#235 ‒ Training principles for mass and strength, changing views on nutrition, creatine supplementation, and more | Layne Norton, Ph.D.

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in depth content. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, at the end of this episode I'll explain what those benefits are. Or if you want to learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com subscribe now. Without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Lane Norton. Lane was a previous guest on episode 163 back in May of 2021 and then 205 back in May of 20. In both of those discussions we were never able to fully get through the content we wanted and we knew we were going to have to sit down and do this again. So here we are onto round three. In this episode we talk about Lane's training and work as a powerlifter. This is in large part because at the time we recorded this, Lane was in the final weeks of training for the World Masters Powerlifting Championship. We focused the conversation around what non powerlifters can learn about muscle strength and the principles to get stronger in the weight room, even if they of course have no desire to ever compete in a powerlifting meet themselves. We also get into a much deeper dive around creatine, which we only lightly touched on in a previous podcast. We talk about fitness and nutrition experts on social media and the importance of being able to change your mind. We talk a lot about nutrition and this includes the three areas of nutrition that Lane has changed his mind about over time. We also discuss some nuances around time restricted feeding, tracking, calories and more. Now, just a way of quick background. Lane is a bodybuilding figure and physique coach and in addition to being a natural pro, bodybuilder and professional powerlifter, and though we didn't know it at the time of this recording, we now know it as I make this intro. Lane has very recently won the 2022 Masters World Powerlifting Championship in October in a drug free tested division. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Lane Norton. Well Lane, we're back for another round of this, but this time we finally get to do it in person.

I'm looking forward to this. This will be I said It'd be a little bit different.

So let's talk about your training, because right now you are training for Worlds in powerlifting. We had a great chance to kind of catch up on some of your training yesterday. I probably won't get into as much detail as you and I got into last night, because that might be more detail than the average non nerd is interested in. But maybe just briefly kind of explain the sport of powerlifting. There are three lifts, how it works, and then I want to talk about kind of how you're training for that and some of the challenges of that.

Powerlifting is a very basic sport. Like you mentioned, there's three lifts. The squat, the bench press, the deadlift, and they go in that order. You get three attempts on each, and they're progressive. So, for example, once you put in an attempt, like let's say you put in a squat attempt of £550 for your opener, if you miss it, you can't go down. So usually the way people do it is first attempt is a pretty conservative weight, kind of like a last warmup. Second attempt is getting close to something that's pretty reasonable, like RPE nine, nine and a half. And then your last one, you're hoping to get kind of your true maximum. I mean, basically highest total wins between.

The three different lifts.

Correct. So at Worlds, they will give medals for individual lifts. There'll be a gold, silver and bronze for squat, Gold silver, bronze for bench press, and gold silver bronze for deadlift. And then there'll be those medals also for the overall. And the overall is just the summation of the total of the number of lifts you hit.

And when you do your three squat, three bench, three dead, are you doing them in that order or are you going.

So it's you do all three squats go, then all three bench press, then all three deadlift.

Typically, how much time in between each.

Attempt, it can really depend. The last time I did worlds in 2015, that was a very, very fast meet. So in our flight, there was only 11 people. So meaning the person who has the lightest squat will go first up to the heaviest squat, and then those will continue to cycle through. Same thing for bench press, same thing for deadlift. And the whole meet took over just. Just over two hours. But I've been in meets that have taken as long as three and a half. So it really just depends on your flight, how quickly the spotters.

But if I'm doing the math, that means you might only have 15 minutes between lifts.

Usually you'll get about at least 30. Because the way they run it is there's no real breaks for people who are spectating. So they'll have two flights going at the same time. So what'll happen is they'll have an A flight and a B flight typically. Sometimes they'll have C flights as well if it's a really, really packed meet, like nationals. But at Worlds, it's usually just an A and a B flight, and they just separate those based on opening squats. And usually that B flight will have the top lifters in it. So you have some time while the other folks are lifting. You're typically warming up, getting ready. And then once, for example, the squats are finished, a flight will start for bench. And then if you're in B flight, you can have time to warm up.

So what are you doing between. So let's just say between lift one and two. Lift one shouldn't have been that stressful if you did it correctly. Does what you eat matter much? Are you getting any tissue work? Like, what do you need to do? Let's just say you have 30 minutes between those attempts. What do you need to do to maximize your odds?

Usually between the lifts themselves, like between squat and bench Press, we'll have 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how quickly things are going.

But what about between the squat attempts? Like between the first, second and second.

Third, between the actual attempts themselves? I mean, I'll take a drink of water. I might throw some candy in or something like that really quickly if I feel like I need it. But for the most part, I'm just mentally trying to get myself in the right zone. And it is a little bit tricky because you can't keep yourself at that really high level of arousal the entire time. Cause you'll just wear out really quickly. So for me, the trick is bringing that arousal down for about, you know, five minutes or so so that I can relax just enough and then start to focus back up. And it's almost like. It's like a wave. You're kind of letting yourself come down. And then when the time is right. And really timing is a big thing in this because once the bar is loaded and they call bar is loaded, you. You'll have one minute to get the down command for squat or bench press or whatever it is, there can be mistakes where, like maybe you come out and you forgot your belt or something happens. So I really try to make it to where when they say bar is loaded, I get out there very quickly so that if there is anything wrong, I Can address it and have time. So really timing it and seeing, okay, how many people are in front of me, how long do I need to amp up? Usually for me, I like to have about two or three minutes to really get very aroused and very amped up. And so just trying to time that correctly is kind of tough. But like I said, for the first five minutes afterwards, I kind of let myself come down, but I never, like, truly relax. I'm still, like, got my music on. I'm still thinking about what I've got to do, but I'm not, like, really hyper focusing. And then as it starts to come into the last five minutes for the lift, I'm putting whatever I need on to focus myself. Mental imagery, visualization. And then by the end, I'm even doing, like, breath work. I want my heart rate to be about 160, 170 by the time I go out to hit my left. Like, I want to be very amped.

Yeah. I was going to ask you what your heart rate got to. I would imagine your blood glucose is probably about 160 as well.

Probably. I've never.

Your liver is just hepatic glucose output at the max.

Your stress hormones are going to be high. It's really interesting. I was. This is a little bit off topic, but I was listening to a sports psychologist talk about how the differences between excitement and anxiety and anxiousness are almost. You can't almost pick them out. It's just your perception. And I remembered when I played baseball in high school, I would come up to the plate with the thought process of, don't strike out. You don't want to look stupid. Just put the ball in play. It wasn't the process of, I'm going to drive these runs in. I'm going to do X, Y, Z. And I was watching an episode of the ultimate fighter, probably 13, 14 years ago, is where Matt Serra versus Matt Hughes. And one of the fighters was vomiting before a match because he was so nervous, and he was over the bucket going, I can't do this anymore. I hate the way this feels. I can't do this. And Matt, Sarah just looked at him and said, what are you talking about, man? That's the feeling of being alive. You care about something so much that your body is reacting this way. And. And ever since then, it completely flipped the way I looked at competition. And so now before, when I would get nervous playing baseball, I would try to, like, calm myself down. Like, why can't I feel normal? Why don't I feel relaxed? And now when I feel those nerves start to kick in. I just tell myself, this is a good thing. This is a good thing. This is your body getting you ready. This is you being ready to go. Really like that reframing of things and just accepting and being okay with the anxiety has helped me so much.

You know, something like that in powerlifting, where the stakes are really high and it's really short. It's not like, you know, in tennis you can have one bad match, right, or one bad serve and it doesn't end the entire thing. In powerlifting, it can. And I guess the other thing I guess is the stakes are kind of high from an injury standpoint as well, because you are pushing at your limit. Have you ever injured yourself in a meet?

Not to the point where I couldn't continue or had really bad pain during, but at the Arnold in 2015, at the Arnold Pro meet, I had aggravated my back a week out pretty badly. And then the day of the meet, when I hit my last squat, which was 661 pounds, I kind of rotated a little bit coming up. And the next day I could definitely feel it was actually closer to my upper lumbar or lower thoracic. I definitely had quite a bit of pain there. So you typically don't see people get injured at meets. It does happen, but I would say that it's less frequent than during training. I don't have any data on that. I'm just guessing, but I think part of it is you are so focused in, you are so excited, you're very tight, you're very conscious of what you're doing. At the end of the day, it is just one rep where I've tended.

Yeah. Whereas the volume when you're training. And you're also probably more broken down and more fatigued when you get ready.

For a meet, if you've done your due diligence, hopefully you've kind of dissipated a lot of that fatigue through rest and tapering. Whereas when you're in the throes of training and you just have high levels of fatigue, maybe you're just not able to execute the lifts as well because of that fatigue. That's where things tend to happen, especially like if you're doing multiple repetitions as you get closer to failure, just the opportunity to get out of position or make mistakes, those sorts of things. So it is definitely one of the things that is part of the game. You're just going to deal with pain. But I always tell people too, you know, I'm 40 now and most 40 year olds, 50 year olds, they have pain anyway. So I'd rather be strong and have pain than be weak and have pain.

How many times a year can you peak for a meet? Maybe not necessarily even you, but at the top level of powerlifting, how many really good meets in a year does a lifter have?

This is just completely my opinion. It's based on my own experience. But for me I've done it where I've only. I've done one, I've done it where I've done four high level meets. Four was way too much. I think probably two is the sweet spot for me. You know, it gives you time to really. I don't think I've ever gone into a meet and just been like, oh, I feel 100% healthy and nothing hurts or anything like that. It's kind of, it's not the same thing as getting ready for like a fight, but in order to be able to execute a heavy lift, you have to lift heavy. And so part of that is you're going to accumulate some dinks and some dunks. Really it's about getting to competition day with enough fitness level in terms of being able to execute heavy lifts while dissipating fatigue and being in low enough levels of pain that you can execute. And so afterwards, really it's always been the most dangerous when I feel good after a meet because then I just tend to like go in like on Monday and say, well, let's get right back into training. And really the smart thing to do is just to take some time, train for fun, keep that core strength, but move more towards accessory movements and things that don't beat me up so much for several months. Then re enter like more of a building accumulation phase where volume is going up but the weights still aren't super heavy. And then those last three, four months for a week now it's time to start putting in more heavy weights and starting to ramp up towards. By the end of my training, I'm mostly on my competition lifts just hitting heavy singles.

So that's what I wanted to kind of talk about is what can the rest of us who aren't powerlifters learn just about strength. Because if I wanted to frame this for a listener, because people have heard me talk about this, but the two metrics that are most significantly associated with longevity. So if we were to stack up every possible known risk factor, smoking, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, end stage kidney disease, whatever, and we were to talk about how much of a hazard ratio do these bring to you in terms of all cause mortality, they're quite big. Hypertension is about a 20%. Type 2 diabetes is about a 30% increase in mortality. Smoking is 50% increase. Being weak relative to being strong is about 250%. Having a very low VO2 max in the bottom 25% of the population versus being in the top 2.5% of the population is about 400%. So when you line everything up, the two things that stand out the most are incredible cardiorespiratory fitness as measured by VO2 max and strength. And then a third is muscle mass. But I think when you look at the data, you realize muscle mass is so coupled to strength that that association is tight. Point being is, if you're listening to this podcast and thus far into this podcast, your eyes are sort of glazing over as we're sitting here talking about powerlifting. It's probably worth pointing out that even if you never once care to do a heavy squat or a heavy bench press or a heavy deadlift, you have to be strong. And in these studies where these associations continue to show up over and over and over again, you know, they're using things like grip strength, bench press, leg extension, things that are a little less technical. But the point remains, anybody who's going to a power meet and crushing a deadlift has pretty strong grip strength. So I think it becomes important for people to understand how to train for power. So let's now talk a little bit about that. So if a person comes to you and says, I want to get stronger and that's my primary objective in the weight room, it's more so than the aesthetic because we're going to talk about that later. What are some of the principles they need to keep in mind?

What's interesting is the principles are pretty much the same. It's just the level to which they're applied. And I think it's important to point out that there are diminishing returns with strength and. Well, I'm sure there are. I don't think the studies are refined enough to pick this out at this point because it's not like they're getting a population of powerlifters and looking at their longevity. But my guess is that at a certain point you pretty much get all the benefits. And just getting even stronger is probably not going to give you more, especially.

If it comes at the risk of injury that can later on in life.

Sure. And then you also see with like running, there's kind of like a J shaped curve. Part of me thinks that just the people that take it so far, whether it be powerlifting, running, whatever, that it's not that their sport makes them more prone to early mortality, but more so that they probably have other behaviors of being an extremist that probably contribute to that.

Interesting.

But as far as strength goes, I mean, really what we're talking about is progressive overload. That is the most important core principle. It actually really applies to a lot of things in life, to be quite honest. But when it comes to lifting weights, a lot of people hear progressive overload and they just think weight on the bar. And that is the most simple way to explain it. Right. So if you come in, you've never done some sort of squat movement before and you do 95 pounds for five reps, and then the next week you come in, you do 100, and the next week you come in and do you do 105.

At the same number of reps. At.

The same number of reps. Right. That is a form of progressive overload. And most people, when they enter the gym, that's kind of their experience, they don't need to increase that number, they can increase the reps. But for the most part, when you first start going to the gym, you're just going to be able to put more weight on the bar pretty much every week. And that is a perfectly reasonable way to progress. And I know we haven't gotten here yet, but people will say, well, I'm postmenopausal woman, or I'm a 75 year old male. It's too late for me. No, it's not. Now is the best time. In fact, when I was at University of Illinois, where I was in a department of nutritional sciences, right across the street in the exercise physiology department, they were conducting a study on frail elderly people who basically almost couldn't really walk. They could, but it was very tough for them and they just started progressively overloading them. And that looked like basically squatting to a really high chair to start. And what they saw was incredible. In like 12 weeks they actually had people who could squat down to like a below parallel chair and come back up, which may not sound like much for the average person, but when you're talking about somebody who's frail elderly, the difference in functionality and their lifestyle is going to be incredible in terms of what they can do. So what I'll tell people is what you can learn from Powerlifters is that progressive overload one in terms of weight on the bar, but nobody's able to increase weight on the bar. Forever, that's just not going to happen. And the longer you get into it, the more non linear it's going to be. It's going to be you're going to go down and come up and go down, come back up. But there's also other ways to progressively overload. One being more repetitions and the other being adding more hard sets. So the latter, adding more hard sets is really something you only need to get to as you get to be more advanced. Because like I said, you're not gonna be able to add strength forever and you're not gonna be able to add reps forever either.

By the way, this is one thing that from one of our earlier discussions that really started to change my training. I started adding a little bit more set at slightly lower RPE net increase volume. So I was doing a lot more RPE 8, 9 stuff. But you could only get a few sets at that level, like you're really, really spent. And instead I was saying, well, wait a minute, why don't we do a little more RPE 6 and 7 and add more sets, more volume. One, I feel like it's lowering my risk of injury. And two, as you said, it's really just another way to progressively overload.

You're always weighing those two things, kind of your stimulus versus fatigue ratio. So I'm coached by a guy named Zach Robinson who's doing his Ph.D. in Mike Zorlos lab at FAU Great Lab. And he talks about stimulus versus fatigue a lot. And they do a lot of training in that kind of RPE 5 to 6 area, which some people call that easy. When it comes to compound lift, I wouldn't really call it easy, but you know, it's kind of like how can we maximize our stimulus and minimize fatigue? And if you're Talking about an RPE9, for example, how many sets at RPE9 can you get?

I don't know about you. I have like one to two right.

Before you really have to drop the weight down or whatnot.

Someone like me who's not at the level that a powerlifter's at, like my form starts to compromise, right?

Mike Israel actually had a great kind of take on this too, in terms of like training to failure. He's like, if you take a squat, like a free barbell squat to failure for 10 reps, and then you try to do another set with that same weight, how many reps will you get? I know from doing sets to failure of 10 reps, a free barbell squat, I might not even be able to get like two or three reps on my next set because it's just so fatiguing. That is one thing that's important to point out when we talk about RPEs, which is kind of a measure for.

Proximity to failure we talked about on a previous podcast. Why don't you tell people how RPE works? Because I think it's really a fantastic system, but you do need to push yourself in the gym to really understand what they feel like.

So RPE is kind of a. It's been adapted from running to lifting and it's on a scale of 1 to 10, or I guess even zero. But RPE 10 being you had no more reps left, that was your absolute all out, 100 effort. RPE9 is you could have done one more rep. RPE8, one more rep, so on and so forth. And one of the issues is we know you don't have to train to failure to grow muscle. In fact, it may actually be a little bit counterproductive just in terms of the fatigue that it causes relative to the stimulus. We know that for most movements you get most of the hypertrophy and strength benefits going within a few reps of failure. So RPE like 7, 8. And obviously if you can do more volume, it may be even more beneficial. But the downside is if you've never actually taken something to failure like true failure, people are really bad at estimating it. And so beginners and intermediates, they find that they tend to underestimate their rpe by about 5, which is pretty incredible. We've seen it in lab. We'll take somebody in and they'll put a weight on, they'll do a rep and, and you'll ask them what was that like? And they'll say their RPE and then the research will actually make them take it to failure while they're like yelling at them and encouraging them and. And on average they'll get five more reps than they estimated they would have.

I can totally believe that.

Whereas when they look at RPE validity and advanced lifters, it tends to be much more accurate. Much more accurate. I was in a powerlifting meet where they had a tendo unit on the bar and they were measuring our bar velocity and they were asking us to rate our RPE after every attempt. And they found that RPE as validated by velocity data, was a pretty good measure in that population of powerlifters because they've taken so many sets near failure. So your point is well taken. You do need some experience going really hard and really close to failure. But once you have that experience and you understand what that feels like, then you can estimate better. You're probably better off staying a few reps shy of failure and accumulating volume that way, just because going to failure is just so incredibly fatiguing.

So for a person who again is not planning to go to a power meet, is there a need for them to go below four reps in training? That's an arbitrary number. But you know what I'm getting at?

I would say probably not. I mean, you can get plenty strong even doing, you know, sets of 10, those sorts of things.

I would have thought you needed to get at least into the fives and sixes sometimes, but so you can get.

Really strong doing sets, 10, 15, those sorts of things. Now, you will not be as strong even per cross sectional area, as somebody who trains for strength, because strength is a specific skill. And even like myself, my best squat ever is a 668. And when I was six months out from that, I added weight to the bar that I was able to squat. But it's not like I added that much more lean body mass, because I didn't. I was practicing the skill of a one rep max, which allowed me to better do the one rep max.

And you were practicing at what percent of ultimately became 661?

Usually around 90, 95, but not very much at 95, mostly at 90 for like singles.

And what was your RPE when you did those singles?

So usually about eight and a half or nine.

And so you would do multiple. Just doing the math. Let's just say that's 620 or something like that. So let's call it £600. So you would do a 600 pound signal three times in a workout, something like that.

And what you're kind of making gains on at that point is just your one. It just teaches you how to grind through a lift. Because a lot of people have never had the experience of really sticking with a lift. And interestingly, the more advanced somebody gets in terms of strength, the slower their 1 rep max velocity will be. And we see this in research studies all the time. Somebody who's kind of new will come in, they will absolutely smoke a weight you put five pounds on and then they get stapled because it's just they.

Don'T have that grind capacity, they don't.

Know how to do it. And part of that may be psychological, but part of that's probably physiological too, in terms of you just haven't trained your body to recruit all the fibers that it can get. So lean body mass and strength are very closely tied together. But when it gets to those finer levels of strength, it's kind of just practicing the actual one rep max. So when it comes to getting strong, you can absolutely get strong doing sets. 10, 15, because you're increasing your lean body mass. Do you need to do sets of three, four? No. But what I would say is, like, don't necessarily count them out because a lot of people actually just do really well with variety. Periodization was kind of a big thing for lifting back in the day, and now we've kind of shown that, at least in the research studies, it doesn't appear to produce greater gains in lean body mass, maybe a little bit better strength gains, but that's probably just because people peak better when you're periodizing things. But what tends to actually be shown is that people just tend to like periodization better because they're varying the repetitions, they're not as bored. So you never want to kind of poo poo the psychological effects of those things. I talk about this with diet as well. Adherence is the most important thing, just getting people to come in and do it. So especially for people who are coming into the gym, if they're just trying to get stronger and be healthy. Well, for me, if I'm talking to them or coaching them or whatever it is, it's like, well, what do you enjoy? What's going to get you to show up consistently? You don't want a free squat, that's fine. Let's leg press. There's many ways to skin a cat. You don't want a barbell deadlift. Okay, no problem. Let's do some RDls, you know, those sorts of things. Slightly less technical lifts that are still going to produce really great gains in terms of strength, lean body mass, those sorts of things. So if you're not going to specifically compete in a strength sport, there's so many paths to roam in terms of getting stronger and increasing lean body mass.

Do you think there are some principles, for example, like, let's say a person isn't confident that they have the technical ability to execute a squat or a deadlift. Let's look at a hip thruster again. You can screw that up too, and you could hurt yourself, but it's a lot harder to hurt yourself doing that. Do you think there is still an essential need for some sort of compound movement like a hip thruster, at least as a compliment, or a leg press, as you point out?

It's pretty funny. I Went through a phase where everything I learned from the magazines, the bro science, I was like, well, this all has to be junk. And now we're actually having studies come out that are validating some of this bro science from, like, 20, 30 years ago. So there does appear to be, like, different areas of the leg muscles, the quadriceps, for example, that are better activated by, say, a leg extension compared to a leg press compared to a squat. So I do think it is good to have variety. I think it is good to have compound lifts as well. And in fact, there's some interesting data that suggests that you don't have to get as close to failure on compound lifts to still get the same stimulation compared to isolation exercises, where you do seem to have to get much closer to failure to get those benefits. But also, just thinking about, again, if we're looking at the longevity or the quality of life piece, what is most analogous to what these people are going to be doing and where they're going to be needing it? Well, if it's bending over and picking something up, that's some kind of hinge, if it's sitting down and standing back up, some kind of squat. Now, you can use variations, right? And I would never, I don't want to say never, because it's a superlative, but I very rarely would take somebody who's like, fresh off the street, put a barbell on their back and say, okay, learn how to squat, because it's going to be like Bambi trying to stand up. Ideally, you're probably going to maybe even start them off with no weight and just teach them how to hinge, how to use their hips, how to use their knees, how to track their legs with their feet and those sorts of things and just balance. Because if you've never put a barbell on your back, it's not a comfortable position. And honestly, to do it well, you shouldn't feel comfortable. You should feel very tight. Most places, once they're established with that, then moving to where they're like holding a kettlebell in front of them, and then you can progress with weight with that, and then maybe you progress to something like a safety bar where they're not having to worry so much about hands and whatnot, to a box, and then eventually take the box away, and then maybe then you can progress to a barbell squat. But I would say that the Puritan in me would be like, yes, everybody should barbell squat, but I know that that's not true. I think the biggest thing is just getting something close and Analogous to the things that are going to be important in your day to day life as you get older, especially if quality of life is important to you. And I mean, when we talk about people who fall as elderly, I think I read something insane like half the people over age 65 who go in the hospital for a fall never come out. I think it's something of that nature.

I've seen many studies on this. The one that sticks out of my mind was 30 to 40% of people over the age of 65 who break their hip will be dead within a year of that insult.

Yeah, because you got infection and then you have. They're going to have to be immobilized.

And then they get pneumonia or atelectasis. Pneumonia or something like that. So, yeah, it's awful. There's a study, and I think I even mentioned this on a previous podcast, but we should link to it. It was an Australian study that took a group of older women. I don't remember exactly how old they were, but they certainly looked like they were in their 60s or above, who all had osteo, at least osteopenia, if not osteoporosis. And it put them on a relatively unsophisticated lifting program. Unsophisticated in that there wasn't a lot of instruction other than just pick up weights. It was mostly just pick up weights, as I saw the video on YouTube of the PI discussing this. Isn't it fantastic? Yeah, because they're in this totally old school gym and you've got these old ladies picking up weights, walking around, some of them getting really. I remember one lady was picking up her body weight. I mean, she was basically deadlifting her body weight. These are women who had never lifted a weight before and their symptoms just got so much better.

Absolutely. The best thing you can do for bone density is lift weight. So this isn't like a mutually exclusive thing. In fact, people get really focused on the bone density portion of this when we talk about falls and whatnot. So they get very focused on how do we keep them from breaking their hip. Well, what if they didn't fall in the first place? What if they had the strength to catch themselves, the balance to catch themselves. And then again, even if they did fall, if you have more muscle mass, you're probably going to have more bone density as well. These are all things that are going to help. And resistance training is great because you can have these other sort of interventions that can improve lean body mass and whatnot, but they all work way better with Resistance training because you're creating the need for the tissue. And that's something I think that has been missed a little bit is the teleological perspective of this, which is you have to give your body a reason to lay down tissue. Muscle tissue is pretty energetically expensive, relatively speaking. So again, I'm kind of speaking philosophically, but the body is not just going to go, oh yeah, we got some extra calories, let's just lay down some lean tissue. It doesn't make sense because from the body's perspective, the number one thing it's trying to do is keep you alive long enough to reproduce. And then once you've done that, it's just trying to prevent you from starving. The risk of dying from starvation over the course of human history is way is magnitudes greater than, than like diseases from too much nutrition. I mean, that's basically a 20th, 21st century problem. So the idea that, oh, well, if I eat some higher protein, I can lay down some more lean body mass. Yeah, you can, but it's going to be really, really minimal compared to what you can build through resistance training. And then when you couple resistance training with high enough protein or, you know, any of these other modalities, now you're creating the turnover in the tissue that the body has the requirement to lay down that tissue.

What do we know about the peak capacity for strength as a person ages? Does this differ between men and women? And I'm sure there's variability for people, but on a per pound basis, are you stronger today than you were at 20?

Yeah, I am stronger today than when I was at 20.

Are you stronger than you were at 35?

No, that's come off my peak a little bit. I don't think that's like a sarcopenia thing. I just think that that's accumulation of injuries and not being able to train the way I used to be able to train. So I used to be able to train much harder than I can train now. My governor is not the work ethic, it's the, okay, how hard can I train before the pain level gets too high?

So it's not that you're losing type 2 fibers, that you're losing some of the 2a or 2b fibers and that's why you're not quite as strong. Do you believe that on a muscle biopsy basis you could be as strong now as you were at 30?

I think I probably could. If you look at the research literature, you do see differences between young and old, but most of those get ameliorated when you start adding in resistance training. More to your point, you know the idea how much strength could I gain? How much lean mass could I gain based on what I've seen? So let's take men and women for example. Women have been shown to gain just as much lean mass as a percentage of their starting lean mass. Now keep in mind it is the relative increase. So for example, if people add 10% lean mass, something like that, well, if you're a male and you have 70 kilos of lean mass, now you're 77. If you're a female and you had 50 kilos of lean mass, now YOU'RE 55. So the male added 7 kilos, the female added 5 kilos. But relative to their start, they added the same. And that's what the research literature says is they pretty much can add the same amount as a percentage of the starting lean mass and the same thing for strength. And actually there's some evidence that women may be able to tolerate higher training volumes than men too. Now I'm not sure if that's, is.

That across all ages you think, or is that within a certain age?

They've only really looked at it in kind of young adults, 20s and 30s. So it's hard to say, but I wonder if that's just more of a function of they're just smaller bodies handling less weight.

My wife would tell you that no one can handle a cold less than me because, and I think it's true, I have an insanely high pain tolerance except for when my sinuses are congested and I have a miserable cough. Then I turn into a little baby. So there might be something about women just being tougher too.

I've thought about this quite a bit. Like let's look at super heavyweight powerlifters just as an extreme example.

And these are guys that weigh over.

What, like Ray Williams for example. So he's one of the greatest drug tested powerlifters in history. First man to raw squat over a thousand pounds. He was a college football player. They dexed him. He had 308 pounds of lean mass and he's probably over 400 pounds of total body weight.

How much lean mass?

Over 300 pounds. Incredible. Now like let's say we're talking about working with 80% of a one rep max. His 80% is 800 pounds. A female's 80%. If she's doing a one rep max of 300 pounds is 240 pounds, they're the same percentage. I'm not sure that you can say that the Same thing in terms of what happens with the body. I know very, because at the end.

Of the day, connective tissue is connective tissue.

I know very, very few super heavyweight powerlifters who train the main lifts like three, four times a week. Some of the lighter weight classes do. So I do think there's something about the absolute load. Part of me thinks the idea that women can recover a little bit better might be that they're just using absolute load lower loads, but we'd have to have some more intricate.

Now, there's an interesting point about that study because I know the one that you were talking about, and I've heard people use that study to suggest that testosterone is not important in muscle gain. The idea being if women can add 10% to their base and men are adding 10% to their base, clearly men and women have a log full difference in testosterone. Therefore testosterone doesn't matter. But of course, you only need to look at tested versus untested power lifters and bodybuilders to know testosterone's doing something. So how do you reconcile these?

I think part of it is. So if we look at, like, let's take the men and women example, one of the main benefits to testosterone is the increase in satellite cell number that you get, which is going to increase your potential for increasing muscle mass. So I don't want to talk about this like it's hard in stone proven, but there's a theory out there I tend to agree with called the myonuclear domain theory. So for those people who aren't familiar with satellite cells. Satellite cells are quascent cells that sit on kind of the outside of a muscle fiber. And through various ways, resistance training, testosterone, whatever, you can get those satellite cells to be donated to the muscle fiber. And muscle fiber is the only cells that are multinucleated. And we think the reason is each myonuclei can only control protein synthesis for a certain area. The muscle fiber can only grow as big as it has myonuclei. So the more myonuclei you can donate, the greater your potential is. So one of the things that we think is a reason that men have more lean mass than women is during puberty, because up till puberty, males and females tend to have similar amounts of lean mass. But during puberty, that's when we start to see these hormonal differences emerge and that exposure to testosterone increases that myonuclei number and just gives them a greater overall potential for lean mass. Which again, makes sense if you think about it as a relative Percentage. So now when you talk about taking exogenous levels of testosterone, now you're donating even more myonuclei, and so you can reach a higher ceiling. So I think, honestly, I mean, this might give me a little bit of trouble, but I think that's actually the strongest argument against the crossover of transgender sports, of people who previously were male, now identify as female, is you can't really get rid, can't get rid of those extra nuclei of the long term benefit that's conveyed by the fusion of those myonuclei. So, for example, and we see this with like muscle memory, for example. So we know that if you've trained before but you stop training, you can gain back muscle much faster than it takes to build it. And they've even shown this in people who have stopped training for years, that they gain it back faster than it originally took to build it. The other interesting thing is they did a study where they looked at giving testosterone to. It was either rats or mice, I can't remember which one, they were able to resistance train them. It's funny to see these rat resistance training setups. I'm sure you've seen them. So one group, they did not give testosterone. The other group, they gave testosterone. Now, of course, both gained strength, both gained lean body mass, but the group getting testosterone obviously gained more. Then they had a complete washout period. And basically for as long as it took for them both to get back to kind of their original lean mass number, then they both had them train again, no drugs in either group. And the group that originally had testosterone just that once gained muscle significantly faster than the other group. And our best understanding is it's probably these myonuclei that got fused through that extra testosterone that confers that long term benefit. So that's kind of how we think about Max.

Do we think that that's kind of like only during a critical window of development or does that happen if you're 40 years old and you're taking exogenous testosterone?

See, that's where it gets more tricky. We don't really know. I think part of it may be there's no data on this, so I'm speculating 100%. But if you have a certain level of testosterone through puberty and now you're an adult and you kind of maintain that that's just kind of your native natural, let's say you don't get too obese or too underweight, whatever, you've probably fused the amount of myonuclei that you're going to fuse, at least from testosterone. But now if you start taking exogenously, you've now ramped that up another notch. Now you can fuse more myonuclei, which again anecdotally would make sense because if we look at the drug use in bodybuilding, it's continued to go up, up, up, up, up. And now we're getting to the point where these guys really aren't getting much bigger because there's just only so many drugs they can take before and we're seeing it now, many of them are. I think last year there was something like a half dozen professional bodybuilders who died. So it's getting to the point where they really can't go any higher in drugs. And you're seeing that lean mass start to cap out.

And this is why, because you compete in tested or drug free powerlifting, as good as it is, they make you guys take a polygraph that says, have you used drugs in five years? And that's an interesting window of time, right? Because you'd think like, why would they care if you used performance enhancing drugs five years ago? But in theory they do care because you may still confer a benefit five years later, even if you've actually been drug free.

That's what we did in natural bodybuilding when I competed. Natural bodybuilding and power team. They don't do the polygraph.

Well, they don't.

So you just, you cannot test positive. So we are completely underwater. So basically the way the water drug testing works is once you enter the water drug testing pool so you've qualified for some kind of international competition, you could be drug tested at any time. So you have to provide, you have to use a whereabouts form, you have to provide your whereabouts, all that kind of thing. And if it's during your window and they say, hey, you need to be drug tested and you don't do it, you can get a strike against you and be out of competition for a certain period of time. There's pluses and minuses to both methods. Polygraph obviously is not something that's crazy accurate. I don't think they allow it in a court of law. But just the idea that you are going to be asked that and it could be something that you fail probably keeps quite a few people from doing it. And the other thing I tell people is there's just not really any money in this stuff. So are there cheaters? Absolutely. Is it rampant? I would kind of be surprised because there's just not that much money. Now when you talk about sports where you can make millions of dollars. I would not be surprised if there's rampant cheating because you're talking about millions of dollars. I think the most money that's ever been on the line for me competing was like two or three thousand dollars. I love to do it.

Not being done for the money.

No, no, for sure. So with the polygraph, at least it allows you to kind of go back like you said. Now, interestingly, the data that we just talked about kind of suggests that, well, if it was five years ago, it doesn't matter, you still got an advantage. But they're also trying to balance that.

With, at some point you got to let people come clean if they've used in the past.

And I actually agree with that point of view. I spoke with a guy who competed in bodybuilding. He's like, you know, I was 17 years old, some guy at a gym gave me something. I was an idiot. I didn't ask what it was. And I got like a bunch of side effects and got bigger and stronger. But he's like, you know, looking back, it was like, I really regret doing that at that age. Well, should that guy be punished for like his entire life and not able to compete in drug free bodybuilding? I mean, you can make the argument, and I understand the argument, but I'm in favor of being a little bit more inclusive in terms of that.

You mentioned that as you're getting ready to train for Worlds yesterday you said to me, you know, your back kind of hurt, you really backed off. Also, this is your first major meet, international meet in about seven years. And a lot of that was due to injuries of which back was the most prevalent. But I think you also mentioned a little bit of knee pain as well. Right?

Yep. Knee, yep.

So how do you think about this personally? How much longer do you want to be loading yourself at basically putting cars on your back and lifting cars off the ground. Right. Which is effectively what you're doing.

Candidly, if I went out and I won Masters Worlds, I'd probably give a real hard thought about, okay, I think I'm done at least competing in this. But the other part of me, I think that part of my problem is I love to train so much. I never really gave myself the time to get pain free. As soon as I started feeling better, I would just start pushing again. And I do think I've slowly gotten more intelligent because I used to think I was basically Superman. So I think I've just matured a little bit. And even like yesterday, getting to a certain point, warming up on squats and saying, all right, it's not happening today. There's no reason to try and force this. I think previously I would kind of create a narrative in my mind of I'm going to power through this because it's what it takes. And yeah, at some points you have to. I think one of the most important things is knowing when to press the gas pedal and knowing when to back off a little bit. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. And for me, I'm probably a little bit weird in that I would train three, four hours a day because I just love to train. I love the way it makes me feel. I love feeling strong. Part of me, the egocentric part of me probably loves to feel like a badass loading up 5, 600 pounds in the gym and whatnot. But I've kind of gotten to the point now where I'm like, all right, if it's there today, we take it. If it's not there, we take what's there and then we live to fight another day. Because I've just had so many experiences where I've tried to press on this. And with the way pain works, the more pain you have, the more pain you're going to have because you just end up getting fixated and ruminating on it. And the research actually shows that the more you ruminate on it, the more. The more you think about it and the more times you trigger it, the worse it's going to get. And so it's like this delicate balance between I kind of know how far I can press something before I'm making it worse. Because the research also shows that you don't want to completely just stop lifting because you detrain. And then when you come back, even if you're pain free, you're more likely to re trigger it because you've lost that adaptation. So it's kind of like when you have those pain triggers, trying to find either a weight amount or a movement pattern or something similar to what you're trying to do. But it's low enough pain that you can start to build back from that. So, like, for example, yesterday, ideally, I would have done some squats and deadlifts. Couldn't do them. Okay, I'm gonna go in and do some leg press. I'm still gonna get some stimulation for my quads, the primary movers of the squat. I'm gonna go do single leg dumbbell rdls. I was able to do those with no pain. Is it loading it as much as I would like? No, but I'm still using my hamstrings, I'm using my lower back, I'm getting in some of that movement pattern and I'm still getting a training effect, some adaptation without further triggering that pain.

And then. So what did you do today?

Pretty much just cleaning up stuff I missed throughout the week. So I just had some dumbbell pressing, I did some more single leg RDLs and I did some mobility work. Not a whole lot of intensive stuff, but when you consider like what I do, ideally all I would do would be squat, bench press and deadlift because it's completely specific to what I'm going to express on competition day. But those are also very fatiguing movements. And I think part of that too is just when you know how much you can do and you know how much you've done, you kind of have like this anxiety about those movements because it's like you're almost being tested and comparing them to what you've previously done. So sometimes just creating a little bit of a variation of that movement where you're not, you can kind of just let the weight happen and pick your rpe. And if it's not a previous set weight, it doesn't bother you. So I've started using a lot more variations to build that baseline level of strength. And then again, when it comes to the actual competition lifts, I'm mostly just focusing on doing heavy singles and building my volume through other areas.

And how many times a week will you do those heavy single workouts?

Once or twice, just depending on how I feel.

I've often thought there would be a really interesting experiment I'd like to do. I wouldn't do it, but I'd like to oversee it. I'd like to see it being done, I guess, which is you take a power lifter and their entire training cycle, like six months building up to a competition, they have no idea what's on the bar. They have a really good coach and the coach is telling them for, for every set, how many reps to do or what RPE to go until. So it's completely being programmed. But you eliminate the problem you just talked about, which is you take the psychology away and you don't let the athletes suffer from knowing, oh my God, I should be able to do this many reps. So one day they might get down on a bar and the bar is going to be really light and they're going to be told, I think you're going to get 10 reps here, let's see it. And they have no idea what percentage of their max it ever is.

So it's interesting. One of the top lifters in the world, somebody I competed against multiple times, a guy named Bryce Lewis. So he actually trained an entire training cycle that way. So he would have his girlfriend put trash bags over the weights. I don't know if he still does that, but he just.

She would load up every set, but she had to be the one to know what every set needed to be in advance.

She's a competitive powerlifter as well, I think a world champion as well. And so she would kind of like look at what his rpes were supposed to be at, load the weight up, put the trash bags over it and then he would go do it. And probably just for what you meant, super interesting. Now for me might work, but for.

Whatever reason, you like to control things a little bit.

Yeah. There's some people on meet day, they'll tell their coach, don't tell me what you're putting on the bar.

Just put it on, make me do.

It, I'll go do it. I want to know. I don't know, maybe it's just part of how my brain's wired, whatever. Because I also have a trust with my coach and all the coaches I've had have been great. Honestly. I've worked with a couple different people and they've all been great. I just had such a good trust in my coach that I just knew if they put something on the bar, they're not going to put something on the bar that they don't think I can do. They know I can do it. It's my job to go and execute. When you have a good meet day coach, that is so valuable because I know they're not going to put something on I can't do. So it's just up to me to go out and do it.

So what about nutrition? How does nutrition factor into powerlifting? You're 208 pounds or so right now. That's about the weight you're going to compete at. You once told me that the difference between powerlifting and bodybuilding is in powerlifting all of your pain is compressed into the gym. In bodybuilding, most of your pain is actually out of the gym, having not done either. I mean, I did some powerlifting growing up, but basically having never really done either of those at a serious level, I can appreciate it just based on the concept. So you've been here now a few days, we've had a bunch of meals together. You're just eating like a normal guy. We're eating Whatever the hell we want. Is there anything you will do as you get closer to the meat with your nutrition specifically, because I know that you'd like to come in £2 or so below your target, but that's something you can modify in days. Outside of just calories, is there something you're going to manipulate with macros or anything that you're going to be thinking about with respect to more creatine that you're going to be loading or anything that you're needling that way?

Not really. I mean, at least for me, because I'm sitting very close to the weight class that I'm going to compete in. I don't really have to make a bunch of changes. If I was sitting at say £215, £217, then it gets to the point where a weight cut to 205 becomes a little bit untenable because where I compete it's a two hour weigh in. So if you're cutting 10, 15 pounds, you're not going to be able to rehydrate and refuel quickly enough.

Two hours, meaning two hours between weigh in and competition and lifting.

Correct?

Yeah. Unlike the day before where you'd have a full day to catch up.

Right. So there are organizations where you can weigh in a day before and I think actually One organization had 48 hour weigh ins. So there were guys which actually in a way makes it more dangerous because people will cut way.

Really, really cut.

Oh yeah. I think Dan Green, who's really well known untested power lifter, I think he weighed in at 220 and then like the next day was walking around at like 2:55 or something like that. So just incredible amounts of weight these guys are cutting. You'll see him with IVs and all that kind of stuff. So for us you cut 2, 3, maybe 4% of your body weight, but you really don't want to go much more than that because with two hours you just don't have time.

Are you doing five grams of creatine daily?

Right now I keep my creatine in because I can modify which is like sodium and modifying fiber a little bit to get some water weight out those last few days. And like you mentioned, I'll usually try to be a little bit under the day before the meet so I can eat enough calories the day before where I don't feel like I'm having to shovel down food because if I have to go pretty aggressive for a Saturday meet. Thursday, Friday. Now on Saturday with that weigh in, I'VE got two hours to get food down, but there's also a lot of other stuff I gotta do. I gotta warm up. I want my brain free to think about the stuff I've got to do, not be like, okay, well, I've got to get down this, I've got to get down that. I'll take some Pedialyte or, or some kind of electrolytes, those sorts of things. But for the most part, I've never really had issues with cramping. I've never had issues with energy on meat day. I think a lot of that is just I keep myself pretty close to within striking distance. And then the other benefit is your leverages can change based on your weight, thickness, the tightness of your belt can change. All that stuff can make a difference in terms of the style of squat you do or how you feel. So just being able to train in a manner that's gonna be very similar to how I compete, I feel like is a little bit of an advantage for me compared to people who have to cut quite a bit of weight.

And if you had to guess by Dexa, what would your body fat be at?

Weigh in, I caliper at around 8%. So I would say Dex is probably like 11 or 12, something like that. Because in my experience, Dex is usually.

3,4% higher than calipers by most people standards. Still incredibly lean, but not necessarily by bodybuilding standards, of course.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's talk a little bit more about creatine. We talked about it really briefly on one of our podcasts, but we were kind of at the end, so I want to kind of go back and make sure people understand that it's one of the supplements we get the most questions about. It's also one of the supplements that we feel the most confident telling patients this is a supplement worth taking. It's clearly passed test number one, which is it's safe and it passes test number two, which is it's probably got efficacy. Well, I shouldn't say it's got efficacy. The real question is, are you okay with a little bit of weight gain because you know you're going to pull more water in. So explain to people a little bit about why creatine is so important. And presumably this is something that's really important in powerlifting. I'm guessing going into a bodybuilding meet, you probably don't want creatine for that extra weight. Or do you?

I think it's actually great for bodybuilding.

Okay, great. I want to hear about it. I would assume that you'd have a little more water, but maybe the water's all in the muscle and that's where you want it.

So creatine is a high energy phosphate donor. So in muscle it exists as phosphocreatine. And when you take supplemental creatine, it'll come into the muscle, it'll get a phosphate attached to it, phosphocreatine. And originally the only mechanism we thought of was, well, it's a high energy phosphate donor, so people perform better. But then we saw people increase their lean body mass, increase their strength, and there's even benefits in terms of cognitive benefits. Appear to be pretty clear that there's some cognitive benefits as well. So as you mentioned, in terms of safety and efficacy data, to me, there's no strikes, really. I tell people, I'm like, I don't even know why we're having this conversation anymore. And it's also, you know, it's gone up in price a little bit recently because of the supply chain stuff, but it's still relatively inexpensive, incredibly inexpensive for what you're getting. You know, when I see people talk about some of these other supplements and they're not even taking creatine monohydrate, and I'm like, you're stepping over pennies or, sorry, you're stepping over dollars to pick up pennies, because this is just the.

Lowest hanging fruit, even at your size and even at your demand. Is there any benefit to taking more than about 5 grams a day?

Some people have postulated there might be. I haven't seen really clear evidence for it yet. You could argue that there's really no downside to taking the extra. The downside might be some GI irritation. For some people. Creatine can be a GI irritant, which I think we'll circle back to, but we know it can act as a high energy phosphate donor. So when you are exercising or just doing anything, your energy currency of your cell is ATP. And in order to drive muscular contraction, your ATP donates a phosphate and that liberation of that phosphate to form adp. And a free phosphate is energetically favorable and helps drive these muscular contractions. So creatine can act, or phosphocreatine can act as a high energy phosphate in order to reform ATP and allow you to perform better. But it's also a really powerful osmolyte, and so it pulls water into muscle tissue, which in and of itself may actually be anabolic. So just a muscle cell being more hydrated, there's some evidence that that can actually improve the that it's more anabolic environment. But regardless of the mechanism, we do know that when you take creatine, you see improvements in lean mass. And some people will say, well, that's just water.

That's what muscle mostly is.

But muscle is 70% water. So. And there's actually research to show that even non contractile just water may improve strength and contractability. So we're not sure exactly how, but it could just be like the volumization of the cell is just a benefit.

You could also kind of make up, at least conceptually, a framework that says a more hydrated cell is more able to carry out its function. So if the function of a myofibril is contractile release, contract, release, and it has more water, it sort of seems logical to me that it's going to be better at clearing metabolic waste and recruiting fuel, which should at least be two things that would factor into its ability to do that.

The other thing about it is if you look at anything that improves hypertrophy, a big portion of it is water. It's not just all myofibrillar. I think regardless of the mechanisms, I mean, it's pretty clear that this stuff works. It's pretty clear it's safe. I mean, they've done numerous randomized control trials, some of them being well over a year long. Yes, you get an increase in creatinine, which can be a marker of renal function.

But I think one, although the data, you know, on this lane, there was a paper that just came out a couple weeks ago that we were really happy to see. We've abandoned looking at serum creatinine for renal function because it's just too easy to get fooled by people with varying muscle mass and training volume. So we've completely abandoned it. So every time you order labs on somebody and you see their creatinine, it'll tell you what their estimated glomerular filtration rate is. We just ignore it completely. We only look at cystatin C. So everything we do is based off that. And there was a paper in JAMA a couple of weeks ago that basically said as much much, which is maybe we should look more at cystatin C instead of Karenin. So I would even say that hopefully this is a PSA for other docs out there listening and other patients to say, please look at my cystatin C as a way to estimate kidney function.

You know, there's some other things that can get a little bit wonky, like from lifting weights, like liver enzymes and whatnot And I tell people you have to keep in mind these are markers. So if you have liver failure or you have kidney failure, it's very, very likely you will have elevated liver enzymes and elevated creatinine. But just because you have elevated liver enzymes or elevated creatinine does not mean that you necessarily have damage to those tissues. So you have to disconnect those two. And I don't think that. I feel like correlation versus causation is just not something that's taught very well in school because I even see not really good doctors, but some physicians get so hung up on just, well this is on the page and this is supposed to be in normal range and it's not, it's like, but just look at the person sitting in front of you who obviously works out is in good shape. If you're concerned about their kidneys, then do a 24 hour urine collection or an ultrasound or whatever you have to do to verify that they're safe. But I don't worry about that kind of stuff. There's also been some people who have said, well, creatine can cause hair loss and you've got to be careful about that. I don't think the data on that's very compelling at all. There was a single study that showed an increase in DHT from supplementing with creatine. One study, 2009, I've never seen it replicated, never seen any follow up.

How much did DHT increase by?

I'd have to go back and look. I can't remember the exact amount. It was significant. But the interesting thing is we know creatine doesn't affect androgen levels. So it's kind of like where is this increase in DHT coming from? It has to come from somewhere. And like I said, there's no randomized control trials showing that creatine actually causes changes to hair follicles or actual hair loss. So maybe it does. But I would think that if that data existed we probably would have seen it already.

Do we think that there are significant benefits from supplementation even on non lifting days? So for example, on hard cardio days, assuming we're not talking about sprints, so clearly there would be a benefit in sprinting because the creatine phosphate system is really lending to that ATP generation during that incredibly high intensity stuff. But if you're out there doing a VO2 max day, which is, that's a really hard day, those are kind of three to eight minute all out intervals which is aerobic, it's peak aerobic. Do you still get a benefit, do you think, from creatine?

I would guess yes. There was a recent meta analysis that came out and looked at different ways of taking creatine and it was useful data. But in some ways it was kind of frustrating because they basically showed, well, if you take five grams a day, you get increases in lean mass and strength and performance. You take more than 5 grams a day, you also get increases in lean mass and performance. But it's hard to kind of compare them directly based on the way they did the meta analysis. They also looked at, okay, if we just take them on lifting days, okay, you get benefits. If you take them on non lifting days, you also get benefits. What I would say is that you probably can get away with just taking it on lifting days. But keep in mind that the benefits of creatine are an accumulation. So you've really got to saturate the muscle cell. That's the key.

Because when we were kids you would load it. I feel like you did 30 grams a day for a week or something crazy. And then 5 grams thereafter. Of course this was reading bro science magazines. You would then do that for a couple months and then you would come off it for a month and then you would repeat the cycle. Am I making that up or is that about.

No, no, that was definitely a thing. I will say that the research does show if you load it, you will saturate the muscle cell faster. Now I always try to tell people like there's no solutions, there's only trade offs. So the trade off with this is a lot of people will get pretty bad gi irritation with loading creatine in terms of gi, bloating, nausea, those sorts of things. So if you just take, if you're.

Playing the long game, it doesn't really matter, right?

You're talking about getting the results you want in one week as opposed to three weeks. Weeks, it's really not a big difference. So if you just want to take 5 grams a day, within a few weeks you'll be saturated and you'll be getting the same benefits. So it's really, I guess if you were somebody who'd never taken it before and you've got like a big athletic event coming up and you really want to be on it for it, that could make sense. But for most people I would say just take five grams a day. And when people say, well, you know, what if I just take it on lifting days, yeah, probably could, but it's pretty darn cheap.

It's easier to forget something when you only do it on certain days. Sometimes it's just easier to make it a part of the routine.

And what I would say too, is people ask me about timing of creatine, those sorts of things. There's some really small, really tenuous. I really want to emphasize that evidence that perhaps after a workout might be better than before a workout. But I tell people, just take it whenever you'll take it regularly. So for me, I just get up in the morning and I take it. And that's what I worry about now, as far as, like, the cycling on and off. So there's evidence that you do reduce your endogenous production of creatine when you're on it. There's also evidence that the creatine receptor on the muscle cell does downregulate a little bit. Now, the important thing to keep in mind is that doesn't mean that your intracellular levels of creatine are falling. So they've actually never shown that even far out, that those phosphocreatine levels in your muscle drop. So what I would say is I don't really think there's a reason to come off, because they have shown that if you do come off within a month or so, kind of everything goes back to normal, but you lose the benefit of the supplemental creatine. So I would say as long as intramuscular levels of creatine are not falling, there's really no benefit to coming off. Used to be, like, I think people kind of just equated supplements with steroids. And so, like, well, you're supposed to cycle steroids, so we should cycle supplements. And creatine is not hormonal. It's not the same biofeedback loop. So I would say there's probably no reason to cycle it.

So something else that kind of bridges the world between bodybuilding and powerlifting is this question I wanted to ask you about, which is basically one of Newton's laws, right? So force equals mass times acceleration. Let's just say I'm on the ground, I've got my dumbbells, or I'm on a bench and I've got my dumbbells and I'm going to press them.

Them.

One school of thought is press them as quickly as possible because force equals mass times acceleration. The mass of this thing is fixed. So any speed with which I lift it is accelerating because I'm moving against gravity. But the faster I can do it, the greater the force. But of course, at some point, the weight becomes so heavy that you increase the effort more on the mass variable than on the acceleration variable. In other words, we can manipulate mass and acceleration to reach maximum force. Now, an extreme example of that is you doing a one rep max. But as you pointed out, the more elite a power lifter becomes, the slower that is. In other words, the lower the acceleration is and therefore the more they're emphasizing the mass, which is of course what you get scored on. No one's scoring you on the acceleration. How do we think about that in terms of mixing and matching the mass versus the acceleration variable in an effort to optimize force? Because of course we also don't want to go to maximum force every time. Because if I did maximum force with a lightweight, I'd probably move it too quickly. I could injure myself as well. Do you think about the variation of mass and acceleration when you're moving weight?

If you think about what the expression of strength is, it's basically force. So as you mentioned, if it's a very heavyweight, it'll just move slower. If it's a lightweight, you can still apply the same force and it will just move more quickly. So this is actually a concept that I heard my coach Zach talk about on a podcast was they do quite a bit of we'll do a heavy single or double or whatever it is, and then our back offsets are relatively light. Talking RPE 4 or 5, but trying to move them as quickly as possible.

Let's just talk about the concentric now and then I want to actually come and have a discussion about the eccentric.

Yeah, on the concentric. Exactly. Because that is, in terms of strength, that is the closest expression of that.

If I'm understanding correctly. You're saying, your coach is saying, look, on the heavy weights they're going to move slow because they have to, but to keep training strength, I want you to move as quickly as possible. As we come down on weight.

Bingo. So the idea is over. Still applying the same force. It's going to move more quickly, but it's going to be less fatiguing because it's lighter weight. That's kind of the concept behind it.

Is that happening with you? So, for example, when you did, let's just say your back wasn't hurting yesterday. If you were out there doing today was an RPE six day, do you think that your speed would have increased sufficiently that you would have almost matched 90% of the force you'd put out on a one rep max best?

It's hard to tell because I've never actually done the calculation of the force. I imagine there's probably a sweet spot somewhere in there where too heavy probably has less force than. But yeah, I'm not sure where that is as far as like hypertrophy. I think that force is probably less important. I think it's more about just having enough sufficiently hard sets. However you slice that, for example, like the whole idea of time under tension training was very popular. And if you look at some of the initial research, I think there was a study where they had people doing curls and I may butcher the study, so I apologize, but it was kind of like a 6 second eccentric, 6 second concentric and they had them go to failure. And they had another group that just did normal cadence and they had them match the number of reps and found that the group that was doing the slow eccentrics and slow concentrics gained more muscle. People said well see, there you go. Well the problem is they were using like 30% of their one rep max for like 10 reps, going really slow. Well, if you're going at a normal pace, how many times could you do 30% of warden rep max? I mean you could do 30, 40, 50 reps. So it wasn't. I don't wanna say the study was bad, it's not bad. It answered the question it wanted to answer. But if you're gonna compare em straight up, really what it needs to be is if you take both of these things to failure, so the same level of intensity or sufficient difficulty, what does the outcome look like then? And so when they do that, they really see very little difference between slow lifting and fast lifting. There was a study that just came out that looked at fast eccentrics versus slow eccentrics and found that there was actually a little bit better outcomes with fast eccentrics compared to slow eccentrics. And that actually relates back to with.

Respect to muscle mass. Yeah, you mentioned this to me earlier. The only time I've ever done a fast eccentric is on my exer fly machine. Because you're forced to. It's pulling you down so quickly that you're screaming down and you're coming to a stop. Outside of that it never occurred to me to do an eccentric quickly. Like if I'm doing eccentric deadlifts, I'm actually almost trying to come down as slowly as I can in my head thinking this is more beneficial. Because I was thinking it's more time under tension.

It's probably partly with the lift too as well. You don't want to take it too extreme. If you're doing a squat and you just dive bomb and there's no tension on the bar. One, that's going to look really bad when you're trying to come out of it. And two, it's probably not what they're actually seeing in the research.

Let's use a bicep curl, it's a safer exercise. So this research suggests that you take two people that are doing the exact same weight and they're the same people basically, and they're doing the same speed of their concentric and one of them is doing, let's say it's a two second concentric and he's doing a two second eccentric and the other guy's going two up, six down. They're saying the two, two will technically produce more hypertrophy.

Might be better. So I say might because it's just one interesting. If you think about mechanotransduction and the force, the mechanical tension being applied to a muscle when you're kind of getting to that point where the muscle is stopping and then having to come the other way if it's fast, that's probably more tension at that specific point. So we just don't know enough about this stuff right now to really be able to say for sure. But I think. But I also don't want to make it sound like there's no benefit to like slow movements, especially for people who have pain or they don't want to go heavy, you know, those sorts of things then slowing down a movement because a lot of times pain can be tied to velocity. If you just slow down a movement, it won't be as painful. So I've used tempo training pretty liberally in some of my training cycles just to make it so I had to use less weight but still make it pretty difficult. Now, was it as good as me doing my regular movement? Maybe not, but it's still better than doing nothing. So it's always important to keep those things in mind in terms of like, don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. So I do think that like slow movements still have application for people, like I said, who have pain or if they don't feel comfortable with heavy weight, you can make it much more difficult just by slowing down the movement. And at the end of the day, the biggest determinant is just doing enough number of hard sets, however that kind of looks.

Now there are a couple of patients that I've had over the years whose disdain for exercise is so great that the most I can negotiate them doing is one 20 to 30 minute workout per week doing the super slow protocol. You know, they have These specific gyms that have very specific types of equipment, and they're going to do, I don't know, maybe eight to ten different machines, and they're only going to do one set and it's going to be to failure. And the sets are typically titrated to be somewhere between 90 and 105 seconds, so about a minute 30 to a minute 45, the sweet spot. Right. So if you're going more than that, the weight's too light. If you're less than that, the weight's too heavy. And they might do like four simple upper body, four upper, lower. So there might be a press, a pull, a bicep, a tricep, a leg press, you know, all that kind of stuff. The reason I negotiate that is my alternative is they'll do nothing. And I'm thinking I probably can't get any better benefit in 30 minutes once a week than I can there if it's done right. Now, the challenge that I've realized with that type of exercise, because I've done this many times myself, it's actually really hard to go to failure at the end of the day. It can be done, but it can't be done often. And I actually think it's really hard to do it eight consecutive times, which is basically what you're asking a person to do in 30 minutes to truly go to failure. So what is your take on the super slow protocols, which clearly guys like Mike Mentzer have? Like, there are really famous bodybuilders who have taken these protocols to the limits. But what's your take both on the physiology of it and then the psychology.

Of it that just kind of shows that there's many ways to skin a cat. And when it comes to hypertrophy, you really have a lot of options. And certainly no one will argue you can't grow muscle that way, because you can.

It is kind of remarkable, isn't it, to think that these people could do 30 minutes once a week and grow muscle.

So a friend of mine, Jeremy Lineke, he's professor at Ole Miss.

Jeremy's been on the podcast bfr. Yeah.

Yeah, he's great. My claim to fame is I actually introduced him to bfr, but they actually published a paper where they looked at just flexing isometric contraction. And we're actually able to show with long isometric contraction, some hypertrophy, which before that, we always thought, oh, isometric doesn't actually grow muscle. There's very little benefit to it. So I think I hate to be the typical tools in a toolkit but things are tools in a toolkit. We're talking about people who are. They don't want to be bodybuilders. They just want to get some of these benefits from resistance training. It really is. What can we do to get them in the gym consistently? And is it as good as compound movements with free bar and training at a normal pace? Maybe not, but it's a heck of a lot better than them sitting at home and doing nothing. Yeah, so I think that's really important to understand. And when it comes to, like the super slow, the physiology of the hypertrophy response, what's wild is we still don't fully understand how the process of muscle hypertrophy occurs. We know that you need to progressively overload to continue causing the hypertrophy response. We know what things are associated with hypertrophy, but every time they try to get really granular with it, we still have a lot of gaps in our understanding. Now, one of the things we do think matters is metabolic stress. So this idea that you're accumulating these metabolic byproducts inside the muscle as you.

Work it out, hence the bfr, the.

Pump, that does appear to have some decent mechanistic data to support it in terms of hydrogen ion accumulation, how that may affect some, you know, signaling, those sorts of things, even right down to like, calcium release into the sarcoplasm. So I think when you're dealing with like that super slow protocol, you're kind of pushing a little bit more on that metabolic stress as opposed to like the mechanical tension portion of it. But there's still is mechanical tension. I think a lot of people think about mechanical tension just literally as weight on the bar. I think what people don't realize is mechanical tension is kind of cumulative because otherwise why wouldn't we just load up a heavy single and just do that every time? Because that's the most amount of mechanical tension you can get in terms of a set point in time. So to me, it seems pretty obvious that mechanical tension has to be like a little bit cumulative throughout a set. And so if you're doing super slow, okay, you might have a pretty light weight, but you've also got a really long time that's under that really light weight. And you're accumulating the metabolic stress and some mechanical tension. So to me, it makes sense that you would have some of those benefits. What I would say is I think the bigger downside is you're probably not going to get as strong doing that methodology as you are doing a little Bit more normal pace, and it may have a little bit less functionality than somebody who's done kind of more traditional strength training.

That's my bigger issue with it, truthfully, is one, I don't think people really can go to failure.

It's hard.

You'll get a couple of sets here and there, but it's really difficult. I think it's easier to do an exercise where you don't have to go to failure, but you make up for it on volume. But then your other point here is, I think you're really missing out on the reason why we exercise. Sometimes we exercise to be better at lifting. Powerlifting is the only example of that, but outside of that, we lift for life. And I do worry that when we rob people of movements that require more than one plane, movements that require balance and some coordination, we're not giving them the full benefit of the exercise. Of the reason to exercise, that is.

I would agree with that. And again, that has to be one.

Of those things where it's better than the couch.

As you said, it's better than the couch. And so I think a lot of people, when they get into things, especially now, we have paralysis by analysis. I'll tell people, like, at a certain point, your paralysis by analysis is actually just your excuse to do nothing. So just go, do. Go do something. Go throw something against a wall and see what sticks. But when it comes to people who may have been sedentary, I mean, sometimes the conversation I'll have is, hey, what do you like doing? Like, is there something you like doing? And let's press on that a little bit, because if the only outcome that we're going for is perfection, well, not a lot of people are going to be able to hit that. So I really do think a lot of it boils down to a conversation of, okay, yeah, this isn't as good as this, but it's still better than that. And I think that conversation is a lot of the stuff that gets lost. That nuance gets lost in a lot of these conversations, especially because you're an optimizer. I love to talk about optimal because as scientists, that's kind of where we live and what we think about. Do people really need optimal to get out of the state we're in where so many people have type 2 diabetes and have obesity and are dying from heart disease and cancer? Like, honestly, if we get them to get 50% of the way there, probably see a huge benefit.

And that's really the flip side to the stats I gave earlier in this discussion. Which were how high? VO2 max and high strength were the two biggest predictors of longevity. And that's true by a country mile. But the part that I didn't mention that is now worth mentioning is that when you break people down into quartiles or quintiles of fitness and strength, the biggest jump in the benefit, right? So the biggest improvement in mortality always comes from being in the bottom quintile or quartile to the next one. This is a really important point that shouldn't be lost. So people are sitting here listening to us thinking, look at these two idiots who train all day and love this stuff. Like, that's nice for you to say. No, actually, you're going to achieve the most benefit when you go from being in the lowest 20% of the population to the second 20th percentile of population. And that can't be overstated. So in other words, the curve looks like this.

And I think one of the biggest failures of the fitness industry, quite honestly, is convincing people that they need to have a shredded six pack and be really muscular to be fit. No, you don't have to. In fact, I would argue that most people that are that lean probably don't feel that fit. I know that when I was very lean for bodybuilding, I had no energy, no sex drive, thought about food all the time and was a miserable human. So the real sweet spot is probably where you got a little bit of fluff. You're still relatively lean, but even not getting to that point, just moving. I mean, look at the step data. The step data is very, very clear too. Like there is a huge inflection at about 8,000 steps per day. You still get benefits by going even up to like 20,000 steps a day. But the vast majority of the benefits, the dip off in mortality, I'm sure you've seen it. It's like going from 2000 to 8000. It's like precipitous, it's like free falling off a cliff. How drastically that decreases mortality. And I don't think there's anything magic about steps. I just think you're just literally looking at people getting more active. So I think one of the biggest failures of the fitness industry is the messaging that you need to look like this in order for you to be healthy. When the messaging should be, hey, for you to be healthy, it's really like a very low barrier to entry. Even if you just get out and walk for 30 minutes a day, so much benefit from that just compared to just sitting down, just doing anything in the gym. People say all machines are worthless. They're not worthless. Machines are great tools. You're still applying tension to the muscle. Would I argue that maybe a free barbell movement might be more functional? Maybe. But if it's the difference between the 70 year old female who's never resistance trained before getting into the gym and doing something or not, well, I'm going to be like, yeah, knock yourself out of machines. So I think that is a huge failure of the fitness industry and the messaging, which is you need to look like this in order for you to have achieved health on that front.

Because I do want to talk a little bit about bodybuilding, both in your own personal experience and just again, the insights that we can gain. I don't think most people listening to this, myself included, ever want to be 4% or 5% body fat, which is.

You don't trust me.

But look, I'm sure somebody who's 25% body fat would like to be 20% body fat and can they learn something from bodybuilder. But just picking up where you went, where do you see kind of the general role of fitness experts in social media? How can a person make sense of the never ending sea of experts out there, man?

So a couple years ago we had a guy on our podcast named Alan Levinovitz. He's been on Joe Rogan's podcast too. And he's a religious studies expert. But he wrote a book on the naturalism fallacy and we were talking about how hard it is for people to identify experts and he said something that I thought was really insightful. He said, what you should look for in an expert is the exact opposite of what you probably think you should look for. If somebody sounds really confident, they're probably not an expert. What you really want to look for is people who sound kind of doubtful and they say things like probably, maybe, possibly. When you speak to true experts, usually if you ask them a question, the first thing they'll do is ask you a question back, unless the question is very contextual. So I'll get people who say, what are your thoughts on X? And usually I'll say, okay, well as it pertains to what, like hypertrophy or strength or fitness or, you know, I need context in order to be able to answer the question correctly. People ask me, like, what do you think about like credentials? This and that? Credentials help. If I see Somebody has a PhD in a certain subject, I'm probably going to give them a lot more leeway in terms of okay, if they say something I Disagree with. Let me see why they said that. Let's dig a little bit deeper. But I've seen some PhDs say some really dumb stuff. I've seen people from Harvard say really dumb stuff. I've probably said really dumb stuff. Like, it doesn't stop you. Credentials aren't a. They're a nice thing, but they're not foolproof. So really, I try to listen to.

How people speak, but given that you have such a knowledge background, it's a lot easier for you to look at someone's Instagram account and pretty quickly realize this person knows nothing. They might look good, they might be a great marketer, but they don't really know anything. But the average person doesn't have your knowledge base. What else can they rely on? So clearly that's one great criteria or two. Some sense of credentialing can be helpful. Some sense of speaking with nuance and being comfortable with uncertainty, that's also helpful. Are there any other tools that a person can use to disentangle this world?

People who say the magic words, I don't know. That again, sounds counterintuitive. So when I was part of getting my PhD, I had to do what was called a qualifying exam. And so that is a four hour oral examination in front of four professors. And when I was prepping for this doctor Layman you've had on the podcast, he said, they're going to push you in whatever subject they start out on until you don't know and you need to be able to say, I don't know. They did exactly that. I'll still never forget the way they started off the qualifying exam was, let's talk about vitamins. What's your favorite vitamin? D. Okay, where is it synthesized? And they kept pushing until I just didn't know. And I'll still never forget, they asked me like an acid base balance question in the lung and I started to get up on the wipe off board and I just turned around and said, I don't know this one. So, okay, move on. And when I got done, they said, you're actually one of the best students we've had the last few years because you knew what you knew and you knew what you didn't know. That division put such an emphasis on not going outside your lane, not speaking about something, not speculating about something that you didn't know and trying to pass it off like you did. So I think that just got hammered into me. So when it comes to looking at other folks, one, if they're willing to like know their scope and not feel the need to comment on every single thing. That's a good metric. Also, I'm going to paint with a broad brush and there's always exceptions to this, but people who use like tips, tricks, hacks, five things to never do, five things to always do the best worst, people who use a lot of superlatives. That's not typically the way that experts talk. I say a lot. There's no solutions, there's only trade offs. There's certain tools that make a lot more sense depending on somebody's goals and where they're at than compared to somebody else, and vice versa.

But that almost suggests that social media is negatively selecting because a lot of those things that you said, certainty, a flair for showmanship, tips, tricks and listicles.

That'S what gets attention.

I think the algorithm likes those things because they get a lot of attention, even if some of that attention isn't warranted. So that adds another layer of confusion to this, which is it is difficult and it's. Even when I scroll through Instagram, I'm amazed at how much it's trying to push to me, you know, I missed the day when all I saw on Instagram were the 40 people I followed. I feel like that was the good old day.

And in the sequence of the way things were posted too, it was like.

Oh, here's what this friend of mine did, here's what this friend of mine did, here's what this person who I don't know, but who I respect. And now it's insane, the barrage of stuff that Instagram thinks I want to see. And admittedly, sometimes it's right, but so many times it's just wrong. And it makes me think, well, if that's my experience, that's gotta be everybody's experience.

And it is. Alan talked about this as information silos. And this is a broader problem, but it is a problem in nutrition and fitness specifically. If you just follow the people you follow and then the accounts that get suggested to you, you're actually not broadening anything. You're sitting in an information silo. And what happens is, or at least what I think is happening is previously 90s, 2000s 80s, whatever, you'd come across people with differences of opinion to you and you could have a conversation with them. And it usually was, you know, sometimes it could be contentious, but for the most part, I would say, like when you can sit down and look a human being in the eyes and talk about your differences, it's usually not as confrontational. Now we have whole Generations of people who are not used to seeing opinions different than their own or thoughts or beliefs that are different from their own because they're in those information silos. And when they get exposed to something different, they just don't know how to handle it. Like, you see some really, like, extreme responses, even to stuff like nutrition. I can't name how many times I've been called a shill for xyz. Big meat, big dairy, artificial sweeteners, big sugar, you know, because it's almost like, well, it can't possibly be. Somebody just has a different opinion based on this data. They have to be a bad person. So I do think it's a real problem. And what you said is very well taken. That is, you almost have to be willing to do clickbait to really get your stuff out there. And so I, as a business owner who does a lot of the business through Instagram, I really have to try to skirt a fine line of I am trying to get people's attention and not lose the nuance and the context, and all those things are important. And trust me, there's days where I'm like, man, I could make so much money if I just. But that isn't how I want to live my life or leave my legacy or anything like that.

You're an interesting person because your personality on Twitter and your personality on Instagram are quite different. And your personality in real life is totally different. People who know you like I know you, you almost don't recognize. Now, tell me a little bit about that. Has that been an evolution? Because I have to be honest with you, I quite envy your personality on Twitter. I've just made a decision that I've almost always been able to uphold, which is I'm not going to get drawn into it. I don't really even look at comments on Twitter anymore. Post and ghost, post and ghost, as Rogan has adequately reminded me many times. So. But I'll be honest with you, I see enough negative ones where I just want to spank the living shit out of the person on the other end. I mean, I want to, with words, eviscerate them.

Yeah.

And 99.9% of the time, I refrain from doing it. But I really get a kick out of the fact that a lot of times you just spank people into the next century. So tell me about that. Is it a conscious decision? Because it never comes across as unhinged. It never comes across as terribly reactionary. It usually comes across as kind of calculated. Walk me through your thinking.

I think it probably was a little bit unhinged. When I first started, the Internet was just in general. Like, on bodybuilding forums, it's like, you're disagreeing with me. You call me a name. Well, you know, but I think my style is going to be for everybody. Part of it, honestly, if I, like, psychoanalyze myself, probably goes back to, like, me being bullied as a kid. And I almost view misinformation and people who, especially you've probably noticed, I save my most, the biggest amount of vitriol for people who is very clearly have a pattern of behavior that's also being monetized. When you're, like, preying on the desperation and ignorance of people, I'm going to have very little sympathy for you. And part of that evolved, too, out of my coaching and seeing how many people came to me, quite frankly, feeling broken because they tried so many of these things that were the solution and the cure. When it didn't work for them, they're just like, you know, something wrong with me. It's like, nothing's wrong with you. You just. You haven't been executing on these principles that work. I really have tried to dial it back a little bit because I think I took it too far at a certain point. But now I just try to, like, use it to be funny to get some attention. So what's funny is, like, my best Instagram posts are all just screenshots of my Twitter. If you look at my. You can go to your insights, and you look at my top performing post, it's 95% Twitter screenshots. Twitter screenshots. One of my top rated posts of all time was Mark Hyman had said something. My response was just stop making shit up. Very, like, cavalier and funny. And there are some people who would, absolutely would turn them off. And I get that. But then I also speak to the people who are like, yeah, I'm tired of, like, stuff being overly sanitized. And I just wish somebody would tell me how they really feel. It's funny because I've had so many academics reach out to me behind closed doors and say, I love your Twitter. I love just watching you break this stuff down. And the thing is, I'll say to people is, it's never just me attacking the person. I'm also providing citations or logic and data and whatnot. But I'm just trying to make it funny and engaging. But I'll always have a conversation with somebody. Like, for example, Thomas DeLauer is a great example. So I've done several videos debunking some of the claims he made. And actually one day he just reached out to me and said, hey, man, I want you to know that I actually really respect you and you've actually made me change the way I think about some of this stuff. Would you want to come on my podcast? Yeah, man, let's do it. Because I really respect anybody who can be self reflective enough to go, you know what, I might have been wrong or just even wanting to get a different perspective on things. So just another great example of that. I'm actually going and speaking at a low carb conference next year. The joke was, do I need to bring bodyguards?

That's so interesting to me. I'm not close enough to any of the dietary communities to know. Obviously, I still get very strongly associated with a low carb ideology, which is funny given that you see how many carbohydrates I eat. But what is the view about you and low carbohydrate diets? Because I've never heard you say anything that is uniquely anti low carb other than the stuff we've already talked about on the previous podcasts.

So I always tell people is I'm like, how could I be anti low carb? If you go to our nutrition coaching app, Carbon Diet Coach, two of the six settings are low carbohydrate. There's low carbohydrate, and there's ketogenic. So how could I possibly be low carb or anti low carb? I think that this is just an example of. I call this the Tim Tebow effect, but it's just like polarization. So do you remember when Tim Tebow was playing NFL football? My hypothesis was there are very few people in the middle about Tim Tebow. You either love him or you hate him. And the way this kind of comes up is if you watch this guy and you're like, yeah, you know, he's not really that good. He's got weird mechanics. He's more of a running back than he is a quarterback. And he's kind of preachy, but, you know, he's all right. But then you see all these people saying he's the Heisman. You know, he's going to the playoffs, he's better than your quarterback. Like, you know, this, that. What are you talking about? Like, his completion percentage is like 45%. How could you say he's good? Then you have the other side, which people like me. I actually was kind of a Tim Tebow fan because I'm like, you know, he seems like a nice Guy who works hard. Maybe not the best genetics to be a quarterback, but he's been successful. That's admirable. And then you look over here and you, you see all these people going, he sucks. He's terrible. And it's like, well, he did win a playoff game. So I think this happens with many different subjects. We were talking about this the other day. You're a car guy. I'm not a car guy. So I've posted many times. In fact, when we bought our new house, I'm going to take a picture of me with the car outside the house. It's going to be the greatest picture that ever goes on my social media because I've still got my grad school car, which is a 2003 Alero, and I've just never felt the need to get rid of it. So I got this really dinky old car with me on the hood, sitting outside this wonderful big house. And sure enough, I got like 1500 comments. But some of the comments were, and I was talking about how basically saying my ability to delay gratification is what got me here. And you can do it too. Like, delaying gratification in anything is so essential for success in almost any goal. Because it's so crazy how in almost anything, whatever provides you short term relief or happiness almost always makes it worse in the long term and vice versa. But people would say, why do you hate people who buy nice cars? Where did I say I hate people buy nice cars? I never said that. Same thing with low carb. My messaging has consistently been, usually there'll be some kind of insane claim, calories don't matter, or, you know, you can eat as much on low carb as you want, not gain fat. Well, here's citation, citation, citation. Low carb does not appear to be better for fat loss than calorie protein equated diets that are not low carb. But that means choose what you prefer because it's not worse. So by all means, if you like low carb, go right ahead. I don't enjoy low carb, but I know many people that do. And so one of the reasons people get so tribal about this is they find something that worked for them and they then retroactively try to find the evidence to show that it's the best thing that there is.

Which of the two landscapes, nutrition and exercise, do you think is more culty? My impression is nutrition.

Definitely nutrition. Definitely nutrition.

And do you think that that's because of the ubiquity of food in our lives and the Fact that we all have almost equally a personal relationship with food, whereas not everybody exercises the same amount.

So there's two things, especially here in America. We come from a puritan background and I think that this kind of thinking that anything that is pleasurable at all must be bad for you and you cannot have it and you should feel bad about it. So I think that causes people to get a little bit tribal. I mean, I've had people say horrible, like moral judgments because I'll post me eating a bag of Skittles or something like that. Never mind the fact I just went and trained for three hours. I think somebody like called me a disgusting sugar addict one time. So that's one part of it, but I think it's the smaller part. I think the bigger part is what you just said. It's funny, whenever I meet new people, I'm always kind of hesitant if they don't know anything about me to tell them I have a background in nutrition, PhD in nutrition. Because usually one of a couple things happens. They either clam up real quick if we're out to dinner and they get very self conscious about what they're eating, which bro, I just ordered the fries good. Or I get blitzkriegged with questions. But mostly people wanting me to validate what they already believe to be true. If I sat down, I said, you know, I'm a theoretical astrophysicist, we might talk about space a little bit, but they're probably not going to question my beliefs or my opinions on string theory. But I think because everyone eats and everyone knows something about their body, right or wrong, they have drawn certain conclusions about what they put in their body and what happens to their body. I think because of that, because everybody has an opinion about nutrition, it makes it really tough because people are already just natively have certain beliefs and we know how hard it is to change people's beliefs. There was a classic study, it was in politics. It was a classic study where they showed hard data and this was for both parties. They would either refute a preconceived belief or support it. I can't remember what they used for Republicans, but for Democrats the belief was that I think George W. Bush stopped or outlawed funding for stem cell research or something like that. The reality was he just stopped federal funding. He didn't outlaw it. They showed people these facts. By the way, again, if I butchered that, I apologize to anyone watching, but I think that was it. They showed people these facts and, and it didn't matter if they believed that he had outlawed it. Even if they show them the facts that he didn't, it still reinforced their preexisting belief. It actually made their belief stronger. The same thing was true for Republicans, by the way. So I don't think it's a Republican or Democrat problem. I think it's a people problem, to be honest. One of the benefits I had very early on in grad school was Dr. Layman just absolutely dismantling so many beliefs I had, but doing it in a way that wasn't judgmental or made me feel bad. And what I tell people now is being wrong about something is a beautiful thing. Because if I'm already right about everything, then I'm already doing everything the best I can. And I can't get better if I'm wrong about something. That's actually awesome because now I have something I can improve on. Now I tell people I like being right. Like, I'll do cartwheels in my living room if I'm right. But if I'm wrong, I don't really take that much offense to it because it's just data. There's no ethical judgment. And I've changed my mind about a myriad of things over the years.

I was going to ask you, what are three of the most impactful things that you have changed your opinion on in nutrition specifically? And let's make it recent, because I know for any of us, if we go back a decade, it's an eternity in terms of our understanding of nutrition science or something like that. But let's pick a narrower window of maybe three or four years. What would be sort of three areas where your opinion has really changed in a manner that actually leads to either a different behavior in you or a different coaching input to your clients?

I can think of three things right away. So first thing being LDL cholesterol. So when I got to grad school, the narrative and even out of the lab I was in was, we don't think it's ldl. It's more the HDL to LDL ratio and the particle size and those sorts of things. And I kept that probably until about five years ago, four years ago. And I just saw enough of these Mendelian randomizations come out. It's like, wow, that's pretty powerful when you look at the mortality rate and it is, like, linear with the exposure, the lifetime exposure to ldl. I'm like, can't really hold this belief anymore because it's just not supported by the data. And it actually changed my opinion on now I'm a Little bit more conscious about the saturated fat I consume. We talked about actually started taking a low dose of a statin. I've never had super high LDL, but I've always been around 150 to 125, even if I reduce my saturated fat, increase my fiber, and I eat probably 60, 70 grams of fiber a day. So I think people get that one twisted a little bit because they'll hear things like, well, it doesn't consider hdl. It doesn't consider this. No, you have to understand what an independent risk factor means. It means that all things being equal, are you better off having higher hdl? Yeah, but HDL is more of a marker of metabolic health because we have some drug trials and Mendelian randomizations now where they modulate HDL and it doesn't really seem to make a difference. Whereas if you modulate ldl. So even at high HDL or low hdl, in both stratifications, lower LDL is almost always better for cardiovascular disease and mortality.

I feel like I need to do a podcast on Mendelian randomization. I write about it in my book. It's very powerful, and I understand why it doesn't get more attention because you do have to really get into the weeds of genetic sorting and the statistical methods that are involved. But I actually, in the book, write about it as one of the five pillars of evidence that we should be relying on as we formulate insights with respect to anything that we do. So that's an interesting one. And obviously it has a parallel piece which is around your relationship to saturated fat.

One of the things to keep in mind is when you're looking at mortality, cardiovascular disease, this is where nutrition science can become so limited. And the power with Mendelian randomization is you're kind of looking at a lifetime randomized control trial. So people will point out things like the Minnesota coronary study, and I think there's another Australian study. And they said, well, look at this randomized control trial where they looked at high saturated fat versus low saturated fat and there wasn't a difference, or, you know, that sort of thing. And one of the biggest problems with those studies is they're two years, which is a really long time for a randomized control trial. But when you're talking about a disease that is a lifetime exposure, two years in people that are in their 40s, I mean, you're just not going to have that many incidences to pick up on. So when you're looking at Mendelian randomization, you can get around that because you're looking at people across their lifetimes. And the way I kind of explain, and I don't consider myself a lipid expert, but the way I try to explain like lifetime exposure risks is imagine if you and I start investing and you get in at 8%, we both invest $10,000. You get in 8%, I get in at 6%. If we look after a year or two, I mean, you'll have more, but it won't be statistically different. But if we look at 40 years, you're going to have a lot more. And I don't know how much exactly, but my guess is it's going to be magnitudes of times greater because you're again, lifetime exposure.

Actually, I've done this exercise. It was initially in my book, I actually used this exact analysis.

Oh really?

Was $1,000 invested at. I think I chose 6% versus 4% or maybe it was even 6 versus 5. It was something that was small enough that at 5 and 10 years wasn't enormous, but at 40, 50 and 60 years was staggering. And that was the exact point, which is the cumulative effect of compounding over a lifetime is so nonlinear that I don't think we are capable of understanding it. Like I don't think we can ever cognitively realize it until we literally just do the calculations and they're staring us.

In the face again. That's one thing I changed my mind on that I'm pretty strong belief about it. It, it's kind of like, well, how much evidence do you need? We still have LDL denialists out there.

I think it's one of the most dangerous things I see.

Actually you have the mechanism, the penetration of the endothelium. It's very clear that that happens. We have the animal models that show linear dose dependent effects.

You have the Mendelian randomization and you have the clinical trials in humans and.

You have the prospective cohort studies and.

Then you have the genetic studies, you have the PCSK9 over and under expressors. I want to come back to Minnesota Heart Study in a moment, but let's go on and hear the other two.

Supplemental branched chain amino acids. That's another one. I used to be a big advocate for that. In fact, the first supplement company I had five years ago, we sold a product with branch chain amino acids in it. And then my current supplement company, outworked nutrition. We do not have a branched amino acid product because.

And that was basically taking the three branched chain amino acids as an in.

Workout supplement, as a post Workout recovery supplement. I still do think there may be a small benefit for delayed onset muscle soreness with branch chains that may be outside of just regular protein, but based on the cost and honestly like the negative impact on taste too because that's.

The leucine's horrible, right?

Oh yeah.

I used to spike 5 grams of leucine into my water during a workout. I mean it's the most awful tasting. Is there any other amino acid that tastes as bad as leucine?

Probably some of the sulfur based ones, you know cysteine or methionine. No, it's pretty bad. And the fact it's also non polar. So it doesn't dissolve.

Yeah, it doesn't dissolve. Well, you're shaking it constantly.

Yeah, yeah. So I was a big advocate for that. I was sponsored by a company called Salvation for years that had a branch amino acid product.

Has the rest of the world caught up to that or are BCAAs still a big product?

They still are a big product, but most evidence based folks will say it's not better than protein. In fact, the research tends to suggest whey protein is actually better than branch chains even when you equate for the dose of branch chains in the protein. So yeah, I just kind of got to the point where I'm like, if I put this in the products, I'm just doing it because I'm tied to branch chains. Right. Like people are expecting this from me because my PhD was in Leucine in the branch chain amino acid and their metabolism and their effects on muscle protein synthesis. But I couldn't hold that position anymore based on the evidence because it was just too strong. So the other thing I changed my opinion on was intermittent fasting, at least in terms of like your traditional 16, 8. Because I used to say, well, I'm worried about the catabolic effects of it, you know, that sort of thing. At least when combined with resistance training and sufficient total protein. The caveat should be that they also in these studies they train within their feeding window. There's some really good studies by Grant Tinsley on this. There doesn't appear to be at least not statistically significant differences in lean mass between people who do 16, 8 intermittent fasting versus people who just eat continuously. So I used to be like somebody like, well really every four hours should be getting a protein dose, that sort of thing. Maybe if you plot it out over 30 years it'll make a difference on how much lean mass you gain. So I would still say if you're somebody who is a bodybuilder and you want to absolutely squeeze out every last ounce of muscle that you can get. I still would say, like, any form of intermittent fasting probably isn't optimal, but for the average person, can you get plenty strong, plenty big, and still do intermittent fasting at least the 16, 8? I would say absolutely.

Which is really interesting because I've kind of gone the other way from you.

Yeah. You were saying, I used to be.

A big proponent, and then what I was seeing clinically, so this was really just anecdotal, but when you see it over and over and over and over again on so many patients on whom you have DEXA data and was we were seeing a real deterioration of body.

Composition now, were they still definitely getting enough total protein? No.

And that's my point. So what I know was happening was they were falling behind on proteins. And so the question then becomes one of efficacy versus effectiveness. In other words, the data, which are done under controlled settings, say, if I control for total protein, it can be identical, but the effectiveness version of that is in practice. Do people make that happen? I guess what I would say is we weren't seeing it. So we still use intermittent fasting in patients as one of the three big levers of energy restriction. But we have a big red caution button all over it that says, if you choose this instead of caloric restriction or dietary restriction, if you want to choose time restriction as your lever, you're going to have to go out of your way to make sure you are not compromising protein.

One of the things I'll tell people is I can do dogmatism over all these different disciplines, including what I like, which is flexible dieting. But people get too hung up on the actual fasting part of intermittent fasting. You're reducing your energy intake. It's a tool. And a lot of people, it works great. Like, they say, I'm not hungry. It didn't feel like I was dieting awesome. But so people will say, well, is it going to break a fast if I have coffee, will it break a fast if I chew gum, will it break a fast if I have a protein shake, What I'll say is, like, why are you fasting? And usually if.

And by the way, I'm only laughing because I'm guilty of this.

Right?

I used to really think about the details of that. And look, I think autophagy is an incredibly important part of our ability to regenerate. I just don't think there's a chance you're getting any meaningful amount of it. In 16 hours. And therefore, to your point, we would even tell patients now to have a protein shake outside of that feeding window. In fact, I think you and I even spoke about that idea, which was, if it's really all about energy restriction, what's an extra 200 calories outside of your feeding window?

Exactly. And actually, if you look at some of the effects of high protein diets, they actually are not dissimilar from some of the effects you get from fasting, at least liver metabolism and whatnot. So I would say to somebody, well, don't worry about breaking your fast in terms of you're eating something, if you're worried about it, intermittently fast your carbohydrate and fat intake and just have an extra dose of protein in the morning or essential amino acid or whatever you want. Because now you're getting that anabolic stimulus, spreading it out a little bit more. You're making sure you get enough total protein in during the day. And quite honestly, I mean, this is a theory that Dr. Lehman and I had, which was breakfast probably is the most important protein dosing of the day because you are coming off a significant period of fasting. And then if you're extending that out, like, how much longer are you extending that out? What does that mean? The long term?

I think I told you. I've officially taken to bribing my 14 year old daughter. There's now real stakes on the line for her to get that minimum 30.

Grams of protein, no pun intended, mistake, right?

Minimum 30 grams before she goes to school in the morning. I'm like an awful father. Just.

It's interesting how that dogmatism plays out. Like, you have the same thing with low carb people so worried about getting any carbs, meanwhile they're like dumping oil on their salad, putting butter in their coffee and eating like loads of bacon. Or they're being keto ice cream because it's not spiking their blood sugar. But if you look at the keto ice cream, it's actually more calories than like, we're missing the entire point here. And the same thing goes for, like, flexible dieting. I had people who were like, they were trying to hack the system of how can I eat as much junk food as I want?

I'm allowed 3,000 calories a day. What if it's all Skittles?

So what if I do just protein shake, Skittles and peanut butter? And my point is, like, listen, if you take anything too far, it's probably a really bad idea. And one of the Things I said about flexible dieting, too, is like, we know fiber is really important. There are some folks who are kind of anti fiber now.

Oh, really? I've missed this movie.

Well, the carnivore. The carnivore, folks.

Okay, okay.

It's funny. Like, I was in a debate one time with a carnivore advocate. And, you know, my research was sponsored by the Egg Nutrition center, the National Dairy Council and the National Cattleman's Beef.

Association, if anybody should be pro carnivore.

And I said, the fact that I'm sitting here defending plants is actually kind of mind blowing to me. And if anything, it should actually increase your trust in what I'm saying, because I am a fan of high quality animal protein. I think it's.

What is the argument? Let's talk for a moment about the carnivore diet. Obviously, for people listening, it's pretty straightforward explanation. It's a diet where you only eat meat.

I've heard some versions now where people eat honey and fruits and whatnot, which. I'm not sure how that's carnivore anymore, but in any case, I would say that's a little better. But so the argument against.

Or what's the argument in favor of that? What do they propose as the reason to do it?

The reason to do it is it's basically anecdotal. People have done this and they've seen this. And of course, you could absolutely lose weight doing something like that.

It seems pretty easy to see how you would lose weight only through the lens of dietary. A strict enough dietary restriction is going to ultimately reduce how much meat can.

You eat, even if it's fatty meat? And the justification, well, I still go to the bathroom just fine. It's like, well, that's not why you should eat fiber. I mean, yeah, it helps, but that's the last reason to eat fiber, in my opinion. Some people have said, well, it helped clear up some autoimmune issues. That's hard to quantify. And some people say, well, get lowered by inflammation and my GI problems. So this is one thing a lot of people get mixed up. They'll get like bloated or have GI discomfort. And they equate that with inflammation. You might have some localized inflammation. Although it's probably based on what we know about, like, IBS and whatnot. It's probably just like Barrow sensitivity. But that's not the same thing as like. Well, I usually say is, well, did you get your CRP measured? Did you get your IL6 measured? That's inflammation. When we talk about inflammation, that's what we're talking about.

Let's assume that all those things are true. Let's assume that I went on a carnivore diet and my actual biomarkers of inflammation improved and my symptoms improved. I don't know what the number is, but if you think of the average number of foods a person will eat in a given week, different foods that it's in the tens, maybe a hundred. If you eliminate all but one of them, it's not a good experiment. You haven't really learned a lot. You've learned that something in those 99 might have been the problem. That's a hard way to learn that.

So one of the things I've said, I think a lot of people are getting benefits is they're basically doing an elimination diet for the most part. Most people don't have sensitivities to meat. I think many people just not being in tune with their body probably have ibs, fodmap sensitivities where they're fermenting a lot of fructans, oligosaccharides, you know, those sorts of things. And that fermentation for people with ibs, even though it's a, a healthy thing, because bacteria getting fuel from fiber is a healthy thing, if it's causing pain, they're equating that with being something negative, which obviously we don't want anybody to be in pain.

I still believe that there are a lot of people who have wheat sensitivities that are not full on gluten, sensitivities that don't rise to the level of celiac disease.

It's possible. So it's one of those things where they eliminate all plants and they go, well, I feel better. Okay, well now the next step should be, should be addition, adding things back in one by one and let's figure out what's actually causing those problems. So what I would submit to people is like still try to include fruits and vegetables and just slowly add them back in and see what works for you. Because I think, and this gets into dietary protein and longevity. I think a lot of this negative perception of animal protein with longevity and health is people who eat high amounts of animal protein. These aren't people, for the most part. They're not eating like lean cuts of sirloin and chicken breasts and whatnot. People eating high meat are typically eating high amounts of processed meat and they eat less amounts of fruits and vegetables. In fact, there's a really classic study, in my opinion, From Maximoff in 2020, I think it was quintals. So four different serving amounts of fruits and vegetables and four serving amounts of meat. So lowest to highest. When you look at low vegetable intake, there is like a linear effect of or sorry, if you look at like going from high to low vegetable intake, linear effect on the incidence of cancer and meat. As you go up in meat not correcting for fruits and vegetable intake, you have a linear effect of meat on cancer. But guess what happens when you couple the highest quintile of meat intake with also the highest quintile of fruits and vegetable intake? There's no effect. You have the same risk for cancer with high meat and high fruit and vegetable intake as you do with low meat and high fruit and vegetable intake. So to me that suggests it's less about the meat you're eating and more about what you're eating it instead of. One of the things to keep in mind with nutrition is when we tell people to eat more or eat less of something, usually there's a replacement that happens. It doesn't happen in a vacuum. So to me, if we're talking about carnivore, sure, I like high quality protein. Great. I would argue probably lean cuts are a little bit better option, but for God's sakes, have some fruits and vegetables with it because it's what's going to mitigate your risk.

Now you said you're getting about 40 grams of fiber a day?

I'm around 60.

60. And that's total soluble and insoluble?

Yeah, it's total soluble.

And so what are your sources? What's the main foods that are contributing to that?

I'll do like a lot of riced, cauliflower, I'll do broccoli, some beans. I love apples. So that's kind of my go to fruit source.

How many grams of fiber in an apple?

I want to say it's like three or four grams, maybe a little bit less than that. It's not a huge amount. But if you want something a little bit more packed berries. Berries tend to be really fiber dense compared to something like apples. Like a banana is a fruit, but relatively low fiber, all things considered. But even like the higher sugar, lower fiber fruits are still relatively well associated with good health outcomes. And then honestly, people are going to laugh and be judgmental. I love popcorn. So popcorn actually is pretty darn high fiber.

More than corn on the kernel per kernel basis.

I don't know about that because I.

Feel like you could eat more corn than popcorn.

Oh yeah. So popcorn is actually very filling. That's one reason I got into eating it. During bodybuilding competitions, I would just like air pop popcorn and I'll usually like put a little bit of cinnamon and splenda over that and then like a little bit of the butter spray. For 50 grams of carbohydrate from popcorn, it'll take you 20, 30 minutes to eat it. So I just found that that helped me control my hunger. And in 50 grams of popcorn, you're getting around 6 to 10 grams of fiber, depending on the specific brand you're using. I love that. As a snack, is it as healthy as if I had some fruits and vegetables? Probably not. But as far as a snack goes, it's pretty good and very filling. So I do that and then like just miscellaneous sources throughout the day. But one of the things to really look at is I was in a debate with Paul Saldino one time and we were talking about fiber and one of the things he said, and he's.

A big carnivore advocate.

Big carnivore advocate. One of the things he said was, well, this stuff with fiber is just healthy user bias. People who eat more fiber, they just have other health promoting behaviors. Now that's a real thing in terms of cohort studies and cross sectional data, observational data, it is a real thing. But when you're dealing with something that's kind of a healthy user bias, typically you'll see the data is not consistent. One study will say one thing, one study might have no effect. One study might say a different thing. You see that with meat, you see that with meat. Longevity. I was just looking at some meta analysis earlier that one MET analysis even showed that after controlling for confounding variables, that actually animal protein was not associated with increased mortality.

But you don't see it with exercise.

You don't see with exercise.

Don't see it with the smoking studies in the opposite direction.

You don't see it with fiber. The effect in fiber, at least in terms of cardiovascular disease, cancer. Cancer. It is a very consistent effect. And it's very consistent even across all the meta analyses I've seen. So do we have a 10 year randomized control trial of giving people enough fiber versus not enough fiber and seeing health outcomes? No, and we'll never have that. That. But do I feel very comfortable saying that I think fiber helps reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer based on the data we have? Oh, yeah, I feel very comfortable saying that.

What's the RDA on fiber? Is it 30 grams? Not that the RDA matters. I'm just kind of curious.

I think it's 20 to 30 grams. I'll be honest. I haven't looked at it in a while. I know they changed the guidelines a while back, too. What I tell people a good target to shoot for is like 15 grams per thousand calories. I would love to go more, but at some point it just becomes intractable to get that much fiber at that low calorie.

Now, all the things that you mentioned for fiber, you're eating real food to get it. So how do we think about it in terms of bars and things that seem. I've heard different things about this where, you know, if you look at the incretin effect, for example, it would suggest that the fiber that's in a processed bar is not really contributing the way a fiber is in the way you just described it. If you're actually eating cauliflower or beans or things like that.

I try not to fall into the naturalistic fallacy. I get a little bit cringed when I hear processed, unprocessed. Because what we do to food now, everything's processed. Processing in and of itself is processing doesn't mean bad.

I just mean. And I'm really talking about this purely through the lens of the disruption of the actual kernel and what that actually does at the GLP1 level.

Getting back to that. Yeah, I would say that Mother Nature's Kitchen is probably better than a fiber bar that's like some indigestible form of glucose or some less digestible form of starchy carbohydrate. But is it better than nothing? It's probably better than nothing. But if somebody says, well, I'm getting 40 grams of fiber a day and it's because they're eating three protein bars that 14 grams of fiber, I would argue that, well, it's probably not equivalent to getting six to eight servings of fruits and vegetables.

Let's talk about one other macronutrient or subset of macronutrient, which is polyunsaturated fatty acids. This is one of those things I always tell people. There's nothing in nutrition that I'm more confused about than the role of Omega 6 PUFAs. So let's go back to that Minnesota coronary experiment that you mentioned. It's a very unique experiment, probably never to be replicated.

No, no IRB would ever approve it again.

I'm still trying to track down Chris Ramsden, who wrote the paper that looked at all of the data that were never published in Franz's first study. But I'll retell the study to the best of my recollection, which is super foggy at this point. So this was a study carried out in Minnesota. Please correct me if I'm missing any details. It was carried out in assisted living or mental facility. There might have been two arms. I can't remember. What makes this special then is that the subjects in this study were fed every meal. So what makes this a really unique study is that it was not a free living study, though it had free living duration. I want to say the average duration was three years.

Just over two, I think. Was it okay, the study was five years?

Yeah. But the feeding intervention was only two.

Well, I think because people were kind of going in and out of the facility, the average subject duration was about two, two and a half years.

So for this period of time, every meal is being fed and there's patients are randomized into two groups. Isocaloric, isomacro. But at the fat level, one group was high saturated fat, one group was low saturated fat. If I recall, the reduction in saturated fat was not trivial. It was 30. 18.5 is a number that sticks out in my mind and I can't remember.

But I don't remember the exact number between.

It was a really big reduction in saturated fat.

It's not something that I would say, well, there just wasn't a big enough difference.

That's right. I think we can all look at it and say, wow, these guys were getting a lot of saturated fat. These guys were getting a lot of omega 6 polyunsaturated. Was it canola? What was the dominant form of the oil?

I don't remember that.

Actually it might have been corn oil. I don't remember which one it was. Which of the big four Safflower. But I think it was canola. But I could be wrong on that. We'll obviously post a link to the original study. So the study goes on and they get all the data. Oh, what was the hypothesis that was being tested? The hypothesis was being tested was in this really well designed, elegant study, the group on the lower saturated fat arm should have had fewer cardiovascular events because this was right at the time when the theory initially proposed by Ancel keys in about 1961 was that saturated fat specifically was the driver of blood lipids. And this was really the connection to the heart, the lipid heart hypothesis.

This was supposed to be kind of like the nail in the coffin for that hypothesis in terms of cementing it as legit.

So the idea was this group on the Higher saturated fat, they would have more heart attacks. And you couldn't argue these data. This was really clear. You've also had a high power to this study because it was very large.

It was like 500 something people.

Oh, I think it was more.

Was it more?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I think it was a stag. I was amazed at how big the number was. And they were old, which meant you were going to see events. You couldn't do a two year study in 40 year olds. You see no events in anybody. So had all these things going for it. 1973, the results come out. There's no difference. The study goes unpublished. It's not published until 1989. Sixteen years later, Franz publishes it. When asked why, he said quite plainly we didn't like the way it turned out. Now, a guy named Chris Ramsden, who I believe is still at the nih though if you're listening to this and anybody knows him, please tell him I've been trying to reach him for the past two years, unsuccessfully, won't return any emails. He comes along maybe five years ago and finds a whole bunch of unpublished data and republishes, I think one, if not two studies in the bmj. Before we get to what Ramsden's findings are, my interpretation of the study that I just described, my initial representation, or my initial interpretation of that 10 years ago was saturated fats not causing heart disease 10 years later. My interpretation was that study wasn't long enough to see a difference at the time. They did measure total cholesterol levels. They didn't fractionate cholesterol at the time, so they couldn't measure LDL or HDL or anything like that. But there was about a 30 milligram per deciliter reduction in total cholesterol on the low saturated fat group, which again, now you have a biomarker that tells you this intervention worked. And the majority of that 30 milligrams per deciliter was probably LDL cholesterol. Could they have measured it? So then my interpretation turned into two years of an intervention wasn't long enough. If you took a bunch of people and put them on a statin for two years, you probably wouldn't see a difference. You could miss a difference. Now, the PCSK9 trials suggested otherwise. It was really interesting. The Odyssey and fourier trials in 2015, which were testing the most potent lipid lowering drugs available, actually did show a benefit in about two and a half to three years, but they were crushing ldl. So again, it's an area under the curve. Problem. This one was reducing it but not crushing it. That's sort of where I left it.

And I think it's important to point out, too, that the modifications that you can make to cholesterol from diet in some cases can be quite small compared to what you can get pharmaceutical interventions.

That's right outside of the most extreme. I'm sure if somebody went on to a zero saturated fat, 12% total fat calorie restricted diet, they could probably cut their cholesterol in half, but they'd be doing a whole bunch of harm, I would argue, along the way.

And the other direction, you do have some people, like in the low carb community, who are bragging about LDL cholesterol levels in the 500s.

Well, that's what I was going to say. You can do the opposite much more. It's an unbounded problem above. It's obviously a bounded problem below. Ramsden's data suggest that actually the people in the PUFA group had worse outcomes. Now, that really kind of throws me for a loop, and that's frankly why I kind of want to have him on the podcast, because his data suggests that at least this particular PUFA had a negative cardiovascular effect. Now, to me, that study is probably, if the details of that study are consistent, that would be the most damning evidence against N6 PUFAs in terms of lowering lipids but raising events. And by the way, there is a precedent for that. There was a drug that was approved in the 1960s that actually lowered cholesterol but increased cardiovascular events. That drug was withdrawn. This was back in the day.

Do you know what the mechanism was for?

That I can speculate. Actually recently discussed this on a podcast. The mechanism that it's believed that this drug worked is it prevented the conversion of Desmosterol to cholesterol. That's the final step of cholesterol synthesis in one of the two pathways. And so when you gave people this drug, and the name always escapes me, Triamitrol or something like that, when you gave people this drug, their cholesterol went down significantly and the drug was approved on the basis of cholesterol lowering, not on the basis of outcomes. Today, cholesterol drugs are only approved on the basis of outcomes as well. But then it had to be pulled from the market because you saw the events. So I don't think they ever investigated it. But I think today we look back and we think that Desmosterol acted perhaps as bad, if not worse than cholesterol in terms of the oxidative process. So you basically lowered cholesterol, but the precursor went through the roof and the precursor was at least as bad, if not more damaging.

Interesting.

That's the suspicion. The point only being there is there was a precedent for you can lower cholesterol and worsen events. And so Ramsden proposes a series of mechanisms by which that might be the case with at least this polyunsaturated fat. Conversely, there is a lot of epidemiology that says the opposite, that polyunsaturated fats, whenever you substitute saturated for polyunsaturated things get better. Nobody's disputing mufa over here. The data seem unambiguously clear that mufa is the best of the three fats, both epidemiologically and experimentally. How do you think about the breakdown? Not the breakdown, but what I mean is the distribution of how one should think about distributing their fats.

I actually have seen some epidemiology that showed that PUFAs were actually lowering events more.

That's what I'm saying. The PUFA data look like it's more favorable than the sfa.

Well, even then, monounsaturated too. I've seen some of that as well. But again, you're dealing with cohort data and whatnot, and we all know the limitations there. As far as the Minnesota coronary study, it's probably sound like a cop out, but I've really gotten to the point after seeing just so many random events and studies where I go, I don't know what one study means, no matter how fun it is. Now, I have seen studies that were so compelling that I swayed my opinion a little bit, but it was usually because there was also other contextual data that made sense. The way this one came about, it's like, we don't really know how to reconcile this because even if you look at some of these omega 6 fats, and I think one of the big mechanisms that's been proposed is, well, they're going to increase inflammation because those double bonds can be oxidized, that oxidation cause inflammation. But if we look at the hard outcome data in randomized control trials where they give like linoleic acid or alpha linoleic acid or whatever, you just don't see inflammation go up if they're not increasing total calories. In fact, you usually, especially if you're replacing it for saturated fat, sometimes you see inflammation go down. So this one of those things where I go, I don't really know what it means, and I think, so I.

Don'T feel bad now. Saying, I just have no clue.

I think it's one of those things where it's. You kind of have to look at the weight of the evidence and then couple that with some of the mechanistic evidence and look at the human outcome mechanisms we can see, which is, okay, maybe we can't do a two year randomized control trial, but 12 weeks is enough time to see differences in inflammation if something's going to cause a difference in inflammation. So we can look at that. I don't know if that was his main mechanism that he proposed for how it was occurring.

It was absolutely one of them. God, it's been so long since I looked at his bigger BMJ paper. We'll attach to the paper in the show notes so people can kind of go through it. If I recall, I can almost picture it. There's a figure that kind of nicely walks through what the proposed mechanisms are.

The other thing to consider is we just talked about how when you suggest cutting something out, you replace it with other things. And I think in the last 20 or 30 years, the biggest contribution to added calories in the diet is actually added oils on a per calorie basis. The big demon right now is seed oils. I haven't even done a post about it yet because the anti seed oil crowd is just so vitriolic and so nuts that I'm like, all right, when do I want to wade into this.

Conversation and tell me about this crowd, this particular sect is of which religion?

They're definitely more towards the low carb carnivore. There's a lot of people in the low carb community who've tried to abdicate saturated fat. It's not bad or it's innocuous, you know, that sort of. Or even it's healthy. Because if you look at elderly people, people who have higher LDL cholesterol live longer. And it's like, well, that's because they're probably actually getting in enough food. And when you're elderly, it becomes a wasting problem and not a obesity problem. But that's a separate conversation. I think a lot of it stemmed from, okay, we want to make saturated fat a good guy, so somebody has to be the bad guy. So it's been seed oils. It's very, very powerful belief that some people hold on this.

And again, if you just look at top level stuff, it fits a pretty good story, which is, we never ate these seed oils. 120 years ago, they represented this much of our total fat calories. Today they're this much of Our fat calories. And look at all the things that are wrong with the world today. It's got that kind of top level story, which I think a lot of things do. Sugar has the same thing. Like we ate this much sugar in 1900. We ate this much sugar in the year 2000. Look what got worse. So it's important to understand, I guess, how. I mean, I've certainly fallen for that. I've looked at that and gone, yeah, that's gotta be the seed oils, it's gotta be the sugar, it's gotta be that. It's gotta be. It's really easy to make a boogeyman.

I think when you look through the data and try to be unbiased about it, what you see is like the continuous boogeyman is just energy toxicity. What you're dealing with is just extra energy. Because. Because people will say, well, we did the food guide pyramid and people did it and everybody got sicker. People kind of did it. They didn't really do it because the food Guide pyramid also said exercise and reduce your calorie consumption. They added in more carbohydrates, but they really didn't decrease their fat intake either. And so, yeah, as we added more calories, we had more of these problems.

I'd really love to know because unfortunately we only have food availability and waste data. So we have to use food availability and waste to take a delta to estimate what's happening. And personally always found that to be difficult. The other thing I find impossible is to estimate what I eat. I want to actually ask you about how you do it because I think you're much more dialed into this. If I could tell you at the end of a day, within a thousand calories, not a thousand, I could probably do it within a thousand. There's no way I can tell you within a day, 500 calories within what I've done. It's just not possible. I can't personally do it. I don't have that infrastructure. So I really believe that we've probably underestimated in the low fat craze how much fat didn't go down and how much low fat stuff did go up.

Well, think about going to a restaurant and if you've ever been to a restaurant where they like go to the Cheesecake Factory, you look at the calories on the dishes, you're like, how do you get that much in there? Well, carbs contribute to that. But the way you densify food is with fat. Fat is what will take something from a 500 calorie dish to a 1500 calorie dish. So when it comes to estimations.

Yeah, last night we were out and you were eating ad lib, but I know in your head the wheels were kind of telling you. Like at some point I think I even asked you and you made some comment. I got about 600 more to go. Is that literally just repetitions? Like you've done enough food logging in your life. You can look at a brownie and you can look at a sandwich and you just sort of know what you're getting.

I'll tell people, for some people, like, that's not a sustainable way to live, to just keep a running track in their head or whatnot. Let me back up just a little bit higher level view. If you want to lose fat or control body weight, you have to practice some form of restriction. Now you can pick the form of restriction you want. For me, the easiest thing for me is to be able to eat what I want within reason, what you want.

When you want, but just control the amount.

Bingo. So if you do that, you're going to have to track calories or macros or whatever it is, or you can restrict time or you can restrict a certain macronutrient group, or I'm just going to eat minimally processed food. So there's some form of restriction you have to do. Now what's interesting is none of these forms of restriction seem to emerge as being better than another in terms of adherence across a population level. So it really does boil down to the individual. So I always say you have to practice some form of restriction, but choose the form of restriction that feels the least restrictive for you. So for me, that's just been tracking macros.

Did you play much with the others?

A little bit like clean eating back in the early 2000s, which was, you know, minimally processed foods and high fiber and whatnot. And I actually found that I wouldn't say I developed binge eating disorder, but I did start kind of binge eating. If you look at the psychology of binge eating, it's really interesting. We had Professor Jake Lenard on our podcast a while back. His expertise is in eating disorders. And he said, really, there's two things that are kind of essential for an eating disorder to emerge. The first is some sort of poor body image perception. That's kind of a prerequisite. The second is hard food rules. So when you create hard food rules, it just does a weird thing in your mind.

I'm sorry, are both of those necessary or sufficient or are they necessary? And sufficient.

Both of those seem to predict when you look at the vast majority of people. I don't want to say every single person, but when you look at the vast majority of people who develop eating disorders, those are two things that are common. So what I found was that.

And sorry for my ignorance. Is binge eating defined as. Because that obviously doesn't involve purging necessarily, right? Correct. Binging just means overeating. How do we technically define binging?

I actually don't know the criteria. From what Dr. Lenardin said, it's kind of like periods of really intense food consumption followed by a lot of guilt, like feeling guilty. And with or without compensatory mechanisms. Because sometimes people exercise in response to people will throw open response.

Or deprivation would be another compensatory.

Correct. And usually you're not talking about, oh, yeah, I had an extra cookie. You're talking about like, you ate the whole box of Oreos or whatever it is, I'm guessing. But it would probably be on the magnitude of over a thousand calories at sitting unintended. And the other thing is it can be tied to stress as well. Well, that's another part of it. But for me, I found that I would just kind of go, you know, the bodybuilding magazine said I couldn't have sugar, can't have this, can't have that. The rules for what was clean seemed to be very arbitrary. But I was young and I didn't know any better. So I'm like, okay, well, I won't have these quote unquote bad foods. And the weirdest thing started happening. I actually started eating more of them. Because when I would get more of.

The things you weren't supposed to, right?

Because when I get exposed to it, I wasn't able to moderate it because it was like, I'm in college buddies bring home a pizza of the apartment, hey, Lane, you want some? Sure. Or I would try to avoid. And it would feel so bad that I'm trying to avoid, but the outcome was the same, which was I would just end up eating way more than I had intended to or even felt hungry for. But it was like this mindset of, well, this is bad. I'm not going to eat this again. This is my last time eating this because I'm going to be really serious after this. So since I've already broken the seal, might as well just go all the way. It just kept going through this, and finally I was kind of like, this seems to be really ineffective towards my goals. I wonder if it's the fact that I have pizza or the fact that I'm eating like an entire large pizza to myself, that's the problem. So at that point I was kind of like, well, let's just try this whole portion control thing and see if this works. And funny enough, I was able to modulate my body composition by eating foods I still enjoyed, but controlling portion size. And it was really interesting. I was supposed to debate, this is like seven, eight years ago. I was going to debate a bodybuilding coach at a seminar about clean eating versus flexible dieting, which is what I practice, which is tracking my macros and kind of treating it like a budget. And my opening argument, he ended up bowing out of the debate. But my opening argument was I had gone to his Facebook and looked at his cheat meals and had estimated the calories in his cheat meals in terms of a per week basis and then put up what my calories were from junk food on a per week basis and was going to show that his was actually higher because in the concentrated amount he was taking in, he was actually taking in more calories from those foods. And so my point was going to be, so you're telling me it's really bad to have a cookie, but if I binge on it, it's okay as long as I don't have it the rest of the week? Because that seems like a really odd metric.

My guess is that everyone, if we exposed everyone to all three different forms of restriction, you would have a rank order for any person of what's most effective, both biochemically and also psychologically. It's a min max. You'd have to find an optimization. What fraction of the population do you think will do best? Meaning they'll have the best physical response. And also just psychologically, we'll have the best response to caloric restriction as a tool or flexible dieting. And I say this knowing there's no data, but asking you to think about clients and what percentage part of it is.

Some people will be resistant at first and then actually really enjoy it later, which I'm sure you've seen that with fasting as well, or low carb, those sorts of things. But it really just boils down to how willing is somebody to make this part of their lifestyle. All of them have downsides. If you're on a ketogenic diet and you're going out, there's a lot you can't eat, but you can usually make do. Most places might get some funny looks from your friends and family, but you know, whatever time restricted, feeding hey, you want to go out and join us for breakfast? Can't. I'll sit and I'll drink some water. There's downsides with flexible dieting. The downside is I've got to account for it. We know the data on reporting for food people underreport by like 50%, and it's pretty consistent in the studies, and people really take that as like an affront. So I'm not a liar. I don't think that people are lying. I think people are just really horrible estimators of what they eat. If you ever want to be depressed, go way out a serving of cereal or weigh out a serving of ice cream or a serving of peanut butter. People, when they do these food recalls, a serving of ice cream is not a bowl of ice cream. A bowl of ice cream is probably three times more than a serving in terms of what people are actually taking in. So it makes total sense as to why people underestimate their energy intake. And one of the things I'll say is, even if you don't land on flexible dieting as the tool that you want to use, tracking and weighing every single thing you put in your mouth for a week is an incredibly valuable tool because it will teach you about portion control and actually you'll learn more about nutrition in that week than probably doing anything else, to be honest. Now, a lot of people don't want to do it because it's a lot. The same reason a lot of people don't want to keep a budget for their money, because they don't want to know where it's going. Because then it's kind of like, here's the mirror, and you have to look at yourself and say, ooh, where have I been spending my money? Oh, I spent $500 on Uber Eats last month, whatever it is. But then with macro tracking, again, it's very much, oh, man, I have had this so many times. People say I'm eating 1500 calories a day and can't lose weight.

It's hard to believe you can't lose weight on 1500 calories.

There was a, a metabolic ward study where they put people on 1500 calories, and there was actually one person who gained just a tiny amount of weight over, like, I can't remember the time period, but the vast majority lost weight.

I wonder what was going on with that one person endocrine issue or something like that.

I think the, the point that I, I would make is that I do think it's useful for people to try tracking for what Our app is different than a calorie tracking app because it actually gives you macros to eat based on your dietary preference and your goals. It will adjust them based on how you're progressing. So it's not just a one and done calculation. And a lot of people love that. But they also, people who've never tracked before, go, oh, my God, I didn't know what I was eating. It has a barcode scanner and all that kind of stuff, so it's much easier. Like when I first started doing this, it was me going to the grocery store with the Complete book of Food Counts and going, okay, where is it? Okay, there it is. But now, after having done this sort of stuff for 20 years, like last night, picking up that brownie. I know.

What, yeah, what's the calculation? How did you do the calculation?

I don't know what particular brownie that is, and I don't know how they made it or anything like that. But it's likely that the calorie density is going to be similar to other brownies. The carb fat ratio might be a little bit different, but the calorie density is probably going to be pretty similar. So I really just try to think about what do I think this weighs? And so last night I was kind of like, it's a little bit denser than a normal brownie. I put it about 40 grams. And so I put that in.

But hang on, you didn't put it into an app, did you?

Oh, yeah, well, you did. I just put it in my app. But I just pulled up some random brownie from Sarah Lee or whatever.

Okay, I feel a bit better now. I literally thought you were doing this in your head the whole time.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

God, how is he doing that?

The apps now make it much easier.

But then the night before when we were out at dinner or two nights ago, I didn't see you putting anything in the app.

I did it after.

But how. How did you remember what we ate? And how would you like the bone marrow and all that crazy stuff we were eating? How are you estimating all that stuff?

So there was an entry for bone marrow that I found. Now, again, the point that I think I'll make is it's very likely that some of these are inaccurate. It's going to be more accurate than just going, well, I have no idea, so I'm not gonna worry about it.

Do you think that the act of tracking it is what's putting a governor on it? In other words, do you think the fact that you had to enter 40 grams of brownie is what prevented you from having three at this point?

No, but for some people, absolutely. This is the. One of the most basic laws of science. When you monitor something, it changes. So I've done this so many times with people who have said the following. You know, like, I'm eating 1500 calories, can't lose fat. And I've said, listen, I don't expect you to do this forever, but for one week, just one week, everything you put in your mouth, weigh it on a scale and track it, and then come back to me and let's talk. One or two things happen. They go, oh, my God, I was actually eating 2,800 calories. I go, well, welcome to freedom. Because now you know that you're not broken. You're actually like, you can modify, or the other thing happens. They actually eat the amount of calories they said they were eating, and they lose three pounds.

Starving.

Exactly. So it's what monitored is what gets changed. And we know that right down on a particle basis, if you monitor it, it changes its behavior. So when you get people to monitor things, they change their behavior. It's like if somebody's like, oh, we're going to do Lane's budget for the month and we're going to put it on YouTube as a video or something, all of a sudden we're like, I want to spend money on this. It's not going to look good. You know, like, when we monitor things, it changes. But we know that about behavior, and we can use that to our advantage. So if I was getting ready for a bodybuilding show, for example, I would have to change how I do things. I couldn't just go out and just kind of guesstimate like that. I would have to get much more granular. Now, the sacrifice might be, okay, maybe I'll still go out to eat, but I'm going to have to take all the ingredients, put them on my scale, and then track it. Which sucks.

But if that's what you're doing, that's what you're doing. That's the price you have to pay to get that good.

The other sacrifice that if I want to do a bodybuilding show is, okay, I can't go out with my friends anymore. Anymore.

Or at least in the final.

Yeah. And I would say, like, in the last four weeks, I'm pretty much a hermit. All these different forms of restriction are just tools. But I do think having that accounting, looking through what you're actually having, is really educational for a lot of folks. And I would say to people who are listening or who are watching and have never done it, try to do it without judgment towards yourself. Really without judgment. Just be curious and see. I wonder what this is. And I think what you'll find is if you just enter it with that genuine curiosity, you'll find some things out that'll be really helpful for you. And you also learn so much about portion sizes that you'll go, whoa, I didn't realize that restaurants serve such massive portion sizes. It's going to sound bad, but I can't tell you how many times I've been eating something and go, yeah, I'm good, I don't need any more.

And are you still hungry when you push it away?

You know, being in tune with your hunger signals, plus some bit of monitoring is helpful. The one other thing I'll say is being in tune with hunger signals is great, but that's also hard when you're eating processed food. Energy dense, hyper palatable food. You know, previously based on our hunger signals, we could autoregulate what we ate because we're in a situation where food wasn't energy dense enough. You would have to become uncomfortable just.

Based on the volume.

Just based on the volume of food you were eating. And even like up until the 1950s, we had hyper processed food, whatever, but you had to walk down to the bakery to get it. You didn't have it in really nice available.

And I still think the serving sizes were a lot smaller.

Oh yeah. If you look at dinner plates from like the early 1900s, they're like this and then they're like this. And now you got dinner plates that are just massive.

I think anybody listening to this who's been to Europe will recognize this. But. But it never ceases to amaze me. No matter how many times I go to Italy or something like that, I can't get over how small the portions are. And it's really wonderful because I'm just a glutton. I think it's part of it is like you grow up as an immigrant kid, you eat what's on your plate. We do not throw out food in this house. And how many times do I get that lecture about those kids in Africa that don't have anything and it's like you're going to sit here until you eat that thing on your plate. And it wasn't like I was being forced to eat bad food. It was liver and spinach and stuff I hated. But the clean plate was just a part of your mindset.

Same grew up in a lower middle class family and so it was very much like, we don't waste food in this house.

I think there's still a little bit of the, you know, I was joking about it yesterday. Like I eat off my kids plates now it's like, what, you're not throwing that out?

Give me that.

Do you think you'll do another bodybuilding show? Do you plan to do that anymore?

Right now I consider myself on a long off season right now. There's just so many things going on business wise and I'm kind of in a place where I'm very grateful for that and I want to get it while I can get it. And hopefully we can get to the point where we're working because we want to work, not because we feel like we have to work. I mean, that's kind of the dream. I love what I do. I don't see myself ever retiring. Retiring, but it would be nice to be able to have a little more freedom to go and do the things that I really am super passionate about doing and not having to worry about doing some of the more granular stuff. So bodybuilding, getting ready for a show would take a significant amount of energy and time, so. And powerlifting already does that. It's just that I can do that without the brain fog and the, the mood swings and all that kind of stuff. If you look at case studies of bodybuilders by the time they're at show, literally every single case study on natural bodybuilders shows that they're hypogonadal by the time they hit stage. And I'm somebody like my testosterone, I've had it measured probably a half dozen times in the last five years. The lowest it's ever been is 900. And the highest it's been, I think I hit almost 1100. People will say, well see, he's not drug free or whatever. But I would tell you my LH is normal and my FSH is normal and all that kind of stuff. But when I was competing in bodybuilding, it was under 300. When I was that close to a show, think about the hungriest you've ever been in your life. And now imagine that feeling doesn't leave you for weeks. And the lowest energy, what's the absolute.

Nadir of calories you're consuming? At the lowest.

So the lowest I've ever been at this level of lean mass was 1900.

How many grams of protein are in that? 1900?

260 grams of protein. So I was like, around 100 or under 100 grams of carbohydrate a day and 30, 40 grams of fat, if I recall correctly.

What does that look like practically? What's the actual foods you're eating?

Egg whites, chicken breast, some Greek yogurt. Fat free Greek yogurt. You have to be very careful with your fats when you're that low calorie.

Meaning you have to be careful you don't go too low on the fats.

That's part of it. At a certain point, you know, the idea is, well, keep your fats high enough in your home. Well, at a certain point, you're like, all right, yeah, I'd like to have my hormones there, but I also need to get lean enough, meaning be careful.

That too much fat isn't sneaking in.

Oh, yeah. I mean, just eating something that's like 7 grams of fat, which by all accounts is a low fat item. I had to be careful about that because it could just sneak up very quickly.

You can't have nuts or something like that.

Oh, no, no, no, no. So the low energy, too. I can literally remember being on my couch. I was probably three weeks out from the show. I had just gotten done training, sitting on my couch, and the remote control was probably. I just, like, sat down, like, literally, like, plopped down. Remote control was probably, you know, five feet away. And the Real Housewives of Some county was playing I abhor that show. And I sat and watched the entire show because I was not willing to get up to go get that remote because I was that exhausted.

And how many weeks into that degree of caloric restriction do you think you were at that point?

That was like 20 weeks in, not at 1900 calories. My calories have progressively come down. Really, It's. It's mostly a body fat issue. I've had clients who were able to eat higher calories and get really lean at a certain point of body fat level. It just doesn't matter. If you're that lean and your leptin is that low, your testosterone's that low. Eric Helms describes contest prep as like, you're circling a drainage and you're just trying to delay going down the drain as long as possible, but eventually you go down the drain.

So how do you get the energy to get on stage? Is that basically one big push of carbs shortly enough before you go on stage that it's not going to show up in your physique?

I will say there are spurts where you feel okay when you're in those dregs of contest prep. I'll also say that for me to get from say 15% on calipers to 7% on calipers, it's not difficult at all. In fact, I had gone up a weight class in powerlifting a few years ago and then came back down. It was about a 30 pound weight drop. So 15 to 7, easy. From 7 to. And I think the lowest I ever calibered was 2%. And to everybody watching, no, I don't think I was 2%, probably more like 5 or 6. But to go from 7 to 3 or 2, which is an absolute lower amount of fat loss, was infinitely more difficult. The best way to describe it is like you get a fresh roll of toothpaste to get out some toothpaste. Very easy. Then as that toothpaste tube gets emptier and emptier, how much effort do you have to put in to just squeeze out that last little bit of toothpaste? It's magnitudes higher than at the beginning. And contest prep is very much like that. But you do have times where you have energy because you still have to.

Train two or three hours a day.

Right. And trust me, like, that is actually the part I despise the most of contest prep is at a certain point, I just don't like training anymore. I'm just doing it for energy expenditure and retaining of muscle. I'm not doing it because I'm passionate about training and I'm somebody who I love to train. It's like my favorite thing in the world. But there will be times you go and you have a little bit better workouts. I did periodize my nutrition, so I would have some higher calorie days on days that were more demanding for training. Usually like lower body training days. As far as like getting on stage. Well, one thing is I never cut water for bodybuilding shows. A lot of people do that. I think it's silly because think about a muscle is 70% water, and in your native state, you keep more water inside your muscle cell than you do outside your muscle cell. And this is just basic Le Chatelier's principle. If you begin removing more fluid via diuretic or fluid restriction or sodium restriction, well, what happens? Well, sure, you remove it from the subcutaneous layer, but you're also going to remove it in the same proportion from the intracellular layer. All you're going to do is just.

Become flatter in the intravascular layer. You get hypotensive.

Exactly. So one thing that helped me is that I didn't Cut water. So I felt I never was like dehydrated or anything like that. Didn't cut sodium. And I could go into the physiology behind why I think it's silly to cut sodium as well. I didn't take a diuretic, but yes, during peak week, food went back up.

Because the idea is, are diuretics even legal?

In testing, you could take OTC diuretics. So you could take like dandelion root and those sorts of things. It's very funny. Like, the logic behind why people cut water and sodium. I think it's like somebody just saw a figure of the sodium potassium pump in a book and they're like, oh, see, the cell wants to get sodium out and potassium in, so let's cut sodium and load potassium. And it's like if you actually look at the physiology, if you get the sodium to potassium ratio too low, it'll actually cause you to retain water as well. You'll actually start reabsorbing water in the distal tubule of the kidney. I think that that helped with my energy and whatnot. But definitely food in the days before the competition comes up. Because at that point, if you're still trying to lose body fat that close, it's probably not going to go well for you. I'll usually, in peak week, I'll start feeling better as opposed to worse. And then on the day of the show, you know, I'm usually having 3 to 400 grams of carbohydrates, something like that. It's very interesting because a lot of the dogmas in bodybuilding originated in, like, wrestling and endurance running. The correlation was kind of like, well, wrestlers cut water and they look really lean, so we should cut water. And I'll always use the example of. If you've ever seen Georges St. Pierre, when he weighed in, he looked gaunt. I mean, just didn't look healthy, not very muscular. And then the day of the fight, 24 hours later, I mean, he looks like a bodybuilder. He looks pretty jacked. Well, that will just show you what drinking water, eating enough sodium and carbohydrate will do for your muscle fullness, because muscles are 70% water. So I think all that stuff kind of helped me have a little bit more longevity in that sport insofar as, like, I wasn't beating my body up with fluid restriction.

So you're 40 now. When you sort of think about yourself being 60 or 70, how do you think about aging in terms of the reductions in strength, which is obviously an important part of your identity? And the change in physique. Do you think that it's going to be a difficult transition? And I'm not suggesting that the alternative to what you're doing now is sitting on a couch all day drinking beer, of course. But invariably, whether you're Arnold Schwarzenegger or anyone who's really fit, you're not going to look the same when you're 60. I think about this a lot. I bug my wife or not bug her. I just say all the time, I'm like, God, I can't stand my face. Like, it's so wrinkled and beaten up from all the sun. And she's like, well, you don't do anything about it. She's like, you could go and see a dermatologist. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just too lazy. I think it's just easier to sit here and sort of gripe about it. Just have these vain thoughts of, well, the older I get, the older I look.

I can sit here and say, oh, no, I'll be fine. Of course I'm going to struggle with it. Look at any athlete. That is your identity for such a long period of your life. Now, I think I'm fortunate in that I've kind of had multiple identities, so I've had academic influencer, entrepreneur, powerlifter, bodybuilder, scientist. So I think it'll be a little bit easier for me because I already have other things that I care about. Being a dad, I already have other things I care about, but of course it'll be hard. Nobody who's successful doesn't have any ego whatsoever. And so I'm not going to lie. Like, when I load up a bar with £500 in a commercial gym and I'm squatting, that, like, part of me feels like a badass. You know what I mean? And so, yeah, there's going to be part of me that absolutely miss that. That's why you have the guy who's like, well, you know, when I was in high school, I 405 or whatever it is, or squatted 600 until my knees hurt. My goal is to not be that guy other than if somebody asked me about what I've done to do it. But I think really what's going to be most important for me is just trying to not judge it and just find other things that I can be interested in. And I'll still always lift, I'll always train. I love it too much. To not do it makes me feel too good. And quite frankly, like, if you look at some of the people who have been doing it for a really long time. I got a great compliment the other day because I was in the gym and I just kind of casually brought up. I turned 40 this year and Lily was like, what? I was like, yeah. And she's like, oh, I would have guessed that you were like mid-30s. Oh, thank you. I think resistance training, as far as, like, keeping you young, that's one of the best things you can do.

I feel like for both men and women, it is a fountain of youth, both cosmetically and also internally.

Looking at some of the. The bodybuilders out there, notwithstanding, like, some of the drug stuff, but some of them still look really good into their 50s if they continue to do it. Now, there's a lot of guys who get out of it and kind of once that identity is gone, they just go, what's the point of putting energy into lifting? But, you know, like, Jay Cutler's in.

His 40s, and Jay Cutler is my favorite of the recent bodybuilders. He's the only bodybuilder of that group that I follow on Instagram. I enjoy looking at him. He still looks to be in insane.

Shape if you look at him. He goes trains every day. He still eats really well. He likes that lifestyle and got used to it and it shows. Yeah, it'll definitely be a hard transition. I'm sure I'll find something to bury myself in and who knows, we'll see.

Well, we went a little longer than we expected to. As always, we've cut ourselves out of a few extracurricular activities I had planned this afternoon, but maybe we'll have time tomorrow. So anyway, Lane, awesome to sit down with you. Thanks again for making the time.

Yeah, thanks for having me. It was fun.

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