that people can do. I always remember seeing this old man, he was in an obstacle course he built.

47:34I don't know if you ever saw this, but it was a video, he was like 89 years old. And he made this obstacle course and he used to add every week or so, he'd add one more obstacle to his course and he built it in his backyard. And it was like a balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things, he used to run the obstacle course once a day. Wow. And he said that like he would try to find new ways to challenge his body so that he would keep his brain guessing as to what's next and again whether or not he was he was finding this thing to be something he didn't want to do maybe it was also feeding into his his increases because he was doing the things he hated to do but the but the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted and by incorporating some of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach because it is important.

48:26The fall risk increases exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we'll talk about with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there. But you need to factor those types of things. And flexibility and mobility feed into that. You can't... I always talk about there's a pyramid, right? If you look at the old nutrition pyramid, there's a bottom, which is supposed to be represent all the things you're supposed to work on, and then it kind of fine tunes and works its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength. You gotta maintain your strength. And then above that, you gotta maintain your muscle mass, like the mountain lean muscle you carry.

49:05And above that, your ability to perform because of those two attributes. So if you be able to actually do things, and if it was an athlete, it would be like, their skill work would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you're a baseball player, how well do you swing the bat? How well do you feel the ground ball? like, is that top level skill work that comes up here? It's cardiovascular in there. Heribasca is in there as well as well. Yep. Your condition would be right, you know, depending about who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance and the sport you play is going to fall right above or below strength.

49:37Now, I would argue that there's a few things underneath the whole thing. It's just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don't see the roots. And the pyramid sits on the ground, but what's underneath the pyramid, the roots, your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person, they could squat 600 pounds. But now I'm gonna put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing. You're not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability. And if you can't obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility, you lack the flexibility, then I've also taken away and I've weakened the strength that you have.

50:16It's there, your strength is there, but it can't be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root of longevity and fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility, instability. Flexibility is the muscle length in the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the joint excursions, the ability to move your joints in their full range of motion. So it's a muscle joint thing. Still the same concept, but they're working on different elements. Do you think people realize that that's so important and do you think they enjoy it? No, I think people hate it.

50:51And I think that, I mean, some people like it. If you're into the practice of yoga, Pilates, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility. But for the average gym goer, no, it's either going to get relegated to the last thing they do before they leave the gym or not at all. And I think that that's going to have a big impact on how well they feel. I think that when they talk about the fountains of youth stretching and mobility is probably the thing that makes people feel the best. I've heard that, people say that, and I agree to almost a full extent, but I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength, you are never going to be as functionally capable as you can.

51:41I actually have this band to sort of show that. Like if somebody was just completely flexible, right? And you were trying to shoot this band across the table. I don't have a lot of tension to be able to generate to get any kind of force to do that. On the contrary, if somebody was strong, right? Maybe even muscle bound. I don't have any flexibility here to, again, and really create much of a elastic output here or to get a lot of forced generation. But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of flexibility, but also the strength in this case, the muscles, the tension, I can shoot that band a lot further with a lot more force and a lot more ease.

52:26Our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this, but our goal should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and mobility. Because that's only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance that possible. How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my mobility? Not much. It just has to be consistent. So I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to ten minutes a day of stretching the areas that are tight, And again, this is very individual. Like one thing that I always stressed, even when I was in baseball, every player from me got an individual program.

53:08And it was based off of a comprehensive assessment. So I would go through the assessment of each player. And you would find that either based on position and the demands of that position body type, you would find certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthen more than others. People have to be willing to seek out where these the deficits are and be to actually pursue a program that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn't have to be an hour a day of doing those things.

53:48You prioritize that list and you focus on five to ten minutes of extra work with it. It's funny, I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning, do that every morning, do this every morning, but it's only appropriate to the people that have the deficits that that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into a whole separate career in order to be able to pull them up. That's not necessary. You can, you find the ones that have the biggest impact. But I don't think that having, you know, doing stretching requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them.

54:19You say that there are five key exercises. You need to be able to maximize your longevity and quality of life that kind of dovetail into this. The single leg Romanian deadlift, the squat and reach, the sumo stance hold, the posterior chain push up and hip abductions. Can you show me these workouts? Sure. As you can see from the space, I mean, you don't need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They're incredibly accessible. They're actually scalable with a low barrier of entry, so no matter what level of ability you bring to these exercises, you're going to be able to do them.

54:50All right, so the first exercise up here is pretty simple, but it does demand some balance, And it also will teach us a very critical biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it's called the single leg RDL. What you want to do is you want to hinge. Pretending that there's a drawer behind you that's open, you're going to close it with your butt. Then you reach four of it at the same time, you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glue on that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance. So your goal is to see if you can get even up to 10 without losing your balance or having and that other foot have to contact the ground.

55:27Next exercise is something that we call squat and reach. And what we do is we get down to the ground like this, down to a squatting position. And we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. Then from here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate and follow it with your head as you go up as high as you can to the sky. Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds. That is what is lost when we get into these chronic positions like this, right? With our devices at our computers, we get to this rounded thoracic spine, this upper portion of the spine. Doing this will give us the mobility that we're lacking.

56:08So the next thing is something we call a sumo squat stance. It's a squat stance hold. And it's based off of something called the horse stance, which again, we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability. Right? And again, we're still going to work on the hip and all three planes. So what we do is we get down, feet wide, and squat down into this position here. Now, the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs for a little bit of support. But what I want to see is tall of the chest as I can get the same way that we just did through that rotation to maintain that area of the spine, that the rastic spine, and getting extended.

56:46Because we know that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it. And the posture will get away from this position and more to this open, upright position. If we don't do it in that beginner format, then what we're going to do is cross the hands over, okay, getting that down position, reach up and out, okay. That is a 30 second hold up to a 60 second hold depending upon how far you can take it. The next thing we do is we've got to work on that upper body a little bit. So the upper body should still be able to do the exercise that is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength, which is the push up.

57:26But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits both front and back side. So we call that supposed to your chain push up. For a push up you want those hands underneath the shoulders, okay? I'll demonstrate one that we'll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes. So you squeeze your butt together, you straighten your knees out by contracting your quads, and then you get a good firm holding plank position here. Now when you go down, normally people would stop here or they wouldn't come up all the way.

58:02You go all the way down to the ground. At this point you slide your hands out in front of you, point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed, tight, and then lift up into what we call a superman. Right from here, you're going to train all the muscles and you're supposed to your chain from the back of your heels all the way up to the tip of your fingers. Right, come down, slide it back, come up into that good firm pushup. Don't lose any of that stability, come down, slide up, and lift. The final thing is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover.

58:39What we're talking about is a side lying hip abduction. Okay, and what we do is we get in this position here. We position our toe down in front of us. You want to basically point your toe down into the ground. Okay, from there you're going to slide your leg back behind you. Okay, as far as you can and then lift up. And right when you do that final lift, you're gonna feel a contraction right here in the glutes, in particular in the glute medias. That's the muscle that's controlling that rotational element of your hip joint and the stability and the strength that's needed to propel your body even on a regular walk without your hips dropping down side to side.

59:21You don't wanna let that happen to you. You wanna be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make in order to feel like they're getting the lift, they'll just rotate their body to let the hip flexor do the lifting. Remember, we don't need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius to do the lifting, so you need to make sure that you're rotated forward the entire time. And that's it. There's the five essentials. Quick, simple and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment, no gym required, just a little bit of space and consistency. Now, back to the Diary of a CEO studio.

59:53This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train and think about our bodies. When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the dioreverseo he explained how modern issues with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet and this is leading to issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Viva barefoot shoes so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot movement and rebuild my strength, but I think it was planter for shilters that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time.

1:00:29And after that I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo barefoot. And research from Liverpool University has back this up, they've shown that wearing Vivo barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit VivoBarefoot .com slash DOAC and use code diary 20 from my sponsor for 20 % off. A strong body starts with strong feet. And what is the context there with those workouts? Why do you choose those workouts and what do these kind of signal? Are you saying that if I'm able to do those, then there's a probability that I have the strength and flexibility conducive with longevity?

1:01:05Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will measure at a high level how much of a deficit you've acquired over the years from not doing them. So you should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they're going to reflect the global approach at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip abductors because the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift, they're occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all time is the lunge, right? I love the exercise, but it's still occurring front to back in this plane here.

1:01:47getting exercises that work the other two planes and mostly through rotation. But working this frontal plane, this side to side, is really important to producing a complete person, right, with complete levels of strength. And because they're not the primary exercises that do that, like that side -lying hip raise that we, that I show you, is not one of the big exercises that are that are gonna be up on your list, you're gonna do your squats first, and you're gonna maybe never do those. But it doesn't mean that muscle didn't matter, right? Those muscles are there for a reason, and they need to be developed.

1:02:25I remember so many times taking some of the most powerful baseball players, leading home run hitters, and then testing their hip internal or external rotation strength, and it being incredibly weak, like incredibly weak. in your city of self -houset even possible because it was never actually directly trained. And does it have a carryover? Obviously, they're doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field. I still think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field. But more importantly, one of the players in question actually went up having a lot of knee pain throughout his career.

1:03:03And there are misgames because of knee pain. What could his career stats have looked like? They're already all the same worthy. Well, what could his career stats have looked like if he didn't miss all those games? So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them. So I think that these types of smaller movements are really revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that anybody can do them. Like it doesn't require a gym, doesn't require an elaborate setup. they're really good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand.

1:03:40Well, why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie? The bow tie, I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I don't think I'm a t -shirt, but this is Raymond. So X -Ray is his full name and then Raymond became his short name. So I broke him out, God, probably in 2011 or 12, and he became a fan favorite pretty quickly. but I think people like the visual. And for me, he's not the most mobile guy. He's lost his lower arm. He doesn't have another arm on the side. And he doesn't really move that well. But what it is important is... He's also lost his legs. He's lost his legs. I got a leg over there if we need it.

1:04:17But the spine. See, for me, again, I focus a lot on the ability to function in space. And rotation is probably the area of biggest deficit. It's what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because the area of the spine that's most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here in the thoracic spine. So what that is is anybody that wants to measure on the self is right at the bottom of the neck. So the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders and it runs down just to below the ribcage. So right where the ribcage ends is where the thoracic spine ends. It has so many far -reaching implications because it shares its range of motion between two different directions.

1:05:00So it's ability to go front to back. Again, he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward. We can go back, right? You want to have ideally about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension to that area. And just us sitting here alone, you know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were getting comfortable and talking. and we kind of get a little bit rounded out. When you use up motion in this direction, and imagine what that looks like when people are on their phones or at a desk all day, you're gonna start to lose the motion and into extension, you're gonna get too flexed.

1:05:36Well, every time you lose a degree into flexion, you actually lose a direct degree into rotation. So, you're, because you're sharing that motion, the motion's only available in a combined way, So if you want to take up motion this direction, there's going to be less motion available here. If I have a thing, if you let me grab this, put this over your back. Over my back. Yeah, just like this. With this. Yeah. Now, allow yourself to slump forward. Pretend you're on that phone, right? Get there now. Just turn from the shoulders in one direction, slumped over. Okay. Now, take a peek down the barrel of that thing behind you and see where you're pointing.

1:06:17How about how far rotated you are? All right, cool. Now come back, reset yourself. Now take back that mobility that you lost through the thoracic spine. So again, crumming back. There's your rotate cup. So get yourself up right now. Nice posture, act like I'm watching, right? So get there. Now go ahead and rotate again in that direction. How much more did you get? Yeah, I go another like 20 % right? So maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space is one of the most important functional requirements we have. When you're falling as you get older, you're likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain and control before you crash down and maybe break a hip.

1:07:02Functionally as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about rotation. You know, you don't usually just move in one plane like this. If you're a football player, American, or not, you're rotating all the time. You generate force as a soccer player, you know, by kicking across your body, right? By throwing a baseball, it's all about rotation. You need to hold on to rotation, but what we lose is the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60, people will have lost 25 to 35 % of their mobility, their mobility in this area. You see it as well. You see what people get, Oh, do they look stiff and they kind of look robot?

1:07:44My grandmother, God bless you so she lived a 97 years old. But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was literally, she had a walker, she was completely bent over at that walker. Could hardly get herself back up. She had lost all of her extensions. So she could not rotate at all. And again, functionally, it's the most important movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to do things. So I think that people need to focus on again, you go back to that whole concept of like, what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength.

1:08:20But if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you've also lost thoracic rotation, I can't deem you to be a really healthy individual because you've given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain. Because I thought that aging and then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable. Because you see it in so many older people, they often are like bent over. And you kind of think, well, why didn't they just stand up? Yeah. Well, it's impossible because you're losing that fight to gravity. Right? Gravity is going to win ultimately, but it doesn't have to win completely.

1:08:55So the more that you work on maintaining your ability to extend through the thoracic spine, then you don't develop those downstream adaptations that happen from always being there. So what happens once you get in this position, you lose flexibility through other joints. Again, if you get in that position again, you actually turn a little bit, try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that position. Okay, now just straighten yourself out, go out tall, now raise your arm up again. Like yeah. Why? Because you've literally mechanically blocked your shoulder because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate around your ribcage as you raise your arm up overhead.

1:09:37Okay. A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket that's over here to get your arm up there. It's the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility. If I went behind you right now and just held your shoulder blade. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn't be able to raise your arm up maybe more than here because it has to rotate in to be able to get to the top. So we realize that this epicenter of this function can have these far reaching benefits for all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can't move up overhead.

1:10:11And then what happens then if you can't move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, Stephen, get your arm up over your head. And like, I can't. No, get your arm up over your head. You'd go like this. You'd lean your body back because your arm can't get any higher. So you're and lean your body back, well, what are you leaning from? You're low back. So now all of a sudden, you're asking an area of your spine that's supposed to be stable, right? The low back, the lumbar spine is supposed to be a stable area of your body. You're asking it to now become a mobile area of your body. And you're asking for motion that is not naturally inclined to want to give you, because this area didn't give it to you, right?

1:10:47The upper thoracic area didn't give it to you. So now what has that happened? Now you're asking that to do too much. The muscles can become spasm. You can damage the joints here low back. Now you're causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has have all these far -reaching benefits. Another thing that can happen too is when you're down like this, I mentioned that this area of the spine we talked about is actually connected to the ribs. Yeah. If you're in this compressed position where you're Hunched over, you actually don't even get good lung inflation. It's like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a box that won't open.

1:11:20and you can't get the lungs to inflate properly. The lack of properly operating lungs are gonna cause you to be more fatigue throughout the day and it causes you to feel less rested at night. So this area has so many up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it. And it's one of those things again, if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on this area, 10 % at most. What have I got to be doing that at my age? So I'm 30, in my early 30s now. What have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older, I'm not hunched over and I do have that full range of mobility.

1:12:02There's a few things. Again, anytime you try to approach any of these dysfunctions, you know, we talk about the mobility flexibility part being the foundation of that. But then there's also a strength component because like you can free up the mobility and flexibility, but can you maintain it? The strength is it was going to help you to maintain it. From a mobility flexibility standpoint, you can simply go up against a wall, right? And what you're supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall, your upper back against the wall, and your butt against the wall. So you're going as flat as you can, and you put your arms back up against the wall themselves.

1:12:35So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the requirements to be able to get there is gonna have good mobility or flexibility through your rotator cuff muscles, because your rotator cuff as it gets tight wants to internally rotate your arms. Can you get them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward but your arms like you're doing a pretty good job but you can see I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position when I'm there? Can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension because what's going to happen is if you lose that as soon as you try to raise your arms up it's just going to fold you forward from the wall and you're not going to be able to get up there.

1:13:13You can do stretches where you take that dial that we had there. You would lay on the ground, face down, dials over your back like that. You spread your legs, you look kind of like a maybe an X with your hands out here and your leg spread. And all you do is you rotate around. So you're trying to basically rotate up towards the ceiling that dial is going to travel back behind you. And you're pretty much isolating the rotation through that mid back, through that thoracic spine. So you're getting rotation and extension because it's causing you to do this. I mean backwards. There's another exercise I have, this is called the bridge and reachover.

1:13:52And the bridge and reachover is you push up through, you're on your back, you do a regular bridge like the glute bridge. But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you over the opposite shoulder. So again, what are you getting there? You're getting extension through that spine and the rotation together to see if you can and combine those movements and again take back that range of motion that's being shared between those two functions. These are all things that anybody can do, like anybody can do them. And maybe you won't do them well in the beginning because you are restricted, but these are the types of things that improve as you do them.

1:14:30And again, don't look for perfection right away, but the nice thing about these drills is they don't have to be done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and the feel what happens when you start to become less restricted here. So if I just should five or ten minutes a day of some of these drills, you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound. Very, very. I think that, again, I think people don't realize the minimal time investment that's required, it just needs to be done each day. Those little deposits have to be made each day and they pay off in big dividends if you do.

1:15:06And is it important for me to train for a long time or for more intense but shorter period. How do you think about that? Yeah, so I always say you could train long or you could train hard, but you can't do both. And I think that, especially as you get older, I think you need to minimize the rotations on the tire. How many tire rotations are you getting? Because even if I just raised my arm up overhead, and I just do it a thousand times a day. I'm still moving my arm up in that position and every time I move it up, even on here in this limited capacity to move here with this guy, like you're still getting some of that rubbing and grinding in that joint.

1:15:49And if you have any degenerative changes, if you've required any type of bone spur in your shoulder and this is rubbing up against that each time, it's like taking a rope and rubbing it over or back over a sort of a sharp edge, right? Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray. I'd rather you trade that in the repetitions for the intensity because the tension delivered to the muscle with the higher level of weight they're using or the intensity of the technique that you're using is gonna have bigger benefits in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions. Now that's not to say that you can't actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle, you can.

1:16:30They've actually shown recently that anywhere between five and 30 repetitions, taking close to or all the way to failure, can stimulate muscle growth. The absolute load is sometimes not even as important as long as the effort is there, but I believe that as you get older, you've got to kind of spare some of those repetitions because it has that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. ultimately you're going to have to change the tires. And we might be able to change these tires as easily. What about the importance of form when we're training? It's one of the things you're knowing for is emphasizing that form really matters.

1:17:08And you know, there might be another school of thought that says, listen, it hurts. So it must be doing something. Yeah. People think that a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting. So clearly it worked. The form is very important because I think doing things in proper form, due to things, number one, it keeps you safe. most likely if you can do something in good form and you're in command of the weight that you're lifting and therefore it's likely going to Do what it's supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing it in terms of The leeway that you have I think that depends upon the goal that you that you're trying to achieve so if you're trying to achieve Muscle growth.

1:17:49I'm a big believer that muscle growth is not given it is taken and you need to force yourself If you need to force your body to make a change because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis it wants to stay the same and Getting it to deliver a new muscle tissue to your body is Metabolically demanding or it's creating more tissue that's gonna require a higher metabolic demand It doesn't want to do that again. Homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same You have to take that and the only way to take that is to put forth an effort and intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do right now.

1:18:27That's why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute failure is 100 % necessary, but it's the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language here. Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I'm pretty comfortable in saying, well, Stephen, you went to failure. Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop an estimated one or two rep shy, which is what research would say is Okay, you know passable same same result potentially How do I know it's really one or two reps? I don't I don't because I think if if there's a gun to your head You might say oh I could do two more well now it wasn't one to two was four and four is Completely not as effective if not at all compared to the one to two and reserve so When you do these exercises is to this degree of effort, there's going to be a little bending of form.

1:19:21Now, I'm not saying that the form should break down. You might find an abbreviated range of motion. You might find a little bit more momentum involved. That's all okay for me as long as it's still controlled. If the exercise you're doing no longer resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you're not doing it, right? Your form has broken down to a point where I don't think you're getting the benefits of that. You might not even actually be training the muscles you were trying to train, right? You might have shifted the focus for you. Started the exercise. It was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you're done, it's for everything but your chest, because you're just trying to move your body through space.

1:19:52That's not effective if you're trying to build muscle. You want to direct attention into the muscles you're trying to build, and sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit, but not to the point where you're actually taking it off of the muscles again. This is just jumping a bit backwards, but a conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about nerd neck. And is there a consequence to the fact that we all walk around now, staring downwards? Like for this whole conversation, I'll be looking up at you, but most of the time I'm also staring downwards at my notes and stuff.

1:20:23And if I'm not here, then I'm on my phone and I'm staring downwards. And we spend most of our lives now staring downwards. And I just wondered if you, how you think about that. It is a good connection back to what we talked about because I believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction, which is that thoracic spine. Because when you go like this, right, you're actually internally rotating the arms too. So this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, right, that's the external rotation. If I do it the way we're just doing it up against the wall, that's external rotation.

1:20:54More difficult when you're higher than when you're lower. But when you're in this position, once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction. When you start to round here, your neck is more of a consequence of what's happening back there, because when you're here, what are you going to do? Yeah, you're going to look up, right? Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So it's not that your neck is necessarily being pulled in that direction, or the fact that you're looking down, it's the fact that your body's following that, and when it follows, the adaptation is, well, okay, now I've developed these tightnesses this way, I've lost that mobility into extension of my back.

1:21:33What do I do to compensate? I got to look up. So now I'm walking around looking like this. And that's that sort of nerd neck. And I think nerd neck is less of something you have to treat from a neck situation. And more of something you have to treat from that back mobility. You've made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we're working out and training. What are the most common but avoidable injuries? And how do I avoid them? Because I care a lot about this now that I'm getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I've pulled some ligaments in my ankle and I was at the physio yesterday, and I've been on crutches and I've got this big boot I have to wear.

1:22:08And it's not until you get injured that you realize how imperative it was for you to avoid this. Yeah. Because it puts you, for me, it's completely changes my whole, it changes my whole life. Not only can I just move through a space normally, but then I can't train, I'm gonna get weaker, It's going to have an impact on my metabolic health. It's going to therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep, my cognition and everything downstream. So I go, okay, I should actually have an injury prevention program. So what are the most commonly occurring injuries? And what advice would you give me to avoid them?

1:22:45Let's see. So first of all, I take personal offense to calling yourself all the 30s. Well, I don't know what that makes me feel like a, the crypt keeper. But you just start to, like, have. You do though. When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for three, four hours. I didn't stretch and I was fine. These days, I have a hundred percent injury rate if I don't stretch. And if I don't warm up and if I don't really, really think about it, a hundred percent injury rate. I'm interesting. I'm on my way downhill, you know? Well, you're certainly going in the wrong direction. But I think when it comes to injury, preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid it.

1:23:22It doesn't, it's not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm, but when it comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either built to be mobile that aren't being controlled or built to be stable that are being asked to do too many things. So what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right? It's a ball, again, we can look at that. It's a ball and socket, right? It's got the ball inside the socket. It's supposed to be able to move in all kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere. If you look at the leg, right, we don't have the other part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball.

1:23:57It's meant to be able to go in all directions. When those joints, the shoulder and the hip, are uncontrolled, meaning you're lacking strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint. That's when you actually wind up having issues. So what are the muscles that control that? Well, we talked about one of those smaller exercises before the glute medias. That muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane. So not just in this front to back squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side plane. It controls the movements of the hips this way. If you don't train them, they're not gonna magically get strong.

1:24:39Like they have a function, and if you're not challenging that function, then you're not strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot, but I mean, you could acquire the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction. So you could do some of the sideline hip lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more challenging where you perform a lunch, but interestingly, all you have to do is wait on one side. So if I were to say, all right, Steven, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunch? Is how much weight do you hold in your hands?

1:25:11When you do a regular lunch or do you not do lunch? I don't do many lunches. You do a ball -garing split squat. Another one of my favorite exercises is where you put one leg back on the bench. I would say hold the weight in one hand. So now if you're doing a lunge and I put a 50 or 60 pound dumbbell in your hand on one side and then you go and you lunge out, that weight, you're in the split position now with one leg out in front. The weight on this side totally wants to pull you in that direction. You have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of the opposite hip to keep you in this position.

1:25:47And I could say, I'm gonna make it seem harder. Go slow, go really slow. So now you're stepping out, you're on one leg as you're stepping. So now you're on one leg and you're being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down, or the double wants to drop you down, you stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second or two in the bottom position, because your body is just aching to wanna move in that direction. I've just trained your hip abduction strength in this frontal plane on an exercise that's truly a sagittal plane exercise front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these things accomplished at the same time you're training something else.

1:26:25So it's not always an extra thing that you have to do. You can actually do this in a way that, you know, it's sort of part of what you do. So what you do then, if I was saying to you, I wanna have a comprehensive workout and you were designing my seven day workout plan, what would you give me to do? One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push pull leg split. And again, if you were to do a push pull legs, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your chest and triceps there, right? Because it's your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work.

1:26:58And again, as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day. So Monday, what do I do Monday? So you could do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push pull legs is that it tends to be a lot, right? Like you're doing shoulders, chest, triceps. Some people don't like that amount of volume. It's push, when you say push. So, yeah, so pushes just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing. So if you look at a bench press is pushing the weight away from you is the concentric action that you're doing. If I look at a lap, pull down, I'm pulling the weight towards me. That's the concentric part of it.

1:27:36If I'm doing a bicep curl, I'm pulling it towards me. try steps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I'm pushing away this way, pushing away that way, push up, I'm pushing away from the ground, try step push downs, I'm sitting in the name itself, I'm pushing down through a try step push down, I'm doing try step, you know, laying extensions, I'm pushing the way to right away, they would all go on a similar day. Again, I like the function of that because it's optimal recovery. So why that's good if you could tolerate, you know, I'm asking, you know, if that's okay for you to do that, because you have, you're not naturally adding shoulders in.

1:28:12If you were to okay with adding shoulders in, then you would do your push workout. And then what I would do is, know that I'm getting enough recovery in between workouts because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday, come back and do Wednesday legs, right? So Monday, I'm just doing push up the body. Yeah, just push up your body. Tuesday, you're gonna give me the day off. Tuesday get the day off. Yeah. And then there's two, I'm gonna give you two variations of this. Okay. And when I say day off, we could, if you were with me, you'd be doing conditioning, all right? So we'll get into that, but that's how it could be.

1:28:47Yeah, it's not a day off. No, you give me seven days. I'll take, I'll take a ball of seven. Even if I'm just doing ab workout and some, but you, you then I'll Wednesday would come back and do your leg workout. What leg workout am I doing on Wednesday? So it's gonna be a front anterior poster, so I'm gonna train your hamstrings, your glutes and your quads, everything will get done together. Thursday you'd have another day off. Okay. Again, likely not a day off, some conditioning. And then the Friday could be your pull workout. Now what's nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn't recover as well as others, and this is not everybody, but that gives you a really good amount of recovery between those workouts.

1:29:27If you could tolerate more than that, the first step I would do is add a total body workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would just be a little bit light The pole because you just did that right you did the day before so you my whole body on signing you could do it You know what when I mean like I would pick very big compound movements that are representative of Including as many muscles as possible at one time. Okay And I can shy off a little bit back off a little bit off of the pole that you were doing because I realized that you just did certain exercises the day before.

1:30:05So I would, if I trained you on, and this gets a little bit lost, but if I trained you on Friday and a pull workout, remember I have different planes of motion I can move in. So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff, like a pull up or a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises like a seated row or bent over row. Right, so I could shift the focus a little bit. And then some day on break. Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I definitely don't advocate seven days a week of full training. Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this particular week? So in that scenario, I'd have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

1:30:38So I had a brain. And if you had your goals were more aligned with fat loss and overall conditioning, and you feel like you're not as healthy as you could be there, I would probably take advantage of that, Saturday to do that. But if your priority was the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, than I would take advantage of that a Saturday as my flex day to do training. And you don't put the cardio on the same day as the upper body legs workouts? It could be, but if your priority again is to build muscle, then prioritize muscle building. Put that first. Do your cardio condition work at the end of that workout?

1:31:14Something might suffer, and the thing that usually comes second is what suffers. If we think just about Monday, which we had down as the push days, that's me doing like chest and is it try steps and shoulders? How many, if I'm training for one hour, how many reps are you trying to do per muscle and how many like sets? So set count, you know, if you can get in, and again, this is a little bit determined by whether you're gonna train on that Saturday. So if you're gonna come back and train total body on Saturday, then I know I have an opportunity to maybe do a bench again on Saturday or a variation of bench and inclined bench.

1:31:50So I don't have to get all of my chest volume in that first day. But typically you're looking for around anywhere between nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week. So if you're going to do let's say the one workout for chest and you're doing say three sets per exercise, you're in that range of around three exercises for chest. Now you don't have to have that. The volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because you're obviously training your triceps while you're doing bench press. So you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I would put something that my favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension where I lay on my back on the bench.

1:32:32And I do the, you know, some people call them skull crushers or nose breakers. If you just take bicep for as an example, how often do I need to train and how intense do I need to train the bicep for it to grow. and conversely, if I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take for me to lose the muscle? Yeah, interesting. So I think this is one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered. I actually discussed this with Andrew Huberman at one point. It's like, it's very interesting. So from person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between the people.

1:33:11from person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between muscles. Like, you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to recover than I would. What's interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I could train my biceps every three days, but I could never train my back every three days, or I could never train my chest every three days. It's just so intricate because every muscle is gonna be different for every person, and even at a holistic one level, you're just not gonna find the same recovery rate across the board for every muscle in your body.

1:33:58So a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training intuition to say, hey, like, am I increasing my weights? is my strength going up on the lift. Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I'm probably recovering well. And you can experiment with like hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture, the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are gonna be. You have this contraption on the desk in front of us. This thing here. Yeah. So many people talk to me about this device and it's quite strange how important people say that this device is and what it tells us.

1:34:43I was doing some reading beforehand. It's a grip strength reader monitor and there's some really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015 Lancet study across 17 countries that found for every 5 kilogram decrease in grip strength. It was associated with a 16 % high risk of death, a 17 % high risk of heart disease, and a 7 % high risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease found that people with low grip strength had a 68 % high risk of developing Alzheimer's. There was another study that linked it to other cardiovascular and blood issues. And another study that shows that older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2 .5 times more likely to fall and be hospitalized with their injuries.

1:35:26And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body strength by 70%. And lastly, adults over 65 with weak grip strength were 2 .1 times more likely to become dependent in daily activities within three years. That was in the journal of gerontology. Grip strength. Pretty important, huh? A lot of that research has been determined to be more are correlative than causative, but the fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative causative thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life are probably doing so because they're regularly engaging in physical activity.

1:36:15Likely they are lifting weights, they're holding heavy weights, they're having to manipulate their body and space if they're doing calisthenic exercises. So there's a level of activity that remains in their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level. So you're selecting out people that are just generally maintaining their fitness in which case they're probably maintaining higher levels of health and lower issues of the age. So it's not the strength in which we can grip that matters necessarily, but the thing that matters is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip.

1:36:49So it's just one, it's almost like a symptom of something upstream, which is positive. Right, or lacking, right? Not doing enough of. That being said, you can actually directly or measure your ability to recover from exercise based upon having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the, over weeks or months of training. So if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool like this in the morning, five mornings in a row and average it out. At a time where you feel like you're feeling energetic and good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength is.

1:37:28What's a good grip strength? So most men would be somewhere between 100 lb, 120 lb. So if you look at that, that's around 46 kilos to 54 kilos. If you want to give a shot, see where you stack up. So to do this now there's some rules here. Yeah, don't go like this, you know, keep it in here. Don't touch your arm to the table. It'll keep it at 90 degrees like that. Yep. And then you're just going to squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard as you can. All right, don't blow out now. All right, let's see. Gosh, my head needs 130. So you're above average. So doing well on grip strength. So now what you would do is, and you would test both sides, I think you could average out the size.

1:38:15Sometimes you're gonna have one obviously, one side stronger than the other. You would then have a good baseline. If you were feeling like you weren't sure if you recovered or not, you would test this in the morning. Not. Can I try this? Sorry. Yeah. This is my week -on. All right. Here we go. All right. You gotta beat it, don't know. Gosh, it's a bit slippery. I think you did. Did I beat it? Oh my God. Wow. 160. New your joke, okay. 160. Not worth that. 160. So you probably, if you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did the other side again, you think I'd beat it. No, no, you're not gonna beat your old performance.

1:38:53You're not gonna beat the left side. Are you left handed? I'm right handed. So that was strange. All right, let's see. Yeah. 150 now. See, I had my prediction was right. So a lot of times it takes a little accommodation to the, to the, the stress of, of doing that. What's your grip strength? I don't know. I haven't tested it a while. See now you're going to show me. Right. All right, let's see. We're going to ask you some of my team members. If they want to give it a shot. All right. Here we go. Wow. Well, crushing. 130. 30 on that side and you left side. Let's see. Anyone else want to do it better?

1:39:34Do you like it a bit short? Try to do it with all the pop, man, but I'll pop. That was my bicep that pop, by the way.

1:39:44110. Okay, so you're right. Round right handed. Okay. So it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of average, but not superhuman for sure. But you try. Yeah. Be almost certainly way stronger than me. Not a grip strength. But you're stronger than me at bicep curls. Okay, but not, yeah, I mean, it is, this is again, underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually. All right, so now hold it like this. Yep, and then you're just gonna one hand, right? Just squeeze as hard as you can for it's kind of a short burst. Okay. All right, there you go. Let's take a look.

1:40:23of wow, 100. Now women's average growth strength is 60 to 80 pounds. So you're actually much stronger than the average woman. I started my first business at 12 years old and I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18. And at that time, what I didn't realize is that being a founder with no money meant that I also had to be the marketer, the sales rep, the finance team, customer service, and the recruiter. But if you're starting a business today, thankfully there's a tool that wears all of those hats for you, our sponsor today, which is Shopify. Because of all of its AI integrations, using Shopify feels a bit like you've hired an entire growth team from day one, taking care of writing product descriptions, your website design, and enhancing your product's images, not to mention the bits you'd expect Shopify to handle, like the shipping, like the taxes, like the inventory.

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1:41:56And then I'm going to reply to you via email with how they answered that question. You might say, how do you hold on to a relationship when you're building a startup? What is the most important thing if I've got an idea and don't know where to start? We email it to the CEOs, they email back, we take the five, six top best answers, we email it to you. I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality, but then I saw what the founders were replying with and they're willing this to reply and I thought, actually this is really good. And all you've got to do is sign up completely free.

1:42:27And can I train my grip strength individually if I wanted to improve it as an individual thing when I just have to grip? Yeah, I mean, you know, they, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old fashioned little grippers, you know, that you just squeeze. And they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels now for people that have worked on it and actually improve when I was young. They're pretty easy to conquer with a little bit of training. You'd be able to squeeze them because they never really made the resistance high enough. But now it's definitely something you could be challenged by.

1:42:59The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we've touched on briefly, but I think is important to talk about because I don't think people realize how prevalent it is, is back pain. I was looking at some stats beforehand and it says that 80 % of people will experience back pain at some point in their lives. It's actually the leading cause of disability worldwide and in the UK, over 10 million workers have lost every year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain are related to back pain. It's the most common reason for people under 45 to see a doctor and cut chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects about one in five adults in the UK and there's five of us in this room now in total.

1:43:36And so one of us probably least it is going to have chronic back pain. Is this something one can avoid? I asked this in part because I spoke to some anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa and they find that back pain just doesn't exist there. It's not a thing. I think the likelihood that you're going to experience back pain at some point in your life is high, but that recurring back pain and that chronic back pain, I think that's entirely avoidable. 26 % of the time at any one time in the United States people have are going to be dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there.

1:44:14The other thing I find interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back pain behind respiratory infection. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year, my own kids have been in at least four or five times to the doctor for respiratory infection, it starts to, and I open her like, wow, and this is something that's somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. that problem is that it can come from so many different causes. We talked about before how the limitation in that thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could, and therefore cause strain there.

1:44:55Now, here's the good part about this. Though 80 % of people, 85 % will have low back pain in their life. Only 27 to 35 % of the time is a disc related. So we're talking about, you know, if you look back on this guy, again, it's the discs, you know, between the vertebrae, right? The vertebral disc that create that spacing and the cushioning between the vertebrae and bar spine. When one of those discs, actually, this is one of them dislodged itself, but when the disc that sits above and below these two levels pushes outward or herniates, it could push on any one of these nerves that's traveling downward.

1:45:33Any time you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure in this case, the disc, you get the radiating symptoms that go down whatever dermatome this is. What that means is this nerve will feed some function of the lower body or some sensory area of the lower body. Depending upon where people complain of pain, like, oh, I feel it in my hip or I feel it in my leg around my knee or I feel it down behind my knee down to my foot. But you pretty much know what level of this problem they have because it's representative of the level of herniation. When you press on something that is at the level of like L5S1, right, the last Lumberbar vertebrae in the first sacred vertebrae, it's going to give you symptoms like numbness tingling down near that back of your calf underneath your foot.

1:46:25If you get something more around the hip, you know, a lot of times people complain of hip pain. They think they have a hip issue. It's actually a back issue that's pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that's an L2L3 or L3L4. You get indicators of where that's coming from. But again, the good news is if you don't have this neurological deficit in your lower body, this tingling numbness, weakness, it's mostly muscle and origin. Now again, even of the disc -related issues, the 27 to 35%, 96 % of those are not operated on. So think about the impact you can have if we're saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you have is going to be able to be addressed through nonoperative, strengthening or stretching intervention.

1:47:13Because a lot of times, as we said, what's the cause of this function? Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool. Okay. Well, let's work on it. So let's start to try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute, right? Having weak glutes because again, the, the, the, the, the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. And others kick the leg back behind you. If I can't get my leg back behind me and I'm trying to basically extend my body by doing that when I step through and get behind me, well, how can I do that? Once again, I could do it from the low back by over exaggerating and stepping in where it's not supposed to.

1:47:54Always remember the low back is supposed to be stability center of your spine is supposed to provide stability. If you're not getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and above and below, it's going to ask for it from the next place above or above it or below it. It's going to say to the low back, please help out, give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it, but at an expense and that's where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses, you have to address hip mobility or issues. This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a mismatch issue.

1:48:33And when they say mismatch issue, they mean that there's a way that we're living our lives these days. That is at odds with how we were quote unquote supposed to live or how our ancestors lived. And it's interesting because I've interviewed David Richollen who is an anthropologist but also Daniel Lieberman. They both spent time with the Hadsad tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was assuming that the reason why we get back issues and the Hadsad tribe don't really get them is because we spend a lot of time like just sedentary. However, David Richarlan said that the Hadsad tribe still spend 10 hours a day in resting postures, but they maintain a straight J -shaped spine, not the curved S -shaped spine common in the west.

1:49:13they squat, they walk, they carry loads a lot, and they aren't in chairs, they're doing more active motions. Now, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it's at a desk doing this or whether it's in an office. I'm wondering from your experience, if you thought it would be better to have a standing desk, or is this... No, no. No, I think standing desk are great, and I hate to say it because I might actually, I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it would be beneficial for me too. I think that too much time sitting, right? There's people that call sitting the new smoking.

1:49:49Like the detrimental effects that sitting can have, prolonged sitting can have on your body, especially when you couple it with the fact that when we do go to sleep eight, nine, ten hours, like how much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day? Like you're working all day, there's a big chunk there, maybe eight hours, nine hours, ten hours with intermittent breaks that you're going to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you got another eight or nine hours at night that you're doing the same thing. Like your body wasn't meant to be that immobile. Like I think there's an actual compression.

1:50:22So when your joints are subject to gravity and you're moving through space, you're actually getting a bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that's in these joints, like let's see your knees, that you're essentially mobilizing because you're compressed and you're getting with your knee, your weight bearing and then your off of it, your weight bearing, your off of it, it's like squeezing and bathing that joint in the snow field fluid. The outcomes are much better when we don't allow that to become stagnant and when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions. Being up on your feet and a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the load that we're getting from the chair and probably discourage some of that really bad posture that comes from sitting and doing this.

1:51:05Standing in the mat, you're likely going to at least improve your posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above, like we talked about, but at least from below, you're going to improve that. But I still think that the inactivity, just standing alone, is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks. I think people need to get up and walk around just a little bit. Five minutes every, you know, 30 minutes or so would be ideal. But like, if you're going to take a phone call, go walk while you're on the phone. Like one thing I do is I have my office and I have the gym and as soon as I know I'm gonna be on a call It's stand up and I walk around the gym while I'm on my call just as an excuse to get up and move I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I'm doing the rest of my work from the chair Anything you can do, you know I know they're cliche, but you know park a little further when you're at a store So you have to walk a little bit more But I think it's the frequency of the breaks that we're not taking which is the main the main problem.

1:51:59I think that But even if you add it up all the time that you're active in a day and then the time that you're not active, it's, if it was the same exact time of an activity, but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you'd have less negative side effects than you do if you're just grouping it. I'm going to be an active from this period. I'm going to be active from this period because again, of that effect of intermitently bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting to that, then to different stresses than just compression, compression, compression. It's one of the reasons why I talk all the time about the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar, right, to decompress your body, you know, even just minimally.

1:52:37Again, not that much, you know, one arm hang or so, you know, two arm hangs a day. It's enough to give your your body a bit of a break that you're not getting right now. Nobody does that. Nobody, nobody hangs from a bar. What about, let's talk about supplementation. I've got a bunch of supplements here with me now. And there's so much said about supplementation. but if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking every day frequently Versus the ones that maybe aren't so important, but also just like the call outs of You know, I saw this thing on Twitter.

1:53:06We're going viral the other day where someone had Screen -shotted the top crit creatines on a certain website And then they tested them in a lab and found that a lot of them weren't actually Creating in the doses that they'd said and in the form that they were selling So I have this, I now have this skepticism around the supplements I'm taking. I've got some supplements here, I've got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be taking? And explain to me why. For building muscle, the two that rank at the very, very top of the list are going to be creatine monohydrate or creatinine.

1:53:37Any form of creatinine, there's a different forms of creatinine we can get into those. But creatine and a protein powder. And some people want to argue the necessity of a protein powder. and I guess if you're getting enough food your diet, you don't have to take it. It's not an assessor. You're not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you are that you're not getting through your food. It's just that you're doing it at a much more economic cost. If you look at the price of protein these days, I mean, it's certainly becoming a little bit unrealistic to think you're gonna meet your daily goals.

1:54:09And for me, my daily goal is around, at minimum, a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1 .2 grams per pound of buy. If you're active. Croutine has become all the rage recently. Yeah. I was looking at Shimbai. Google search data, and it shows just how quickly and search for you, creating is increasing from the early 2020s to 2025. Now it's exploding. And it's been around forever. Forever. And in the benefits have been known forever. So that's interesting because that's all related to the neurological benefits that creatine is showing in terms of depression and degenerative neurological diseases and its improvement in its ability to slow, prevent things like MS and Parkinson's and by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable bio -energetic state, being able to feed the neurons of the brain with the energy that seems to be lacking as some of these degenerative diseases.

1:55:13Also the other thing that I think has happened, and I did a little test in my office a couple of months back where I asked who in the team took creating. And every hand that raised was a man. And I asked the women in my office why they didn't take creating. And the overarching sort of misconception, which also my girlfriend told me about when we were in Cape Town a couple of years ago, and I said, baby, you should take creating. Everyone on my podcast is talking about it. And she was like, no, it's gonna make me. I think, yeah, she sort of, I was like, she saw it as a steroid. She was like, it's what bodybuilders take.

1:55:43Well, that's gonna change quickly because I think that you have a lot of people, highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas that we're talking about. I urged my wife recently to take it. She is chronically sleep deprived because of my boys. So she has, you know, she has definitely operating on a higher stress level. It's been shown to actually improve brain health and performance in sleep deprived and in stressed high stress states. From a depression standpoint, it's being shown to be very effective even when kind of paired up with traditional approaches to treating depression through pharmaceuticals.

1:56:28It's just got a lot of promise and the good thing is that there's really no downside. They haven't really identified a downside to taking it. There's a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. Actually, made a video recently where I talked to them and I addressed head on what they were. Jesse, of course, played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked, but there is a big confusion that people have when it comes to people think it's a steroid. And they think that because the outcomes of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle, it can increase strength. Sure, because the outcomes are the same as, let's say, anabolic steroids, doesn't mean that the mechanism is the same or the magnitude of what you're going to see from them is the same or even the legality of the supplement itself is the same.

1:57:17We're talking about two completely different mechanisms completely And two different things that the body are going to react much differently to when it's an metabolic steroid is going into the muscle cell, bite into antigen receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression, right? To basically convert as I did in that video, I said, you're taking an iPad and making it a MacBook, right? You're completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine monhydrate, you're just talking about providing a more constant flow of energy to those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance.

1:57:54Well, what happens when that occurs? You're able to generate more work in a workout. By getting more work done, you're creating more of that overload. You're also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle cell with the creatine because as modically, when you pull anything into the cell, you're going to bring along with it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the same. Well, that extra water keeps the muscle cell hydrated and that's a great thing. A more hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better longer in the long run, just like a flower of water would grow better than one without.

1:58:30And there's lots of different types of creatine, right? There's like gummies now. There's monohydrate. There's all kinds of creatines. Over the new years, again, I was looking at different types of creatines. So I went to the shop and this sounds crazy, but like 30 types and I just started researching it. And I realized that there's like a better form of creatine. Yeah. And there's some creatines which aren't so good. I once have many things added to them, et cetera. Yeah. Creatine is pretty simple. I always present it in sort of two forms to people because there's one creatine monohydrate and then there's one called creatine hydrochloride.

1:59:06And the only difference is what is bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule and the hydrochloria is bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that's ingested in your body is that one's more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloria is more absorbable than the other. So you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine monohydrate is usually taking in a higher dosage. And now there's some new research coming out that states that I used to think that it was just five grams for everybody. But now they're finding that people that are like upwards of 200 pounds or more, they might benefit from like eight, nine, 10 grams per day.

1:59:41So bigger dosages there and people who are at, you know, 120 pounds or so and maybe some of the females and female athletes, like they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creatamine hydrate. Hydrochloride is usually in lower doses anyway. So comparative dose of five grams of monohydrate might equal out to two to three grams of hydrochloride. What's all this stuff about loading? Because when I was young, my brother was bodybuilding, he would tell me that you had to load up. Yeah, I had to have a huge dosage for a week and then they're after good back to a low dosage. It's just so your body ultimately reaches a capacity for creating storage.

2:00:15So if you want to get there faster, you load. It's five grams four to five times a day. So a total dose of 20 to 25 grams in a day. Some people are going to find that that's a little bit of an overload for them on their on their gut. There is a byproduct of creating breakdown, creatinine, is what it's called. We get measured whenever we get our blood test done. That can sometimes pull along with it some extra water and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you're using hydrochloride, you wouldn't see that breakdown as much. You wouldn't get as much of that accumulated breakdown in the creatinine, so you might get less of that bloating.

2:00:53That's the only indication why I would ever suggest hydrochloride. If you are some of that 15 % of people that have some sensitivity to that. And a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some of that discomfort that you feel, that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it. So what happens if you don't load? You just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace. So anywhere from 27 to 35 days or so, you're going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you're taking it because you want to see benefits in performance like power output and performance, let's say leading up to an event that's a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind of get to those full capacities sooner.

2:01:38But I don't really see a need to have to load. If again, in the long run, you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level anyway. And what about the proteins I've got here? Are there any particular proteins that are better than others? I mean, I like to say since that's mine, that's better. but the fact is that anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein. So in general, your isolate proteins are going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They're still protein, but there's more on a gram -program basis. It's 90 % versus 80 % by volume if it's isolate versus concentrate.

2:02:19So you're getting more protein per volume. But then all as advertised. Are they? Because no. There's, I mean, And look, without everyone disparage other brands or, you know, I'm not in the practice of doing that, but like, there are some garbage quality proteins out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retailers. You know, they don't, they're in it to make money. They're not in it to provide high quality. And again, you're still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what's in there, it's netting out to less than what it could be. How do I spoke garbage? I think the best way to spot garbage would be to like there's something called amino acid spiking you like people will will actually Include a lot of Glycine in their in their proteins like spiced like adding glycine to it because they can get the Label benefit of increasing protein content, but it's actually not a complete protein So you're not getting the actual quality that you would be getting from an isolate protein.

2:03:20What are some foods that you would just absolutely never let go near your mouth the real ones way if your kids are still, you know, you just say, there's no way we're eating that. I really hate the dyes and foods, the food dyes. I think that's a really, I'm glad that things are being done as we speak to try to eliminate them from our foods. I don't know how our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it has in Europe. They've known about the dangers of food coloring and food dies for a decade or more and we're still eating these in our foods all the time for what benefit so it looks more attractive on a package like that's bullshit.

2:04:03What about melatonin? I've got a little jar that here that I found. A lot of people are taking melatonin now and I've got a friend very close to me that's encouraging me to take melatonin. Do you have a view on it? My view is I believe it to be safe. I believe it to be helpful for people that are having a problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. We actually do, I give it to our children at night because they do have issues with sleep. But honestly, the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up.

2:04:43And when you know you're on the right track, you generally don't need an alarm clock to wake you up. If you're doing it right and you're getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up within five to ten minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm clock. Have you thought much about how we're supposed to sleep? I mean, we talked about lower back pain, etc. Is there an optimal way to sleep? Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side? So again, I think this is individual, you know, and again, there's a lot of conditions that can sway somebody in one direction or another.

2:05:15But in general, I think the position that has the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call the corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms, sort of at your side or crossed over your belly like this. If you're able to tolerate even more and kind of up in this position here, with your arms up, just because again, that actually helps a little bit with some of that internal rotation, internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders, that you were demonstrating up against that, the wall with that position before. Not as big a deal, but you have to understand that at what other time really, again, we just talked about being static throughout the day, but at least you're getting up to go to the bathroom, at least you're getting up to go get a meal, at least you're getting up to go take a phone call.

2:06:01When else are you pretty much statically in the same position? I don't care if you are on your side or on your back or on your other side or on your stomach, you're pretty static for seven, eight, nine hours. There are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant. Like, there are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain. They did something during the night and they all, I must have done something when I slept, right? People say that all the time because they probably did. They probably did. They either stayed in one position for too long and weren't conscious of it.

2:06:35Or they positioned themselves over an arm and it kind of, you know, was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren't conscious of it. But then there's the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper, especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position, they pull their knees up. The last thing you need is more hip flexion is like sitting like you're getting from a chair. you're creating your own chair and bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in that position. Like lengthen them out, you know, get some flexibility or at least, you know, get some elongation at that joint and those muscles.

2:07:12Now, sleeping with a pillow that is too fluffy can wreak havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day, most of the back pain sufferers you talked about before, 82 % I believe of people that report, sleep disturbance to say it's from back pain. and what happens, they feel it mostly 77 % of them feel it upon waking. So they're not feeling it when they're sleeping, which is even worse, because if they did, they might be able to modify that. They're feeling it upon waking. And it goes back again, what we were talking about earlier. You see, it all relates. You know, this back pain seems isolated, and we're talking about the thoracic spine, that's back pain, but now I'm talking about sleeping, and that's back pain.

2:07:54Like all these things relate to each other. That's why you have to care about all of it. But being in that position is with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of excess flexion of your neck which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints in your neck over time. So you might like to do that, but I'm telling you the healthier position is the sleep of the really flat pillow, a really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up every morning with some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about one or two inches high just enough to support my head I never have any issues with neck pain again You're not abnormally propping it up not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues at night The on the back position with the head propped up is gonna be worse because you're closing down your airway a little bit more You know there are some cases where again that apnea patient might want to be on their side You know, it's gonna be easier for their breathing but in most cases on their back and also too, interestingly, you know, look, most people have tight calves.

2:08:57They're ankles are again, we sit all day, we're not pulling our ankles back towards our head, we're not maintaining that mobility towards in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head. Well, what happens in a bed? You get in bed? The sheets are kind of tight at the bottom, they're pulling your ankles straight down like that and your feet are pointed the whole night further tightening those calves because they're shortening in that position. Especially if you train your calves that day and your muscles repairing and regenerate at night, you're basically repairing them in the shortened position because your toes are pointed down.

2:09:27I always say if you're going to get in bed loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you at least get the ability to move your toes backwards or they're freely moving, they're not being forced into this position. So lots of little tweaks you can make and some people think they're not as important. I think they're very important given how long you stay in those positions. Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much time in that position. Jeff, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to health fitness, longevity.

2:09:52And I guess just more broadly, just living a good life. I think that you don't want to stress yourself out thinking of all the things that you need to do because there's many. And then doing so become paralyzed by an activity. Instead, I'm not going to do anything at all because I can't do all of it. I think that's one of the biggest things that I see people do is they, they, talk themselves out of it from the very beginning because they think that the commitment is going to be too much more than what they're doing right now, too much to ask and they can't do it. That's a mistake. Chippewa, dude, make those, we talked about in nutrition again, like make that first pass.

2:10:31Take away the obvious stuff. The stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life. Then make another pass when you're ready from a fitness standpoint. Get yourself to the gym. Try to do that first thing. We said to take that first action. Get yourself out the door. Get a habit of doing that over a period of a couple months. You want to start to adopt a more intense training plan or you want to start to adopt a more intricate training split. Fine, after don't worry about it, like the most important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. You know, I'm really noticing that my my thoracic spine is not mobile enough, like Jeff said.

2:11:06I mean, you know, hang from the bar, do that one little activity each day, those are the types of things that will pay big dividends when added up, but don't be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you're not going to be healthy. Any investment that you make into your body is going to be a good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, like like you're realizing now at 32, it's gonna matter at 52, 62, 72. And so by doing what you're doing now, you're making the right step in the right direction. That can always be intensified as you go.

2:11:47And by the way, your ability to intensify it and do more is gonna be so much easier than when you've adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you're doing. And rather than making that big departure from what you're doing now and thinking you're just gonna all of a sudden start loving all these things, you're not. and you're likely going to wind up making yourself not want to do it. Jeff, thank you for doing what you do because as I said to you before we started recording, you've been the go -to resource for me over the years and in fact whenever I've got a challenge, whether it's like how do I have all my triceps, how to avoid an injury or other challenges relating to strength or longevity, all these kinds of things, I'm always happy when I find your videos because you're someone that everybody trusts, you're someone that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way of, you know, your famous for drawing on your own body, showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and the range of motion.

2:12:39But you've helped me for free for a long, long time. Like, I think, I think probably a decade, I think I spent about 10 years as you as you being my sort of personal trainer. And because this information is free and it's on YouTube, you would have helped literally billions of people. I mean, I was looking at your time, I think you've got almost three billion views. might even be more now. I just on that one channel alone, then the clips and everything else and how that's inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube. So on behalf of all of those people, but also on behalf of me, just thank you so much for doing what you do.

2:13:10We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what would you change about to you first and Secondly, now answer why haven't you? Okay, what are the change about me and then why have I not? Wow.

2:13:35Oh, man.

2:13:39You know, there's not much. And I'm thinking off the top of my head here. So when I identify something that I want to change about myself, I usually do a pretty damn good job of putting in place steps to make that happen. And there are things that are quite personal about myself. There are things that from a relationship level, there are things from a self -improvement standpoint. Like, I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those changes. And I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I've wanted to do, I think I always wanted to be more adventurous.

2:14:27I think that I'm a bit of a homebody and I think that I might, my wife is a big traveler and I think that I probably would benefit from being a little bit more adventurous and taking some vacations to places that I would never order another go to. If I'm looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to want to do that with me So I think perhaps I wish I would have changed that I could certainly use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy and and there's a lot of reasons why I have them But it's probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away But we seem to go back to the same places all the time.

2:15:07You're gonna give me two so first and secondly I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time and if anything, just keep it on the side of opinionated. But be open to hearing the opinions of others more. The reason why I haven't, I think, is more of wanting to be heard maybe in a time when I was a kid of not being, I was a third kid. So I was probably not heard as much as I often thought. I wanted to be. So the opinions have come out first as a reflex. But if I could do that, I still wish I could get a little better. Thank you. Thank you. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this.

2:15:58I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love. If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, whatever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.

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