S1:E7 - Alexander Juan Antonio Cortes - Enterprise Fitness Podcast Episode 7

This is the show we let you inside the doors of a world-renowned personal training studio. Welcome to the Enterprise Fitness Podcast. I'm Mark Ottobre, owner and founder, here to introduce this episode with master enterprise trainer Rhys Adams and our guest today, Alexander Duan Antonio Cortez. Alexander lives and works by the mantra of being stronger. In 2008, After injuring himself, he needed a cane just to walk. But after reading Dave Tate's Under the Bar, he made a choice that would never— that he would never be weak again. Coming from a non-traditional athletic background with a degree in dance choreography, Alexander is an intense study of the physiology and science of how and why we train. He has trained hundreds of clients as a personal trainer since 2009. Alexander is a personal trainer located in Hollywood, California. In addition to training clients in person, he coaches online with John Meadows of Mountain Dog. John Meadows, we obviously had on the show, was one of our very early episodes. And he also writes for Elite Fitness Systems along with his own blog. Personally, I love this podcast. I found myself listening to it in the car, nodding along to pretty much everything that Alexander was saying, especially as it relates to the art and the science of coaching. So I think you guys are going to get a lot out of this, a lot of things that, you know, I definitely agree upon and some really just really good content and good reminders. Like I found myself on these, yeah, like why don't I, why don't I say that more? Why don't I do that more? It's just really, really, really good stuff. This podcast. If you like the backing track that you can hear underneath my lovely voice, this is the official Enterprise Fitness anthem produced by my buddy Jamin. And on the track that we're going to release, this is the instrumental obviously, we have Prodigal Son from Wu-Tang Clan/Sons of Man who raps on it and it's absolutely fantastic. I'm so I'm so happy with the track. It's our anthem. When you guys listen to it, you'll be like, oh God, that's pretty cool. You know, the guys at Enterprise thought I kind of lost my marbles a little bit getting a track produced, but then they heard it and they're like, yeah, like, that's dope, I get it. So enough about the track. I hope you guys really enjoy this podcast, and please leave a review at the end of it and let us know what you think on iTunes and Facebook. Share that stuff, social media town, yo. Without further ado, let's bring it on. Bye.

Welcome and thank you for coming on Enterprise Podcast today, Alexander.

Thank you for having me.

For our listeners, are you able to give us a bit of a background on how you first got involved in the fitness industry?

Yes, so background-wise, I started training in 2009. At a 24 Hour Fitness, which is a very popular chain in the US. I was actually, I was a dance major in college, in university. My actual degree is in performance choreography. And the, I guess the short version of the story, I had some pretty, really severe injuries very early on in my collegiate career, so to speak. And I was forced to rehab myself. And then the educational process of doing that It got me very interested in training. And I always had a, I've always really enjoyed teaching just as sort of an art form unto itself. And personal training seemed sort of this to be a natural avenue to do that. So I transitioned into doing that, I believe junior year of university. That's 2009. And then I have not stopped since. So that was the start.

How did you injure yourself, Alex? And what did you do?

Yeah, so the first injury, major injury I had was I was late to class and pretty dehydrated. And I was dancing. I was doing a piece of choreography that required you to go into the splits, front splits, which I'd done many times before. This was not a test of flexibility for me, per se. But that morning, I was, let's just say, under-recovered. Underslept, dehydrated, and I went into the splits and my left hamstring tendon on the leg ruptured off the bone. And that was a— that was very debilitating for, you know, obvious reasons. And then that took a while to heal because I kept reinjuring it where I didn't realize the extent of the damage until literally like 2 or 3 years later. I thought it was a hamstring tear. Which, you know, looking back now was silly of me since there was never any bruising of any kind. It was actually the tendon. But that caused a lot of, uh, this— let's just say movement issues. And then that kind of got better somewhat, but approximately a year later I broke my left foot. And, uh, after that happens, it was a hamstring rupture, the tendon rupture, and then a broken foot on this— on the left leg. And after that, um, the left side did not work right. And it still doesn't to this day. I had another injury I sustained. That was 2007— that's no, 2008, 2009. And then in 2013, I had an injury to the leg, to the femoral head of the femur. I gouged out a piece of cartilage along with some bone loss. But, you know, that was later on. But yeah, the left leg just didn't work right after the two injuries. So that took me out of the dream of the professional career. But it got me intensely into training and the sort of the development of the body since I had to really do everything I could to keep myself functioning together.

Yeah, how have you gone about, I guess, your training now? Is there anything that you can and can't do?

You know, there really isn't. I just, I have to keep things fairly light. I know that's, you know, it's one of those things where you can always get called a pussy for, you know, training light. But, stuff that's going like, let's just say, anything below 6 on squats, in terms of 6 reps or less, that's going to the 85% plus range, it will just hurt the next day in the bone. And that's something that I really have done everything I can to mitigate and build up the musculature of the legs to a decent degree. But, the higher intensity ranges are still just very aggravating. And yeah, it's kind of funny since it forced me to essentially train sort of like an older lifter since, you know, because especially in the past, my joints were compromised on that side. I wasn't able to go heavy like a lot of young guys like to do. I couldn't kill myself in the gym just because I would hurt later on and it would really compromise recovery. So, I was really forced to study the methodologies of older lifters or let's just say mature lifters because they train for progression but also longevity versus when you're young and in your 20s, you can sort of train for progression but also train to be stupid and get away with it to a degree. From essentially an early age, I was 18, 19 when I injured myself, I was not able to get away with anything at all.

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I've got a herniated disc in my back and yeah, I look at some people and I go, how do you get away with that?

Yeah. I mean, those are the things that— Yeah. And that's not to say that to discourage anybody from powerlifting or wanting to push the maximal intensity. But there's a risk and there's a reward. There's a cost and there's a benefit. And for a lot of that stuff, unless it's really, let's just say, programmed out and for an intent purpose, a lot of it just serves the ego. It doesn't really serve, I guess you'd say, gains at all. So, I mean, for a lot of guys, everyone knows that guy that's never gotten hurt until he gets hurt. Yeah. It's true. When you're in your 20s, it's very easy to say, "Oh, I've never been hurt. My friends have never been hurt," what have you. If you get into your 30s, you get into your 40s, that's when it catches up to you. Or you're the 34-year-old that swears up and down that you've never had an injury, and then you're 35 and then suddenly you tear a rotator cuff. Yeah, so some things do take, you know, some amount of time to show up, but they do end up showing up eventually.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. How did you come to start writing for EliteFTS? How did that come about?

Yeah, EliteFTS, so I was— that was in 2012. I submitted a series of articles to them which actually didn't have anything to do with training per se. They were I guess you could call it almost like strength poetry. They were more philosophical in tonality at the time. I was between jobs and I was actually at a career low point. I was between jobs and I wrote these two articles about sort of trying to find resiliency at a low point in your life. And then the articles were surprisingly popular. And there was one, two, and there was a third one actually that was about sort of like garage strongman training. I was training out of my garage at the time. And they proved surprisingly popular and I was asked to be a columnist with the site as essentially a personal training authority. So that was the end of 2012, 2013, and then I haven't stopped writing for them since.

I have noticed that—

brought me— say what?

I have noticed that I looked on EliteFTS page and there's countless articles by you. They just keep going.

Yeah, there's a lot. That was what brought me into contact with John Meadows as well, since I ended up meeting him at one of the seminars back in 2013. So we made that connection.

Yeah, with your background in dancing and ballet, how did you find it to complement how you train your clients? Has it complemented?

Massively so. The thing with dance, like I said, as both an art form and as a physical form of study, as a dancer you're very, very accustomed and entrained to observe movement on a very fine level. And when I say movement, I don't just mean athletic movement, the sensibility of competitive sport, but really movement as a concept that you can move your body. You can create form in any possible direction—up, down, sideways, internally, externally rotation—in a way that goes beyond biomechanics and conventional physics of how I think most people that are athletic background conceptualize movement. There's far more to it than just sagittal, frontal, and transverse. Much, much more. So, when I got into training and then especially relative to bodybuilding, which really bodybuilding obviously there's a huge emphasis on not just the aesthetic aspect but muscle control and really targeting the area that you're trying to work. I found that it had this phenomenal carryover or transference, however you want to say it. I don't want to say it gave me this incredible edge, but It definitely, I think it set me apart in the way I instruct and teach since what I see when I watch someone exercise is I know much more comprehensive in detail than I think what a conventional trainer sees. That's not to say that I'm better than anybody, but it's just because I've been watching bodies in motion for so long in so many different ways for the last over a decade, my observational skills are just a bit more developed in that sense. And that's something that especially for bodybuilding is very, very crucial since for a lot of young guys, especially today, there's been a loss of appreciation for aesthetic, but also a loss of appreciation for muscle control in a way. Just because you have various popular figures in the sport that really emphasize how much they can push weight. And they're huge. They're big guys. Without question. Well, relative to whether that works for most people is usually not the case. I mean, obviously, Ronnie Coleman being a preeminent example. I mean, he's enormous, 300+ pounds and freakishly strong. But that approach for the majority of people would just injure you. And even for him, it ended up injuring him ultimately in the end, unfortunately. And if you look, if you contrast that to the historical training of, let's just say guys like Arnold or Zane or Franco or Bill Pearl going earlier than that or even Lee Haney. They were phenomenally strong, but their strength was a byproduct of their focus upon musculature, not the other way around. The paradigm of get strong, get big is, I don't want to say false, but it's very misleading. If you get muscular and you focus your training upon muscularity, you'll be strong as an outcome. That will happen. How strong, I mean, that depends on your genetics. But there's no doubt that adding more mass begets your ability to move mass. But if you focus upon moving mass and not essentially your own, you're gonna run into issues. Yeah, what I've noticed— I think I just went off on a big tangent.

No, that's okay. That's why we've got you on. So what I've come to notice is they've done tests on the bent over barbell row. And basically what they found was, as the weight got progressively above what you were comfortable handling, you actually recruited your assisting muscles more than the actual target muscles. So often people think, hey, I'm actually doing a 150 kilo barbell row, but let's be honest, they're actually using their forearms and biceps to a greater degree than the lats. So they're probably actually getting more activation out of their lats going lighter. Does that make sense?

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, in that situation, I would use— I encounter this a lot with clients or people I've worked with. Well, they'll be insistent upon the braggadocio of like, I can lift X amount of weight. And I'm like, if you can lift X amount of weight with supposedly good technique, how come you don't have the muscles to match it? You see this a lot with, let's say, dumbbell rows. Let's say someone, I can row the 50, 60, 70 kilos. If you can truly row that, you should have extremely developed lats, upper back, I would expect. But you see guys in the gym all the time. They're just heaving at the weight and there's no real back contraction taking place that's gonna build muscle. They're just testing how much weight they can move. And again, that's not to say that you should just train light, but if you did lighten the weight and develop the muscle control to actually move it, A year from now, you probably would grow some muscle within, let's just say, your back. Same thing with the bent over barbell row. But people, a lot of times, are just unwilling to accept that what they're doing is not working. So, they will persist until, I guess, reality runs up against disillusionment in most cases.

A lot of people I find, they might contract away to move it, but they don't contract it through. Then they sort of just catch it as they bring it back down. Have you noticed that as well?

Yes. Yes. That's something that you have to earn the right, the way I phrase it, to move a weight dynamically. Or to cheat. This is something I really emphasize with my clients. There's a right and a wrong way to cheat moving a weight. There's a right and a wrong way to accelerate the weight and to catch it. And there's a wrong way to do that where you're essentially just jerking the weight, as I say. But the foundation for anyone that's really looking to get muscular, regardless of whether you wanna be a competitive bodybuilder or not, it is that fine motor control for being able to do a lat, do a back movement, do a bicep exercise, a chest exercise, what have you, And truly innervate that target muscle and use that to initiate the movement. And if you can do that and develop the range of motion and that capacity, you will grow. I've never had a client that I failed to put muscle on. But the predominant problem that I think I see for most of the DRE people is not that the movements they're doing are bad or that they are hard gainers. You just can't. I can't gain any muscle mass. It's just I have bad genetics. You don't have bad genetics. You have bad training. Your execution, your performance of what you're doing is not to your development at all. That is what's holding you back.

Yeah. I do agree with that.

Again, it runs in people's— Yeah.

Go ahead. Sorry. You keep going.

I was going to say it's one of those things where it's hard to point out to people because you could be training hard. Like I said, people get their personality and their ego wrapped up in it too. You can be trained very hard, but it can be wildly ineffective at the same time. But then when you point that out to people, they're insistent, "Well, I trained really hard, so that has to work." Which then of course becomes this funny fallacy. If you trained so hard and it had to work, then why hasn't it worked?

You couldn't have stated that any better. What type of clients do you deal with mostly, Alex?

I have something of a variety. I'm not going to say, oh, I train every kind of client. I don't. My predominant clients now are in person. I work with a lot of female population just because that just happens to be the demographic of where I live. Currently in the gym, that I help run, Relentless Performance. So, for the women, the focus is pretty much hypertrophy year-round, 24/7. We do have some women that are, let's just say, fat loss. It's more so of a recomposition rather than dramatically needing to lose significant weight. And then online, I would say, again, these recreational lifters that are largely physique-minded They wanna build more muscle. I do occasionally have people that come to me that, let's say, are semi-competitive, maybe with CrossFit. And they have some muscle movement issues. I know movement issues has become a real popular thing now. But predominantly it's that. It's physique people or it's populations that just wanna build muscle mass. And for the ones that occasionally have the movement issues, Very oftentimes, it goes back to just how they're exercising and they don't realize that muscularly they've trained themselves into a state of muscular imbalance. So, that's not so hard to fix. It just becomes a standpoint of if you're doing a lot of squatting and you're not doing any, let's just say, lateral movement ever, you're probably going to have some, let's just say, exterior, interior hip pain or you're going to have weak adductors. Your gluteals will be underdeveloped. So, for the majority of people, it's a perspective of just having them do what they haven't been doing and need to do or just filling in the hole, so to speak, in their programming where maybe their program is addressing most things but it's not addressing everything. And while there is no such thing as a perfect program, there is such a thing as programming continuity where you can keep yourself healthy and still continuously progress. I know for a lot of people, they seem to— I've noticed this a lot in the last few years. People follow a program. They follow a program. The program creates issues. And they have to reprogram to fix the prior program. I've seen that a lot with the CrossFitters where they'll get stronger doing, I guess, CrossFit programming. But then a few months later, they'll have to retrograde and go back and fix what the imbalanced programming caused prior. This is stuff that with proper periodization you can address from the outset and avoid. Periodization, I'm not going to say it's a lost art, but there's more to it than just slotting in exercises and saying, "Do this." You really have to tailor it to the person. It's very case by case.

And have an idea of where you want them in the end and obviously track back from there.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You have to create an outcome. And that's something that I work in very long phases with people. Generally about 6 months is usually my— I'll tell people that's my preferred minimum training time. That's because you can do stuff in 12 weeks, but it's still only 12 weeks. But you set an outcome of sorts of qualities you'd like to develop. Or just let's say it's muscles. Then you work backwards from there. And then it's a feedback-driven process. The thing that I always keep up with with clients, it's not just did they do the workout, but how was the training performance? Since modifications, I'm not changing stuff every day, but I'm changing things usually around every 2 to 3 weeks. And movements will be taken out or rep ranges will be increased or decreased. Or even the performance of exercises will be altered depending on how they're doing. Obviously, I'm not there in person, but that's something that you you can't just assign workouts or assign a program and expect that it's going to be optimal in what delivers. It may be good. And for a newbie, you can kind of do anything. But for an intermediate lifter, you really have to develop that training instinct of knowing what works not only for your body, but what works in regards to 3 months, 6 months, 1 year from now, where are you going to be? And it just goes back to that longevital perspective. You have to really think about Muscle building, it's a marathon. You have to consider this long-term and then work through that paradigm. It can't just be a 12-week get big program. In reality, the accretion process for muscle, you're talking about adding at best a gram or two a week of actual dry tissue. Not glycogen, not increased water retention, not inflammation, but adding truly muscle tissue, you're talking about grams of muscle. And that process, in 3 weeks or 3 months, you're not gonna add that many grams. 6 months, you add a few more. But 3 months, the majority of changes are gonna be more morphological in appearance versus true muscle gain. So regardless of whether you're enhanced or not, even if you're enhanced, maybe, might be a slightly different story. But these are all things that just don't get accounted for for people. Or the people are just fallacious and they're thinking, that stuff is going to go way faster than it's going to go. And, you know, it will not, you know.

On average, how many phases would you stick with hypertrophy as the main focus before changing to a different phase? I know you said— am I correct in saying that you change the phase typically every 2 to 3 weeks, or is that just— you might just change, uh, one aspect of the program?

Yeah, hypertrophy, um, [Speaker:MARK OTTOBREMER] I'll be, I'll say, I'm gonna be controversial. You can train for hypertrophy year-round, but the manner in which you do so has to change. So, I mean, just to give a basic example. So, typically for more novice-level clients, I'll actually start them out with strength endurance. And this is very classical linear periodization. Now, a strength endurance phase, let's just say the repetition ranges are 10 to 30. That will build muscle. People have this idea that if you do something for high reps, it's just working endurance, not building muscle. Absolutely, that will build muscle. The research bears out that muscle can be built with anything from 20% of loading up to 90%. Some things are more effective than others. But again, when you look at studies, studies are looking at controls and they're testing things. In relative isolation within a short-term period of time. If I talk about building hypertrophy over a year, let's say for my female clients like I have right now that I've worked with, I started them off when I first arrived at this gym with a 3-month essentially strength endurance phase. All the reps were 10 to 30. Now, what this does is that this improves the muscle's ability to utilize oxygen. Oxygen is a rate-limiting factor for muscle growth. Not even just for muscle growth, but for every metabolic process in the body. If your ability to use oxygen is poor, let's just say your stamina is poor, your endurance is poor, your ability to grow muscle will be compromised. There's a reason why strength endurance is that first phase within the textbook examples of periodization. So, I start someone off with a strength endurance phase. And this is even for intermediate people. All the reps are high. The workouts are very metabolically taxing. But I improve their ability to utilize oxygen. I have angiogenesis take place. So angiogenesis meaning higher reps will promote the growth of capillaries, essentially blood vessels within the muscle. That improves blood flow. So, I'm improving your ability to use oxygen. I'm improving blood flow to the muscle. I'm improving the endurance, let's just say type 1 fibers if you want to say that. So, I set you up where you have this very developed work capacity. You have improved blood flow. Your stamina for any other phase beyond that will be pretty excellent. Then I can transition into a more classical rep range, let's just say 6 to 15. Yeah. 6 to 15, that is generally agreed upon, let's just say, by the authorities in both the body of evidence. 6 to 15 is sort of the relative sweet spot zone for muscle building. So, we go from a higher rep phase down to, let's just say, more moderate to high repetition range. That's another 3 months. So now we're at 6 months. Following that, we've built up some degree of tissue. Now I can say, all right, let's maybe utilize triples or sets of 5, something like that. Or maybe we can run a strength peaking program. We can improve your neurological coordination that way. Again, we're still going to be building some muscle mass through this phase incrementally by a process of accretion. So now we've gone from endurance. Classical, let's just say, mass building. We're now into a strength phase, let's just say 6 to 9 months later, in which we're improving neurological coordination. We're improving your mental attitude towards handling heavier weight. We're introducing a new novel stimulus. And then, at the end of that 9 months now, you're stronger than you've ever been. You're more muscular than you've ever been. We've kept you within a hypertrophy phase essentially the entire year. And where do we go from there? Now we can move on to something that's, let's just say, power-based. And again, this is a long time frame. And this is a stage where I could say it may be a benefit to do stuff. It may be a benefit to actually do power cleans as muscle-building movements. Or maybe a benefit that you can do dynamic effort work. There's such things as, say, like, conjugate bodybuilding. Maybe you could. Maybe you could. But again, this is very dependent upon a lot of factors. Or we could take that strength phase and just transition right back into a higher rep phase. You could repeat the cycle. Or based upon your personal experience with the training, I could get your feedback. And I'll have your feedback as a coach, my observations. And we can design something that's a little more customized. Let's say like a Fred Hatfield style workout. And we can utilize all the rep ranges from as low as 3 to as high as 20. And we can move into an integrated bodybuilding scheme. But that's done over a period of time. And throughout this whole thing, what is the predominant focus? Hypertrophy, hypertrophy, hypertrophy, hypertrophy. But we're doing it upon a continuum.

Very, very good. The listeners will love that one. In your opinion, Alex, what are the main important aspects for hypertrophy, in your opinion? If you had to give, say, let's say 3 important aspects.

[Speaker:MARK OTTOBREMER] So the first predominant one, let's just assume that you are training. So the foundational need for hypertrophy, you have to recover, i.e., sleep. If sleep recovery is compromised, then whether the workouts are good or bad, the effects thereof, they're not going to happen at the same rate or they're not going to happen at all. That's something that it's so basic. It's like, really? Sleep? Yeah, sleep. If you're not getting enough sleep or if you're just under-recovered, what do you really expect to be occurring? You're not giving your body the time to actually build the muscle. Training, whether the training is good training or bad training, training is fundamentally, it's a catabolic process. You're breaking down tissue. That's very basic. There's no such thing as a muscle-building workout. There are muscle-promoting workouts. So, if you're not recovering enough, that's not gonna happen. That'd be number 1. You gotta sleep. Number 2, I would say, I would actually say, I would put training over calories, in fact. This will sound controversial, and I know it will. But I do believe you can actually build muscle in a calorie deficit, i.e., a small one with a caveat that you still have to have adequate protein intake. But I don't truly, truly know that you absolutely need to be in a surplus to build muscle. This is because of this based on results I've seen with dietetics clients, one of the companies I work with. And I'll readily say that that's like I'm throwing it out there and don't quote me as I totally believe that you can build muscle in a hard deficit, but I think the body is capable of things beyond the current body of evidence. Yeah, but number 2 would be training. So, for hypertrophy, training is gonna be a determinant factor. If the training isn't effective, it's not gonna happen. If the training is effective enough, it will. The majority of people that struggle with muscle growth, it is assuming that they are sleeping enough and let's just say getting adequate protein intake. Their lack of musculature is because their training is ineffective. Then number 3 would be, let's just say, caloric need. So long as protein intake is adequate enough and calories are roughly around maintenance, you can build muscle. It may not be as fast as if you're in a surplus, but so long as the, let's just say, the substrate needs for amino acids and all that jazz are being met, something will be built. And again, it can only be built so fast. But with that in place, with sleep in place and training in place and, I guess to say, nutrition in place, you will have growth. The thing that finds people is either lack of sleep or training is lousy. Nutrition, I don't think honestly is that hard to do. You could reasonably eat nothing but peanut butter and chicken breast all day and you'll gain weight. And especially for men, just, if you're a man and you get fat, your body will add lean tissue. That's something most people don't realize. A lot of guys don't necessarily realize that fully. If you were to just gain 30 pounds right now eating like absolute shit, you'd actually put on muscle without necessarily trying to. Your body will add muscle mass without being necessarily fully prompted, just by the sake that it has a big surplus. So nutrition's not truly hard. No, it's the recovery and it's the stimulus that gets people.

I agree with your opinion on nutrition being that you don't necessarily have to be in a surplus to put on muscle. I've seen it with my clients time and time again as well. Obviously getting ready for a competition.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where, again, I don't want to say you're going to build a ton of muscle mass while you're losing body fat, but if you can maintain a positive nitrogen balance and maintain— let's just say this is very bro science— if you can maintain a positive nitrogen balance and maintain a level of, let's just say, circulating amino acids in the blood at all times, you can be in a deficit and your lean mass will increase a little bit. I mean, I've seen it with this having people test their body composition a few weeks into a dieting phase and it's always surprising but they'll actually go up a little bit in lean body mass. It's not super dramatic. It's not like you're gaining 10 pounds while cutting, but it does happen. You know, the downside to that is the vectors that you'd have to control for in a lab setting, it would never allow that to happen since, you know, by the nature of running a laboratory experiment or let's say like a double-blank trial, everything has to be controlled. And, you know, it just, it wouldn't be, it would, I mean, it's again like I said, you can't create that in that setting, but on an n=1 anecdotal basis, you can. I think any coach that's been doing this long enough could probably attest to that.

Alex, have you got a favorite training system you like to use hypertrophy? Have you used John Meadows, or do you— have you developed one of your own that you've had some good success with? Obviously, I know that you periodize everything, but any systems in particular?

[Speaker] You know, I actually do not. I don't believe in having a system in that way. And that's not to say that training is disorganized. But it's because I always program on a case-by-case basis for everybody. There isn't any one thing that I sort of fall back to often enough. You know, with Meadow's, you know, let's just say style of training, with the mountain duck style training, the main thing that I take from that is the, Sequencing is hugely important. Sequencing of movements and intensity techniques. Those are two things that can really amplify the training effects of a program. Beyond that though, like I said, I mentioned Fred Hatfield's programming where he uses an integrated approach utilizing all the rep schemes. I've used that when appropriate. I've used that paradigm when appropriate for certain clients. I've utilized total body training when appropriate for people. The one thing that I do utilize quite often with my, let's just say, general population clients is just a very simple alternating A/B scheme of upper body, lower body. That's not going to get you to, let's just say, competitive physique athlete level. But for general population, it often surprises people when they, let's just say, consult with me or talk to me like, "What do you do for a general pop?" If they want to build muscle, I literally alternate between lower body and upper body. That's it. And the workouts are just fairly high volume. We're talking about around 30 to 40— let's say 30 to 40+ working sets. But that scheme, and again, it goes down to sequencing, it allows you to address a lot of, say, common general population issues. The clients get a lot of stimulus. And if they're only training, let's say, 3 times a week, they end up training their whole body. Or they end up training their upper and lower halves on an alternating schedule. And I've had very excellent results with that for a very decent period of time. And I've tried other things where I try and keep it total body all the time. Or I try and set it up where, OK, we'll make it a little more specific where you have, let's say, a push day and a pull day. Then a hip dominant day. And a knee, let's say, quad dominant day. And it's funny because I just always end up falling back to just the AB upper/lower scheme. And then all that requires is that you keep essentially the, let's just say, the compression and expansion movements or pressing to pulling or hip to knee movements relatively equal. But that's a very flexible framework to work from. And the results that I've gotten, I mean, I could post up photos. I have in the past with some, especially the women. They get very muscular from doing that. And that high-volume approach, your general population, you think it might overwhelm them. People respond very well to that. It's very reminiscent of sort of like the old school, let's say, like total body, actually like the sort of total body 1 by 20 Ironman Perry Rader workout from the 1940s and '50s. I'm just referencing that, but the idea that you just hit everything or hit half the body very hard in a very complete fashion in regards to the joint angles and movement angles. That works. It works and it's something that at some point I'll probably maybe publicize it. This has a methodology that we use at Relentless. But yeah, if I had to pick something that would I use the most, it's actually that. That's because that's what I use every day with the in-person clients. My online people, it really varies. So I couldn't really assign myself to a system. I'll just borrow from whatever I think is most efficacious for the person.

Yeah, with the 30 to 40 sets, how long does it take for the client to get through it roughly?

It's about 45 minutes to an hour. I don't time rest periods at all, but the way I sequence— so let's just say, for example, so you have an idea, I use something I borrowed from Scott Stevenson. I'll use sort of a zigzag technique. Basically, it's just a circuit. So, for example, it's an upper body day for a— what was today? Today was Wednesday. So, it was an upper body day for a group of my female clients and we were working upper body. We had just done the pressing sequence. The pressing sequence, it was multi-directional. We hit a vertical press, a horizontal press, and a downward press. So, we started off with a standing dumbbell push-press for sets of 6. We then transitioned to slightly elevated push-ups. Those were taken to just a little bit short of failure. And then we ended that with a bench dip. And then these movements were tailored a little bit to each of the women. There's 3 in the group. But that was the pressing sequence. There was no rest in between any of those movements. Now, they're pressing, but they're non-competing in regards to them being different directions. So, I'm not following up a bench press with a dumbbell press with a push-up. I'm essentially having a shoulder dominant press followed by, let's just say, a pec dominant press followed by a tricep dominant press. That was repeated actually 4 times. And those rep schemes were different. It was 6 reps and then going to about 10 to 20 reps and then the last movement being higher reps because it was less demanding. So, that was done in a row 4 times total. So, that was actually 12 working sets, let's say. That was followed by the back sequence, which was a high angle row, which then transitioned into a bent-over row, which then transitioned into a face pull movement. So again, we're emphasizing the back obviously with these movements and the same muscles are being worked, but the variance in angle those changes the emphasis upon which muscles of the back specifically are being worked. So, you have this big accumulation of fatigue, but you have these movements that are not necessarily bleeding over into each other where one is compromising the performance of the next. At the same time, the loading for all these things was fairly conservative. So, that 6-rep exercise in the beginning probably could have been done for 8 or 9, but I kept it at 6. By the time you get to the 3rd and 4th set, the accumulation of fatigue, the accumulation of lactate, the accumulation of metabolites from the muscle the pump event itself. Now that's slowed down the rep performance, which is OK since I care for it. Same thing for the back sequence. As they fatigue and we get this pump effect and we get this waste product buildup, I'm driving the factors for hypertrophy. I'm also giving them complete muscular development. I'm not just hitting their back horizontal. I'm not just hitting it vertical. I'm hitting it in all the possible angles that the joint can move from. So, I'm not gonna have any issues of, "Oh, I overworked this angle or that angle." too much of this particular movement for the shoulder. It's being developed essentially evenly. And you can tell when you look at the women. Again, you look at my female clients. It's not that they're big and huge, obviously, but they're muscular and they have very proportionate development all around within their upper and lower body. There is not anything where— there's not any musculature that's disproportionate. And that just goes back to the programming. It was the upper body day and everything is sequenced out in that fashion. So that would be, uh, yeah, I mean, that'd be an example of how you get through a lot of sets in a relatively concentrated period of time. Yeah.

How long would you say the rest period is? I know you don't time them, but, um, after a tri-set like the ones that you've explained?

Yeah, after tri-set, I typically will give anywhere from what, like 1 to 3 minutes, actually. And I guess, uh, give it a lot— Yeah. I mean, I always tell people I will let you rest however long you feel you need to rest. With women, my female clients' workouts, their volume is typically higher than men since they just don't need to rest as long. I mean, obviously, it's due to various physiological differences with a female body. Women can power through stuff with degree of rapidity that men cannot. Let's just say the typical male client's workout is, let's just say, 16 to mid-20s, maybe 30 in the working set range. All the women are routinely around the 30-set range almost without fail. I'm always very surprised too. Female physiology's propensity for aerobic adaptations for lower-intensity work happens incredibly fast. I've seen clients go from not being able to push a sled 5 times in a row without being winded to literally 3 or 4 weeks later, they're pushing it for sets of 20-second sprints and they're barely breaking in between. And they're OK. They're OK. They're getting their air, so to speak. So, I mean, that's just something that, again, it's relatively unique in that fashion. But yeah, rest periods. I don't push rest periods. I try to keep them short. I let people go as they go. What I find happens is if you sequence stuff in, I guess you could say, the right way, there develops a continuity of flow to the workout where people mentally get into the zone. And that does a lot to buffer fatigue. Obviously fatigue is real in the muscle. It's not like, you know, you can only overcome the body so much. But when you get that vein of feeling strong and you're within that mental state where The movements are going from one to the next and one to the next. And it feels good. Yeah, it might take people a few weeks to get within that mindset. But once they're there, they can always do more work than they previously could. And that's something that any experienced bodybuilder has probably written about in the past. You get into the zone. You get into the flow state. And you can go. And you can do more work than if you were out of that state.

Is there anything else that you found to differ between males and females in terms of your programming?

Oh, Jesus, a bunch of stuff. Yeah, so with women, I will say that women broadly have a greater variance in joint structure, in anthropometrics I should say, than men. You know, so with women, You really have to account for a few things that are very crucial. Women, because their joints are generally smaller, especially in the wrists and the elbows and the shoulders, and in the ankles, there's going to be more wear and tear than if you were compared to a man. So pressing for women, there's a reason why girls' wrists tend to hurt a lot. And it's just because they neglect the strength in those joints individually. And that's something that really needs to be addressed with programming. One thing that I do with all my female clients I always do direct forearm and essentially wrist work. I always do direct tricep work in isolation with high reps to develop the joint integrity. You also have to address hips with women. Hip structure female to female can differ vastly. The assumption that all women should squat wide and squat low, completely backwards. With women, with the variance in human hip structure anyway, you're looking at You're looking at about 16 possibilities, so to speak, of how hips can, how the femur can fit within the socket. You have to take into account femoral head, how it fits into the acetabulum, the pelvic depth. You have to take into account the length of the femur and the tibia. You have to take into account the torso. You have to take all these anthropometric measurements into account. And that's going to impact how they perform any given movement. And then you add in the joint structure on top of that. If you have a woman with very small joints who's very petite built, but she's 5'9" and she's got really long femurs, but then comparatively short lower leg with a short torso and relatively, let's say, a shallow facing hip structure where external rotation is difficult, her leg workout's going to look very different from a girl that has big hips and is built thicker. It's going to be very different. And how she performs movement's going to have to be customized to her. You can't just assign go squat because how she squats is not going to line up with the ideal textbook model of what a squat should look like. I mean, I've had female clients where they have very particular hip structures and they can only really box squat. Otherwise, it turns into a good morning. I've had female clients where they have no external rotation because the bone runs into itself. But they're phenomenal high bar, knees forward, literally squatters. And that's the only way that they get balanced recruitment from the quads and the glutes and the hamstrings is almost doing it Chinese style. We're like, yeah, guess what? Her knees are going to shoot way over her toes. She's going to be sitting back almost on her heels. But her torso's upright. Everything's at a 45-degree equalized angle. If I add everything up, and that's how you squat. But I couldn't just tell her, put the bar on your back and drop it since if she tries to mimic what another woman does and she's going— high and wide, or let's say low and wide, her hips are going to get torn up. Yes, I mean, women are— I don't want to make it sound more complicated than it is. This is all very learnable stuff. But a lot of assumptions get made about training women that you just train them like guys or all girls can lift heavy. And that, again, it's sort of a false comparison. There's no such thing as male and female training. There's just resistance training. And then you appropriate it to the person in question. So a woman that trains like a man, she's not training like a guy. She's probably just training with more load than she was prior. That's usually what the saying is. That's where the fallacy comes from. You have women that have never really lifted weights and they associate lifting as a male activity and they start lifting and they assume they're, "Oh, I'm training like a guy." You're not training like a man. You're just lifting weights. Do men train like men? No. Men just lift. Again, it just comes down to lifting appropriately for yourself.

You do get guys with small wrists as well, some guys.

Yeah, that's the thing. You have guys that are, let's just say, light structure. You can't load them up in the same fashion that you could someone with heavier bone structure. That's a very obvious thing. Look at someone's wrist. Look at their elbows. Look at their knees. If they've got skinny wrists and knees and elbows, they're never going to be a powerlifter. Like very, very unlikely. They're not going to be that guy that can push a heavy double or triple. They're probably going to be the dude that needs a combination of isolation work with some compound movement work. That's why you can't assign systematic ratios. I do have clients where the majority of what they do is more isolation-based. Let's say it's like 60/40 isolation compound. Then I have clients where it's like 80/20 compound isolation. They can do 2 or 3 things with some isolatory work and that's what helps them. That is what is most effective for them. So it's just very dependent upon structure and it's dependent upon genetic predisposition.

Some very good points. What's your opinion on deloads, Alex? Do you use them? And if so, how often would you implement it? And when you go about implementing it, do you use lower intensity or reducing volume?

Yeah. So, deloads, they are necessary. In regards to when, there's different, I guess you could say, mentalities to this. If you want to always play it safe with training, you could say deload every 3rd or 4th or 5th week. You could say that and that wouldn't necessarily be bad, but again, that's just a very journalistic example. It's a very journalistic suggestion. The reality is that deloads, it's dependent upon the training. I mean, it's dependent upon the intensity of the training. If someone is training, let's say, 7 days a week, you may need to actually deload every, let's just say, 4th week and have a week where you cut the volume down or you take out, let's say, the barbell movements. And it's less stress. And that may act as your deload. But, you know, and then you may have cases where someone, you know, let's say they can go hard for a period of time and then they just kind of hit a wall and they crash just because— not crash that they're, you know, they lose their gains, but crash in the sense that, you know, this, you know, say inflammation and, you know, the workouts start to pile up. And taking a week off may be good for them. But it's case-by-case specific. And deloads, this, you know, the concept of deloading, it's a carryover from sort of the Soviet model of year-round training where they'd push the athletes through intense periods and they'd have to give them time to either supercompensate or, let's say, recuperate from the training phase they just went through. For a general population client, it's probably unnecessary to deload. Your deload would be more of a lifestyle thing of, you know what, I can't train this week because life happened and I guess I can't train this week. There's your deload. For a bodybuilder, a deload could be, which I've done very often with people, you're not allowed to touch the barbell. So you take out all the barbell movements and everything you do is gonna be dumbbells, machines, cables. And that, obviously, so you're not doing anything that's gonna be real heavy. That can act as your deload. Or deload could just be you go and train 3 times this week instead of 5. There's a huge amount of variance to it. I mean, the classical deload, I guess you could say, to clarify, is predominantly used in strength programming where you've built up the intensity of your training over a period of time where you've, let's just say, gone from 70 to 75 to 80 to 85 to 90 to 95-ish or 92%. And then, you deload and you supercompensate for a period of time, typically around 6 to 10 days. Usually about, let's just say, a week to 10 days. And then, you go and perform. That would be the classical example of a deload. For hypertrophy, it's not necessarily going to be a deload. It's just going to be a lowering or a decrease in training volume or intensity or just overall amount in some fashion or another.

Do you have any specific clients that you do it for?

Yeah, no, I have a guy. I have me all the time. I just had a guy this week. He hit some numbers. He's a powerlifter. He's going through hypertrophy phase. He had a high week. And then he had— we've been doing— we're seeking muscle growth. So he hit his numbers, so to speak, last week. And they're all-time PRs. Phenomenal. And then this week he was a little bit lower. And he's feeling kind of beat up. And his training had been going fairly progressively for about 5 weeks. So I had him deload. And he uses a 5th set methodology, which for powerlifting, Swede Corey Burns, he's the progenitor of 5th set programming. I use that for the guys that are inclined, where they really wanna get stronger. I'll use that programming method for them. So that's what I had him do. He was at his 5th week and he was followed by a deload. And that works very well if someone is interested in that. But yeah, I mean, so I just, I took out, I told him like, this week you cut the workouts way down. You're gonna hit some singles at 50% and you're gonna get out the gym. You're just gonna go in and practice some of the technical aspect and we're not stressing the body just beyond giving a little bit of familiarity with what you're doing before.

Awesome. I recently read a great statement by you with communication and mindset of the client being very important. You found most trainers to focus on the programming side of it. Or the biomechanics, which helps to a degree, but the teaching aspect, the biology aspect, these tend to be neglected. And that your main point is that being a personal trainer, personal should come first and then the trainer, not the other way around.

Yeah, that is something. I mean, I can expound on that a lot, but the thing that happens for people, which is common, they get into, let's just say, personal training And they want to educate themselves. So they focus upon the technical aspects, which is not bad. But fundamentally, if you view this as a job not where you are just teaching a person to exercise, but that they are in fact coming to you for leadership in a domain of knowledge that they do not possess, they're not asking you to work them out good. They're asking you to lead me through something. And this is a paid service. I need your service, I need your leadership in this endeavor, and I need your help. And that doesn't have a whole lot to do with the exercising in itself. That's someone that's personally appealing to you as another human being for your aid, you know, essentially. You can say it's professional aid or professional help or professional leadership, what have you. But that is a relationship. You know, because you have to really take into account, if the person could do this themselves, do it themselves, they already would have done so. Or you have people where maybe they're coming to you and they're hiring you because I don't wanna have to think about this. And it always drives me crazy when trainers will sort of criticize that mindset. Like, if you really cared, you would think about it. Or like, no. The reality is for a lot of people, they only have so much, let's just say, personal energy to manage their life. And if they can find someone that's an expert that will manage their health, help to manage their health for them in this aspect, and they can put their trust in you, absolutely that's worth investing in. The trainers that say that, I always know either they've never hired a coach themselves or they're just lousy trainers. For someone to tell you, hey, I'd like you to be the one that takes charge of this, that's very admirable. That's telling me that this is someone that really values their time. And they're coming to you and saying, I value my time so much that I'd like to put my exercise and health in the hands of an expert and have it be guided for me. So, yes, this is very personal in regards to what this job is, in regards to what this profession is. So, I mean, just basic things. Your ability to speak. Your ability to make eye contact. Your body language when you speak to somebody. The comfort that you create when you meet them, when you sit down with them, as you take them through the session. Everybody's different. You can't just assign it and say, oh, well, there's visual and auditory and kinesthetic learning styles. Everyone learns every which way. They just have preferential ways in which they learn different things. And then going beyond that, physical exercise is oftentimes very personal for people. Everyone was a child at one time. They went through life. They played. They ran. They moved. Or maybe they didn't so much. But doing this can have a profound, you know, have a profound transformative effect upon the mentality of a person. That's why I always talk about mentality creates physicality and physicality creates mentality. They go back and forth. So, all these things, not that you have to think about this when you go sit down with somebody, but there is a lot to this field. There is a very strong undercurrent of psychology. There's obviously a very relatively easy foundation of exercise science. And then you're blending the two into the art of training a person. It is a personal experience. The reason why bad personal trainers can have lots of clients, they're probably really, really good at the personal part. I wrote about this on EliteTS actually some weeks back of my own experience as a trainer. And I was not a good trainer my first 1, 2, 3 years. I don't think I was. I wouldn't say. I probably wasn't I wasn't okay at training until about year, maybe around year 3, 4-ish where I felt like I wasn't god-awful. But, you know, how did I survive those first 1, 2, 3 years? I was really personal with people. I like to talk. I like to get to know people. I have a very strong affection for the people I work with. And that's essentially what carried my business. It wasn't because my training was top-notch. It was because the personal interaction was, really, you know, the sense that it's really good. And, you know, that's something that, you know, for trainers, if you're literally looking at like, you know, how come my business is not where I want it to be, look at the relationships you built with people. You know, I mean, if your clients, are they truly loyal and devoted and they essentially look out for you? Or is it a case where you train a lot of people and it's just more of a volume approach and you're always needing more clientele? You know, obviously people will cancel times or, you know, you'll have clients where they come and go. But, you know, for the trainers that are successful in the long term, a very, very large part of that is attributed to the fact that they develop really phenomenal relationships with the people they work with. And they're constantly improving the quality and depth of those relationships. You know, and in this business and any business that is a business, relationships are everything. You know, that's where the network— it's not about who you know, or it's not about the size of your network, it's about who you know. That's where that kind of stuff comes from. It's no different than me telling you, you are the sum of the 5 people you spend the most time with. What am I really telling you? Your life is the result and outcome of the 5 people that you have the strongest relationships with. That's what I'm saying to you when I tell you that. And for a trainer, you have the opportunity to be one of those 5 people for somebody. So if you take that for granted, you're doing both your client and yourself a very big disservice.

One thing I have noticed is the clients that really trust you, they tend to get a lot better results than the ones that tend to question the whole process.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's something again, it's, yeah, I'm glad you're saying this. It's a very fundamental thing that just gets overlooked. It goes back to kind of like that statement of flow I made earlier. If you want somebody to be bought in and to, you know, value your service and believe it's worth money, I only need to ask one question. Does your client trust you? And how do you build trust? You build trust through personal interaction. Trust is not built through exercise. It's built through you speaking to them and looking them in the eye and spending time with them. If you can build that quality of trust and they have that sort of inherent, let's say, that inherency of trust within you, in that relationship, you're always going to be worth the money if nothing else. If you can't build that or you struggle to build that with people and they're sort of on the fence about— not on the fence about your training, but they're on the fence about you, you're not going to hit the level of success that you want either with your business or with your clientele. You just won't.

Couldn't agree more. How do you differentiate your service between training clients face-to-face and online? Alex.

So my personality differs a bit between two ways. When I am training someone in person, where I mean that's really where, you know, that is the foundation of training. I am very, very intensely into the person. I'll sort of, you know, I'll brag about myself that way, but I had a trainer tell me once that a facility I used to work at where he watched me train people over the course of the day. He's relatively new. He came up to me at the end of the day. He told me, he's like, "I've been watching you all day with your clients." He's like, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you kind of look like you're in love with everybody when you train them." I asked him, "What do you mean?" He's like, "The way you look at them, it's just like you are all about them." I'm like, "Yeah, absolutely." So, I mean, that's how I am in person. So, aside from the standpoint of, yes, I'm there to teach you, I'm instructing on the exercise. For that hour or so I'm with the person, there is nothing else going on in my mind. I think that's a trainable quality. Focus is something that can be trained. And if you want to master a craft, then while you are doing it, practicing it, your focus has to be utter and to totality with what you're doing.

[Speaker:MALE #2] Sorry, that's training somebody.

[Speaker:MALE #1] That's training somebody.

Is that something that you picked up while dancing?

[Speaker:MARK OTTOBREMER] Oh, no, not at all. Yeah, you could say that. Dancing, when you're performing, it's kind of the same thing. I guess for athletic competition as well. When you're doing something that's athletic or you're associated for performance, you have to fully inhabit that moment, moment to moment. There is no room for distraction of any kind. There is none. It will compromise the performance, it will compromise the expression of the art, and it will undermine what you're trying to essentially speak about or slash dance about within the bounds of the stage. So, I mean, you could say that. I know my personality, I can be very single-minded just in general. So maybe part of it perhaps was environmental, part of it was a, you know, nature, that is my nature. But yeah, definitely there's definitely transference from that. Online it's a bit different obviously since you're communicating through, majority of the time through text and through the written word. So with that, I just try to be as explanatory, to make up a word, as I possibly can. I don't like to leave things to, I don't like to leave things nebulous with people or leave things vague. So I'll definitely always really try to over-communicate as much as I can with clients that way. This is because I want them to understand my thought process behind it. So that does come out somewhat clinical at times where it can be a little bit dry since you're trying to explain something to somebody where, okay, here's how it works in my head. Let me make sense of it on paper, so to speak, so you get it, so you understand it. But yeah, it is different forms. Written word is never gonna be quite the same as in person. I guess you'd say the essence of how you train comes out with the online world and how you write, at least how I write. That's how I feel. But if you want the full experience, obviously that can only be done in the flesh.

Do you use Skype at all with your clients that are online?

Yeah, I do. That's not something that I can reasonably schedule every week. But pretty much everyone I've worked with, I've always had at least the initial meeting, like we've Skyped, or we've had talks every so often. We're like, hey, let's have a Skype meeting and talk face-to-face. And I mean, it's one of those things that increases trust. It gives them a lot of assurance that you want to talk to them, if nothing else. And then too, watching someone through the screen, but you are watching somebody, I can see as I'm speaking to them how they're reacting and how they're sort of taking it in. Then that definitely gives me more insight to, okay, if I know how you listen, let's just say somewhat in person, then I can have a better idea of how to write for you when I correspond with you over the course of the week through email. People's actions are proportionate to their perception, you could say. How you perceive and hear and listen absolutely influences how you act and think and feel and perform. And then that's something that, you know, to learn that about somebody, you do have to talk to them and at least, you know, watch them a bit, you know, eye to eye. Yeah.

How have you found working with John Meadows and the Mountain Dog team, and what would you say is the most valuable lesson you've learned?

Working with John, that's been a great experience, uh, just because Obviously, you get, you know, we've got very excellent clientele that are very, you know, let's just say single-minded to what they want. You know, people either they want to get, you know, they want to get ripped, you could say, or they want to grow. You know, in regards to the caliber of people that, you know, they're on the team, that's been the biggest thing, you know, that you've, that's what probably has taught me the most on a, let's say, professional level, personal professional level in regards to the work I do with the clients. Is that when you can have really excellent dialogues with people that are, you could say, masters of their crafts within different aspects, that will always, always improve the quality of what you are doing yourself. I mean, it just will. It's one of those things where if you were to ask me, how do you get better as a trainer? First and foremost, you have to work with clients. Number 2 behind that though, you have to work with people that are ahead of you. And you know, there's no going around that. So you know, the guys on the team like Scott Simpson, you know, Scott Simpson, Trevor Cashy, he's a very good friend of mine that I work with now. Uh, you know, guys in the past like Frank Minks that just, you know, this very, very intelligent, very practiced, and you can always, you know, interacting with them, they really help to expand, not necessarily your technical skill set, but they, they help to expand and attenuate your perspective. Of what you're doing. And that's the biggest thing I've taken away with working with John and team. It's really the perspective and the paradigm approach with how you do one thing is how you do everything. So evaluate how you're doing anything.

Yeah, and always, I guess, look from an outcome perspective.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's, in the outcome perspective, I mean, there's two aspects to it. You have two differing mentalities, you know, in a way. You can almost say Eastern, Western. You have the goal-based mentality where you look at the outcome and then you kind of work back from there. But then, you know, in other cases, especially for general population, you have a process mentality where you're trying to create a sustainable system It's not necessarily working towards a hard goal, but it's working to continuously evolve and improve upon itself. So, for a guy, for someone that's a competitive bodybuilder, yeah, definitely there's an outcome where I'm going to do a show. I want to put on, I need to put on X amount of muscle or I need to improve these areas. Let's do that. That's very concrete. That's very easy to set up. For some internal population though, it can be a little more nebulous in regards to improving quality of life. I want to feel healthier. These are more emotionally driven desires. So in that sense, it's not necessary or prudent that you set up hard goals for people truly. It can rather be that you set up sort of markers of time where you want changes in their mentality to happen. And that means, you know, helping them to facilitate changes in such a way with their mental state that they develop a system of training, of being healthy, of how they're eating. And that carries them forward into their years. You know, that's something that I really work with, with my older clients, let's say in their 40s and beyond. You know, they don't have goals anymore. It's like, it's a goal to be X amount of weight or look this way. They might want those things, but in reality, it's reflective and representative of the fact that I have incorporated health and healthy practices into my life. And so long as I continue to do these things and progress them and learn, the system will take me forward to a better quality of life as I age. And I just need to keep doing it. You know, and that's something that, like, that is the essence of process. And, you know, for when you're young, that's hard to grasp, definitely. But as you get older, that becomes more that becomes much more prescient. And that's something that you end up realizing that you sort of need to do. At a certain point as someone ages, you realize that you're never going to be— at a certain point you realize as someone ages, or as they realize as they age, that they've passed the mark of being at their biggest and strongest and leanest and fastest and what have you. And that becomes, OK, I'm not going to be in my prime when I'm 45. Because I'm 45 now and I already was 25. But, you know, how do I live? How can I improve that? You know, and how does exercise, you know, in essence fit into that? How does my diet fit into that? You know, am I truly valuing my time? You know, if I improve my health, will that increase the value of my time and increase the meaning of my life? Probably. Okay, so if we accept that, then what's the process for doing that? You know, it's a different mentality.

Now that we're on the track of the Now that we're talking about achieving goals, what tools do you use to track body composition with your clients?

Uh, for my composition, yeah, I— so the thing that I have tracked in the past, actually now when I work with clientele, I generally will have them work with Relentless Dietetics, um, just because I— it's essentially run by Nick Pearce and Trevor Kashey. And they're both brilliant minds and having— since working with them myself now and then having the clients that we have, which I cross-refer over, they get phenomenal results. But what is tracked actually is more so just this body weight in the beginning and it's establishing a baseline of what is your weight, what is your caloric intake and macros, I know it sounds very simple, but this is how it goes. And then we take it from there. When you're talking about body composition for people, obviously you can take measurements. You can take caliper measurements. You can go ahead and do the BOD POD test. But relative to the majority of people that say they need to lose body fat, they need to be cognizant of their weight. Otherwise, if you don't establish a baseline day to day to day to day and you don't have the data, you don't have any true objective way of making changes. So it starts with just how much is gravity pulling you down? Like, quite literally. Is it 138, 139, 140, 137, 139, 140, 141, 137? If we're gonna set up some caloric parameters, some macro parameters, whatever, for nutrition, we need to know what your baseline is for metabolic expenditure. That has to be done first. Otherwise, I'm just guessing. It might be a good guess, but it's still a guess. You need data. I know that can sound somewhat dry and impersonal. Well, what if the person doesn't wanna track that or if they have issues about it? If that's the case, then they do. But from a standpoint of being, let's just say, a scientist while being an artist, yeah, I can go on instinct and paint a picture. I still need to know colors. I still need to know how the primary palette works for what complements each other and what doesn't. I'm still working within parameters of physics and structure that are rather incontrovertible. The idea that you can intuitively teach somebody to eat, if you can do that on an individual level as a trainer, by all means, more power to you. Good. I'm glad you're able to do that. That's a very admirable skill. That is not a replicable system at all. That's something where you have the personality and the personal experience where you can sit down with somebody and like, "Okay, we're gonna make nutrition not scary for you and we're gonna make it so it's all about, you know, you follow your heart, follow your intuition, I'll teach you what you need to know." And that's good. That's very cool. That can be done. But if you're like in the position that I myself am in or Roland Stack, Texas in or Executive programming, that company that I've used now, programming people. I'm working with larger populations of people. I have to have a system to both educate them and provide them with some framework and create outcomes over periods of time and create something that gives me objective feedback that I can make decisions off of. So for body composition, that starts with daily body weight. That being consistent. And then from there, then you can talk about caloric intake. And then you can make adjustments off of that. And that is undeniably, that's, it's just being scientific. There's no other way really to describe that. Pardon my very long-winded explanation. It's just being scientific and to the point with what you want to have happen. And then following those steps.

And with day-to-day weigh-ins, you can track energy expenditure better as well. Which days are they spending more energy and is there a consistency?

Yeah, you can. And then the thing is with daily weigh-ins, I mean, it's something that the industry loves to bash now, this idea of like people don't have to weigh themselves. The reality is if you have someone weigh themselves the same time every day in the morning, that can bring to light the fact that, oh, did you drink enough water yesterday? Nope, I only had a liter. "Okay, did you notice then that on Tuesday when you only drank a liter of water that the next day on Wednesday and Thursday that your body weight had increased a kilo or a kilo and a half?" "Oh, I did, but I thought I got fat that day." "No, the reality is you probably had water retention." "Well, why'd that happen?" "Because you didn't drink enough water the day before." "Oh, oh wow. I didn't know it could fluctuate that much." Yeah, it can. Or in the case, let's say, for women that freak out about it, they find out over the course of the month where their body weight goes up around their menstrual cycle. And they're always upset. I'm like, you realize you have fluctuation hormones. There's increased water retention. You yourself are telling me you feel bloated. Is it truly shocking to you that your weight's up a kilo? No, I guess not. So, OK. So the fact that I have these numbers in front of me, I can educate you a little bit. And now I can make you feel better about something that you previously were attaching a lot of emotion to. And now you have an explanation for it. Not that I fixed it for you in your head, but at least we have some logical thinking we can apply that, "Hey, I know you're upset that the scale's up a little bit." But rationally and logically and from speaking with us, you know that it's okay. It's not something that we're gonna be reactive to. Again, and that's a start. But how do you do that? You track body weight. If I put you through a really hard workout and it's legs and it's Friday and we just did gazillions of squats, whatever, and then on Saturday it's like, oh gee, my weight was up. It's fully possible that after a really hard training session, you're going to have some increased water retention. Cortisol will be elevated. Your body's going to want to hold on to fluid and food. And then, oh look, on Sunday your weight came back down. So that's probably why it was up that day. Again, this is all stuff that you— I'm just throwing out examples. So this is all stuff you can do if you have the data in front of you. And it's so basic and no one likes to do it now. Everyone sort of likes to do this, I don't know what you'd call it, sort of this habit, let's make healthy habits and talk about our feelings. And that's fine, but it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both. If you want to change someone's subjective habits and their subjective view of themselves, give them some objective stuff to work with, some objective material. It doesn't have to be one or the other.

Some very good points, Alex. With your in-depth understanding of program design, for those wanting to take their skills to the next level, where would— if you were to do it all over again, where would you recommend starting?

Hmm, okay. Okay, this— I'm gonna undermine myself with this. For program design, firstly, I would— I want to say don't listen to anything on the internet. I would much more intensely vet who I listen to and read about in regards to how long have they been practicing training. If it's less than a decade, they're probably gonna get tossed in the pile of just don't bother. So let's just say, so I want people with at least a decade plus of experience. Then beyond that, I'd wanna know that have they written any resources or no, not resources. Do they have any, let's just say, pieces of content or anything where I could say, okay, they produce results for people or they have do they have testimonials, do they have clients, or even, you know, not even that, are they working with people currently in person? You know, I've seen it happen a lot where you've had coaches that are online now where they actually don't work with clients anymore but then they talk about how to train people. If you're not training anyone and you haven't in, you know, some years, I'm not gonna trust your information. I'm just not. I'm not going to. You know, not unless you're, you know, Unless you're Boris Chaikov and you're retired, but you trained people for 30 years. If you trained people for 4 and then you went into the online business and it's been 3 years since you last trained somebody, I don't give a shit what you have to say anymore. You don't actually work with anybody. So, I mean, yeah. So if I could do it all over again, I would first look to the veterans or people that are actively practicing and training in the industry. And it may not be the people that are online. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Let's just make it easier. To name people, so Nick Timonello. He has a website. He's been a trainer now for 20 years. I know him personally. He still trains clients to this day. He has never stopped. He is a phenomenal, phenomenal resource. Eric Helms. I want to say 3D Muscle Journey. I know that he actively works with clients. Very educated guy. Very excellent guy to work with. You know, I guess, like, you know, if you can learn his material, really, really excellent resource. You know, some people may hate the living hell out of him, you know, for fair reason at times, but I personally really love his material. Lyle MacDonald, really good resource. Has enormous breadth of material about training that's very practically written coming from somebody that trains people. I know he's trained people just based off reading what he's written. And he could testify to the fact. But really good resource. Beyond that, if you're going to go into more subspecialties, obviously John Meadows has worked with God knows how many people. His material in regards to bodybuilding training, hypertrophy, really excellent. For powerlifting, I am extremely partial to Swede Corey Burns. His 5-set methodology is just phenomenal for strength development. He does do seminars actively. And he pretty much— and again, he's a personal friend of mine. Some of these guys are actual friends of mine. But he has a gym and he trains his people every day. And he is very, very good at it. He's a phenomenal coach, phenomenal teacher. So, Eric Helms, Lom McDonald, Nick Tramello, sweet Corey Burns. Yeah, this is a small group. Anything like Dave Tate. I mean, again, Dave Tate, he was a personal trainer for a fair number of years. He still basically trains people to this day. They come to the gym all the time. He's got, I mean, Dave Tate, he's got so much content out there. I don't even know where to start. Just type in Dave Tate training and you'll come up with a lot of stuff to read. So I mean, yeah, I mean, I just look for those guys. I mean, look for the people that I mean, look for the guys. This comes down to, you know, find resources by individuals that, you know, have experience first, and then, you know, they have experience first and then they have reflection and development, you know, second, you know, going off of that experience. And you learn from those people. Yeah, well, the one book that I would really recommend, it's on my website, you know, to any new trainer to give them an objective view of sort of the history of training in the industry. Two books actually. The first one being "The Purposeful Primitive" by Marty Gallagher. Marty is a very, very old school powerlifting coach going back about 4 decades. "Purposeful Primitive" is a phenomenal book. It presents an anthology of training and highlights stuff from the 1980s going forward into sort of the modern day. And from both physical side and the mental side and even sort of the spiritual side. so to speak. And another book that is very excellent, it's a very dense read but it's excellent, Muscle: Smoke and Mirrors by Randy Roach. Basically the size of a Bible, but it talks about the history of physical culture from about 3000 BC to modern day. And the reason why I'm big on the historical aspect, that you want everything that you do and learn to be within a context. And when you know the history about something, past, present, you can understand, better understand the future and better understand what you're doing within the moment. And it will give you a much more objective criteria of really what matters in regards to your personal development when you have that context. If you don't have that and everything is new to you and you assume everything's new just because that's what the industry says, you're always going to be changing your mind in all the wrong ways. That is why trends repeat and reoccur over and over again because people just don't know the history of anything. So they get caught up in the next big thing which is really the next big thing 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. It's just meant to reincarnate itself in a slightly different way.

Very, very true. Do you currently have anything in the pipeline that you're working on or planning on releasing soon?

Yeah, I do. I've got about 4 different things I'm working on right now. Yeah, just because I do have like sort of various partnerships with people. I likely will release, you know, through— I did through Kindle, through LeapTS, some ebooks later this year. Just on sort of like, you know, this— what I call like sort of like longevo protocols to training in regards to these different muscle groups. And that will cover the practical aspects of training and sequencing in regards to workout structure. I do probably likely maybe a year from now I'll release some content with Relentless that will be sort of a personal training programming handbook of sorts. Again, this is for practical application. It won't be necessarily scientifically focused but rather just within the context of the gym and having someone in front of you, you know, how do you troubleshoot and game plan and strategize that? If anyone does want to find me, so to speak, I have my personal website alexanderjuanantoniocortez.com. I post there pretty frequently and update that. And then, you know, for online training, the website would actually be executiveprogramming.com. Just type that in, one word, and that will take you to the portal, so to speak. And then I also have, for bodybuilding-centric folk, obviously MountainDog.com. I'm there. And then for the industry articles, LeafTS as well. I do have some stuff for Ironman Magazine that comes out monthly. Oh, just to keep adding to stuff since I'm just talking and blabbing, I do have a monthly column on Ironman actually, a Q&A. So, if anyone ever wants to send me questions at all, generally I will. I pretty much answer everyone that contacts me. But you can always contact me either on Facebook. Again, full name, Alexander Juan Antonio Cortez. You can contact me on my website or through email, cortez.hx.training@gmail.com. But for the Q&A, we just actually started that with Ironman. But if anyone has any training-ish questions, feel free to send them my way and you might end up in the magazine actually.

After speaking—

I know that's like 5 things I just listed off. That's good.

That's why we got you here. Like I said before, after speaking to you recently, I noticed you're good at understanding biology. You mentioned if someone was to put stomach acid on your face, it would burn right through. I found this really fascinating. Yes. Where did you learn this from?

I actually, I didn't. So when I was in college, my, I guess, sort of my emphasis was, so it was dance choreography. The emphasis was dance medicine. And then when I was in high school, I actually took college-level classes in biology, which I mean is common, I guess, in a lot of countries you can take collegiate courses while you're still in a high school. But biology, I always took an interest in, not just in the sort of the hard science of biology, but the philosophy of science. What does it mean to be a scientist and actually study something? So that always got me interested in biology. And then if you, I guess if you really study the philosophy of biology, it gives you some basic background in metabolism. It gives you an understanding of why things adapt. It gives you a better understanding of what does it mean for something to be alive in response to stimulus. So, I mean, the standpoint of the stomach acid thing, I mean, that's something that's very basic, I guess, that I learned in human physiology. But, yeah, I mean, it's one of those things that a lot of people are very unaware of. That's why I always laugh when I see the videos of, like, look what Coke or soda does to 'Look at XYZ food' or 'Look at what the sweetener does' or 'Look at what this chemical does to metal.' In reality, the body has a number of highly acidic compounds in it that if you extract them and were to concentrate them, stomach acid being a perfect example, stomach acid is highly acidic. I mean, there's a reason why when you throw up, like, 'Why does my throat burn?' Because it's burning off layers of tissue. It's an acid. That's why it hurts to vomit it up. If you took stomach acid and took it out of the stomach, like I said, and you tossed it in your eyes, you'd scald your eyes. You have a chance you could go blind. Your stomach acid, it can digest a lot of things. It can quite literally degrade bone almost a little bit. Not that you can digest, digest bone, but If you dropped a bone, so to speak, let's say like a soup bone in human stomach acid and sat, left there for a week, and it was biologically active, that thing would melt. It would be reduced to nothing a week later. It's a strong acid. It has to be. So yeah, I mean, regardless of where I learned that from, I've always studied the sciences from a young age. I studied the sciences and I studied arts and I always looked for the merger of the two. So.

Is there any courses or reading material you'd recommend about biology?

You know, okay, there is a book. I mean, if someone really wanted to get educated about biology, get on Coursera. You know, it's a free— Coursera is a website that actually has actual college courses from various universities worldwide that are free to take. And you can get a certificate for completing them, and they're actually very, very high quality oftentimes. You can get on Coursera. You could take a biology level 50 class or a human biology class, and that'd be a way to educate yourself. There is a book that I do recommend at times, and it's called— it's a bit of a heavy read, I'll say this. So if you're someone where you're like, you don't really like science, don't— I'm not gonna say go buy it. Because you'll be like, "What the hell am I reading?" It's called "Design in Nature." It covers the Constructal Law, which is actually a universal law with physics and energy that governs the structure of biology and the structure of technology in a way and the structure of how systems organize themselves in nature. Essentially, the Constructal Law is almost ground— it's grounded in thermodynamics, but says if you have energy and you direct it with any degree of force into anything, or the fact that it exists, it will always attempt to equalize itself and split into two. So to give an example of that, since I know I probably just confused the living hell out of people, if I pour water down like a windowpane, the water will divert into streams. And all that means is the water encounters a slight obstacle, so rather than make an inefficient pattern, the water tended to split around it. You can see this in rivers. You can see this in blood vessels. If I take all the blood vessels out of the body, it looks like a river. You can see this in trees. If you look at trees where they have branches that come off them, the tree grows. It creates a structure. That supports other smaller structures, everything goes off. You can see this in how— you can see this in the flow of traffic, how traffic naturally will organize itself. People will stop and start, whatever, but they'll go around objects, they'll make turns, and the flow of traffic for any city really and flow of roads will follow a, essentially a constructal law design. So the book's called "Design in Nature" and it's a way, I guess you could say, of understanding essentially much of the natural world around you. It does, I think, have carryover to understanding biology and personal training. But you have to sort of be able to converge fields a bit. But Design in Nature by Adrian Bejan. And it's not a long book. It is a heavy read, but it's not a long book. But that will, I think if someone wanted to tackle that, that would sort of open their eyes, so to speak, to a lot of the I said, I love the convergence of what they do with training and what they do with health and what they do with everything else and how interrelated life is that way.

How do you spell the website that you mentioned, Coursera?

Oh, Coursera? Yeah, it's C-O-U-R-S, Coursera, R-S-E-R-A.

Okay. And are you lecturing anytime soon or is there a possibility that you could come down to Australia with John next?

You know, I'm not lecturing anytime soon in the US because we're in a sort of a building stage with the gym, the business right now. There is a possibility I could come down to Australia with John. He did have an Australian tour last year that was pretty successful. So I mean, yeah, that's something that if there was, I guess you'd say, sufficient interest and I was available, definitely I could make the trip. I do have some things in the preliminary pipeline for 2017 where I'll maybe be going overseas to go teach. That's something that I just— I had outreach from some clients, you know, sort of friends in Europe. They expressed that to me. So it looks like that'll be probably 2017, probably won't be this year. But yeah, I mean, like education-wise, I'm always trying to educate as many people as possible. Like, you know, I have very full days and I love what I do. So, you know, the more people I can reach, the better.

Lastly, you're a big fan of learning from your mistakes. What would you say is the biggest mistake you've learned from?

The biggest mistake. What has been, I guess to say, what's been a recent big mistake? There's been a lot of mistakes.

And if you're not making mistakes, you're not challenging yourself, would you agree?

Yeah, I mean, it's just like there's just a lot of mistakes. I would say this, the biggest generalistic mistake I have made with just life in general, since God knows I've fucked up royally at times, thinking that you got something figured out and you don't. I know, and it's like, you know, it's a mistake, yeah. Hubris will absolutely unmake you. Times. And the idea that you understand something as good as it could possibly be understood, whether it be a relationship, whether it be finance, whether it be your business, whether it be training. Oh yeah, I've got this down or I got it figured out. I know what I'm doing. You know what you're doing until you don't. And as soon as you encounter a situation that takes you out of your sort of narrow range of experience, you can run into a lot of problems because then you start making decisions based on reactivity and what you've done in the past. And if you're in something that you've not encountered before, which as you go through life, technically every day is a new encounter for you, you'll have fuck-ups. You know, I mean, I could have a whole podcast about just the mistakes I've made with a whole bunch of things. Maybe we'll make one. Yeah. I mean, I've done well. Say what?

Maybe we'll make one. We'll see.

Yeah, no, we absolutely— I mean, I'd be happy to. I mean, this relative to training, like, oh Jesus. I mean, I could tell you so many stupid things I've done with people over the years. I mean, now I feel pretty confident with what I do. It's always improving. Those first few years of training, like, holy shit. Yeah, I was terrible. Even stuff with business that I've just made this major mistakes. Or just thinking perhaps, you know, I mean, I'm not going to talk about my personal relationships, you know, in a public forum. But yeah, personal relationships, you know, past things with, you know, ex-girlfriends where I was like, okay, like that was, you know, not the wrong thing, wasn't the right thing. It sure as hell didn't work how I thought it would. And again, it just comes down to that thing where you don't know until you know, you know. The presumption of arrogance where I've got this figured out or I know what the fuck I'm doing. No, you don't. Even if you've been alive a long time, let's say you're 70 years old, there's always something new that can happen to you. There's always something new. There's always a difference of experience that can occur. And then that's at the critical juncture where you either will fall to the level of training or you'll rise to the level of your competency or incompetency. And maybe you'll figure it out and progress, or maybe you'll have a crash and burn where you ground yourself in place and it's like you got knocked down, you're gonna have to get back up. And that's never a pleasant experience at all, but it happens. It happens, and you have to be prepared for that.

And making mistakes isn't always a bad thing because let's be honest, you always learn something from those mistakes. And if you don't, —then you got to— Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's not like it's bad at all to make mistakes. I mean, the reality is that most of your critical junctures in life with what you really learn and your values and your realizations, they will come at your points where you probably performed or failed the worst. So I mean, you have to— like my buddy Ray Cash says, he's a Navy SEAL. Very high-performing guy. But you have to eat that shit up. If it happens to you, you truly do have to view it as an opportunity to, "OK. I screwed up." Whatever the situation may be. So I have a maximal opportunity to learn a whole lot right now. Otherwise, if you don't take that approach, you view everything in the context of how bad it was, you're gonna develop one of those attitudes where it's not about the life you created, it's about how life has what happened to you and what was done to you. And that can become toxic very quickly.

Thank you again, Alexander, for taking the time out to chat with us today. I know you mentioned before a couple of your—

Are you there? Yeah.

Thanks again, Alexander, for taking the time out today. How can our listeners stay up to date with your knowledge bombs? I know you mentioned before, but I just wanted to make sure that they don't miss out? In terms of like your website, Facebook?

Oh yeah, the best way, anyone's free to friend request me, send me a message if you send a friend request, you know, just to say, hey, I heard you. But you know, Facebook, excellent way, and then my website, it's my full name, like I said, alexanderjuanantoniocortez.com. And that, I email everybody on the mailing list at least twice, 3, 4 times a week. And I post there pretty much daily. And I always welcome any kind of conversation through email at all, through messaging. That would be the best place to get in touch with me. Facebook messaging is great, but I don't spend a lot of time on the feed itself necessarily anymore. It's because my working days are just pretty long. So, but I mean, I can guarantee everybody that after training every day, I'll always get in touch and reply back with any correspondence. So, you know, do not hesitate at all that way.

Thank you very much, Alex. Look forward to talking to you in the future.

Likewise, Rhys, likewise. I really appreciate the opportunity for, uh, having me on and let me, uh, go off on a tangent.

So, absolutely, we loved it.

What an awesome podcast that was with Alexander and Reece. Really great info and insight into his career of coaching and how to, how to put together dance and training. And you think, you know, sometimes dance doesn't go along with powerlifting and bodybuilding, but speaking to Alexander, you see how perfectly it fits. And from a dance background, how actually that's an advantage. So really love the podcast. Love to know what you guys think. Please leave us a review on iTunes. That's always super appreciated. Boost us up in the rankings and let your friends know where to get the good information from. Also, if you have any questions for us, maybe suggestions for future guests, or want to know about our personal training packages, want to do a consult with myself or Reece or one of our staff members, or want to do personal training with us at Enterprise, or want to come to one of our awesome courses Email info@enterprisefitness.com.au. Yes, we have a hotline. The number is 1300 887 143. Caveat on the hotline is our phone literally rings off the hook. So a lot of the time people are like, well, it's engaged. Yes, we know that. It's not a huge amount we can do about at this stage. So preferably, if you do have any inquiries, do hit us up on email. Or likewise, go into our Facebook page and shoot us a message. But yeah, the info@enterprisefitness.com.au is the best place to get in contact with us. So until the next show, train hard, supplement smart, and eat well.