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Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength, but also improve brain health and performance in sleepdeprived and
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high stress states. But there's some new research coming out showing its ability to slow prevent things like
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Wow. Jeff Cavalier is the physical therapist and strength coach trusted by the NFL, MLB, WWE, and even Sylvester
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Stallone. He's built a global reputation for science-based training that delivers. What do people want? When we
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pull our followers, I found that for men, they want their six-pack abs, getting bigger arms, develop their chest, and for women, they want to have
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better legs and well-developed back sizes. So, we'll get into those exercises. But the biggest problem most
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people have is the struggle to get started. And in doing so, become paralyzed by inactivity and say, "I'm
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not going to do anything at all." And I get emotional, but it's sad when people don't ever find that drive and and
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motivation cuz like the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body, they call it the new smoking. Like if I take away your
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health, you're done. So finding the drive to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
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So if I was one of those people struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me? I would start with and I'm not done yet. Lower
00:01:12
belly fat. How do I get rid of that? Calories and calories out. What's your view? You say that there are five key exercises to maximize your longevity and
00:01:19
quality of life. Can you show me these workouts? Sure. And then why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie? This is Raymond and I use him to
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show one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered.
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This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribe to the
00:01:37
show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way
00:01:43
that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do
00:01:48
everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests
00:01:55
that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so [Music]
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much. Jeff, you're very much known as the the king and the OG of online
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fitness training, advice, support.
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In terms of the mission that you're on in particular and how your perspective differs from other people out there in
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the market, what is it that you think makes your perspective different, unique, and more important potentially
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than a lot of the perspectives out there as it relates to how to how to how to build up our muscles, how to have a
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strong, healthy body, and how to prolong our health span. Everybody that for the most part that's
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out there trying to put information out, they should have a level there's a
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level of respect I have for everyone doing that because they're all trying to help people get better or improve themselves. I think where I was really
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heavily focused was on a more comprehensive more uh multiaceted way to
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do that because my background wasn't just in let's say strength training or in aesthetic appeal of of training but
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also as a physical therapist and having a physical therapy background I understood the importance of not
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sacrificing the body in the process of trying to aesthetically improve the body. So I believe that when people
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understand the why and they do become empowered to sort of you know make this their own journey the benefits are so
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far reaching it's it's not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you imp
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improve it's your it's so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves like mental health is directly
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related to people's physical health. If you feel if you look better and feel
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better about yourself, your mental health improves, too. Like every element of life is improved, I think, with
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improved levels of fitness and health. So, my why has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to
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understand that even the smallest investments, it doesn't have to be every bit I do. And I try to stress that in
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all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition, like you don't have to eat the way I do to get as lean
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as I am to still benefit from being lean. You could be you could have body fat levels much higher and still see the
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immense benefits in terms of overall health. So, you don't have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the
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information and apply it to yourself. That to me is the most rewarding part of it. Because if I can show you how to do
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it, the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right? If I could do that, then I think I've done something right. I say all the time, I could take everything
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away from you. I could take all your money, I could take houses, I could take everything away. I could take even, you
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know, relationships away because we could always find another relationship potentially. If I take away your health,
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you're done. Health is everything. And what did you study? So a few things. Physio
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neurobbiology was my initial degree and um I became a physical therapist which
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required another three years. And you became a certified strength and conditioning specialist as well. Most of
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the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that regard. So you'd have to have a
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college degree, but then you'd also have to have um um a certification. And in this case, it was the National Strength
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and Conditioning Association. And over the last 25 years since you got that certification, who have you worked with?
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Who have you helped? And how many people? The most important thing that came from that certification was that it
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qualified me to work for the Mets. And what's the Mets for anyone that doesn't?
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So the Mets are the New York Mets professional baseball team. So I work with some of the best baseball players in the world. Had a chance to work with
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some of the greatest football players in the world. Like it's wrestlers. was a big wrestling fan growing up and we have
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a lot of wrestlers that that come through and that's a cool thing because wrestling though some people may not
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like the storyboarding of wrestling athletically they're some of the most gifted athletes in the world. I mean,
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the travel schedule, the amount of days that they that they that they wrestle every week, the the rigors that they put
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their body through, whatever you want to say, the outcome might be determined, but the the the the bumps and bruises
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are not fake. And, you know, they also have to have that aesthetic appeal, too.
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So, it's this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me. When I look at someone like you and I see these bulging muscles and I see
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how lean you are, I it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, you were just born with extreme
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motivation and that's why you are the way that you are. Well, I think motivation is extremely
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overrated, right? Because like motivation isn't what produces the results. It might get you to the to the
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show and get you to actually show up at the gym and initiate the work, but only discipline keeps you there. And being
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disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have. Now discipline comes
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with finding success. So at an early age if you can or an early training age if
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you can experience some success early you do become motivated again self-motivated
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um to continue on down that path. So my genetics were never great. I I didn't if
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my mom was 5 foot tall my my dad's 5 foot n 5'8 160 pounds not a lot of
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muscle. I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle, but like I didn't come from this genetically gifted pool of
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cavaliers. There's no there's no way. But I did have this desire to do
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something in terms of training and taking my body as far as I could. But I really found the discipline
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through the fact that I liked it and I found that this was feeding me in other ways. It was it was making me feel
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fulfilled. So it was easier for me to stick to it. you you must deal with so many people that are struggling that
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come to you and they say, "Listen, I've got these big goals. I'm I'm overweight. I don't feel good. I've got diabetes here, cardiovascular problem here,
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inflammation here." And they say to you that they want to change. Yeah. You know, you can see it in their face.
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They're desperate, but they don't change for whatever reason. We live in an age
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now where you have access to the internet. You have so much access to information. use it in whatever way you
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can to get started on your journey because the earlier you start the better. But it's it's it is quite sad
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when people don't ever find that spark. And trying to play catch-up, it's no lie to it. You're not it's going to be
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harder as you get older. Starting or initiating a training program in your 40s and 50s, though way better than not
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starting one, is much more difficult than if you had started in your teens and 20s. you know to develop that habit
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to maintain that habit it's very difficult to initiate that the older
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that you get but I do think that it's possible so my best advice to people who
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have that struggle to get started is to figure out ways that you
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can eliminate thinking right because the longer you think the more likely you are to not be able to do it you know the
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thing that stops most people there's that saying the start is what stops most people right but at the same token, it's
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not the obstacle that's in your way. It's the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting. So, you
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wind up saying, "Well, I you know, I could just sit on the couch and watch this. I'm not going to go to the gym." And believe me, there's even nights now
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for me where I'll be with one of my sons and we'll be in his room putting him to bed. I might fall asleep in there, you
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know, and wake up and it's late at night. I don't even think I let my dogs out. I go right outside. I walk.
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Sometimes I'm literally half asleep as I'm walking, but I know if I can get to the gym, get in there, turn on the the
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music, and kind of put the lights on, and do one warm-up set, I'll I'll be good. And if I even sat down for a
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second, I might find that path of least resistance to be a lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable.
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And then once it becomes something that you enjoy, because for the most part, I think you probably enjoy it now, right?
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The process, it becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step. But there's still going to be days, you know, maybe
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a long day of shooting, you know, and you're going to be like, h, not maybe not today. But if you stop the
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negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that's all it usually takes to get you through
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the door and you realize that you know what you're what you were set out to do. When you think about all the many millions of people that have watched
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your videos, I mean, it's actually billions of people that have watched your videos and consumed your content, you must hear a lot of different types
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of spark. When I say spark, I mean the moment in someone's life where they something happened and it stuck. It
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finally stuck. What are the kind of things that you hear? Oh man, they're life-changing. Like that it it is it's
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part of the why that keeps me going, you know, hearing some of these stories. I had a live event a few years ago, first
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woman that we ever had. So, I was I was a rookie. I didn't know how it was going to go, but part of that event was a
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competition that we ran. So anyway, we we had a guy who was in his uh late 50s, first one to do the competition. So he
00:11:00
he drew number one. Okay. So he goes and the first thing we had was a 300 yard shuttle, which is just a 50 yard
00:11:06
distance. They had to run to the cone and back. That's 100 yards back and forth again and back and forth again. It
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was extremely hot that day. It was like 95 degrees because of course I ran the event in July and it was like, "Okay,
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this is not going to work out so well." So anyway, he goes out, he comes back on the last run. He uh he starts to
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windmill his arms. He's he's losing his balance forward. And I'm like, "Oh no." And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes
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up his knee, blood all over the place. Okay, next kid comes up. He He's up now.
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He goes by the second station, he's overheated. He tried so hard. He has to stand out the rest of the competition
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because he overheated from I was ready to to put a stop to the games because I
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said, "We just weren't prepared for this heat in this first time." And anyway, we continued. So, the fourth drill up for
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the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled push. And we had put 225 lbs on the sled, but that sled
00:12:04
was on the pavement out in the parking lot from this gym that we that we hosted it at. And the friction of the of the
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sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted for. It made it even more difficult. Well,
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again, he's got that bloodied up knee. He's he's pushing it. He gets it to the end struggling. And now he has to pick
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up at the end 100 pound kettle bell and walk it back. He goes down there. He
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grabs a kettle bell after a long, you know, multiple attempt to get the sled down there. And I finally run down there
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and I said, uh, his name is Craig. I said, "Craig, dude, you don't have to do this. You're good. You're good. It's
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okay." And he's like, "No." And he says, "I'm gonna do it." And he starts walking and he's crossing the legs over each other. It looks like he's gonna go down
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again. I put my arm around him. I said, "Man, listen. you don't have to do this. He says, and I get goosebumps from
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think. He goes, Jeff, I have to do this. He goes, I was diagnosed with MS, you know, four years ago, and I can't feel
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my feet. I got to do this. And it's that kind of drive and and
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motivation. And you never know because you don't know who the what they're dealing with, you know? And I get
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emotional, but it's it's like that's the kind of stuff that gets me going. We had another guy who uh competed at our event
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and he was doing uh the push-up portion of the competition. It's the second year and he was doing his push-ups. He wasn't
00:13:28
going all the way down. So got down to like I don't know two three inches away from his chest. So I go over to him. I'm
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like um hey dude just a little bit lower. Get your chest down. He says, "I
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can't because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer and I can't get all the way down because of the
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port." He wound up dying two months after the competition. So, when you realize that
00:13:53
people do this for reasons that you don't like, it's not just to go to the gym to get a six-pack. It's it's going
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there to for reasons we'll never know. And I think that those those kinds of um
00:14:05
moments are more than touching to me as you can tell. But like they're they're they're just they show the power of will
00:14:14
and that is something that we'll never be able to quantify
00:14:20
within that as well. I was thinking about how that guy who wouldn't put that 100 pound kettle bell down for him.
00:14:27
It it was actually about a story he wanted to tell to himself. It's
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something that he wanted to do for
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reasons that are much more about one's identity and one's self-story as we call
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it. And uh on that particular point, it's one of the things that I often think about with fitness and working out
00:14:52
is if I can be the guy that grabs the keys that day when I don't feel like it,
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then how that permeates through the rest of my life and how I show up in the rest of my life when there's things I don't
00:15:03
want to do and how that then shapes me over time into somebody who is able to have the difficult conversation, is able
00:15:10
to confront the thing, I think is like really understated. I actually was reading this um I think Andrew Hubman
00:15:16
told me this. He said that they've neuroscience has found a part of the brain which is associated with doing
00:15:21
hard things. Yes, I saw that. And I think he said basically that that part of the the brain and I'll put this up on the screen grows the more hard things
00:15:27
that you do. So you basically build the muscle of being able to do hard things. And the minute I learned that, I oh,
00:15:33
this makes a lot of sense because the more I was able to make the workout stick and the health and fitness stick and now my diet is like as we sit here
00:15:41
now is extremely disciplined. I've like changed as a person in other areas of my
00:15:47
life. Like I've got more organized with like my my possessions and well, you
00:15:52
realize what you're capable of too, right? Because I think we underell our capabilities. And I think that in
00:15:59
reference to those two men that I just talked about, like when you're staring at the face of something that seems to
00:16:05
be much more dire than again what level of fitness you have, you realize that
00:16:10
there's a much deeper well that you can tap into to do things that you don't want to do. Yeah. And I think the people
00:16:18
that are lucky enough like yourself to have found that have found the keys to
00:16:24
the kingdom to be able to you know take themselves to another level of awareness
00:16:30
and self-awareness that does 100% like you said play out in other areas of your
00:16:35
life. you know, when you can do the difficult thing, it's still not an automatic that
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you're gonna be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody, you know, but you know that you have the
00:16:46
capacity to do things that you didn't really think you could and it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry
00:16:52
those out. Interesting thing on that that uh study that uh Andrew Hubin was talking about was that if you start to
00:16:59
like the thing that you actually didn't like in the beginning, then it no longer challenges that area of the brain. that
00:17:04
area of the brain starts to shrink again. Oh, really? So, it it has to kind of which is cool because it means that
00:17:10
you need to continue to seek challenge. I was thinking a lot about this over Christmas and New Year's. I was I sat down with one of my best friends and
00:17:16
said to him, I said, "What exercise and what thing do you dislike the most and we basically made a list of them and
00:17:22
then we started doing those things. For me, it was actually running and it was leg day and squatting." Yeah, it also
00:17:29
made me cuz when I asked him why he didn't do those things, the list of reasons he gave were things like my legs
00:17:36
aren't insert excuse, my brain insert excuse. And we both came to realize
00:17:41
together that that was just a bunch of that we like made our identities and it was now limiting us.
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Are there things like that in your life that you just Oh gosh, you avoid
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conditioning, running, I try to address those things and do them knowing that I
00:17:57
should do more of them, but there's always more more to do. One of the things you must have figured out from
00:18:02
all the content you've produced across all the these channels is really like the essence of what people want and and
00:18:09
I you know because you'll see from the views and the engagement and these things you'll build this sort of mental pattern of oh okay people are really
00:18:15
interested in this. So if you had to summarize for me the essence of what you think people are looking for and when I
00:18:21
say the essence I mean like the why why why the very bottom of that what are those things? Oh, I think I think
00:18:29
insecurity is definitely a factor. I think um a feeling of wanting to be
00:18:35
accepted is is part of that. I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable,
00:18:40
right? Because I think a lot a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are. You know, if the moment arose
00:18:46
that they needed to, let's say, protect their family or do something that was physically needed to be done, how
00:18:52
capable would you actually be? And I think a lot of us feel insecure in our
00:18:57
preparedness that way. So I think that's a driver. Um I heard this quote many years ago. It says change happens when
00:19:04
the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making a change. And I was thinking if you were my trainer and I was one of those
00:19:11
stubborn people who were struggling to get the ball rolling. Where would you start with me? Like what would you do if
00:19:16
I was super stubborn? I tried for three years. I'd never made it stick. But but clearly there was health consequences
00:19:23
playing out in my body. Where would you start with me to get me going? Probably the conversation, you know, I I would
00:19:29
start with always with the conversation. I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody
00:19:35
because if you if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do, but if you ask the question of like why
00:19:41
do you want to get in shape? Um you might say I'm too fat right now. And I
00:19:47
would say to you, well, what would it mean to you to not be as fat as you think you are? Well, I it would be
00:19:54
better because I'd have a six-pack. What would be important if having a six-pack?
00:19:59
Well, I would like how I looked in the mirror more. Why would it be important for you to like who you're looking at in
00:20:04
the mirror? Because I don't feel like I'm enough right now because I'm letting myself down because I know that I'm not
00:20:10
doing the things I need to. Why is it important to not let yourself down? Right? So when you start to ask the
00:20:16
question multiple keep digging you find the why very quickly and a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood. It
00:20:24
comes from pain of of letting others down. It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either
00:20:31
because it was you know drilled into you from your parents or or others or because you just never lacked the
00:20:38
self-confidence to actually feel better about yourself. I always say that most people who are lifelong gymgoers, they
00:20:46
all have some level of pain in their life that caused them to seek this out because it's the one thing they can
00:20:52
control. It's the one area where it's like I can I don't have to listen to anybody. I have to do what I have to do for myself and I'm in control of my
00:20:58
body. And I think that a lot of times people or or it's an escape, you know, where you benefit from the endorphins
00:21:04
that are released through exercise and it's your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better. But that a
00:21:09
lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain. So if if if I had you had come to me in the
00:21:16
very beginning, I would have started with that conversation and tried to find out why is it that you can't stick with this? You've tried and you stopped. And
00:21:22
I think that people need to understand that. And finding the why to get
00:21:28
yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything. What about the
00:21:33
very top then? Like how does it manifest like the the title of the video or the thing? I mean the top is uh abs, biceps,
00:21:40
chest and uh and you know low back pain. I mean people actually come to me for
00:21:46
one of two things. Again I think it's having the two the two hats of physical therapist and uh strength and conditioning coach. I think people come
00:21:52
to me to fix something or to improve the look of something. So we have lots and
00:21:58
lots and lots of views obviously based around fixing issues um low back pain,
00:22:04
postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain and how it disrupts their ability
00:22:11
to carry on in life or through their fitness pursuits. Then there's the other side of it where people of course they
00:22:17
want their six-pack abs and then they want their arms and they want their chest. And I I highlight those because
00:22:24
the fact is that is where people are most interested because it's, you know,
00:22:29
it's it's the it's the beach muscles. But that's it's a fact of life. People want to improve those areas. What I try
00:22:36
to do when I when I bring people in through that track is to also make them
00:22:42
aware that it's okay, this is cool. You want your abs, that's good, you know, but obviously it's going to require a
00:22:48
healthier eating plan. So I know I can have a much broader impact on their
00:22:54
overall health and life if I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now. So I always feel that you can
00:23:00
come in for whatever your top level interest might be. But my mission and
00:23:06
goal is to make sure that you understand there's more to it than that. I've kind of broken everything you've said into
00:23:11
three sections which is people want to look good, they want to perform in whatever that might be and they also
00:23:18
want to be able to do it for a long time. They want to live long. Yeah. So under if we start with looking good as a
00:23:25
topline category, what are the things that you think are the subcategories of looking good? The amount of fat that
00:23:32
someone carries. So how lean they are. Yeah. The aesthetic development of their
00:23:38
muscles. what their bodies are shaped like because, you know, you could lose weight, but as you've described before,
00:23:43
skinny fat isn't really an attractive look. Um, so I think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways.
00:23:50
What is it the difference you see between what men say they want versus what women say they want? What do men
00:23:55
come to you and say that they want to, you know, as a a trainer of athletes, it's it's sacrilegious to me, but they really discuss anything in the lower
00:24:01
body, right? They're not talking about, I just want really big legs or I want to have, you know, strong developed glutes.
00:24:06
I mean, it's just not really high on the list. So, pretty much everything is going to focus on, you know, from the
00:24:11
waist up in terms of the aesthetic desire, bigger neck for men. For women,
00:24:17
it's the opposite, right? For women, they focus first and foremost below the waist. They want to have better legs.
00:24:23
They want to have stronger legs. They want to have well-developed backsides. They want to like, and there's probably,
00:24:29
I mean, a cultural importance upon that. You know, people are, you know, men are being judged aesthetically on their
00:24:38
upper bodies more than women are, and women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower bodies. So, we're we're feeding into those desires,
00:24:45
especially, you know, one scroll through Instagram and you're just reinforcing everything I just talked about in that category as well of looking good. Um,
00:24:51
nutrition. Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted by nutrition. So, let's
00:24:57
start with fat and lean. Mhm. If I want to be lean like you and I want to have low body fat,
00:25:03
where does one begin? What happened with me and what I always advise people to do is start just by
00:25:11
looking at globally from 30,000 foot view. What do you know you're doing in
00:25:17
like not well right now? Like are you drinking excessively? Um do you end
00:25:22
every night with you know a pint of ice cream? like you know you're doing some
00:25:28
things wrong. So you make one pass at the obvious stuff and you just do it for
00:25:35
a couple weeks, you know, and you see how you progress and what will normally happen is usually those are the most
00:25:40
offending the biggest offenders when it comes to nutrition that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it.
00:25:46
What do you think are some of the offenders that we don't realize are offenders? I've had so many in my life even like ketchup and Yeah. I thought
00:25:53
white rice was great. Yeah, I mean, white rice is actually there's a place for carbohydrates in people's in
00:25:58
people's diets, I believe, but um you have to have a healthy respect for them because they're the most likely to be
00:26:04
overeaten. Like the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us. Like you but you could pound a whole plate
00:26:11
full of rice and then some or pasta and then some because they're they're they are much more chemically pleasing to the
00:26:18
body. So, I think people need to uh be c cautious of overconumption of
00:26:25
carbohydrates and they're not aware of portion sizes really impacting them because they'll say, "No, I had I had
00:26:30
rice and uh and and pasta and and I would say I have rice and pasta too every day, but like I probably don't eat
00:26:37
as much as that person does." So, portion sizes when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a
00:26:42
good awareness about. the kind of hidden offenders. I mean, there's sugar in a
00:26:47
lot of things that is used just to make these things more appealing, especially, you know, like yogurts, right? People
00:26:54
will have, you know, fruit on the bottom yogurt, but it's like loaded with sugar or I my first experience was oatmeal. I
00:27:00
was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in the morning. So, of course, I
00:27:06
was buying Quaker Oats, but I was buying those little packets and they have brown
00:27:11
sugar in the bottom and it's like they were loaded with sugar. They were not the equivalent of Quaker Oats from a
00:27:16
from a like a a canister. And so here I'm thinking I'm doing something right, but I'm not
00:27:23
because there was more sugar in that than there was in a in a a bag of or in a a bowl of tricks cereal. What do you
00:27:30
look for in the on the package? I always look for sugar and fat. That's what I look for. So B dietary fat there are
00:27:38
nine calories per gram of fat versus four calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate. There are much more
00:27:45
calorie dense foods. So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or
00:27:51
form calorically the that dish is going to increase pretty quickly. So you have to be mindful of them. If you if you
00:27:58
want to lose weight and achieve a hypocchloric state to get there, you're going to have to take in fewer calories
00:28:04
than you're than you're than you're burning. That's why I would look at fat content. But sugar is just really not
00:28:10
necessary. It's just one of those things that our bodies do not need and um tends
00:28:16
to be uh too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating
00:28:22
sugar. So, I think that's one of the fastest ways to um to get yourself on track is to is to try to minimize the
00:28:29
sugar content in the food. And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms
00:28:34
of improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to
00:28:40
satiate you. So, if you're eating a higher protein food, you're likely going to find yourself feeling satisfied and
00:28:47
full faster than if it's just a carbohydratebased meal. So, those are the three things that I look at every
00:28:52
time I turn a label around. Protein, sugar, and fats. And what does your diet look like? I eat uh breakfast in the
00:28:59
morning. And I have usually, again, I'll give you typical meals. I have uh oatmeal. I even put like some pumpkin in
00:29:06
the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin just for some additional uh vi vitamins and minerals, protein shake, um and some
00:29:13
maybe some egg whites. So, I get good amounts of protein. And for lunch, I'll
00:29:20
have like a grilled chicken wrap. Again, trying to prioritize protein at every single meal. And I'll try to have a
00:29:25
Greek yogurt that has limited sugar in it. Um, then I'll have a protein shake
00:29:31
usually after work only because I know that when I get done with work, usually at 6:00, I come home, the kids are
00:29:38
there, they want to play. I wind up just having something to tie me over, realizing that my dinner's going to
00:29:43
occur later at night after my workout. What happens though is that workout occurs at around 10:30 to 11 o'clock at
00:29:48
night. So dinner happens at around midnight for me. Um that's always again
00:29:54
based around a protein first. So usually chicken or steak or fish and then
00:30:00
fibrous carbohydrates. So it's going to be something like uh I I I like edetamame. It's um you know it has good
00:30:08
protein uh in it and I'm not fearful of the soy protein that's there especially in that limited amount. broccoli and
00:30:15
then I have my f my starchy carbohydrates which my favorite of all time is uh sweet potatoes. So I'll have
00:30:20
sweet potatoes or or pasta or both. I'm still shocked that you're eating dinner at midnight and that what So what time
00:30:25
do you train? So I train around 10:30 or 11 until around4 to 12 or so. Is that
00:30:32
suboptimal? It's it's only optimal because it's when I can consistently do it. Okay. If I
00:30:39
could change that, I would probably work out at 5:00 p. p.m., you know, but I
00:30:44
always find that there's still work going on. People still need me at that point in the day. Why not the morning? I
00:30:50
have a very difficult time waking up. I'm one of those people that act like a zombie for probably uh 15 minutes before
00:30:56
I'm feeling ready to go. I'm very much the same. I probably eat a bit too late. I train a bit too late, etc. And as I'm
00:31:04
listening to you, I'm almost listening to myself. And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Stephen, if you went to bed
00:31:10
earlier and you ate earlier, then you'd wake up and you'd be able to train in the morning. Yeah. Well, how do you feel
00:31:15
when you wake up? Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up? Or do you feel No. Yeah. Um, I'm very similar to you. I
00:31:22
wake up late. Yeah. And if I wake up late, then I feel fine. But if you try and wake me up at 7:00, the chances are
00:31:28
that I went to bed maybe at midnight or 1:00 a.m. So, there's not enough sleep taking place there. But having worn this
00:31:34
whoop for a while, who are a sponsor, I'm an investor in the company, hashtag ad hasha. Um, one of the things I came
00:31:40
to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep, my body isn't actually asleep cuz I could see my
00:31:46
resting heart rate so high through the night. So, my body's actually just working on the the food, so it's not restoring my body. So, what are my goals
00:31:55
for this year is to try and not eat after 9:00 p.m. I I think it's a good goal in terms of
00:32:03
establishing a more regular sleep or or or time to go to bed because the number
00:32:09
one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep, the the routine of sleep is
00:32:15
what's most important. I believe even in cases of lower sleep totals um there's
00:32:22
actually 27% of people report sleeping
00:32:27
uh less than six hours a night and 20% of people sleep four to five hours. I
00:32:33
actually fall into the category of sleeping probably 5 to 6 hours uh most
00:32:39
nights because I get to bed late and I get up around 7 o'clock each each morning. Do you sleep track? Uh I don't
00:32:44
sleep track. I did for a while. Um, I don't sleep track. I actually, you know, I've tracked my cortisol levels and my
00:32:50
levels of cortisol have actually improved even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished. Now, there
00:32:58
is, and I hold on to this um as a possibility, but I haven't tested myself. There are two genes that are
00:33:05
actually responsible for uh short sleeper syndrome. In other words, where you can get away with less sleep because
00:33:12
it it optimizes gene expression for wakefulness and brain stem activity that
00:33:19
allows you to wake up easier. And the downside to that is that only 1 to 3% of
00:33:25
the population has that. So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be, you know, playing a game that
00:33:31
I ultimately can't win. Um, but I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep
00:33:39
totals than others. On this point of being uh lean, one of the things people are most
00:33:45
obsessed with getting rid of is lower belly fat. This stubborn belly
00:33:51
fat that occurs right right there. Right there on our little mannequin here. You don't have a pouch. That's what we call
00:33:57
it. Me and my friends, we call it a pouch. um we can be, you know, very lean elsewhere but still have a little bit of a pouch there. Some people think doing
00:34:04
sit-ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat. What is the answer in your view? It's the level of
00:34:10
strictness of nutrition. And when I mean the level of strictness, it's not just in the foods that you choose, but
00:34:17
the consistency with which you choose them. So, how long can you sustain this
00:34:23
really clean diet? And I hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean, it's actually the
00:34:28
first thing is a red flag that they don't. Um, but I think it comes from
00:34:35
having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way. When men put on
00:34:40
body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off. And one of the biggest areas for that, you
00:34:46
mentioned that I don't have one, but I mean, as as ridiculous as that's this is going to sound, when I start to see a
00:34:53
little bit of fat on my body, it's right there. And it's because that is the absolute first place to go on. This the
00:34:59
shamefulness of of how your body does this. And what it does to us is that it
00:35:04
kind of works from this top down approach. Like you lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down and
00:35:10
the last place is here. So it works in this top down approach. Well, by the time you get all the way down there,
00:35:16
you've lost the fat in your face. You've lost the fat in your neck. So, like, you know, I I sometimes I look at myself in
00:35:21
the mirror, I'm like, man, you're gone, you know? And I hate the way that like my my face gets sort of caved in. But
00:35:26
it's sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique. Um, especially naturally because that's
00:35:34
how your body starts to lose fat and especially as you age, you start to lose collagen and skin thickness. So, it looks even it's even more of a
00:35:39
challenge. But this top down approach is sometimes good because it allows you to
00:35:46
start to see like the upper row abs underneath the chest or so when you start to get into better shape. You
00:35:52
might have noticed this yourself. You start to see like okay my my lower chest isn't as saggy anymore. It's actually
00:35:57
starting to take some shape. Well, what's cool is that's actually that little spark of motivation that like I
00:36:02
want to keep going. I can see the top ab, right? I can see the top ab like there it is. I can see I have them, you know? I actually have them. You I got a
00:36:09
two pack, but I have them. Well, you continue down that path. Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more.
00:36:14
Sometimes you take one extra night of, you know, uh, socializing or drinking out of the schedule and you start to see
00:36:21
it, you know, go even lower and you start to get that second row of abs, then it becomes a question of how
00:36:27
motivated you are to actually discontin what level of sacrifice is required or
00:36:33
is worth it to you to continue. And that's the caveat that I always say I mentioned early on like is it that
00:36:39
important to you? Because I could tell you that at 10 11 12% body fat, you're
00:36:44
going to look amazing and you're going to look better than 98% of all men. So
00:36:51
whether you have that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you're still going to have your abs.
00:36:57
You're still going to have defined shoulders and arms and, you know, some veins popping out and other places. like
00:37:03
is that is that good enough so that you experience the health benefits you
00:37:08
already would be you you be there aesthetically you're probably really happy with where you are now compared to
00:37:14
where you came from and you still get to live a life that's not as filled with sacrifice yeah to get there and that's
00:37:21
the battle people have to have to um wage and ask themselves what is how worth it is it to me is is the game of
00:37:27
weight loss basically calories in calories out I I just need to have less calories than I burn. Yes and no. So, to
00:37:35
lose weight, you're going to need to be in a calorie deficit. Um, but if you
00:37:42
took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let's just say you ate Twinkies in a deficit, you're not going
00:37:47
to get the same outcome because the type of weight lost is going to vary
00:37:53
depending upon what you ingest. So, if you don't ingest enough protein, you're just eating Twinkies. might lose weight,
00:38:00
but you're also going to lose muscle in the in the in the process. So, if you want to deter the loss of muscle and and
00:38:07
maximize the retention of muscle and maybe again even slightly build in that deficit, then you're going to want to
00:38:14
prioritize protein. So, it's not just the calories in, calories out that will get you to lose the weight. But when you
00:38:21
ultimat loss, they really want to make sure that they're maximizing lean muscle at the same time that they're losing
00:38:27
weight. if they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it's it it it's gonna matter. What are the big
00:38:33
misconceptions we have about abs to get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff like that doesn't
00:38:38
work, you know? Um I think that's probably the biggest misconception. I always remember Llo. Lazlo was a was a
00:38:44
guy who worked on my house as a contractor when we were building it. He would come up to me just he was like the
00:38:49
typical male, right? He was in pretty decent shape. He worked every day, active. He's like, "I gotta get in
00:38:56
shape, man." And I was like, "Well, you know, how many days a week do you train?" He said, "Well, I don't really train. I just, you know, do a couple
00:39:02
push-ups and stuff." I said, "Well, you're gonna have to probably train. What do you do for your nutrition?" I kind of eat what I want. And I was like,
00:39:08
"All right." But he wasn't really overweight, you know, but it's the typical. And I He goes, "Just tell me what I could I just want to know what I
00:39:14
can do for this. What's a good exercise I could do for this for for his belly fat?" For the belly fat. It's just pointing at his stomach. And it's like
00:39:20
there's still that belief that there's just an exercise or two that you need to do for that. That's not how that's not
00:39:26
how it is. Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise. It's always about nutrition. It's always
00:39:34
about nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else. Now, when you get lean enough, if you're not doing
00:39:40
any type of uh ab training, you'll probably have less defined abs because
00:39:45
you won't have the development of that muscle. There's nothing different about the abdominals and the biceps or the quads. There's still muscles that can be
00:39:53
developed. And because of the anatomy of the abs, there's that line down the middle and the packs, right? That's just
00:39:59
caused by a suturing down of something called linear alba. It's just a tendonous sheath. When you develop the
00:40:06
muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training, right? Even weighted ab work is is helpful in
00:40:11
this case. The muscles are just growing just like a bicep would grow. And as they grow that you can't change the
00:40:17
suturing down of the tendonous sheath. So they're sort of growing out more prominently from that area. So you get
00:40:23
more visible abs. But that's the only way to really do that is through
00:40:28
training to hypertrophy the abs. But you're not going to get there if you don't first attack the body fat that's
00:40:35
over them. And that's only going to come from nutrition. You know, sometimes you see um older bodybuilders, like former
00:40:40
bodybuilders, and they kind of look a bit bloated. What is that? I mean, that's usually anabolic steroid use that
00:40:47
causes that or growth hormone. Um, that doesn't generally come from natural
00:40:52
occurrences where your where your belly gets so bloated like that. I mean, sometimes if you have um different types
00:40:58
of hernas, you can get hernas actually within the abdomen, not just in the ingral um, you know, in the groin area.
00:41:06
That could cause some of that distension in the abs, but not that global bloating that you get there. That's really
00:41:11
usually a tell a telltale sign of like growth hormone use. Something that they've that they've abused that causes
00:41:17
the the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension pushing out of the
00:41:24
belly. That's the organs growing underneath. Yeah. It's actually is a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it's not a it's certainly
00:41:31
not a healthy thing to have. And uh you know, there's always a lot of repercussions to um going down that
00:41:39
path. you know, they might look short term the way they want to look. And I would argue that even in those
00:41:45
cases, you know, the the the the large super large Mr. Olympia look, I don't
00:41:51
even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even a lot of people, but um it it definitely leaves behind a
00:41:57
lot of a lot of damage. And people do that at a variety of different ages now. I think even people that aren't training
00:42:04
to be bodybuilders, I can think of several people that I'm aware of who have started taking like TRT and growth
00:42:11
hormones pretty young. And I'm actually seeing a little bit of that same body
00:42:17
shape. I don't even know what it is, but yeah, I mean I think it look at TRT is
00:42:23
becoming such a prevalent path for people. I don't like
00:42:29
that that's a prevalent path. I don't want to come across as somebody who is anti-TRT because I've been I've been
00:42:35
reminded of that and that on some of the videos I've made about it that look Jeeoff there's a lot of cases where
00:42:40
people have extremely bottomed out testosterone levels and there's nothing medically that can be done other than
00:42:46
replace the testosterone that's not being made. I completely appreciate that. But as you've noted, the rise in
00:42:54
interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation of people talking
00:43:01
about their use of it and and how, you know, they it's it's physically changing them and they're doing it at at a rate
00:43:08
like it's it's becoming option one. Like what about maximizing your natural
00:43:14
potential first, you know, before declaring yourself as low testosterone even at levels like of 400
00:43:21
and 500 and then going and using testosterone like you're going to be on that for the rest of your life if you
00:43:26
pursue that path. You know, once you decide to replace your body's own natural testosterone level with
00:43:32
exogenous testosterone, you're going to have to rely on that for the rest of your life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their
00:43:38
body's ability to produce testosterone, but that's not a given. So, be prepared that once you go down that path, that's
00:43:44
one you're going to have to be on for the rest of your life. Have you ever taken TRT? No. No. Would you ever?
00:43:51
If it's proven down the road that it's something that could be beneficial and safe, I want to say I want to I'm aching
00:43:59
to say 100% safe because that's what I want. than maybe I would if I felt like I was really suffering from, you know,
00:44:06
the the the loss or the change that my body was going through. Cuz I don't want to just let myself get old. I want to
00:44:12
try to do what I can, but up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that it
00:44:19
feels most rewarding because I haven't had to do anything. So, I feel like I'm most inspired by my ability to keep
00:44:25
going. And I'm I'm going to be 50 this year. What about let's do living long then. Um, when we think about longevity
00:44:32
and what it's going to take for me to be live a long time but be strong into my
00:44:37
later years, where what areas do I need to focus on training and and staying strong
00:44:44
and where do I need to invest my energy and time? So, this is where I think when I say if you want to look like an
00:44:50
athlete, you got to train like an athlete because like the hallmark of their training is that it's multiaceted.
00:44:55
So, you can't just have one element developed and be a great athlete. Even
00:45:01
if you look at someone as one-dimensional, I'm not doing this saying this to put them down, but onedimensional as an arm wrestler,
00:45:06
right? They could have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff
00:45:12
strength, you know, to be able to actually turn somebody over, but if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep, poor
00:45:20
recovery, they're likely going to lose, especially because your neurological output and grip is directly correlated
00:45:28
to your ability to recover. If you don't have more than one
00:45:34
element de developed, you're not going to be your best. So when people are looking, the general population is
00:45:40
looking to become healthier and feel better, it's not going to be one thing.
00:45:46
First and foremost, I believe that getting on a training plan that
00:45:52
prioritizes the building of muscle, so hypertrophy and strength building is
00:45:57
going to be really important because we are going to again like I talked about before, you're going to naturally lose
00:46:04
strength every passing decade. You know, up to 8 to 10% per decade as you as you pass the age of 50. So, you need to make
00:46:12
sure that you are doing something to save that off. You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength
00:46:18
training and engaging in regular weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you you have to do
00:46:24
that. The brain ages. So
00:46:30
having challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to
00:46:36
maintain muscle recruitment because that's again neurologically your brain your neurons start to fire at a slower
00:46:42
pace. You need to train these things. reactivity, reaction, your reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are
00:46:48
all little parts of things that people can do. I always remember seeing this old man. He was in a he had an obstacle
00:46:54
course he built. I don't know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old and he made this obstacle course and he used to add every
00:47:01
week or so he'd add one more obstacle to his course and he built it in his backyard and it was like a balance beam
00:47:08
and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day. Wow. And he
00:47:15
said that like he would try to find new ways to challenge his body so that he would keep his brain guessing as to
00:47:22
what's next. And again, whether or not it he was he was uh finding this thing to be something he didn't want to do,
00:47:28
maybe it was also feeding into his his his uh increases because of he was doing the things he hated to do. But the but
00:47:34
the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multiaceted and by
00:47:40
incorporating some of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach because it is important. The fall risk
00:47:47
improve uh increases exponentially as you get older. Um a lot of it has to do with something we'll talk about um with
00:47:55
the thoracic spine and losing mobility there, but like you need to factor those types of things in. Flexibility and
00:48:01
mobility feed into that. Like you can't I always talk about there's a there's a
00:48:07
pyramid, right? If you look at the the the old nutrition pyramid, there's a bottom which is supposed to be represent the the like all the things you're
00:48:13
supposed to work on and then it kind of fine-tunes and works its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is
00:48:18
strength, right? You got to you got to maintain your strength. And then above that, you got to maintain your your muscle mass, like the amount of lean
00:48:24
muscle you carry. And above that, your ability to perform because of those two
00:48:29
attributes. So to be able to actually do things and if it was an athlete it would be like their skill work would be at the
00:48:34
very very top. So could you if you're a baseball player you know how well do you swing the bat? You know how well do you feel the ground ball? Like it's that top
00:48:41
level skill work that comes up here. Is cardiovascular in there? Cardiovascular is in there as well as well. Yeah. Your your conditioning would be right you
00:48:48
know depending upon who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance and the sport you play is going to fall
00:48:54
right above or below strength. Now, I would argue that there's a few
00:49:00
things underneath the whole thing. It's just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don't see the roots. And this in the pyramid sits on the
00:49:06
ground, but what's underneath the pyramid? The roots, your stability, your
00:49:11
flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person that could squat 600 lb, but now I'm going to put
00:49:18
you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing. You're not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength
00:49:24
because I took away your stability. And if you can't obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility
00:49:31
or you lack the flexibility, then I've also taken away and I've weakened the strength that you have. It's there. Your
00:49:37
strength is there, but it can't be expressed because I took away the stability. So, the real root of
00:49:42
longevity in fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility,
00:49:47
flexibility, and stability. Flexibility is the muscle length and in the in the ability to change the length of the
00:49:54
muscle. Mobility is the joint excursions, the ability to move your joints and in and um their full range of
00:50:00
motion. So, it's it's a muscle or joint thing. Still the same concept, but they're working on different elements.
00:50:06
Do you think people realize that that's so important? And do you think they enjoy it? No, I think people hate it. And I think that I mean some people like
00:50:13
it. If you're into the practice of yoga, Pilates, you you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better
00:50:19
you feel when you do those types of uh exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility. But for the average gym
00:50:26
goer, no, it's either going to get relegated to the last thing they do uh before they leave the gym or not at all.
00:50:32
And I think that that's going to have a big impact on how well they feel. I
00:50:38
think that when they talk about the fountain of youth, stretching and mobility is probably the thing that
00:50:45
makes people feel the best. I've heard that people say that and I agree to almost a full extent, but I think that
00:50:51
if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the the strength, you are never
00:50:59
going to be as functionally capable as you can. Actually, I I have this band to sort of show that like if somebody was
00:51:06
just completely flexible, right, and you were trying to shoot this band across
00:51:11
the table, I don't have a lot of tension to be able to generate to to get any kind of force to do that. On the
00:51:18
contrary, if somebody was um strong, right, maybe even muscle
00:51:23
bound, I don't have any flexibility here to again really create much of a elastic
00:51:29
output here or to get a lot of force generation. But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount
00:51:37
of flexibility, but also the strength in this case, the muscles, the tension, I
00:51:42
can shoot that band a lot further, a with a lot more force and a lot more ease. Our goal should be not just
00:51:49
athletes should be striving for this, but our goal should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force
00:51:56
capability with the flexibility and mobility because that's only at that point that you actually can express
00:52:03
probably the best performance possible. How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my
00:52:09
mobility? Not not much. It just has to be consistent. So, I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to 10
00:52:18
minutes a day of stretching the areas that are tight, and again, this is very individual. Like, one thing that I always stressed, even when I was in
00:52:24
baseball, every player from me got an individual program, and it was based off of a comprehensive assessment. So I
00:52:31
would go through the assessment on each player and you would find that either based on position um and the demands of
00:52:37
that position, body type, you would find certain requirements of a program that
00:52:44
needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more
00:52:51
than others. People have to be willing to a seek out where these the deficits
00:52:57
are and b to actually pursue a program that would work on those deficits. And
00:53:02
then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn't have to be an hour a day of doing those things. You
00:53:09
prioritize that list and you focus on 5 to 10 minutes of extra work with it. It's funny. I make a lot of videos on,
00:53:15
hey, do this every morning, do that every morning, do this every morning. But it's only appropriate to the people that have the deficits that I highlight
00:53:20
in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into a whole separate career in order to be able to
00:53:26
pull them off. That's not necessary. You can you find the ones that have the biggest impact. But I don't think that having, you know, doing stretching
00:53:33
requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them. You you say that there are five
00:53:40
key exercises you need to be able to maximize your longevity and quality of life that kind of dovetail into this. the single leg Romanian deadlift, the
00:53:47
squat and reach, the sumo stance hold, the posterior chain push-up, and hip abductions.
00:53:54
Can you show me these workouts? Sure. As you can see from the space I'm in, you don't need a whole lot of room to be
00:54:01
able to do these exercises. They're incredibly accessible. They're actually scalable with a low barrier of entry.
00:54:06
So, no matter what level of ability you bring to these exercises, you're going to be able to do them. All right, so the first exercise up here is pretty simple,
00:54:13
but it does demand some balance. And it also will teach us a very critical biomechanical requirement, which is a
00:54:19
hip hinge. So, it's called the single leg RDL. What you want to do is you want to hinge. Pretending that there's a
00:54:25
drawer behind you that's open, you're going to close it with your butt. Then, you reach forward, but at the same time,
00:54:31
you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a
00:54:37
counterbalance. So, your goal is to see if you can get even up to 10 without
00:54:42
losing your balance or having that other foot have to contact the ground. Next exercise is something that we call a
00:54:49
squat and and reach. And what we do is we get down to the ground like this, down to a squatting position. And we
00:54:56
anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. Okay? And then from here we post
00:55:02
up on one hand, reach up and rotate and follow it with your head as you go up as
00:55:08
high as you can to the sky. Now the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds. That is what is lost
00:55:16
when we get into these chronic positions like this right with our devices at our computers. We get to this rounded
00:55:22
thoracic spine, this upper portion of the spine. Doing this will give us the mobility that we're lacking. So the next
00:55:29
thing is something we call a sumo squat stance. It's a squat stance hold and it's based off of something called the
00:55:35
horse stance which again we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability.
00:55:40
Right? And again we're going to still work on the hip in all three planes. So what we do is we get down feet wide and
00:55:47
squat down into this position here. Now the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs
00:55:54
for a little bit of support. But what I want to see as tall of a chest as I can get the same way that we just did
00:56:00
through that rotation to maintain that area of the spine, that thoracic spine, and getting extended because we know
00:56:07
that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it and the posture will get away from this position
00:56:12
and more to this open upright position. If we don't do it in that beginner format, then what we're going to do is
00:56:18
cross the hands over. Okay? Get in that down position. Reach up and
00:56:25
out. Okay, that is a 30 second hold up to a
00:56:30
60-second hold depending upon how far you can take it. The next thing we do is we got to work on that upper body a
00:56:36
little bit. So the upper body, you should still be able to do the exercise
00:56:43
that is often times the benchmark for upper body strength, which is the push-up. But we can do it in a way where
00:56:48
we get bigger benefits both front and back side. So we call this a posterior chain push-up. For a push-up, you want
00:56:55
those hands underneath the shoulders. Okay? I'll demonstrate one, then we'll do it together. You want to be able to
00:57:01
push up all the way to full extension. You also want to have tightness through
00:57:06
your quads and glutes. So you squeeze your butt together. You straighten your knees out by contracting your quads. And
00:57:13
then you get a good firm holding plank position here. Now, when you go down,
00:57:19
normally people would stop here or they wouldn't come up all the way. You go all the way down to the ground. At this
00:57:24
point, you slide your hands out in front of you, point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed, tight, and
00:57:31
then lift up into what we call a superman. Right? From here, you're going to train all the muscles in your
00:57:37
posterior chain from the back of your heels all the way up to the tip of your fingers. Right? Come down. Slide it
00:57:44
back. Come up into that good firm push-up. Don't lose any of that stability. Come down. Slide up. And
00:57:51
lift. The final thing is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually
00:57:57
has a lot of functional carryover. We're talking about just a sidelineing hip
00:58:03
abduction. Okay? And what we do is we get in this position here. We position
00:58:08
our toe down in front of us. So, you want to basically point your toe down into the ground. Okay. From there,
00:58:14
you're going to slide your leg back behind you. Okay? As far as you can take it and then lift up. And right when you
00:58:22
do that final lift, you're going to feel a contraction right here in the glutes.
00:58:27
in particular in the glute medius. That's the muscle that's controlling that rotational element of your hip
00:58:33
joint and the stability and the strength that's needed to propel your body even on a regular walk without your hips
00:58:40
dropping down side to side. You don't want to let that happen to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30
00:58:45
to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make is in order to feel like they're getting the lift, they'll just
00:58:51
rotate their body to let the hip flexor do the lifting. Remember, we don't need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We
00:58:56
want the glute medius to do the lifting. So, you need to make sure that you're rotated forward the entire time. And
00:59:02
that's it. There's the five essentials. Quick, simple, and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment, no gym required,
00:59:08
just a little bit of space and consistency. Now, back to the diary of a CEO studio. This one change has
00:59:15
transformed how my team and I move, train, and think about our bodies. When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the diio.
00:59:21
He explained how modern shoes with their cushioning and support are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing
00:59:27
what nature intended them to do. We've lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet and this is leading to
00:59:32
issues like back pain and knee pain. I'd already purchased a pair of Viva
00:59:38
barefoot shoes. So I showed them to Daniel Lieberman and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot
00:59:44
movement and rebuild my strength. But I think it was planttoicitis that I had where suddenly my feet started hurting all the time. And after that I decided
00:59:50
to start strengthening my own foot by using the Vivo barefoots. And research from Liverpool University has backed this up. They've shown that wearing Vivo
00:59:57
barefoot shoes for 6 months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit
01:00:04
vivarefoot.com/doac and use code diary 20 from my sponsor for 20% off. A strong
01:00:10
body starts with strong feet. And what what is the context there with those workouts? Why why did you
01:00:16
choose those workouts and what do these kind of signal? Are you saying that if I'm able to do those then there's a
01:00:21
probability that I have the strength and flexibility conducive with longevity? Yeah, those are good standard exercises
01:00:27
that will measure at a at a high level how much of a deficit you've acquired
01:00:35
over the years from not doing them. So, you should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they're going to
01:00:41
reflect the global approach at least to working on flexibility in your groin or
01:00:48
working on the strength in your hip abductors. Because the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift,
01:00:55
they're occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all time is
01:01:01
the lunge, right? I love the exercise, but it's still occurring front to back in this plane here.
01:01:07
Getting exercises that work the other two planes and mostly through rotation.
01:01:12
But working this frontal plane, this side to side is really important to
01:01:18
producing a complete person, right, with complete levels of strength. And because
01:01:24
they're not the primary exercises that do that, like that sidelineing hip raise that that we I show you is not one of
01:01:32
the big exercises that are most important that are going to be up on your list. you're going to do your squats first and you're going to maybe not never do those. But it doesn't mean
01:01:39
that that muscle didn't matter, right? That those muscles are there for a reason and they need to be developed. I
01:01:45
remember so many times taking some of the most powerful baseball players, the
01:01:52
leading home run hitters, and then testing their hip internal or external
01:01:57
stren uh rotation strength and it being incredibly weak. Like incredibly weak.
01:02:02
And you say to yourself, "How is that even possible?" because it was never actually directly trained. And does it
01:02:09
have a carryover? Obviously, they're doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field. I still
01:02:15
think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field, but more importantly, one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot
01:02:21
of knee pain throughout his his career. And there are missed games because of knee pain. What What could his career
01:02:28
stats have looked like? They're already Hall of Fame worthy. What could his career stats have looked like if he didn't miss all those games? So they may
01:02:35
not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept them healthier and having other issues be avoided by
01:02:41
doing them. So I think that these types of smaller movements are really
01:02:48
revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that anybody can do them. Like it doesn't require a gym, doesn't
01:02:55
require an elaborate setup. They're really good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand.
01:03:01
Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie? Uh the bow tie. I mean, he came dressed even more than I
01:03:07
did. I think my t-shirt, but this is Raymond. So X-ray is his full name, and
01:03:12
then Raymond became his uh short name. So I I broke him out, God, I probably in
01:03:19
2011 or 12, and he became a fan favorite pretty quickly. But I think people like the visual. And for me, he's not the
01:03:27
most mobile guy. He's lost his lower arm. He doesn't have another arm on this side, and he doesn't really move that
01:03:32
well. But what it is important is he's also lost his legs. He's lost his legs. I got a leg over there if I need it. But
01:03:38
the spine. See, for me, again, I focus a lot on the ability to function in space. And
01:03:47
rotation is probably the area of biggest deficit. It's what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because the area
01:03:54
of the spine that's most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here in the thoracic spine.
01:04:00
So what that is is anybody that wants to measure on themselves, it's right at the bottom of the of the neck. So at the
01:04:05
base of the neck, the height of the shoulders, and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the thoracic
01:04:12
spine ends. It has so many farreaching implications because it shares its range
01:04:17
of motion between two different directions. So its ability to go front to back
01:04:23
again, he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward, we can go back, right? You want to have ideally about 40
01:04:28
degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension through that area. And just us sitting here
01:04:35
alone, you know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were getting comfortable and talking.
01:04:40
We kind of get a little bit rounded out. When you use up motion in this
01:04:45
direction, and imagine what that looks like when people are on their phones or at a desk all day, you're going to start
01:04:52
to lose the motion into extension. You're going to get too flex. Well, every time you lose a degree into
01:04:58
flexion, you actually lose a direct degree into rotation. So, you're because
01:05:05
you're sharing that motion. The motion is only available in a combined way. So, if you want to take up motion this
01:05:10
direction, there's going to be less motion available here. If I have a a a thing, if you let me grab this, put this
01:05:17
over your back. Over my back. Yeah. Just like this. Yeah.
01:05:22
Now, allow yourself to slump forward. Pretend you're on that phone, right? Get there. Now, just turn from the shoulders
01:05:30
in one direction. Slumped over. Okay. Now, take a peek down the barrel of that
01:05:35
thing, you know, behind you and see where you're pointing. How about how far rotated you are? Yeah. All right. Cool. Now, come back. Reset yourself. Now,
01:05:42
take back that mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine. I'm getting crumpled. There's your rotator cuff. So,
01:05:49
get yourself up right now. Nice posture. Act like I'm I'm watching, right? So, get there. Now go ahead and rotate again
01:05:55
in that direction. How much more did you get? Yeah, I got another like 20%. Right. So
01:06:03
maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space is one of the most
01:06:10
important functional requirements we have. When you're when you're falling as you get older, you're likely reaching
01:06:17
spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash down and maybe break a hip. Mhm. Functionally as
01:06:23
an athlete, your ability to perform is all about rotation. You know, you don't usually just move in one plane like
01:06:29
this. If you're a football player, American or not, you're rotating all the
01:06:34
time. You generate force as a soccer player, you know, by kicking across your
01:06:40
body, right? By throwing a baseball, it's all about rotation. You need to
01:06:46
hold on to rotation. But what what we lose is the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60,
01:06:54
people will have lost 25 to 35% of their ability, their mobility in this area.
01:07:00
You see it as well. You see what people get older, they look stiff and they kind of look robotic. Awful. My grandmother,
01:07:06
God bless her soul, she lived to 97 years old. Wow. But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was
01:07:11
literally she had a walker. She was completely bent over at that walker. Could hardly get herself back up. She
01:07:17
had lost all of her extension. So, she could not rotate at all. And again, functionally, it's the most important
01:07:24
movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to do things. So, I think that
01:07:31
people need to focus on, again, you go back to that whole concept of like, what do you need to focus on? Well, I could
01:07:37
tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength, but if in the process of getting a really strong
01:07:43
squat, you've also lost thoracic rotation. I can't deem you to be a really healthy individual because you've
01:07:49
you've you've given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain. Cuz I I thought that aging and
01:07:56
then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable because you see it in so many older people. They
01:08:02
often are like bent over and you you kind of think, well, why don't they just stand up? Yeah. Well, it's it's
01:08:07
impossible because, you know, you're losing that that fight to gravity, right? Gravity is going to win
01:08:12
ultimately, but it doesn't have to win completely. So, the more that you work on maintaining your ability to extend
01:08:19
through the thoracic spine, then you don't develop those downstream
01:08:25
adaptations that happen from always being there. So, what happens once you get in this position, you lose
01:08:31
flexibility through other joints. Again, if you get get in that position again, actually turn a little bit. Try to raise
01:08:37
your arm up as high as you can from that position. Okay. Now, just straighten
01:08:42
yourself out. Go up tall. Now, raise your arm up again. Like, yeah. Why? Because you've literally mechanically
01:08:49
blocked your shoulder because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate
01:08:54
around your rib cage as you raise your arm up overhead. Okay. Right. A great percentage of ability to move your arm
01:09:00
over your head is not just the ball and socket that's over here to get your arm up there. It's the fact that your
01:09:06
shoulder blade has to rotate with it to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if
01:09:11
I went behind you right now and just held your shoulder blade. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn't be able to raise your arm up maybe more
01:09:17
than here because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top. So when you realize that this epicenter
01:09:25
of dysfunction can have these far-reaching benefits where all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can't move up overhead and then what
01:09:32
happens then if you can't move your arm up overhead right and I say Stephen get your arm up over your head like I can't
01:09:38
no get your arm over your head you'd go like this you you'd lean your body back
01:09:44
because your arm can't get any higher so you're going to lean your body back what are you leaning from your low back so
01:09:49
now all of a sudden you're asking a an area of your spine that's supposed to be stable, right? The low back, the lumbar
01:09:56
spine is supposed to be a stable area of your body. You're asking it to now become a mobile area of your body. And
01:10:01
you're you're asking for motion that it's not naturally inclined to want to give you because this area didn't give
01:10:07
it to you, right? The upper thoracic area didn't give it to you. So now what does that happen? Now you're asking that to do too much. The muscles can become
01:10:13
spasm. You can damage the joints in your low back. Now you're causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has has all
01:10:19
these farreaching benefits. Another thing that can happen too is when you're down like this, I mentioned that this
01:10:25
area of the spine we tal about is actually connected to the ribs. Yeah. If you're in this compressed position where
01:10:32
you're rounded forward, hunched over, you actually don't even get good lung
01:10:37
inflation. It's like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a box that won't open. You can't get the lungs to inflate
01:10:43
properly. lack of properly uh operating lungs are going to cause you to be more
01:10:49
fatigued throughout the day and they cause you to feel uh less rested at night. So these the this area has so
01:10:56
many up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it and it it's
01:11:03
one of those things again if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on this area
01:11:08
10%. At most what have I got to be doing that at my age? I'm I'm 30 in my early
01:11:14
30s now. What have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older I'm not hunched over and I am I do have that
01:11:20
full range of mobility? Yeah, there's a few things like again anytime you try to approach any of these dysfunctions, you
01:11:26
know, we talk about um the mobility flexibility part being the the
01:11:31
foundation of that. But then there's also a strength component because like you can free up the mobility and flexibility, but can you maintain it?
01:11:37
The strength is just going to help you to maintain it. From a mobility flexibility standpoint, you can simply
01:11:42
go up against a wall, right? And what you what what you're supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall, your upper back
01:11:49
against the wall, and your butt against the wall. So, you're going as flat as you can, and you put your arms back up against the wall themselves. So, the
01:11:56
back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the requirements to be able to get there is going to have
01:12:02
good mobility or flexibility through your rotator cuff muscles because your rotator cuff as it gets tight wants to internally rotate your arms. Can you get
01:12:09
them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward, but your your arms You're doing a pretty good job. You can see I can see some deficits there. So,
01:12:16
can I get in that position when I'm there? Can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do, the only
01:12:23
way I'm going to be able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension because what's going to happen is if you
01:12:28
lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it's just going to fold you forward from the wall and you're not going to be able to get up there. You
01:12:35
can do stretches where you take that dowel that's that that we had there. You
01:12:40
would lay on the ground face down. Dowels over your over your back like that. You spread your legs. So you look
01:12:46
kind of like a like a maybe an X with your hands out here and your legs spread. And all you do is you rotate
01:12:51
around. So you're trying to basically rotate up towards the ceiling. That dial is going to travel back behind you. And
01:12:58
you're pretty much isolating the rotation through the low through that midback through that thoracic spine. And
01:13:04
so you're getting rotation and extension because it's causing you to do this and lean backwards. There's another exercise
01:13:09
um I have that's called the bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach over is you push up through you're on
01:13:15
your back. You do a regular bridge like a glute bridge. But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and
01:13:22
try to touch behind you over the opposite shoulder. So again, what are you getting there? you're getting
01:13:27
extension through that spine and the rotation together to see if you can
01:13:34
combine those movements and again take back that range of motion that's being shared between those two functions.
01:13:40
These are all things that anybody can do. Like anybody can do them. And maybe you won't do them well in the beginning
01:13:45
because you are restricted. But these are the types of things that improve as you do them. And again, don't don't look
01:13:51
for perfection right away. But the nice thing about these drills is they don't have to be done for more than a few
01:13:57
weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel what happens when you start to become less
01:14:03
restricted here. So if I just did five or 10 minutes a day of some of these drills, you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound? very very
01:14:10
I think that again I think people don't realize the minimal time investment
01:14:16
that's required um it just needs to be done each day right those little
01:14:21
deposits have to be made each day and they pay off in big dividends if you do and is it important for me to train for
01:14:27
a long time or for a more intense but shorter period how do you think about that yeah so I always say you can train
01:14:34
long or you can train hard but you can't do both right and I think that especially as you get older, I
01:14:42
think you need to minimize the rotations on the tire, right? The how many tire
01:14:48
rotations are you getting? Because even if I just raise my arm up overhead and I just do it a thousand times a day, I'm
01:14:54
still moving my arm up in that position. And every time I move it up, even on
01:14:59
here in this limited capacity to move here with this guy, like you're still getting some of that rubbing and and
01:15:07
grinding in that joint. And if you have any degenerative changes, if you've occur, if you've acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder and this is
01:15:15
rubbing up against that each time, it's like taking a rope and rubbing it over and back over sort of a sharp edge,
01:15:21
right? Eventually, it just starts to fray and fray and fray. I'd rather you trade that in the repetitions for the
01:15:27
intensity because the the tension delivered to the muscle with the higher
01:15:34
level of of weight that you're using or the intensity of the technique that you're using is going to have bigger
01:15:40
benefits in a in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions. Now, that's not to say that you can't
01:15:46
actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle. You can. And they've actually shown um recently that anywhere
01:15:53
between five and 30 repetitions taken close to or all the way to failure can stimulate muscle
01:15:59
growth. This the absolute load is sometimes not even as important as long
01:16:05
as the effort is there. But I believe that as you get older, you got to kind of spare some of those repetitions
01:16:11
because it has that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. ultimately you're gonna have to
01:16:17
change the tires and we may not be able to change these tires as easily. What
01:16:22
about um the importance of form when we're training? It's one of the things you're known for is emphasizing that form really matters. And you know, there
01:16:29
might be another school of thought that says, listen, it hurts, so it must be doing something. Yeah, people think that
01:16:34
a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting, so clearly it worked. Form is very important because I
01:16:40
think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one, it keeps you safe. You know, most likely if you can do
01:16:46
something in good form, then you're in command of the weight that you're you're lifting and therefore it's likely going
01:16:51
to um do what it's supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing
01:16:57
it. In terms of the leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal
01:17:03
that you that you're trying to achieve. So, if you're trying to achieve muscle growth, I I'm a big
01:17:10
believer that muscle growth is not given. and it is taken and you need to force yourself. You need to force your
01:17:16
body to make a change because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. It wants to stay the same and getting it
01:17:24
to deliver new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding or it's
01:17:30
creating more tissue that's going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn't want to do that. Again, homeostasis states that it wants to keep
01:17:36
you the same. You have to take that and the only way to take that is to put
01:17:42
forth an effort and an intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do right now. That's why I I am a big
01:17:49
believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute failure is 100% necessary, but
01:17:56
it's the only objective end point for you and I to speak the same language here. Because if you go to the point
01:18:02
where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I I pretty comfortable in saying, "Well, Stephen, you went to failure." Good. So, I know
01:18:08
you went far enough. If you stop at an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, you
01:18:15
know, passable, same result potentially. How do I know it was really one or two reps? I don't. I don't. Because I I
01:18:21
think if if there's a gun to your head, you might say, "Oh, I could do two more." Well, now it wasn't one to two, it was four. and four is completely not
01:18:29
as effective, if not at all, compared to the one to two in reserve. So, when you
01:18:35
do these exercises to this degree of effort, there's going to be a little bending of
01:18:41
form. Now, I'm not saying that the form should break down. You might find an abbreviated range of motion. You might
01:18:46
find a little bit more momentum involved. That's all okay for me. Um, as long as it's still controlled. If the
01:18:53
exercise you're doing no longer resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you're not doing it right. Your form has broken down to a
01:18:59
point where I don't think you're getting the benefits of that. You might not even actually be training the muscles you were trying to train. Right? You might
01:19:05
have shifted the focus for you started the exercise, it was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you're done, it's for everything but your chest
01:19:10
because you're just trying to move your body through space. That's not effective if you're trying to build muscle. You want to direct attention into the
01:19:16
muscles you're trying to build. And sometimes form can become a little bit laxed in that pursuit, but not to the
01:19:22
point where you're actually taking it off of the muscles. Again, this is just jumping a bit back backwards, but um a
01:19:27
conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about nerd neck and is there a consequence to the
01:19:35
fact that we all walk around now staring downwards? Like for these this whole conversation, I'll be looking up at you,
01:19:40
but most of the time I'm also staring downwards at my notes and and stuff. And if I'm not here, then I'm on my phone
01:19:45
and I'm staring downwards. And we spend most of our lives now staring downwards. And I just wondered if you how you think
01:19:51
about that. And it's good. It's good. It's a good um it is a good connection back to what we talked about because I
01:19:56
believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction which is that thoracic spine because when you go like
01:20:02
this, right, you're actually internally rotating the arms too. So this this is e
01:20:07
internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, right, that's the external rotation. If I do it the way we're just
01:20:12
doing it up against the wall, that's external rotation. more difficult when you're higher than when you're lower. But when you're in this position, once
01:20:19
you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction. When you start to round here,
01:20:25
nerd neck is more of a consequence of what's happening back there. Because when you're here, what do you got to do?
01:20:31
Yeah. Got to look up, right? Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So, it's not that your neck is
01:20:38
necessarily being pulled in that direction or the fact that you're looking down. It's the fact that your body is following that. And when it
01:20:45
follows the adaptation is well, okay, now I've developed these tightnesses this way and I've lost that mobility
01:20:51
into extension of my back. What do I do to compensate? I got to look up. So now
01:20:57
I'm walking around looking like this. And that's that sort of nerd neck. I think I think nerd neck is less of
01:21:03
something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility. You've
01:21:09
made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we're working out and training. What are the most common but avoidable
01:21:16
injuries, and how do I avoid them? Because I I care a lot about this now that I'm getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I've I've
01:21:21
pulled some like ligaments in my ankle, and I was at the physio yesterday, and I've been on crutches, and I've got this big boot I have to wear. And it's not
01:21:30
until you get injured, that you realize how imperative it was for you to avoid
01:21:35
this. Yeah. because it puts you for me it's completely changes my whole it changes my whole life. Not only can't I
01:21:41
like just move through a space normally but then I can't train. I'm going to get weaker. It's going to have an impact on
01:21:47
my metabolic health. It's going to therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep um my cognition and everything
01:21:54
downstream. So I go okay I should actually have an injury prevention program. So what are the most commonly
01:22:00
occurring injuries and what advice would you give me to avoid them? Let's see.
01:22:06
So, first of all, I take personal offense to you calling yourself old at 32. Well, a bit older. I don't know what that makes me, but I feel like a the
01:22:12
keeper. But you just start to like You do though. When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for 3 four hours. I
01:22:18
didn't stretch and I was fine. These days, I I have a 100% injury rate if I
01:22:23
don't stretch and if I don't warm up and if I don't really really think about it. 100% injury rate. I'm like, I'm I'm on
01:22:28
my way downhill, you know? Well, I mean, you're certainly going in the wrong direction, but I I think when it comes
01:22:35
to injury, prep preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid it.
01:22:42
It doesn't it's not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm. But when it comes to the more
01:22:48
common ones, I think you could look to the joints that are either built to be mobile that aren't
01:22:56
being controlled or built to be stable that are being asked to do too many things. So what is that? If you look at
01:23:02
your shoulder, right, it's a ball. Again, we can look at that. It's a ball and socket, right? It's got the ball
01:23:08
inside the socket. It's supposed to be able to move in all kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere. If you look at the the the leg, right? We don't
01:23:14
have the other part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball and socket. It's meant to be able to go in all directions. When those joints, the
01:23:22
shoulder and the hip are uncontrolled, meaning you're lacking
01:23:28
strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint. That's when you actually wind up having issues. So, what
01:23:34
are the what are the muscles that control that? Well, we talked about um one of those smaller exercises before,
01:23:39
the glute medius. um that muscle controls motion of the hip in that
01:23:45
frontal plane. So not just in this front to back squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side
01:23:52
plane. It controls the movements of the hips this way. If you don't train them,
01:23:57
they're not going to magically get strong. Like they they have a function, and if you're not challenging that
01:24:02
function, then you're not strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot. But I mean, you
01:24:08
could acquire the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction. So, you could
01:24:13
do some of the sidelineing hip um uh lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more challenging where you
01:24:21
perform a lunge, but interestingly, all you have to do is weight on one side. So, if I were to say, "All right,
01:24:27
Stephen, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunges? How much weight do you hold in your hands when you do a regular lunge? Or do you not do
01:24:34
lunges? I don't do many lunges. Got to do lunges." So, let's say you're doing like or Bulgarian split squat, another one of my favorite exercises where you
01:24:39
put one leg back on the bench. I would say hold the weight in one hand. So, now if you're doing a lunge and I put a 50
01:24:46
or 60 pound dumbbell in your hand on one side and then you go and you lunge out,
01:24:51
that weight want, you know, you're in the split position now with one leg out in front. The weight on this side
01:24:57
totally wants to pull you in that direction. You have to pull back on this
01:25:02
side through the muscles on the outside of the opposite hip to keep you in this
01:25:07
position. And I can say, I'm gonna make this even harder. Go slow. Go really slow. So now you're stepping out. You're
01:25:14
on one leg as you're stepping. So now you're on one leg and you're being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops
01:25:20
down or the, you know, the the dumbbell wants to drop you down. You stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second or two in the bottom position
01:25:25
because your body is just aching to want to move in that direction. I've just trained your hip abduction strength in
01:25:34
this frontal plane on an exercise that's truly a sagittal plane exercise front to back. So, I have ways that I can
01:25:40
actually trick you into getting these things accomplished at the same time you're training something else. So, it's
01:25:45
not always an extra thing that you have to do. You could actually do this in a way that you know is sort of part of
01:25:51
what you do. So, what do you do then? If if I were saying to you, I want to have a comprehensive workout and you are designing my 7-day workout plan. What
01:25:59
would you give me to do? One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower
01:26:04
split or with a push pull leg split. And again, if you were to do a push pull
01:26:10
legs, I would I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your chest and triceps there, right? Because it's your only shot in that week
01:26:17
to do your shoulder work. And again, as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day. So Monday, what do I do
01:26:23
Monday? So you could do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push pull legs is that it it tends to be a lot,
01:26:31
right? Like you're you're doing shoulders, chest, triceps. Some
01:26:37
people don't like that amount of of volume, right? What's push when you say push? Someone that doesn't know. Yeah.
01:26:43
So push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing. So, if you look at a bench press, it's pushing the
01:26:49
weight away from you is the concentric action that you're doing. If I looked at a lat pull down, I'm pulling the weight
01:26:54
towards me. That's the concentric part of it. If I'm doing a bicep curl, I'm pulling it towards
01:27:00
me. Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I'm pushing away this way. Pushing away that way.
01:27:06
Push-up, I'm pushing away from the ground. Tricep push downs, I'm it's in the name itself. I'm pushing down through a tricep push down. Um, I'm
01:27:13
doing tricep, you know, lying extensions. I'm pushing the weight away. They would all go on a similar day.
01:27:19
Again, I like the the function of that because it's optimal recovery. So, why that's why that's good if you could
01:27:26
tolerate, you know, I'm asking, you know, if that's okay for you to do that because you have you're not naturally adding shoulders in. If you were to okay
01:27:33
with adding shoulders in, then you would do your push workout. And then what I would do is know that I'm getting enough
01:27:41
recovery in between workouts because I could give you a day off in terms of your weight training on Tuesday. Come
01:27:47
back and do Wednesday legs, right? So So Monday, I'm just doing push upper body.
01:27:52
Push. Yeah. Well, it's Yeah. Just push upper body. Okay. Tuesday, you're going to give me the day off. Tuesday get the
01:27:57
day off. Yeah. Then there's two I'm going to give you two variations of this. Okay. And when I say day off, we could we we if you were with me, you'd
01:28:04
be doing conditioning. All right. So, we'll get into that, but that but it would be Yeah, it's not a day off. No, you give me seven days. I I'll I'll take
01:28:10
a ball seven. Even if I'm just doing ab work on some, but you you then on Wednesday would come back and do your
01:28:16
your leg workout. And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday? So, it's going to be front anterior posterior. So, I'm
01:28:22
going to train your hamstrings, your glutes, and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you'd have another day off. Okay. Again, likely not
01:28:29
a day off. Some conditioning. And then the uh Friday could be your your pull workout. Now, what's nice about that is
01:28:36
if you are somebody that doesn't recover as well as others, and this is not everybody, but that gives you a really
01:28:44
good amount of recovery between those workouts. If you could tolerate more
01:28:49
than that, the first step I would do is add a total body workout one more time.
01:28:55
So, I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would just be a little bit light on the pull
01:29:01
because you just did that or you did it the day before. So you my whole body on Saturday. You could do it. You know when
01:29:06
I mean like I would pick very big compound movements that are representative of including as many
01:29:13
muscles as possible at one time. Okay. And I can shy off a little bit back off
01:29:18
a little bit off of the pull that you were doing because I realized that you just did certain exercises the day
01:29:24
before. So I would if I trained you on and this gets a little nuanced, but if I trained you on Friday and a pull
01:29:30
workout, remember I have different planes of motion. and I can move in. So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff
01:29:36
like a pull-up or a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises like a seated row or bent over row,
01:29:42
right? So I could shift the focus a little bit and then Sunday Sunday I break. Yeah, I definitely I mean I I
01:29:48
definitely don't advocate seven days a week of full training. Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this in
01:29:53
this particular week? So in that in that scenario, I'd have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, I had to And if you were
01:30:00
gonna, if you had, you know, your goals were more aligned with fat loss and
01:30:06
overall conditioning and you feel like you're, you know, not as healthy as you could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that.
01:30:12
But if your priority was the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take advantage
01:30:18
of that Saturday as my my flex day to do training. And you don't put the cardio on the same day as the upper body legs
01:30:24
workouts. It could be, but if your priority again is to build muscle, then
01:30:29
prioritize muscle building. Put that first. Do your cardio conditioning work at the end of that workout. Something
01:30:34
might suffer. And the thing that usually comes second is what suffers. If we think just about Monday, which we had
01:30:40
down is the push day. So that's me doing like chest and is it uh triceps and
01:30:46
shoulders. How many if I'm training for one hour, how many reps are you trying
01:30:51
to do per muscle and how many like sets? So set count, you know, if you can get
01:30:56
in, and again, this is a little bit determined by um whether you're going to train on that Saturday. So if you're
01:31:03
going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I I know I have an opportunity to maybe do a bench again on
01:31:09
Saturday or a variation of bench, an incline bench. So I don't have to get all of my chest volume in in that first
01:31:14
day. But typically, you're looking for around anywhere between nine and 16 sets
01:31:21
or so for that muscle group across the week. So, if you were going to do, let's say, the one workout for chest and
01:31:28
you're doing, say, three uh sets per exercise, you're in that range of around
01:31:34
uh three exercises, right, for chest. Now, you don't have to have that. The volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because you're obviously
01:31:40
training your triceps while you're doing bench press. So, you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me,
01:31:47
I would put something, my favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension where I lay on my back on the bench and I do the, you know, they some
01:31:53
people call them skull crushers or nose breakers. Just take the bicep for as an example. How often do I need to train
01:32:01
and how intense do I need to train the bicep for it to grow? And conversely, if
01:32:06
I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take for me to lose the muscle? Yeah. Interesting. So, um I think this
01:32:13
is one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered.
01:32:19
Um I actually discussed this with with Andrew Huberman at one point. It's like it's very interesting. So from person to
01:32:26
person, we know that there are different recovery rates between the people. From
01:32:32
person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between
01:32:38
muscles. like you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to
01:32:43
recover than I would. What's interesting is from the individual themselves,
01:32:49
certain muscle groups require more or less frequency to recover from. So I
01:32:56
might find that I could train my biceps every three days, but I could never train my back every three days or I
01:33:03
could never train my chest every three days. It's just so intricate because every muscle is going to be different
01:33:09
for every person. And even at a at a holistic one level, you you're just not
01:33:15
going to find the same recovery rate across the board for every muscle in your body. So I a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of
01:33:22
training intuition to say, "Hey, like am I increasing my weights? Is my strength
01:33:28
going up on the lift? Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I'm probably
01:33:34
recovering well. And you can experiment with like hitting it again more
01:33:39
frequently. I think in the big picture, the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the
01:33:45
results are going to be. You have this um contraption on the desk in front of
01:33:50
us. This this thing here. Yeah. A lot so
01:33:56
many people talk to me about this device and it's it's quite strange how important people say that this device is
01:34:02
and what it tells us. I was doing some reading beforehand. It's a grip strength Yeah. reader monitor and there's some
01:34:08
really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015 Lancet study across 17
01:34:13
countries that found for every 5 kilogram decrease in grip strength, it was associated with a 16% high risk of
01:34:19
death, a 17% higher risk of heart disease, and a 7% higher risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of
01:34:26
Alzheimer's disease found that people with low grip strength had a 68% high risk of developing Alzheimer's. There
01:34:32
was another another study that linked it to other cardiovascular um and blood issues. And another study that shows
01:34:38
that older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2.5 times more likely to fall and be hospitalized with their
01:34:46
injuries. And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body strength by 70%. And lastly, adults over 65 with
01:34:53
weak grip strength were 2.1 times more likely to become dependent in daily activities within 3 years. That was in
01:34:59
the journal of gurontology. Grip strength. Pretty important, huh?
01:35:08
Um, a lot of that research has been determined to be more uh correlative
01:35:15
than causitive. But the fact is that maintaining your
01:35:20
grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative causitive
01:35:25
thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life are probably doing so
01:35:31
because they're regularly engaging in physical activity. uh likely they are lifting weights, they're holding heavy
01:35:38
weights, they're having to um manipulate their body in space if they're doing calisthenic exercises. So there's a
01:35:45
level of activity that remains in their grip that probably keeps their
01:35:51
level of strength at a higher level. So you're selecting out people that are just generally maintaining their
01:35:56
fitness, in which case they're probably maintaining higher levels of health and lower issues as they age. So it's not the the strength in which we can grip
01:36:03
that matters necessarily, but the thing that matters is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip. So
01:36:09
it's just one it's almost like a a symptom of something upstream which is positive, right? Or lacking, right? not
01:36:15
you're not doing enough of. Um that being said, you can actually directly
01:36:22
relate or measure your ability to recover from exercise um based upon
01:36:28
having a a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the over
01:36:33
you know weeks or months of training. So, if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool like this in the
01:36:39
morning, five mornings in a row, and average it out in a at a time where you feel like you're feeling energetic and
01:36:45
good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength is. What's a good grip strength? So, most men would
01:36:51
be somewhere between 100 I'll talk in pounds, 100 to 120 pounds. So, if you
01:36:56
look at that, that's around 46 kilos to 54 kilos. Um, if you you want to give it
01:37:03
a shot, see where you stack up. So, to do this now, there's some rules here. Yeah. Don't go like this. You know, keep
01:37:10
it in here. Don't touch your arm to the table at all. Keep it Yeah. 90° like that. Yep. And then you're just going to
01:37:16
squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard as you can. Wish me luck. All right. Don't blow out now.
01:37:23
All right. Let's see. Oh gosh, my head nearly exploded. 130. So, you're you're above average. So
01:37:31
doing well on grip strength. So now what you would do is and you would test both sides. You could average out the sides. Sometimes you're going to have one obviously one side's stronger than the
01:37:37
other. You would then have a good baseline. If you were feeling like you weren't sure if you recovered or not,
01:37:43
you would test this in the morning. Not Can I try this side as well? Yeah. This is my So this is my weaker. All right.
01:37:48
Here we go. My weaker hand. All right. You got to beat it though now. Oh gosh.
01:37:53
It's a bit slippery. I think you did. Did I beat it? Oh my god. Wow. 160. No, you're joking.
01:38:03
160. 160. So, you probably if you did the other side again, give it another
01:38:08
shot. If you did the other side again, you think I'd beat it? No. No. You're not going to beat You're going to beat your old performance, but you're not going to beat you're not going to beat
01:38:14
the the left side. Are you left-handed? I'm I'm right-handed. So, that was strange.
01:38:21
Okay. All right. Let's see what you got.
01:38:26
150 now. See, I have my prediction is right. So, a lot of times it takes a little accommodation to the to this the
01:38:32
stress of of of doing that. What's your grip strength? Uh, I don't know. I haven't touched it in a while. See, now
01:38:37
you're going to show me left and right. All right, let's see. We're going to ask if some of my team members if they want to give it a shot. All right, here we
01:38:43
go. Wow. Crunching.
01:38:49
130. Okay. On that side and your left side. All right, let's see. Anyone else want to do it? B, you want to give it a
01:38:55
shot? Try to do with all the popping without the popping. That was my bicep that popped, by the way.
01:39:04
110. Okay. So, you're right. And I'm right-handed. So, it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on
01:39:10
this side. So, I fall in the range of average, but not not super human for sure, but you try. Sure. But you're most
01:39:18
certainly way stronger than me. Not in grip strength, but you're stronger than me at bicep curls, bench press,
01:39:25
everything else. Yeah. I mean it is it is this is again un underscoring why some of these things need to be trained
01:39:30
individually. Okay. All right. So now hold it like this. Mhm. Yep. And then you're just going to one one hand right
01:39:36
squeeze as hard as you can for as kind of a short burst. Okay. All right. There you go. Let's take a look.
01:39:44
Wow. 100. Now women's average grip strength is 60 to 80 pounds. So you're
01:39:50
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This has never been done before. A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the
01:40:56
world's top CEOs. All the time people say to me, they say, "Can you mentor me? Can you get this person to mentor me?
01:41:02
How do I find a mentor?" So, here is what we're going to do. You're going to send me a question. And the most popular
01:41:08
question you send me, I'm going to text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the
01:41:13
top CEOs in the world running a hundred billion dollar companies. And then I'm going to reply to you via email with how
01:41:20
they answered that question. You might say, "How do you hold on to a relationship when you're building a
01:41:25
startup? What is the most important thing if I've got an idea and don't know where to start?" We email it to the CEOs. They email back. We take the five,
01:41:32
six top best answers. We email it to you. I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality.
01:41:37
But then I I saw what the founders were replying with and their willingness to reply and I thought actually this is really good and all you've got to do is
01:41:44
sign up completely free and can I train my grip strength individually if I
01:41:50
wanted to improve it as an individual thing where I just have to grip. Yeah, I mean you know they they one of the easiest ways to do it is with those
01:41:56
oldfashioned little grippers, you know, that you just squeeze and they make them in some really really uh heavy
01:42:03
resistance levels now for people that are have worked on it and actually improved. When I was young, they're
01:42:08
pretty easy to conquer with a little bit of training. You'd be able to squeeze them because they never really made the resist resistance high enough, but now
01:42:15
it's definitely something that you could uh uh you could be challenged by. The other thing I I wanted to talk to you
01:42:21
about, which we've touched on briefly, but I think is important to talk about because I don't think people realize how
01:42:26
how prevalent it is, is back pain. I was looking at some stats beforehand, and it says that 80% of people will experience
01:42:32
back pain at some point in their lives. It's actually the leading cause of disability worldwide. And in the UK, over 10 million work days are lost every
01:42:39
year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain are related to back pain. It's the most common
01:42:45
reason for people under 45 to see a doctor. And chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects
01:42:52
about one in five adults in the UK. And there's five of us in this room now in total. And so, one of us
01:42:58
probabilistically is going to have chronic back pain. Is this something one can avoid? I I asked this in part
01:43:04
because I spoke to some I think the anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa and they find that back
01:43:10
pain just doesn't exist there. It's not a thing. I think the likelihood that you're going to experience back pain at some point in your life is is high. But
01:43:19
that recurring back pain and that chronic back pain, I think that's that's entirely avoidable.
01:43:25
Um 26% of the time at any one time in the United States, people have are going
01:43:30
to be dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there, the other thing I I find
01:43:35
interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back pain behind
01:43:41
respiratory infection. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year, my own kids have been in at least
01:43:48
four or five times, you know, to the doctor for respiratory infection, it starts to an eye openener like wow, you
01:43:54
know, and this is and this is something that's somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The
01:44:00
problem is that it can come from so many different causes. You know, we we talked
01:44:06
about before how the limitation in that thoracic mobility could ask the low back
01:44:11
to do more than it could and therefore cause strain there. Now, here's the good part about this though. 80% of people or
01:44:19
85% will have low back pain in their life. Only 27 to 35% of the time is it
01:44:27
discreated. So, we're talking about, you know, if we look back on this guy again, it's the it's the discs, you know,
01:44:32
between the vertebrae, right? The the the vertebral discs that create that spacing and the cushioning between the
01:44:37
the vertebrae and our spine. When one of those discs, actually, this is one of them dislodged itself. But when the disc
01:44:44
that sits above and below these two levels pushes outward or herniates, it
01:44:50
could it could push on any one of these nerves that's traveling downward. Anytime you get any touching of this
01:44:56
nerve with some other structure, in this case the disc, you get the radiating symptoms that go down whatever dermatome
01:45:02
this is. What that means is this nerve will feed some function of the lower
01:45:07
body or some sensory area of the lower body depending upon where people complain of pain like, oh, I feel it in
01:45:15
my hip or I feel it in my leg around my knee or or I feel it down behind my knee
01:45:22
down to my foot. you pretty much know what level of disc problem they have because it's representative of the level
01:45:28
of herniation. When you press on something that is at the level of like
01:45:34
L5S1, right, the last lumbar vertebrae in the first sacral vertebrae, it's going to give you symptoms like
01:45:40
numbness, tingling down near the back of your calf underneath your foot. If you
01:45:45
get something more around the hip, you know, a lot of times people complain of hip pain. They think they have they have
01:45:50
a hip issue. it's actually a back issue that's pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that's an L2 L3 or
01:45:57
L30 L4. You get indicators of where that's coming from. Again, the good news is if you don't have this this
01:46:03
neurological deficit in your lower body, this tingling, numb, numbness, weakness, um it's mostly muscle and origin. Now
01:46:11
again, even of the discreated issues, the 27 to 35% 96% of those are not operated on.
01:46:18
So, think about the impact you can have if we're saying that pretty much every
01:46:24
single instance of low back pain that you have is going to be able to be addressed through non-operative
01:46:31
strengthening or stretching intervention because a lot of times, as we said, what are what's the cause of the dysfunction?
01:46:38
Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool. Okay. Well,
01:46:43
let's work on it. So, let's start try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute? Right?
01:46:51
Having weak glutes because again the the the the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. In other
01:46:57
words, kick the leg back behind you. If I can't get my leg back behind me and I'm trying to basically extend my body
01:47:04
by doing that when I step through and get behind me. Well, how can I do that? Once again, I could do it from the low
01:47:09
back by overexaggerating and stepping in where it's not supposed to. Always
01:47:14
remember the low back is supposed to be the st the the stability center of your
01:47:20
spine. It's supposed to provide stability. If you're not getting mobility from your hip or from your
01:47:26
thoracic spine up and above and below, it's going to ask for it from the next place above, you know, above it or below
01:47:33
it. It's going to say to the low back, please help out. Give me the mobility that I lack. So, the low back will do
01:47:38
it, but at an expense, and that's where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses. You have to address hip
01:47:45
hip mobility issues. This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a
01:47:51
mismatch issue. Um when they say mismatch issue, they mean that there's a way that we're living our lives these
01:47:57
days that is at odds with how we were quote unquote supposed to live or how our ancestors lived. And it's
01:48:03
interesting because I've interviewed David Rachalan who is an anthropologist but also Daniel Lieberman. they've both
01:48:09
spent time with the Hadza tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was assuming that the reason why we
01:48:15
get back issues and the Hadza tribe don't really get them. It's because we spend a lot of time like just sedentary.
01:48:21
However, David Ralin said that they the Hadza tribe still spend 10 hours a day
01:48:26
in resting postures, but they maintain a straight J-shaped spine, not the curved
01:48:32
S-shaped spine common in the West. They squat. Um, they walk, they carry loads a lot. Um, and they aren't in chairs,
01:48:39
they're doing more active motions. Now, I'm, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it's at a desk doing this
01:48:46
or whether it's in an office. I'm wondering from your experience if you thought it would be better to have a
01:48:52
standing desk or if there's No, no. I think I think standing desks are are are
01:48:57
great and I I hate to say it because it might actually I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it it would be beneficial for me, too. I
01:49:04
think that too much time sitting, right? There's there's people that call sitting the new smoking. Like the the
01:49:10
detrimental effects that sitting can have, prolonged sitting can have on your body. Especially when you couple it with
01:49:15
the fact that when we do go to sleep, 8 n 10 hours. Like how much time do you
01:49:20
want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day? Like you're you're working all day. There's a big
01:49:26
chunk there, maybe eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours with intermittent breaks that you're going to to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you got
01:49:32
another eight or nine hours at night that you're doing the same thing. Like your body wasn't meant to be that immobile. Like I I think the there's an
01:49:40
actual compression. So when you're when you're when your joints are subject to gravity and you're moving through space,
01:49:46
you're actually getting uh a bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that's in these joints like let's say
01:49:53
your knees that you're essentially mobilizing because you're compressed and you know again with your
01:49:59
knee you're weight bearing and then you're off of it. you're weight bearing your off. It's like squeezing and bathing that that joint in the synovial
01:50:04
fluid. The outcomes are much better when we don't allow that to become stagnant. And when we when we stimulate that
01:50:10
through frequent movement sessions, being up on your feet at a standing desk
01:50:15
is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the load that we're getting from the the chair and probably
01:50:22
discourage some of that really bad posture that comes from sitting and doing this. Standing in that, you're likely going to at least improve your
01:50:28
posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above like we talked about, but at least from below you're going to improve that. But I
01:50:35
still think that the inactivity just standing alone is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more
01:50:41
frequent breaks. I think people need to um get up and walk around just a little bit. Five minutes every every you know
01:50:47
30 minutes or so would be ideal. But like if you're going to take a phone call, go walk while you're on the phone. Like one thing I do is I have my office
01:50:54
and I have the gym. And as soon as I know I'm going to be on a call, I just stand up and I walk around the gym while I'm on my call just as an excuse to get
01:51:01
up and move. I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I'm doing the rest of my work from the
01:51:06
chair. Anything you can do, you know, I know they're cliche, but you know, park a little further when you're at a store,
01:51:12
so you have to walk a little bit more. But I think it's the frequency of the breaks that we're not taking, which is
01:51:17
the main the main problem. I think that even if you added up all the time that you're active in a day and then the time
01:51:25
that you're not active, it's if it was the same exact time of an activity, but
01:51:30
I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you'd have less negative side effects than you do
01:51:35
if you're just grouping it. I'm going to be inactive from this period. I'm going to be active from this period because again of that effect of intermittently
01:51:42
bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting to that them then to different stresses than just compression, compression, compression.
01:51:48
It's one of the reasons why I talk all the time about the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar, right? To
01:51:54
decompress your body, you know, even just minimally, again, not that much, you know, one arm hang or so, you know,
01:52:01
two arm hangs a day is enough to give your your body a bit of a break that you're not getting right now. And nobody
01:52:07
does that. Nobody nobody hangs from a bar. What about let's talk about supplementation. I've got a bunch of supplements here with me now. And
01:52:13
there's so much said about supplementation, but if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking
01:52:19
every day frequently versus the ones that maybe aren't so important, but also just like the call outs of, you know, I
01:52:25
saw this thing on Twitter going viral the other day where someone had screenshotted the top creatines on a
01:52:33
certain website and then they had tested them in a lab and found that a lot of them weren't actually creatine in the
01:52:39
doses that they'd said and in the form that they were selling. Yeah. So, I have this I now have this skepticism around
01:52:44
the supplements I'm taking. I've got some supplements here. I've got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be taking and
01:52:51
explain to me why for building muscle? The two that rank at the very very top of the list are going to be creatine
01:52:56
monohydrate or creat any form of creatine. There's different forms of creatine. We can get into those, but creatine and a protein powder. And some
01:53:04
people want to argue the necessity of a protein powder. And I guess if you're getting enough through your diet, you
01:53:12
you don't have to take it. It's not a necessity. You're not you're not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you are um that you're not getting
01:53:18
through your food. It's just that you're doing it at a much more economic cost. If you look at the price of protein these days, I mean, it's it's certainly
01:53:25
becoming a little bit um unrealistic to think you're going to meet your daily goals. And for me, my daily goal is
01:53:32
around at minimum a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1.2 2 grams
01:53:37
per pound of body weight if you're active. Creatine has become all the rage recently, it seems. I was looking at
01:53:42
some Google search data and it shows just how quickly in search volume creatine is increasing from the early
01:53:50
2020s to 2025. Now it's exploding and it's been around forever and been and
01:53:56
and the benefits have been known forever. Right. So that's interesting because that's all related to the
01:54:01
neurological benefits that creatine is showing in terms of depression and um
01:54:06
degenerative neurological diseases and and its improvement it ability to slow
01:54:12
prevent things like MS and Parkinson's and you know by
01:54:17
basically keeping the brain in a more favorable uh bioenergetic state meaning
01:54:23
be able to to feed the neurons of the brain um with the energy that seems to
01:54:29
be lacking in some of these degenerative diseases. Also, the other thing that I think has happened and I did I did a little test
01:54:36
in my office a couple couple of months back where I asked who in the team took creatine. Yeah. And every hand that
01:54:42
raised was a man and I asked the women in my office why they didn't take creatine. And the overarching sort of
01:54:49
misconception which also my girlfriend told me about when we were in Cape Town a couple years ago and I said, "Babe, you should take creatine. Everyone on my
01:54:54
podcast is talking about it." And she was like, "No, it's going to make me it." I think she Yeah. She saw it as
01:54:59
like she saw it as a steroid. Yeah. She was like, "It's what bodybuilders take." Well, that's going to change quickly
01:55:05
because I think that you have a lot of people, highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we
01:55:10
speak in these areas that we're talking about. I urged my wife recently to take to take it. She is chronically sleepd
01:55:18
deprived because of my boys, you know. So, she has um you know, she has a
01:55:25
definitely operating on at a higher stress level. Um it's been shown to actually improve brain health and
01:55:32
performance in sleepdeprived and in stressed high stress states. from a
01:55:38
depression standpoint, it's being shown to be uh very effective even when kind
01:55:44
of paired up with traditional approaches to treating depression through uh pharmaceuticals. It's just got a lot of
01:55:50
promise and the good thing is that there's really no downside, right? They haven't really identified a downside to
01:55:56
taking it. Um there's a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. Actually made a video recently where I talked to and I
01:56:02
kind of addressed headon what they were. Jesse of course played our concerned parent who had all the questions he
01:56:07
asked. But like there is a big confusion that people have when it comes to people think it's a steroid and they
01:56:14
think that because the outcomes of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle, it can increase strength. Sure,
01:56:23
because the outcomes are the same as, let's say, anabolic steroid use doesn't mean that the mechanism is the same or
01:56:30
the magnitude of what you're going to see from them is the same or even the legality of of the of the supplement
01:56:36
itself is the same. We're talking about two completely different two two different mechanisms completely and two
01:56:42
different things that the body are going to react much differently to. When it's an anabolic steroid, it's going into the
01:56:48
muscle cell, binding to and receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression, right?
01:56:54
To basically convert, as I did in that video, I said you're taking an iPad and making it a MacBook, right? You're
01:56:59
you're completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine on hydrate, you're just talking about providing a more
01:57:06
constant flow of energy to those muscle cells so that they they can continue to
01:57:11
turn over faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance. Well, what happens when that when that occurs?
01:57:16
You're able to generate more work in a in a workout. By getting more work done, you're creating more of that overload.
01:57:23
You're also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle cell
01:57:28
with the creatine because osmotically when you pull water, anything into the cell, you're going to bring along with
01:57:33
it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the same. Well, that extra water keeps the
01:57:41
muscle cell hydrated, and that's a great thing. A more a hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better longer in
01:57:46
the in the long run just like a flower with water would grow better than one without. And there's lots of different types of creatine, right? There's like
01:57:52
gummies now, there's monohydrate, there's all kinds of creatines. There was over New Year's again, I was looking
01:57:59
at um different types of creatine. So, I went to the shop and it sounds crazy, but I bought like 30 types and I just
01:58:04
started researching it and I realized that there's like a better form of creatine. Yeah. Um and there's some
01:58:11
creatines which aren't so good. I ones that have many things added to them um etc. Yeah, creatine is pretty simple. I
01:58:18
always present it in sort of two forms to people because there's a there's one
01:58:23
creatine monohydrate and then there's one called creatine hydrochloride and the only difference is what it's bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to
01:58:29
a H2O molecule and the hydrochloride is bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that's ingested
01:58:37
in your body is that one's more absorbable than the other. the hydrochloride is more absorbable than
01:58:42
the other. So, you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine
01:58:48
monohydrate is usually taken at a higher dosage. And now there's some new research coming out that states that I used to think that it was just five
01:58:54
grams for everybody, but now they're finding that people that are like upwards of 200 lb or more, they might benefit from like 8, nine, 10 grams per
01:59:01
day. So, bigger dosages there. And people who are at, you know, 120 pounds or so and maybe some of the females and
01:59:06
female athletes like they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creaty hydrochloride is usually in lower
01:59:13
doses anyway. So a comparative dose of five grams of monohydrate might equal out to two to three grams of
01:59:19
hydrochloride. What's all this stuff about loading? Because when I was younger, my brother was bodybuilding, he would he would tell me that you had to
01:59:25
load up. Yeah. I you had to have a huge dosage for a week and then thereafter go back to a low dosage. It's just so your
01:59:32
body ultimately reaches a capacity for creatine storage. So if you want to get there faster, you load. It's five grams
01:59:40
four to five times a day. So a total dose of 20 to 25 grams in a day. Some people are going to find that that's a
01:59:47
little bit of an overload for them on their on their gut. There is a byproduct of creatine breakdown. Creatin is what
01:59:53
it's called. We get it measured whenever we get our blood test done. um that can sometimes pull along with it some extra
01:59:59
water and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you're using
02:00:05
hydrochloride, you wouldn't see that breakdown as much. You wouldn't you wouldn't get as much of that accumulated breakdown of creatinin. So, you might
02:00:11
get less of that bloating bloating. That's the only indication why I would ever suggest hydrochloride is if you are
02:00:20
some of that 15% of people that have some sensitivity to that. And a lot of times getting around the loading phase
02:00:26
and not doing it would bypass some of that discomfort that you feel, that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it.
02:00:32
So what happens if you don't load? You just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace. So anywhere from 27 to
02:00:40
35 days or so, you're going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you're taking it because you want to see
02:00:46
benefits in performance, like power output and performance, let's say leading up to an event that's, you know,
02:00:52
a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind of get to those full capacities sooner. But I don't really see a need to
02:00:59
have to load. Um, if again in the long run, you take away any of those risks,
02:01:06
those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level anyway. And what about the the proteins I've got here?
02:01:11
Are there any particular proteins that are better than others? I mean, I like to say since that's mine, that's that's better. But the, you know, the the fact
02:01:18
is that anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein.
02:01:23
So, in general, your isolate proteins are going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. Um, they're
02:01:30
still protein, but there's more on a gram per gram basis. Uh, it's 90% versus
02:01:35
80% um by volume if it's isolate versus concentrate. you're getting more protein
02:01:40
per per volume, but they're not all as advertised, are they? Because No. No.
02:01:45
There's I mean, look, I without I don't ever want to disparrage other brands or, you know, I I not in the practice of
02:01:52
doing that, but like there are some garbage quality proteins out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like
02:01:58
the biggest retailers. You know, they they they don't they're they're in it to make money. They're not in it to provide
02:02:04
high quality. And um again, you're still getting protein, but by the time your
02:02:09
body absorbs what's in there, it's netting out to less than what it could be. How do I spot garbage? Uh I think
02:02:16
the best way to spot garbage would be to like there's something called amino acid spiking. You like people will will
02:02:22
actually include a lot of um glycine in their in their uh proteins like spec
02:02:28
like adding glycine to it because they can get the label benefit of increasing protein content. but is actually not a
02:02:36
complete protein. So, you're not getting the actual quality that you would be getting from an isolate protein. What
02:02:41
are some foods that you would just absolutely never let go near your mouth? Like the real ones where if your kids
02:02:46
asked or you know, you just say there's no way we're eating that. I really hate
02:02:53
the dyes in foods, the food dyes. I think that's a really um I'm glad that
02:02:59
that things are being done as we speak to try to eliminate them from our foods. I don't know how our industry has gotten
02:03:06
away with it for as long as it has, you know, in in Europe. They've known about the dangers of food coloring and food
02:03:12
dyes for a decade or more. And we're still eating these in our foods all the
02:03:18
time. For what benefit? So, it looks more attractive on a on a package. Like, that's What about melatonin?
02:03:24
I've got a little jar of it here that I found. Um, a lot of people are taking melatonin now and I've got a friend very
02:03:30
close to me that's encouraging me to take melatonin. Do you have a view on it? My view is I I believe it to be
02:03:35
safe. I believe it to be um helpful, you know, for people that are having a
02:03:41
problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. Um, we actually do uh uh give
02:03:47
it to our children at night because they do have they do have issues with sleep. Um, but honestly, the the thing that
02:03:53
people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern
02:03:59
is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up. And when you know you're on the right track, you
02:04:06
generally don't need uh an alarm clock to wake you up. If you're doing it right and you're getting enough sleep, you
02:04:12
generally see that your body naturally wakes up within 5 to 10 minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm
02:04:18
clock. Have you thought much about how we're supposed to sleep? I.e. because we talked about lower back, back pains,
02:04:23
etc. Is there an optimal way to sleep? Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side? So again, I think this is
02:04:29
individual, you know, and again, there's a lot of conditions that can sway somebody in one direction or another.
02:04:36
In general, I think the position that has the less the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how
02:04:43
you feel upon waking is to be in what we call the corpse corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort
02:04:49
of at your side or crossed over your your belly like this. If you're able to tolerate even more kind of up in this
02:04:54
position here with your with your um arms up just because again that actually helps a little bit with some of that
02:04:59
internal rotatingness internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you were demonstrating up against that the wall with that position before.
02:05:07
Not not as big a deal, but you have to understand that at what other time
02:05:13
really again we just talked about being static throughout the day, but at least you're getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you're getting up to go get a
02:05:19
meal. At least you're getting up to go take a phone call. When else are you pretty much statically in the same
02:05:24
position? I don't care if you are on your side or on your back or on your other side or on your stomach. You're
02:05:30
pretty static for 7 8 n hours. There are some effects
02:05:37
that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant. Like there are times people wake up and they feel
02:05:44
excruciating amounts of pain. They did something during the night and they all I must have done something when I slept, right? People say that all the time
02:05:50
because they probably did. They probably did. They either stayed in one position for too long and weren't conscious of it
02:05:55
or they position themselves over an arm and it kind of, you know, was in this really strange position for a long
02:06:01
period of time because they weren't conscious of it. But then there's the sort of chronic
02:06:06
effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper, especially some that like to sleep in the fetal
02:06:13
position. They they pull their knees up. You the last thing you need is more hip
02:06:19
flexion. It's like sitting like you're getting from a chair. You're creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in
02:06:25
that position. Like lengthen them out. You know, get some get some flexibility or at least, you know, get some
02:06:30
elongation at that joint and those muscles. You know, sleeping with a pillow that is too fluffy can wreak
02:06:38
havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day. Most most of the back pain suffers we talked about before. 82%
02:06:45
I believe of people that uh that report sleep disturbance say it's from back
02:06:50
pain. And what happens? They feel it mostly. 77% of them feel it upon waking.
02:06:56
It's like they're not feeling it when they're sleeping, which is even worse because if they did, they might be able to modify that. They're feeling it upon
02:07:02
waking. And it goes back again what we were talking about um earlier. You see, it all relates. Like this back pain
02:07:09
seems isolated and we're talking about the thoracic spine, that's back pain. But now I'm talking about sleeping and that's back pain. Like all these things
02:07:15
relate to each other. That's why you have to care about all of it. But being in that position is with that pillow up
02:07:23
behind your head causes a lot of um excess flexion of your neck, which can
02:07:28
cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints in your neck over time. So, you might like to do
02:07:34
that, but I'm telling you the healthier position is to sleep with a really flat pillow. A really flat pillow. Um, I
02:07:40
myself used to wake up every morning with some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much
02:07:46
only about one or two inches high, just enough to support my head. I never have any issues with neck pain again. You're
02:07:52
not abnormally propping it up. Not to mention, if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues at
02:07:57
night, the on the back position with the head propped up, it's going to be worse because you're closing down your airway a little bit more. You know, there are
02:08:04
some cases where again that apnea patient might want to be on their side. You know, it's going to be it's going to be easier for their breathing. But in
02:08:11
most cases on their back and also too, interestingly, you know, look, our most
02:08:16
people have tight calves, right? Their ankles are again, we sit all day. We're not pulling our ankles back towards our head. We're not maintaining that
02:08:23
mobility towards in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head. Well, what happens in a bed? You get in bed, the
02:08:28
the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom. They're pulling your ankles straight down like that and your feet are pointed the whole night, further
02:08:35
tightening those calves because they're just shortening in that position. Especially if you trained your calves that day and your muscles repairing
02:08:41
regenerate at night, you know, you're basically repairing them in the shortened position because your toes are
02:08:46
pointed down. I always say if you're going to get in bed, loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you at least get the ability to move your
02:08:52
toes backwards or they're freely moving. They're not being forced into this position. So, lots of little tweaks you
02:08:58
can make and some people think they're not as important. I think they're very important given how long you stay in
02:09:03
those positions. Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much time in that position. Jeeoff, what's the most important thing we
02:09:08
haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to health, fitness, longevity, and I guess just more broadly just living a living a good
02:09:16
life? I think that you don't want to stress yourself
02:09:21
out thinking of all the things that you need to do. Um because there's many and
02:09:27
in doing so become paralyzed by inactivity and say I'm not going to do anything at all because they can't do
02:09:33
all of it. I think that's one of the biggest things that I see people do is they they talk themselves out of it from
02:09:40
the very beginning because they think that the commitment is going to be too much more than what they're doing right now. Too much to ask and they can't do
02:09:45
it. That's that's a mistake. chip away, dude. Make those We talked about nutrition again, like make that first
02:09:51
pass. Take away the obvious stuff, the stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life. Then make another
02:09:57
pass when you're ready from a fitness standpoint. Get yourself to the gym. Try to do that first thing we said to take
02:10:02
that first action. Get yourself out the door. Get a habit of doing that over a
02:10:07
period of a couple months. You want to you want to start to adopt a more intense training plan or you want to start to adopt a more intricate training
02:10:15
split. fine after. Don't worry about it. Like the most important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these
02:10:22
little things. You know, I'm really noticing that my my thoracic spine is not mobile enough. Like Jeff said, I mean, you know, hang from the bar, do
02:10:29
that one little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will pay
02:10:34
big dividends when added up. But don't be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you're not going
02:10:41
to be healthy. Any investment that you make into your body is going to be a
02:10:47
good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even right now, but as you started
02:10:52
this with the idea of down the road, like you're realizing now at 32, it's going to matter at 52, 62, 72. And so by
02:11:00
doing what you're doing now, you're you're making the right step in the right direction that can always be
02:11:06
intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do more is going to be so much easier then when
02:11:12
you've adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you're doing and rather than making that big departure
02:11:18
from what you're doing now and thinking you're just going to all of a sudden start loving all these things, you're not. And you're likely going to wind up,
02:11:24
you know, making yourself not want to do it. Jeeoff, thank you for doing what you do because um, as I said to you before
02:11:29
we started recording, you've been the go-to resource for me over the years. And in fact, whenever I've got a
02:11:34
challenge, whether it's like how to build my triceps or how to avoid an injury or um other challenges relating
02:11:40
to strength or longevity, all these kinds of things, I'm always happy when I find your videos because you're someone
02:11:45
that everybody trusts. You're someone that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way of, you
02:11:51
know, you're famous for drawing on your own body, showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and
02:11:57
the range of motion. But you've helped me for free for a long long time. Like I
02:12:03
think I think probably a decade. I think this I spent about 10 years as you you
02:12:08
being my sort of personal trainer. And because this information is free and it's on YouTube, you would have helped
02:12:13
literally billions of people. I mean I was looking at your channel. I think you've got almost three billion views. It's might even be more now just on that
02:12:20
one channel alone. But then the clips and everything else and how that's inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube. So on behalf of all of those
02:12:26
people, but also on behalf of me, just thank you so much for doing what you do. Um, we have a closing tradition where
02:12:31
the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what would you
02:12:39
change about you first and secondly? Now answer why haven't you?
02:12:49
Okay. What would I change about me and then why have I not? Wow.
02:12:56
Oh man, you know, there's there's there's
02:13:02
not much and I'm I'm thinking off the top of my head here. So, when I identify something that I
02:13:09
want to change about myself, I usually do a pretty damn good job of putting in
02:13:14
place steps to to make that happen. And there are things that are quite personal
02:13:20
about myself. There are things that from a relationship level, there are things from a, you know, uh, self-improvement
02:13:28
standpoint, like I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those changes. Um, and I takes I
02:13:35
take it serious and I make steps to do that. So, of the things that I've wanted
02:13:40
to do, I think I always wanted to be more
02:13:47
adventurous. I think that I'm a bit of a of a homebody and I think that I I
02:13:53
I might my wife is a big traveler and I think that I probably would benefit from being a little bit more adventurous and
02:14:01
taking some vacations to places that I would never ordinarily go to if I'm looking for a travel partner or someone
02:14:07
that could do that. She more than would be willing to want to do that with with me. So, I think perhaps I I wished I
02:14:15
would have changed that. Um, I could certainly use an excuse and say that that the boys keep us very busy and and
02:14:20
there's a lot of reasons why I haven't, but it's probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away, but we seem to go back to the same places
02:14:27
all the time. You got to give me two. It says first and secondly, I wish I could be a little bit less
02:14:33
judgmental from time to time and if anything, just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be be open to hearing
02:14:40
um the opinions of others more. The reason why I haven't, I think, is more
02:14:45
of of wanting to be heard. Maybe in a in a time when I was a kid of not being. I was a third kid, so I was probably not
02:14:52
heard as much as I often thought I I I w I wanted to be. So, the opinions come out first as a reflex, but if I could do
02:14:59
that, I I still wish I could I could get a little bit better. Thank you. Thank you.
02:15:04
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02:15:35
much. Heat. Heat. N. [Music]
02:15:54
[Music]
