Fitness Expert: How to Build Lasting Muscle - Nick Mitchell

0:00The fitness industry is the most undervalued industry in the world. In terms of transforming your body, your health, your fitness, everybody can do it. And people can do it far, far quicker than they believe. You've just got to be committed. Nick Mitchell is a personal trainer, author, and founder of Ultimate Performance, one of the most successful gym groups globally. Since forming in 2009, Ultimate Performance has helped tens of thousands of people transform their health and bodies. Nick is a world leading fitness and nutrition expert who has trained top celebrities and Hollywood actors. He's the best-selling author of fitness guides including your ultimate body transformation.

0:44Discipline is overrated it's not discipline it's desire. Do you want do you want the six-pack or do you want the pizza? 5 % of people get something out of the gym, 95 % of people don't. If done properly and effectively two to three hours a week in the gym it's all anyone needs so the gym doesn't work for most people if you don't do it right it doesn't work what works what most people need is the reason why everybody has such an issue with food is that it's just so personal it's a mental game food is tied into emotions people are stress eaters, people are bored eaters people are worried eaters Food can help you mitigate stress How?

1:35So as an entrepreneur, I go through intense periods of stress Are you recommending me to eat carbs when I'm stressed? For me to lower my cortisol levels? That's an interesting one I was told to go for a walk, but I'll take the carbs any day of the week So you were around the bodybuilding world for an extended period of time Did you take steroids? If you're not doing the rock's work and carrying the rock's muscle, and the rock will be, you know, chemically assisted. You think so? He's on steroids.

2:20Nick, who are you and what is it that you do for a living? I'm best known for being the founder of a business called Ultimate Performance, which is the only global personal training company in the world. I sold that business in 2024 so I'm the only person in the world that's built a personal training business and then had the private equity exit the personal training industry is very fractured very small full of one man one woman bands and a couple of gyms here a couple of gyms there I built it into own a state not franchise 12 different countries I'm not going to kind of name the numbers, but five, six hundred employees ranging from Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London, Amsterdam, Spain, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney, and lots of other places in between.

3:12Why is fitness or was fitness interesting enough for you to go and build all that? Do you want the true story? The true story? The true story is that I followed the prescribed academic path as a kid, did a law degree, went to bar school, trained to be a barrister, started off in investment banking. none of that spoke to my soul i was never the person to want to be a cog in a larger mechanism i always wanted to row my own boat when you mean always when did you actually have that always from from from when i was from being 12 years old i was aware of it when i was 12 years old my dad brought me back a book from america from business ship in america i was 11 in fact and on the cover of that book was Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan, semi-naked man holding a sword like this.

4:13I looked at that and I thought, that's what a man should look like. Interesting. And the bug bit me and I bought Arnold's autobiography. You'll enjoy it. You should read Arnold's autobiography, not the later ones. The later ones are sanitized, you know, whitewashed. The first one is called Arnold, the Education of a Bodybuilder. It's a relatively simple, relatively easy read and it's schwarzenegger's psyche i mean i probably read it in 1984 but schwarzenegger's psyche until the early 80s and he was set on the path to being governor of california and being a huge movie star even though he he hadn't got there yet and he lived a life of joy and fierceness and that spoke to my 12 year old soul i i got into bodybuilding bodybuilding and the gym was the most consistent thing throughout my life, I then kind of bounced with careers.

5:04And I went into business for myself and I did okay, but it wasn't really for me. I sold a business, made a bit of money, played with that money, lived a little bit of a, for want of a better word, playboy lifestyle for a few years as well in my late 20s. And then I was in my early 30s. I'm looking around. I'm looking around at my peers and my peers were excelling in their careers, doing extremely well. And I was kind of just doing nothing, going nowhere, feeling mediocre. A friend of mine legitimately, seriously said to me, well, I think I've got two ideas for you for what you should do. Okay, I'm all ears.

5:49This is a clever, clever man, successful man. What are those two ideas? Well, one, you should be a personal trainer. or two, you should be a porn star. Interesting. It was completely serious with both, which tells you how insane being a personal trainer was. And so obviously I discarded both ideas, right? Both ideas straight away. And then one idea, not the porn star idea, right? One idea, because the gym had been the most consistent thing. You know, I've been going to the gym since I was 14 years of age. So it just was that there and I'm thinking to myself, maybe oh no this you know being a personal trainer it's not a great career in general it's not you can't really build something with it but I thought here is an opportunity for me to add value here's an opportunity for me to do something differently and for the first time in my life for the first time in life because too many things had come to so too many things in life came too easily for me I'm from a strict family I'm from a self-made father a working-class man who who did pretty well in business with a small business but that did well and I always knew the value of hard work but everything just came too easy to me just came too easily and I cruised and I'm in my early 30s I'm looking at my friends doing well better than me and you're going to compare you so you shouldn't compare yourself but you do and for the first time in my life I was scared I was scared that I was going to be mediocre for me, for me personally the worst thing in life is just not fulfilling your potential whatever your potential may be and it's not about being grandiose we talked at the start before the cameras were rolling about the definition of success my definition of success is very simple find the thing that fulfills you find the thing that fulfills you if it's building a big business, making a lot of money becoming famous, writing a book bringing up a family how can you arrive to that conclusion?

7:48How can someone find that definition? It's easy. Their personal definition. It's super, super, super easy, but most people can't do it. You just have to have the courage, the maturity, and the conviction to have an honest conversation with yourself. Anyone who is capable of having an honest conversation with themselves, and it's one of those things that's mindful, right? You have to keep revisiting it because it's a moving target constantly. Your honest conversation with Alberto at 18 is not the honest conversation with Alberto at 29, right? You're a different man. So you've got to have the courage, have the balls, to constantly be asking questions of yourself.

8:27Which questions?

8:31Why am I doing this? Is this the right thing for me? What do I really want? What dream am I pursuing? How many people do you know who have good professions? Doctors, architects, lawyers, engineers? it depends on the definition of a good profession but they do that but they do that because their parents wanted them to do that and then and then they're stuck and you know golden handcuffs is a real thing as well yeah and it's you've got and also oh i'm i want to do this i want to build a business yeah i so i mean i will get every single week from across the world i will have some trainer trying to build their business reach out to me with with pretty much one message how on earth did you do it?

9:16Because we could get into this later if you want. You know, the personal training industry is incredibly tough. It's herding cats. There are so many inherent structural weaknesses in personal training that this is the reason why there's only one, there's only ever been one significant personal training business in the world. There haven't been any others because it's so hard. And I will get these younger people coming to me going, oh, you know, how you've done it, don't know how you've done it, don't know how you've done it. And they think they want to do what I did. I don't think they do. I don't think most of them do.

9:52You said early on you think the main determinant for success is hard work. I agree, but I phrase it slightly different. I think it's the ability to sacrifice. I think it's the ability to sacrifice. For myself, I'll give you an example for myself. I'm not good enough to have it all. Maybe some people can have it all. I'm not good enough to have it all. So for me, my sacrifice was personal friendships, social life, and any hobby that really didn't have an impact upon my business. But I didn't have to sacrifice my home life. I was able to be an active father. I was very, very fortunate and blessed to have the support of my wife, the unflinching support of my wife, who is the homemaker and did a lot of the heavy lifting, allowing me to still do the important stuff with my kids and then everything else was work.

10:46Most people are not prepared to do that. Most people are not prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You know, the ups and the downs. And you've got to take the ups for what they are. They're an up. When you're on a high, you've not conquered the world. And when you're on a down, it's not the end of the world. That's very, very hard for people to take. In the personal training industry, because your bread and butter are the people that deliver the product. When those people that deliver the product let you down, because everybody lets you down, this is part of life and a part of business, but when they let you down in the personal training industry, what you've done is you've given your client contact as a business to these trainers.

11:28And when the trainers leave, and it's very easy for them to leave, and it's very easy for them to go down the road and actually temporarily, short-term, make some more money for themselves, if you've invested yourself as you should in your trainers if you've given of yourself if you should as a good leader and as a good manager it takes a piece of you away with it and it breaks you not breaks you it hurts you it hurts you and most people they break but if you're prepared to sacrifice and we're using my analogy but we could apply this to the restaurant business where we apply to anything if you're prepared to just go i'm going to go on no matter what and this isn't me saying I'm a hero going on no matter what, because I didn't feel I had a choice.

12:10And when you don't feel it, again, it's one of those things. If you put yourself in a position where you have that honest conversation with yourself, you think you've got no choice, it becomes really easy, right? I've got no choice. It's not a conscious decision. I don't have a, you don't have a conscious decision to make, to clean your teeth in the morning. It's the same as that. You know, for me, exercise is easy. I don't have to make a conscious decision. I live for it. I love it. Simple. No discipline required. I personally agree with your definition of success. And this is something that we've discussed at length with various entrepreneurs in this show.

12:45I believe that anyone should find success in their own terms. And in order to identify that, you need to have that personal talk. You need to talk to yourself. And that's a difficult conversation because a lot of people feel like once they understand what is it that they want to do in their lives, their life is drastically immediately going to change for the better. So they feel like, oh, if that is my definition of happiness or my definition of success. So if I go from career A to career B, which is my calling from day one, I should be happy. It should feel easy. It should be, it should feel purposeful every single day.

13:23And I personally believe that what people don't understand is that in order for you to achieve that success or that definition of happiness, you are going to struggle. How can you connect both worlds, right? I am going to be struggling in a journey that will lead me to happiness. Because the struggle is the value. Exactly. The struggle is the value. If you chase happiness, if I wanted to chase happiness, I'd get up in the morning, I smoke a joint, and at five o 'clock, I sniffed some MDMA I don't mean that literally but you get my point right I'm just going to live a hedonistic lifestyle chasing whatever it may be there's no fulfillment in that there's no satisfaction in that there's no purpose in that so it goes back to this idea of fulfillment and you can link it to purpose it's just about purpose what is your purpose and the fight I tend to speak with kind of bellicose language the fight The fight is everything.

14:26If it came easy, first of all, if it came easily, everyone would do it, or it's luck. And if it's luck, if you make$100 million from your own graft and your own sacrifice, the confidence, the sense of pride that should give you is fantastic, right? If you win$100 million, lucky you. But intrinsically, inside, so you get to spend all the money, and it's just the same as if you've earned it. But inside, it's not the same thing. No, you won't develop those strengths. I agree with you. But on top of that, I believe that the more advanced you are in your life, from a maturity point of view, and the more experiences you have, the more complex you're going to see a situation, right?

15:16So I see in a lot of my friends, which they are right now in their mid-seniority level within their careers, and they could be lawyers or they could work for big financial institutions. And they all have great ideas. And most of them, actually, most of them want to become entrepreneurs. But because they've been in that corporate ladder for too long, they've been exposed to the complexities of what it means to run a business. They identify things like the competitive landscape, the ever-changing, the constant evolution of the consumer taste and preferences if you're in consumer goods and services.

15:49And they start building up all these different complexities that obviously is going to make them feel incredibly scared of starting. That's why I am personally a massive believer in starting early. because when you start, for example, a business in your early or in your 20s or like yourself in your early 30s, you are naive enough to feel like there is no plan B, there's only plan A. And also, and most importantly, your opportunity cost of failing is not incredibly big, right? It's not like you're living a career in which you're making already half a million and you're 50 years old. And also failing only means that you're failing by yourself.

16:27But if you're failing at the age of 50, perhaps you're failing along with your wife and with your kids, so your risk appetite is lower. So I think having a conversation, the conversation that you were just describing earlier with yourself becomes relatively easier if you do it earlier rather than later in life. Of course, yeah, 100%. I want to take us back to fitness. Yeah. So, I mean, you've been in the industry for over 20 years. You've opened gyms all over the world, worked with some of the biggest A-listers like Glenn Powell. Glenn Powell, yeah. I've seen it in a few movies. I'm great with faces, but I'm just not great with names.

17:07Now, when you've worked with all these different people, and you've also worked with beginners, right? Beginners that go to the gym. When they transform their bodies, something must change, right? In their mind. What's the transformation that you see in all these people? Belief. Belief. It's belief. Some people come in, and if you're talking about a transformation, and a transformation doesn't have to be I've lost 100 pounds, 50 kilos, whatever it may be, right? It could be just transforming relationship with exercise, relationship with food or something like that. The most important thing is belief.

17:47Some people come in with belief ready-made, already baked in. Other people, and this is the secret to good coaching, other people you have to you have to draw it out of them does that make sense yeah everyone can this is something so i don't think that everyone can be successful in business because i think it requires just a combination of too many different things from the hard work to the sacrifice to the ability but in terms of transforming your your body your health your fitness everybody can do it Everybody can do it. Everybody can do it. And people can do it far, far quicker than they believe.

18:27You've just got to be, well, you've got to be committed, like anything in life. And the more committed you are, if you want to go hard, the faster you can go. And some people can achieve amazing things like that in no time at all. I think starting is definitely going from zero to one is incredibly hard. But when it comes to working out and staying fit, committing is, you know, when you stick to it for the long run is when you start seeing results. What mental tools would you advise people to use in order for them to stay committed in the long term? It's about positive reinforcement. Okay. If you understand, so first of all, there's an education piece.

19:17if you go to the gym for the first six weeks and you're getting stronger every workout and then it slows down, which is what happens to everybody. You've got the newbie gains is what you call it. You've got to explain to people, you're going to start like this and then it's going to slow. How long does it take for you to plateau in that newbie's gains? Plateau, it could take years. Well, newbie gains will slow. It honestly depends. It depends. The problem is with many answers about the human body, The answer is only it depends. It depends on the age, the starting points, all these kind of things.

19:54Typically, the first month to two, you're getting stronger in every exercise at every single workout. And then obviously it has to slow. You can't carry on infinitely getting stronger. But you can carry on improving in the gym your strength, your endurance, things like your VO2 max. What is a VO2 max? A VO2 max is a measure of, I'm going to give you a very simple answer, a measure of ability to use oxygen. Wow, okay. Yeah. And it's now seen as one of the key determinants to longevity as well. it's something that you improve actually less by traditional weight training and more by extended periods of what you call zone two cardio which you might have heard of yeah the type of cardio where you kind of you're fast walking up a hill yeah you know you're not sorry to breathe you can't talk but you don't want to talk it's a combination of that with very hard four minute long all-out intervals that's how you traditionally will improve um vo2 max but the new began slow down you need to have the education it's going to slow down if you approach it correctly you can continue to improve from workout to workout in something for years for years some people will disagree with me on that if you know what you're doing now this is the challenge most people don't know what they're doing this this this is the problem so what most people need to do with their exercise regime and i use the term exercise regime broadly doesn't have to mean weights the most the the single most important thing, find the thing that you enjoy.

21:35Find the thing that you enjoy. If you hate weight training, weight training done properly is controlled aggression. This doesn't appeal to everyone. It's a more stereotypically masculine thing that there are more and more women going into it. So this is not me saying this is not for women. It's very important for women, especially as the age, as you probably know. Weight training is not the only thing. Weight training is the single number one form of exercise for everybody because it's the most malleable tool. Because you can apply weight training principles to almost any goal. And you can't do that with running.

22:11You can't do that if you're playing tennis, right? You can't do that if you're rock climbing. But really, ultimately, the most important thing, what gives you a buzz? What do you look forward to? And then the trick with weight training is to learn to utilize it in a way, not necessarily that you enjoy. It's like business. You can't always enjoy it. You're not chasing enjoyment. You're chasing fulfillment. You're chasing purpose. And with weight training, it's kind of the same thing. What can I do with it so that at the end of it, I feel a sense of satisfaction? I feel a sense of pride. That's a job well done.

22:48ideally you can exercise in such a way that you raise your endorphins and if you raise your endorphins this is good for you you feel good and you walk out of the gym you might be very tired after after a hard session but you feel good it sounds to me that in order for people to stay motivated as you've said they need to find these positive reinforcements but ultimately they need to know what they're doing towards a specific goal which entails that they need to have a level of fitness education or information in order for them to reach those goals because they might be doing something that they have no idea what they're doing then goal is not breached and then hence i'm going to quit so how can how can someone an average person that perhaps cannot afford a personal trainer understand what is it that they're doing and they're doing something correctly towards their goal whether it's losing fat or whether it's building muscle should they go to youtube Are there any apps that you can recommend?

23:42So I'll elaborate on that. It's not just education. The most important thing is accountability. It's accountability. So I think, you know, I'm going to come up with a stat, and this is just a made-up stat from me. 5 % of people get something out of the gym. 95 % of people don't. That actually kind of correlates in a certain way with commercial gyms. Commercial gyms in London, I don't know if you know this, they operate on a 10 % usage model. So they want 10 % of their members to use the gym. They want everybody to sign up in the new year, maybe just before the summer, early summer, and they want them to not use the facilities.

24:23Because if everybody used the facilities, if 40 % of the people used the facilities... People will complain. Well, it will be too busy. So what a messed up business model. Their model is not, we're going to give you maximum value, a return on your investment. The commercial gym model is we want to take your money and we don't really want it to work for you. It's based on profit. It's terrible. Wow. The fitness industry is the most undervalued industry in the world because when it's done well, it can be so profoundly life-changing. Just one parenthesis. So what you're saying is that if I go right now to my gym, the people that I'm seeing are only 10 % of the people that actually are subscribed to that gym.

25:07Correct, yeah. Correct. I mean, you'll have a gym with a 2 ,000, 3 ,000 square foot gym floor and they'll have 10 ,000 members in a busy city. You know, you can fit on a 3 ,000 square foot gym floor if you have 40 people. How can they know that the members are not going to show up? I actually don't know. I don't know. Well, they do know, right? They do know. They model it out, right? It's insane. It's crazy. so the gym doesn't work for most people if you don't do it right it doesn't work what works what most people need is is i'm saying this as if i'm arguing the case for personal training but i'm i'm trying to make it wider it's guided fitness it's guided fitness you know my next business step will be into guided fitness not necessarily personal training but guided fitness like berries something like that everything from group exercise to small classes ultimately probably back to personal training as well, subject to my various limitations because of my private equity sale.

26:06The easiest way for me to explain this to you and the audience, because I think most people will get this. It's diet. Looking at diet. Everybody, everybody, everybody knows what healthy eating is, by and large. Do you think so? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll tell you why I have my doubts go on as before we started the recording i shared with you that i go to the gym regularly five to six times every week uh for so many years i do also thai boxing regularly um and when you go so often to the gym and to the same gym you start seeing the people that are go as regular as you and they don't change exactly they don't change and i go i go every morning and usually the people that you see in the morning are totally different than the people that is in the evening and i'm seeing these people year after year going five, six times a week, like sweating.

26:56And I'm like, God damn it. Their bodies look exactly the same. So why do people put so much more effort into the gym than their diet? Is it because they don't know, that's my question, what a good diet looks like? Or is it just that it's harder? They do. Our grandparents knew what a good diet looked like. You're Spanish. Spanish people know what a good diet looks like. It's true. We know. It's not processed foods. It's eating. Basically, here's what a good diet is in its simplest form. Eat from the land. If your great, great, great grandfather wouldn't recognize the food, don't eat it. You know, if it comes in a cardboard box, probably don't eat it.

27:36So whole foods. Whole foods. And portion control. So when you're full, stop eating. We'll deep dive now into nutrition in a bit, but what's the mistake that you see gym goers make in their training? Because after going so many years to the gym, sometimes I look at some people doing their exercises. They don't train hard enough. There's loads of things I could say, good form, exercise selection, blah, blah, blah, but ultimately they don't train hard enough. From Instagram, I feel like people go to the gym, they feel great wearing their gym clothes, and then you see them for like half an hour on Instagram, and then 10 minutes later they're out.

28:11they just don't train hard enough so basically it's this you go to the gym you get outside your comfort zone yeah right and this is your comfort zone and at workout one you push it a bit here for the record he's just like you should tune in right now into the video because he's doing some okay yeah so so if you can see me on the camera this this is if this if this is your comfort zone yeah we're just going to push it a millimeter like your first session by the time you've done 20 sessions, your comfort zone has expanded. If you don't push your comfort zone, you're not going to grow. You're not going to adapt.

28:44And that comes in the form of feeling tired after you're working. No, not necessarily. It comes in the form of progressively improving what you do. The most obvious example of that is I'm going to add more weight, but it might be, I'm going to improve the quality of the exercise, the quality of the movement. You know, some people will do chin-ups and they'll do half movements. Some people will do full range movements. Full range is obviously harder it's more challenging you're moving your body through space against gravity more you're moving more distance there are regressions and progressions of exercises these are the things that that people need to do to move forward a good example would be um a lot of women can't do push-ups so they might start with their feet on the ground and their hands on a bench and do a push-up that way well once you've done let's say three sets of 10 like that and you've mastered it go lower make it harder and that's what people don't do where should people start so my first day in the gym what should be my goal what should what should i be doing and what should i be avoiding this is one of those it depends answers let's say you're in your mid-30s from a broad breaststroke perspective you want to be doing what i would call primal movements so you want to do a hip hinge, a squatting type movement, a hip hinge where you're kind of bending forward at the waist, right, with your feet on the ground.

30:08A squatting type movement, a horizontal push, a horizontal press, a horizontal pull, a vertical pull, and a vertical press. Basic movements. On what frequency until you get tired? How many reps? Again, it depends. So, again, as a beginner, you might pick four or five exercises. People often pick too many exercises. Pick four or five what you call compound exercises, multi-joint exercises. Do three sets of, let's say, 12 repetitions, three sets of eight repetitions. There's honestly no one truth to it. I definitely feel like to start someone, especially if someone has never gone to the gym before and had no fitness experience, they need to get a trainer or some sort of guidance.

30:58Because as you said, A, they're not going to get that positive reinforcement and they're going to end up quitting because they're not seeing results or they plateau too quickly or B, they're going to injure. They're going to get injured. Less so, less so. The injuries in gyms are less, yeah, far, far less than almost any other activity. What I did, and tell me if this is something that you believe I did right and you would recommend for other people to do. Get a trainer if you can for a period of time until you feel like you know enough to continue by yourself. I would think that's a very sensible thing.

31:30How long do you think should someone train with a trainer, assuming that the trainer is good? For as long as your budget allows and you're getting value from that trainer. Yeah. You know, at Ultimate Performance, we've had clients spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, but they can afford that, right? And they get the accountability and they get the ability to continually progress. Other people would save up. When I had one gym in London, we used to have a cattle farmer that would come from Cardiff twice a week to learn how to train. That's great. You do that for six weeks. You've got the basics.

32:05And again, it's not just, there's an education component. These are the right exercises. These are the way to do it. But also a good trainer, really good trainer will help someone to feel unfettered in the gym. it's really really important this when you go into the gym if you exercise within yourself you're like this you're not going to get anything out of it you're not going to put on a performance you're not going to spark up your nervous system so your your performance of the exercise is not going to be optimal which is going to hold you back and if your brain is holding you back because you're training within yourself, you're not going to enjoy yourself.

32:50If you can learn to be expressive in the gym, and expressive for some people might be making loads of noise, for lots of others it doesn't and shouldn't be making loads of noise, it doesn't really matter what it is, if you can just think when you go there, all that you're thinking about is, let's say I'm going to press this bar, I'm thinking about pressing the bar, I'm thinking about the control, I'm not thinking about him there or her there, I'm not thinking about, oh you know, is my slip showing or I'm dripping sweat I'm just there and I'm in the moment if you can learn that from your trainer that's that's golden and if you can learn that you can carry that with you to exercising by yourself in any form of exercise you can apply it to to meditation and yoga and running and anything else and it's an incredibly important lesson I think there's a generic reason why most people want to go to the gym.

33:40They want to A, look good, B, feel or be healthy, and then C, feel energized and have enough energy for the rest of the day. Now, for these three different factors, right now we live in a day and age in which we are seeing that there are so many different types of trainings, as you've mentioned, strength trainings, functional trainings, HIIT trainings. Now, if you want to reach the optimum level of these three factors, which type of training do you recommend? I recommend what you would call strength training. So I recommend a version of what some people might call bodybuilding. A version. How does that look like?

34:21Because if you're talking about the aesthetic, to maximize the aesthetic, you want some version of a bodybuilding program, but a bodybuilding type program is not mutually exclusive from something that, let's call it, is functional. Okay. Um, you can also be malleable with the workout and make it so that there's a significant cardiovascular demand as well. So, so if done properly and effectively two to three hours a week in the gym, it's all anyone needs. I could show you, I could show you the results. Lift weights two to three times per week. And how many times per week should I do cardio? the answer is it depends for what reason what would you be doing cardio for i want to stay lean i want to improve my as you said my oxygen intake levels so to stay lean the primary tool is your diet and your calorie intake so you don't need to do cardio whatsoever to stay lean and get lean no no one does it's it's if you're just looking as a calorie burn it's a bit of extra calorie burn this is not saying cardio is bad if it's purely looking at your improving the way your body looks.

35:34Cardio is a tool, but it's not a vital tool. The single vital tool is the resistance training and then the diet and the lifestyle that accompanies it. What is cardio good for? Cardio is good for your cardiovascular system. It's also good for your recovery from the hard weight training. So I would always recommend someone does cardio, but it's less about the aesthetic and more about overall health and mental wellbeing. So I would always recommend, you might want to have people do what's called NEAT, non-exercise activated thermogenesis is what it stands for. But basically we burn most of our calories with that background hum activity that we do.

36:17So if I'm sat here like this, you know, when you're really, really hungry, your metabolism slows down. And one of the reasons your metabolism slows down is because you stop doing things like fidgeting. Think of a skinny person, a naturally skinny person. They're always, they're doing this, right? That is how most people burn most of their calories. So that background hum is very important. And that's, that's steps. You must have heard of people talk, do 10 ,000 steps. There's nothing magical in 10 ,000 steps. It's just a decent kind of background daily goal of background activity to keep your metabolism going and going and going and going.

36:53The ideal workout program for somebody that has the time, for me, is two to four times a week of resistance training in the gym, depending on the goal. Twice a week is minimum dose, minimum effective dose. What's resistance training? weight moving what is the best way to define imagine I'm a 10 year old it's weight training or body weight training so it could be body weight training for how long each session again it depends on the person if you're a 65 year old female twice a week at home optimal for a 65 year old female you can do 3 times a week for 20 to 30 minutes at home and after a month, your life has changed.

37:45Your life has changed. It doesn't mean your body looks wildly different, but your strength, the typical unexercised, I don't want to say untrained, unexercised, de-exercised, deconditioned 65-year-old female, if she starts doing, lifting some bags with a few cans of beans and kind of thing, right? Just moving, doing certain guided movements and does that for a month, two to three times a week, When we're not talking really hard, her life will be different. Her life will be different. She'll improve her strength by 20 to 30%. So it ranges from twice per week, that's the minimum, regardless of how old you are and your gender, all the way until four times resistance training.

38:28I would say four times a week. There's diminishing returns after four times a week, but four times a week, someone like you, a 29-year-old man, you say to me, oh, I want to put on five kilos of muscle. Yeah. I'll say, okay, four times a week weight training is probably the best for you. But if you said to me, I've got enough muscle. I want to stay strong, but I want to focus on my cardiovascular health I want to play more tennis whatever it does. I want to do I'd say okay twice a week weight training twice a week full body weight training is all that you need 45 minutes to 60 minutes per session But then I would incorporate so it's really about what's the goal.

38:58So it's two to four times a week strength training Two to four times a week Let's call it cardiovascular exercise and cardiovascular exercise could be you enjoy bicycling go bicycling You want to play tennis? Play tennis. Want to go for long walks? Go for long walks. Pick the thing that you enjoy.

39:20All right, I'm going to share with you my routine, and this is perhaps for people that are in more, let's say, fitness advanced levels that might be interested for some other people. It may not be applicable. So I go to the gym. I work out six times a week. Okay? You weight train? Weight train five times a week, and every day includes also cardio. Okay. either intense one hour muay thai session or at least a 45 minute zone to low intensity cardio mondays are chest and triceps tuesdays shoulders back and biceps wednesdays he repeats mondays thursdays he repeats tuesdays and then fridays is leg day and then and then saturdays is a cardio session of roughly an hour right okay and that's it and i stretch every day okay and i'm 29 181 tall, 71, 72 kilos with a six pack.

40:12And I feel good. Am I doing something too much, too little? Am I going to get injured? Do you enjoy it? I enjoy it. I enjoy it. But because I've been doing it for so long, as you said, for me, going to the gym, it's like showering. It's like brushing my teeth. It's a non-negotiable in my life that when I think about it consciously and logically, it has given me so much. It It gives me energy. It allows me also to release and decompress my stress. It builds up obviously a level of confidence and purpose every day because you start with the positive reinforcement. I got that done and that's very good for me.

40:50But at the same time, because I don't know if I took it to an extreme and I like to always be very honest with who I am and who I am not. I don't think anybody's perfect. I sometimes feel like if I don't go to the gym, let's say I'm on holiday and I can't go to the gym. So for example, tomorrow I'm traveling for a wedding and I'm already looking at that particular hotel that my fiance booked has a gym. It's not that I'm going to go crazy if there's not a gym, but I will feel relatively uncomfortable. So I feel like perhaps it's ingrained too much into my life that I'm right now in a stage in which I'm trying to be more flexible and not look at the KPIs of body fat percentage or kilograms and just do what it feels right for me and try to be flexible.

41:34So if there's not a gym, I just don't go to the gym. And probably a lot of people might think, well, that's obvious. If there's not a gym, you're not going to go to the gym. But for someone that has been working out so hard towards a goal, and this goal is not necessarily just to look good, it's to feel good and so on. I just feel like I don't want to lose it. In the same way for my business, right? if you extrapolate this example into a business it feels like if you've been working so hard so consistently and then if you stop doing one thing for a day it's going to push you back months or years that's my biggest worry is it going to push me back and maybe it doesn't have merit you know the answer you know the answer just as with business just as in a relationship it's true I know the answer logically but then emotionally is when but you see again this is where working working with someone having someone to hold you accountable it goes back to what i talked about healthy eating everybody knows what healthy eating is but no one can do it not no one most people can't do it because at nine o 'clock at night the fridge calls everyone's name yeah right everyone and if you haven't got the discipline is is overrated it's not discipline it's desire do you want do you want the six pack or do you want the pizza oh i want the six pack yeah i want the six pack but i'm eating the pizza no no no you want the pizza more be honest with yourself that's what you want immediate gratification yeah that's what people want so for you you're doing a lot of exercise but if you feel great on it yeah if it's if it's not grinding you down if your sleep is good if you're eating well and you're a young man relatively young man great if you said to me gosh it's the first time that somebody uses the word relatively young man okay 29 nearly 30 right um wait till you turn 50 that's the that's the that's not relative anymore no 50 is i'm seven and a half years off being an elderly person in the united states of america where there is such a crime as elder abuse why do you look at those do you realize how bad that makes me feel seven and a half years i'll be a protected class um that doesn't feel right it really doesn't feel right i don't think that's gonna be okay If you wanted to build muscle, just muscle, I'd say, hmm.

43:47Too much cardio. Too much cardio. I might even pick apart your split because five times a week of weight training, you're doing five times a week weight training, maybe four times a week, maybe you tweak the split. This is splitting hairs and getting into the detail. If you wanted to maximize Muay Thai, I would tweak it as well. I'd definitely change the weight training, right? I'd make it a little bit less brow split bodybuilding, you know, chest and triceps kind of thing. I'd tweak that. I'd look at what the exercises that you're doing. I bet you're doing things like triceps push downs and stuff like that.

44:18Yeah, I know it, right? Whereas I'm probably going to change that. You know, I have a 16-year-old son. My 16-year-old son is a couple of kilos tall. He's relatively young. No, not relatively. He is young. He's 16. and he can squat. He can put the bar on his back. He can put, what is it? I always think in plates, like kilos, 61, 21, 40. He can put 140 kilos on his back. He can squat. He can sit in a deep squat with his ass on his calves for 10 seconds and then come back up. He can dip. He can dip with the rings. You should be using the rings in your workout, by the way. Someone like you, if you're into Muay Thai, into the functional.

45:00So this is how you make things multifaceted. Rather than doing dips on a machine, get on the normal dip stands. And once you're good enough on the normal dip stands, use rings. Because the instability of the rings makes your brain go, effing hell, Alberto, if I screw this up, I'm going to get hurt, right? I'm in a world of pain. And what that does, that makes your nervous system light up. If your nervous system lights up, the muscles that are responsible for power and strength light up that much better. You know, it's the story of the woman who can lift a car up off a baby, right? It's there. So it's picking the right exercises.

45:41Okay. Now this question, my fiance wanted me to ask you. Okay. So she loves what I call the low intensity forms of exercise, like your yogas and your Pilates. Every time we go on holiday, she's trying to hook me into these things. And for me, I can see the benefits, but at the same time, I don't get the physical, you know, like, pump that I need to go and do it often. Do you think people can stay fit or get fit just by doing these forms of exercise? No. No. Can you say that again? Some of my fiance listens to that. I think if you're just doing yoga and Pilates, unless the Pilates is something that really is combining a cardiovascular component, which some of them do now, no, you're not going to maximize your fitness.

46:26Does that mean it's going to make you unfit? No. And if someone is naturally fit, they're walking around London all the time, that kind of stuff, it's no problem. I would also say this. There's yin and there's yang. You, like me, right? There's the Taipei people. They like the yang exercise. That stuff. We should balance it with a bit of the yin. We should balance it with a bit of the yoga. Do I think that you, with your lifestyle, might even feel better if you replaced half an hour of the Muay Thai, half an hour of the cardio, half an hour, it's sacrilege for me to say this, half an hour to an hour of the weight training with a bit of yoga.

47:06You know, yoga is almost a version of meditation. Do I think that that might make you feel better, even better after a month of doing it? Very possibly. Very possibly. We need to bring things down. Someone like you, you're going to be up and up and up and up all the time. After what you just said, I won't be able to get away from this because my girlfriend is going to say this is happening. We have this thing called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is kind of like the rest and digest nervous system. It's why sleep is so important. And you just need to just keep it down. Now, this is a bit Physician Heal Thyself me saying this because this is not something that I do.

47:45It's not something that I practice. I've been saying to myself for 20 years that I should do yoga and I still haven't started. It's boring. It's boring for me, right? I appreciate the honesty. It's boring. It's boring. But all forms of exercise, all forms of exercise are great if you put your heart and soul into it. Some forms of exercise are better suited to certain things. And some forms of exercise, like resistance training, provide unique benefits. You know, I talked about the example of 65-year-old females. As we age, we have this thing called sarcopenia, which is a fancy term for muscle wasting.

48:20I think - Muscle wasting. Muscle wasting, sarcopenia. And I think we lose about 1 % of our muscle mass after the age of 30. So the only thing that will combat that is resistance training. The only thing that will combat that is resistance training. And this is really important for women, say, after the age of 50. Like really, really important because they will suffer more from this and more likely to suffer from things like osteoporosis. and what what builds the bones resistance training load on the skeleton so you know people go ah swimming i swim that's fantastic well if mrs jones is 50 55 and she swims every day it's great it's great it's wonderful but it's just a little bit myopic it's a bit short-sighted because you know you she would be much better swimming to her heart's content but spending 20 minutes minimum twice a week, doing the things that make her muscles burn and put some load on her skeleton.

49:19When I go to the gym, I'm starting to see more and more couples training together, which I think on one hand is it's a very nice and cute thing to do. But then on the other hand, I see that they do the same exercises, literally, one follows the other. And I wonder, I mean, obviously, you know, we're physiologically different, right, men and women. So what are the main differences that should be reflected in our training women tend to have a higher pain threshold so women can take higher reps better than us they have high pain threshold than we do especially if they're not if they're obese and very inflamed their pain threshold goes awry but just because of things like childbirth really that's the speculation so women have a higher pain threshold so women can often push themselves harder early on than men Men, you see, can generate kind of more force.

50:12And because of the controlled aggression aspect of weight training, they can often, I'm generalizing, kind of get into it a little bit more early on and push themselves too hard, actually. For women, they can unleash hell, really, quite early on. There are exercises that are going to be more female-friendly versus male-friendly, but that's only from an aesthetic perspective. If you do lots of front squats, this is where you put the barbell across here. The mechanisms of front squat push a lot of the stress onto a muscle called the vastus medialis muscle. That's the teardrop muscle that sits on the inside of the leg that goes over the knee.

50:54You can picture that muscle. Now, a well-developed muscle on a man there kind of speaks of power. On a woman, no woman wants a well-developed vastus medialis. It's like traps. Men don't mind a bit of trap. Most women, they don't want traps, right? They don't want to develop the traps. What are women looking at doing? Looking at developing. It's all glutes, isn't it? It's glutes, glutes, glutes, glutes, glutes, glutes, glutes. So there are exercise selections that one should gear towards certain populations. But again, it's individual specific. In terms of the workout program, by and large, by and large, it can train the same.

51:30If they want to get stronger, they should do the same range protocol. If they want to get bigger, same range protocol. Similar diets. women are more complicated as we know right women are more complicated you've got to factor in things like time of the month there's one week a month with a lot of women where um sticking sticking to a certain diet becomes more challenging in actual fact as a little bonus um around around menstruation I can't exactly remember when it is um but dark chocolate is is genuinely therapeutic for women who are kind of feeling a bit of PMS Interesting. Let's talk about food, one of my favorite topics.

52:11Obviously, most people and a lot of my friends relate to that. And I've also related to that for a long time in my life. They associate dieting with a punishment. So they feel that they need to say no to the pizzas and the pastas. And if they want to get in shape, they need to be eating things that are absolutely uneatable. flavorless. Yeah, chicken and broccoli, right? Yeah. So what would you say to these people so they could reshape their perception towards healthy eating and have a positive long-term relationship with dieting in a way that they can also enjoy it? Most people, if they're starting any kind of diet, would benefit from a food diary for a week because people underestimate what they eat, don't understand how many calories are in certain foods.

52:59So it would be very, very useful to understand what your weekly calorie balance is. Weekly. No one should be trying to count calories on a daily basis. No one. No one. No one. Because you're going to become obsessed. You're going to have a panic attack. I've seen people have panic attacks because they ate one gram of carbohydrate over their diet. One gram is four calories. Four calories is an aggressive fart, right? It's nothing. so so people obsess take it on a week your body your body is not oh i've i've eaten too few calories this today i've eaten too many calories today and instantly you're getting fat it doesn't work that way so you you look at the week's calorie total and if you look at the week's calorie total it gives you that wiggle room so if you want a piece of pizza have a piece of pizza so it does become about about calorie balance yeah and and you need to learn to be flexible but most people need to earn the right to be flexible you've earned the right to be flexible because you're very active and you're lean the the more overweight you are the less flexible you can be the leaner you are and the more muscle you carry the better your body can handle carbohydrates I mean there's a million studies on this the obese population if they eat a pizza and you eat a pizza goes to two different places on you especially if you've been exercising you've been burning glycogen the fuel that the body uses when it's resistance training the carbohydrates that you eat if you eat excess carbohydrates it often just gets converted to glycogen if you're obese no everything goes wrong it just goes into adipose tissue it will go into fat.

54:51So the fatter you are, the more likely that the carbohydrates that you eat, as an example, are going to turn to fat. And the leaner you are, the other way around it is. All right. You said counting calories weekly. So this is something that everyone should do. What about macros? Should people count their macros, macronutrients? Again, it depends on your goal. If you came to me and said, I've got six weeks to get on the cover of Men's Health, you want to count everything. You want to measure and assess everything. and you probably want to be very strict and you don't want to give yourself a piece of pizza.

55:20Someone that wants to look fine, stay healthy and feel energized. No, they don't and shouldn't count calories. Once they understand what calories are, many, many, many people, you see this all the time. I don't overeat. I've got a slow metabolism. I only eat 1 ,200 calories a day. They count the calories. They eat 3 ,500 calories a day. What are calories? Oh my God, that's terrible. as a layman's definition. It's a unit of energy. It's the energy that your body burns, but it's very, very difficult to describe exactly what a calorie is. Essentially, in very simple terms, we see 3 ,500 calories has been like a magical number.

56:01It's not as precise as this. If you burn off 3 ,500 calories over the course of a day, which is now impossible, over the course of a week, your body will drop and this is very general a pound a pound of fat if you have a 3 500 calorie deficit if you have a 3 000 calorie excess you're going to put on a pound of fat i'm speaking in gross generalities here right so if someone wants to drop some weight you do need to understand calorie balance. The problem is, well, let me get to this. So the most important thing, track what you're eating for a period of time so that you can understand it. But once you've got there, I personally, unless someone has a super specific goal, I personally don't like the whole calorie counting business because it just destroys your relationship with food.

57:01And we should have a nurturing relationship with food. It should not be sacrifice and punishment. Again, it doesn't matter. If someone is sprinting to a goal, I'm getting married, I've got a photo shoot, I'm going to be on the beach, and they want to go for it for a month, no problem. If they want to go for it for longer, no problem. But eventually, life returns to normal. And just understanding portion control, understanding that this piece of chicken might be this, this bagel is going to do this, and just having a flexible approach to it, it is long-term the only way. Having said that, the reason why everybody has such an issue with food is that it's just so personal.

57:45It's a mental game. Food is tied into emotions. People are stress eaters. People are bored eaters. People are worried eaters. People just sit in front of the TV, mindlessly eat, and you have to break habits. So eating is also about patterns and breaking patterns, and this becomes incredibly tough. So the best way for someone to follow a diet is to be mindful, have that honest conversation with themselves that we talked about at the top of this conversation, and figure out what works for them. So many, many people, what works best for them is to record everything. And then eventually they can release themselves from that.

58:29Some people, the people that love to spreadsheet everything, the more anally retentive people, they respond best to tracking everything all the time. And there are people that will track in their food apps, be tracking their food for 15 years. And maybe not 15 years, the food apps aren't around that long, but you get my point. And then other people, if you gave someone like me, oh, you've got to track your food every day, Nick, I'd go mad. I'd go mad. I'd hate it. So other people, even when they're starting, you've got to say to them, here are 10 rules to live by. Here are the 10 rules by which you should eat.

59:04Follow these rules and we'll get you there. You know, if you've got the busy type A businessman who's not a spreadsheet type guy, you can't say to him, right, I want you to spend 20 minutes a day recording exactly what you eat. They'll just tell you to piss off, right? It won't happen. But you can give them 10 rules to live by. And this is your, these are your North Stars here. this is what you do you don't you don't deviate from this and it works a lot of my friends they ask me which one is the ideal diet that they should follow especially on the ramp up towards summer they don't necessarily want to be on the cover of men's health but they want to look good they want to look clean and again be healthy and feel energized there's so many diets out there there's a keto diet which my twin brother follows and i don't intermediate fasting low carb diet carnivore diet, vegan, vegetarian.

59:52Now, again, going back to the three basic principles, which I think are the common denominators that everyone can relate to. You want to look good, but again, not to be a supermodel. You want to feel energized and also be healthy. Which diet would you recommend? So the problem with that is some people feel better on one type of diet, and other people feel better on something else. So I'm guessing your twin brother feels good on the ketogenic diet he does most people it's an absolute disaster it's too it's too restrictive he probably responds well to the restrictive nature of it there's no thing there's no thinking involved on my sister right you've you've just eliminated a whole array of food groups i don't even have to think about this it's easy so he's got no temptation with the pizza because he knows he can't eat it you see you have to work out what's best for you you have to work out what's best for you for most people for most people and i am again i'm generalizing if they want to look good on the beach and not go crazy you set a protein goal and if you weight training a decent protein goal might be two grams of protein per kilo of body weight so you said you're what 79 kilos right no 70 70 70 so for you it might be 140 150 grams of protein a day which is easy, right?

1:01:15It's three meals with an okay size portion of protein. And then it's what's your calorie balance and you make it up from carbohydrates and fats, good carbs and good fats, carbs and fats from the land. You know, the fat might be from eggs. It might be from beef. It might be from olive oil, this kind of thing. I said the carbs there, the fats might be from that. The carbs can be from, you know, good starchy sources. And, you know, potatoes are fine and rice is fine and yams and things like that, right? A bit of fruit, all this kind of stuff. And you make up the balance according to how you feel best.

1:01:56So some people, some people, especially people who are always on the go, very lean people, are going to feel better with more weight towards carbohydrates. People who are overweight, people who are what you call insulin resistant, People who, if they have a bowl of pasta at 12 o 'clock, want to fall asleep at 1.30. This is, let's call it low-grade insulin resistance. This means their body really is kind of not handling carbs in the right way. These people are going to be better steering more towards fat than carbohydrates. It doesn't mean they can't eat carbs, but you don't want a really carb-heavy diet with someone like that.

1:02:35Until they probably get leaner, put a bit more muscle on, and the leaner and more muscle you put on, the more you can steer towards carbohydrates. A lot of friends don't eat carbs for dinner. That's probably one of the easiest things. No, that's actually the wrong way around. Okay. So that's a really like 80s, 90s thing. This is how I'll explain it for you. You'll get this completely. How do carbs make you feel? Energized for a short period of time and then I crash. Okay, that's unusual. Okay. Okay. Well, all right, but what kind of carbs? So if you eat chicken and rice, surely you're not going to feel energized and then crash from that.

1:03:15No, because of the chicken, precisely. If it's only rice, I'll probably won't. It might crash. After an hour, I feel like the fuel that I get from fat and protein lasts longer than the fuel that I get from starches. This is true. So when you're stressed, what do you want to eat? anything that's in front of me do you want me to piece of steak or do you want me to croissant what do you think most people want to eat I think people want to eat a croissant because the carbs blunt cortisol you've heard of cortisol the hormone of stress think of cortisol as an energetic hormone you need cortisol for what's called fight or flight if you have low cortisol you're completely screwed right yeah you want but you want cortisol high in the morning so you've got a curve you want high cortisol in the morning to get you out of bed okay and at night you want low cortisol yeah carbs blunt cortisol because insulin the carbs raise right your body when you eat carbohydrates your pancreas releases insulin to shuttle the carbohydrates to places okay insulin mitigates cortisol so this is why when we're stressed we want carbs because the carbs raise insulin levels and that pushes our cortisol levels down so should we be eating then carbs so when should you eat carbs yeah in the evening what should you have for breakfast you should you should not have you know oh i'm gonna have a lot a non-fat yogurt and a bagel no most people the overwhelming majority of people, the overwhelming majority of people respond best.

1:05:00It changes their life to a protein and fat breakfast. So you want the best breakfast for someone like you? It's a piece of steak and some nuts. Steak and Brazil nuts, steak and macadamia nuts, and it will light your brain up. For many people, you know, oh, I'm going to be healthy. I'm going to have oatmeal and nonfat yogurt. No. Okay. So that's my breakfast. What would my lunch look like? it depends but if you're having say steak and nuts and it can be you know salmon and salmon and a different type of you know it can be scrambled eggs and smoked salmon yeah fat and protein yeah at lunch have you trained or are you going to train i've already trained you've already trained so you've already trained so you've made your body ready to soak up the carbs okay so i would have some carbs not necessarily carb heavy because you need to work and you want to be productive for the rest of the day, right?

1:05:50So, you know, you might have, again, a piece of lean protein from the land and some starchy carbs, which could be a potato, sweet potato, rice, yams, those kinds of things, you know, a little piece of fruit. And then in the evening, the evening is when I would have, I would push the dominant part of my carbohydrate intake. And that's when you feel relaxed. You know, the best time to have a bowl of oatmeal, porridge, for supper, not for breakfast. It's the first time I hear this. Yeah, this is, but it makes sense, right? It makes sense because no one, okay, 99.9 % of people, when they're stressed, they don't crave steak.

1:06:29They don't crave salmon. They crave carbohydrates. But a certain question. So as an entrepreneur, I go through intense periods of stress. So are you recommending me to eat carbs when I'm stressed for me to lower my cortisol levels? That's an interesting one. I was told to go for a walk, but I'll take the carbs any day of the week. It's what you recommend. Yeah, going for a walk is better. You don't want to medicate your stress with sugar. But when you're stressed, if you're going through periods of acute stress, mental stress, physical stress, illness, you want to be very careful with things like intermittent fasting.

1:07:05You want to be very careful with, oh, I'm going 16 hours without eating, where your blood sugar goes low. Because this is raising cortisol levels, right? No matter what. And again, cortisol levels by themselves are not bad. Acute spikes of cortisol we need. It's not bad. But chronic cortisol is a bad thing. You know, we were made to chase after the rabbit, right? We were made to hunt, whatever it may be. We were not made to sit in our car worrying about our mortgages. We were not made, you know, the undercurrent of stress, the undercurrent of, you know, because we're constantly on, because it's very easy to be, I'm checking my email, I'm checking my WhatsApp, I'm doing this.

1:07:43There's no time to decompress. And because of that, you have to really mind your stress levels very carefully. So with food, food can help you mitigate stress. How? Balancing blood sugar levels. What should I eat if I'm under stress, ideally? Three times a day or more. There's nothing magical, by the way, with eating like six meals a day. You know, sometimes people go, oh, it revs up my metabolism. That's not true. three times a day or more of eating meals, not letting my blood sugar get too low. This does not mean I'm going to eat tons of carbs. You don't have to eat tons of carbs to keep blood sugar stable at all.

1:08:22Not at all. Well, look, your brother's blood sugar will be very stable because he's in ketosis. But I don't like ketogenic diets for almost everybody because it's just too hard for them to follow. And they just become absolutely obsessed with food. And then sometimes they go insane when they break it. And that's what you don't want. Because it is too easy to develop an unhealthy relationship with food. Can you give me examples of food that people should eat when they are under stress? Specific examples. The problem is it depends, right? It really depends. For the general population. Well, it depends on the time.

1:09:03So if it's in the morning, you're overstressed, that just means you're just kind of wearing everything out. You want something that will help raise certain neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are like, let's call them brain chemicals. And you want to raise things like dopamine and acetylcholine in the morning. This is when you want things like red meat. You're a restaurateur. Caviar is a great one. Caviar is the best food when you land in a new place and you're jet lagged and it's daylight and you think you should be sleeping and you want to reset. Caviar is the best because it will raise this neurotransmitter called acetylcholine.

1:09:47Let's call it the neurotransmitter of focus and alertness. Is there something more cost-friendly that might give you similar effects? Cheap caviar. You get cheap, what's cheap? Sturgeon, you know, cheap salmon eggs, right? And that gives you the same nutritional values. Mm-hmm. Okay. So macadamia nuts do these kind of things. Later in the day, if you want more yin, we're talking about yin and yang, white meat, for instance, right? So things like turkey, certain cheeses, like provolone cheese, turkey. These are, let's call them, I'm becoming a bit too woo-woo here. These are calming foods. I would say like a bowl of porridge is a calming food.

1:10:26And that's all for lunch? No, that would be later in the day. So the porridge is 14. I would say for later in the day. What you're saying is if anyone is going through a period of stress in the morning, either a piece of steak, macadamia nuts, or a form of caviar. Protein and fat, protein and fat. Some people go like, I can't stomach a piece of meat. Well, okay, have some eggs. And then for lunch, a white sourced protein. No, no, no. It can be any source. There's nothing magical. But later in the day, maybe steer it more towards a white meat. White meat. And then some carbs at night. Yeah. Ideally eating three times a day.

1:11:06Yeah, or even more often. Not letting yourself get too hungry if you're under too much stress. Because first of all, it's just a bit more stressful on the body and you're adding stress to chronic stress, which is not good. Yeah. But also if you let yourself get too hungry, food choices become much harder to make, right? That's the key thing. It's all about, you see, diets. There's a reason why there's 100 new diet books every Christmas. They just don't work because there's no magical diet. We're battling with big food. I'm very much of the belief that, you know, the marketing departments in big food are smarter than the general public.

1:11:43That's just a fact. They've won. They've won the battle. That's why a Zenpik has been so profoundly... What do you think of a Zenpik? What do I think of a Zenpik? Let's just start by defining what's a Zenpik. What is it? Oh, what is it? It's a GLP-1 agonist, isn't it? So a Zempic was developed as a diabetic drug. And now we have a whole family, a Zempic, which is different from Manjaro. You've got a new one called retitrutide that's GLP-1, GIP, and something to do with glucagon. I'm stepping beyond my bounds here a bit, to be honest with you. They've been so profoundly successful. Well, a Zempic is coming out of Denmark, and I think it's increased Danish GDP by 2.2%.

1:12:24I don't know if you knew that. Yeah, right? That big. Obesity rates in the US have dropped for the first time in something like 50, 60 years. But is it healthy? It depends. If you are diabetic, yes. If you have gut... These are the things people that talk about. It slows down gut motility, the speed at which food transits through your body. People with digestive disorders, even things like IBS, have a problem with, often they might have a problem with slow motility, but often they have a problem with too fast motility. The food just passes through them, and this will give them diarrhea. Too much water goes into their colon.

1:13:02They don't absorb their nutrients. A Zempic can slow all that down. We're finding A Zempic can help with things like mast cell disorders, all sorts of chronic immune disorders. But you're asking me, you're asking me about weight loss. if you are 100 kilos overweight and you are incapable of addressing that no judgment but you're incapable of addressing it you're not incapable of addressing it by the way because of some weird spooky metabolic disorder you're incapable of addressing it because mentally you just you cannot follow the diet right my view is that most people who are obese have eating disorders it's an eating disorder it is it's also something that never gets talked about some people are physiologically hardwired to feeling good when they have a full stomach.

1:13:49I myself, I feel better when I have a full stomach. I sleep better with a full stomach, which is terrible for your sleep. If you are physiologically hardwired towards having a full stomach and food is just plentiful, right? What happens? You can easily become obese. These people need help. They need help. So a Zen pick does not come without downsides, powerful, powerful drugs that effectively change your brain chemistry and completely change your relationship with food have some very significant side effects. But if you're 100 kilos overweight, you're going to die from that, right? So if someone wants to lose five kilos, should they use Ozempic?

1:14:39No, they're... If someone wants to lose 20 kilos, should they use... No, because 20 kilos is unlikely to be life-threatening to them. Right. So where is the watermark here? I would say life-threatening. If you are so overweight that it's life-threatening and you cannot follow a diet, then any one of these new diet drugs is something that you should consider. Because if you are obese, you are more likely to die of what is called all-cause mortality. Your all-cause mortality rate is far higher. So you are more likely to die of anything if you are obese, anything, anything. So there is nothing good, there's nothing good about being obese, nothing.

1:15:26And if you can't fix it yourself and it's an eating disorder, recognize it for what it is and you need help. And if living better through chemistry helps you, there's a risk-reward ratio, there's a risk-reward ratio to every drug that we take, even taking an aspirin for a headache, right, or ibuprofen for an achy joint. There's a risk-reward ratio. And if you are obese and can't fix it with diet, by all means, examine whether ozempic is for you. If you are 20 kilos overweight, you've probably not got an eating disorder and you've just been a lazy bastard. And if you're five kilos overweight and you want to roll the dice with it, I mean, good luck to you, But to me, this is foolishness.

1:16:12Some people, they try diets, and they probably try diets through an extended period of time to lose fat, and they just don't seem to lose it. What are they doing wrong? Then they're eating too many calories. So they're eating healthy, but they're eating too many calories. They're still eating too many calories, yeah. So it comes down to eating whole foods, as you mentioned, and in a way counting your weekly calories. It comes down to eating less food and drink because, oh, you know, again, I've seen people say, I eat 1 ,200 calories a day and then they go to Starbucks and they get a 1 ,500 calorie drink.

1:16:48It comes down to consuming fewer calories than your body needs. That is it. It's a pretty simple equation. And then there's loads of things that we can layer upon it that are more complex to trick the body to make it more efficient. Things like carbohydrate manipulation and things like that, right? But ultimately, it just comes down to you need to eat less than your body needs.

1:17:13What do you think about drinking alcohol and staying fit? Well, there's research out now. We used to say, even five years ago, looking at countries like Spain, oh, a glass of wine a day is healthy for you. Now, it seems to be settled science that all alcohol is bad, full stop. Regardless of the quantity and the type. all alcohol is bad. All alcohol will increase your risk of cancer and things like that. However, this is what I would say, because there are also lots and lots of studies that look at beer drinkers and wine drinkers, and sometimes they can live longer. Why is that? Well, if you're going to the pub and you're drinking a couple of pints of beer and you're relaxing and you're having the social connection, you're having the glass of wine with your friends at a meal, you're having the social This is very, very valuable.

1:18:02So you've got to look at things in balance. Do I think someone drinking a glass of wine twice a week is a terrible thing for their health that I would look down on? No, no. If it relaxes you, makes you feel better, you've got to live a little, right? It's like this. We'd all be better driving our cars at 25 miles an hour, wouldn't we? Yeah, probably. But we're not going to. So it's the, but you know, we should wear our seatbelts and we should follow the rules. I'm not sure if we're going to be better. We're probably going to have less accidents, but I'm not sure if we're going to be better. Well, we're going to have less accidents.

1:18:32We're going to arrive late. That has other consequences. But you get my point, right? Yeah, I get your point. So that is kind of the way that I would look at alcohol. I guess people would ask, can I stay fit if I drink? Yes. Okay, you can stay fit. For sure, yeah. Do you drink? No, I don't drink alcohol, actually, no. None? No. Why? I don't like it. It upsets my stomach. Yes, that's my stomach. Did you ever drink? Yeah. I'm English How else am I going to talk to girls? Was there a catalyst moment? I have Like a little bit of a chronic illness issue With lime and mold and stuff like that So that kind of Upsets my stomach I will occasionally have a small glass of wine I'll occasionally might have a brandy But I will smoke cigars For instance, they're not healthy What about cheat meals?

1:19:28what about them? so people there's a lot of nuance around cheat meals how often can we eat them in order to again going back to those three factors I want to stay healthy look good and feel energized should it be a cheat meal or a cheat day? should I be having everything? or just maybe avoid your sugars? you know the answers already perhaps other people don't so I would not look at it as a cheat meal I would kind of look at it as a free meal I like that. Right? There's a nuance to that, but that makes sense, right? It's liberating. It's a free meal, yeah? A good rule of thumb for a free meal is I'm going to eat whatever's on the table, whatever I want.

1:20:11When my bum has left the seat, I'm done. That's also a good little bit of discipline with it. I think a free... I've done that and then I just don't want to live. No, that's the problem. Well, you know, that's all right, right? I think a free meal versus a free day is much, much better. A free meal can't really do much damage, right? But you've got to deserve it. So the more active you are, the more muscle you have, and the less body fat you have, the more you deserve it. The more wiggle room your body has. Because again, when you eat, say, excess carbohydrates, if you have resistance trained your muscles, both your muscles and your liver are more likely to take on the carbohydrates that you eat.

1:20:57as something called glycogen, which is effectively, let's call it, fuel for muscular contractions, let's call it, versus sending those carbohydrates into your fat cells. The fatter you are, the more inactive you are, the less your body can handle it. So a very lean, very active person, purely from a body composition perspective here, by the way, right? Not necessarily health. Purely from a body composition perspective, can have free meals all, you know, far more often than someone who is overweight. At what frequency? Because it really honestly depends. The general person, right? The general person that is not overly fit, but at the same time not obese.

1:21:36Once a week, twice a week. Once or twice a week. It depends on what they're doing. I've seen people, I've known bodybuilders competing, getting very, very lean, having to eat McDonald's every day just to maintain their metabolism because they've got such fast metabolisms. Just to keep it, you know, to put in what you call dirty calories. But what you have to remember with the bad stuff, and I don't want to demonize stuff because, you know, unless someone has a food intolerance or a food sensitivity, there's no, you know, we shouldn't demonize anything, right? We shouldn't demonize any food. Not even sugar?

1:22:13No. Well, you know, again, someone like yourself, if you want to have a dessert a couple of times a week, It's not going to touch the sides, no problem. But if you've got a disrupted gut microbiome, for instance, right, this is where you need to be more careful with sugar. If you're snacking on sugar twice a day in between meals, well, this is bad for your blood sugar, but it's also very, very bad for your digestion because you have this thing called migrating motor complex, MMC. And the migrating motor complex is the thing that, it's the housekeeping of your gut. and it's almost like a wave, 90-minute wave.

1:22:55It's a 90-minute wave. It takes about 90 minutes to two hours after feeding for it to start working, and it goes deeper with each wave. So ideally it takes about six hours, and this is the thing that flushes, let's call it the debris out, the bad mucus, the bad bacteria. Many, many, many, many people are never giving this migrating motor complex the chance to get to work, also because it slows down during sleep. so you don't want to be snacking all the time you can snack and it's not going to show on your body but internally there's a difference this is the key point with with free meals there's a lot of people that they design their nutrition their nutritional life their food intake around what they see online there's a lot of influencers fitness influencers that they're incredibly fit let's just take a very simple example that perhaps anyone can relate to the rock right he's incredibly big he works out probably a lot probably a lot yeah but also he's big on his cheat meals and and he shares those cheat meals i think he does them on a weekly basis and then a good friend of mine uh told me that he started following that he's like oh i'm having the same cheat meals that the rock does on a weekly like once a week and i'm like you're not the rock you're not the rock that's the point right so what would you say to these people because they do that on the cheat meal example but also on what these people also eat in their normal clean days and and they don't first of all they don't have the same physiological structure they don't they perhaps are not as active so what would you say to these people well you can eat the rock's food if you do the rock's work if you're not doing the rock's work and carrying the rock's muscle and the rock will be you know chemically assisted for sure so he's on steroids oh for sure for sure for sure 100 rock is on steroids 100 doesn't make him a bad person doesn't make him a bad person does he make him a cheat i think he says it makes him a cheat yeah a fraud it makes him it makes him a fraud if he lies about it it makes him a cheat if he's selling something that says you can be like me whilst taking something that he's deceptive about.

1:25:15So he's not doing the latter. He's not selling his fancy workout program. You know, the people that sell the fancy workout programs, you can look like me and I'm natural and they're not. That's a cheat. I think he has come out many times. I think Joe Rogan has said this, right? like Gonjaro and say, oh, the rock's not natural. No, he's not natural. But again, it doesn't make him a bad person. He should just not say anything.

1:25:44But bodybuilders, because I'm unaware of this, are they allowed to get on steroids? In some competitions, yes, and in others not. So there are drug-tested competitions where they'll claim to be natural, and then some will be natural and some will not, some will cheat, just like in the Olympic Games and in a lot of other sports. But in the bodybuilding world, steroids have been around at least since the 1960s, and it's just an accepted thing. If you want to compete at a high level, you take steroids. It's absolutely not considered to be cheating. So you were around the bodybuilding world for an extended period of time.

1:26:25Did you take steroids? When I competed, yes. What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing it? You recover better. You have what's called increased protein synthesis. So basically, you grow muscle faster. And what are the disadvantages, the downsides? That's, again, an it-depends answer. It depends on luck. Some people can have bad responses. Some people can take gallons and have no health implications whatsoever. Some people can take small amounts and have health problems. in my experience and we're going back to the 90s with me now right and and the world has changed because what happened was the internet and forums the old forums the the crazies were isolated and the older wiser heads moderated the crazies and then the forums came along and people went nuts and it was always one-upping oh instead of taking 500 milligrams of a steroid I'm taking five grams of a steroid, that kind of thing.

1:27:26Not me personally. That's what people are doing now. And it's changed the whole landscape of bodybuilding and it's become chemical warfare. If you really want my view on steroids, because I'm in the fitness industry and steroids are rife in the personal training industry as well. They're rife. Steroids are rife everywhere, right? Go anywhere. Go into a mall in Dubai. Go into a mall in Dubai and you're going to see a tatted up dude

1:27:55on steroids on every single corner. On every single corner. What are some general side effects? Slightly increased aggression, but most people can handle it. Increased sex drive, depending on what you take, increased sex drive for sure. And then you can be on a roller coaster because what goes up must come down. And even if you stay on all the time, you'll get a spike and it will go up and your sex drive can go absolutely crazy and lead to very, very, very bad decisions, by the way, right? very, very bad decisions, and then it will come down and can crash. The real problem that I see with steroids, outside of people taking crazy amounts, outside of people taking bathtub drugs, bathtub steroids, it's the mental side of things.

1:28:37Because what you are doing, you're bringing in exogenous hormones, you're rapidly increasing people's testosterone, and this changes their personality. And I have seen it change people's personality, make them do incredibly rash, incredibly stupid things. I've seen it almost turn people bipolar. So I'm very, very much against steroids in a way that before I went into personal training, I wasn't so against because I wasn't seeing young men mess themselves up. Now having employed thousands and thousands of young men and seeing hundreds take steroids, and there are hundreds of thousands in the fitness industry, not millions of people in the fitness industry taking steroids, lots of people can handle it.

1:29:19Lots of people can handle it. I've known people handle it for 30 years, 40 years, but I've seen people mess themselves up as well. And for me, you can build a really good physique, a really good physique without taking steroids. It takes longer. It takes longer. You've got to grind it out. It takes longer. That's the thing. There's less wiggle room for cheap meals. There's less wiggle room for drinking. There's less wiggle room for partying, but you can do it and it lasts and it sticks and it doesn't affect your brain. And so I'm very, very much against it. However, if you said to me, my life's goal is to be a professional bodybuilder, you've got to take steroids.

1:30:02End of story. End of story. End of story. It is what it is. What about supplements? So going back to those three ideal targets, I want to look good, be healthy, and have enough energy or good energy levels. there's so many supplements protein glutamine creatine what should the average person take so you don't need a protein supplement okay let's take a step back by definition supplements are supplementary so they are a tertiary consideration in the grand scheme of things when looking at your health you should put your energy your time and your money into the quality of the food that you eat that's paramount if you have any money left over you can look at supplements protein powders are a way to conveniently get extra protein in would you be better off eating steak eggs and fish yes 100 because you know there's fillers there's artificial ingredients there's all these things in protein but if you want a quick hit of protein especially like after you've worked out protein powders are there for convenience they're not essential creatine works everybody in this room should take creatine, everybody, whether they're lift weights or not.

1:31:15How much? Four or five grams a day? No, well, there's new evidence now. So we always said five grams a day. And I've used five grams a day since the 1990s. Now there's evidence that 20 grams a day can have significant impact on protecting cognitive function. And they're even looking at 30 to 40 grams. And it's helping, actually helping Alzheimer's patients. so now it's looking like you know 10 to 20 grams a day and it's cheap it's cheap it's the most studied supplement that there's ever been there's no side effects is there any particular type of creatine monohydrate basic cheap basic cheap easy accessible from you know one of the discount supplement manufacturers you don't have to really do massive quality control and creatine age agnostic gender agnostic it doesn't matter yeah the older you get the more important it is Anything else?

1:32:11Aside from creatine? There's so many things. Basics. So, D3. Vitamin D3. Yeah. Which you probably want to take with some of the K vitamins as well, because it helps for absorption. You take D3, by the way, with fat. Don't take D3, because it's a fat-soluble vitamin. Not fat-soluble vitamin, it's a fat-soluble substance, sorry. So, you take it when you eat steak, your eggs, whatever, you don't take it on your stomach. Everybody, not everybody, but everybody in England, they're deficient in D3. most people that are even living in sunny countries are also deficient in d3 you can go to the doctor get a d3 check it is profoundly important to your health again it's cheap it's kind of a commodity supplement everybody should take it they should most people should be taking at least five to ten thousand ius of d3 so a relatively high dose right yeah a relatively high dose magnesium at night calms down the nervous system my preferences of magnesium called magnesium bisglycinate Most people are deficient in magnesium.

1:33:09How much magnesium are you taking? I bet you're not taking enough. Are you taking like one capsule? One capsule, yeah. I mean, that's like farting in a hurricane. Really? Yeah. You should be taking... Like farting in a hurricane? Four, five hundred milligrams. Four, five hundred milligrams or more. I'd probably take a gram. How do you take it in the form of pills? Capsules. Capsules. Capsules, yeah. So everybody should take that. So creatine, vitamin D3 with 5 ,000 IUs. Magnesium. digestive enzymes you are not what you eat you are what you absorb think that through right you're not what you eat you put what you eat you put in there but it's what your gut absorbs with modern life stress age drinking not sleeping i was told that we absorb between 20 to 30 percent of all these supplements by an ivy drip expert and then she told me it depends on the bioavailability of the supplement.

1:34:04It really depends. There are things like glutathione is something that is often delivered by IV. This is much more bioavailable from IV than it is orally, for instance, but it depends. Vitamin C is still quite bioavailable when you take it in a capsule form. And collagen? Oh, collagen is a...

1:34:29Almost all the collagen supplement companies are semi-scam gimmicks. They're semi-scam gimmicks. If you break down collagen into it... So collagen is not a very kind of well-assimilated protein. if you break down collagen you've got two amino acids called proline and glycine and these are the things that really we think now are the thing that gives collagen the magic so it's just better to take a teaspoon of glycine and a teaspoon of proline it's much cheaper it's much easier to take collagen is hard on the digestion as well so i wouldn't take it glycine by the way is a very interesting one for you if you're thinking about kind of optimizing your life so glycine is super cheap tastes a bit like sugar you don't want to take too much the first time you take it because it can loosen your bowels glycine is spelled g-l-y-c-i-n-e you should get some it again it's it's let's say it calms the nervous system down so three to five grams so less than a teaspoon half an hour before you go to sleep it will help the quality of your sleep i'll try it really will help quality sleep there's only positives from glycine Probiotics, you know, digestive health, digestive enzymes, probiotics, good quality ones.

1:35:49These are super, super important ones. And then, you know, there's a plethora of other supplements, but those are kind of what I would consider to be the core basics. Let's talk about, I mean, you're mentioning sleep, so let's talk about sleep and recovery. So we've covered physical exercise, we've covered nutrition, but a lot of people, even though they may get these two firsts right, it seems to be like recovery is something that they don't feel as valuable or is the thing that perhaps for them is a bonus a good to have but not a consistent thing that they follow every day so what are some habits that everyone can follow in order to get that recovery that is needed the very first thing that people must understand is that sleep is not a luxury sleep is a necessity so instead of seeing sleep as a luxury it's no it's it's part of a conscious health regime.

1:36:46Sleep discipline. We call it sleep hygiene. And it's simple to do, but like diet. It's super simple. I can give you it all in under two minutes. But like diet, it's hard to follow. Because, you know, hey, Netflix. Hey, WhatsApp. You know, or emails. Make your bed, your bedroom should be for two things and two things alone. One of which is sleeping. make it into a bat cave dark as possible quiet as possible cool as possible and a good hack is to invest in one of those sleep coolers I think there's one called eight sleep and it kind of pumps let's call it cold water even like under under your topper on top of your topper in bed fantastic for sleep you want to cool temperature you don't want too much heat you want to go to bed at the same time every night if you can not always possible and above all else what you want to do is you want to avoid blue light the light from electronic instruments i'm looking down at my phone here you know from your laptop from your ipad for a couple of hours before you go to bed this is the most critical no tv tv tv isn't actually as bad but you want to limit the tv you know some people you want to really go full hog you'll you'll wear the blue light blocking glasses right you know like those red glasses that you see the biohackers wear i've got them they're a bit of a pain in the butt you know i mean i don't really like to use them but what i have in my bedroom i have um a red light you're familiar with red light therapy i have a big red light box that i use at different times of the day but instead of putting a light on at night i will use the red light as my light my wife absolutely hates it but you know it it keeps the light on the right frequency because the red light mimics both sunrise and sunset so it's helping you get ready for sleep.

1:38:37That is what you need for your bedroom. If you have a problem with the noise, wear earplugs. I wear some kind of silk sleep mask. Once you get used to it, it's enormously, enormously helpful. And this is what you should do. We should aim to wake up without an alarm clock. I know, again, that's like a really, you know, people go, oh, that's, I can't do that. Well, you probably can if you discipline yourself enough to go to bed at the same time you know keeping regular hours you can catch up on sleep but you can't catch up everything so you know people go right i'm gonna go man i'm gonna cane it during the week and i'm gonna catch up on the weekend it mitigates but it doesn't fix it doesn't fix if you don't sleep properly it over time you will accumulate wear and tear on your hormonal system so for instance you will feel it in your sex drive you will feel it women are more sensitive to things like thyroid issues.

1:39:32Women have something like five, six times the thyroid issues that men do. Again, women will feel it more in things like their thyroid issue, their thyroid. You will feel it in your body composition. You will become less adept at utilizing carbohydrates. So in other words, your insulin response will be blunted. You're going to get fatter. Yeah. Yeah. So sleep is absolutely vital. And sleep hygiene is really, really important. and if all that you do is go, I'm going to turn my bedroom into the Batcave. I'm going to use it for my bedroom for two things. My bedroom is not for watching television. It's not for the PlayStation.

1:40:08It's not for lying in bed and doing my emails, right? This is not what you should do. You should resist the urge. You know, if you wake up in the middle of the night, I mean, again, physician heal thyself. I have to stop myself doing this. This isn't me saying I don't do this. If you wake up at four o 'clock in the morning to go for a pee and you pick up your phone and you start checking your messages you're an idiot it's the wrong thing to do i'm an idiot because i will there are times when i will do it does that does that make sense it does make sense and it's really simple what about stretching is it very important for our recovery should we stretch no it makes no difference to your recovery the only way no the only way it makes a difference to your recovery is if you are stretching and breathing because you should breathe into a stretch you know you breathe out into a stretch right if you're stretching in that way and doing the right breathing the breathing exercises and the breathing patterns will calm you down and that's good for you but stretching you know stretching is overrated as a recovery technique good stretching well you must be quite flexible with the muay thai right good stretching as you know is not relaxing is it good stretching is hard work right because you're flexing you're getting into the position then you're flexing the opposing muscle right if i'm stretching my biceps here i'm going to flex my triceps hard so it's hard work the kind of stretching that people think for recovery is a version of yoga it's not bad but there's nothing magical in the stretching do you stretch often not as often as i should how often should we stretch we should it's not about stretching we should see it as mobility so we should be moving our body through wide ranges of motion every day really i mean a really good thing to do would be you get up in the morning, you grab your cup of coffee, you sit outside, ideally it's sunny, right?

1:41:56But you know, in England, it's not necessarily, you know, but you go outside somehow, some way, or get some daylight on you, and you might spend five or 10 minutes opening up your body. Do you have any breathing techniques or recommendations? Yes, yes I do. If you do a long exhale, a long exhale, it has to be more than four seconds. After about four seconds, five seconds, everyone in the room should try this now. Okay. If you can do a, and then you breathe out slowly, after four, five, six seconds, you start to feel things drop, right?

1:42:39there you go so if you want to calm yourself down if you've got an interview or something stressful if you do a couple of those a large inhale you could do the second inhale as well you could do the and then finish off a little bit and then a super super slow exhale it could last 30 seconds it will lower your pulse as well your resting heart rate will come down right yeah can you deep dive into that because a lot of people that are listening to this might be thinking well that's too simple to give me that great of an effect so what's happening in our body once we follow that i oh you know what you're stretching me now i think that your parasympathetic nervous system is just kicking in so i it's a nervous system regulation thing where everything is just goes right okay we're just going to shunt ourselves and just and just lower it down i can i can decrease my blood pressure by a few points just by sitting there and getting to go down if i'm hooked up to a machine and my pulse my my pulse might be let's say my pulse is 63 uh beats a minute i can get it to 58 in a minute just by it's nothing magical i've never done a course or anything it's just understanding breathing um box breathing is the other one you're not familiar with box breathing the four seconds in four seconds hold four seconds out, four second hold.

1:43:58You do that for a minute. And it will take your brain somewhere else, right? So if someone's having a panic attack, if someone is stressed, again, it's just a useful thing to do. If you can't sleep, box breathing is recommended. I, if I can't sleep, will, I'll do the long exhales though. I'll do the long exhales. I'll do the long exhales when I can't sleep. Nick, if you had to compress all your knowledge into one essential advice, just one that we must implement in our daily lives what would it be one essential piece of knowledge that we must implement into our daily lives is that is that we have we have come to control of our health of our fitness mental and physical we have it in our hands if we care if we're mindful yes there is luck yes there is really bad luck all you can do in life is play the cards that you're dealt and you can improve those cards that you're holding with a little bit of effort thank you pleasure thank you nick um i i believe that right now we live in a world that is going through so many changes constant changes is evolving but i've identified two particular industries in which these changes are happening faster.

1:45:25One of them is the technology industry and the other one is the wellness sector, which includes fitness. Now, a lot of people are skeptical about the leaders that are transforming the technology environment. So you're Elon Musk's because they are not too sure about their real motives. I also believe that it's equally important to hold people accountable or hold the leaders accountable that are transforming the wellness sector. And in this case, after discussing for two hours, it is profoundly clear to me that your main goal within the industry is to transform it for wellness and health reasons rather than purely for profit.

1:46:11And you called out immediately some specific sectors within the wellness space. it could be the collagen industry or some other supplements, or even generally the gyms, right? And having that level of authenticity and clarity and being honest about what's true, what's not true, what's good and what's bad is what I believe people need in order for them to follow healthy life. So I thank you for providing clarity into a lot of nuances that we are right now seeing online. and I very much hope that you keep spreading this message to as much people as possible. So thank you very much. Thank you, Bert.

1:46:51Thank you for your time.