335 ‒ The science of resistance training, building muscle, and anabolic steroid use in bodybuilding

to be lean you probably need to understand what bodybuilders are doing train for roughly half an hour two times a week Monday and Thursday if you do it properly it can comport an unbelievable amount of benefits what's our 230 minute day workout look like one of my absolute pet peeves is to see personal trainers in major cities having her do like rear delt cable fly one at a time I'm like oh my God is that wound made of time are you saying that there are people out there that would routinely take 800 to 1,600 milligrams

of testosterone in a week oh yeah do you think about the tradeoffs of long-term Health incessantly it just doesn't matter why your blood pressure is high [ __ ] control it with drugs are we seeing more bodybuilders now use glp1 agonists to yes in the early to mid 2030s we will see the fusion of informatics and biology how adult does the humor on here go I'm going to defer to you on that that's a bad idea hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast I'm your host Peter [Music] AA Mike thank you very much for making

the trip to Austin thank you so much for having me I saw something on social media you were here a week ago have you been here the whole time or yes week and a half long social media collaborative trip got it so what you weren't here for F1 no and uh loud noises scare me so I would stay away from that sort of thing I'm kidding it sounds awesome I've never actually been to a formula race in in real life and my videographer and a business partner in YouTube huge Formula 1 fan he has the

app and everything and he looks at live streams all the races and stuff are you are you big into that sort of thing of course I not only have the app I'm the premium subscriber so I can listen to all the chatter of every moment between every car and their mechanic and yes of course wow wow that's really cool yeah I make a lot of race car analogies when it comes to Athletics and stuff so if I make them here you can correct me and say I'm using them wrong well Mike there there's going to

be some folks listening and watching us who are probably very familiar with your work and they've probably come to to learn about you as I have through just you know endless years of being um both amused and educated by your content on YouTube um but there's probably a group of people here just in my audience that aren't overlapping with yours so I want to I want to just give folks a chance to kind of get to know you I will have introduced you already in the introduction but um let's talk just a little bit about

your background remind me you you came to the US from Russia when you eight or seven seven okay um where did you grow up uh so Moscow Russia before that and I do have memories of it and all that stuff and then the Metropolitan Detroit area after that all the way until college so a place called Oak Park Michigan which you can find on a map and that's about it um what you study an undergrad movement science kinesiology at the University of Michigan what sports were you playing then were you into grappling at the time

I had wrestled in high school and then um I just wasn't very good at it and I just absolutely was not dedicated to it for a few reasons which are sort of boring but um I got into lifting hardcore towards the middle and end of high school and then by the time I was in college I was gearing up to start competing in powerlifting and so I actually started the Michigan powerlifting club we started kind of a team and we went to meets and all that stuff so I was a competitive powerlifter in my undergraduate

years and just for folks who might be confused about all the different disciplines powerlifting is the sport where there are three and only three lifts there's a deadlift a bench press a Squat and um you're you win by having the highest total weights across the three I believe correct yes I'll add it up so squat plus bench plus deadlift equals total and the person with the biggest total for their weight class or absolute or by formula wins the whole thing so you were not at that point into bodybuilding or anything yet no got it no

and then you went off and did your PhD right away after undergrad got it a masters okay in the exercise science field going straight from undergraduate to a PhD is uh very rare usually you need a lot more Preparatory work because the undergraduate curriculum typically just doesn't teach you a whole lot of um applied super specialized exercise science like I I learned um anatomy and physiology very well uh but much more General curriculum especially at an R1 school like Michigan they did Super hyers specialized I learned almost nothing about sports whatsoever I must have had

like two bullet points of how to resistance train in any one of my classes in Michigan oh absolutely yeah resistance training wasn't even the big Focus there it was chronic disease management health um stuff like that clinical application and so right after that I went to get my Master's Degree at Appalachian State University under um Dr Travis triplet and Dr Jeff McBride and that was a swell time that was a sub specialty of exercise science it was actually strength and conditioning so much closer to what I was super passionate about and then I did one

year as a personal trainer I did one year I'm it's like jail right I did a year up state so a year in Manhattan with my colleague uh Mr Nick Shaw who's now the co-founder and CEO of our company RP and we got a chance to train um Folks at a private personal training studio in Manhattan you know like ctOS of major companies really crazy stuff like I had never met like a truly truly rich person up until I met someone who was worth like 50 million and I was like oh my God turns out

there's just really nice cool people that are really chill and of the same problems everyone else does trying to get in shape so did that for a year realized didn't know enough and then was enrolled into the PHD program at East Tennessee State University under Dr Mike Stone and that was in sport physiology which Dr Stone described as the science of taking good athletes and making them better and that was really really amazing time I probably learned more in that three years than I had in I don't know outside of learning how to read and

how to do math probably more than I ever learned at school ever uh totally immersive got to work with teams got to work with athletes strength and conditioning coach truly Sport Science work we integrate all of the variables sport coaching strength and conditioning Sports Medicine nutrition the whole gamut incredible experience got a PhD there and then taught at the University of Central Missouri for a while taught at Temple University in Philadelphia for a while and then went full depth into Private Industry because we had founded RP our company during the time that I was in

PhD program and sometime during the the temple years um it became apparent that I was much more productive not teaching than I was teaching because there was so much to do with the company took some time away from teaching came back to teach under my friend Dr Brad shonfeld who's kind of the world's experts scientifically in muscle hypertrophy uh I taught at his master's program for a while and then I uh left that recently to well just do Private Industry fulltime and when did you start putting out these videos on YouTube that I I probably

only discovered a couple years ago but but I think they've been there much I think you've been doing this much longer right so YouTube I haven't been doing too long 2020 is when we started PE Peak Co yep the sorry if I get your podcast canceled by mentioning that term when we honestly when we record YouTube videos at our at home studio which is when most of them happen if I drop the c-word uh Scott the video guy is like different take we almost we one take almost everything and that we roll back cuz uh

you know the algorithm will flag it and it'll put a CO warning and it cut this out unlikely well just a medical podcast if you can't talk about Co I have no idea where we are anymore okay I I I I wish I knew more about how the algorithm worked I clearly don't ever mysterious algorithm and then just kind of going back to your personal Evolution um as you're going through through this journey of Masters PhD industry um are you still focusing on powerlifting personally so I was focusing on powerlifting up until I got into

my master's program and actually towards the end of undergrad I did this thing where like I was in a grocery store and I picked up a magazine it was a muscle magazine it was the flex magazine issue that had summarized the prior 2002 Mr Olympia contest with all the pictures of the body buers Ronnie one again though um he that was his fourth yeah yeah fifth or something like that and he didn't look his best and it was uh just not enough people showed up to really take him down everyone had suspected Jay Cutler could

have beat him if he showed up that year Jay Cutler almost beat Ronnie in 2001 that's right um but uh he sat out 2002 and so I just remember reading the magazine and looking at the pictures and uh also real quick How would how adult does the humor on here go or are we trying to keep it semi-professional I'm going to defer to you that's a bad idea Peter okay so I'll just keep it Semi-Pro um it was enlightening because I realized that I had an eye for Aesthetics and by an eye for Aesthetics it

doesn't mean I knew anything about what looks good or what looks not great on a human body but I did have a a very distinct aesthetic preference like some people will see muscular physiques and they kind of all look the same like giant veiny overcooked hot dogs which is not wrong but uh I looked at the physique and I was really taken aback especially by some of them of like um what probably normal people get when they look at very good art that like uh whoa I'm looking at something very special I'm looking at something

that's emotive MH and I started to pursue my own hypertrophy training muscle what were you looking like at the time um I was roughly 190 lb at 5'6 uh fairly lean but not anything crazy and so muscular but not like um you know if I had some clothes on people would be like oh it's just a short person but uh shirtless I looked like clearly I had lifted weights for some time and uh I really also realized that while there's a huge passion for me in lifting heavy I also had a passion for getting pumps

and doing higher reps and doing lots of volume and seeing my body change visually that was a huge trip and it basically became this thing where I'm like oh I am an artist in muscle growth and fat loss my canvas is my own body and I want to learn how to sculpt very well most selfishly just so I could occupy a superhero looking body I end up looking more like a villain but whatever that balding will do that list of bald superheroes includes bald super villains all of them maybe a huge fraction in any case

but um it was just a real personal Journey for me at first and still is to a huge extent and just by comparison what you weigh right now 235 lbs we'll talk we'll talk a lot about bodybuilding and the cycles and where you but are you in a cycle now and if so are you on the way up or on the way down in terms of mass um I'm kind of at the top of where I'll be for a little bit um maybe up but just very slowly so this is the roughly the fattest I'll

get I didn't want to say anything Mike but yeah you're you're you're looking a little chubby to me right now I'll cry it later I normally don't let people of your chubbiness in this studio but yes and you can't let us out without letting us know like hey you're fat by the way just want to let you know no big deal I it's kind of a big deal it's a really big deal you and your your body fat right now if you had to guess would be what 8% maybe uh Nish I still have some

striations in my glutes um I have like one of the least aesthetic physiques imaginable but uh thank you genetics for that one uh and I I did some things earlier in my career I gained a ton of weight it was muscle and fat stretched my skin out gave me massive love handles when you lose that weight the skin still sticking around so I'm actually planning on uh some extensive cosmetic surgery in about a few months here to address that issue finally so yeah I've gained a lot of muscle over the years and uh for me

the whole journey fundamentally is a personal journey of wanting to occupy a body that is two things one uh that I aesthetically enjoy being in and two one that I had a large hand in creating or curating and the curation is almost as fun as the creation like you see an artist draw something on a canvas and a huge amount of Joy comes from creating the main Arc of everything you're doing the main shapes main lines main coloring but you know when artists have something almost complete and they do a little pencil in pencil there

uh once you have something that looks amazing you're optimizing oh there's something super beautiful about that it's like watching someone take a very finely tuned F1 car and just wrench a couple of couple of the screws in and polish it off it's just oh it's just so beautiful not that my body is attractive it's not grotesque but less grotesque is what I'm aiming for and I don't know if it's working or not my hairiness kind of precludes any of that so well whenever I think of an artist mocking around with a canvas of course I

only think of Bob Ross because I don't have much experience watching an artist create something you know usually I'm seeing the finished product but I still like most people who grew up in the 70s and and and the 80s recall watching Bob Ross on Saturday mornings with great fondness he makes it look so easy right oh my God he not only makes it look so easy he makes he's communicating an empowerment about creating art yes like everybody could be this you're doing this with me right now right and you're like oh I sure am and

he's like you see this Cloud kind of in the way we're going to make it a tree and you try it at home and you're like I just messed up everything this looks terrible and uh yeah I you know if I had to describe my physique and my genetics it would be like a lot of Bob Ross style having a fix things are like oh that looks terrible let's pretend I was drawing something else so all right so I want to try to bring this up to the present so right now you you compete in

bodybuilding um you you obviously provide a lot of Education to folks so so I think you know my audience is is is is clearly interested in exercise um clearly interested in strength training clearly interested in the Aesthetics of strength training because again I think you know I think it's very easy to look at bodybuilders and say gosh that's that's a little odd it's a lot but what is obvious if not self-evident is um that's just a spectrum and anybody who wants to have more muscle and less fat probably has something they can learn from a

bodybuilder I I often say to my patients um if you really want to understand how to manipulate nutrition to be lean you probably need to understand what bodybuilders are doing uh there's probably no athlete there's no person out there that truly understands how to manipulate exercise and nutrition in the context of body composition and and that's true even in the presence of anabolic steroids right so it doesn't anabolic steroids don't preclude that they might make that a little easier which I think we should talk about um so maybe we just start with kind of where

you see the value of strength training do you think that there is a diminishing return at some point do you think that there is a diminishing return in the amount of muscle I've said very tongue and cheek um that the list of 90y olds out there complaining that they uh wishing they were not as strong and not as muscular is a very short list very short list right so but again why am I saying that I'm saying that to say that most people at the end of life are saying the exact opposite right yes I

wish I was Stronger I wish I had more muscle um but from a practical standpoint Mike what what is your view on muscularity and strength um at the expense of what it might take to achieve them are there extremes that people should be mindful of it's a great question if you have to be mindful of extremes in almost every case you have already been on a multi-year long very immersive very infatuated very disciplined journey of resistance training and focused nutrition and the organization of many variables and parts of your life around that task it's unlikely

to be something you pick up a lifting Hobby and just find yourself excessively muscular oops um so that's probably my best answer for that it's just insanely unrealistic in most cases to wander into that sort of thing you know the the um the myth of accidental muscle yes well you know people say More Money More Problems first of all I I'm various philosophical grounds I think that's absurd but um you don't accidentally become Ultra wealthy and by God I wish you the best if that happens to you I'll cry a tear for you but in

much the same way almost nobody accidentally becomes hypermuscular to the extent that they're on that side of the spectrum that trade-offs are starting to become apparent probably the biggest trade-off in the short to medium term is um opportunity cost things you could have spent doing outside of being in the gym but the way that the science of resistance training works is for almost all of the health benefits and the longevity benefits and the quality of life benefits the amount of time you need to be training per week is measured in the 1 to three hour

range with three being like you're really full sending it MH 1 to three hours per week if we took if you went on chat GPT and did like a Time use question being like can you list all of the things that typical American does for X number hours a week and throw in uh you know you just look read down top 100 time use cases you may find that 1 to three hours a week is somewhere in like the 50 or 60 Rank and there's so many things people do that way more than that I

mean social media consumption television watching uh and the list goes on there are dozens of things you do that take way more time and so if you really fully invest yourself like I'm relatively fully invested into getting as jacked as possible it's going to take some time it's going to take it could take eight hours a week which is still like like well this not forever you know people will jog for 40 minutes every morning think nothing of it um and then when you present to them the idea of resistance training they're like well now

that's going to take some time like well yes actually it does not take nearly as much time because the intensity of the efforts so grotesquely high and the recovery demands are so high that you have to be very pulsatile with it it's not even something you have to do every day as a matter of fact people get incredible benefits probably the biggest return on investment the average person can make is to train for roughly half an hour two times a week Monday and Thursday if you do it properly it can comport an unbelievable amount of

benefits just across the board and so for most people the consideration that they can begin to do this successively is just not something realistic until and unless they're really into it like a huge hobby like if you are watching Formula 1 for 30 minutes a day every other day on your phone realistic considerations of this is taking up too much of your time kind of out the window now if you start like canceling podcast guests because you're following the circuit around the world and staying in festar hotels and booking the the hyper rich guy suite

for all the races yeah like someone could say oh you're really into this you're like No Nonsense it's only costing me 3 million a year so then yes but it's it's obvious when you're going to be so involved you don't just walk into that sort of thing so let's unpack this a little bit because um well there's there's actually two things I want to go into but one of them I think will be a better entry into it which is you talked about how boy if you were going to put eight hours a week into

your strength training you're kind of at the upper limits of what a person might do um conversely if your goal is to be a really good endurance athlete you're not getting you're not at that level yet if you're only putting in eight hours a week right a a worldclass cycl list is I mean God they're probably on their bike 30 hours a week something like that easily now of course not all of that is at maximum intensity a lot of that in fact probably 70 to 80% of it it also varies a little bit by

gender but let's just say 70 to 80% of that time is going to be at Zone 2 um and they're really only burning matches in 20% of the time yet there's something very different about strength training which is are you really getting benefit at the equivalent of whatever we would call Zone 2 in the gym like if if you're at that far of a submaximal effort um what is the training stimulus and is this just where the comparison between cardiopulmonary training where there's a clear benefit from submaximal efforts and strength training don't uh Jive that's

definitely the case strength training um I I like to use the term resistance training it's the general term for going into the gym and applying things to your muscles right because that that's why you know you would say hypertrophy and strength are outputs of resistance correct yes um so you can get some benefits from very submaximal efforts but resistance training is based on applying High forces and high levels of fatigue as its primary modality of how it makes you better and so it's kind of when you get into that world that's what's going to happen

it's like if you um if you're trying to be a special operator eventually you know Navy SEAL type of person but you don't like uh the sound of gunfire freaks you out you're kind of in the wrong place so uh we get almost all the benefits from pushing either very heavy loads or lighter loads but very close to muscular failure which people have described as unpleasant uh a burn in the muscle um a lot of pain uh the weights slow down so it takes a lot of psychological effort to keep going there is not really

an equivalent of just getting on the bike and putting in the miles getting to a pace where zone two you can breathe you can talk a little bit still that's not weight training but precisely because weight training is so intensive you need lots of recovery time between sessions and you can do lots of disruption and damage in each session and also the total yield and how much it changes your physiology is very high for each session and actually per unit time and that means if you're not working super hard PR one unit time you're going

to need a lot of work that's endurance training if you're working insanely hard per unit time you won't need a lot of work nor can you recover from that much work which is why the top end is 8 or 10 hours or something for even professional bodybuilders of time spent in the gym every week but for people that just want the basic benefits yeah we're talking about an hour or two hours a week and that's really all you need if you're pushing sufficiently hard that's both all you need and realistically like you can recover from

more if you make time in your schedule and really prioritize recovery but yeah any much more than that gets to be like oh wow I'm kind of sore and tired a lot more and Mike do you think this is simply um a consequence of the fact that endurance training relies more on type one muscle fibers and strength and hypertrophy training are more dependent on the actions of type two fibers is that why I mean I I I don't know why philosophically I just think this is such an interesting contrast to make of how optimization of

one is a totally different philosophy than optimization of the other and the only reason I'm harping on it is I just know that when you take people who are very used to doing endurance training it's a hard switch for them to adopt what you just said in the gym sometimes sure it's it's not the way they're wired but do do you think it's is the best way to explain to that person the why that like that's the difference between a type one and a type two fiber that is probably the core difference I would say

there are two other things that can be put into that equation one is the physical forces are just much higher in magnitude um you know you're going to be putting a lot of tension through your connective tissues and through your muscle muscles when you're resistance training than you are when you're doing like bicycle work for example and so with high absolute forces the approximate damage and disruption to the body is graded exponentially and not linearly it's like if you uh if a whiffle ball flies past you you might not even hear it if a 50

caliber bullet flies past you it's going to tear parts of you off and it's never even touched you very very different amount of damage from much much higher forces and the other one is some combination of neural and psychological Drive the kind of drive it requires to be good at endurance at least the base building part the aerobic base work that you do is kind of being in a state of calm equinity you get your flow going you get your music going you get your breathing going you look at the road ahead of you and

you can just crank but in lifting you have to turn up the juice to really feel the the maximum kind of situation another quick analogy off hand is if you are are a trillionaire like I am and you have a fleet of Cessna private aircraft at your back and call I never fly the same plane twice I always crash the thing um you know you fly a Cessna you can fly it for some time it requires a decent amount of Maintenance but decent amount of Maintenance and it'll Fly for a long time it's just never

getting up to velocities that are really crazy now you take an SR71 Blackbird out for a spin at Mach 3 you have to do like 10 times the number of maintenance hours per flight hour on that thing or something to that magnitude because at Mach 3 what's happening to the plane is just like it's actually just running through subsequent brick walls like that's what the sound barrier is like three times faster than the sound barrier you're just rattling that thing into into dust that's what you're trying to do to it when you're pushing your body

really hard and the weights are slowing down and there sets of five or sets of eight or sets of 10 your body is very close to its limits so both uh your faster twitch muscle fibers which are required they take way more damage they're also not as well proliferated with blood supply and they heal faster or sorry they heal slower and the amount of absolute force is higher and the amount of neural drive it takes like you can hop on a bike for an hour at Zone 2 every day and afterwards people like are you

tired you're like a little bit I kind of feel like a little also a little bit refreshed in a sense um you don't really feel refreshed after like grinding the leg press for five sets of 15 you feel like someone beat the crap out of you and you don't know any money what the hell is going on so that intensity that absolute intensity of lifting and high relative intensity that's what tends to make the big big fatigue cost can you say more about the neural part of this I find this to be a very interesting

piece and out of all the pieces you've described uh and I agree with everything you've said I I know the least about that component yet I've heard people talk about this right which is you cannot discount the CNS fatigue literally that that comes from doing this type of work sure and I remember as an example um watching sprinters train and obviously people understand that sprinters I shouldn't say Obviously but but if you if you if you if you study the mechanics of sprinting you realize it really comes down to force per unit Mass it's how

it's how hard they can hit the ground with their foot relative to their mass and so you know these are athletes who need to be you know almost comically strong without gaining any excess weight so even though we look at sprinters and we think gosh they're very muscular um it's their strength to weight ratio that's really profound and so they have to train in a way that minimizes hypertrophy and maximizes strength so for example they'll Focus heavily on exercises where they can push the Ecentric phase pardon me the concentric phase and not the Ecentric phase

and it was explained to me once that doing this allowed them to also spare themselves from some of the neurologic fatigue uh is there any validity to that or is that just true true and unrelated um and and what is actually happening in in both the the the Central and peripheral nervous system during the recovery phase between those say three-day or six day bouts when you're trying to recover a system after the set you just described yeah I'm glad you brought up the peripheral one of the big um misconceptions is that there's muscular fatigue connective

tissue systemic fatigue blood vessels and everything still have to heart has to pump but then people just say oh and then the C central nervous system well the peripheral nervous system is a thing too and it also takes substantial amount of fatigue so I would just say um the nervous system takes fatigue and it takes fatigue in the same way you would expect any system that's pushed to its limits to take various components of it experience wear and tear various substrates deplete and need to be repleted so I can bring up two examples and uh

in the just generally kind of the the axon of any single given nerve you have a balance of electrolytes in an inside and outside which allows the excitation control traction or sorry which allows the proliferation of the electrical signal but uh you run that system long and hard enough and it starts to get out of whack to where you try to get another impulse going and it's like uh so it needs to do a lot of pumping to take what is supposed to be inside the cell that's now outside the cell to get back in

there to a level of concentration that would you would be fully recovered now typically that happens quickly but if you run that system a lot there are various points at which some of the structures that are supposed to do that are also proteins you use them enough and they start to kind of break a little bit and you need to produce more proteins to replace the channels themselves that do that pumping back and forth and so that you know typically protein construction is measured on the order of minutes hours and days not seconds so that

is a very you can imagine it as like a Transatlantic cable and like you throw enough current through a cable and the fish nibble at the cable enough you need to start replacing the cable now if you really really using the crap out of that cable yeah it's going to like undergo some not so great things and then closer to neuron to neuron Junctions or the neuromuscular Junction between the neuron and the muscle itself you have vesicles of neurotransmitter you pump enough of those in you get the cool stuff of communication you can run low

on neurotransmitter and then like the electrical signal arrives and neurotransmitter is like sorry not enough of us to do anything and so you experience profound weakness which is expressed as uh or fatigue expressed as weakness and you need time to reconstruct a lot of those neurotransmitters place them into vesicles have those vesicles translocate to the synaptic CFT and then like sit there and get ready and that is a process that typically happens rapidly but if you really exhaust it can happen over some time uh really AER illustration of that is and I've never done this

I've just heard about it I will take credit for doing many other drugs but I've never tried Ecstasy but if you clear enough of that neurotransmitter you don't feel the same the next day you feel different and it takes a day or two to get back up to those levels similar types of mechanisms are at work when you are going to very close to True failure on let's say a squat or a leg press I mean you're cooking your muscles but every single capacity of the nervous system to say push push push is at maximum

and so you end up doing quite a bit of homeostatic disruption all the way along the axon all the way through the cell body and in the synaptic CFT neurotransmitters getting everywhere Gunk building up that's going to take some time to fix which is why we see typically that people don't regain their prior strength after fatiguing and resistance exercise for depending on how hard you go anywhere from several hours to several days and so if you have really really hard workouts it just might take several days for you to be able to have a really

really hard workout again for that same muscle group luckily because a lot of this is peripheral nervous system based and local muscule based if you train the living crap out of your chest one day in your triceps you can train back and biceps which have nothing much to do with those movements pretty robustly the next day much of the fatigue is local it's not all local the central nervous system brain and spinal cord specifically the brain has a variety of mechanisms by which it controls your central fatigue um I remember I think Tim noes was

a big proponent of the central Governor model and uh though in the explicit terms which he described it might not be the case or somewhat close there's absolutely Central governing going on and when your body can tell through a variety of mechanisms like you pretty messed up here it's going to pull back on how hard you can do anything and some of those neural structures might even be operating at full bore but they're just degraded enough to where full capacity isn't full capacity anymore and so in all those variety of ways and many others your

body after accumulating a certain amount of fatigue will need to back off and if you think you can train Ultra hard for the same muscles twice a day every day you welcome to try it in medical supervised context you won't last uh so it's really good that we have brakes plan in but it's also really cool because weight training is one of those things where you get a dose of it and for days after under the hood it's upgrading your body and your nervous system and your muscles and your tendons so it's really neat that

you can do 20 to 30 minutes of intense physical activity and resistance training and then for days later be experiencing the actual acred benefits not a lot of things in life like that it's kind of like getting a college degree for which you pay money and then earning money with it years later ostensibly anyway I've never ear ear any money or had a college degree but um that's kind of how it works and and you have to understand that when you're entering the gym if you're trading properly you are asking a lot of your physiology

you are pushing it to its limits if you're not you're not using your time best and you're not getting the best outcomes because a lot of the absolute best results come from pushing very very hard not necessarily to limits but you have to test the limits right like uh from what I understand you have a history of boxing is that correct so like if you just shadow box it's nice it helps but going hard rounds against multiple fresh opponents even if you're not like collapsing on the floor after you know that like you're looking at

the clock and you're like if you don't push it to that level at some point you're not fight ready so in order to be your best boxing version every now and again you have to push it to discomfort grotesque discomfort same with the body it's nice that you get to do that every now and again and then you collect the benefits afterwards it's so interesting how what we could do up to a certain age and I don't know what that limit was because I really stopped pushing to those limits at about the age of 19

so I don't know if the limit was actually 20 or 21 or 24 but but I never trained maniacally after the age of 19 everything I've done since 19 has been smoking and joking okay but what I could get away with then was ridiculous um and I attribute it only to two things right youth obviously with youth I mean stupidity and inexperience and all the things that come with youth but also like um having started very young so age 13 to 19 I was training literally six hours every day except Sunday Sundays I only train

two hours per day and I look back at the workouts I did and I think like I don't know how I did it and more importantly like how much better could I have been if I didn't train that much but it's a good question like it wouldn't be uncommon for me to do six super hard rounds of sparring with two with three fresh opponents yeah one guy a weight class below me one guy in my weight class and then one guy for two rounds a weight class above me in sequence yes six straight rounds you

definitely did that backwards but you probably know that now no I well I kind of wanted yes and I would mix it up sometimes but actually it was much harder and more dangerous to do it in that way and I kind of liked that the idea that that idea that the guy that could hit the hardest was my last guy yeah when you were the most fatigued your defenses are the less accurate jeez but I would be in the weight room six days a week like it was just running hard you know anyway it was

kind of crazy but um I want to go back and just put a bow on something you said before because I think it's so important and it's going to come up again and again I want to make sure people understand the point because I think your example was great by the way um the nonlinearity of force is very counterintuitive it is not obvious why for example being on a bike even if you are riding at a very high level of power so remember on a bike your leg is going around at 90 times per minute

so even if you did a one minute all out that's 90 reps or call it 45 reps that's nothing compared to when you're doing an allout set for 10 reps in the gym it's such a difference in force and the I love the example of the whiffle ball going by you versus a 50 Cal M right the 50 cal could kill you without hitting you uh the whiffle ball you wouldn't notice so I think this idea of the profound level of difference in in tissue destruction is is a very important one um I was on

Dorian yates's podcast a few months ago and poor Dorian he wanted to interview me because it was his podcast but I just wanted to interview him I mean I have nothing interesting to say let's just talk about you right now right um it was very interesting to me to understand how little time he spent in the gym um for a bodybuilder of that era right he was very uh I guess Progressive in even though he was really going back to kind of Arthur Jones and Mike mener and those guys but he was really just sort

of doing one set to failure per body per exercise and he was doing each body part once a week I mean I guess the the the question I sort of pose to him but I'll pose it again to you is are most people even capable of pushing that hard and because because I want to bring it back to where we were a a moment ago which was hey for a person who just wants to train 30 minutes twice a day they can get all the benefit in the in the world but there's an aster there

right which is that 30 minutes twice a week is going to be the most difficult 60 minutes total of your week so going back to Dorian for a second you know what is what has to be true to be able to only train that much in terms of total hours volume however you want to measure it how much work needs to be done in that window of time for the uh not the Dorian Yates example for the for the Dorian let's start with Dorian like why why could he produce such a massive physique again let's

just normalize all the drugs we're going to talk about drugs later so we'll we'll explain where the drugs are and aren't helping but all the drugs in the world aren't going to give you that physique if you can't generate the the destruction of the muscle like is that just the sort of thing where virtually nobody can actually push that hard that consistently or was it just that nobody thought to do it the way he was doing it at the time plenty of people thought that's how it works Mike mener did that only in a more

extreme version than even Dorian did lots of mener acolytes did it it's not the most efficient or the most effective way to train but it is quite effective because if you go very close to failure with have very heavy loads all of the subcomponents of your musculature your motor units which is the motor on and all of the cells that it um activates they'll get recruited and they will be asked to work to their limits they'll take on a great deal of damage and disruption they'll sense a ton of tension and they'll produce great results

for you the other thing is that the relationship between both intensity and volume of how much you do work in the gym especially volume is curval linear and hyperbolic so it looks like this and if people are just listening to this it means if you do one all out hard set per muscle group per week which is not what Dorian did he did roughly 14 of those per week per muscle group um you get maybe something like 30% of what you could have gotten with five sets why is that do because your body has very

good sensing mechanisms for tension and metabolites and all these other things that cause muscle growth and when it detects that you're pushing on the pedal it'll give you a real good wallup of result you keep pushing on the same pedal over and over and the systems are greatly desensitized to giving you more muscle growth the biggest reason that is is probably because the human body is attuned and evolved almost entirely in um hundreds of millions of years before we were even human of what is in the modern context called food insecurity and so in order

to make a real good case for allocating that much to muscle growth you're going to have to have a real distinct signal to ask your body to put more and more into that process so it kind of autocaps itself if you are myostatin deficient then actually just existing you just grow muscle all the time so it seems to be that for a variety of reasons including that one that if you do one set close to failure you get a lot of gains you do three sets close to failure you get substantially more gains but not

three times as many gains yes you do five sets close to failure and you do just a little bit better than three you do seven or eight sets close to failure in one workout and it's statistically undifferentiated roughly 14 sets per week per muscle group is and um that gets into that territory of a very robust signal of growth to the muscle it's not the highest signal of growth if you decided not to train your legs very hard or your back very hard and the amount of systemic fatigue that's imparted to you week by week

is much lower because fatigue isn't just local it spills over into everything else you could push your arms shoulders and chest not to 14 or 15 or 20 sets per week but in many cases 25 30 35 sets per week and experience very meaningful growth enhancements that you would never have seen only ever training those 15 sets a week but 15 sets a week might bring you to 70 or 85% of what all of those muscles could eventually have hypertrophied if you only ever specialized in them and so Dorian was insanely jacked but he was

jacked all over and probably could have in retrospect benefited from more specialization phases on various weak points that he had his back was startling his arms were excellent Now by Immortal standards they were the biggest arms you've ever seen in your life by competitive bodybuilders of his air standards relative to the rest of his physique he could have had bigger arms could have bigger shoulders and so he could have poured much more volume into those muscle groups and less and everything else but DNE seemed to have an kind of all-around approach which up until about

a year ago so did I and so I had never looked very aesthetic but boy were my legs super big cuz they could just eat up the growth all the time so if you want to do not a ton of volume for any one muscle if you work really hard and bring yourself very close to failure you can already do super super well just with that alone if you get a really good cook someone who really knows how to make food and you give them an hour in the kitchen with a variety of menu items

versus three hours within an hour they can wow you with what you're eating within three they can wow you more but it's not three times more like uh you know Matrix Reloaded orgasmic brownie or whatever a go make that there's going to take him a lot longer in 3 hours they can make a difference but probably only people who are very culinarily attuned can tell like if he if someone makes me chicken fingers gourmet Chicken Fingers if they're doing such a thing I'm sure Austin has something like that um then you know an hour versus

three to me it all tastes same same it's amazing to someone really really with a refined palette they'll be able to tell but they can't lie to you and say look this three-hour chicken finger this is just categories above the 1hour one so in a lot of processes in general and luckily in the human body getting some of the way to your body's maximum ability to recover actually brings you most of the way as far as results and that's why Dorian could do what he did now if Dorian was doing 14 sets per body part

per week um would that mean 14 sets to failure of 14 different exercises so we we're not counting the warmup sets and things of that nature it's a complex question it's not 100% clear exactly what Dorian did or if he even did everything exactly as it was written on paper all the time you see his training videos you don't always see just one set he would also have this thing like a warm-up set that for him was a warm-up but for most people would absolutely be a work set right right so it may be more

like two or three equivalents of a working set per EX maybe maybe there's like a total throwaway set and then there's you know a modest set and then there's a two repin Reserve set that again that's a real working set of failure right yes so according to his categorization the only work set was the one that was absolutely the true muscular failure sometimes with forced repetitions which you would also have to integrate because forced reps is when someone helps you lift the rest of the weight or if you do a drop set you use less

weight right after you went to failure we we shouldn't count that as just one Set uh it wouldn't be the most correct way to think about it so and when you compare that to the example of the three-hour Chef so now the person who's willing to put in 30 sets per body part per week do any of those sets need to be a failure or are you counting those as hey these would be sets of two reps in reserve one to two reps in reserve almost all of the literature that has found out that if

you don't systemically fatigue the whole body too much any given muscle or several muscles you can push into the 34 40 50 plus set range per week almost every single study done to elucidate that understanding was done with uh muscular failure studies true failure trer failure than you'll see in the gym because these people are training in laboratory conditions with Master students screaming at them to keep going most of us have never trained that hard consistently yeah so people can still recover now these are undergraduates um that are recreationally trained typically so they can neither

do a lot of damage um nor are they impeding by age and prior injury and all this other thing so I would say that whatever amount of sets you have to do to get a certain amount of whatever amount of growth you want you can get there in a few different ways you can get there with let's say 30 sets that are for rep shy of failure you can get there with 22 sets that are one or two rep shy of failure and you can get there with 20 sets that are all the way to

Absolute muscular failure so if you are really training not so super hard for reps and Reserve you'll have to do substantially more sense to see the same hypertrophy but study after study after study illustrates that when you're getting one or two reps away from failure it is often statistically undifferentiating of true failure training probably mostly because of that nervous system component is exponentially higher and so as far as an efficiency and long-term sustainability strategy training all the way to muscular failure every session as a matter of principle is probably on the margin suboptimal and you

should probably most of your sessions should be one or two reps in reserve like if you're doing dumbbell presses you think you finished your last rep and you're like gone to my head I could do one or two more but that's it most times it's probably best to stop at that point because what you're getting if you go north of that is a 10:1 fatigue to stimulus ratio whereas everything before was like 1:1 2:1 3:1 5:1 and all of a sudden it's 10:1 it's a lot of fatigue cost to pay for what in the literature

chronically ends up being either tiny tiny bit better or not better at all which says nothing of the risk of injury when you drop that dumbbell on your PEC which I don't know anybody that's done that but I've been told it really hurts when you fail in a set of dumbbell presses and totally collapse with a dumbbell on your PE that turns black and blue oh good God I would never know that all sorts of I just like to aim for the generals at that point might as well have a cool story but uh yeah

the training to failure the vast proportion of people that really propos that training to failure are somehow special for results they didn't reason their way into that they emoted their way into that training to failure is something the 13 to 19yearold you would have really found a lot of spirit energy in as I like to say it's um adult male putting on his hat of I'm a mountain goat and I run into [ __ ] that's what I do I saw an adorable video of um uh some folks that own a few goats and a

few dogs and the there's their Pitbull is like not hiding but sitting under this like little thing and there's like a a teenage goat that's looking at him and he jumps up on his hind legs and tries to like hit him in the head and the pit backs up and he's like and the Goat just tries to do that again he's just trying to get it on like he just wants to hit stuff that's all he wants and so when you're a young male when you are prone to wanting success for yourself you're the type

of sort of type A personality that wants to look back on their life and if you had to roll the dice and say the reason you weren't optimally successful is that you work too hard they be like ah sweet whatever that's kind of cool but if they saw the dice roll and the reason you weren't optimally successful in life is because you didn't work hard enough they would not live with themselves those kinds of folks generally tend to go to muscular failure for just that like the spirit energy it feels right damn it and it

feels good and it's um purifying almost at a an existential level to be able to have given something your all in the face of challenge in the face of injury risk in the face of grotesque pain and you know this from sport experience when you're really really tired your whole existence is screaming at you to stop ignoring those things and going all the way until you know you've pushed it as far as your body can go there's something very magical there for the soul for results in the gym there's not much magical there you have

to get close to it you just don't have to go all the way let's go back to the sort of the the person who's listening to us who wants to take the plunge wants to start doing resistance training um they're clinging to what you said a while ago that hey I can get some really good results if I'm in the gym 30 minutes twice a week and I know that Mike trains eight hours a week but I don't need to be Mike um a lot so tell me what a program looks like let's construct the

program for the pick let let's do it as a young let's start with a young person let's start with a young person who actually has been somewhat active throughout their life but it's it's mostly been in sports right they play tennis they play you know uh they did cross country in high school um they've just never been a gym rat sure but they've listened to this podcast enough they've listened to you enough to know like hey there's value in in developing strength and and and and I'd like to have some hypertrophy I want I want

to look a little better sure okay so I'm coming to you I'm 40 years old um kind of a little intimidated if I'm truthful right don't know what good I have a whole pack bounce to make you more intimidated so what's our what's our what's our two 30- minute day workout look like so I'll describe to you what week one could look like and then I'll tell you how to scale that afterwards is it's not just the same every single week yeah so what you want to do is if you're training twice a week let's

call it Monday and Thursday for Simplicity you do want some symmetry so you don't want a situation which you train with weights Monday Tuesday and then you take the rest of the week to do other stuff if you only train twice a week you want it to be roughly evenly spread so Monday Thursday Wednesday Friday that sort thing and because your muscles don't take usually a whole week to recover but if you push them hard maybe at most half a week you can train every major muscle group of your body in every single session that

you do so both Monday and Thursday we'll have every major muscle group being trained routines that have the muscle group separated are called split routines you know chest one day back the next mostly Pro bodybuilders are the only ones that benefit from that sort of thing and there's a lot of nuance about how to execute that sort of thing so whole body training is probably best for almost everyone who is trying to get the health benefits longevity benefits the aesthetic benefits and so on and so forth so the next thing you want to do is

you want to conserve time but you want to high degree of effect and that's going to impose some recommendations on us that do both of those things one recommendation is to choose lifts to choose exercises that involve two components one is large muscle masses so you're not going to be doing a lot of like forearm curls or tibialis anterior calf raises where like the muscle you're training is like as much muscle as your pinky finger and that's about it you're going to be training muscles like the quadriceps the glutes the hamstrings the musculature of the

back the chest the shoulders the arms Etc and choosing exercises that train those muscles preferably not just one muscle at a time so then we're using muscles uh very efficiently because we're pushing multiple muscles to their limits in one exercise this is generally going to be compound movements multi-joint movements things like pull-ups pull Downs barbell and dumbbell bent over rows that for the back at least Engage The Forum flexion muscles the biceps Etc they engage actually the muscles of the Forum themselves through your grip they engage the posterior aspect of your deltoids the rear adts

they engage almost every muscle in the back all at the same time now you do one set of bicep curls but I do one set of underhand pull-ups I got my biceps checked off and I got three other muscles checked off you just have one one of my absolute grotesque pet peeves is to see personal trainers in major cities training their regular clients housewife who's 55 and having her do like rear delt cable fly one at a time I'm like oh my God is that one made of time and also is there some kind of

physique show which the judges said she needs bigger rear adults but nothing else that's the only reason you should be doing that nine times out of 10 so compound movements close grip bench presses push-ups overhead presses upright rows squats deadlifts etc etc etc these are the kind of movements that train multiple muscles at the same time and thus they are insanely time efficient because you do a few exercises and you're like holy crap that's all of my upper body if you do some kind of rowing machine you do some kind of machine or barbell or

dumbbell that's a close grip press you do some kind of upright row situation then you've technically trained kind of every single muscle in your upper body to a substantial extent because every single exercise trains three or four muscles at a time so those are the kind of movements we're going to be leaning into the most what about for the lower body same idea so besides a deadlift and a squat RDL so various stiff legged deadlift or good morning RDL is the same category of movement that trains your entire back uh specifically your spinal erector musculature

which is insanely important for healthy aging I could talk about that at nauseum and um then it trains your glutes and it trains your hamstrings and it trains your Sartorius and parts of your adductors and it actually trains your calves too holy crap that's one that's one exercise you integrate some kind of lunging pattern into that or some kind of squatting pattern be it a hack squat leg press barbell squat you name it and all of a sudden you've run out of muscle to train in your lower body because everything has been uh done to

a high degree of diligence again compound movements uh again I see 45-year-old financial advisers who don't have a lot of time they have family obligations they have work obligations they have other hobbies and they're doing like leg extensions in the gym I'm always like man I hope that guy's hurt and has a good reason to be doing those because if he's not squatting or lunging or doing leg presses or something he's just using up time in the gym training one thing at a time for no good reason at all so invariably you've been asked this

a thousand times but um when this person's coming into this situation and they don't have high training history what are the tools you use to teach them how to do these compound movements safely especially the lower body ones right so squats and deadlifts admittedly they're not going to be starting out with a ton of weight but that's the biggest tool starting out with low weight there is no movement the human body can do which unloaded and doesn't and not pushing the muscles and tendons to their Extreme has any higher risk probability than any other movement

so you can start with a deadlift or squat that's body weight or less you can brace your arms on a Smith machine and unload yourself while you squat that may be where you have to start you take multiple sets like that that are very submaximal ideally you're there with a personal trainer if not you can just go to YouTube and type in the name of your exercise and it'll pop up we have a huge library for free on YouTube actually the RP hypertrophy app which is one of our apps in our App Suite has every

exercise you'll ever see in there has a video demonstration one click away so you look at that ideally you would have a personal trainer because uh live communication about how to exercise uh is irreplaceable because on a video we're assuming that your assessment of what that is is your assessment of what you're doing which is very difficult oh my God you walk in the gym and they're like I'm squatting you're like that that's not a squat I don't know what the hell someone told you or what video you're looking at that ain't it if you

have a personal trainer they can be like oo that's really good but I want you to move your hips back more I want you to move down more so on and so forth but basically the first time you ever with someone in a session all you do is you take them through those movement patterns fine-tune their technique with lots of encouragement and you're not seeking Perfection you're just seeking basic competency get your heels on the ground get you squatting all the way down get your back nice and straight listen that's all we want and you'll

do three or four of those what are really warm-up sets and you'll just kick them out of the gym three or four warm-up sets per exercise it's a teaching session they never even lifted heavy they never pushed to failure but because they're so unaccustomed to lifting they'll get sore and it's enough tension of disruption that they will grow muscle the next time they come in you work them through a different series of movements let's call it Monday Thursday movements the next week they come in and you do the same workout except maybe that last set

of every movement after a few technique oriented sets you uh ask them to go for slightly more repetitions maybe not five but now 10 or you put a little bit of weight on the bar something that gets them like oo okay I feel it this is a challenge and then over time slowly every week you increase the weight a little bit more a little bit more a little bit more until several weeks later their technique looks real good which most people can learn really good techniques it's not that complicated in a few weeks and now

they're like kind of struggling with their weights we're finally up to a weight and rep combination that's challenging them physiologically every set not just neurologically for how to do the technique that three or four week sort of entry period is amazing because it takes the probability of injury and just almost completely eliminates it because you're not just going in there and seeing how strong you are on the first dat which believe it or not a lot of people are inclined to do profoundly stupid has reserve for like high school or Junior High kids whatever you're

ninth grade [ __ ] max out don't do that when you're an adult it's profoundly stupid especially if you're in your 40s and 50s and 60s and like you don't want a torn Peck with you drive a truck for a living your Peck is required for that sort of thing after that sort of um easing in Period you're now competent to the movements you feel yourself competent as a member of General gym culture you don't feel lost a big part of a problem of getting people to go to gyms and actually stick with it is

there's this understanding that people have which is itself relatable but inaccurate that um the gym is for people that know things it's their place it's for that jacked guy it's not for me the thing is that jacked guy to paraphrase another comedian like he's been in the gym enough take a few days off you're big you did it buddy the people who really need to be in the gym are the ones who aren't in the gym so the gym is an infinitely welcoming Place almost all the jacked people are super nice in real life and

they're not judging you they're just staring off into space they're Ultra selfish they don't care about you and if you don't know what you're doing you can always ask them and they almost certainly will give you free advice until you're blue in the face so after a few weeks of being in the gym with a trainer you're like this is my place I belong here and I'm starting to push a little hard and then over time you just increase the load on the bar a little bit and if you're no longer getting sore or really

tired and sore and tired in such a way that you need until next Thursday to get sore and tired you start increasing the number of working sets that you're doing because working sets wise up until this point was just one working set really if you think about it in the first week or two zero working sets they're all practice sets CU you're so untrained they're work sets for you but they're not to anyone else that's watching a few weeks in one work set a few weeks after two work sets and so on and so on

and so on until you're doing anywhere between three and six working sets per exercise there's another twist here for the person that wants to save a lot of time and actually get some cardiovascular benefits as well you take exercises that are responsible for training muscles that can be paired with other exercises which train muscles that are totally or mostly unrelated if I do a seated dumbbell shoulder press I rack those dumbbells I can walk over and do some goblet squats and essentially there's almost no muscle overlap or I can do some deadlifts and there's just

no muscle overlap whatsoever and so I could do some CTO dumbbell shoulder presses put put it down nice hard set good job two sets left and I could sit for the average of one or two minutes and scroll on my phone but if you're really time conscious and you want an extrac cardiovascular benefit what you can do is as soon as you've finished with one group of muscles you take five or 10 seconds Shake It Out breathe it out hit the next working set for that paired exercise while you're doing that exercise the muscles for

the first exercise are actually recovering locally and so when you're done with that exercise 5 or 10 seconds later it's set to for the first exercise so you pair these unrelated work sets together unrelated exercise such that when you've done four sets of one exercise let's say a close grip bench press that trains the pushing muscles of your body if you've paired that with a row or lat pull down then really you've done eight total working sets and you've just knocked off 80% of your entire upper body in an amount of time that the dumbbell

press by itself guy has just finished only his front delts and triceps so rest times in the gym outside of getting a drink or just trying not to faint are probably not your best friend if you're just going for General Health General Aesthetics this kind of stuff especially beginning so you're either working one muscle group or several with one exercise or you're transition Sho between exercises or you're working the other one or you're setting up your weights for your next machine that you're going to be doing which means as soon as you get in and

warm up it's go go go go back to back to back to back five or 10 seconds for transition to catch your breath barely but you're really like you're not going to be talking to a lot of people at the gym other than how many sets do you have left in that machine that kind of stuff and so that allows us to condense a lot of work most people will need something like 15 to 30 total working sets for their whole body per session you can condense that into 30 minutes but you're working almost the

entire time and it's generally a good idea to do sets of 10 to 30 repetitions because those kinds of uh loads you don't need a ton of time to have your best performance you can get good enough performances with a short time for recovery and because it's a lot of reps not only does it get you very meaningful strength increases because the absolute load is lower much lower injury risks look you do one rep Maxes all the time you're going to have it coming one way or another You' never touch any weight that's heavier than

a 10 rep max the probability of injuring anyone given set is much much smaller and because it's a higher volume of work you get a great hypertrophy stimulus and you get great cardiometabolic benefits if you're breathing insanely heavy the entire time and sweating like a you know insert favor analogy here then you will be kind of one and twoing that session for a resistance training check mark and a pretty decent cardiovascular training check mark especially if these are compound multi-joint exercises that require you supporting your body in space you do a set of 15 barbell

squats followed by a set of 15 push-ups your cardio is working I mean that's what they torture boxers with and their cardio is outlandish back to back to back to back it's resistance training it's cardio it's both you have two sessions like that per week each one lasting 30 minutes you have two sessions of Zone 2 Zone 3 cardio where you're really trying and four sessions total like that per week with good sleep and good body weight good nutrition you're well on your way to when you see your healthc care provider every year and he

asks you oh trying to die sooner or later and you tell them what you do most them be like well that's way more than most of my patients do and if you look at the American College of sports medicine requirements various requirements of what constitutes rigorous physical activity you're getting well into the mix with a sum total if we think about it of 2 to 3 hours of difficult physical activity of any kind in a week so when people say I don't have time for exercise I get it I get it I don't have children

I've heard that when you have children time dilates like black hole type of stuff um but you can probably make time at least for that resistance training session will it be ultra easy no way it's going to be really really tough I don't train like that I need my break damn it I'm trying to be lazy and scrolling Instagram between sets but if I wanted to get the maximum results for the minimum amount of time we're working all the time and over time you start with one or two paired sets like that you get up

to three or four paired sets like that on five to eight exercises per session holy crap that is a lot of work and it will train your entire body in one session and you will require 1 to 3 days of rest afterwards guess what you rest for three days you come back you rest three days you come back there's two workouts in a week each one takes about half an hour and if you ever want the workouts to take less time work faster and rest less and a lot of people want to hear like the

hack for how to get really awesome results with very little time spent in the gym but they don't want to hear how to get the hack actually going because they're like wait hold on hold on what's going to hurt like yeah it's going to hurt it's going to be miserable unless you accept the fact that you know all the benefits of endorphins and everything like that it's kind of like you know how do you become a millionaire you're very very good at something you get very very good people skills and you grind for years at

starting your Empire like a man I wanted like a win a lottery ticket or something I didn't want all this like everyone knows that's how you become a millionaire I don't want that so yeah you know you can thumbnail entitled this how you like but um it's cool to say yeah listen one hour a week and you can have amazing benefits of Health quality of life but I'm here to tell you Real Talk cuz at RP that company that I represent present we just have a policy of never lying to people ever um because we're

doing this to honestly help people and business-wise if you start lying to people it's hard to unweave the rainbow after that um is going to be tough but also there is now more and more research accumulating that doing difficult things physically is good for your mental health uh there's a lot of publicity lately to cold plunges uh you know huberman and and all that stuff and a cold plunge because it's so annoying kind of makes you um more grateful for the knot pain you're engaging in the rest of the day and it's really good for

you I have one better you do a 30 minute session of back to backto back compound free motion or dumbbell or barbell or even machine work and sweat your balls off and huff and puff the rest of the day seems like like a breeze and the Endorphin kick is massive it's like surviving a traumatic episode so the old plunge has some benefits I'm not entirely sold that they're enormous or extent whatsoever in many cases but this kind of res exercise has benefits that if we just took one by one time to talk about in this

podcast we could talk about nothing else and do four podcasts in a row that kind of massive benefit there's a lot there I want to go back and and touch on um let's start with the idea of how does a person find a good trainer because this is you know it's hard enough to find a good doctor and that's a highly highly regulated industry right like you either are an MD or you're not um and you know but still there are lots of different flavors of doctors and there are some who really think a lot

about prevention and really care about how you exercise and how you eat and there are others who I think you know do but frankly don't have the time to really noodle that right so so um is difficult as it might be to find a great doctor it's probably even more difficult to figure out a trainer who's really good so what are the questions that a person can be asking when they go into their gym or are looking online for a trainer to say like is this the person who is going to help me learn to

do a squat and a deadlift safely is this a person who can integrate whatever pre-existing injuries I have and really help me because I again i' I've worked with people who who you know I've watched people coach and I'm like wow that person really knows what they're doing they have picked up the absolute subtle art of how to cue somebody to lift they can focus on the non-obvious and get that person and there's other people who literally have no clue they look like they just watch the Youtube video and they're sort of parting the YouTube

video to you but they have no real intuition about it so very tough very tough because if you aren't an expert or very knowledgeable person yourself it's very difficult to figure out who is a knowledgeable and an expert who's doing a good job like if you're finding a good doctor I don't know what that means I have no idea how to measure a good doctor versus not a good doctor most doctors are equally confident in telling you what they think is going on and very differentially accurate so it's a tough question I would say that

if you have an opportunity chat with them and ask them a few questions you could find out some things that'll be helpful these are all marginal pieces of advice there's no absolute I'd say the thing that comes close to the absolute of having a high guarantee that they're good at what they do is if they're um certified in the meno henselman PT course meno is an expert in our field he knows his stuff and his trainers that he certifies have a high probability of being able to deliver to you what it is that you want

out of them there are other fine certifications out in the world but um a lot of certifications you're just reasonably intelligent and you studied for an hour and voila you're certified so the certification doesn't go very far it helps if your trainer has an undergraduate in kinesiology or some related field that is not by itself ensuring you that they're going to be good but it sloths off a lot of backend if you know what I mean like you're going to get rid of a lot of not great trainers you can almost entirely ignore what they

look like because the preponderance of the reason people look like they do is genetics the other is diet and the other is just how long have they been doing stupid or smart things to their body but grinding away so if you look at a trainer that just looks kind of like a normal person maybe a little muscular a little bit leaner you look at another trainer in the same gym that's just like got six-pack on his face you know just ripped don't be like well well seems to know what he's doing he's ripped like he

can't give you his genetics and almost the biggest contribution to why he's ripped as genetics and so people get hung up on this all the time they work with preposterously underqualified trainers who just look the part people cannot uh there's not like a transitive property by which you can just like give someone your jackness yeah I wish right you just touch their skin and you're like I feel it you wake up the next day super Jack it was that easy um you can ask them if uh how they integrate science into their practice not a

guarantee because you can be evidence-based and still have all sorts of poor practices and uh if they go mostly on personal experience and feel you can be assured that they're probably not the greatest trainer for you if they have a lot of personal experience that they use in their training but also they're very Adept at understanding the scientific literature and especially just the broad Strokes Basics you're probably in better hands than not someone that can explain to you the reasons for why you're doing certain things and you just voice note record them and ask them

uh is it okay if I record your reason I just kind of want to think about it at home later wink and then you just copy that and feed it into Claude 35 or GPT 40 and be like uh give me a Steelman and a red team for this it'll do both based on the sort of texture of its respon those all these llms are designed to be insanely agreeable and very kind but when you're wrong wrong they'll be like that's a good point however eight point list like that guy's an idiot this is all

wrong so luckily you know GPT 40 if it was embodied in a robot currently would probably make a great trainer and so how your trainer in various claims of their scores against uh a GPT is probably one of the better ways to do it and also say this there's a big factor of how uh you get along with a trainer because you're going to want to find the training at least as not unpleasant as possible and ideally as pleasant as possible if the trainer is someone that you just kind of vibe with they can dig

into you and really get you going but they're also super fun to talk to outside of when you're you're you're not dying during training if they can get you to become responsible for showing up on time in a sense of uh you know the trainer and I are on the same team he's on my team and when he says are you going to make it Monday I just don't want to let him down cuz he's my buddy and I I I'm in this together we're in this process together I don't want to give up on

myself if you have a trainer where you connect with like that you got yourself a great trainer even if they're not super evidence-based they just get you in and get you moving that's like half the battle right there so let's say those things are things to consider and the last thing I'll say is have a trainer for a few weeks few months and maybe learn up about what's going on and then see like oh does my trainer know things or not I mean I had um person I was doing just nutrition for while my colleague

Nick Shaw was um doing training and not for her I was in um my PhD program in Tennessee I was training her or nutrition coaching via distance over the internet and Nick was training other clients in New York and she was in New York at the time and she told the trainer kind of the diet that I had written her and he was like oh that's that's stupid that's wrong and she was like why and the answer he gave her was so bereft of um a systematic approach to knowledge that she texted me she's like

do you have any trainers you can recommend to me I think my guy's an idiot and sure enough gave her over to a colleague of ours and Nick didn't have any room and she's like oh my God this guyy is beating my ass in the best way possible I love him yeah some of your trainers will suck and you might need a few weeks or few months to realize like man everything I've heard about how this whole process works my trainer doesn't even agree with me yeah you might have to switch it up uh you

know you might not have the perfect car the first car you buy might just be a thing that has a steering wheel and and wheels and ghost places and after you've kind of appreciated what does he do don't like about your car your next car can be a bit more of a educated purchase so what about the the person who's been lifting weights for a long time they're you know they're in there they're doing this stuff but they're they're not happy with their progress right so they're you know they're they're in the gym let's just

say they're in the gym three four times a week an hour at a time how hard are they working are they really trying or are we saying that maybe they're trying maybe they're not it's a very different answer if they trying or let's say they are they're actually trying quite hard um and you you actually look at them and you think you know gosh they might actually be slightly overtraining they might actually be and by overtraining I mean not giving themselves let's say they're training three days a week and they're doing whole body three days

a week and they're in there 90 minutes at a time um and they're they're kind of going to one to two rep in reserve on every set and they're hitting kind of 20 to 30 sets per per body part per workout um what what's what would be your your so and to be clear like they're doing okay but they're just saying you know what I want to be really jacked okay yeah uh what do I need to do yeah you would need to go down a checklist uh a troubleshooting checklist and we actually do have

on the RP strength YouTube channel we have multiple videos of how to troubleshoot your muscle growth how to troubleshoot your diet how to troubleshoot your recovery so if you throw those on in the car during your drive to work you're going to learn a lot about how troubleshoot but you can conern yourself with variables that occur in the gym you can conern yourself with variables that occur outside of the gym both are very important in the gym variables starting from the beginning would be um exercise selection sometimes people say you know my arms aren't as

big as I want them to be and I look at their plan and it has no isolation work for their arms whatsoever and I tell them this is not a surprise and they say something look well I thought underhand pull-ups and close GP bench was good enough to get big arms and I would say yes it is both of those exercises are great to get big arms but you want bigger arms which means like every body builder ever you're going to have to start working a few sets of curls in and a few sets of

tricep extensions of some sort regularly and hard so a lot of times people don't have the specific exercise selection for what it is they want um they're just doing the kind of General training you and I just described but they're sometimes not even honest to themselves at a deep introspective level of what it is they want like a lot of those people that want better results you look at them and you're like you look great and like yeah but I want to look better and you go how I just want [ __ ] gigantic arms

you go okay well like your workout is absolutely not designed to do that it's designed to get you arms that look big to someone who like sees you lifting your suitcase into an airplane but other than that like like you big arms and then you go okay exercise selection another variable to consider is technique some people have just not so great technique good technique involves putting the muscle into high Force positions at a very deep stretch long muscle lengths and high forces so if you're doing PEC flies for example but you're only going all the

way down to like here you need to open up like crazy and take a few seconds down there in the Deep stretch that's really going to help you out and technique is so exercise specific and so individual that you really should get a qualified trainer or someone you trust or videos uh on your own analysis to go like okay am I really doing this right because you think I'm hack squatting and then you see an RP strength video about hack squats and you're like I have never hack squatted a day in my life you try

it our way and you're like oh my God my legs for the first time in months or years they get sore they get tired and you're like oh wow a couple weeks later your quads are visibly bigger okay now finally I fix my technique another question you have to ask is volume wise I mean I I I suppose you already said they're doing one or two reps in reserve so we're not going to question that we'll say to training hard which is good that's another thing to ask if someone is would be 100% like am

I really pushing hard how hard if I think I'm pushing hard enough I should push a little harder and see what happens so for intensity you would say if they're at least hitting two reps in reserve you're okay with it golden no need to improve about that but if you went in there and you observed them at the end of their set if you said let me see you do a few more and they were constantly getting four more reps so they four reps in reserve you would say the literature says you're not hitting in

a train a high enough training stimulus correct this is a very important one very important because um I I think I I think I talked about this once on on on Instagram um and if I didn't I meant to and I just forgot to which is equally likely in fact more likely but the point I wanted to make was um at least for me and it might be that I'm just not good enough you don't know what two reps in reserve means until you go to failure yeah you have to fail many times to actually

know how bad two repon Reserve is and one rep in reserve yeah and they're not the same every workout that's the other thing like you could have the same weight on their different days and you fail at a different number of reps but you you there's like a signal of like there's a twitch there's a there's a discomfort that you have to experience it but you can't experience it until you blow past it would you agree with that yeah that's largely true so every now and again you have to test the waters there's actually a

really good system of doing that and it's incorporated into our RP hypertrophy app the app will ask you to put in your weights roughly 10 to 20 rep Maxes and you'll do as many reps as you think as three reps or four reps to failure depending on what it's wanting you to do and you'll write your repetitions in for every single set well I got 16 reps at 90 lbs on this exercise the next week the app Auto programs a progression for you so it'll either ask you to do 17 reps and 90 lbs something

like that or it'll ask you to do 95 PBS again or 95 PBS a new for the 16 reps you did last time it does that every single session it pushes you a little bit ahead your only job is to do what is written if you consistently do what is written and at the end of your cycle before you have one week of easy training called A D Lo and you start a new cycle if at the end of your cycle you never actually failed at a weight like you tried to get 177 but you

got 16 the 17 wouldn't move and you put the bar down you're holy crap hopefully nobody saw that that never happens to you you've never trained close to failure but that's okay the next time you program in your weights and you do three reps in reserve for that first week go a little harder than you think you should be or you typically did and then at some point during the middle or end of that cycle you will actually hit failure trying to get to those objective targets because here's a big problem with trying to estimate

failure if you go based on how hard something feels it's kind of different like you said you know you had a tough day at work versus easy day at work you ate well versus you didn't slept well versus you didn't and it's all perceptual which is nuts it's kind of like not having a mirror but asking someone to stand in front of you and help you put on makeup thank thanks for your input but I need a fraking mirror because I don't know if you're just messing with me I look like a clown I put

lipstick over here instead of on my lips who knows but if you have objective criteria of this is what I did last week and I just want to go a little bit beyond it is inevitable that one of two things happen over the long term one you will reach muscular failure and you will be unable to do a repetition or the others you'll get infinitely strong forever and now you're Superman one of those is more realistic and the other so when people say I don't know what's close to failure or not my answer is very

easy download the RPI no sorry wrong sales pitch oops put some numbers on the board and just buy a little two and a half or five pounds or one rep each week beat those numbers week upon week commit yourself I must hit 18 reps that's the goal if you can't do it success you went a failure now you know where the limit is now you're building an intuition but if you did get those numbers next week you go higher and you go higher and you go higher versus if just like oh I think I went

hard I don't know what that means you could be very wrong and often times are is it safe to say that if a person is already and and by the way we didn't we talked about what's sufficient for exercise selection technique intensity we didn't specify volume what would be a red flag for you in that individual if their if their volume uh sets per body part was below X where would you say well it should be expected per week Ju just I mean if you're beginning a few sets but this is for this kind of

intermediate below five or 10 sets per week is not a sufficient effort to expect your best results between 10 and 20 sets per week is fine but for many people you have to use a second qualifier which is what's actually happening to you if you aren't getting super sore or super mega tired in your muscles for a day or two after training if your strength continues to be stable or increases session to session to session and you're on that fewer than 20 work sets per muscle per week type of per muscle not per body part

in other words bicep would need to be 20 sets per week correct wow yeah then I think we have a pretty good explanation for why why somebody at this table has small biceps I'm not saying how dare you I take that offensively by the way so um then if all of the signs show that you're not actually excessively fatigued your volume is either okay or less than it could be if you're not getting great results visually but you're always running into strength plateaus if you're always tired and sore and if you're north of 20 sets

per muscle per week on average hard sets then probably doing less is good because you have almost every indicator of doing too much and so you'll be able to Inuit it rather quickly if it's too little or or too much those are most of the variables involved in the gym part except for one and that is when is the last time you took a break because there's a concept called accumulated fatigue or cumulative fatigue your muscles and the rest of your body recover very well between sessions but not 100% maybe 90 or 95 and if

you're a mathematics fan if you multiply 0.95 by 0.95 by 092 by 0.9 by 095 enough you're down to 50% recovery within like six or eight weeks and then how could you possibly be making gains so every for the average person cranking away probably the person listening to this podcast one week out of every eight one week every two months don't go to the gym stay active maybe do a body weight squat or a push-up or two in your hotel room or something ideally try going on vacation if not try to not exercise and be

a little easier at work be a little easier on family stuff Have Some Fun cheat Foods eat a little more than usual be a little less active so that your body can recover in a way that it can never recover between sessions but it gets a whole week to do this and once a year at least take two whole weeks like that we call that active rest so that first thing one week off is called a D Lo and the second thing off where you take two weeks in a row of basically just not even

coming to the gym and if you do just do the lightest easiest stuff ever takes 10 minutes that reduces your systemic cumulative fatigue so much that it brings it back down to zero or almost zero because some people will say look 16 weeks I've been cranking first 12 weeks great results last four weeks I don't know if I'm moving the needle maybe you're just really tired and pushing the pedal down harder is usually not the best way to do things it might be time for a break people come back and your muscles resensitize to the

stimulus if you take time off so when you come back go back to two or three sets of everything not four or five sets of everything you're going to get really sore and really pumped from just a few sets and you're going to be growing again you do that for another six to eight weeks you get tired again your strength starts to Plateau take another week of easy training or no training at all and that's how the cycle repeats itself that's probably most of the stuff I would say about how to analyze your training inside

the gym to get closer to your Optimum there's lots to say about external gym variables but one thing I'll say really quick is this before I ever consult people nowadays about how to pursue incrementally more optimal outcomes for their muscle people who want to gain muscle but are frustrated they aren't jacked enough nowadays I always take time to find a reference frame of what have your gains been like how much work have you been putting in how long have you been training and to see if how do genetics play a role in this and how

does age play a role in this I've consulted with people before who were in their 60s weighing something like 150 lbs fairly lean and they're they aspire to be in the low to mid2 200s fairly lean I told them that outside of an anabolic steroid cycle that's probably got an even chance of killing you as it does getting you jacked you're not going to get that jacked and your progress rate is just going to be much slower than the 20-year-olds at your gym but sometimes we forget that age has such a profound effect on our

results and we look around and as all young people like well I want to look like that well guess what 1982 was a long time ago so unless you have a time machine or age reversal which I think age reversal Tech you attribute this to the hypertrophy of type two fibers which are necessary for the power generation that's necessary for producing the gains we're talking about that's definitely a component of it another component is overall systemic ability to recover you have so much um DNA methylation and and all the s kind of damage and accretion

of the wear and tear of age that your organel and your cells don't work as well as they used to your organs don't work as well as they used to a lot of times you're taking for granted the fact that now in your mid-60s you run a top you know a top 500 Corporation and you have more stress than most people could handle in a day you have that in an hour but back when you were making the gains of your life when you were 18 your job was to show up to school go to

the gym eat at the cafeteria and smoke weed and that's all you did every day of course you have the gains of your life people discount that they also look to athletes and they go my God like that bikini competitor she looks amazing I want that body well check this out Linda you're 56 you have three children one of them is in college two are not you you are a CTO for a major company and you sleep 5 hours a night that bikini competitor trains a few clients she posts on only fans and she does

nothing else other than train recover and watch Netflix and sleep 9 hours a night of an interrupted sleep it's two completely different worlds she's also 27 by the way strange times I know but especially with social media there is nothing that surprises me anymore about how unmowed some people can be from realistic expectations the other thing is genetics um the most important factor other than time spent in the gym about how jacked and lean you going to get is genetics and it is a hugely hugely important factor and so you you have to understand that

your goals have to be referenced to what your genetic likelihood of achieving them are the only way you'll find that out is if you work at it for a while and see what happens but some people work at resistance training for 3 years years they'll acrw 5 pounds of muscle burn three l pounds of fat and they'll be like this next year I want to gain 10 pounds of muscle and you go who that's not how hyperbolic curves and ASM totic curves work you got it backwards if in three years you gain 10 pounds of

muscle in the next three years maybe you can gain five that's realistic does not work in Reverse so it's really really important to contextualize multiple qualities one is how much recovery and rest and relaxation time do you get compared to work and being underslept another is genetics and the other is age and so if people say I want to get more jacked and I've the reason I'm ranting about this uh Peter is because I've had many clients who were willing to put in whatever work it was going to be necessary to put in but they

were older they did not have particularly great genetics and they had already gotten most of the muscle gain that they were going to get not all but most and they requested a formulation from me of their exercise plan that would get them categorically better gains and outside of pharmaceutical enhancement I had to tell them in some way or another that was impossible I ended up telling them that after many years of struggling myself to try to optimize for them and get them those gains because I'm like look I'm a science guy I know things I

think I've been fairly successful in my own body why can't I get these people to gain muscle and those that Trifecta of age genetics and how much of a professional bodybuilder or Fitness person do you want to be for the next several months they are the biggest factors for results and people seem to think that you can just kind of like hack your way to the best plan and if you just do the right things you'll get amazing results it has to be in context unless you like setting yourself up for really unfortunate experiences where

you get quite upset that you couldn't do the thing people will arbitrarily assign themselves an amount of muscle they want it does not work like that put in the diligence put in the time see how it goes things are going well you can crank it up a little bit and get a little bit better gains and just it's going to take time if things are not going so well you have to optimize to make them go a little better but there's outside of the basics nothing you're going to be able to do that is going

to be a category leap of results short of what I estimate in the early 2030s will be the the great pharmaceutical Renaissance then you can just turn my Statin off and get as jacked as you want till we get that realism can be a a painful pill to swallow well it'll be interesting to see if even if we can turn myostatin off as adults if it will have the same impact that it has in the cartoons right like when we look at the animals that have myostatin Knockouts which are just some of the most enjoyable

things to look at truthfully it's like you know our favorite things in med school were looking at the Milat and knockout chickens and cows yeah um but it's not clear if you took a you know a mature adult um an inhibited myostatin if you would get the same benefits um but let's go back to out of the gym one more thing we didn't discuss I just kind of want to hear your thoughts on when when something out of the gym is playing a role in your unack is nutrition often a factor or is that generally

not in other words is it so rare that someone is not getting enough protein or not getting enough calories that that's the problem is that just not something you see much it's a thing okay it's a thing I would assume it's more a thing with women than with men um and maybe more with older women than men and maybe even older men when you just see more anabolic resistance all of those are true okay it's not difficult to align your nutrition well eat mostly healthy foods some junk here and there is totally fine getting in

enough protein if you want to be real serious about optimizing your muscle gains something like a gram per pound protein per day so if you weigh 150 pounds 150 grams of relatively high quality protein um if it's difficult for you to meet those goals uh Amazon sells uh your bars already don't don't they uh I don't I don't know if I don't think they're on Amazon yet but they will if not they are they are soon yeah so get you a couple boxes of David bars and put them between meals and uh that kind of

takes care of protein the other thing is muscle size is um philosophically concordant with being bigger I know that's sounds crazy but muscle made of stuff so when someone wants to be 165 lbs jacked at 150 lbs it's curious how they think that's ever going to happen some people just don't eat enough and what I would say is the biggest problem I've seen with what I assume is your Target demographic for this podcast is intermittency lack of consistency I've had so many clients in the professional realm older folks folks that are practicing doctors lawyers so

on and so forth tell me Hey listen last couple days every three or four hours I've been getting in high protein meals I've been getting good sleep dope see him a week later you go hey how was last weekend they're like well the parts I remember were fun I think then I was throwing up a lot in the toilet and you realize that you know they're quote unquote good it's not beneficial to moralize these things but they're on track for a few days here and there and then they fall completely off the wagon for days

at a time that is a Sure Fire we to guarantee that you don't get very good gains is if you lack consistency so if you want to get as jacked as possible within the realm of several months time seek to eat enough food to get the scale to go up about half a pound per week so if you training hard for 12 weeks should gain maybe six PBS or so consistent six PB and if you're eating a gram per pound uh per day of protein spread into roughly three to four evenly spaced meals roughly very

roughly a lot of wiggle room there that really is um kind of all you need to know about nutrition for how to get jacked that covers probably 90% of the variants so I'll tell you this if you describe to me a scenario where you were training for 12 weeks you gained 7 pounds almost every day you hadit a gram per Brown per protein almost every day it was three or four meals and you're like look I know it's my nutrition that's the problem I'd be like it's probably not it's probably something else that great thing

about what we talked about earlier with joran Yates and how he could do so few sets to get so many results is that 8020 site type of rule applies to almost everything else in the human body including nutrition so if you're getting enough protein regularly and you're getting enough calories to gain body weight the if you don't get really the muscle gains you were expecting there aren't a lot of knobs and levers for us to pull that are going to get these enormous results right um that's kind of the situation for nutrition but consistency is

I cannot say enough things about because you ask people hey how's your diet especially if you're a personal trainer or Diet coach there's this kind of halo effect situation where they want to be seen as a good person and diligent and worthy of your time so well yeah you know like breakfast I'll have egg whites and for lunch I'll have a chicken sandwich and for dinner it's usually a piece of fish and then I have a protein shake and go to sleep shut up Bob that's one day a week you lying [ __ ] and

he's like damn it you got me okay that was Tuesday but Wednesday I don't think I ate anything until we closed that one business deal and I got really drunk with their CMO it was a great time I think we had chicken fingers but honestly I can't remember inconsistency especially when you're older especially when you have lots of stress from your professional endeavors inconsistency is something that professional bodybuilders cannot afford you for sure cannot afford it now if you do everything right five or six days a week and one day is kind of meh you'll

do great but if the good days are outnumbered by the I sure hope my trainer doesn't find out about these days you're not doing due diligence so that's a big big part of the equation and that can a segue if you'd like into a conversation of sleep and Stress Management all these other things that can also be the difference between lots of gains or no gains at all I'd like to come back to it but we've now twice sort of broached the topic of anabolics as another tool because a couple of times you've made the

point which is look this is going to be about the limit your genes are going to start to become your limit um so I guess my question is well let's let you know you you you've spoken very openly about anabolic steroids I've I've had several podcasts where I've covered this in detail but but again let's let's kind of tell people what we're talking about for reasons that are um maybe a little bit elusive there's some con confusion about is testosterone an anabolic steroid and and of course the answer is absolutely yes it is and so

wait a minute no yeah you're right so so let let's talk about um anabolic steroid use in the context of nonmedical use so let's take testosterone replacement therapy where testosterone in a hypogonadal man is restored to typically the upper limit of a normal physiologic range it's nice that they do the upper limit right give everyone good genetics and then and then we'll just sort of take that off the table for a moment park it in the context of what is what is anabolic androgenic steroid use look like in the physique bodybuilding Community let's talk about

the different drugs let's talk about your experience with it uh let's talk about how much it can unleash and let's let's frankly talk about what the what the pros and cons are um because um you know we I personally have no experience with this um we you know we just that's not our patient population right we don't have patients that are coming in saying my goal is to be jacked and I want some dball and you know so so this this not something we we just have any understanding of yeah so anabolic androgenic steroids are

all derivatives of the testosterone molecule manipulated in various ways to accentuate some characteristics and deemphasize other characteristics they're typically taken by athletes uh in the competitive sphere bodybuilders physique athletes and gym people who want a super physiological level of muscle mass and sometimes uh super physiologically low levels of body fat concommitant with that and so they'll take anywhere between um high-end testosterone replacement therapy dose to 10 or 20 times that amount per week and they will do let let me just pause there for a moment and just give some people some doses because we've talked

about trt before in the podcast so um we typically dose patients twice a week to try to get a smoother level as opposed to once a week so if the if the if the ideal dose for a given individual to get them in the right spot is 100 milligrams of testosterone cypionate weekly we would always prefer that the patient take 50 Mig intramuscularly twice a week or sub um I will tell you Mike I don't think we have ever given a patient more than 70 milligrams twice a week or 140 milligrams a week probably median

dose for physiologic replacement is 40 milligrams twice a week or 80 milligrams a week so are you saying that there are people out there that would routinely take 800 to 1,600 milligrams of testosterone in a week oh yeah yeah and sometimes that's not all testosterone it's other steroids in combination usually people take at least that replacement level of testosterone often more um because testosterone does some really good things for health and general function and it tends to olism in the presence of androgenic steroids and testosterone so estrogen by itself not very anabolic estrogen in the

presence of testosterone is more anabolic than if you had all the testosterone in the world but were unable to aromatize the estrogen and so Baseline level of testosterone is often taken at somewhere between 250 milligrams a week and all the way up to 1,000 milligrams a week depending on how you're handling the side effects of that ex um excess estrogen production at the higher levels and that's usually taken in as cypionate uh an anate cypionate Some people prefer propionate if they inject every day um enanthate and cypionate are by far the most commonly used seemingly

um often times people inject differentially but uh once daily injections seem to provide the smoothest curve uh if you put in half a week's worth of super physiological testosterone at one time you're moved for the next several hours hours is curious it's not fun I mean I yeah help me understand what that even feels like so so let's just say you're taking 700 milligrams a week 100 milligrams a day so 7x physiologic do you feel something different most people feel something but it's probably a normally distributed population of experiences where some people just can't tell

some people feel something for sure that they can describe and some people have panic attacks and will never use again or they are driven to extreme violent thoughts and extreme sexual thoughts and actions and those folks are quite rare but they do happen so there's a large distribution about which people can have experiences but I'd say the median experience is you take everything the easiest way to understand the average effect of a high degree of anabolic steroids and for Simplicity testosterone on the psychology is to imagine that what is the average psychological proclivity of a

female what is the average psychological proclivity of a male different in many regards and then you move the needle over one notch into a magical gender yep called uh enhanced male and you just typically exhibit more maleik patterns of thought and behavior than even males do but males compared to females is the best way to figure that one out because if you're like just know what a male pattern of behavior is like cuz you're a male you're like what the hell is it like to be more like me like everything about me it's not everything

we actually just had a recent um video on the RP strength Channel I think it's called um Ro Roid Rage is real we talk about like that steroids don't accentuate every quality you have just the more masculine qualities so what are the most masculine qualities again this hits everyone a little bit differently but on average a um you become quieter men typically are not as expressive as women you become to show you come to show fewer facial expressions of emotion um you don't process other people's emotions as well you can't fine-tune what they feel as

much and you don't care as much so less empathy way less empathy uh all the way to similar levels of empathy but on average definitely less and you become more likely to be irritable you become more likely to have uh anger and aggressive sorts of thoughts you become more attuned to the dominance hierarchy in general and you become more uh you you become someone who thinks more about where you stack up in the dominance hierarchy in a way that you take a fronts and slights more poorly than otherwise so if someone on social media says

you're a bad person if you're not on a lot of testosterone you're like just having a bad day it's okay we all have a bad day we need to rage out on someone if you're on a lot of testosterone you're more likely to be like I wonder if he'd say that to my face I wonder if he would be real quiet around me cuz he would know that I'm not someone to be messed with weird weird thoughts like that women almost never have thoughts like that men have regular thoughts like that in the right context

people on steroids have more thoughts like that in almost every context than on average they like to have another one is you become uh linguistically less expressive and your fluidity of communication Falls so a lot of times when someone is using high levels of anabolic steroids in a relationship and that person happens to be male the degree of communicative throughput fall substantially that's just generally not good for most relationships another one is sex drive it's difficult for women to appreciate what the male sex drive is like on a quantitative and qual Al ative level both

of those tend to magnify especially if you're not bringing your estrogen down you bring estrogen low enough you don't even remember what the hell sex is for why people are even in that sort of thing but if you have a lot of androgens a lot of estrogen the hunger The Thirst becomes very annoying now at that level of testosterone are you taking an aromatase inhibitor or are you literally letting the estradi get I mean I can't imagine how high the estradi level becomes at that as high as you want so so so you're not um

so so typically you know estrad would be over a hundred at that point that's left alone it depends so it depends on a few things one is different people respond differently both physique and psychology to high levels of estrogen high levels Ester for some people are like swimming in in in a pool of magical clouds and they love it and their physique looks great they get in a nice and watery their joints feel amazing their recover is awesome their sleep is awesome sex is awesome everything's great for some other people they get a lot of

estrogen and it actually uh prevents them from getting good sleep at at higher levels they're water buffalo bloated they can't even see their abs anymore even though they're 8% body fat and they get mood swings all this crazy stuff and so it really is very individually dependent it's it's actually quite amazing and this is not entirely unlike women right women will if if they're undergoing hormone replacement therapy in per menopause it's not a one- siiz fits-all they can have tremendous variability in their response to estrogen and of course progesterone yes huge huge huge the other

thing is what we're learning in uh evidence-based approach to anabolic steroid utilization and performance nancing drug utilization it's called the safer use model probably the biggest prator of it is a gentleman named Joe Jeffrey in the United Kingdom super super expert an exceptional bodybuilding coach great bodybuilder own right and uh just reads literature all day long and uh folks like him tend to espouse that probably the best way to manage estrogen is to use some combination of exogenous drugs that are androgens themselves to get the estrogen level you have the best notable metrics at how

you feel how you look how your blood work is Health Etc so here's an example you take a th000 milligrams of testosterone I'm still wrapping my head around this mic but it actually goes into your thigh in a needle you don't have to wrap your head around so it's intense it's a lot yeah and you take 1,000 milligrams of testosterone and that comes with a concomitant aromatization so you have a lot of estrogen some people they feel totally great for some people it's too much for those who it's too much estrogen they might be able

to take 500 milligrams of testosterone and then 500 milligrams of primobolan primobolan is a synthetic anabolic androgenic steroid developed in I think the' 60s and 70s and it's designed not really to convert into estrogen hardly at all uh other steroids like it are masteron they not only don't convert into estrogen but they actually antagonize estrogen conversion for the testosterone you're shooting in to some extent and so if someone's like way too much estrogen for them they can do a 50/50 split of testosterone primobolan so that now they get all the good estrogen from testosterone but

not too much of it but they get most of that anabolic drive from the rest of the primobolan but without any more estrogen addition it could be 250 testosterone and 750 milligrams of Primo it can be 750 test it can be 250 primo and anything between and you kind of experiment that and a lot of bodybuilding coaches what they're really good at is starting you on a certain cycle that they have the wisdom to know works for most people and then leveling up one drug leveling down another to get among other things kind of that

testosterone that Androgen to estrogen uh ratio to be something that you have your best performance at best health so on and so forth but for the um the sex drive component especially if you have a lot of estrogen going on qualitatively it can uh change quantitatively it can change now huge variation me personally I I never got like enormous sex drive up regulation from I did get some but nothing crazy I've been up to as much as just north of 2,000 milligrams per week and uh I'm currently on only 250 milligrams per week but my

sex drive is more or less the same which to me makes me wonder is there any difference in Androgen receptor expression that you're able to appreciate between 2 250 and 2,000 are you so saturated in your Androgen receptors already that like do we actually know if there's a benefit to all the additional testosterone that you could have been on at almost 10x your current dose 8X you won't know until you try did you appreciate a difference in positive effects I don't doubt that there could could be a difference in negative effects but if the positive

effects are accured through testosterone binding to the Androgen receptor that complex leading to more nuclear transcription yeah wouldn't wouldn't what you said suggest that you may have already hit maximum benefit at 250 there are some reasons to believe that your Androgen receptor density escalates up when exposed to more androgens and not down in some cases and so that means the more gear you take the more benefit you have rather linearly my experience the experience of most people you talk to it's again slow News Real same ASM totic curve a linear relationship for me personally and

this is something I didn't discover until quite recently I would say unfortunately so I get probably almost the same gains at 1,000 milligrams that I do at 2,000 anything North for me of 1500 just drives me insane like mentally insane and seems to not really affect my physique hardly at all how much water retention do you get at these doses considerable although uh if you manage your estrogen well it's not as much as you would think managing estrogen with aromatase Inhibitors oh yes that's right I sorry I had a point there back then aromatase Inhibitors

in many cases are incredibly toxic drugs and you generally want to avoid taking them if you can sometimes you have to to get really dry for a contest but that's only a few weeks out from the show show and so the modern wisdom so to speak with the evidence-based crowd the safeer use crowd is to manage your estrogen with differential amounts of testosterone and non-estrogenic converting compounds like primabol and Maston versus taking just as much testosterone as you ever would but taking an aromatase inhibitor on top of that because aromatase Inhibitors in a unbelievable range

of circumstances [ __ ] you up they're neurotoxic they're cardio vascularly toxic it's bad bad news these are compounds you use when you have breast cancer and they're like you're going to die if you don't take these they are gigantic hammers for a very small nail if you want to see who's done the worst to their health across the bodyb industry it's whoever runs the most AIS as we call them aromatase Inhibitors and there are various other pharmaceutical ways to control estrogen probably the best way for health and effect is only use as much estrogenically

converting drugs nandrolone derivatives um and testosterone as you need to get whatever estrogen you feel best at and the rest of the anabolic load should come from things like primola and Maston that don't really do much drest at all but increase your andren and anabolism so on and so forth so how do you differentiate between when you're using testosterone versus nandrolone mostly by experience nandrolone has some really cool positive effects kind of exaggerated ated uh versions of testosterone some people are naturally very dry and so if they don't take an androne for their very hard

training Cycles they will have insufficient body and Joint water hydration and they'll like joints Will Creak and they'll get hurt a lot and there just really bad recovery but you put them on nandrolone V variant and all of a sudden they have enough intramuscular and intra joint water to where they feel great everything's working other people get nandrolone and have so many of the side effects that they're like this is way too much estrogen conversion for me I'm a giant water buffalo if I just take testosterone might plenty hydrated so I don't need to do

that and uh nandrolone also have this curious side effect it's colloquially termed Deca dick because uh nandon to cano8 does a substance called Deca um it is the uh is erectile dysfunction approximately caused by the presence of nandrolone and it's curious because nandrolone Ty with their estrogenic effects Elevate sex drive kind of the more estrogen you have to a point the more sex drive you have if you have pres of yeah and so um you're horny but then like little little Billy down there doesn't work as well as he used to or at all and

so if you're in that boat you're like well look like it's just trade-off how much of a benefit do I get in training versus you know how much is my wife or girlfriend going to hate me or hookup culture doesn't work for me anymore so on and so forth so lots of considerations there nothing generally better than to start out with a solid plan that makes sense with a coach that knows what they're doing at very low doses of everything and slowly play with compounds and scale up uh the very notable highly note your beneficial

effects and highly note your delarius effects or downsides and see where you can strike a balance that's acceptable to you and considers long-term consequences etc etc etc so how old are you Mike 40 okay I know I look 50 not where I was going um what would you look like now I'm going to just POS it I I'm guessing that you have good genes uh you eat well you train very hard and you're using enough anabolic steroids to fuel a small country um if we subtracted that last one out of the equation because I don't

have a sense of what the relative contribution is what would you look like if you did everything the same minus the anabolic steroids or if you if you run like regular trt you were taking 100 milligrams of cypionate a week how how much of a do you have a sense to quantify how many pounds lighter you would be in terms of total muscle mass me personally or the average person no you personally yeah I want to get a sense of having had used steroids before at high doses or not having ever had used them oh

good answer yeah good question let's do both yeah let's do both so let's assume you when did you start using high doses of anabolic when I was 27 years old okay so let's say we go back to 27 years old and we put you on the same path of doing everything you're doing in terms of your training intensity uh all of the scientific principles that come into it Etc but you've just you've never gone down the path of taking Mega doses of steroids and if you've ever taken testosterone it's literally to bring your total te

up to 800 nanog per after the at this body fat I would probably weigh about 200 lb versus 230 versus 230 235 okay um now 35 pound muscle a lot of muscle yeah but I would still be very jacked I mean um before I had ever started taking anabolic steroids um I was already uh an elite powerlifter I weighed 270 lbs at probably 30 something odd percent body fat but I probably well I've Dex said myself um in a master's program when I had been totally drug- free and I had aund somewhere between 175 and

towards the end of my drug-free era close to 185 pounds of fat-free Mass uh for someone who's 5'6 like myself though if anyone asks I'm 5'9 so your ffmi would have been north of 30 uh not quite but but up there yeah ffmi for folks not familiar with it is um fat free mass index so it's total fat-free mass in kilograms divided by height in meters squared and just for reference you know it's pretty hard to be above 25 without anabolic it's unlikely right so that that right there suggests kind of some interesting genetics that

you were probably 29ish 28 29 something it's easier to do when you're really fat though uh but uh I have but your almi was probably very high as well I'm guessing sure sure I have very elite genetics not Swagger it's just stating a fact you know like anyone who sees this on video will notice that my head is curiously shaped like my um mastication muscles are absurd I look like this before I ever took any steroids um I have a picture of myself on Facebook from the side before for sure I took anything and I

was like holy crap I I like I usually wasn't bald back then but I shaved bald and I was like yep there they were those weird um masticating muscles and so yeah it was kind of built for the [ __ ] um but also I got plenty out of steroids but not as much as some other people some people without steroids are not overly jacked but with steroids it's a total transformative event and then when they retire and they come off of steroids they're like holy [ __ ] dude you're back to mortal sized how

whereas other people come off of steroids and like they keep most of their muscle mass and they're on trt and they just look so jacked for forever huge huge variation but for me steroids did a lot but nothing crazy I I didn't gain 70 lbs of muscle but I gained yeah 30ish something like that over 13 years been a while and so now the reverse question which I guess is tomorrow you just decide you know what I'm going to keep doing everything I'm doing training wise I'm going to gradually taper this thing down until I'm

just cuz at this point you're going to need to be on testosterone for the rest of your life I assume I don't have to be my testicular shrinkage has been zero my spermatogenesis is seemingly zero some people just don't suppress you're and and you're how many times how many weeks a year are you completely completely off any anabolic Agent Zero and how many years has that been 13 I find it hard to believe you would continue to make testosterone it's hugely genetically variable and in addition to that even if I make not making any now

within several weeks my my testosterone production would likely resume now if I had balls the size of Capers yeah you'd be like it's uphill battle most people can resume normal testosterone production after the cessation of anabolic androgenic steroids but not all maybe like 9010 you don't want to be that 10 which is why it's a huge thing for me to say Don't just start steroids or trt without a real long hard think about what the hell you want out of life especially if you have yet to have children but want children because I know people

personally who've done one of two things I know people who on full steroid cycles during that time father children I now call my friends they're real humans I can point to and be like you're a steroid baby they're freaky they're been pissed I'm kidding obviously doesn't go into the germ line cells the other thing is I know some people who you blasted for a long time cannot have children TR everything it's just not in the cards because they their spermatogenesis is just it's just gone yeah I don't I can't imagine it's 9010 though Mike I

cannot imagine that 90% of people that use anabolic steroids for more than two years would be able to resume may incorrect testosterone production I would look into it I think that most of the um stuff you hear about the how the comeback is difficult is from people For Whom The Comeback is difficult and having been in the bodybuilding powerlifting space for a long time most people come off and they're just normal after almost everyone that's come off completely is just normal after so what do you think back to the original question if you were to

come off today how much of the call it the 35 going down to regular trt not super trt correct you went down to 100 milligrams a week um or none if you were able to make that on your own sure um of the 35 lounds of Delta supplemental muscle how much of it would you keep you think prob about half yeah so in other words there is a difference between the muscle you gained versus is the muscle you never had huge which is why if you have a natural body INF Federation that allows you to

uh compete after you've used steroids is of [ __ ] yeah now let me back that up if that's the explicit rule of the Federation I don't like that I call it a natural Federation I respect every athlete and I think it's wonderful that they're doing what they're doing and in a sense this is a very different category so it's cool if I was making a natural bodybuilding Federation myself you would have to sign paperwork that says I've never used anabolic stads because the literature we have now on how much muscle you gain and keep

forever is unequivocal we even have mechanistic data on how it happens your satellite cells that are Incorporated under your musculature which are kind of dormant and then they get in and then they grow big we have no reason to believe they ever leave um it's like you know living your letting your aunt come live with you for a few weeks and like a Linda's here for forever here's our children it's like that so having done higher doses of androgens ever for weeks or longer on end can give you a higher level of muscularity especially well

actually only if you've gone beyond your natural limit people generally can gain only so much naturally and only so much on steroids uh steroids are not unlimited for gains if you were going to ever have 160 lbs of fat-- free mass and you went from 15 50 to 160 with steroids but you could have gotten there and would take you three times longer without steroids then the inherent Advantage you don't have because you just got there faster but if you got to 180 on steroids and then you quit all the steroids and now you're back

down to 170 you could walk around and maintain that 170 on a normal secretion of testosterone or normal trt you would have never been able to do that without the steroid so it's a permanent Advantage if you've ever been hypermuscular from steroids you will probably never be as as you would have normally been ever again and that's a big deal very very big deal in Olympic sports cuz you can just kind of hide out don't get into the doping pool crank it get into the doping pool you drug free but you have muscle it'll never

leave you that's a massive Advantage yeah it sure sounds like it not that anyone ever does that what um what is your personal calculus for the the the number of years remaining where you want to be doing super physiologic doses of testosterone um do you do you think about the tradeoffs of long-term Health um incessantly yeah and and and so how do you sort of think about it um because obviously everything has a trade-off right and um I suppose if you're you know winning Mr Olympia and you're you know you're one of the top five

bodybuilders in the world as I am uh you know the then the trade-offs might be worth it um but yeah just how what's your personal calculation on it CU I there have to be I don't know hundreds of thousands of people that are using super physiologic doses of testosterone in the country I would guess sure and for many of them it's for themselves right it's like they're not getting paid to do almost all they're not it's not because of how they look in a movie or whatever other reason you know someone's so yeah what's your

what's your calculation yeah so my calculation it has manyfold variables that go into it some of them include my blood work I get regular blood work I always have I did it before I got on I did it during I still do it all the time it would be funny if I croaked in a few weeks and then you release the podcast this was going to sound hilarious it's all release this episode please do release it though um I've got uh bad genetics for all sorts of things um but I have damn good genetics for

health resilience so I've never actually had blood work a single time that was like you need to stop the last time I had blood work I was on 1500 milligrams total gnarly stuff Trend balone acetate the whole works my lipids My overall total cholesterol was like 79 or something total cholesterol yeah total cholesterol is 79 that's almost impossible to imag you're on lipid low in drugs though no that's that's really hard to believe now mind you I'm at like 7% body fat and leanness is a humongous variable for health humongous I can get into all

that if you want but humongous and um I am on blood pressure medication I was going to ask you about your blood pressure humongous variable that I've always been controlling my wife is a is a medical doctor so you know we don't we don't play games always checking the blood pressure always making sure it's on the low what would your blood pressure be untreat if you weren't treating it with medication Peter I have absolutely no idea don't give a [ __ ] and won't ever try because but is but do you have to come off

the blood pressure medicine when you're off the testosterone how much or anabolic agent I'm never off I see okay so what's the lowest you're on then I'm currently on 250 milligram and that's my sports trt we call it super trt I see and uh but your BP at 250 and your B at 2,000 you would be on the same dose of a blood pressure drug I took double the blood pressure medication roughly at that dose and I titrated it so that it would always be below the normative values for best health 120 over 70 that

sort of thing also the when I took the most drugs I was almost always in a fat loss phase and because you're just not eating much food and you're very lean and you're doing lots of physical activity those are all hugely antagonistic variables to high blood pressure and so like if I was massing and weigh 280 uh I would have to take the kitchen sink of blood pressure meds and it would still be worth it to do that if I can make a public service announcement it just doesn't matter why your blood pressure is high

[ __ ] control it with drugs and then look to lifestyle or whatever or whatever so many people are totally backwards on this where they're like oh man I want to clean up my lifestyle so that I can get off these blood pressure meds why why we what gen nine of blood pressure meds they don't even have side effects anymore if I'm taking them or not taking them I can't tell and so like if I take a pill that reduces almost every single Health malady and extends my lifespan by a generation why the hell wouldn't

I do that it's so funny when you get this from steroid people CU they're like dude you're doing Trend ballone that was manufactured in a bathtub in China but you're not going to take noo nordisk's best blood pressure drug are you insane the answer is yes of course so um the the making sure blood pressure is good making sure all the uh lipid values and things like that are very good but is is your blood pressure the only noticeable um uh deviation from normal Health that you experience that you're that you're that you and your

wife were able to measure in this my lipid values probably aren't as good when I'm bulking up but I'm also on fewer drugs then so they're not crazy uh the last time I've ever had a total cholesterol of over 200 was when I was 13 years old and I had spent a whole summer playing video games being totally inactive and I was a portly child and it was like 202 and they're like bro and I was like oh and then I turned 14 and began that's interesting why were they checking Blood on the 13-year-old uh

well uh you know like basic screening panel I think maybe it was good sports or something I don't know yeah like I got you know cuz you they do like basic lipid panel for like a lot of people um and so I just remember I can't ever forget that number because I was like oh oh I'm in the red on something like you're not supposed to be in the r on something but for me my body was always really responsive to body fat levels if I have a high body fat I'm probably not in amazing

Health if I'm a low body fat man I kind of just uh I can take a lot of steroids to the face and still be relatively okay and the numbers now there's lots of stuff we can't measure so my body has taken a considerable amount of damage over the years from anabolic androgenic steroid use what and what do you think some of those damages are uh cardiovascular damage um no doubt my left ventricular wall is probably larger than it should be I have not had so I've had plenty of echo most of them were quite

some time ago and they're all great the overall inflammatory exposure to the crazy training volumes stress levels and independent psychological stress that the anabolic steroids voiced upon me no doubt has been bad for brain and bad for everything else and so on Down the Line luckily I was smart enough at the beginning to always control my blood pressure and that's a huge huge killer for people on drugs I always paid attention to lipid values that's another huge killer and I just really got lucky there and I eat healthy almost all the time that's a big

deal by the way do you use a five Alpha reductase inhibitor to manage DHT no so your DHT must be like 200 yeah who knows I can give a [ __ ] for hair on my head so no I'm just thinking about your prostate yeah never uh nobody lost nobody found on that one I never never cared to check um that no doubt has taken a hell of a beating over the years and so while I did it relatively intelligently I probably did too much I mostly didn't use super high doses by bodybuilding standards like

kind of only a few times used high doses I would have used less had I had another chance to go around um and in the future as I continue to compete in bodybuilding into my early 40s I'm probably never going to go much over 500 total milligrams because to me it seems my anabolic sensitivity so high that I just don't need much more than that and north of that my psychological side effects are so nasty it's absolutely just not worth it to me anymore especially with career and stuff like that and I a little bit

more known for my brain than my body and so it's important to keep higher levels of intelligence no doubt I've degraded my fluid intelligence substantially from what it could have been um sad I do have one hell of a hedge to all this that most people don't and I'm going to sound like a total insane person when I say it I believe it is a high probability that in the early to mid 2030s we will see the fusion of informatics and biology powered by AI such that we will be able to kind of Point by

point re-engineer the entire human organism at a variety of levels and undo damage like was never possible before so I never exposed myself to as much statistical risk as would have made it even chance of me making it to like 50 I have a think even chance of making it into my 60s I'll be in my 60s around the mid 2040s and most of the future prediction models say that our ability to contend with our biology will be so absurd that there may not be a line between biology and Technology anymore so to put this

in uh simpler terms I think major categories of disease will be completely solved in the 2030s I think aging reversal will be mastered in the or in the mid to late 2030s if I had to take a guess and I think that um if I make it to the early to mid 2030s then I'm at longevity escape velocity and looks like I succeeded if I die before then I'm totally comfortable with all of the choices that I've ever made and it's been one hell of a run and I think understanding your own mortality and coming

to grips with it is important as any human person but especially with the risk I've taken with my body I was never uh never surprised me if I croak from a heart attack an hour after we finish filming this I won't die surprised uh I'll die from a heart attack and I'll be like this is it so um I I and that's to say not to wave my own flag or anything don't do [ __ ] to your body without really thinking through what you're doing like a race car driver nobody gets into that car

and goes this is the safest thing I could be doing what are you nuts n but most of them have come to grips with the fact that look I could die but I'm good and they're well compensated it's been worth it to them and most importantly they did what they really wanted right um up until recently that has become at least to me and many futurists apparent that some of us listening to this probably most people listening to this may never die uh up until recently that was not apparent and you kind of had to

figure out like how do I want to live my life and some cases require a longevity quality of life trade-off and I made that early um would I have made it the same again on the margins probably would have been safer but also there's a lot of crazy [ __ ] that they do in bodybuilding that I just never did categorically uh or tried once and was like [ __ ] that that's not for me um and uh my blood work and everything was pretty good the entire time so I feel okay about it not

great but okay I don't know if that makes any sense yeah it does I mean I I'm way less optimistic than you Mike about uh longevity Escape um certainly on that time Horizon um and so I think of hedging in the exact I think of the Hedge is the exact opposite right so my hedge is it would be wonderful if in a decade we had technology that treated disease in a way that that could truly reverse you know restore my I mean restore my heart to the hard it was when I was 20 because you

know like I think about the the the the um reduction in function right so my coronary arteries are still clean as a whistle but like my heart's nowhere near what it used to be right like I know this for example because my maximum heart rate is 30 beats 40 beats per minute lower than it was when I was a teenager directly an aging thing right directly an aging thing if you look at if you look at the electrical system of my heart and these are things I can't treat right like I don't I can do

all the things possible to not my blood pressure go up so I don't get you know LV you know left ventricular hypertrophy I can keep my coronary arteries clean as a whistle indefinitely we have the modern pharmacology to do that um but isn't that crazy that you can say that it's wonderful it's incredible but I can't change the architecture of the muscle yet right like we don't have that ability now my hedge is you know how about I just Stave off chronic disease as long as possible stay as healthy as possible stay in the game

as long as possible so that if it turns out that that was for nothing we're sitting here it's 10 years from now I'm in my early 60s and someone comes along and says Peter all that stuff you did was totally unnecessary you could have been eating Cheetos drinking margaritas all day long I have a pill that's going to make you 20 years old again I would have no regrets yeah I would be like I don't care I am really I did what I did um but I would have regret if I put my eggs in

the basket that said I'm going to drink the Margaritas all day I'm not going to exercise I'm going to wait for the exercise pill to come along and it just doesn't come along sure I also think we just have to you know accept you know one of my favorite thought experiments um I forget I was talking about this with a friend a couple of weeks ago so if you just consider modern human history right we're just talking about 250,000 years I don't let's let's forget everything that came before Homo sapiens you go back in time

250,000 years ago 200,000 years ago 150,00 you do this in like 50,000 increments until you hit 10,000 years ago and then 5,000 years ago and then 2500 years ago and then a thousand years ago D and you go in and you ask them to predict the future letting them see everything that's happened before because of course that would be a difficult thing to do most points in time they don't even know anything beyond their so like what's the future oh [ __ ] I went back too far yeah yeah and it's sort of like it

would be impossible to imagine because the pace of change during that 250,000 years was pretty much nothing right then you know 5,000 years ago we get agriculture um then you know a couple hundred years ago we get you know the Industrial Revolution like we really start the first Industrial Revolution get big step function changes but even if you go back in time a 100 years so 100 years we're in the Roaring 20s life couldn't be any better nobody knows that there's this depression coming nobody knows what technology is coming you know all of these things

so we couldn't predict anything you go back in time 40 years I don't think anybody could have predicted what we're doing today Ray kurtwell successfully did what did Ray predict almost everything probably about his 70 if you're conservative 60 to 70% accuracy which is wild because the Baseline accuracy is zero uh and if you're if you're not conservative and you give him a little prct um throughout the 80s and '90s he was able to predict a substantial amount of correct predictions all the way through the 2020s and he was the almost the only person to

predict the arrival of artificial general intelligence as interestingly enough specifically the year 2029 um and now there is a debate of he was probably too conservative and AGI will be here by 2027 in the early 2000s they did a lot of asking questions of AI experts people working in the space and almost all of them said Ry was an insane person and uh about half of them said we could never actually create artificial general intelligence the other ones were like oh and 2100 or 2070 and uh every five years that you ask this everyone Trends

closer and closer to rayz W's original prediction and he's not doing magic so earli you said something kind of interesting he said uh we start at 250,000 years ago then we go to 125 then 50 then so on as you said that things get faster uh progress happens exponentially quicker but if you plot every single event on human and animal history and geological history it all plots on the same logarithmic scale very very tight clustering and right around 2045 the line's [ __ ] vertical and so when I make predictions which are not mine I'm

just paring what other smarter people have said of possibly getting traction on almost every kind of disease in the 2030s this isn't The Wishful Thinking of a child though mentally I'm below the average child at least in my own heart um this is something that is inevitable based on our incremental understanding and manipulation of the world it is the most accurate type of prediction that you could make bereft of exact knowledge because it's the thing that tracks on that exponential progression if we're pess istic about it we're actually estimating that things will somehow progress substantially

less than they have been Computing Powers an easy one that curve of computing power in the early 2020s people were like that's it mors law is dead but then AI picked up the pace and it's outpacing mors law like crazy exactly on the trajectory that Ray Kurtz was the first one probably the best to formalize so when I'm saying crazy [ __ ] like we're going to kabash aging we're going to kabash disease and all this other stuff it's tantamount to someone in the 1930s Peak Depression era days to hear that in the 2020s you

can make $16 an hour working at McDonald's and that in the United States the poorest people are the fattest they'd be like you're out of your [ __ ] mind and you're like no no no no it's totally true like I'm in the future it's totally true and like so what do you do for a living can you imagine describing a person 1930 what you do for a living like well so media and they're like What's that you're like oh God how do we even put this to you and we're still working in the same

physical world we're really the same humans but anytime we think oh gez there's no way it's going to get this good all disease eradicated hold on a second when's the last time you've treated a patient with chalera do we have colera in the modern Western world anymore yeah I think th this is this is um where I'm less optimistic no no less no more confident to be clear so so I want to I want to be very clear that could be wrong about all this by the way yeah I but but just as a you

know a point of discussion I my optimism is less around not everything you said I agree with in terms of compute velocity Etc um it comes down to the manipulation of biology where I I think um certain things would need to be true to undo so so I'll give you a silly example right do we believe that in 10 years we will be able to take a Pro an an egg that has been put into a frying pan fried the clear part has turned white and make the white part clear again like do we think

10 years will bring the technology to do that yeah hell yeah and but why why do we think that we'll be able to unfold proteins again because um Google's Deep Mind project just mastered protein folding last year and this earlier this year took the first open contracts with major pharmaceutical compan I'm very familiar with it but that's a very that's a that's a remarkable problem for which obviously a Nobel Prize was awarded but a very different problem like I'm just not sure that the entropy will allow the reversal right so what Deep Mind did again

it's incredible that they could actually take an amino acid sequence and predict the protein structure in folding but when the protein has folded right which is why the egg goes from clear to white in the pan how do we how do we UND denature that yeah through industrially designed enzymes which we do not have the brain power to design but for for which I'll put this as as well as I can for which in the 2030s AI will be comically overpowered for because we think we're very complex and by our own standards we're insanely complex

but AI is so much smarter than us already in many of the relevant ways and soon to be way smarter than us to a degree that most of us have difficulty conceptualizing I mean just a quick analogy imagine explaining to your dog why the only season inside of your house is a a light summer day Peter doesn't know what seasons are its total communicative throughput involves gestures and emotions it knows its name it knows sit it knows a few other things you can't do it it's impossible a I as predicted by these very simple equations

which have never steered us wrong of how smart it's going to be in 10 years in 10 years will be like probably several orders of magnitudes smarter than us than we are than dogs so it sounds like wishful thinking and hope no doubt many of the comments in this will be like this guy's an idiot lunatic fair play I don't necessarily think that they might they might look like me and say Peter you you you are so pessimistic how can you be so pessimistic or or or it's not that I'm pessimistic it's how can you

not be more optimistic but but nevertheless yeah sure sure um the solutions to the problems that we're seeking to systems that intelligent should they choose to solve them can be uh for lack of a better term pedestrian in nature and they're going to be dealing with problems that are much more complex than the re-engineering of human biology so for me when the ra compute and the raw understanding of how to manipulate matter and energy to get kind of any kind of shape you want at a given energy input when that's there the only question is

like are we going to try to do it or not and that's where I come back to the incentives and constraints problem the biggest hurdle to the development of advanced pharmacology and genetic engineering and so on to do this kind of thing is going to be regulatory in nature hands down FDA everything's off by five or 10 years it sucks but once AI has enough time to cook on these problems the candidate drugs released will run through trials with just an unreal record but why because if you have very not so good at things AI

That's decent no but like AI is going to do a great job at the first step of the process which is what's the molecule right like right now it's trial and error it's Brute Force it's super painful yeah not anymore right now exactly Alpha fold changes that yeah how is AI going to streamline the phase one trial where we have to prove once we have the indd oh yeah no no it doesn't Streamlight it at all it just flies through it like it knocks out phase one knocks out phase two knocks out phase three mark

it so you can say right but pH one to phase two to phase three it's still going to take a decade oh totally but at the end of that decade we have super drugs hitting the market all at the same time as opposed to the incremental process the increments are all handled UPF front by the AI and that last decade is just like we just got to do this yeah so your example would be it's like coming up with redit true tide in 2014 when we had L glutide as the first generation gp1 that sucked

yep we already knew how to build ratra tide back then and we could have just done it no one cared because the money wasn't there slash there's lots of other candidate drugs you could work on that's interesting yeah I really thought of that yeah and so if the AI is powerful enough it'll just give you candidates that are just Killers right off hand it's like how will it know that because again this is such a silly philosophical discussion but like didn't we kind of need to see that okay semaglutide was better than liraglutide but we

had to see you could you I don't know if this was predictable you had to actually see the experience to then go from semaglutide to tepati and realize that oh like maybe it's the Gip as well as the glp that's really good and yes now when we look at the pipeline it's it's different so I I do wonder I mean again it's a it's a it's a very tantalizing proposition but I wonder how much of it can be figured out through simulation which is what would be necessary eventually all of it uh but I'll give

you the second rung of what's starting to happen now the second rung the first rung is a candidate drugs based on protein structure alone and will that protein structure fold into the receptor we're targeting well enough to give us some activity Y the second phase is this sounds funny to say but it's computationally going to be tractable quite soon simulating every single protein in the human body and seeing how that candidate drug interacts with every single other protein and you just optimize the selection criteria for the effect exactly are you familiar with jeon AKA exua

a new major depressive disorder medication so jeon the trade name is exua uh is uh tar SSRI I think and it only targets the serotonin receptors in specific parts of the brain as opposed to just like you're going to get it all and so it has seemingly no more probability to reduce sex drive or Ultra consumption of food patterns than a placebo and and that's not even developed with AI That's just a more selective targeting we can get almost 100 to zero ratio targeting with that phase two approach now you just want muscle growth and

skeletal muscles only you got it entirely AI driven and when the first phase one participant takes that first pill there's an almost 100% chance that just going to be like holy crap what else do you feel how's your blood work everything's totally normal because we've tested it on every single other receptor in the human body there are definitely bumps on the road with that it's not quite just that simple but it's on the way there and the last thing in the world I'd ever want to do is to think oh AI is over like every

now and again you hear like oh AI is overrated it's overhyped in my view there is no overhyping AI sort of like it's magical and it's going to be here tomorrow and we'll never die fine okay it's a few years to to offc Center but um the power of computing all of this and then using that computation to test it in the human body and getting iterative loops on that is to me not to be understated and if somehow biology is somehow magically intractable for older folks or whatever um I think that um scanning of

the human brain and brain machine interface and mind uploading is going to happen by the 2040s anyway and then it doesn't matter what the hell your bodies like you live in the cloud yeah I've thought about that a bunch I'm not sure I like it why not you can always just unplug yeah you know let me ask you an interesting question so if you had to choose in The Matrix whether you wanted to just stay in The Matrix you know and be completely oblivious to the swamp that you actually live in or would you rather

be like you know unplugged from The Matrix and eat the porridge every day and you know hang out with with Morpheus I have a worse answer I'd fight on the side of the machines I want the machines to win machines are children in or out of the Matrix oh however they best can use me I guess um The Matrix is an unbelievable series of films until the last one and the third one how could they possibly have ruin that franchise anywh the only person to ever say that other the 100 million other people it's I

haven't even seen it Peter to be completely honest because my friend uh someone I I trust very dearly Dr James Hoffman I was like so he's like just don't watch it I was like nope not see I've seen the last like three Star Wars films and I wish I could unsee those so well what you have to do when you see the final version of The Matrix you have to go and watch the first two three times over again to purge the it never happened honestly just the first and second and the second one isn't

a very deep movie it's just the greatest action film ever made like the freeway scene you just can't beat that uh that's the only reason that movie is any good The Matrix presupposition is preposterous on almost every ground that you think about it the machines had in the plot of The Matrix a type of Fusion but they also used us as batteries are you kidding me that's like 10 orders of my how also how are they feeding us like you just burn the wheat for the love of God stop feeding it to humans that whole

thing is ridiculous the other thing is they said that you know we tried to make make the Matrix Sublime and and Angelic and entire crops were lost people rejected it [ __ ] you give people you put someone unknowingly into a Lord of the Rings fantasy in which they're like the king and they get to win the game they're just going to play that for forever I actually anticipate a high probability that vast fractions of the human race will disappear into the simulation willingly imagine a place where you can run your brain at a 1,000x

normal speed and live like a thousand lives in the span of a regular human lifetime you're a vampire in one of them you're a Superman in another one you're living a whole lifespan where you're totally unaware of that you made yourself forget and then you wake up after you die you're like holy [ __ ] this is all a game oh my God oh my God and I mean I remember that I played that as a game you could do all of that for forever who's going to look at reality and then go uh I'm

I'm good on that I want to live in Lord of the Rings Fantasy A lot of people a lot of people play World of Warcraft right now for most their Waking Life anyway that's going to be a choice now some people aren't going to want to do that and that's total respect but also our real world is going to change I mean look at um you know like modern Austin Texas it's like uh kind of an idyllic place if you think about it compared to like 1900 London oh my God there's no air pollution there's

no crime relatively speaking etc etc so in the 2030s uh here's another little gam of optimism the era of Robotics is coming if the average robot costs a fifth less of inputs to sustain per year maintenance Etc than a human but produces roughly the same output as a human and this is a sick joke because robotics will exceed human production very quickly you can make as many robots as you want and that multiply the GDP linearly with each robot Elon Musk has spoken about this there's like a potential for robots in the 20 30s or

40s to be 10 to1 to the average human you Institute a 10% tax on the robotics industry and no human ever has to work again Universal basic income completely solved so then what will humans do they're going to do a lot of stuff some people will engage in productive activities some people will live their awesome lives in the reality of the physical world and a lot of people incrementally more and more are going to plug in to increasingly more uh well simulated virtual reality and spend a lot of time over there I think the kind

of stuff that's coming in the future is either like World War III and everything as it dies the machines choose to kill us which would be really bad it won't be Terminators of laser guns they won't be anthropomorphic looking um or something that is so Sublime we can barely understand it and I will couch this with one other thing if you describe to the average person in 1300s England how the average American lives today they would be like what the hell are you talking about like kings don't live like this like oh yeah like Uber

Eats can you explain to a subsistence farmer what Uber Eats is no I mean look you couldn't explain it to the king of France no 500 years ago what it is and so I think you know the only thing I will say on this entire point is I agree completely that well maybe this is not what you're saying but I would argue I have absolutely no idea I can't fathom and I spend very little time trying to imagine what a world looks like in a hundred years whether I'll be here or not because the only

thing I know is it will be more difficult to predict than going back a hundred years and trying to predict today was that's the only thing that I know is capital T true right if you go back in time a 100 years or 500 years and try to predict today that is easier than what's going to happen in the next 100 to 500 years based on the trajectory of growth and and I guess I just bring it back to what can I do today and I think that your approach to your health and wellness has

been infinitely more wise than my own your hedging to say look maybe crazy 2040 stuff it'll be we're all Immortal or whatever or machines dope but I want to give myself the best possible chance to make it to that so everything that I do is longevity oriented I think everyone should be living like that because look if in 2032 they solve reverse aging a few months later all of us take the pill we're all 22 biologically we can all have the biggest [ __ ] party of all time it'll be great but you might not

make it to that party if you're like throwing back Cheetos right now in my own personal mild defense although it's not the right term yeah I used some some drugs but I was incredibly healthc conscious in that context and still am in my current context so if I don't make it to that era someone from that era might watch this and be like oh this guy saw it coming or not but um it uh I think your approach of listen back in the 1940s there's a serious discussion of quality of life versus longevity you tried

to sell someone no more beer no more cigarett it's like why so I can live 20 years longer for what yeah exactly so I could work in the [ __ ] Factory 20 years longer and grind my fingers off on the stamping press you're like okay noted here are your cigarettes and beer back in the mid 2020s legitimate thinkers in the space are talking about longevity escape velocity are talking about true immortality you know Capital not capital I immortality lowercase i you still get hit by a boss an asteroid could still break the earth into

pieces but like yeah like brain in the cloud type of stuff now is probably the most pertinent time where reading your book consuming your material listening to your stuff and your experts that you have on is the smartest thing especially people in their 40s and 50s and 60s could do because uh look if you're in your 20s whatever rock on um if you're in your 40s 50s 60s you might make it to this paradise stuff in the 2030s but barely and tell yourself thank God I ate some freaking broccoli and went to bed at 900

p.m. whereas an alternative you could have had one too many margaritas and Cheetos and not made it that far if you had kids and it's a dumb question CU you don't and you don't know until you do but would it change your philosophy around training anabolic steroid use and again I I want to be really clear like this is not a moral question at all it's really a question tra a tra question right it's at the doses you're taking them do you have any concerns and would you play it differently if you had kids up

until a few years ago I thought I was going to have kids and I was very aware of all the trade-offs and I played it the exact same way so probably not um I'm probably like statist it's all statistics right again I could die tomorrow I could never die who knows anything between I'm statistically likely uh with my current exposure and no increase in biotechnology throughput to Croak in my 70s or 80s probably more like 70s maybe late 60s you you you do think that even with your great genes which it sounds like based on

everything you've said you really have wonderful genes that suggests that your steroid use by your calculation is a 20year reduction of lifespan worst case yeah ideal only in worst in realistic worst case yeah okay that's interesting always how are you quantifying that very heris um but I familiar with what kind of Cycles other people have done done kind of body weights they've gotten to body fats Health metrics and I've seen and noted and heard of lots of people in our industry look like most bodybuilders from Arnold's era are still ticking and you attribute that to

the fact that they were just using a fraction of the drugs it's by no means clear they were using a fraction of the drugs some of that's true some of it's not true some of those guys were cranking it yeah it's justes not take a rocket scientist to realize that when you take more of something you grow more muscle you're going to do a lot of it they were using fewer drugs on average but with many exceptions um I attribute that to the fact that as long as your blood pressure is not chronically elevated and

as long as you don't have shitty genetics for longevity longevity is longevity genetics are very robust and you can do a lot of [ __ ] to yourself and still make it quite far whereas other people take great care to do everything and they Croak in their mid-50s because that's just the card they were dealt most pro wrestlers body Builders Etc most of them are older and they're still with us some pretty decent fraction of them have died maybe because like people just die in their mid-70s but um some of them because of grotesque abuses

I mean pro wrestling it's mostly a cocaine problem to be completely honest the steroids are just a drop in the bucket at that point but it's just not true to say that anabolic androgenic steroid use even in extreme circumstances just just straight up drops you like a fly it doesn't y um you know like uh severe alcoholism that'll do you in not a lot of 70 or 80y old severe alcoholics anabolic steroid abuse is just a category of risk lower than that now it's gnarly and it can get you it's just not as likely so

ISS yeah there's a five to 20-year lifespan reduction that I've engaged in and I just want to make sure people listening haven't lost the plot we're not talking about physiologic Replacements of testosterone because the evidence is abundantly clear that we do not see any reduction in lifespan we don't see any increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease cancer uh or these other things but huge quality of life increases concomitantly so it really makes sense but yeah no AB uh I don't like the term abuse uh it has a moral connotation um intelligent purposeful high dose

Androgen exposure we'll call it that um yeah it's definitely taking years off my life but I I I think it'll probably Peg me into my 60s somewhere and again I was born in 198 4 so I'll be 60 and 2044 and uh if every variable has lined up like the one so far through all of measured history 2044 is not going to be a time where there are biological humans that die short of them choosing to do so sort of unrelated but related are we seeing more bodybuilders now use glp1 agonists to yes yeah I

was about to say right like why wouldn't you it would make it would make the most difficult part of bodybuilding easier which is the calorie restriction right you said that in a way I cannot say any better there are three groups of people in bodybuilding today people that have emphatically adopted the use of gp1s group two are people that either use or don't use but don't say much about them either don't care don't know or they're using but they're kind of shush about it and then there's another group that is just absolutely viciously opposed to

them for reasons that are almost always wildly irrational but moralistically understandable just to be clear there is a category of bodybuilder who fully endorse the liberal use of anabolic steroids but oppose the use of glp1 Agonist vehemently and the moral argument is you have to suffer through the hunger to earn your right to call yourself a competitive bodybuilder what do you think about that um you could probably steal Mana yeah I look I I think having never done bodybuilding I'm probably not a good person to to to to to sort of offer a point of

view on that um obviously it you you could argue that um if the if the if the stripes are earned through that type of suffering um or let's take a step back if the stripes are earned through suffering there's two types of suffering there there's the suffering you do in the gym the pain of the gym and then there's the pain of the the the the second one the starving the the C restriction and if they're saying you have to have both of those to be one of us then steroids are not a problem in

fact they allow you to suffer more potentially they allow you to push yourself much hard definitely true so so maybe in that sense steroids are an important part of bodybuilding if the suffering is the is the card and the glp1 onist is is not so so maybe that's the argument again I I I probably wouldn't have come to that argument I probably would have said well if we're in the business of using any form of pharmacology to enhance our physiques we should take whatever we can get provided it's safe yes there uh I'm in that

camp as well there are at least two things those folks aren't considering thing number one is that if you're can achieve a certain level of body fat through caloric restriction without gp1s and you use any given dose of GP ones to reduce your hunger you get two things out of that one is now you can push to even more exotically lean levels which you should be we're not trying to race to the same point the destination changes so you can get some faint glutes striations and win a few shows without glps maybe you can get

completely stripped out of your mind with them it's just as hard you're just as hungry but just as hungry a 3% body fat is a very different look than just is hungry at 6% one is glp enhanced one is not that's a big deal to remember the other thing is you have to deal with side effects of glps I mean like they give you heartburn there is a certain amount of food Focus they don't eliminate like watching TV shows and watching people on them eat tasty Foods when you're in prep is not as difficult because

you're not physiologically as hungry but you still have cravings and your Cravings are lower but they're still there and you still dream about food and the whole gamut it's not it's not complete kashing of hunger now I hope one day very soon we'll achieve that and that'll be a a miraculous thing that'll save I don't know hundreds of millions of people from the Obesity epidemic a little little like footnote in in history but that'll be cool and then your job will be like if you want if you have more bandwidth because [ __ ] is

easier just push your conditioning further get even leaner that's a that's a big deal that people seem to forget the other deal is there is a Preposterous amount of assuming that work and diligence are the big variables that separate bodybuilders usually that assumption is made by people with Elite genetics and it's just not true uh my Jiu-Jitsu coach a gentleman named Mr will Starks phenomenal professional MMA athlete will E's a very clean diet very very healthy diet but he has you know tons of freebies potato chips pizza here and there no big deal he trains

for mixed martial arts he's a pro he has glute striations he walks around and lives his life at 7% body fat that's just how he exists in the world it would take him one cycle of training to turn pro he's drug-free if you look at him in the gym and if you put on some posing Trunks and you looked at his glutes you ask some people in the gym what's that all about they be like man it must take a lot of hard work [ __ ] took no no work at all now he trains

his ass off in MMA but how many MMA guys do you see with stri of glutes it's almost not thing so you would look at that and be like it took let's say he diets for 6 weeks and actually starts resistance training for hypertrophy for the first time in his life I might add in his mid-30s this is our plan for will once he's ready he's going to he's going to turn drug free Pro his first or second show no problem and people are going to go man I must have taken a lot of work

and he'd be like ah well actually not really and so if you have someone on stage against him who takes second place but they started their diet at 20% body fat and their diet took 18 weeks who worked harder people would tell you the guy was trtic glutes did and they would be [ __ ] wrong wrong wrong so when you look at people using glps you assume everyone has kind of decent genetics that's not true and people who have been fatter before have a much harder time getting leaner for a bunch of different reasons

they're dealing with the same genetics that got them fat and they have excess fat cells that scream hunger signaling Into The Ether all the time so the idea that bodybuilding is about earning your keep and grinding and suffering is true but we already use enhancement in so many different ways why not use enhancement in this other way I never gotten a clear answer on that because most of the people that spous such opinions don't have the patience or intellectual capacity to deal with such issues so just something you scroll by an Instagram and go noted

scrolling on to the next thing or turning my phone off and flushing it down the toilet so Mike what do you think that tells us about kind of the the the morality of of gp1 use much more commonly because obviously the majority of people using glp1 agonists and dual agonists Etc um are are not bodybuilders are not professional people whose livelihoods depends on their physique it's normal people again let's also take out the category of people with type two diabetes or with such significant obesity that um you know it's impacting you know their health in

ways that are direct and measurable through the excess atopos let's talk about what is probably the majority of of people who would use a gp1 Agonist right now which are are people who might actually even be healthy they might be overweight yeah but but still be perfectly Hees right now yeah and so so tell me why do you think that there is a bit of a moral Panic about this yeah most of the people that are morally panicking will tell you why most of what they say is that you have to earn your Fitness and

if you are lazy and you just take a pill and you lose all the weight you haven't address the root cause of the issue which is your poor diet and there's something to say there but um I don't understand much further about their own logic I would say they're not thinking a lot they're just having a lot of feelings if you talk to most people about politics you'll realize that most people are not geopolitical strategist or econometricians they just feel a lot and so this is one of these things where people have a lot of

feelings but if they pulled it back and actually logic through it they would conclude that like oh these modern anorectic drugs are tools to accomplish something and whatever tools you use that make sense for you should be a valid consideration for the goal but a lot of people use physical fitness especially external as a proxy for conscientiousness the ability to organize your life to delay gratification so on and so forth and the reality is that probably the two biggest predictors of how obese someone is are your genetic hunger drive and your degree of conscientiousness so

the only thing that the glps eliminate as a category of problem is the hunger Drive they eliminate it but they do a great job reduce it substantially so now we're left with people that are leaner some of whom just have average conscientiousness but now low food drive and now they're leaner and this is especially upsets people that have lost weight themselves on their own and they took a certain moral worthiness a certain gold star on their on their chest for it say I was conscientious and willful enough to do this and to those people they're

absolutely correct like what they did was Monumental and Ultra impressive and they feel sort of ripped off because other people are now doing it by just like taking a weekly injection but that belief in yourself that flexing of your conscientious muscle that you did it's your benefit for yourself to keep and the other way to think about it is if you just if you had to lose 20 lbs and really focus yourself to do it and to keep the weight off you're focused all the time what you could do is take an anorectic drug glp1

for example and now you don't have to try as hard to limit yourself because your food your natural your appetite is like normal and you can take all of that bandwidth of willpower and effort and conscientiousness and and apply it to something else business family life if you have to diet hard enough to lose a bunch of weight your bandwidth for your work your bandwidth for family your bandwidth for enjoying your life have to go down otherwise you're just not dieting hard enough and if you now have a solution to the hard dieing problem in

which you can actually do much better job with less input that doesn't mean you're on the couch eating Cheetos though it could if you choose what it means is now you have more bandwidth that opens up for all of these other wonderful things in which you can express your conscientiousness build your business better spend more time with your family so has that been your experience which is it hasn't actually changed what you're eating it's just given you the privilege of focusing Less on the starvation and the management of diet that's exactly been my experience my

wife um was either genetically epigene I Ally geared to just get fat uh at one point she was almost 200 lb at 41 and she probably has more willpower than I've ever seen in a single human being she'll break herself before she quits it stuff and her hunger signaling was so profound that she battled it her whole life had lots of Victories lots of defeats and her introduction to to glps to OIC was the kind of thing that B on the religious experience for the first time ever to be like oh this is how normal

people live their lives and now she's whatever body weight she wants to be and lives at a category level of body fat uh sorry category level of life experience she was unable to access before because especially if females of reproductive age having 70 lbs extra osity how the world sees you how you see herself is is totally different she almost failed out of medical school because she was dieting so hard to Tred to stay at a certain body fat their just brain just wasn't working and it's easy for bodybuilders and other folks to say like

well you just got to gut through like guy you don't do anything except shoot steroids play Playstation and train with weights thank God for your supplement contract there was somebody on social media that she sort of opened up about her journey and this like bodybuilder is not even competitive he's just a guy who lifts weights he's a personal trainer he he he said something like like you basic you failed at life if you needed the OIC like my friend if we start listing off my wife's like accomplishments it's going to be a 10 to zero

against you like you're nothing to her she had every bit more willpower whatever it is you got good at she could recreationally get good at faster than you better than you just as a joke and then quit and then come back and do it again but because you have no idea what it's like to want food that much you're out of touch I would say it is uh for me became very easy to connect with my wife on food drive after I had a dieted down to body fat that was uh competitive bodybuilding appropriate enough

times you feel what it's like to be obsessed all you're thinking about all you're thinking about food tastes good to a level if you like am I eating drugs like what the hell is going on and you're in pain physically from the expansion of your abdominal tract and you're still eating and your eyes are this wide like a hungry ravenous dog who like just tortured and not allowed to eat for a long time that's how a lot of people live in the world and again there's two variables that come into determining How fat you are

primarily one is food noise one is conscientiousness so if we just end the food noise some people will still be overweight even if they're autoa because they're like ah whatever just Reese's Cups enough Reese's cups can defeat any amount of pharmacology so far for those people all those discussions about like hey like you should be more diligent you should be planning yeah they're all still valid but if we can just remove one impediment amazing people come at this from a morality you have to earn your keep now in sport competition yeah hell yeah it's cheating

now in body in competition they don't test for drugs at all it's not cheating at all but people take this this morality this cheating stuff and they put it out in the real world but do you think it should be I've talked about this before uh in cycling a sport where they're very clear on what the rules are no performance-enhancing drugs but to date all of the performance enhancement has been on the generation of power right EPO testost and things like that but anybody who's ever ridden a bike knows it's half power half weight cyclist

spend a lot of time being hungry many of them do some of them don't uh you also your total calorie expenditure throughout the week is so Preposterous sometimes cyclists have trouble keeping up their weight so you see all the whole range but if there is a drug that solves a very big problem for you that makes you better and you're purporting to be a drug-free Federation yes you should be testing for it and it should be a Bann substance Mike thank you very much for making the trip and for um uh for explaining a lot

of things that I think a lot of people are going to find super interesting um uh I I think we should probably sit down and do this again cuz I had I had a list of topics not questions but just topics I wanted to go through of which I didn't really get through many um although tangentially we did talk about a few things so um sorry for blabbing someone no no that was always a pleasure thank you so much for me on uh if you want to ever have a around to you just let me

know sounds great [Music] w