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He's like the godfather of health and fitness. Yeah, that guy was amazing. He was definitely a pioneer in our space. Way ahead of his time. Way ahead, remarkable man. By the way, little factoid with that guy. You guys know he set the world record in push-ups and pull-ups in his 50s? Doesn't he have several? Such a bad ass. Doesn't he have several world records? Yeah, where he pulled a boat with his mouth across the English Channel or something like that. He was 70 to celebrate his 70th birthday. He had, it was either 10 boats or seven boats with 70 total people in them, and he pulled it with his teeth and his hands and feet shackled like a dolphin. And I think he went to Alcatraz, I think that's what it was. But you can find the video on YouTube, so. Hand cuffed and shackled to Fisherman's Wharf while towing a half ton boat. Today, the task of towing 70 people onboard 70 rowboats one mile on birthday number 70 of water between 60 and 70 degrees. A piece of cake, right? I haven't eaten that stuff since I've been 15 years old. I was a full-blown sugar holocaust 15, 15 years old. I committed myself and that was it. It's one of those so much more manly than I even described. Anyway, one thing he used to say, it was a quote that he used to say, is he said that nutrition is king and exercise is queen or one or the other. And together you have a kingdom. So it was one that was king, one was queen. Together you have a kingdom. I've never heard that before. Yeah, so maybe Doug, you can find the. Yeah, he probably should, he might've just made that up. The actual quote of, oh look at that, he did. He towed a flotilla of 70 rowboats during a mile long swim from Long Beach Harbor to Queens, what is that, Queensway Bridge. Wow, on his 70th birthday. Oh, it's in Long Beach. That's the thing. How old was he when he passed? 90 something. 90 something. Yeah, but yeah, his quote is in regards to exercise and nutrition and how they're both very, very, very important, right? One of them is important. The other one's important. Together you have, what he would say is, he said exercise is king. Exercise is king, nutrition is queen. Together you have a kingdom. Okay, so I wanna talk about. By the way, that statement's a little interesting in itself because we've been taught in the space that diet is 70% of your results, right? I mean, abs are made in the kitchen. You've been told so much that diet is everything. And so I do like this idea of drawing up an episode that we compare the two of them with all the. Yeah, let's pin them against each other. Yeah, and let's talk about all the different things that people are looking for whenever they're embarking on a fitness and health journey and the importance of nutrition and exercise in each of them, which one is more important, I guess, for each one of them and kind of what they mean. The first thing, obviously, the number one reason why anybody ever starts a fitness journey is because they wanna look better, whether it's fat loss or changing the shape of their body, right? Aesthetics are the number one goal. I mean, as trainers, when you would ask your potential client. Almost always. Yeah, it was always that, almost always, right? Even clients that had like a performance goal, they would even, they'd always say, and I wouldn't mind. Oh, so it'd be great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Abs will always do that. Yeah. It's like, all right, I got you. Exactly. So now you made, you said something. You said that quote abs are made in the kitchen. Yeah. There's some truth to that, and this is, I think, where it comes from. If you wanna get leaner, you have to create a caloric imbalance, right? You have to be burning more calories than you take in or put it differently, take in less calories than you burn. It's really hard to manually burn calories. It takes a lot of work to burn four or 500 calories. By the way, your cardio machines are lying to you. That when they say that you burned 800 calories during an hour of cardio, baloney. Yeah, it's much easier. It's much easier to resist the extra large milkshake after your meal than it is to go burn off that milkshake. Or to put it differently, you could eat, I could eat 500 calories, super easy, super fast, right? Burning it, it's like all kinds of work. So people who try to burn calories manually through exercise and try to achieve weight loss with that studies show with fat loss, it's a terrible approach if you don't also address nutrition. It's almost always a failing approach. Now there is another side to that, which is exercise, although doesn't burn many calories, at least not in comparison to how many calories you can eat, it can speed up your metabolism. We talk about this all the time on the podcast. In this case, when it comes to fat loss, resistance training or strength training can make a pretty significant impact. Well, and this is where I can get behind what Jack LaLaine said, which is exercise is king. This is where it can be king, right? Because in the context of trying to lose body fat, lean out, which is the number one goal that most people sign up for, building some muscle on your body is in result going to speed your metabolism up, which in result will make the caloric deficit you're talking about much easier to accomplish. It's a longer term strategy, but it's something that too will last longer that way as well. So in terms of what you're gonna see as results, it may be a little further down the road, but it's something that will be way more sustainable. Yeah, now realistically, I would say people would boost their metabolisms over a regular consistent workout over the course of maybe six months to a year. I would see clients have their metabolism boost by about 500 calories a day, which I think is relatively realistic. Of course, this is general, so it's different from person to person. In some cases, you'd see much more, I know the cases would be more challenging, but 500 calories of extra calorie burn all the time, that's pretty significant. It's 3,500 calories a week, just supporting your extra lean body mass and the muscle that you've built. So that's pretty good. However, again, I wanna go back, 500 calories are really easy to eat. So for fat loss, the importance of exercise is to maintain muscle, maintain a fast metabolism so you don't just lose weight, right? Losing weight can mean you also lost muscle, but for the fat, so it helps you with the fat loss, but then of course the diet has to be a part of this. Not just for fat loss, also for muscle building, right? You can also exercise and train all day, but if you don't give your body the nutrients that it needs to build muscle, that whole idea of us speeding the metabolism up doesn't end up working out for you, so you gotta keep that in mind also. Right, now we will say this, when it comes to building muscle, exercise is more important. I mean, you could have the best diet in the world. If you're not sending a signal to build muscle, you're not gonna build any muscle at all. So when it comes to shaping and sculpting your body by building muscle, exercise definitely is very, very important. And look, I could build muscle on people with eating excess calories all day long. I mean, somebody who wants to lose, who's just eating too much, just have them lift some weights and you watch them build some muscle. So when it comes to building muscle, I would say the exercise portion of that formula. You'd weigh that a little bit more. Yeah, it's definitely more important. But overall for aesthetics, I would have to say it's a 50-50, I would have to say, right? Pretty much 50-50. A lot of it is the reveal, right, is nutrition-based and I think that's what people like to highlight the most, you know, to be able to kind of present yourself, but the work itself is really reliant on the exercise. Well, and most people are searching for whatever results they're chasing as fast as they can get there. And if you are neglecting one side of this, regardless if you could do it without it, it's going to take a lot longer and you're just extending your results as far as when you would get that. If you neglect nutrition in this case, or you neglect strength training. Totally. Now the next one, mobility, right? Mobility is your ability to move through full range of motion without pain. You've got good control and stability. So it's not just range of motion, it's not just flexibility, but rather you own that range of motion, that flexibility, you have strength within it. So- Fluid movement. Yeah, so it's like you can get, it's the difference between sitting in the splits, or sitting in the splits, be able to stand up out of the splits, or not hurting yourself if someone jumps on you when you're in the splits, right? Mobility is strength, stability, within a range of motion. Now I'll start with nutrition with that. Can nutrition improve or decrease your mobility? Well, I guess it can by contributing to inflammation, right? I've had clients change their diets and notice less pain because of less inflammation. That's really the only angle I can see is, I have had situations like that where there was a lot of inflammatory type foods that were causing this type of stiffness or pain and restriction within the movements itself. But in terms of like actually like going through mobility and gaining more strength in range of motion, I would have to weigh exercise heavily on this one. What about the role that it plays with body fat though? Somebody with higher body fat percentage, I would imagine is gonna be limited with their mobility compared to somebody who is leaner. So, it does play a little bit of a role also there. So obviously immediately it plays a role with inflammation, but long term it plays a role with the reduction of body fat. If somebody, let's say all of us in this room, if all of us, we're all carrying a little bit of body fat on us right now, so a little bit less than most of us right now. If you were to drop 10 pounds of fat off your body right now, do you think you would be more or less? Sure, because your body fat is this weight that just kind of sits on you. It doesn't, it's not really functional. I mean, it's got some function, but not much. So if you gained 30 pounds of body fat, it would be like wearing a 30 pound weight vest. That's right. So now, however stable you were in particular positions, you're less stable now just because you're heavier. This is why when people lose weight, they notice dramatic improvements in their mobility. So that's a great point. So through weight loss or fat loss, through the reduction of inflammation, diet plays a role in mobility. I had a client once, in fact, we were trying to address some chronic back issues, back pain issues, and the diet made a significant, and improving their fluid intake, drinking more water. Actually made a pretty decent difference in their back pain. Well, if that counts, right? Drinking more water, that would definitely be a contributing factor. But when it comes to just impacting your mobility overall, exercise here weighs much heavier. Are we gonna play the same game that we did with the first one, which is like 80, 20, I would say. Yeah, that's not a bad idea, I think. The first one 50, 50, this one, I say like 80, 20. I would say 80, 20, or at the most, 70, 30. Exercise, 70, or 80, to the diet being 20 or 30 at the most. I like that, I get down with that. And it's cool because as we go down, if you find one, you're listening or watching the podcast, and there's one that you really wanna work on, it'll help you put more focus on the work. Yeah, prioritize it a little more effectively. Exactly. The next one is performance. So performance, we're talking about strength, speed, endurance, like your agility, your body's ability to move and perform. Let's start with the diet side of it. Can diet affect your performance, both negatively and positively? Absolutely, it's for sure. Yeah, for sure. I've noticed differences in my performance if my carbohydrates are too low, or if my digestion's off, because I'm eating foods that are not affecting my digestion well. I can see that I'm more bogged down, or light-headed, or not as focused. So there's definitely an impact with diet. Well too, I noticed some of the best performing athletes have figured this out, that it's a vital component. There's a lot of athletes out there that can get away with eating a little bit more excessively, and not probably the highest quality that they could be. Just because their priority is so focused on exercise and movement and performance, that it's sort of, you know, they're working in spite of all that. But this is definitely, if they were to look further into their nutrition, they'll find that they could, you know, sometimes it even leads more towards injury, you know, where the inflammation itself is a contributing factor, which then leaves them susceptible with, you know, some other underlying issue that, you know, may aggravate it a bit more in that direction. Well, speaking of athletes, I really think that in the last two decades, the progression that we've seen in almost all sports, I think, is nutritional science. Yeah. I think that where we've come in- That's where you see the biggest difference. Yeah, and I know they did a really cool TED Talk that we've all watched before, that talks about, like, you know, the number one thing actually is related to, like, the gear that they wear, and that type of sport. The democratization of sports. Yeah, and that, yeah, that made a big difference, right? You're free to say. I was just trying to put it out there. But when I look at the last, you know, 20 to 30 years of, you know, high-level sports, you look at the amount of attention that these professional athletes now are putting towards nutrition. It's so different than what it used to be. And now you're starting to see that bleed into even, like, younger kids. Younger kids are now starting to pay attention to that, where when I was growing up, that was an afterthought. Like, you didn't even think about nutrition. You just, you did your sport as much as you could. Totally. Now that being said, whereas most of the money, energy, structure, programming being spent, diet or exercise, workouts, training, skills, acquisition. For sure that. Yeah. It's the workout portion, right? Like, and it's funny, we talked about aesthetics earlier. You look at bodybuilders, when they're getting on stage to get lean, most of their attention's placed on their diet, right? When you're looking at athletes, football players, baseball players, any other type of athlete, yes, at the high levels, nutrition is definitely a focus because it plays a role, but most of the focus. For the most part, it's an afterthought, which is kind of what I experienced going through that. But there are specific sports too that require, you know, different type of nutrition strategies and two ones that require cutting and require you weighing in. And so I would, I would, if we were to kind of be nuanced about this and like go through each specific sport, you might have a little bit different ratio, like for wrestling, for instance. Yeah. Something in terms of MMA. I would probably have to weigh nutrition a bit higher. Yeah, so I feel like that's a not a fair comparison because even long before it became popular in all sports, it was always like every wrestler, if you had to cut wet, you cut calories. That's been around since the beginning of time. That's not like the evolution of nutritional science. So I feel like it's not fair to, or like bodybuilding could be considered a sport and we've known for dieting for a show is like one of the most important. So I, I think other than those very specific situations. Let's put those over here. Right. I think this is an even lower percentage than the mobility argument that we made. Totally. I would say 90-10. Yeah. I would say 10% nutrition, 90% skill acquisition, training, strength training, exercise programming. So if you're an athlete and you want to improve your performance, unless you're at the high, high level where your training programming is dialed, in which case I'd say maybe look at nutrition, you probably want to focus most of your energy on your workouts, on the exercise portion. All right, the next one, longevity. So longevity is not just how long you live, it's also how long you live and you're healthy, however long you live. Because Western medicine has done a good job of stretching out our lifespan, but we find the last five to 10 years still to be pretty terrible, just because a machine or some drugs can keep you alive, isn't necessarily what I would consider longevity. Now, when we look at the studies on longevity, what we find is very unspecific when it comes to exercise. It's like, so long as you're active, that's okay, but the diet, boy, does that play a huge role in longevity. I was curious of what direction you were gonna go here because I thought maybe we might have a little bit of debate here because I think this is gonna be the first one that it's flip-flopped. Yes. Right, so for the first, when you talk about all the blue zone stuff like that, there's people that don't even traditionally weight train or exercise. Most of them don't. The biggest commonality is a little bit of a reduction in calories. That's right, and whole natural foods, right? And just being active and outside. So I feel like this will be the first one where most everything is centered around how you eat. Yes, now there is a caveat here, right? The caveat is if you're super sedentary, exercise makes a huge impact. So what I mean when I say, what we mean when we say that diet is heavier on this than exercise, that just means that the exercise doesn't need to be super specific or programmed or you don't need to put a lot of planning into it. However, if you don't do any exercise at all, if you're the average American in your 70s, you can have the perfect diet, but if you're the average American sitting on your couch all day long and you start to literally wither away, lose muscle, boy, one day a week of resistance training can make a dramatic improvement in your laundry. Oh yeah, every one of these categories there's gonna be this massive individual variance. And there's always going to be outliers and someone's like, oh, that's not true for me, it's this, right? So, okay, of course, but generally speaking, if you are just looking for longevity, right? The person who eats really, really well their whole life could never do any sort of structured training. And they're- So long as they're active and they're moving. Right, right, they're gonna be pretty damn well in comparison to somebody who trains like crazy but then neglects a good diet. Yeah, cause we could get into quality, but that's a different subject. But yeah, I would, that's one of those things like community and then just really being mindful of what you put in your body is gonna have like a massive impact on how long you're gonna- It does, and what you'll find is the heavier ways on diet or the heavier ways on exercise, the more important the details are. Does that make sense? Yeah. So like for example, with performance because it doesn't weigh very heavily on diet, that means so long as you fuel your body and you have great, very structured, workout programs, you're gonna do really well. On the reverse with longevity, it's like the diet needs to be very, very good. There's important, no fatty acid profile and the types of carbohydrates you intake in your protein. That's very important. Micro-micronutrients. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And then as far as exercise, so long as you're active. Exactly. So I would go and say as extreme as the other end of 90, 10 this way. Yeah, it could be 90, 10 or 80, 20, something like that. I would argue even it's just nutrition with longevity so, so important. And so long as you're active, you're probably gonna be okay. All right, the next one, brain health. This is a big one. No Doug, I ain't giving them 80, 20, 90, 10. You wanna do 90, 10? I would say 90, I would say 90, 10 almost 95, five because you literally could be someone who never exercises so long as you walk every day. Oh okay, just the active part. That's right. If you walked every day and ate perfect your whole life, you're signing up for probably a long, healthy life. I could get down with that because I could definitely get down with that. That's what the research is showing, right? When you look at, again, some of these blue zones. Yeah, these blue zones, they're basically just moving. There's other factors by the way, they have close friends and they have a good spiritual practice and all that, but you're right, they're doing things like going fishing when they're 80 or I hike up the hill every day to grab water. And I think you nailed it perfectly. I mean, just the smaller that number is the less detailed to that. So I look at it, if I say five or 10%, that means so long as you do something, right? So long as you fish, you walk, you do something, you're addressing that five to 10%, most of the energy and focus on the 90% of what will really make the impact. Brain health, okay. This one, my opinion has changed considerably. If you asked me five years ago, it would be different than what it is now. In the past, I would have said it was very similar to longevity where it was mostly diet. But now the current research is showing that what's very important for this is to maintain insulin sensitivity. You know, the most common brain degenerative issue would be like Alzheimer's, dementia, and researchers call those type three diabetes. Your ability to maintain good insulin sensitivity is very important. Now, of course, diet plays a role in that, but having muscle plays also a very, very large role. In fact, just building muscle, regardless of your weight, will improve your body's ability to react to insulin. In essence, improve your body's ability to utilize carbohydrates, sugars, glucose for energy, which again, this is why if you put someone who has Alzheimer's on a ketogenic diet, they see improvements in cognition. It's not because of ketogenic diet's magic, but rather because at some point, their brain stopped working really well on carbohydrates. So they put them on ketones and they seem to operate better. I thought you shared a study not that long ago, too, about the benefits of it, too, in regards to stability training and challenging that way, too. Didn't you talk about it? Yes, oh yeah, so here's the thing. Oftentimes, we think of the brain and we separate the body from the brain. So we think, so long as you're thinking a lot, in the past, they would say, here's a great way to exercise your brain, and they'd say, do word puzzles. Learn a new language, develop a new hobby. This is the only information we used to get about brain health, and now we're learning that training your body in different ways and provides all this new stimulus. You think about all the neural pathways and all the different types of stimulus your nervous system is providing you. That's all through your body, and to be able to express all that through exercise and movement really has a massive impact on the brain. And this is where I think the contralateral training, stability training, and anybody, if it was ever done, even something as simple as a bird dog, right? I remember getting my clients that were in advanced age, and it actually sometimes, you could see the delay. Totally. It takes them to do opposite arm, opposite leg. They get down on all fours, and then I'd say, bring your right leg left leg out, and they naturally want to do the same side. You can see them taking a moment there to like, oh, I have to fire this side and fire that side. And so for the ever I've known that's challenging, and then it's later on I've seen the research that's come out to support the benefits of that. Oh yeah, if you were to compare two groups of people and looking at their brain health, and one group did, and everything else was controlled, but one group did lots of brain challenging exercises, and the other group just did balance and stability exercises, challenged their brain that way. You would actually see better brain health with the people who were moving. The brain is intricately connected and tied to the body. It's part of the body. So moving the body, challenging, doing certain, this is by the way why you lose skills. You lose skills not because you lose muscle and strength, but rather because your brain loses the ability to do those skills. So it's like, you know, people say, oh, I used to be able to squat, and now I'm unstable or whatever. Yeah, your muscles might be weaker, but really your brain just kind of forgot almost the ability to do that kind of stuff. So it's very important movement and exercise are very important for brain health, just like they are for muscle health. Do you guys have exercises that you have like told your clients like, you know, hey, when you get way older and you don't care about so much how you look at this, and when you just want to feel good, look good, and like overall health, like longevity that you stick with you should do forever. Like do you have like specific ones or like ones that you like to, I have something. That's why I have one in mind. And I've said this to clients before. I've like taught the exercise and they listen, long after I'm gone, we don't have a relationship together. You're 30 years older and stuff like that. If you continue to keep this skill right here, the benefits that you will get for so many reasons. And that would be like a step up to a balance to a toe touch. Oh, sure. It seems like- I was gonna say Turkish get up. Oh, yeah. Another great, another great one. That's what I meant. Like, see, yeah, it's a great example of an exercise that is so good for this right here. When you talk about brain health, longevity, you know, people can, the strength community and the, you know, muscle building people will shit on some of the- Those scoff on it. Oh, they will. They'll make fun of movements like this, but here's an example where, and this is why I always tell trainers, be careful when you critique another coach or trainer that's teaching a movement like this that you may think is ridiculous or silly because you don't know the goals of that client. You don't know where they're currently at or you don't know where they wanna be in 20 or 30 years. And a movement like a step up to a balance, to a hinge over and touch your toe, to be able to do that. How it challenges the brain, the stability, the strength, just the overall health that you get from a movement like that or like a Turkish get up, I just think it's- When you look at people who've had brain injuries, when they go get physical therapy, how do they rehab the brain? By doing exercises, you know, my grandmother went through this, right? Where they would have her try and hit a balloon that they would hit to her and it was training and strengthening the brain. Now in the past, I would have sworn to God I would have said, oh, it's 80% diet, 20% exercise because I was into the mentality that the brain was like this separate thing. Now it's a 50-50. They're both equally important for brain health because I understand now that the brain is part of the body. It's no different than if you ask me the health of your bones or the health of your organs. We just thought it was cognition only. We just thought it was the education that you were building that brain muscle with when in fact it's so interconnected with the body is it's crazy. Totally. Another one I really liked, I'm just starting to think of all these exercises that I remember teaching like advanced age clients that they don't come to you and somebody who hires you so these are all the coaches that are listening that's 70 or 80 years old. Rarely ever they say, hey, I want to get in that bikini body, right? Or I want to build 15 pounds of muscle, right? They just want to live as long and as healthy as they can. And so movements and exercises like the Turkish Get Up, like the step up to a balanced toe touch that these are so, so great for them. Yes, there's exercise that build more muscle, burn more calories, but there's another side to this that we're training. Another thing that you guys ever seen those balls that are like shaped different. So when you bounce, they always go in different directions. And you got to react to it. That's right. So I'd have a client where that's all, that was part of our training. For like 10 minutes, I would just bounce the ball back and forth with him and he'd have to grab it because every time it reacts differently. I'm telling you, okay, I trained people in advanced age quite a bit towards the end of my career. It became one of my specialties. A lot of the doctors I trained would send me their patients and all the doctors would remark after six months or so, like so and so, so much sharper. Their moods are totally different. They're telling these jokes. Their memory seems to be better. I would see this all the time in the people that I trained, not just the physical changes where they were stronger. They could stand up, you know, better. They could sit down and squat. They could reach their arm up above their head. But I'd also noticed changes in positive changes in their personalities and how fast they were to think. And then I remember once I had a client, I've told this story before, it was a very terrifying thing for me to witness. I had a lady that was already in early stages of dementia. And her daughter brought her to me and I trained this woman for years. And I noticed ever so slight declines in her mental capacity, or maybe they kind of stayed the same. I would say maybe what I noticed is she would kind of tell the same story over and over again. But remember, this woman was, at this point, she was in her late 70s getting into her 80s and she already was in early stages of dementia. Then she fell at home, broke a bone. Her daughter no longer could afford to hire me. I ran into this woman. It was like, no joke. It was months later. It wasn't years later, it was months later. At the grocery store, she didn't even recognize me. That's how, and this is a woman I trained for years. That's how fast that cognitive decline went down because she could no longer move and exercise. So exercise extremely important for brain health and of course diet very important. I don't think I need to make that case. Okay, so what's our score for this? I would say 50-50. I could even be convinced to say 60% exercise. Yeah, that's obviously good. Oh, that's interesting because I feel like in the past, just 10 years ago, you would make the case the other way. Absolutely. For sure. Absolutely, I would even, you could easily push me to say 60-50. In fact, let's do 60-50. 60-40, man. Yeah, or excuse me, 60-40, man. That's right. That's right. Speaking of brain health. That's what you're gonna have to do. Hey, man, I do everything 110%. That's right, yeah, he goes beyond. That always annoys me when people say that. Oh, I know. How's that possible? There's only 100. All right, 60-40. Let's talk about hormone health, all right? So when we're talking about hormone health, I think we're talking about, typically, are your hormones balanced? Are they making you feel good? Is your energy levels good? Your libido good? Usually, I would say people refer to more youthful levels of hormones as being healthy, right? So as you get older, as a man, testosterone levels maintaining kind of where they were when you were in your 20s or 30s. With women, we get this nice balance of estrogen and progesterone, good growth hormone, sensitivity to insulin, a nice, healthy, appropriate cortisol response, all those things, right? So let's talk about diet first. Can diet positively or negatively affect your hormones? Oh, 100%, in fact, this was- It's a big one. Almost, we talked about this in the show that how when I get a client, every female client that I had that was having hormonal issues, almost always one of the things that we just simply bumping their healthy fats or increasing proteins solve the problem. Especially because they're typically chronic dieters, right? Yes, and that wasn't everybody, but a large portion of female clients that I got that would complain of hormone imbalances. One, it was as simple as a fact of feeding them some more calories and primarily coming from healthy fats. Just being well-fed. Yeah, yes. It was a massive contributor. Yes, and we just came out of that, the era of demonizing fat. And fat plays such a role in hormonal health. And so they would be so, I'd look at their diet and they're eating like 10 grams of fat. Dude, same thing here. I would get clients, same exact thing, 10, 20 grams of fat. And I remember when I would see something like this, part of me would get excited. One of the things that gets me excited as a trainer is knowing that there's a single thing that I can do that will make a huge impact. Cause I want to show this person the value in what we can do and something that they can control quite easily. So I would literally tell them, I want you to add an avocado and a fatty piece of meat or something like that every single day, right? Or something like that along those lines. And they'd be like, are you sure? They'd be like, yes, trust me. And sure enough, within a month or two, they were like, whoa, I feel so different. Well, cause too, you could see the opposite when the calories have been super low for a really long period of time. What happens inevitably, you start to see they'll lose their period, they'll lose hair, their skin's affected. Like you see the ramifications of a poor nutrition strategy, like very visibly. Right, right. And then with men, I mean, nutrient deficiencies, boy, do those cause problems with testosterone. Zinc and vitamin D are actually quite common to be issues with men with low testosterone. In fact, if a guy, especially if he's young, shows up and gets tested for low testosterone, the doctor's gonna look at a few things, sleep, one of them. And then the other one is, let's test your nutrient levels. Your zinc and your vitamin D may be low. And that may be causing issues with your testosterone. And then of course, are they eating way too many calories for too long or too low of calories for too long? And then especially, by the way, this is something we haven't touched upon. When your calories are really high, it matters more where those calories come from than when they tend to be low. When they tend to be low, you get away with a little bit more. Now, I have a question for you. Curious if you know the answer to this. Is it directly connected also to the libido? Because I remember even when I was taking synthetic testosterone, so if you were to measure my blood, you would see high levels of testosterone. Yet when I get to the last two weeks, like before a show, because I had been dieting so hard for so many weeks, I would completely lose my sex drive. But yet, if you were to measure my testosterone levels, my testosterone levels would be really high. Does that also affect just a male who's decreasing his, even if he has high testosterone levels, can also lose his libido because he's not eating enough calories? We often talk about testosterone because it's like the main driver of that. But so many things play a role in libido. I mean, psychologically, there's roles that play a role in libido. You could be stressed out and that would make you not feel like you're very much in the mood. But there's so many different things. Libido is actually quite complex. If you're not healthy, you typically will have a low libido. And let's be honest, I used to love that you used to do this, Adam. This was really cool. You're the only person I know that would do this is you would go so far before a show and then you would tell your audience, this is the part where it's unhealthy. Yeah, you'd say, okay, I'm up until now. And I don't know how many weeks out that would typically be. Yeah, it wouldn't normally be up until the last, like I would stay really, I would consider eating healthy, training healthy until about two, three weeks out. And then at that point, I know that I was crossing the line. I knew that I was about to go to extremely low body fats. I know that's not a healthy place to be. I know I'd be depriving myself of nutrients, like my body, I'd be pushing my body past. And so I made, I would make that switch and I would. I would always, you know, talk to my Instagram when I was talking to people on there and say, okay, like, you know, up into this point, everything I've been showing you, the average person could follow me, right? So even if you weren't trying to compete, you could follow the tips that I'm giving as far as nutrition and exercise. And I think it's a really good advice for everybody. Now I'm crossing that line. Now I'm going beyond that. I know that I'm chasing an aesthetic look for stage, for sport, and therefore this is not healthy. Right, now let's talk about exercise. Okay, for hormones, one form of exercise actually has pretty profound, we've talked about this so many times, profound effects on hormones and that strength training or resistance training. And this is because that form of exercise is pro tissue, meaning the main signal that it sends is to add active tissue, which is muscle. Now what the body needs to build muscle are these hormones, right? So if a man's body wants to build muscle, it's fed properly. You're sending a signal to build muscle with good strength training or resistance training. It's gonna need more testosterone. It's gonna need more androgen receptors. These are the receptors that testosterone attaches to. You're gonna need to have more insulin sensitivity. Remember, insulin is also, in fact, insulin's the most anabolic hormone. A lot of people don't know this. You're gonna need to have better growth hormone responses. Your cortisol can't be high all the time because that eats away at muscle. And for women, progesterone and estrogen need to be more balanced out. Inbalances there will prevent muscle gain actually cause fat gain. So when you're doing a pro tissue form of exercise like strength training or resistance training, it has a pretty profound effect on hormone levels. In fact, it's profound enough to where you could take any man and simply having them do an appropriate amount of resistance training, you will notice an increase in testosterone and an increase in androgen. Well, it's important to bring that up as a differentiating point in terms of how you're training because if you were just dependent on high cardiovascular output and you were putting all your eggs in that basket, it could be a detrimental towards your hormone balance. Well, I was really curious where you guys were gonna put the percentage here because again, this is talking about my own experience but I was fascinated by this. When I came off of taking synthetic testosterone, I had went through one of the hardest times of my life. I mean, I battled with depression because my testosterone levels were so low and the goal was can I bring it up naturally? And I was doing all the things you could think of infrared and focused on sleep and doing diet related stuff. I was taking supplements that Sal was telling me to do but one of the things that I personally felt more than anything else was coming in and strength training, heavy lifting and not, and you gotta be clear here. I remember you saying you would notice the day of or the day after. Yes, and it wasn't intensely training. It wasn't like when I say heavy lifting, I don't mean like killing it in the gym. I mean just some good, a heavy five by five and that's all I would do. I'd come in and just squat five sets and do five heavy, five by five type of lifting and I would feel this little spike the next 24 to 48 hours afterwards more than I felt from any of the supplements or sleep or the diet being all diet or the infrared. All those other things that I was doing in conjunction with that. I felt the strength training. I personally felt that effect my hormone levels more than anything else. Yes, and it's very interesting when you would do that you would come in, you would comment on it just how much of an effect it had on your body. I would see this with clients all the time, all the time. I would at one point I had a lot of guys that would come to me with testosterone issues again, sent to me by doctors and it was the strength training, resistance training and these guys were trying, they were doing everything and it made that big of an impact. Now I'm gonna give two different scores on this one because it's different for men than it is for women. By the way, when I talked about androgen receptor density, they're now finding in studies that that's the most important factor, more important even than testosterone levels. They actually did a study where they compared men and their testosterone levels to see who built more muscle and what they found was that so long as they were within a reasonable range, it wasn't a big difference. The difference came from how many receptors they had for that testosterone. Resistance training always up regulates androgen receptors. It always makes that big of a difference. Now when it comes to hormone health for men, I'm gonna say that this is more 70-30, 70 exercise, 30 nutrition. You will pretty much reliably benefit a man's hormones with exercise regardless of their diet. Now with women, their exercise is still very important but they tend to be more sensitive in my opinion to nutrition. To nutrition. I would say 50-50 or 60-40, I would say. I would say 70-30 for men, 60-40 for women. How do you guys feel about that? 60 on nutrition or 60 on exercise? Yeah, 60 on exercise, 40 on nutrition. I would push it even higher on nutrition for women. I would go 50-50. So you think 50-50? Yeah, I would say 50-50 with women on nutrition and strength training right down the middle. I'll get you behind that. And 70-30 for men? Yeah, I like that. Okay, I'll get behind that. All right, let's talk about sleep. How each of them affect your sleep quality. So when we look at the studies, we can clearly see that diet plays a definite role in your quality of sleep. Definitely, if you eat foods that make you obese, that can affect your sleep. If you eat foods that- Stimulants? Stimulants gotta count. God, if we include stimulants for sure, right? I mean, you're eating it, right? No, that's a good point. That's a very, very good point. If it affects your digestion- That alone raises it way. I know, that alone skews it way to that side right away, right? It does, it does. It makes a big difference with the stimulants. Now that you said that, I think I'd want to change my score. Digestion, if you're eating foods that you're intolerant to that are causing inflammation, heartburn, you know, that kind of stuff, boy, does that have a big impact on your sleep. But exercise, let's talk about exercise now. Exercise almost reliably improves sleep. In fact, in studies, pretty much anytime they just add some exercise so long as it's appropriate they sleep better. I know I'm sharing personal experience stuff and I know that doesn't count, right? But I tell you, one of the things that I always notice, as soon as I start my routine back up, I always sleep better at nighttime. And if I ever find that I'm restless, it's almost always because I didn't get my lift in that day. There's something to that restlessness of wasted energy or unused energy because I feel like my mind will just keep sort of trying to use it somehow and that's what's keeping me up. Sometimes if I'm exhausted, my sleep is just immediately better. And my theory on this is that this is getting progressively worse as we evolve. Totally. Because tech and we're becoming so sedentary as humans in general, like this probably wasn't as big of a deal 50 years ago when almost every job, everything was exhausting. Yeah, everything was exhausting. I never had a problem sleeping when I went to work with my dad all day long in construction. Like you come home, I didn't need a lift. I didn't need to exercise that day to like pass. Yeah, to pass out, but we just, we don't tend to expend the same kind of energy that we're, I think we evolve to be able to do. And we sit down, we stare at screens which stimulate the brain all day long. And then you think you're just gonna go lay down in bed and your body's just like, nah, I got so much more I could do. Sleep issues are an epidemic these days. And I think it's more related to the fact that we just don't move than it is to our poor diet. Our diets have been shitty for longer than the fact that we have been as a sedentary as we are. The lack of activity has dropped very, very, or has increased, I should say sharply over the last couple of decades. I saw this with my kid by the way the other day, my son, if it wasn't for structured workouts, I swear to God the kid would, he would literally morph into the couch or into his bed, right? He does all the school work, he studies a lot. Everything he enjoys involves his computer. That's how he meets up with his friends or whatever. And yesterday he had a scheduled workout with Serene. I've had him trained with our personal trainer who's on our YouTube channel, Serene. She's amazing, right? And it was so funny last night. And my kid has sleep issues. He'll stay up all night. Last night he comes downstairs and he goes, oh, I'm gonna be going to bed now. It was like 9.45. And I'm like, who are you? Why? Because he worked out. He worked out that day. So when it comes to sleep, I think I would go 70 exercise, 30 nutrition. And again, this is based off of what I've seen with the studies. I could be pushed 60, 40 because you threw in stimulants there, Justin. Yeah, that's where I was leaning. But again, I just think that that's a massive one. I know, I'm gonna give it 60, 40 for that because who the hell do you guys know that don't drink coffee? That's the thing. Yeah, so popular. Yeah, who the hell do you know that does not drink coffee? Or pre-workouts at this point. And when I think of, when I look back at all my clients and someone that was struggling with sleep, I would say more often than not, fixing either the time or the amount of caffeine that they're intaking was one of the first offenders that we fixed. Yeah, that's a good point. So because of that, because it is one of the number one things that I would adjust as a trainer, I gotta lean a little bit more that direction. So I would go 60, 40. You could even push me 50, 50 on this one. Okay, that's good. I'll go 60, 40. All right, life quality. Quality of life. This encompasses pretty much everything that we talked about. How much do you enjoy your life? How challenging is your life in negative ways? Are you getting meaning out of it? Are you able to do the things that you wanna do? Oftentimes we talk about life quality what really contributes to negative life quality is you wanna do something but you can't. Like I want to walk to my friend's house but I can't or I want to do things for myself. This is a big one people don't think about. As people age, one of the main reasons why their quality of life declines is because they're not independent anymore. I can't drive. I can't go up the stairs. I have to rely on someone to help me out all the time. So when it comes to life quality and all of those things, this for me is very easy. It's 50, 50. This is very even. Your diet include is a longevity. We talked about 90% being with longevity but your exercise keeps you moving, keeps you strong, keeps you mobile. Allows you to do all those things. I can't see how either one especially the second component of their mood. Like you just know right away when you're eating the right types of foods that are benefiting you and it's not just about flavor and just about calories. It's about like what quality of food you're putting into your body but then also like what kind of movements are you doing and if you feel strong and able bodied like what kind of mood that puts you in it's huge. I think there's something you need to add to talking about diet when it's related to mood and like quality of life though it doesn't mean being on a diet or restricting forever is what's most beneficial either. It's the ability to have that balance where you can enjoy. That's a big part. Right. So that's important right? You don't want to be caught the other direction where it's like, oh the guys say that it's 50, 50 diet for quality of life so I'm gonna stay on a diet my whole life. Like that's not, I think you have to explain that. That is a very, very good point. Look, I come from, my parents come from a culture that celebrates food. It's such a big part of where my parents came from in Sicily or in Italy. You need to be able to enjoy food also for its palatable abilities, for enjoying the way it tastes. It's like a celebration. The way it brings people together. So no, your imbalance is very important with this, right? And same thing with exercise. Like we say, oh exercise is real important. That doesn't mean like you're so rigid with your workouts that you miss your kids game or you end up not having any friends because you're always working out. Balance is very important. But I think Jack LaLaine's comment about exercise and diet both needing them both to create a kingdom. I think that really encompasses life quality. You need to have them both. You can't just have one. And I think that was that the ending music there there? Yeah, wrap it up yourself. Yeah, very good. So look, if you like our information, head over to mindpumpfree.com. We've got so much great free stuff you can download. You can also find all of us on Instagram so you can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. Me at Mind Pump Salon. Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Our vulnerability is when we don't wake up every day and ask ourselves why are people working out and what do we need to do to keep them consistent? At some point, it may become more about education. It may become about giving them different types of routines. It might be about understanding that when people do begin to fall off the wagon because maybe they had a life event. Maybe they had a kid. Had.