Ben “The Pak Man” Pakluski is an IFBB professional bodybuilder and champion from Toronto, Canada.
ben has been coaching in the field of bodybuilding as a bodybuilder and coach for so long and has proven himself so great in this field that a lot of athletes around the world follow his fitness advice and health tips.
he also has a youtube channel with lots of educational subjects which has been shared between a lot of fitness enthusiasts and since you have requested us to share useful podcasts, we decided to share this with you.
in this podcast, ben talks to luke leaman, which he describes as someone who has seen it all, has coached high level athletes as well as gen pop, has an endless thirst for information and is an absolute wealth of knowledge. he is The co-founder of Muscle Nerds.
In this podKast eduKation, ben pakulski and luke leaman get into fitness subjects such as:
programming and periodization, client assessment, the application of aerobic fitness, exercise selection and more.
(before we share the podcost, we should mention that this site is a non-commercial and non-beneficial website which its only goal is to find good sources and resources of information about health and fitness and share it with you but we do not promote any product or brand which may be advertised in the video)
hey everybody welcome to the podcast i’m sitting here talking to my buddy all the way across the world in australia luke lehman welcome back man nice to be here this is good this is weird last time we were sitting in a living room in melbourne yes and now we’re halfway across the world so man and without blowing smoke up your butt i’m very grateful to have you back because there’s very few people who i actually enjoy having conversations about muscle building with because most of the time it’s the same stuff and i like to tackle people who are pushing the paradigm and challenging things and thinking differently and as we just talked about prior to uh recording i said i was very interested in hearing your thoughts on periodization and programming because you know i’ve been building a course and doing a mentorship and you know i spent hours and hours and weeks and weeks developing my own thought problems and years obviously developing my own thought process but this seems like and i could be wrong it’s there this seems like there’s very few people that are doing it uh in their own way right they’re just kind of following what everyone else does and as i said modeling strength and power lifting and i’d love to explore how you approach periodization and i’d love to talk about your course and love to talk about how you’re mentoring coaches but kind of just getting into you started talking about percentage-based periodization yeah i mean everyone looks at the hypertrophy stuff as it’s very how do i want to say it it’s very myopic the way people look at it right and you know i think part of the problem is is a lot of the evidence-based community where if you don’t see it in a study it doesn’t exist and so everyone keeps repeating the same thing and everybody’s learning things from the same places so most of the time you’re gonna with traditional periodization you’re gonna see a percentage based model or a rep range based model but that rep range based model is going to be based on a percentage of one rep max so whatever your one rep max is then you can work down and there’s a lot of different rep max continuums the one i used i learned from charles poliquin and it’s very easy to memorize so that’s why that’s the one i teach and it’s it’s within point whatever number from what everybody else uses and so if we look at like traditional rep ranges you’re gonna go you know eight to twelve right eight to twelve that’s typical bodybuilder stuff so you look at those percentages being somewhere around seventy seven point five percent to around sixty seven point five percent right but and they think that that’s the only way to grow but it’s not right you’ve got progressive resistance obviously you can keep adding weight to the bar you’ve got mechanical tension you’ve got muscle damage you’ve got metabolic byproducts will stimulate growth so in that case you’re looking at inflammatory markers right the more inflammation i can i can create that i can recover from my muscles going to swell and grow so there’s a man there’s so many different things that people need to look at there’s some theories on on lactate producing growth as well you know there’s a lot of things you’re not going to see really in the literature yet because it just hasn’t been studied enough but people see it in empirical observation and some people have measured it but it’s just not in the literature you know then you’ve got the factor of food and supplements and you’ve got the the factor of what’s actually causing the growth is it monofibular growth or sarcoplasmic growth and then people fight about that and i think one of the arguments that people fight about is that you know you you can’t just have sarcoplasmic growth without having more fibular growth right but in my opinion you can have myofibrillar growth with no sarcoplasmic growth right yep you know so and then you’ve got various muscle fibers you’re looking at what are you really breaking down yeah there’s a lot of levels right and that’s what i say well the more you know about about programming the more complex it becomes the longer it takes i often tell people that like hey for me to write a six week program can often take six to eight hours and people like how is that possible because there’s so many things you know my my foundation of everything is exercise selection so i want to make sure that i’m selecting exercises that fit the right objective for the right person that are complementary to each other that are maybe even synergistic to each other uh and then so that’s step one i’m gonna have to make exercises work as far as like what do you mean where are you mechanically in your ability to execute and skill and then i’m gonna try to find things that are synergistic and then i start compounding variables on top of that of like how do i accumulate volume or how do i accumulate some other variable of exercise so if we’re speaking specifically about myofibrillar hypertrophy myofibular hypertrophy and you know we’re striving to accumulate protein we’re trying to accumulate tissue damage and ultimately tension what’s the first variable assuming assuming everything else is the same as far as exercise selection which is again we could spend an hour talking about that and i actually would like to but going just just with respect to myofibrillar hypertrophy do you have a particular favorite or a couple favorites that you’re like hey this is how i tend to progress this it seems to work well for people or is that so subjective based on who it is yeah it’s all it’s all contextual that’s what it is like am i dealing with an athlete who needs to grow or am i dealing with gen pop or am i dealing with a bodybuilder so like i’m of the firm belief that if you’re a bodybuilder you don’t really need to go below six reps there’s really no point you’re just you’re wasting time unless you’re doing you know very small blocks of that so i kind of like what chris aceto used to talk about where he would do he programmed 10 to 12 weeks of like hypertrophy and then you throw in two or three weeks of maximal strength work to create density i think that makes a lot of sense because increasing sympathetic tone is going to increase the density of the muscle or at least the way it looks because it’s going to give you residual uh hardness from jacking up the nervous system so just backing up one second then you’re by the sounds of it you’re a fan of blocks so if i’m doing hypertrophy like a 12-week block i’m not mixing in multiple stimuli within that block typically i’m like usually staying in this rep range so i’m just specifically targeting that that reference and that tissue quality yeah so i still like to use more traditional types of periodization but i i don’t get crazy with the extremes of where i’m taking them right so you know when you’re looking at various strength qualities like you know strength uh strength endurance hypertrophy function per should be maximal strength super maximal strength with with with that type of physique stuff i usually stay in a pretty narrow block and i keep it somewhere around functional life perch of gap perch me and maybe a little bit of strength endurance i would rather what i would rather do especially if they’re a high level if i want to build more volume and build more reps i’d rather do that as a giant set or a tri set and more like milo sarsap type things so that i can keep the reps kind of kind of smaller so they can have more weight on the bar so i might use a mechanical advantage triset or i might use i might use like a more of a gbc i’ll use gbc for muscle growth the way i see it is that you know traditionally that’s a fat loss protocol but if we’re looking at that with kind of some of the theories that are floating around about inflammation and lactate producing growth as well well if i use a gbc and use excessive amounts of food and put them in a surplus you could do something grow yeah so so if you could explain what gbc is german body compound i don’t know i don’t know listener knows what that is so it’s basically it’s it’s something that charles poliquin came up with it’s based on the concept of peripheral heart activation so they use peripheral heart activation as it was come the beginnings of circuit training so you would basically do a lower body exercise and upper body lower body exit and you basically move blood around the body to try to force more lactate production and so when charles looked at that he didn’t he thought it wasn’t really conceptually wasn’t great to use in the gym because circuit training wasn’t going to be as conducive for athletics training and fat loss as just focusing on big main exercises so like a typical gbc template traditionally would be a quad based movement then it would be a back movement and then you would move to a posterior chain movement in a pressing movement and then you would finish off with arms and calves and abs and all that stuff and so typically you would do let’s say you did a some type of squat maybe it was a cyclist squat or hills elevated squat something like that you would rest 60 seconds or less and you would move to pull up or a pull down or a row or whatever and you would repeat that four or five times you’d move on to your b sets and so by keeping the rest at a minimum and shuttling blood from the bottom to the top of the body you increase lactate production which there there is for a long time i couldn’t find literature to support what he was talking about but then i started finding some stuff last year during uh during the covet lockdown i had lots of time to read and uh there there’s some pretty okay literature showing uh the increase in growth hormone from that will accelerate fat loss now for me it’s always been about just increasing work capacity and just getting more density in the workouts and and basically raising the heart rate and raising the vo2 max which will elicit faster fat loss if you’re in a caloric deficit but from what i’ve seen using it with clients and a surplus very good for building muscle and losing body fat pretty much at the same time and it’s it from a time management perspective it’s pretty good because most of my clients only have two or three days to train so full body body’s really going to be the way to go yeah so as far as choosing exercises within that context is it often just looking for generic exercises that you think are going to be most effective like compound style or is it going to be relatively individualized yeah it’s going to be individualized you you’ve got to look at how the client built or they built for certain exercises some exercise is going to be great for building quads some aren’t like a back squat and a bench press for most people they’re not great bench press isn’t a great chest builder for people but it’s a great pressing movement a squat is a great squat pattern movement but it’s not going to be as good at muscle building as something like a hack squat or a leg press but it really depends on what i need to get out of the client most of the clients that i train here at our gym or gen pop so we we we choose more movement based stuff and more athletic based stuff than we do bodybuilder for the fact that i don’t have a lot of bodybuilding machines so our only thing we can do are front squats back squats overhead squats you know low bar squats box squats so it’s split squat so it’s everything’s about squatting and and traditional barbell stuff sure but if i’m training someone online and they’ve got access to a really nice kid at gym then we’re going to use a lot more machine based stuff than i would in person at my gym very cool so coming back to talking about staying within that hypertrophy range within a periodization block how long do you usually recommend somebody stay on a block or how long do you typically design it and then within let’s say we’re doing a six week block how do you build progress into the weeks so realistically it’s going to be dependent on are you still seeing results so if they they’re still seeing results i don’t change the program so the program week to week is exactly the same or changing okay it would have been so if it’s if it’s somebody who’s really high level like i train a girl from chicago uh krista carlson so she’s an absolute animal and her sometimes her goals will change like she’s more physique oriented but sometimes she wants to do some strength stuff so then like okay i’m gonna do strength stuff and i’ve trained her for about two years and i know that she can do maximal strength for about two weeks before the hits the fan and she loses her appetite she can’t sleep and all you know that type of thing so what i do is i write a six week program but i go two weeks of maximal strength and then i move her to a week of more metabolic or hypertrophy work with a little bit more aerobics and a little bit less volume she recovers and then i move her back to uh back to the strength work and then back to the uh what we call more of like a least mode week and that’s how i do d-loads i don’t do traditional d-loads where if somebody’s lifting really heavy we just cut some of the sets out because what i’ve noticed is there’s still that sympathetic neurological stimulus you’re just kind of turning it off so it would be like if you were burning your hand on something and you you started seeing your hand blister and you just turned the heat down a little bit well your hand’s still getting burned why don’t we put some ice on it instead and i just totally made that up so i hope that makes sense but the way i said is if you’re going to do a d-load just do a massive delay and switch the emphasis so if you’re doing something that’s highly neurological just move to something that’s more metabolic for a week let them recover let their metrics get better and then you can smash them again yeah so that’s interesting so you basically just the way i view it is you’re kind of taxing different systems right so the nervous system versus the muscular system versus maybe the energy production the mitochondria in the liver the ability to clear lactate so if someone if you know someone is neurologically fatigued because of the sympathetic overdrive you know switching to something that’s more muscular based or more energy based meaning gonna require the mitochondria to produce more energy or tax the liver or just going to be a different system does that sound kind of sound like it’s alignment yeah yeah that’s pretty much it so and everybody has their individual tolerance of things like i’m on the i’ve always been a strength athlete everything’s always about extreme fast heavy violent type of things well yeah texas high school football right but that’s just the way i’m built right i’ve got a jacked up uh nervous system massive add i’ve always been a big guy even not not when i’m training i i didn’t train for six years and i was still 110 kilos uh so it’s like that works for me i can i can go in and do twice a day five days a week of three two one wave loading and be totally fine but i can give that to someone else and it’ll crush them within a few days and they’ll be master logically over trained and they can’t handle it so i you yeah you’ve got a the whole the art of coaching and and what we should be doing is looking at that client saying okay when do your metrics change when do your symptoms increase okay now i need to figure out what’s causing the subjective m objective data to just get screwed up because now i know you’re overreaching so now i need to pull you out of overreaching so you can super compensate and get bigger and faster stronger so that segues beautifully into a question that i had for you is when someone comes into your world for the first time you’ve never worked with them what what are you looking at maybe subjectively or objectively to determine where this person is neurologically so an example being some people you know are tend to be very fast twitch very sympathetically oriented some people come tend to be slightly more slow twitch or more parasympathetically oriented or anywhere on that continuum obviously they may require different types of stimuli they may recover differently they may be able to subject themselves to more or less work accordingly so do you have some means of assessing people or is it just like what do you look like and what’s your athletic history yeah so kind of our our system that we’ve developed over the last uh six years is we we want to look at subjective metrics find out everything we can about how they feel and what they’re feeling and that’s really important to people you can’t just look at objective data i need to know like how they feel about themselves how they feel about on our questionnaire we ask things like how do you feel if someone comments negatively on your physique how do you feel when somebody says something positive how do you feel when you go off your nutritional plan how do you feel when you miss a workout so we asked very subjective questions about that and then other things like how are you pooping on a scale of one to ten how are you sleeping how’s your stress what do you do for a living how many hours do you work so we’re getting all this make them answer those questions once we what we do is once because we we maintain so much communication with our clients by six months into it we know everything about them so and we know the tone of their emails and how they’re talking to us on text or on video we can tell when they’re we start learning those personality swings and those mood swings and so we’ll we’ll get a good pattern of how long we can keep them on certain things and then we also get some objectives if they’ve got an orange we’ll get some of that information we use elite hrv and a heart rate strap to get hrv get morning heart rate afternoon heart rate we use body temperature we use blood glucose if they’ll take it but a lot we train probably 95 other coaches and other personal trainers so they will get that type of data like the blood glucose but most of your gem pop people aren’t going to do that unless they’re diabetic or pre-diabetic yeah so we get all that stuff and then we use that as a guide once we get a good pattern and a good trend we see okay this person’s resting heart rate is way too high their blood pressure is way too high their body temperature is way too low and then we determine what we’re going to give them as far as conditioning lifting nutrition supplementation and also lifestyle recommendations we get them pretty good and pretty level and get them really healthy first so we’re all about health before performance of course yeah we get them healthy first then we start beating the out of them and then we watch their symptoms so if their symptoms go you know crumble okay let’s take some of your metrics for four or five days if we see that those metrics have gone too far off the baseline we know they’re overreaching it’s time to go to a deload and usually we see about a week and then all of a sudden all their metrics get perfect again and then we can beast them out again so we go from we get them healthy and we go from beast mode then we go to least mode and then back to beast mode man i love that you talk i think that’s why we get along wellness in this space is because i think there’s not enough people going okay before you know everyone comes like i got 12 weeks let’s get in shape and i just don’t know i was like well go over yes like i really always say i always jokingly say any chimpanzee can get you in shape just by starving you and giving you more cardio that’s not the goal right first let’s make you healthy and uh that that’s there’s a lot of subjective and objective things there i’d like to talk about all the objective things that you’re looking at when someone comes in and says hey i want to make you healthy and so what are the objective variables we’re looking at there to to kind of the physiological prerequisites to to uh hypertrophy ultimately right how do we objectify health i mean we look at you got to look at things like we’ve got two different gut gut questionnaires we give people right and the reason we do it’s like a personality test sometimes they mark something zero on one but then they click a yes on the other so we we like to have things that kind of uh checks and balances against themselves if their guts wrecked their bloating gassy you know if they if they take a crap and it’s peeling paint off the walls you know if they have burning in their stomach we want to look at all that stuff first because you’re not going to grow if you’re not getting the food into your body and people people tend to think that just because you swallow food that it’s in your body but it’s not that elementary canal that runs from your mouth to your anus has a protective barrier and not everything you eat will get in your body so it’s really important from a growth perspective that if you want to be in a surplus eating 4 000 calories doesn’t mean you’re in a surplus if you’re just pooping it out or if your bacteria is eating it and you’re not actually getting it in you so we want to we want to clean up all that type of stuff and we also want to see where your stress is so if we look at a good hrv number if we look at blood pressure we can get a pretty good and heart rate resting heart rate we can get a pretty good idea of where is this person where is their autonomic tone are they too sympathetic because if they are that’s not great for building muscle because you don’t you’re stimulating muscle protein breakdown when you train but then you have to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and if you’re always catabolic because you’re in a fight-or-flight uh pattern you don’t your body never rests you don’t sleep well you don’t recover well you can’t train well your motivation’s not there and you’re in your compliance for meal prep isn’t gonna be great how much are you looking at like blood markers and urine markers and stool you ever look at those with clients or is that just kind of beyond the scope only only when there’s a pathological reason so if we have somebody with hashimoto’s if we have somebody with diabetes then i’ll take a look at that stuff and if it’s stuff that’s easy to fix that we can work with their doctor on then we’ll we’ll send some literature to the doctor and work with them on that stuff if it’s stuff that’s outside of my scope then i’ll refer them to a dietitian and make sure that we’re getting everything signed off of what we’re doing so that we don’t step out of our box and do something that’s going to be harmful to the client yeah i ask because so many coaches out there come to me and they go you know i’m helping my client with their blood and their urine their hormones and stuff i’m just like oh boy i mean you know people don’t understand the level of complexity right and this concept of a complex system where i change one thing potentially for the positive and i don’t acknowledge that there could be three other things that are happening on the back end that could be negative from that one positive shift that i made so i’m always curious how coaches especially smart ones approach this type of stuff so you see someone’s ilk through the roof right or or their whatever you know they’re sorry aisle six through the roof you know what are we is it just like hey go see your doc you have some inflammatory problems or are we going to go right after the gut well i mean if we’re looking at il-6 that’s what you said right all six yeah you’re looking at you know base overall systemic inflammation so i’m going to start looking at immune system i’m going to look at their training volume as well any time you train you’re increasing il-6 i’m going to look at crp if crp yeah you look at like if they if they haven’t been sick and crp is a bit elevated then i know there’s some systemic inflammation so we want to look at we might look at white blood cells you might look at some of the markers there to see if there might be an underlying gut issue as far as a pathogen or bacteria or something like a lot of people walk around subclinical gut infections they don’t even know they have especially on this side of the world because they all go to third world countries they go to all these places they get you know they come home with three or four tourists they don’t know they have and they can’t figure out why they feel horrible in texas we’d go to you know we’d go to cabo we go to cancun and the same thing would happen i actually had a guy uh years ago probably 16 17 years ago he was 200 you got 235 pounds pretty short got him down about 190 in a few months he decided to celebrate by going to mexico i said okay i need you to take take your hydrochloric acid and take your digestive enzymes take all this stuff be careful what you eat don’t drink the water make sure you’re not eating it you know don’t go to food like food stalls any god knows what unless you’re taking this stuff because you’re going to get a pathogen he comes back he starts putting on gobs of fat he’s putting on like two pounds a week and we couldn’t figure out what the problem was so i sent him to a doctor to get checked out and he had gotten something like seven to nine parasites that he picked up in mexico and he the doctor had to write him a a huge protocol to get rid of it and he got rid of it but it was crazy because everything that he was doing that got him lean in the first place nothing was working we kept pulling calories it wasn’t working add cardio had more training get more sleep and it was just the fact that he had a gut issue and that was increased making all of his uh his endocrinology haywire yeah i got that when i went to bali man i came back and for like eight weeks afterwards i was just a disaster i was like what is this it was an accident man you know one time i brushed my teeth i think i just rinsed off my toothbrush with the water i didn’t think about it yeah that was enough to to give me a parasite same thing happened to me zoe and i went and i was in a pool and i’m swimming in the pool and i accidentally swallowed some pool water and i’m thinking surely they put chemicals in the pool to kill everything nah man i was so sick it was coming out both ends yeah i got the point i was sleeping on the toilet for three days because every time i stood up i just had to sit back down so i took a pillow and i put it on the counter and i just slept in the toilet and uh i lost nine kilos in three days and i finally was i was well enough to go to the chemist to try to get something and uh you’ve written the little scooters in bali right yeah like the roads are bumpy so i’m i’m spending the whole time doing a kegel trying to keep myself from hitting my pants and i get to the first pharmacy and i’m like give me some activated charcoal we don’t have any what do you mean you don’t have any it’s bali you know we’re going to get volley belly so they gave me imodium didn’t do anything finally found a hippie fufu place with activated charcoal i took a couple of teaspoons stopped me up i didn’t poo anymore but then i didn’t for two weeks so it was like one or the other i looked amazing you know i don’t know how periodization turned into on a scooter but that’s nothing right well it’s important that is part of periodization because when you look at most people look at periodization as far as just the training aspect but you have to match the nutrition and the lifestyle and you have to you have to match the gut and the brain and the mitochondria and everything else with it or you’re not you’re not periodizing yeah how does the body adapt to the stimuli right and i often talk about this reality where if your training isn’t your biggest stress then you just can’t respond to the to this to the training right so you have to look at like what are the interventions to start gaining control of your psychological perception to the stresses of your life and uh if you’re someone who’s aiming to improve your physique and have a great you know great physique you have to create a life that ultimately allows training to be the greatest stressor and that’s in my eyes the only way you’re ever going to adapt because you make sure you get people who come in and they’ve got all these other things going on and they just don’t respond as well and you’re like well that that has to be an expectation that gets managed like you know i have clients who i work with like i’m not responding really well and but they’ve got this and this and this and this that are that are probably greater stresses physiologically to their body so no matter what straight training stress you’re subjecting them to their body just isn’t prioritizing responding to that and adapting that it’s prioritizing these other things and i think that’s a huge thing to think about when it comes to periodization that most people don’t consider is like what is the biggest stressor in your life right is it finance is it relationships is it whatever you know covet it could be a lot of things yeah i like that i like training should be the biggest stress in your life that’s a that’s actually a really good way of putting it like if you want results then you’re going to have to be stressed in the gym but you need to be relaxed everywhere else it’s not getting the most out of it yeah it’s two hours of sympathetic and 22 of parasympathetic and that’s a maybe like a ideal but i think that’s the way you got to contextualize it it’s like you’re not going to grow i mean bodybuilders grow because because they take excessive amounts of anabolics to it’s you know i call it the automat the the ultimate autonomic override right it’s just like no matter how much sympathetic arouse you’ve got you’re still going to grow so that’s why my body was able to grow and people always throw that back like oh bodybuilders grow and they’re always stressed yeah but they’re taking more gear than you know most people should ever look at in their life but if you don’t have that lever you have to look at well what is what are all these mechanisms and interventions i could use to to ultimately uh regulate the autonomic nervous system i think you know i think people don’t understand as well with the bodybuilders is they’re taking also things you’ve never even heard of like and you won’t hear for another 20 years unnecessarily most of the time yeah yeah i mean i live that world for a long time and like i would meet guys like i’m taking this and this and this i’m like what the is that and you know how they train right that’s always the funny thing it becomes it always seems like those guys and this could be an over generalization but those guys are the lower level bodybuilders it’s not usually the high level pros and the olympic guys it’s the guys who aren’t quite good enough or the high level nationals or you know the local bodybuilders who are taking exponentially more than everybody else and they think that you got to take this much to get to the high level but they don’t put any emphasis on training them but any emphasis on nutrition don’t put any emphasis on recovery modalities or someone at my level like i was ocd about that stuff man like i i was neurotic and about all these things i was absolutely obsessed with what’s my recovery look like what’s my nutrition look like what’s my training look like and then this other thing was just an augment and this i don’t say i was innocent i wasn’t an angel but it certainly wasn’t to the extent that i hear some of these other guys just just abusing substances yeah i never understood that because i mean i i trained for 13 or 14 years before i ever to took a steroid and the first thing i took was bravo t200 from mexico which was under dosed there you know you get eight mils and a 10 mil bottle you didn’t know how what you were taking it would cause massive bloat and then we were taking a reform it be and you know we’re going to mexico getting all this stuff and you know then we started getting into the point where you had really high quality stuff coming out of mexico they got smart they said oh these people want well they want steroids we give them really high quality stuff so they started doing that and i was never a big cycle person even when i was 270 pounds it was like you know i took the minimal effective dose to get as big as i could and then when that didn’t work i said well i’ll just try more stuff and all it did was make give me more more side effects yeah you know yeah you know so what are you looking at if i say luca i’m a i want to be a pro bodybuilder what are all the boxes that i need to check as being things that are essential to my success well the first thing you need to look at is do you have the genetics to be a pro bodybuilder you know just because and the thing is just being able to get big isn’t enough you have to have there’s a certain uh bone structure you need a certain joint structure there’s a certain tendon length you need or your muscles just aren’t going to look good so that’s the first thing you have to put that aside and say you know what i want to make the most of my physique like i want to be the best me i could possibly be yeah the first thing is take as little gear as you never we’re talking gear too you’re going to be a pro right well even before that let’s say before we get out okay before that number one make sure your training is sound make sure it makes sense and it’s conducive to what you want it’s specific to the adaptation you’re looking for making sure that you’re not doing too much too soon like people will they’ll get flex magazine and they’ll start doing you know some ridiculous workout written by ghost rider that the person that they say is doing it hasn’t even done it like don’t don’t hit yourself with a nuclear bomb when a bb gun is all you need at first save the big stuff the save the advanced stuff until you have a good foundational concept of basic just getting really good at basic stuff and taking your time and understanding that this is a process you’re not going to be you’re not even going to be a good amateur bodybuilder for four or five years you know they think that or longer they think that okay i’m just going to start training in three months i’m going to win my first show that’s not how it works that’s how instagram makes you think it works but that’s not how it works it was eight eight years of training for me before i ever even thought about stepping on stage and even then i thought it wasn’t ready that was the time back then right like when when i was a kid and we were getting in the bodybuilding people would train you know they would train for 10 15 years before even thinking about jumping on stage now people think they can do it in 10 weeks or 10 months and just gratification so before you go into other stuff i want to kind of decode this a little bit and just take this a little bit so you know start with what you’re saying like make sure you kind of get by with the minimum effectiveness what does that look like what are your kind of priorities and pillars for someone with just respect to training like what should i be looking at is there specific skills i should be good at is there a specific periodization that i should be looking to implement what you say is like foundation i think from a training perspective i’ve got a saying like if you’re looking at bodybuilding as you’re sculpting right you’re you’re doing you’re making a biological sculpture if you look at how someone makes a big statue they take a big piece of granite so they hit they hit a quarry with a piece of dynamite and they make a big rock so the first thing you should do is just put on raw size just take time building everything big and then what’s the next thing a sculptor does they take a big chisel and they start chiseling out pieces so now once you’ve built the base now you can start looking at where your weaknesses are and maybe you need to bring your arms up your legs up so you prioritize that and then once everything starts getting in the balance then you take smaller chisels and you start tapping away at stuff and as you tap away at stuff you start seeing where you have more weaknesses that you then have to rectify but i think that let’s just look at getting fat does that just like get as big as you possibly can no absolutely not that’s that’s the one thing i was about to say next you don’t the fatter you get uh and now here’s this is something i can’t prove yet but uh it makes sense to me right so if we look at the ways that we trigger anabolism part of its part of its insulin and and growth factors stimulating its receptor getting amino acids in the cells but the fatter you get the more inflammatory chemicals you’re going to create of course and those inflammatory chemicals are going to desensitize the insulin receptor and other growth receptors so you get to a point where the bulking gets too far and you’re too fat to get big without drugs and a lot of the guys to get big and they’re a little bit fatter than they need to be like some of this the the world’s strong men and some of the big bodybuilders people don’t understand they’re taking drugs to override that process but you know if you’re looking at it from a purely physiological perspective you don’t want to push yourself to the point where now you’re not growing correctly or the right tissue you’re getting big but it’s not the big you want so you want to make sure you don’t get too fat i think that you know once you stop can’t see the shadowing of your abs you probably need to do a mini cut right so i think once you start getting close to 20 percent and that’s being very conservative not being conservative being very liberal with it i think people probably shouldn’t get much above like probably 16 17 before they need to cut a few percent off and what’s crazy to me is it’s so easy to cut a few percent of body fat off you can do that two or three weeks especially if you’re coming off of a big bulk where you’re set per at a perfect time to lose weight there’s no reason to push into the you know 22 23 24 which a lot of guys do and i think they’re being very they’re in denial about how fat they are which is easy to do when you when you look really good in clothes you know and you look massive in closing look at people are commenting on how big you’re getting and then you don’t think to look at yourself and then one day you look in the mirror and you’re like oh i’ve taken this too far and you look down you can’t see your deck anymore like that’s you’ve gone too far true story so speaking of training do you have a an approach to how you might choose exercises for someone in that scenario meaning are there certain ones you think like hey you need to get really good at this this this and this if you want to build that yeah i think you know getting good at the basic stuff getting good at squat pattern getting good at pull patterns it’s gotten really trendy these days i don’t know about your view on this stuff people like uh you know you know front squats not great for bodybuilding back squats not break great for bodybuilding just use machines and all that but realistically to me it is it’s taking a very mobic viewpoint of the stuff and the thing is like some of the biggest growth stimulus stuff you can do are these big compound movements and as far as keeping the body if they’re done correctly the body has made them do those patterns i’ve got a very specific response to that and i think it’s maybe it’s the most logical i’ve ever uh come up with and so you you know people as well as i do and i can think of someone off hand that we both know but i won’t mention names who can let’s say someone can do a nine plate hack squat super strong like unbelievably strong crazy leg extension but they don’t squat let’s say they get a nine plate hack squat but they’re doing a two plate squat right what does their hip mobility look like what does the spinal cord really look like you know but without even having to just to see it you know someone who can if there’s that big of a differential between what i can hack squat and leg extension what i can squat by definition you know my hip mobility is and you know my spinal mobility we know that yeah so the way i view that is internal stability versus external stability right so external stability with hexagon and leg extension i have a machine or apparatus there to stabilize therefore the musculature of the hip pelvis and spine isn’t required to do work it’s just turned off so i’m getting really good at this extension pattern and i have nothing at the hip that’s able to stabilize so the quad obviously originates on the hip so if i want to generate stability at the origin end i need to have the muscles there working so if i have that much of a differential between a squat and a hex squat i know your mobility is going to be poor i know your spine is going to hurt i know your hips are going to hurt always like these people are constantly getting injured so what have you the necessity of squats lending and front squatting is uh whether or not irrespective of the fact that they’re a good or a bad exercise for muscle building to me doesn’t matter what matters is do i have the ability to generate a near equivalent internal stability with my musculature as i can external stability with my apparatus because as those things scale i’m going to have improved internal stability therefore i’m going to have in improved mobility because i have to have mobility to access the position or otherwise i can’t squat so when i see someone that’s got a big differential there i’m literally going to pull them off the leg extension and the hack squat and go you’re not allowed to do that anymore you got too much horsepower not enough steering wheel right so you know your alignment’s going to be broken if because we hit we hit the gas pedal something’s going to explode yeah so that’s kind of how i view the necessity of squatting and and front squatting again i think it’s a useful thing to do for for muscle building for some people i i would definitely argue that that hack squats and leg extensions are better uh as far as direct isolation to a muscle but it can’t be in isolation it has to be both of them growing in tandem yeah and the thing is like in the last five years i’ve gotten into the manual therapy side of things so i do fashion stretch therapy i do massage scratch neurostem all this stuff and the bodybuilders that are the most up or the guys who don’t do full range of motion and they never do squat pattern they never that it’s always on a machine or that’s just junky form so and you know i the the old like the you you were talking about this well in melbourne talking about like a muscle centric versus movement-centric movement and i’ve always done kind of the paul check thing of isolate before integrate and looking at that thing and you know it’s it’s just a matter of semantics we’re both saying the same exact thing and so i look at some of this stuff where people are talking about intention training and just origin to insertion and things like that that’s good but the problem is that that’s not how the body works so when you start looking at fascial lines and how things work in concert you’re going to be limited on how much weight you can use with that type of stuff which is going to eliminate limit some of the gross stimulus and you’re going to create dysfunction at some point that you’re going to have to fix later because let’s say you’re doing like a lat specific row if you’re doing that that’s great but if you do that too much and you don’t get all the other muscles around the scapula and the low back and the thoracic spine and the cervix spine if you don’t get those to move with it eventually that muscle is going to dominate something and throw something else off now you’re injured now you can’t train yeah or now you’re in pain and that increases sympathetic drive which limits your recovery so there’s a lot of other factors into it so i still love doing more athletic based movements for uh bodybuilders to keep their body tip top and moving like it’s supposed to but then we’ll supplement that with some of the more specific things like the leg extension or a lat specific pull down or whatever you’re going to use for that stuff one of the things that i like to use that i’ve been talking about for over half a decade that is now coming out in the research is that people don’t train positions in the lincoln state enough and that’s causing a lot of issues where things get tight and they destabilize and then other muscles have to take over and it’s subjective too right like just because you think of muscles lengthen doesn’t mean it is right so like any lat as an example if your serratus isn’t actively actively contracting you’re not lengthening your lats so there needs to be some awareness of what that actually is and i think people just go it feels length and that’s enough but it goes deeper than that right it goes a lot deeper that if you’re doing say like let’s say we’re doing a pull over and you’re allowing your ribs to flare you can’t keep them down or you can’t kill like you said they can’t get the serratus to to create that coupling between the ribs and the scapula and if you don’t if you don’t keep that stuff locked in then you’re getting fake length on the lat the lats not actually lengthening out you’re going to have to figure something else out or you need to kind of regress back and start working on those smaller muscles around the ribs and scapula that people don’t take care of especially bodybuilders like most of my bodybuilders are doing tons of serratus work we’re doing a lot of stretching i know stretching everyone hates stretching but if it works it works and so we’re doing a lot of stuff for either soft tissue on the subscap and the teres minor or teres major uh in concert with trying to strengthen the serratus anterior and get all that stuff pulled back into place so they eliminate shoulder pain yeah i think people don’t acknowledge what length and muscle is like even in a pack like just because you’re at the bottom of a fly it doesn’t mean you have a lengthen pack like if you’re not externally rotated at the shoulder you’re not actually lengthening your pack and when i started incorporating that stuff you know years ago pain just went away man i was like man my you know and the way i equate it in my brain is the greater the distance the more the body is dependent on on kind of proximal stability or generating proximal stability right so if i if the weight’s close to me the body is kind of less dependent or requiring less proximal stability of the joint so as i get it further away from me and i get that muscle flow length and it’s almost requiring this 360 degrees of stability right so rather than it’s like balancing joint forces so rather than one thing is going to have be hypertonic and trying to compensate for something else in the back that’s not working by taking it to that almost like vulnerable length of that muscle the agonist muscle now requiring the antagonist to activate and turn on and create more tension as a state as a means of stabilizing in order to generate torque in the opposite direction as soon as i started doing that i was just like man i feel like i feel like a newborn baby with my joints yeah i mean a lot of this stuff we were teaching at a very low level some of this stuff in the picp program the charles event like doing things like working the lower traps working trap three and four working on your rhomboids working on the serratus and then diagnosing what needs to happen so i think people don’t put enough emphasis in that so when i give bodybuilders lower trap raises or serratus wall slides or wall angels they think it’s stupid because like oh i look i look ridiculous i’m like yeah but look you’re shaking and you can’t even get in the right position so this is exactly what you need if you want to get out of pain and get the right muscles growing because if this stuff is not in balance you’re not actually working the muscle like you’re supposed to be working it and this is why your upper chest looks like yep dude so much so much wisdom there so coming back to you know that that kind of went down this path of you know what training might look like for people in the beginning and i guess to summarize for the listener it’s it’s like you know making sure you’re getting full range challenge ultimately like training training the length and range making sure you’re doing your basic compounds making sure you can ultimately access full range of motion and then stabilize full range of motion seems like you know you are talking the same language as far as what the prerequisites are for hypertrophy in the gym now if we look at kind of physiological prerequisites for our portrait outside of the gym or or like let’s say someone comes and says look i want to make the most of my body one of the things that you’re you’re kind of saying hey go pay attention to this so how much attention are you giving to recovery and what are using as your modalities how much are you paying attention to nutrition what else is playing into it how much is aerobic capacity important to you how much is you know body fat and hormones important to you yeah i think the that what you just said the aerobic stuff it’s funny because when we started uh when we started talking about doing more aerobic conditioning like industry was going one way i was going the other that’s because i mean charles was the reason that i went that way you know that like yeah but i think not to speak bad but i think that was his you know he was very influential and everybody followed i think too like people people misunderstood what he was saying right because they weren’t putting in the context he trained high-level olympic athletes and all almost all of them were shot put you know discus they were mainly strength stuff weight lifters and that type of thing and so when you look at now looking at towards bodybuilding and everybody’s going well we’re going to move away from you don’t need aerobics to get lean you’re right you don’t but it makes the process a hell of a lot easier yeah yeah and it makes muscle growth a lot easier too and it allows you to eat a lot more food and oxidized food at a better rate so yeah it was funny because i started i started making poliquin coaches do aerobics because when i left pelican group i had all these coaches that came to me and this is how i figured out all the metric stuff i i was looking at these guys eight pack abs with veins in their forearm veins in their elbows and fingers right they look fantastic their hair was falling out their thyroid was dysfunctional their testosterone was low they had all these issues they couldn’t sleep they were convinced they couldn’t have a carbohydrate without getting fat they had all these issues pre-diabetic it was it was nuts but they looked phenomenal and so i started taking all these metrics and looking into it i’d have guys with a resting heart rate of 85 to 95. their hrv would be like 48 their blood pressure would be 150 to 200 over a hundred as i started thinking about this what’s the one thing they’re not doing they’re not doing aerobic conditioning so i started making them do that the metrics all got better and they all started growing and that was the first thing they started telling me is my lifts are going up and i’ve put on like three kilos of size in the last six weeks i’m getting leaner and i’m getting leaner i don’t understand it and i i can eat five or six hundred more calories and i’m like aha so then like okay let’s create a system around this stuff so i think a lot of people don’t they just jump into this stuff they just want to put on size they don’t think about the fact that the healthier you are the better you’re going to recover the more muscle you’re going to put on the more strength you’re going to get faster i tend to use i tend to use the sound bite of i take an autonomic view of performance meaning what is the state of the autonomic nervous system and what can i do to intervene and make it ultimately more adaptable right and it sounds right it’s an over generalization but it’s a good perspective for people to start going what is the autonomic nervous system doing so if i’m in a state of high sympathetic arousal i’m not building muscles so i need some parasympathetic interventions and aerobic fitness ultimately is a very good lever not maybe the best lever but certainly a very important lever in parasympathetic stimuli it’s huge you’ve got you know you’ve got a parasympathetic stimulus there there is uh something i got from stuart mcgill there’s an analgesic effect from it how many bodybuilders do you know with low back issues they’re chronic lower back pain you know a lot but i think that’s you know poor diaphragm function from what i can see i don’t know if stu miguel talks about that but i find that is it is it a chicken or egg thing is the diaphragm dysfunctional because you’re overly stressed is the diaphragm dysfunctional because your psoas and your ql’s are jacked up and they’re eating so much food the stomach’s already full in the diaphragm can’t expand down into the cavity right that’s it so you’ve got i mean there’s a lot of different facts because breathing is a big deal right now everybody’s getting the breathing but it’s like okay guys hold on let’s not do the typical industry thing and go too far that direction there’s other factors of breathing as well you know you do the pri stuff you can think about that but you also start thinking about hip stability did the diaphragm did you lose hip stability because the diaphragm or did you lose the diaphragm because of the hip stability issues so you kind of have to take a multi-factorial approach but one of the things i got from stuart mcgill was doing more aerobic activity has an energy effect and helps eliminate lower back pain so i mean think about all the times you’ve been on dball or anadrol and you do two sets of squats and you have to sit down because your lower back’s so pumped up you can’t stand up straight so you know bodybuilders need to start thinking about that type of stuff too and understanding that aerobics are not the uh aerobics are not a negative thing and that walking yeah that’s the most aerobic thing you can do but that’s rate limiting you don’t have you don’t have time to walk four hours a day but you can do an hour of cardio a day and get kind of the same effect and also get more adaptations for the aerobic system but then you also have to know when do i need to pull that out because you don’t need to do endless amounts of cardio forever you just need to do them until you get the adaptation you’re looking for then you pull that stuff down and you don’t really need it unless you’re using it as a caloric funnel at this point or unless you see your metrics go haywire yeah and then your bike when you pull it out your body responds like a sponge right i always say like you’re kind of wringing out the sponge and you let it go and it’s just your body just responds and you get people putting on 10 and 12 pounds in three weeks so you know five six kilos in three weeks and they’re just and it’s all muscle and they’re they’re mind blown because your insulin sensitivity is optimized your android sensitivity is optimized your recovery is amazing you’re recovering so that’s again a point that important to acknowledge is aerobic fitness is the key predict or one of the key determining factors of your recovery between workouts but also between sets and you get a lot of bodybuilders who take five ten minutes between sets because they simply can’t recover and just doing a little bit of work a little bit aerobic work allows you to increase the density of the workouts without increasing the perceived exertion so therefore you’re getting more ultimate work in less time and i think that’s just such an ideal circumstance as well as then recovering more more rapidly between workouts which again get back in the gym faster why wouldn’t we be doing aerobic fitness almost you know three and four times a week i think it would be a good foundation for most people yeah i think one of the things that i’ve noticed is a lot of bodybuilders and in gen pop as well even worse they have a low vo2 max so you know we test people out at you know 35 vo2 max or less and we’ve noticed if we can get them into the 50s everything changes that tends to be like the magic so if we give them eight eight weeks like two two four week blocks of aerobics and we might be doing some steady state we might also be doing aerobic intervals tabatas reverse tabatas things like that if we can jump that up about 20 points everything changes their work capacity changes they start that basically just falls off them out of nowhere they can eat more and lose weight they can have a lot more carbohydrates without worrying about getting fat they sleep better their guts better and as long as we can maintain that we raise the vo2 max when that ceiling’s up lactate threshold can now move up as well which means they can train harder without so much burn you know we’ve had guys that we give them a 12 rep max on the bar and by set four their legs are on fire that’s not that’s pretty common but it’s not normal if i can raise your aerobic capacity now you can actually hit the 12 reps with more weight which means more growth and more recovery is that intervention you use in the beginning with many people because i got i mean i’ve had a lot of clients who come and you’re like i really hate the burn and i get such terrible burry it interferes in my workout so that’s exactly where my brain goes it’s like i need to improve your co2 tolerance and vo2 max yeah yeah so that’s basically not everybody but most everybody people tend to come to us when they’re really jacked up so they’ve been to six or seven other people and no one’s gonna fix it they come to us like okay we’re gonna do the opposite of what they were doing before and so we’ll do some testing we’ll do a 12-minute cardiac output test we’ll see where their resting heart rate is versus their maximal heart rate and if that’s that gap is too narrow then your vo2 max is going to be pretty so we’re going to prescribe you know good six to eight weeks of aerobic training then retest it because there’s no point just jumping into a specific physical routine if you can’t if you’re not healthy enough and generally you’re not prepared for it so we’ll go through pretty pretty heavy amount of aerobics initially and it’s different right most people put the aerobics at the end because they’re chasing calories well from my perspective i’m chasing adaptations so if i put it at the first it’s going to make every phase after that even better and they’re not going to have to do a lot of cardio to then you know to create a caloric deficit at that point because they’re they’re just burning through so much and then we do uh typically we’ll do what we call backloaded structural balance so this is where we do a lot of unilateral stuff most of the stuff is training in the length and ranges we’ll use stretching in the workout if if we’ve got a kind of a concept of if we look at things that are too tight we need to loosen those up and then we need to strengthen them in their new range of motion so let’s say somebody with massive anterior pelvic tilt and we find that the wrecked femme is pulling too much and the hamstrings are in too much length and it’s jamming the lower back and we start looking for things like that we might actually stretch the quad and then do a weighted mobility movement so it might be a couch stretch into a split squat or a lunge stretch into a bulgarian or something like that and then looking at the hamstring well it’s already in a state of stretch but so it’s going to be long and weak so we put it in a lengthen position and strengthen it there with an isometric position and then we put them in a fully shortened position so we might do a drone to leg curl or like a trx leg crawl or something like that in order to get the hamstring to start to shorten more so it pulls her hip back in the right position and release the lower back yeah and and i often will throw in just on top of that the just the kind of synergistic relationship between hamstring obviously pulling posterior and the abdominals pulling uh posterior as well as foreign so uh most of the time i find people can’t get into a posterior pelvic until one hamstrings are obviously weak at all lengths and typically the rectus as well because of that default anterior pelvic tilt and yeah he knows these things surgically sometimes even with just doing a glute bridge but pulling into the the posterior pelvic tilt seems to be a good way to teach people kind of positional control yeah and then thinking about when people do glute bridges unless they’re instructed correctly they just basically raise the hips they don’t think about okay you’ve got all these muscles that are creating a force couple so it’s not just about see i i tell people to think about their ass cheeks like two corkscrews and you want to try to screw them up but then you also want to try to pull your the asis towards the rips right we’ve got to learn how to get the lower rectus abdominus and the obliques to create posterior tilt it’s not just about the butt it’s about the butt’s relationship with everything else so what i’ll tell guys is just just try to take your dick to your chin right that’s what you’re trying to do and in order to do it you’re gonna have to pull with your abs and when i tell it’s more uh metaphorically imagine you had a penis and you’re trying to lift the towel with your penis because they’ve all been with somebody if they’re straight they’ve all been with a dude who’s gotten the boner put a towel or a hat on his dick and lifted it up and down and made a joke about it kind of a universal thing right yeah i think that i mean that’s that’s amazingly useful because i mean from my experience 75 of the population has an excessive anterior pelvic tilt and has no idea how to fix it and i think it’s it’s you know mindlessly going after hamstring contraction without acknowledging length and shortened positioning obviously going after glute contraction without acknowledging the additional function as well as hip extension in ultimately anterior pelvic tilt or posterior pelvic tilt and external rotation so incorporating all those functions into those exercises is what ultimately makes it a useful intervention right people just bang the head against long but i can’t or i’m tight or yeah don’t understand the intricacies of like the simple intricacies right and that’s i think what what we kind of where we kind of meet is like it’s so simple but nobody’s talking about or very few people are talking about it and it’s like it’s the what the what the trainer and coach needs to understand is they need to understand a very complex manner but then they need to be able to simplify the cues and what they give to the client because the client doesn’t need to know all the different muscles and their relationships in this stuff they don’t know what what’s that or do they care anymore no they can’t yeah they just need no application so the coaches need to know this much in order to teach the client this much right the problem is people don’t know this much they only know this much and that that creates a big issue because people don’t have a good a lot of trainers don’t have a good knowledge base of applied anatomy and what happens when a joint rotates and how that how you create that rotation how you create forced coupling between everything and what happens when you put a muscle in a different position muscles don’t act the same in every joint position they switch roles and they switch you know some things become prime movers then stabilizers or fixers and everything changes depending on where you’re at in the movement and that from exercise selection that makes a big difference huge difference tell me about your periodization course because it sounds like uh you’ve got a better handle on this stuff than most people uh or or maybe all people so i’d love to have you tell us tell the audience what your course is about and where they can find it yeah so we’ve got kind of the flagship course the program design so it’s basically you pay one time and you go through it as many times as you need to understand everything and it’s it’s massive it’s uh it’s got to be over 120 to 140 hours by now so basically you sign up you’re in it for life until you just decide not you don’t want to do it anymore and we go through stress module how that affects everything so we talk about autonomic tone we talk about how to measure that how to regulate that how to measure symptoms and objective measures how to assess those and then how to create protocols we talked about then we’ve got you know the standard standard basic periodization theory so linear alternating we go into conjugate concurrent types training things like that how to lay out a workout order of exercises how to think outside the box too like here’s this is traditionally what you’re going to be taught but if you figure that stretching between this exercise and this exercise will create a solution okay then we’re going to do that but you’re only going to know that through the assessment modules so there’s a couple of weeks of assessments where you go through manual muscle testing length tension looking at joint where somebody should be when the joint’s in a certain position how to assess that and how to interpret all that and then we go into conditioning as well how to lay that on and and long-term programs yeah that sounds awesome i i wrote uh so i did do a mentorship and i wrote a 63-page doc on programming then with separate 26 27 page docs i got this 90 page document on programming and i’m just kind of like what am i going to do with this like does anyone actually want to read 90 pages of programming but now it makes me feel better that you’ve done 140 hours yeah i mean we’ve done everything on video right everything’s on video and it took you know it’s taken us years to put this stuff together completely we just added a sales and marketing thing that we hired somebody else to put in for us and we’re not big on the sales market because it is important but it’s important after you know what the hell you’re doing sure yeah and that’s what my mentorship is man it’s like i’m going to teach you how to do stuff and sales and marketing once you’re a good coach you know people just come to you that’s it yeah that’s it like in in our in the mentorship i do so i’ve got a private mentorship thing as well that’s about 42 hours and the the biggest thing from that the people that have done all of our stuff they’ve done foundations program design the mentorship they easily triple or quadruple their income without i don’t teach them any i’ll teach themselves if they want i’m not good at marketing i can teach you sales but the main thing is you get such good results that you end up on a waiting list and then the first sales thing i’m going to tell you to do is double your prices and then they’re on a bigger waiting list you know and it’s it’s just because they’re getting better results it has nothing to do with them doing fancy facebook ads or any of that stuff yeah one of the one of the things i do in my mentorship is accountability and like i’m keeping you accountable to being a better version of yourself and i think that and of itself if you taught them nothing else would allow them to be better coaches because they’re putting you know the rubber meets the road man it’s like are you setting goals you’re achieving goals are you training hard yourself are you proving to yourself you’re capable and you start to understand like yeah i can do this stuff and when you believe that now you become inspiring and obviously then i’m building a skill set on top of that but i think the number one thing that i find a lot a lot of coaches are missing is they don’t do it themselves like so there’s this this interesting uh dichotomy that exists in our community i think we briefly alluded to this is like you have the theory people over here and you have the practice people over here and it doesn’t seem to be enough of this right there’s a very small group of people who are doing theory and practice and those are the ones that put themselves apart and when you when you apply what you are learning and you practice what you preach you become a valuable asset if you’re just someone who reads books you’re you’re an often having time right like you have this great theoretical knowledge but you just have the ego because you think you know what you’re talking about but you don’t have the fortitude to apply it and that that’s just so common in what we do and that that’s why there’s this separation in the science community quote unquote the data driven or the you know whatever the hell they call themselves now as compared to the people in practice and i think you know there needs to be more of the intermingling where the rubber meets the road yeah yeah i think like one of my mentors dr laurent banik i think he says it best he’s uh he’s a phd and he works with athletes and he says look i’m not evidence-based i’m evidence-informed so if they see this stuff’s working they’re going to use it and then they’ll test it in the field because you know often what you see in a study that’s done in a lab it’s not going to correlate really well with what actually happens when you’re in the field doing the thing you’re doing and and because one right it’s always just men like contextually who is who is this person what’s their state of the nervous system what’s the state of their their endocrine system what’s the state of their brain yeah muscle lengths mechanics so many considerations that uh you know you’re looking at man so dude it’s been an absolute pleasure it always is and i’m so grateful for the the fact that you’re teaching people and making this fitness industry a better place for coaches to ultimately apply your knowledge and then make it their own so luke thanks man i appreciate it oh man you know what realistically it’s not really my knowledge right it’s everybody i’ve learned from right now but you’re totally man but like all of us it’s a unique synthesis of everyone else’s information uh applied to a very specific context right because like no one has your experience no one has your brain so you’re taking all of this information in the ethos and going boom i’m going to put this into this specific application so ultimately it is yours right i think it should be give credit where credit is due yes we stand on the shoulders of giants but nobody has your unique perspective and ability to apply it what do you do i think man thank you uh i think you know realistically the the biggest thing i learned from charles uh poliquin was how to systemize other things right that’s that’s what he was brilliant at and saying okay why does this work what does this work what is this okay how do i sequence these in the right thing and i think that’s you know all part of critical thinking and figuring out you know systems and methods of what to do is taking other people’s stuff and then putting into something that makes some sense and clarifies things and filling in gaps and things and i think when we started muscle nerves i wanted to do that for the general population first before we i went back into athletic training and things is like no one was teaching people how to train normal people so i said okay how do i take everything i’ve learned from all of these high level strength coaches nutritionist doctors and how do i water down and synthesize it for like mary muffin top from next door and so that’s kind of what we what we’ve done you know yeah and so the reason i i say that man is because most people are taking something poliquin said in its application for strength training or power lifting or athletic training and applying it to hypertrophy or applying it to to gen pop and it doesn’t apply you know there has to be some thought process and some context applied so your ability to think differently and ultimately take content concepts that work in certain contexts and go well what about that would make it work over here what about that would it make it not work over here and how do i as you say take all these pieces and make them fit in this specific context that’s the wisdom man that’s the brilliance and that’s what takes thought rather than just rote memorization right and application and seeing where the rubber meets the road and ultimately how it all fits yeah i think that’s uh that’s basically what we teach in all of our courses we teach this is how you need to be thinking like stop thinking like everyone else you need to think about this like sit there and stare at the wall until a thought comes into your head and then write it down and then see where it fits and then test it that’s the only way you’re gonna know right yeah yeah and that’s the first thing i say when people come into my classes as they forget everything you think you know my objective is to teach you how to think like don’t think you know anything just think right and if you can think you’ll start to have new solutions and new processes and and there may or may not be accurate but the more times you apply them the deeper your thoughts will go and rather than being wrote you can you can just uh think i think that’s right yeah man yeah that’s like it’s funny because people are scared to try things that other people say don’t work and it’s like look if something makes sense try it i had a guy the other day shoulder issue right and it just came out of nowhere and i was looking at the shoulder we were looking at you know folks on significant things and i went hold on a second didn’t you roll your left ankle uh two weeks ago he goes yeah and i said now your right shoulder’s hurting good yeah okay we did some gluten hip work and then he tested the shoulder on all the pain went away okay it started it started on that spiral line from your rolled ankle probably affected your glute now it’s affecting your shoulder i didn’t know it was going to work and when it worked i started yelling and i was jumping up and down there was a couple of physiotherapists in the gym that we trained and they were like what just happened i’m like i didn’t know it was going to work it worked badass let’s write that down absolutely man i’m a fan i appreciate your friendship and where can everyone find more from luke lehman and muscle nerds uh uh usual stuff facebook you know muscle nerds uh muscle nerds underscore health at instagram uh website musclenerds.net we’ve also got our new gem if you want to see that it’s uh iopc gym uh iopcgm.com.edu tell me what that stands for again the institute of physical culture i like it yeah very cool man uh i’d love to get out there hopefully i’ll get out there and see you soon when the world gets back to some semblance of travel crazy craziness now all right thanks very much for your time luke thanks for having me on again and that’s a wrap ladies and gents thank you so much for tuning in to the muscle intelligence podcast i hope you love this podcast as much as i did absolutely love sitting down to chat with luke lehman he always brings so much value and insight from the years and years of experience he has both as a teacher and a clinician putting it into practice in the field and getting real-time results with people and this is the stuff that matters that the bridge between theory and practice and a lot of people live on one side of the fence or the other but very few people are bridging the gap which is where we live here in muscle intelligence we live in that bridge and thank you so much to luke lehman thank you for being here i do not take your time lightly i am so grateful that you’re here and thank you to buy optimizers for taking care of the podcast and taking care of you and hooking you up with some of the best products on the planet to optimize your health health guys if you don’t think about it is an absolute necessity and a prerequisite to growth or progress or anything in order for the body to respond from that hard training you’re doing your body needs to adapt your body needs to have the prerequisites it needs to adapt an adaptation by its nature requires a quick adaptation of the nervous system which requires sleep requires fats it requires optimized digestion decrease inflammation this whole list of things that people often times the performance space aren’t looking at until you start to get to the really high levels and i’m hoping to bring the information from the really high levels to the masses and that’s why we are here i hope you love the podcast but don’t forget to head over to buy optimizers.com use the code muscle10 to get hooked up with all the products and leave us a review and don’t forget to subscribe because the awesometimes podcast is coming at you in 2021 with bigger better better information guests and so many great messages to support your greatest life have a great day thank you so much for tuning into muscle intelligence if you enjoyed today’s episode please be sure to share it with at least one person you know make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss an episode this podcast is for information purposes only statements and views on this podcast are not medical advice this podcast including ben polsky and the producers disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests this podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility this podcast may contain paid endorsements or advertisements for products or services individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest and products or services referred to here in if you think you have a medical problem consult a licensed physician