determine what you want. Okay, where am I at? That is a, what do I want to be that is see now I gotta fill in all the letters in between and I need to schedule that on what is most important. So we've got big rocks, small rocks, what's, what can I do right now? That's going to give me the biggest return on my investment. Okay. Is that rock too big to get done right now? If it is moved to a smaller rock and eliminate those rocks, a lot of it's like, it's like debt management. If you find yourself into $100,000 worth of debt, how do you get out? Well, I have to pay all of their minimums and have to focus as much money as I can into getting something out of the way. Once I get that out the way I can take all that money and go to the next rock and the next rock. The same thing can be done with your lifestyle, exercise and your nutrition that. But the whole point, I mean, the first thing you have to have the discipline to sit down and write it out and determine what it is you want and and more importantly to is why do you want this and how is it going to benefit you? And are you motivated enough to go where you want to go? Or maybe we drop our expectations of what we feel about ourselves and we wait until we get to that level and then we raise the expectation more.

Hey guys, welcome to today's episode of the live transform podcast. I'm your host, Sean Cobra and joining me today is an absolute heavyweight in the fitness industry luke. Lehman, Welcome to the podcast mate. Thanks for having me man, I'm really excited to talk to you today because um, whether you know it or not, you've actually helped shape my coaching philosophy and my training philosophy um, after I did your muscle nerves, foundations course a couple of years ago. Um, and I'm really excited to, you know, discuss all of the, um, the tools and, and kind of pathways that you've taken to become the person, you are, become the trainer that you are today. So, um, just for my listeners, can you give them a little bit of a background story to who you are, how long you've been in the industry, how you got into the industry and what you're doing now? Yeah man, I mean we gotta go way back, right. So I started training or when I was about eight years old. So growing up in texas, you know, we start, especially when we're in the country, like I'm out in the middle of nowhere in my hometown is, it's a bunch of what you would expect on a movie, a bunch of redneck hicks cowboys.

We, yeah, we all did the, you know, roping and riding and building fence and all that shit and then, and we just played football. So you didn't have a lot to do there is either like fighting or fucking or you know football, that's the three of texas. Um, And so I, I started out, you know, not not really having access to a lot of information because this is way, I mean obviously this is back in the 80s, we didn't have, we didn't have the internet back then and so it's just like finding books and magazines and things. And then I was very lucky that when I went into into school, most of our coaches were ex collegiate football players, ex powerlifters, bodybuilders. So they taught us how to do things right, which you normally don't see in America at the high school level or at the junior high level, most of them is that they're ugly cleans, you can see any of these fell videos where guys doing really horrible power cleans and squats and terrible stuff but you know did that power lifted through high school and um during this time, so we got the internet when I was about 14 and in the magazines, I've seen Charles pollock win paul check Charles staley.

All these all these like heavyweight guys, like the legends that we all look at now and Charles really resonated me the most because the stuff made sense. He took all the systems that everybody had done, he was a fan of physical culture and so as I am as well, physical culture history. So when I did his stuff was like, man, this shit works, this works for me and it got me big and it got me strong and it helped me through football and When I when I left for college I I kind of got out of parenting one in the body building for a while. They went back in the power of the thing then went in the body building. They want a strong man they went back in the body building and you know just kind of got tired of all of that stuff and at some point around 2007 I saved up enough money. I'd never really left Texas on my own ever right And so I'm like 27 I help on a plane and I fly to Chicago to meet Charles Peloquin and to do his course and I was instantly hooked. I love the culture, I love what he was saying, I loved everything about it. So then I did my level two I did bio sig I did a lot of special consideration courses like how to train swat team, how to train mm A how to train the corporate executives and at one point he asked me if I would come on and be an assistant.

So for a long time I did a lot of the bios take courses throughout north America. So in Canada and America and eventually eventually when he was leaving the company I took over kind of took it over his duties there as far as teaching. So I was one of the head lectures for bio sick. I was ahead lecturer for the P. I. C. P. Program developing courses doing research development giving the courses and that type of thing. And then in about 2015 I was just kind of Fed up with the company when you when you work part time for a company and you're not there all the time and you don't see all the things that happened at the corporate office. You have a different viewpoint when you when you're balls deep into it and then you see how everything really is and you pulled a kind of pull back the curtain it didn't really align with my ethics or morals. And so at one point it was like okay we need to part ways and that's when I started muscle nerves and then it just it just fucking took off. I really enjoyed the muscle Nerds Foundation of course I think it was about two years ago that I met you in Singapore. Um and that really had an impact on my knowledge and understanding of the autonomic nervous system and getting into basic health markers and things like that.

And I've got about 80 episodes of this podcast out now. The first episode is all about the introduction who I am, you know why on what I've put out a podcast, my background knowledge experience etcetera etcetera. But then the second episode is all about those basic health markers. Um and that's one of the biggest things that I took away from your muscle nerds course man. And that's kind of led me down that path of you know, understanding stress management and um you know, the importance of sleep and hydration, nutrition etcetera etcetera. So um we're going to dive into that in a moment because I want you to um kind of touch on all of the different elements that make up health and performance before I go into that though, which kind of segues into that question is I'm an ambassador for Swiss Eight which is a proactive mental health program designed to allow people to structure in and schedule eight important pillars of health and wellness um to allow themselves to be better at life. And those pillars are sleep, nutrition, discipline, time management, fitness, personal growth, mindfulness and minimalism for you are one of those pillars more important than any others and if so why?

And have they changed throughout the years of your life so close to your mike, I feel like we have the same mike, I feel like I should be like talking into it like this looks good. Um Yeah, that was just kind of me stalling in order to figure out was going to say here's the thing like for me they're all equally as important. Um I look at everything, everything that I look at that has multiple qualities. I try to look at it as a radar craft and I say ok in the middle of my goal And I have all of these elements on the outside and I need to be focusing on all of them. But sometimes we need to focus on more than others because we have to bring those points to the middle so they all align. But I think the one point out of, out of all of those, that's probably the most important is the discipline one because it's, it's good to say we need more sleep, we need to eat right, we need to exercise. You know, we need the lifestyle stuff. But if you don't create the habits and take those habits tournament the rituals and you don't have the discipline to do it. Then when things get tough you're going to fall apart.

So you have to create some type of structure discipline thing. Um Yeah, I mean you basically have to treat it like the military, you get up at a certain time, you go to bed at a certain time, you get up and you make your bed, you get up and you make your bed and you take a shit, You get up to make bed take a shit and you brush your teeth and then you have breakfast. That's probably the one thing that most people are missing and the reason they can't get to their goals is they have something, they like the idea of getting fit. They like the idea of getting dick skin lean. They like to do of being being able to run really fast five K and have a heavy squat, but they don't put together a plan and if they do put together a plan, they don't act on it. And that's the difference between people who actually get there and people who don't mm I love that answer man. Um your your voice is obviously a lot louder than mine and you boom a little bit more so you've got a little bit more space on the mic there. You're good bro. Um make great answer for people listening that are like, all right, cool, it makes a really good point. I need to create a little bit more discipline in my life.

What some recommendations that you can give to them actually takeaways. Yeah, I mean look, the first thing you have to do is you gotta push it on paper if you don't have a plan and you don't schedule things and have a diary, it's not gonna happen because things are going to pop up, that's going to throw things out of whack and you need to be able to get back into a certain rhythm. So building some type of rhythm structure where like I said, you get up, go to bed at the same time, you have lunch at the same time. Even if you have to put a lot of people that skip mills, they'll try to make up the mills, they will skip exercise. My God, we've all got smartphones just put put, if you have to put 15 different alarms on your phone to make sure you drink water and eat enough food do that. Um, you know, it's all about time management. If you don't have time management, you are going to get stuck when a spanner gets thrown into the will. So put it determine what you want. Okay, where am I at? That is a what I want to be. That is easy now. I gotta fill in all the letters in between and I need to schedule that on what is most important. So we've got big rocks, small rocks, what's, what can I do right now?

That's going to give me the biggest return on my investment. Okay, is that rock too big to get done right now? If it is moved to a smaller rock and eliminate those rocks, a lot of it's like, it's like debt management. If you find yourself into $100,000 worth of debt, how do you get out? Well, I have to pay all the bare minimums and have to focus as much money as I can into getting something out of the way. Once I get out of the way, I can take all that money and go to the next rock and the next rock, the same thing can be done with your lifestyle exercise and your nutrition that. But the whole point, I mean, the first thing, you have to have the discipline to sit down and write it out and determine what it is you want and, and more importantly to is why do you want this? And how is it going to benefit you? And are you motivated enough to go where you want to go? Or maybe we drop our expectations of what we feel about ourselves and we wait until we get to that level and then we raise the expectation more because a lot of people, they come to train with us, you know, like, okay, what do you want? I want to look like this, you know, instagram person and I'm like, okay, you're 38% body fat, you don't have the same structure, You definitely don't have the same discipline.

How fast do you want this? I think this can be done in 12 weeks honey, this is going to take you a few years. Like that person eats, sleeps poops and does drugs like, are you willing to do that? No, Okay, now we got to take it one thing at a time and make that plan and make sure you start, how do I help you do the plan without it being too inconvenient, right? Yeah, another great answer. Um, and people that have been listening to the podcast for a long time will just be like, okay, I understand where coaches coaching philosophies come from man because I basically say the same thing may and it's like, you know, you've gotta, you always say, you always say prep the prep, that's something a big one that I took away from you is like prep the prep, you've got to get people to the fucking starting line first and that means you need to manage people's health, that means that they need to be sleeping right, That means they need to be managing all these other physiological processes and having the body out homeostasis before we can then start pushing them and something you talk about is least mode, Beast mode, Can you talk about that for a moment? Yeah, so this kind of came up as a joke between me and one of my best mates and what happened was he was sending me instagram trainers or instagram models or whatever that we're showing like their hashtag beast mode workouts and we're looking at the workouts going, that is, that's all, that's what you're calling beast, but really you're just doing crazy shit and it's not even hard and then my friend goes it's more like hashtag least mode.

And I went uh huh, that's pretty good. So I wrote that down and then when we started muscle nerds and we started thinking about, you know why why do a lot of people fail? Like getting where they want to be well they're doing too much too soon when they don't have the physiology to actually do that long term. So we need to create, you look at like yin and yang. We need to create a yen for the yang. So the beast mode is the yang and the least motors the end. If you constantly have too much yang, you burn the oil out yang is fire. If I need to replace the oil, I need the yen. So sometimes we need to think, well this training and dieting or straining in a surplus may not be the answer. The answer might be more recovery, more cardiovascular conditioning, get in shape, get mobile, get flexible, get out of pain, get your, your structural, your structure back into balance. Then when you're feeling good and you've got your home that you've got your homeostasis and that is lifted to a point where now you can actually begin beating the shit in beating yourself into the ground, right? And that's the whole point is when you, if you want to make a big jump in fitness or a big jump in strength or a big jump in size or a big drop in fat, you have to push the body in a state of overreaching.

Um So if you're already overreached and then you jump into the training, you don't have any platform to recover from. So it's better to get your recovery up, get your parasympathetic system up, get it level with the sympathetic system, then purposely crush one and raise the other until you start getting symptomatic that the shit is hitting the fan and then you go back to the least mod stuff, right? But I think something I just thought about um you know, a lot of people, if you were gonna go run, you're gonna go run a marathon, right? You you would get in the car and you would drive to the place where you started, you wouldn't run to the place where you're starting the marathon. That would be stupid. But that's what people do. They sprint to go to the marathon. That makes absolutely no sense. May I fucking love that analogy, I'm going to I'm going to steal that and credit you of course, but we're going to dive into the autonomic nervous system in a little bit more detail in a moment, man, because that's um that's brilliant. I talk about that a lot and again, I think that came back down to being educated from you and realizing that you can't just fucking smash yourself into the ground and expect results.

You need to balance that autonomic nervous system which will dive into in a moment. But um what we've just spoken about is that kind of what led you down the path of starting muscle nerds and has created the philosophy behind what's driving muscle nerds. Yeah, partly. I think part of it was when I was when I was learning from Charles and when I was teaching at publican group, I I realized that we were teaching personal trainers how to train olympic level athletes. So the protocols, we use the dieting, the supplementation, the lifting, all that stuff had to do with I need to take somebody from year 02 year forward to get ready for the olympics or world or some type of national event. And so I started asking people how many people do you actually, how many athletes you actually train like high level athletes And no one will raise their hand, I might get one or two people and they may train one guy may in the class of 60, may train all athletes. One other dude trains to athletes. He thinks he's an athletic trainer, like you're not your person, your your personal trainer, you just happen to have a couple of athletes.

And so I realized after using it with the general population, Okay, this these are all great methods But using them in a gold's gym with Mary Muffin top and Joe Dingleberry. It's not the right thing for them. Like if you're dealing with the people who have disposable income which are 35 and up career professionals, A lot of this stuff is way too hard a way too intense and it needs to be modified and dial back if your demographic, as athletes your training, 21 year olds. you can do this stuff but I found it wasn't as effective without modification, heavy modification. And so when I left publican group, I said to my wife, we were dead broke, we don't have a fucking pot to piss in. Uh she had, I met her in Sydney and 2.5 months later she flew to America, both of her job, sold her car, flew to America, we went around America for three months and now I don't have a job and like, okay, do we go to texas or do we go to Australia? Do we go to new Zealand? And we're like, well we'll go to Australia New Zealand because I have an apartment there, we can say they're like, okay, cool.

And uh we said, I said, well what are we going to do? Like I no education and no training, I don't have any other fucking skills like so we said, well let's start an education company and let's do it real, let's not make an edgy, let's not make a supplement company, hint, hint that's masquerading as an education company. Let's make an actual education can be with no financial ties to any supplement company, any gym equipment, just we just sell education and tell people how to do things, right? And I said, okay, well where we've got to find a hole to fill in the industry and you know, I kind of go on the premise that if you want to be successful you need to solve a problem that people have that no one else is solving right now. And I said, well no one's teaching how to train normal people if you do your, your certifications gets a strengthened edition certification or it's a sports medicine certification or whatever. No one's just being realistic about training normal people, your normal next door neighbors, the people who need it the most super overweight, super out of shape, whatever.

So we're just gonna, we're gonna specialize in training general population and teaching coaches how to do this correctly. So, um, when I announced that I left publican group, we had hundreds of people texted me and said, hey, can we do, can you do a workshop here workshop? They're kind of train with you. I always wanted to work with you, but I didn't want to work Republican group. And I went, yeah, that's cool. And so we actually paid our way back to Australia By a guy in Kuwait said, Hey, can you come out and train my 30 trainers? Yes. A guy in Dubai said, Hey, on your way to Kuwait, can you stop by and do a seminar? Yes, that's how we actually got back to Australia and then we did a seminar there, a seminar in New Zealand and then it just, it was just one after another one after that and then just got out of control really fast. But yeah, so you know, that's the reader's digest version. Yeah, I saw where I would have failed as a coach and where other people failed and where I can help them not make those mistakes and and actually get them better results in a safe and healthy manner. I love that story and I think that's uh that's testament to, you know, speaks volumes about why you're, where you're at right now and how successful muscle nerves has been because a lot of people and I was the same when I first started, you know, I did, my first certifications was I want to train athletes And most trainers, like I want to train professional athletes and 1% of people actually make it there where they're training professional athletes, but going through that journey, you have a lot of general population clients that you're dealing with, and every single person that walks into the gym is a jigsaw puzzle.

Everyone's got different stresses, everyone's got different lifestyles, everyone's got different traumas that they're carrying from fucking childhood and shit like that. So, you know, every single person is a jigsaw puzzle and um your methodology has really opened my eyes to. I was kind of already doing some of that stuff, but without kind of knowing the mechanisms behind it. Um just by looking at how people moved and how they walked into the gym, what their body language was, like, how they were speaking, etcetera, etcetera. So I did my NLP um courses and things like that when I was younger. Um but yeah, your course really put a lot of that stuff together for me, um and I think it's a really powerful tool for trainers and you know, it's one of those courses that I would recommend to really new trainers that are getting into the space to manage people's fucking health first before they then start putting the foot on the accelerator and trying to get them to their end state because a healthy organism is an adaptable organism and we need to be in a healthy position first before we can then start going into beast mode, like you say, um can you give your explanation of the autonomic nervous system for people listening at home?

Because I've spoken about it numerous times on the podcast, are probably sick of hearing me speak about it. Um I'd like to hear your take on it and how you would explain that to people. Absolutely, Absolutely. And just to come kind of on the back end of what you just said, I when I wrote the foundations, of course I I said, okay, I'm going to write the course that I wish I had 20 years ago when I started training people. So what would have been the most valuable thing? And how do we say, Okay, as a trainer, you shouldn't be like, I know some trainers want to read labs and biochemistry panels and all this stuff, it's not your job and most of us don't have the training for it. How do I find, okay, let's have a symptom profile and let's take those symptoms and let's match them up with objective data to form a blueprint and fit those jigsaw pieces together so that we can make the right protocol. That's going to work for that person and that at that moment at that time. And then how do I progress them through proper period ization to improve their health and then then improve the performance. Now when we look at the autonomic nervous system, there's the two main branches that people think about and and just to define the autonomic nervous system.

This is basically all the stuff that keeps you alive that's pretty much automated. Now we do have some control over this training and nutrition can control we have supplementation that can control these things, breathing techniques, more sleep. Leslie this can move things and positive negative manners. But if you didn't have the economic nervous system you wouldn't remember, you have to constantly remember to breathe, right? And there's there's things that control stress response, relaxation response and all that. So when you look at the traditional two branches you've got sympathetic and parasympathetic. Now we are designed to be mainly in the parasympathetic pathway. The majority of the time. The way I look at a lot of stuff and a lot of people give me flak about this. But I look at things from an evolutionary perspective if you took our environment away and put us back in loincloths and spears. The only reason you would have a sympathetic system is in case a lion jumped out at you and you have to either run or you had a fight. That's realistically all it is. So are Are those pathways aren't really different than they were, say 10,000 years ago.

What's different is our environment? And so the environment is causing this sympathetic system, which is a very acute system. It's supposed to go up and immediately go down. Now it's revved up all the time. So it would be like getting in your car shut slamming in the first gear and then trying to go, you know, 100 and 20 K on the motorway, your engine would go Rambo movie. But that's exactly what people are doing with their own physiology, right? Um So what we need to do is make sure that we have a good parasympathetic reserve and where most of the time in that pathway, it's better for everything. It's better for fat burning, it's better for relaxation. It's better for long term health. Um But we need to be able to flip that switch and we still need to stimulate the sympathetic drive at some point. So that's what training is supposed to be. But if you're massively sympathetic all the time and you go and train and drive that harder, You're just making it worse when you try to go back to rest and you never actually really recover properly. It's gonna impair your sleep, it's gonna impair your hormones going to pair your guts, going to pair your brain, your immune system, everything, it just makes everything crash and there's a third part of that that sometimes you'll see associated with that sometimes not, which is the enteric system which is the entire nervous system is your gut.

So Used to when I was a publican group, the solution for a gut issue was an elimination diet and then throw 500 fucking pills and potions at it. I quickly found out after I left that you know what the easiest way I still believe in elimination diets. I never run any allergy testing, food intolerance panels, any of that. I just do an elimination test. Um we remove things that are bothering your gut, we replace it with something else for 6 to 8 weeks. Then we add back stuff slowly but and that works really well to calm things down. But the main thing is we have to get control of the brain's response to things. So the more hyped up you are, the more sympathetic you are, the more likely you are to have gut issues, bloating, diarrhea, Belgian gas, gas that kills the paint off the wall, you know all that stuff, pain in your stomach. If you can get everything calmed down, most of your gut issues will just disappear. But that's not what people want to hear. It's like, hey maybe you shouldn't work 80 hours a week. Hey, maybe you should sleep more than four hours a night, Maybe you shouldn't go to the gym twice a day for two hours.

You know, maybe you should not eat 1200 calories, may try 2400 calories. Maybe you should take a multivitamin, That stuff's too hard. It's a lot easier for somebody to go to Australian sports nutrition and ask some 18 year old about a gut and they hand you some box, uh bullshit that just makes you shit and piss yourself all day and it doesn't work right. It's absolutely free to heal most gut problems by getting your brain and your autonomic nervous system balance right now, last thing I'll say on this, don't think about this as a teeter totter because it's not think about is two elevators and they can go up or they can go down. So if your parasympathetic system is down here and you're sympathetic drivers up here, What we need to do is remove things that keep the sympathetic system up. So maybe reduce your training a little bit or change your training focus from neural. Maybe more metabolic stuff. Don't do. Hit training, do more aerobic style stuff only go to lowest effective dose and prioritize sleep and having a hobby and spending time with your family and whatever else that makes you happy in life and gives you self fulfillment, journaling reflecting long, moonlit walks at the beach, whatever floats your boat.

If you start removing the stuff that is causing the sympathetic drive, it will lower, but the missing pieces, you have to actively work on. Parasympathetic system, sympathetic system go down. Parasympathetic system can still stay suppressed. You have to work on sleep, passion, unionism, family, friends, social life, you still have to work on that. So you have to train the parasympathetic side just as diligently as you train the sympathetic side or you're kind of wasting your time. I love that man. That's an excellent explanation. Um Now for people listening, the sympathetic state, the fight or flight state is essential for short term survival and the paris sympathy, paris, parasympathetic state, rest and digest is essential for long term survival. And as luke said, it's your body is constantly trying to get back to homeostasis and balance everything out so that you know, everything is running optimally and you know, uh as luke said, there are different stress responses.

Um and you know, low level stress in your everyday life adds up to chronic stress. So how I like to explain this to my clients is I will take um you know, a sheet of paper and I'll draw a line down the middle left column, right column, left column is going to be a sympathetic state. Right column is going to be the parasympathetic state and I add up all the things on the left side that creates stress and that might be a poor night's sleep, it might be poor nutrition, you know, less than optimal hydration levels, might be problems with my relationship, might be a career issues or anxiety around what I'm doing with my life and where I'm going and financial problems and you know, the kids are being little shits or whatever and they might all be like level 12 threes, okay, but all of those things add up and if they're not dealt with then over time that's going to become chronic stress and then your sympathetic state is going to be jacked up. Your parasympathetic state is going to be well suppressed and there's gonna be a massive imbalance there, which is then going to lead to illness and disease and inflammation and all that type of stuff.

Now, on the right column, I look at all the things that relax you and most people don't have any tools on the right hand column. So it might be a massage, it might be training, okay, it might be yoga, it might be some mindfulness and meditation, whatever. Okay. The point that I want to make here is that those tools are going to um impact people in a different way. So, for example, I love taking my motorbike for a ride and listening to a podcast in Thailand and you know, I get into a little bit of a flow state and you know, I kind of relax for me, it's therapeutic, It drives the parasympathetic nervous system, but some people, they're going on a fucking bike in Thailand and they freak out and that's going to up regulate the sympathetic nervous system and if they've already had a stressful day going to the gym and hammering yourself, most people go, oh that's stress relief, okay, but all you're doing is adding stress on top of stress. If you've had a stressful day, you woke up woken up late, you haven't had a good breakfast, you're catching every red light on the way to work.

You stuck behind some fucking asshole who's going slow in the fast lane, your boss is looking over your shoulder etcetera etcetera. Like the last thing you need to do when you go to the gym that day is fucking hanging yourself, still go to the gym, it's part of your schedule, it's part of your routine, but focus more on the mobility side of things. Focus more on some aerobic works and low level aerobic work where you're focusing on, you might be listening to some chill out music or you're listening to, you know, a podcast or something like that. Um Is there anything you want to kind of add to that? Yeah, and here's the thing to like let's say this is your situation and you know, everything is going wrong in your life and you feel like look lifting some heavy ass weights makes me feel better, You can still do that but you want to limit the exposure. So if you, if you have 60 minutes to work out instead of bashing yourself the ground for 60 minutes compartmentalize that maybe look at doing like more of a concurrent routine. So it's like okay for the 1st 15 minutes I'm gonna work up to a 12 rep max or I'm going to work up to a five right max.

Now I've I've appeased that monster inside of me that needs to feel heavy weight on my back in a squat, then the next section you might do okay, I'm going to do 25 minutes of aerobic stuff so I might do two minute rowing, I might do two minutes on the eco bike, I might be two minutes on the skier and do more of an aerobic protocol that's significantly hard and gases you out but at least it's pushing the the aerobic system and the pacific system is said and then now that you're nice and warmed up, spend the last 20 minutes or so. Working on flexibility and mobility, there is a high association with static stretching and calming the nervous system down there. You can also find research talking about how it builds Gabba in the brain and calm down some of the more excitatory neurotransmitters. Um And then I mean let's face it, most people are about as mobile as concrete. So if you if you find that stretching hurts, you probably need to do a little bit more that so think about waited mobility, work static stretching, Start give yourself a goal to start learning how to work into the splits.

Um Anything you can do to increase joint mobility and reduce pain is going to lower sympathetic drive because the pain is going to kick that up. Um and a lot of people trained through pain, which I've learned over, Oh God, 35 years of lifting that you don't want to do that. And if there's a paint, if there's some type of pain and dysfunction, if you just keep loading that, it's not gonna get any better, you might as well go ahead and work on eliminating that and then going back to loading later that way, you don't make sure that way, you make sure you don't end up injuring yourself and now you can't lift at all. Last year I hurt my back massively. It was something that I was avoiding. It was just a *** was a niggle, I told myself. Um and then one day it just went and I was crying, I was side flex and rotate and I couldn't stand up and within a few hours I couldn't even crawl. I tried to get out of my bed to crawl to the bathroom because I refused to piss in a bucket and I got off the bed and I got about half a meter and Zoe goes, my wife goes, you're not gonna make it in the bathroom and I'm looking, I've got another two m to go, I go nah, so I just kind of win Bebe, it's kind of backed up and it took me about 20 minutes to get that in bed and I was like okay bring me the bucket and I just, this is in the bucket all night and I had to fix that and I wanted to go back to squatting but every time I put a bar on my back that fear hit sympathetic, drive one up and I went, no I'm not ready, I'm not ready.

And it's just been this week, I've been away from Jiu Jitsu for almost two years now because of business and also getting hurt and I've gone now Two days of Ju Jitsu and my back is 110%. It couldn't be any better. But you get a lot of guys especially you see it a lot and fighting, they get injured, they keep fighting and then they end up with my knee hurts. Now they've got now three months later they got a municipal terror or they've got an A. C. L. Injury or now the back is all fucked up Nafta have surgery if you just stop what's doing that and work on the rehab, you could be back, you could be back doing what you want to do in three months and avoid having to have surgery and now you're out for fuck, maybe even a year trying to rehab it another really fucking good point. And something I've touched on numerous times in the podcast as well is one of the first things I do when I get a new client is I'll go through a movement screen and I'll literally just get them, take their shoes off, take the shirt off, minimize their clothing and I just get them to stand there and do a postural assessment and then I'll get them to walk down the gym up and back and then I'll get them to jog and then I'll gradually increase the pace.

And if I'm seeing dysfunction at that fucking low of an intensity where they're just standing there and then there walking, you know, that's going to show us, we're going to shine a spotlight on that as we start increasing that load, we start bumping up the intensity to start bumping up the volume, etcetera, etcetera. So I think that's a great point. And that kind of ties into again, what you said before with that kind of modular system where you do some heavy lifting, you do some aerobic work, you do some flexibility, mobility, and this is something that I say all the time is like start your session with that mobility and flexibility work, get your body moving correctly, put the joints in the correct alignment before you start loading it, get the stabilizers firing up, then get the prime movers fired up, then go and lift heavy, do your strength work, your speed, work, your power work or whatever and then finish off with some aerobic work and I love that kind of modular training system where we're touching on a number of different aspects of quality movement. I mean I could say strengthen conditioning but fuck man, it's quality movement, Get someone moving well first before we start loading it, otherwise, you know what you practice becomes permanent.

If you practice shitty motor unit recruitment patterns, that's going to become your norm, that's going to be what your body falls back on. Like every time you learn something, your brain creates these neural connections, these neural pathways. And if you're not paying attention to your quality movement when you're learning something and you're just going through the reps in the crossfit stole session and just banging out rep after rep for time and you're not paying attention to your technique, what muscles are firing in what order, when etcetera. Then you know that's going to become your pattern. Every time you need to do that movement, your brain just goes boom and fires that blueprint and then you start practicing shitty movement over and over and over again and then you start loading that movement and as you said, you know, you start getting a little bit of a pain in the knee or your elbows or something, one of the joint starts talking to, that's your check engine light coming on saying, hey something's not quite lined here, something's not quite moving as well as it should be, but most people don't pay attention to it and they go, well I'll just work around it blah blah. And then after three months they're like, oh now I can't squat anymore because it hurts when I squat and then six months later they're like, well now I can't do fucking any lower body movements because it hurts all the time and it's like you've just, you've just created these poor patterns and you just loaded those patterns time and time and time again and that acute issue has now become a chronic issue.

Yeah. So you look to the brain is controlling everything and the brain will do anything it can do to keep you moving again. Going back to evolution. The two most important things your, this is the same for every single person on the planet. Your two most favorite things in the world is oxygen and gate. If you can't walk, you can't hunt, you can't find food and I know, hey, cool, I can just call Uber eats but your body still wants, it still wants to do it. Remember bodies haven't changed the environment changed. So in order to keep you walking or crawling or trying to find a source of food and water, your body, your brain will create faulty motor patterns to work around an injury. Well, like you said, check engine light if I feel that and I keep lifting like trash and I don't address that eventually, it's going to manifest as a shoulder issue or risk issue or the elbow is going to go or even the hip might go. So um once you get locked in those faulty patterns the brain is looking and talking to the muscles muscles are dumb, they just do what they're told and you have what's called muscle synchronicity.

So what I'm learning and exercise, the reason people are shaky and they look like shit at first is because the brain is trying to figure out okay what muscles do I need to fire and and relax in the right order. And when you start getting into a faulty movement pattern, the brain then re wires how it's finding those muscles. And so it keeps you locked into that position. So then things just continue to deteriorate because you're you're consciously thinking about one movement, your brain is thinking about doing it a different way. So you're basically fighting against your brain for control over a joint and the brain is going to win. That you're not going to beat your brain. It's got its way smarter than you are. Uh And everything that it does can be done on a level that you can't tap into. So you might as well just work with the brain and stop fighting your own physiology where I want to go now is kind of circle back to what you were talking about earlier with people wanting to get into the G. M. And left even though they might have had a stressful day or whatever. Um Now I want to talk about um the HP.

A. Axis because I'd like for you to explain um why some people feel like shit until they start training again because they may have some form of dysfunction there and they need that cortisol and adrenaline response from that firing up that sympathetic nervous system. Can you talk about that for a moment? Yeah I mean you've got you have a couple of a few things to kind of a pact with that right? You have some people that and you you always know who they are because they are exercise addicts. They're in the gym for three or four hours. The only time they feel normal. A lot of these people have pushed themselves to a point where their their H. P. A. Doesn't work effectively. Maybe their receptors are desensitized because they're bathing and adrenaline or bathing and cortisol and they get to the point where they just chronically fatigued. Unless they do that thing. Or there could be a neurotransmitter issues. You might have low levels of certain neurotransmitters that are excitatory and you're using the gym too boost those up. Just like like for me I have A. D. D. I have to take a medication that basically floods me with adrenaline or adrenaline and dopamine because some of those things I don't make I don't make dopamine correctly I don't transported correctly.

my receptor doesn't work well. So when you look at like uh somebody who's depressed and the doctor will give them something like a selective serotonin re uptake inhibitor or like a norepinephrine, M. O. A um serotonin receptor inhibitor, those things then bathe your brain and the chemicals that you're not actually able to make properly. So it just keeps the bread the neurons of the Exxon's from pulling the neurotransmitter back into the Exxon bowl and and some of them will destroy the enzymes that break those neurotransmitters down. So you have a heightened level of these things for as long as the medications work in your body. For a lot of people, they're using the gym to boost those things up so they can feel better because that's basically their medication. Sometimes this trauma people have run resolved baggage trauma, you get guys, I was bullied when I was a kid, right? I was in the martial arts, I did judo, japanese jiu jitsu and this weird this weird hard style karate kimpo taekwondo mash up, right?

So it's all this weird stuff and I became quite lethal as a kid and then I went home, my parents go, if you ever use this at school, you're going to be in deep shit when you get home. So I just let people slap me around and pick up because I was so definitely afraid of getting in trouble when I got home and so you know my parents were trying to do, we're keeping my kid out of trouble at school but they didn't realize that was causing long lasting trauma. That led me to go into paralyzing bodybuilding strongman steroids and all this to put on a gorilla suit thinking that people would leave me alone if I just got really fucking massive and I can tell you that doesn't work drunk people drunk dudes, small drunk dudes love to fuck with the biggest dudes in the in the bar always. And uh so you can have all these different issues on that if someone has chronic fatigue. You know sometimes training makes them feel better but what they really need to do is resolve the issue of why the hypothalamus or the pituitary or adrenals aren't working correctly in the first place which is a very complex topic. If someone, if someone is listening and they do go I feel like shit most of the time until I do start training.

You know how could they potentially have a look at um what might be causing that. So the first thing we gotta look at the nervous system. So you gotta take the metrics, Same stuff that that I taught you in foundations, Look at their heart rate, look at their blood pressure, look at their H. R. V. If the heart rate is high and the HIV is low or if one of the high and low that's not a great thing and blood pressure super higher super low your body is not working off the woman or we need to figure out how we get the body back to a level of under 120 over 80 blood pressure, your heart rate, your blood is really low. Like say Under 90/50 we need to bring that up. If your heart rate is really high we've got to bring that down um if your exit is really low we've got to try to bring that up and a lot of it is you know not stopping training but then really really like reframing what you think training is supposed to be. So if you're stressed out Ceo Fortune 500 company and you love to go in and run sprints on the eco bike and you love to push the prowler and you love to just go crazy in the gym if you have stress response it's not normal that's just going to compound and make it worse.

So it kind of my thing is when you look at most guys, I assume that most men that walk in my office are going to be hyper tense, they're going to have high blood pressure. They have high heart rate and they probably don't do any conditioning, they've probably gone through bulking and cutting phases trying to change their physique. I assume that they're you know most of our type A. O. C. D. Go go go go go and I assume that a lot of women in order to change their bodies have done zumba and body combat and lots of running and starve themselves and then go starving starving cells and binging is that they've done this binge and purge cycle. And so most women that come in that I see are normally hypotensive. So their blood pressure is actually too low. They got postural hypertension. So when they stand up they see spots and they get really faint. Um you might need to different protocols whereas the women might need to do more lifting and the guys might need two more conditioning. So that's my guideline for most of the clients when I get them in is men need to do more conditioning and a little bit less weight training and then move the weight training from neural to more metabolic.

Most women need to do more neural heavy lifting and a little bit less condition. Maybe more sprint work. And then we need to also look at the diet to see if are you eating enough sodium? Are you eating too little sodium potassium too little because that can cause a stress response as well. If you can't manage your sodium potassium pop man so many so many things to unpack there? I don't really know where to start. Um So you know you said most women need to probably do a little bit more weight lifting and you know most chicks particularly when they're looking to lose weight. You know, they're they're fucking cardio bunnies, Right? And they're undereating. Um so that's creating a stress response. And if you're under eating you're you've got 11 systems of the body and if you're, those systems are being fueled with what you're eating, um you know, the ratios of macronutrients, how much you're getting men when you're getting them in etcetera, then your body is literally fucking running on fumes. Um And you know, when you said when you spoke about guys training, most guys going to be more neurologically driven.

So when you say the neurological training, you mean more like the strength work. The power work. The speed work. They need to do less of that. And more of the the kind of strength endurance. Bodybuilding stole training, is that correct? Well, okay, so here's the thing, like, I'm actually not opposed to doing speed work if it's pure speed work, but a lot of the guys are doing like their whole conditioning is 60 hit intervals. If you're working on speed and power, that heightens the nervous system, but it doesn't typically tax the nervous system what really tax the nervous system is too much volume with metabolic work, which a lot of women do and too much a centric heavy eccentric loading, which is a lot of guys do um you know, a lot of the guys, you know, they might come in that they're doing five by five protocol because that's an easy one to find online. Um They'll be doing a lot of bodybuilding stuff and then, you know, but just getting through the reps isn't enough. They want to do forced reps and drop sets and so that they're they're choosing really good tools not appropriate for their situation.

We got to regress that back and say, look, when's the last time you did a push up push ups for pussy's All right, Let me see. Do a push up. Whoa, That looks horrible. Maybe we should try working on push ups and single leg squat split squat step ups. Maybe we should pull ups. Maybe we should start working on TRX a little more and actually get everything moving. And then we'll slowly progress back into the weights and with the women what they're doing, you know? Uh what's the what's the Les mills thing? You nobody pop. You know, they're like, I lift weights. I go to body pop. That's not lifting weights. You're just dancing around with two kg uh dumbbell in your hand that I'm talking real last weights. Like what the dudes do The dudes need to do more of the chick shit. The chicks need to do more dude shit. And then when they're both normalized now, they need to figure out what's most important to blend that in and stay within a context, right? Well said, mate. Um I want to talk about period Ization for general population. You kind of just touched on it there. Um, and you spoke about it earlier.

Um, I want to get your thoughts on how you think period Ization fits into a general population clients program man, period Ization is one of those, one of those ridiculous arguments you get in, uh, in the personal training in the strength kitchen world. Some people love it, some people at it. I'm a big believer in privatization. I mean everything you do in the gym has got a specific adaptation. So if I'm looking for something specific, I'm going to program a specific way and then I have, if I don't know where I want to go and where I'm starting, you don't have a plan. You're just lifting. You get much better results. If you think about it as far as going through hypertrophy phase, strength endurance, face max strength phase, you've got all these different phases, linking them up into a chronological order. That makes sense. In order to this phase is going to potentially eight. This phase, which potentially this phase in this phase and by the time you get the last phase, now we had a crescendo of Peking something, whether that's muscle mass or a dead lift or five K whatever you're not using privatization as a trainer, your fucking lazy, you need to get more education and paradise, your client shit because you have no plan.

You're just basically throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks and we get paid a lot of money. You're not getting paid to watch people exercise and be their best buddy and count the reps and tempo. You're getting paid to get results and to get world class results, you need a fucking plant. Can you imagine somebody coming to you and saying in four years, I'm gonna be in the olympics and you go, okay, cool, we'll just do uh, what's open, we'll do some leg, press and then uh, the hack squats open. We'll go do that. You'd never see that happening in olympic training center. Why are we getting paid so much? And we're not giving our clients the level of care that you would use with a professional athlete. Okay. Because they need it the most. So we want to look through what is the big rocks and little rocks. What do we take care of first? First thing for most people, a structural balance stuff. They need to learn how to, if you're going to want to operate on two hands and two ft, you need to work on one at a time, get the balance, get control, gets stable, get flexibility, mobility, strength is easy. If your body is mechanically really good and sound, you've got a stable spine.

Building strength is probably the easiest part of this whole thing. Do the exercise rest for five days, go back, add a little bit of weight, Do the exercise, go home rest for five days, go back, add a little bit more. It's not fucking rocket science. Um Now there's ways you can increase strength using serialization, but and you can make things a lot faster. But Um even even with Jim Popeye, absolutely use period Ization. Everything we do is plan, we plan most of our clients training 6 to 12 months out. I have built a skeleton of what I'm gonna do. I may not use that phase, but it's there. So everything is already planned out 12 months in advance. If we hit a hiccup, that's cool, I'm just going to move the timeline and add a phase in here to take care of that hiccup and I'm gonna get back on the planet. Yeah, I love that man period Ization is a plan. It's an end state that you're working towards. And then you've got all of those steps that you're putting in place from, as you said earlier, A to Z. All right, cool. To get dizzy. I need to go from A to B. First.

That means I need structural integrity. That means I need good movement, um function. That means I need, you know, my joints are lined and moving correctly and stable and strong at all ranges at multiple joint angles. Then I start loading that. Then I start building strength, power speed, etcetera. Now that's regarding training, let's talk about period ization regarding nutrition. How do you fit that into the mold as well. Okay, so the first thing I look at, I look at the continuum Now, when you look at the macro nutrients. Well, when you look into nutritional studies, it's pretty clear, it doesn't matter what diet you do, as long as the protein is high enough and the calories are matched, high carb, low carb doesn't really matter. But that doesn't mean that one isn't better at a certain time than others. So somebody's more insulin resistant. A lower carb diets gonna work fantastic if their insulin sensitive, higher carbohydrate is going to work really, really well. So I've got this this continuum with a ketogenic diet on one side and then a carbohydrate diet on the other.

So you got and everything in between like standard keto, athletic keto, which is something that I created. You got cyclical, targeted, modified low carb diet, ice, a calorie diet. You've got zone. Then you start moving into like, you know, 50 60 70% cards. Your client's going to fit somewhere on there right now. And as they lose weight or as they build muscle, they're going to be shifting around that continuum. Now, most of the people that we deal with this is gonna be fat loss, right? That's most of the personal training and people they feel bad about themselves. They don't they can't fit in the clothes, they fit in their twenties. They want to fit in that stuff. They want to look good. They want to be desirable for their husband or they got a divorce. They want to go get some ass whatever, but that most of them wanted body recount, that's the majority of what we do. Um So if I have someone who is really overweight, so let's say somebody is, I shouldn't say overweight will say, I'll say something. You're not supposed to say overly fat. Can't say that these days. Right? Um Well, say they have a little bit have excessive stored energy on their body that we need to get rid of.

Okay, so the more stored energy you have on your body can't say fat cells. So I'll say the more stored energy in your deposits be clinically correct. Um The chances are the more inflamed you're going to be because it deposits secrete inflammatory chemicals. So the more you have, the more inflammation. So carbohydrates tend to be the macro nutrient that has the most effect on how you move energy around the body. So if you can't manage your carbohydrates, well, it's going to affect fat burning is also, so what I'll typically do is I put almost everybody in a lower carb diet, that doesn't mean keto. That doesn't mean, you know, two licks of dried prune as Charles used to say, that means, you know, whatever your activity is, we're going to set your protein, set your fat and then we're going to fill in the gap with carbohydrates. If you have a shit ton of exercise, you're doing. That might be a lot of carbs and that might be a low carb for you, a really high card for someone else. So everyone's an end of one, it's all individual. Most of the people I have at our gym at the Institute of Physical Culture here in Brisbane, most of them are 30 50 30 to 50% body fat.

First thing I do is I put them on a very low carb diet and I'm just gonna say it, I usually put people on a carnivore ish style diet initially because they don't know how food works. They don't know how to track it. They don't eat enough protein. So I said, okay, all you're going to eat is animal protein. If you're a vegan, you're gonna have a lot of shakes and a lot of low, low carbohydrate, vegan type foods. When you start losing weight, we're going to slowly add more carbs in, we're going to slowly add more exercise to your tolerance and then we slide them up that scale until we find for them what's a good amount of carbs as a 25%, wherever that is. And then that will fluctuate depending on how much activity they're doing, telling the more activity to do the more yummy cards you get. So if you train hard and you do a lot of training once you're ready for it, we're gonna give him a lot more carbohydrates mm. So you kind of already building in like a somewhat of an elimination diet, you're removing all of those um, potential um, foods that might be creating intolerances, get them on a fairly restrictive diet where it's very fucking simple eat meats and then progressively start adding things in.

Yeah, I love that man. Um, let's, that brings up another point for me. Let's discuss the difference between eating and training for health compared to eating and training for performance. What's the difference there and how would you talk to someone who does want to come in and train for performance but doesn't have their health markers in line yet? Okay. And so, and just so that listeners are clear. Yeah, I do put put people on a carnivore style dot or put them on cardboard and non starchy veg. So what you said earlier, that's exactly it. Simple. I need to create a solution that is simple. The more simple it is. And the less shit you got to manage, the more compliant and easier it is for your client. So if I'm teaching somebody to weigh and measure and track food, it's way easier to cut a bunch of foods out and just focus on one macro and as much green veggies you can put in your mouth. So we'll tell people eat this many grams of uh, some type of something that had eyeballs and breathe and you do that like four times a day and then I want you, you can have two fists of veggies or more if veggies to me, if you're getting something like green beans, carrots, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower, eggplant, any of that shit, eat as much as you want.

It's not going to keep you from losing fat. Now, if you eat a lot of it then you're not used to it, you may should have turned sideways and it may rip your butthole, but you know, that's okay, that's all right. Um So um now going to performance versus health. Okay, so with the health stuff, the way I train and the way I have my coaches train in our gym and online is we for health, we prioritize movement over muscles. Okay, so the hard thing is we want people to get moving with the mobile, flexible stable, have lots of control over their joints. Um And then bodybuilding is kind of a secondary thing. If you get really mobile and looking good and you're getting stronger and you're getting better at your movements, you're going to build the body that you want, it's going to have good symmetry. Nothing is going to be overdone because the body tends to keep all the muscles kind of in line with each other and you don't end up, you know, having a massive chest and no arms or you might, you know, having like all quads and no hamstrings, but the goal is to get them moving and feeling better and not having a lot of restrictions in their movement.

Um I don't, we don't do a lot of bodybuilder type stuff, We don't do it, we do single joint stuff if it makes sense. So if it's for a rehab type thing or it's going to make something like a chin up easier than we'll throw in your bicep curls and all that type of stuff. Um for the eating, we go, we usually think lower car, get to the goal weight you want to be as we're bringing the carbs up, let's get you stabilized and let's focus on trying to eat as much healthy clean food. And that's another thing I hate when people go, there is no such thing as a clean from dirty food. Yeah, there is fucking, you're gonna tell me that chicken and broccoli is versus a fucking doughnut, that the donuts not dirty. Um So, okay, if you, if you were going to say that there's no such thing as clean dirty food, okay, let's reframe it differently. There's beneficial foods and less beneficial foods, right? Um So we try to get them to eat more beneficial foods and the limit the non, not as beneficial foods to like treat every once in a while, birthday saturday night movie that not not every day ending in y is not a special day for special treats.

So we try to get our gen pop people to do that. Um and so, but when it comes to performance as a whole, another animal, because now everything that we do has to be specific for the sport if they come in and they've got a host of injuries, we have to take care of those injuries because once we start loading those heavy weights or long runs, it's just going to get faulty and falter and then they end up on my treatment table and I have to do is keep shit of treatment. Um So what we do is we try to get all the stuff in line if they have a specific posture for their sport. For example, if I have something you would know very well if I have a tie fighter or a boxer coming in, they're going to be in this posture, this is where they live, if they're walking in like that and you're in pain. The goal isn't to get them like this because number one, you're not going to be able to do that because they're always here, the goal is to get them functional in this position, because if you alter that position, they're fighting goes to shit, it's like taking a golfer and fucking up his golf swing and he never gets it back. The same thing with what I do is ju jitsu, we're all like that too.

We live in this position here. If I have a jiu jitsu guy, that's a brown belt, he competes, I'm not trying to remove that faulty posture because that posture is not faulty for his sport. Um so what we do is we try to eliminate the pain, get the structure strong in that position. Um Now when you look at athletes, most of them, if they've been training a long time, so what would be considered those faulty postures are actually quite strong and rigid and they usually get an injury for something else because they slowly adapted their body into that. So they do have structural rigidity in a skeletal structure that usually you wouldn't, if I see that in a gym pump, we have to eliminate that. If I have somebody comes in and got excessive infosys forward, head posture, internal rotation, I'm going to try to correct that as much as it as can be done because they don't have a sport that they need that position for once we get the, the athletes out of pain. Now we say, okay, what needs to come first strength or speed or distance or speed?

And so depending on, we're working with ultra marathoner versus, you know, a boxer or something like that. So then we start using metrics. We look at like velocity based training, you know, how is your one rep max in certain list compared to your med ball slams or maybe your bar speed on the squat and then we start designing programs for that and then to match the nutrition up every sports got a different nutritional profile. One of my vegan ultramarathon runners, like I've got to write a diet that fits in. That's vegan and but supplies enough protein and then also supplies enough carbohydrates to do those long runs. And I have to also get her to do a body re comp which you've done quite nicely. Now she's eating her Dieting is like 3000 calories. People go, that's a diet. Well, yeah, she's doing like 100 K every week. So that's her volume is high enough that she needs that much. So her low carb might be 300 And for Jim Popper, their low car might be 75. That's the main differences. And then through the different sports, like protein allotments are a bit different endurance athletes.

We try to get them about 2.2 g per kilogram. A lot of research says that's a little bit more than they need. But I would rather remove all doubt and make sure we're absolutely hitting that. Um um, and rather than give them 1.6 and think we'll find out 10 years later. Oh, 2.2 is actually where we need to be. If I've got power lifters, Strongman fighters, we try to get them a little higher. Try to get them up to 2.52 point six. And then we fill in the rest of carbs. The problem with fighters is convincing them that they need to eat more. You can't train eight hours a day and eat fucking 1800 calories. That's been the biggest thing is trying to get these guys understand like a fucking cup of yogurt before your bed isn't enough protein. You need to be eating a lot more food and your injuries would go away. A lot of will go away if you just feed the body. Mm mate, that was an amazing passage. That is literally like the art being applied to the science. That was that was an incredible passage man, thank you. Um I need to start winding up, makes I do have another interview um and I'm obviously aware of your time.

Um but just to wind up the episode, the name of this podcast is live train perform, which stands for live life to the fullest train to your potential and perform at your best. What does that mantra mean to you, jesus man, I love these, one of these little tidbits on the podcast when they just throw up the three of boomerang, you're like, oh shit. Um so you know look, living like, say it again, living life to the potential. Say it, don't say it one more time for me to live life to the fullest life to the fullest Live life to the fullest, yep, got it trained to your potential, your potential perform at your best best man. That could be so many things that I love that though, I do love that, you know, I think one of the things that people don't do anymore is they don't follow their passions. Um and I think if you want to live life to the fullest, you need to be working not on yourself instead of working on other people. And one of the things that I see with a lot of people these days, I'm massively against altruism. You should never set yourself on fire to save someone else.

Like the philanthropy and generosity is different than altruism, right? So we need to be able to take care of ourselves first and for that, it's like, okay, what makes me happy for me, I need a lot of alone time. Like, you've seen me get up and go like a maniac lecturing and it looks like I'm an extroverted, I'm doing all this stuff and I have a blast and I'm lecturing, that's why I will always do, I will never only do online, I always do in person stuff too, because I enjoy it so much, but I'm fucking wiped after it. Like, I'm a massive introvert, um I have a lot of hobbies and passions that I do um and and my wife knows that, you know, when we're at the house, I'm going to have to have just a long time or I've been nobody bothers me, even my own wife. And so I think that a lot of people need to be more true with themselves about what they need to be a good human, what they need for their mental health and what they need for their physical health. And sometimes that's having hard discussions with your partner or your friends and, and, and learning that no, is a single statement, there's no, no, this is why, no.

So be steadfast and tell people know when you don't want to do something, when it's going to be detrimental to your own schedule or your own health or whatever. And then find stuff that you're passionate about, find a sport you're passionate about. People don't do enough sports stuff. You can play, you know, tag footing on the weekends or ju jitsu or you can get a kickboxing class, you can go to a weightlifting competition, find something to train for, because the best results are people who have an actual thing, whether it's a photo shoot or a 10-K or something, find a reason to fucking live and stop stop pursuing hedonistic things. You know, stop pursuing getting drunk on the weekend, chronic masturbation, doing, blow off a hooker's ass, whatever, like channel all that energy into something that's instead of Hedonism, more unionism and gives yourself a life purpose and that's where you look at things that you're passionate about and going full monty end of that. How's that? Yeah, fucking awesome answer. But you know that, you know, that made, um, where can people find you, if they want to, if they're interested in doing, um, the foundations course, you've also got your um, program design course as well.

If people want to follow your stuff, they want to get involved, learn from you. Where can they find your content? Yeah. So just go to, you can go to our website uh Muslims dot net. It lays out all the programs and we've got a few out right now. We have one, we've just released a nutrition one that's about eight modules. I think it's about seven or eight hours long and it goes through um you know what is a protein and what is the car, but what is the fat chemically, what do they do in your body? Why are they important? And then ranges that you need to think about. We go into things like relative energy deficiency and low energy availability, why you don't want to die it too hard for too long and how to paradise that and how many calories do you actually need, how to calculate that out, how to figure out your lean your fat free mass. Just using circumference measures how to write a diet for that. And then it goes in some things like cultural and religious and belief system things and we wrote it for trainers. But it's actually been, I've got a lot of trainers that have their gen pop clients actually buy it because I explain a lot of things in there that make it easier for them because now they don't have to explain it.

Like just go watch looks in the video but we go over things like, you know, if you have a client that's muslim, you really need to know like what they can and can't eat because you don't want to offend them as a client that's bad for business and you don't want to be writing things that they can actually do. If you're training a guy that jewish and indian, you know, if your training somebody from what fucking Eskimo, you need to know what they eat. You need to know what their, how their culture and their religious preferences revolve around food, whether it's a family thing like Italians and indians, you know that you got to know this stuff or you're not really given the level of service that you should. Um we go into. So that man, that is such a cheap course, it's like 4 97 Australian. So it's like, you can almost pay for it with monopoly money because the Australian dollar six. Um, but it's all online, you do it online. There's a quiz after every, after every section and then you get a certificate of completion. We've got the foundations, we can't do right now because Covid that's the live one, but I'm slowly taking all the modules and I'm trying to videotape them and basically revamp and refresh it and make it totally new.

Um and put way more stuff in it than we've ever done in a live class because in a live class, I've only got 38-10 hour days to get the material across. Now, I don't have a time limit. I can just write it for however long I want the modules to be. So we'll have the, you know, the gut health distress stuff. We'll have the carbohydrates, proteins, all that stuff in and go wacky deep into the biochemistry. Um, and so I'm going to be putting that out soon. The program design is a massive course. You pay once you go through it as many times as you want, you basically, it's like, it's like, it's like becoming a crip or blood, you're in it for life and you try to leave. I'm gonna kill you. Um That type of shit. But actually if you return, if you come in your return, I'm going to kick you out anyways. But you go through it and that lays out everything you need to know about assessments, body reading, how to figure out where to put somebody in a squat based on the orthopedic profile period. Ization sets, reps timing attention, you know, all that stuff, stress response with that as well. Like it goes into everything you would need as a beginning train or even an advanced trainer, a lot of shit. You would never have been taught in your search 34.

So if you might not have thought about it. And the feedback I've gotten is it's not like you, like you said, hey, you know, I went to foundations and you know, I was already using some of this stuff and then I found other stuff to layer in, and I hear that quite often and then then usually I hear this, that course actually provided the glue that I needed to pull all the shit I was doing. So it made sense of why I was doing and how to system eyes it, because all of our courses, we try to do it in a way that makes you a better critical thinker, so that you think about why and what you're doing instead of just giving people stuff just to give it to him, because somebody told you that that's the way you do it. So that's basically most of the stuff we have, that's muscle nerds dot net. And then instagram's muscle nerds, health, muscle layers underscore health, if you want. If you want memes, then luke Lehman, L E A M A N if you like means especially really bad political, politically correct shit. That's what my instagram is for. Don't contact me on that for any contact muscle nerves because all I do on there is post, like, horrible fucking political means and like, really bad shit that I'm gonna get in trouble for someday.

Mhm brilliant. I'm going to have all of those links in the show notes, particularly your personal page, so people can go and get those good memes. Um but may I really want to say thank you for your time one. Um but thank you for the content that you're putting out. Um and for the muscle nerds, um I guess uh crew that you're creating the um what would you call it, the fucking, the people that that follow you man, like you've got such an amazing array of trainers, people that buy into your program, buy into what you guys are doing, believe in what you guys are doing and I'm proud to be a part of that crew and I met some amazing people have had will focus on the podcast, the number of times and um I think you know, you know, lizzie Raidi as well. Um yeah, those guys have been part of the podcast many, many times, so um yeah, I just want to thank you personally. Made for your time and for what you guys are doing, it's definitely made a massive impact on my career and my coaching and training philosophy. So thank you very much brother.

We shall we have to do this again man. We literally just touch a surface. Yeah, I just want to say, I really appreciate you having me on, I love getting on and chatting this stuff and so so thank you and it's good to see you. Good to see you. I haven't seen you forever. We chat from time to time, but it's just probably not enough. It's really good to see you in looking so fucking tan, look at you. Thank you brother. Really appreciate it mate, let's do this again soon. I've gotta run bro, please mate. And there we have a great conversation with my man, lou, Claremont of muscle nerds, health. If you enjoy this conversation, you think your friends and family can benefit from the message, Please make sure you pass it off to them. Any five star ratings and reviews are much appreciated. Much love guys piece