 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. What a great time. Everybody, you know what? Everybody has been hounding us for, when is Ben Pak's episode going to go live. The anticipation. We wanted to wait, because we shot a YouTube series with Ben. Super cool. He actually broke down his intraset stretching technique that he utilizes in one of his number one selling programs online that he has. Yeah, I've never done a technique like this before. I was familiar with finishing a set and getting into deep stretch. What was that training called? Fascist stretching. No, dog crap training or DC training did it that we called at one point. But this is different. I know you guys are like, huh? That's literally the name of it. I don't know. This was different. And Ben told me that, I guess, they had done a controlled study on this particular technique. And it was very effective at building muscle. And since then, I've tried it a couple of times. It does get you very sore. You do get a very ridiculous pump. Well, there is a protocol to it, too, because you better believe the very first thing that I asked him when I heard something that intense. I was like, OK, obviously you don't recommend this non-stop. And he's like, no, I think it was, I think six weeks is what the program's protocol calls for. I can't remember what he said. I asked that question when we were going through it on the YouTube. But he did a YouTube series with us that we actually went through all the techniques for those that are interested in the techniques and go to the YouTube channel. Check it out on Mind Pump TV. Yeah, he teaches you guys how to do it, because there's a specific way to do it. He had to really break it down for me, because it was hard to understand as he was explaining it to me. But it's pretty interesting. It's an interesting new technique. I was not familiar with it. Yeah, and I know he's combined that with his body parts, because I know he's a body part split guy. And he has that in his. He is, but his programs, when we look through some of his programs, although he does a split, he trains with more frequency than typical body part splits. Well, yeah. One of the big problems with splits that we've had is this whole once a week type of thing. But he advocates like two or sometimes three times a week. So although it's a split, it's similar to how we advocate people work out or whatever. But I think we have something set up, right? People want to check out more, get more information on it. Yeah, no, he has a discount for all the Mind Pump fans, so there'll be a link in the show notes. And then also after the Mind Pump, I mean, after the YouTube series, I know Doug will have a link in there also for it. And the program is, what's it called, Doug? Is it MI40 Extreme? Good, so we'll have that set up. But Ben is one of, becoming one of my favorite guests. Very intelligent guy, very self-aware, super growth minded, like super growth minded. We got into some really good conversations in this podcast that some of them have nothing to do with like bodybuilding. We talked about self-awareness and mindfulness. Although I came out the gates on some bodybuilding questions on them. I had to stir a little controversy. He fucked me up in the gym, man. We worked out earlier in the morning and he crushed me. And I looked at him, I said, listen, bro, when we get on the podcast, I'm gonna dig at you. You're a fire engine. So right out the gates, I came on and stirred some shit up just to get him back pedaling a little bit. But great episode, man. And he has become a good buddy of ours. He's just a really interesting dude and interesting to listen to. And I just love his mindset these days. It's definitely contagious. He's awesome. He'll be out there with us at Olympia. So he'll be with us at Olympia. He'll also be with us at the Spartan race. Yeah, we're becoming best friends. Yeah, best. He's a good dude. He's the wolf in the wolf pack now. Also, this month we have the promo where we're giving away forum access for free. So we have a private forum. It's got about 2,000 people on there. It's full of fitness professionals, competitors. There's bodybuilders on there. There's doctors. And then, of course, me, Adam, and Justin are on there all the time. It's an amazing resource, a place to ask questions, post videos, whatever. As long as it has to do with fitness and health and wellness, that's the place to do it. Normally you'd have to pay for access, but we're giving it for free. All you have to do is enroll in one of our programs, one of our maps programs or our bundles, including our maps Super Bundle, which has them all. It's about a year's worth of exercise program. It's one of the only programs I know of or at least one of the only bundles I know of where you can enroll and you've got your year planned out for you. Enroll in any of those things. Get forum access for free. You can find it at mindpumpmedia.com. And without any further ado, here we are talking to Ben Pacolski. Make sure you guys go check out his podcast, too, Muscle Expert podcast. You guys head over there, give him a five-star review, hook our boy up. So how's your guys' workout this morning? I heard Adam came back and he's like, oh, it's cool. He took me through a nice easy chest workout. I came back, I said, chest workout? I text a boy, this is the shortest workout ever. Ben's a pussy. Yeah. My body weight shit. Arm weight resistance. It was like, the idea was we were gonna do chest and shoulders, right? I hit him up, I said, oh, good, I'm gonna say it. Or I said, no, what I said was, I just needed to touch chest and shoulders, right? And he said, yeah, me too. So we get in there and I think on like the fifth exercise or so of chest, I'm like, hey, are we gonna start shoulders anytime soon? Yeah, Adam came in and he's always a little wavy, a little shaky in the hands. So yeah. What'd you think of the gym over there? Not bad, huh? I do like it, man. I've been here before. I've been to the other, what used to be golds. Oh, okay. And I've been to that one, I think, once before too. I went with Hanee. In 2010, I worked with Hanee, so I came on here one time to train with him. Oh my, I did not know this. How was your training? We're gonna talk about this. How did that training go? The pro-maker, right? No, and here's, this could be a paradigm shattering moment for me. And I'm sure there's people that are big Hanee fans because I've kind of thrown subtle jabs at him. And I honestly, I don't know enough to actually speak on it enough. And you expect me to talk about this on the podcast? Well, can you do it? Can you repeat PC about it? Man, I'm not a politically correct guy. Come on, oh, then fuck it, it's my pump. I'll give you shit, do you give me shit? You seem better. Well, it's up to you. I mean, we can edit, we can edit whatever you want to edit. We don't have to. I'll talk about it. Here's actually, here's the thing. I want you to talk about fucking everything I ask you, because you said you're an open book and I told you I'm coming after you for coming after me in the gym. You came after me in the gym, I'm coming after you around the gates here. So here's the deal though. We talk about anything and everything, but afterwards, whatever you want out there, we'll pull out. So that's the deal. I just want to have a good conversation with you. So if afterwards- The pullout method. Yeah, exactly. It just didn't work for me. You're doing it wrong, bro. You're doing it wrong. No, so we'll- We're recording this. It was just, fuck yeah, we're recording. As soon as my pump works, as soon as Doug throws the headphones on, we're fucking rolling. We did it your way last time, this is our way. So we're gonna talk, we're just talking about everything. We're talking about life, bro, right now. Dude, I'll pull no punches, I'll talk about it. Okay, so and the reason why I was, maybe we can do this somewhat PC, right? Cause I've thrown jabs at Hawni and I don't know him very well. I just have happened to have picked up athletes that have been coached by him. People come, I got known real quick to, if someone had fucked up someone's metabolism or if you were a bikini girl who, your coach told you to eat 1,100 calories and do two hours of cardio for 13 weeks straight, like if you had coaches that were doing things like that, I was the guy that you called up and I kind of helped you out, right? And so let's go there because you and I are both in the middle of quote unquote transformations right now and they look completely opposite. Really, you don't think we look the same? Well, no, at least our transformations look completely opposite as far as our objectives, right? I think people wanna know what are we doing and why? And because we can both actually and tell us and articulate the why and have a good amount of reasoning behind it, at least I can, you're gonna talk through your ass, but. Boom. Same old, same old. Not really, so I think people would be interested and then you can throw those Hawni questions out and we can talk about what his approach is and I don't know what his current approach is cause in 2010 I worked with him and I'll tell you the story man, I turned pro in 2008 and I hired him in 2009 because the pro game, if you wanna get any degree of traction in the pros, you have to get eyeballs. You need to get significance. So I hired him literally as soon as I turned pro I said, Hawni, I wanna work with you because you're working with Phil. Everybody knows Phil or Phil's great. Did I learn anything from Hawni? No. Did I expect to learn anything from Hawni? No. Fair. So it is what it is, man. I came up to train with him, he was my coach and I wanted to see what I looked like and we did a workout together. Was it a great workout, it was what it was. You know, I spent two days here, two workouts I think and he trained me for two shows. First one, I got third place for it in Tampa in 2009 and it was funny that the day before the show he goes, dude, you're not ready, you're not going on stage. And I go, relax man. So the way I trained, I was constantly overtrained, constantly inflamed because I didn't know how to rotate my stimulus. I was a typical driven meathead who I fucking buried everybody in the gym. Nobody would come close, I buried them but I also overtrained the shit out of myself and I didn't know enough about fluctuating in the biochemical stimulus in my body. So fluctuating between strength stimulus, hypertrophy stimulus, metabolic stimulus and more importantly how that influenced my body. So I didn't change it. So I was always doing the same thing. So I was so inflamed I never gave my body a chance to reduce that information. So when it, the day before the show he goes, dude, you're not ready. I go, Hawni, let's just drop my water and watch what happens. And we did. And I was the best condition guy on stage by far. But the day before because I was so inflamed from all the training I was used to doing, my ankles were like fucking. But you knew that. Yeah, because that's kind of my MO man. Like that was always my thing since I started as a bodybuilder. I just trained and trained and trained because it's what I love to do. And then you realize your goal is not just to train. Your goal is to be a great bodybuilder. So when I learned how to fluctuate stimulus and strategically change that, match my nutrition to the biochemical response of the training, things change, things happen. Now, do you see with, because this is common, I've heard from a lot of people who compete in stage presentation sports like bodybuilding where they push themselves so hard that eventually they call a burnout, like my body burns out. Now in the wellness sphere, they'll refer to something like that. Like they'll call it like adrenal fatigue. Although we know there's no evidence in terms of the adrenals getting fatigued, but the symptoms are very real. The, you know, where you're tired, you know, low levels of depression, anxiety, food intolerances go up, stuff like that. Did you ever experience anything like that yourself? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, more than one occasion actually. And sometimes you know you're there, man. Like, you know, there's multiple occasions I come to mind that I knew I was there, but you're so close to the show you can't let off the gas pedal, right? And your only option at that point is more and more and more. And I know a lot of athletes get into this, I have to do more because, you know, every meat head, you know, sorry, I use that term kind of. Terrogatory? Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. But I use it almost too often and it's too broad stroke. So specifically any coach, most coaches out there put their girls on or their guys on low carbohydrate, two hours of cardio, and then they go, oh fuck, what do I do? And your only option is I have to do more. And a lot of people find themselves in that position and they don't know how to change it. They don't know how to change their stimulus. They don't know how to fluctuate anything. And I've been guilty of that, you know, being three weeks out from a contest and going, well, I can't let off the gas pedal now. The only option I have is to do more. I'm not losing fat as fast as I want. And you go more and more and more and more is not always better. More is often worse because you're just gonna drive up more inflammation, drive up more cortisol, more sympathetic nervous system response. And your body just goes, you know, two middle fingers up, I'm not doing, I'm not gonna respond the way you want to. That's all too often the case in the fitness industry, right? Is people just get this huge hormonal cascade of cortisol and norepinephrine and they never allow their body to recover. And then fat loss is not even an option at that point. So here's what's interesting with that. So I've seen, so adrenal fatigue has been thrown around in the wellness world for a long time. And Western medicine doctors laugh at it because again, there's no evidence that the adrenals are actually getting fatigued, you know, except for actual cases where they have, you know, terms form, like if you have Hashimoto's or other types of disorders. Nonetheless, the symptoms are real. And so there's an alternate theory that's coming out. And what happens sometimes in medicine is you see like a host of symptoms that tend to happen altogether and you start to see a lot of it. And so people come up with theories of how it's working. What are the mechanisms behind the symptoms? And then they say, you know, a test will come out and say, okay, the mechanisms, the theory is not true. Therefore, that condition isn't real, but that's wrong because the symptoms still exist. So there's this alternate theory which really resonates with me and it's something called cortisol resistance or a form of, yeah, a form of, okay, so we know of leptin resistance, we know of insulin resistance, both of those are proven. We know that those are both things that happen in the body. We know, or at least bodybuilders, pro-bodybuilders know that a form of, and this is speculative, of course, speculative, that a form of testosterone resistance will even happen with athletes where they'll use higher and higher levels of androgens and their bodies just stop responding to testosterone. Cortisol and catacolamine production, it only makes sense that your body will start to, it desensitize itself to adapt to these elevated levels of epinephrine, norepinephrine and cortisol. And some of the symptoms of that are needing stimulants to feel normal because what you're trying to do is you're trying to stimulate more of that cortisol and get higher levels to get the same kind of feeling. Or even, this is another interesting one that you'll see is that people will actually place themselves in stressful situations, not knowing that the reason why they're doing that is they're trying to create a novel way of stimulating more cortisol. So they'll find themselves being late more often or not meeting deadlines or doing things that will create more of these stressful situations because there's this kind of temporary relief from this increased burst of cortisol. How do you feel about that theory or behind those symptoms? 1000% man, it's the paradigm of our entire society right now is take as many stimulants as you can, sleep as little as you can, do as much as you can. It's go, go, go. Beast mode. Yeah, overstimulated with blue lights, artificial lights. Everyone's overstimulated. No one pays attention to anything on the back end as far as modulating inflammation, stimulating the parasympathetic response, getting better sleep, good quality sleep, taking care of their environment. All these things are massive and it's absolutely true, man. I think it's more common amongst average people as well. Oh, absolutely. As well as fitness people. So I think that's very likely to be the mechanism and I don't know how extensively it's been studied. Did you ever train clients privately or do you, I know you have people who work for you that do that, but did you ever? No, for years, man, for years I did. I ran gyms from the time I was 18 years old and for seven years I put myself through colleges and managing gyms, selling personal training, being a personal trainer, all that stuff. So you know as well as we do is that when you start to look at all the clients that you've trained over all those years and you start to notice these patterns and one of the things that I remember picking up on and it took years for me to put this together, but everyone's doing the wrong things it seems like. So for example, like you get the guy who is total yogi guy, hippie, hipster, you know, smoke sweet, like crazy chill all the time. That guy could probably use a little bit of intensity and stress in his life every now and then. Then you have the other person who is, you know, works seven days a week, 14-hour days, manages 60 employees, stressed out of their fucking mind. What kind of workouts do they like? I wanna go do heavy exercises. Hammer, hammer their shit, right? They wanna get hammered all the time. They love those high intensity classes, like you see all these orange theories and the soul cycles and all these circuit-based type classes where they just hammer the shit out of you. Those are the people that are filling into it and they're like the worst ones that could possibly do it. And it's because it literally fits in the paradigm of cortisol resistance or may seem like cortisol resistance because they get temporary relief from doing that. If you're a high-driving type A person and you've already got some resistance to catacolamine production in cortisol, you are gonna get temporary relief from squeezing out a little bit more cortisol with a high-intensity class. This is why you'll hear those people say, but you don't understand, like if I do a spin class, I just feel so good afterwards. It gives me relief, but it's temporary relief and it's like giving more sugar to the person who's insulin resistant. You know, keep throwing sugar. I'd like to, I'll dive a little deeper on the biochemistry of cortisol resistance because I haven't, to be honest. And I know it would have something to do with the brain and I know it would be something that would be cellular and there's gotta be a way you can influence it. And it may just be like periodizing through your stimulus because muscular training would actually improve cortisol resistance because it could potentially improve the muscle's ability to uptake cortisol, but it would have to be a very specific stimulus. You couldn't be stimulating, again, high amounts of cortisol, right? So and I guess the only, and this is where, you know, maybe therapies like cryotherapy comes in is the idea of it's gonna give you a cortisol response, but hopefully it'll allow the cortisol to actually come down after. So that's, I think seems to be the problem with the paradigm is it's this constant stimulation of cortisol rather than high levels of cortisol. Right, and also cortisol rising and dropping at the wrong times. Like they're not getting the natural spike of the cortisol in the morning that you're supposed to get and they're getting a spike in the evening sometimes halfway through their sleep. And so you'll find what's common is people will go to bed and find themselves inexplicitly waking up, you know, between the hours of like 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. for whatever reason. And it's that cortisol comes up and come up. Yeah, so a lot of people get blood sugar and fluctuations at that time, right? So, you know, ancient Chinese medicine is kind of, they suggest they've nailed down the timing of something that sometimes it's blood sugar problems that happens three to four hours after people go to sleep. And that's often why people wake up is they get a dip in blood sugar. So this, their cortisol spikes to like to mobilize energy and they wake up in the middle of the night and they're, why do we can't get back to sleep? So that's again, that could be insulin resistance to start that could be just poor environment before bed. Again, it could be some cortisol things. See, for me, when I think of, when I look at resistance to hormones or natural, you know, chemical production of our body, the answer seems to be for all of them to reduce your exposure to whatever you're resistant to over a period of time. And then your body starts to up regulate receptors and start to become more sensitized. For example, if you have, you know, a form of insulin resistance, reducing your consumption of carbohydrates and maybe even a ketogenic diet has been shown to increase insulin sensitivity so that then people have a nice more, you know, even blood sugar. Same thing with leptin and, you know, resistance or even cortisol. So I know the, in the wellness world, the advice for people in this, who have these symptoms is usually, you know, number one is sleep quality. By the way, sleep quality is different than just going to sleep. I actually talked to people about this all time when they're like, you know, I sleep really good when I go to sleep. And it's like, there's a difference between being so exhausted that you crash and actually having good quality sleep. Meditation is another one, you know, turning everything off and going outside and just being exposed to the sunlight. That's another way you can kind of reduce, naturally reduce cortisol and maybe increase your sensitivity. The problem with all of that is it takes time and it's counter how we tend to tackle problems. Like when we have an issue, we tend to say, okay, I'm gonna go after that issue. You can't go after this hard. You know what I'm saying? I can't like meditate hard or sleep hard. Step one, man. And Alvin and I here, we're talking about this on the way up is perception is everything. And, you know, if you can't learn to modulate your perception to stress, like all of us are under stress. It's inevitability of the society we live in. But if you can't learn to at least somewhat control your physiological response to stress by your perception, you don't stand a chance. And so him and I and Roland had a conversation on the way up about, you know, everyone has the ability to change their response. And that's kind of the only thing if you want to touch about what we talked on on the way up, Alvin. Yeah. Hey guys, how you doing? Hey Alvin. All right. Yeah. So, you know, my big thing when I worked at Ben, I've been working at Ben since 2007 when he was an amateur. And my big thing when we work with the athletes is helping them to control their mindset. Cause myself, I had that whole thing. I was a gym fighter. You know, I was great. I was a boxer, martial artist, wrestling in high school, all that kind of thing. And I had dreams of the visions of Olympics. And, but I was amazing in the gym and the ring, but get me out in the public. And I choked every time. So I realized that the mind game is a huge factor with these guys. You know what I said? 90% mind game. Cause we can all work out in the gym and meet each other's expectations and meet each other's energy. But when we get out in the ring, it's who has a better mindset. So Ben and I were talking about that is it's all about the mindset and that perception of the stress. Cause stress is good. There's some stress that you need. As you're talking about the guy in the gym that's just blitzing out. They need a little bit of stress cause you can't blitz out all your whole life. Right? You need to have some use stress. And so that's the whole thing Ben and I were talking about. How do you manage that? How do you, there's a great research out, McGonigal. Anybody know that? No. She's a Kelly McGonigal. Okay. She's got a book out called Upside of Stress. And she talks about the whole stress factor and how you should convert that and how you should look at stress. Cause you need it. I've been reading, I don't know if you're from Eckhart Tolle, so a new earth. I've been going through his book at the behest of my girlfriend. She's been like hammering me. Like you got to listen to Eckhart. So finally I'm like, all right, let's listen to him. And it's really blowing me away. And one of the things that he says is, you know, it's not the problem that's the issue. It's the thought. It's what you think of the problem. It's the thoughts behind it that are the problem. Your view of it. Absolutely. And the way you see something is different than what I see something. That's reality, right? And how much we spend on, in terms of how much time we spend on work and exercise and diet and all these other things and how little time we spend on that side of things. Amen. You know, so Ben, are the things you do now that you do that are different than you used to do in terms of, cause you said you used to over train and push yourself too much and you weren't as balanced. You seem like a pretty balanced guy when I talk to you. You're pretty chill and relaxed. So sad, so. Is it fake? So I mean, from a physiological perspective, my training has massively changed. And I think part of that was the catalyst for it was the fact that I know back in the day that my only tool in my toolbox was more harder, more harder, that's all I could do. And I was like, I just can't be right. Like cause, and I knew that wasn't right because it was a point where it's diminishing returns. So my team and I at the gym constantly study fluctuating your stimulus and doing as much as we can to quantify, learning how to manipulate training to allow your body to recover from the stimulus. So we know we have, every time we train, we subject our body to different physiological stimulus. So a strength stimulus will be a primarily neurological stimulus, maybe some mechanical damage. Virtually stimulus is gonna be a lot of metabolic stress. How do you do that with the individual variants? The individual variants has to be so great with some of that because this person's stress cause they've got something depressing going on in their life, this person over here is not sleeping right. You know, like, how do you, the stress in the gym can still be the same. Like, you know, so if I'm training doing a strength based neurological based stimulus, the rest periods are longer. I'm staying in a very specific rep range. I'm very. Right. So that's like a phase one of maps anabolic type of thing. So you're in the low rep ranges. Right. Trying to build central nervous system adaptation basically. Yep, exactly. And then just learning that those things do different things biochemically to my body and eating for those. And if you push one system, you know, the other ones are kind of, so I just kind of look, view it like, you know, the things Doug's doing over there, manipulating everyone's volume and sounds and levels. He's looking like that, right? So if I'm pushing my hypertrophy stimulus, well, hopefully my other two are kind of back. And then one of my hypertrophy stimulus, maybe it is, you know, pushed all the way up and then maybe I can push a metabolic stimulus, more of a fat loss to me. So now I'm kind of fluctuating them through so that you're only ever really stressing one, maybe two stimulus. I gotta interrupt you right here because I want you to talk a little bit deeper about what you're talking about right now with, what in your opinion, what do you think is like an ideal time to pivot from one to the other? Like, so like how many weeks would you stay hypertrophy? How many weeks would you? So that's where it becomes subjective. You talk about person to person, that has to be subjective, right? Like my response to hypertrophy stimulus is very different than yours. I might be able to, you know, depending on what I'm taking, depending on how my nutrition is, depending on all these different factors, my sleep rate recovery, you know, some people can stay on hypertrophy stimulus really, really long. Other people, they're gonna get inflamed almost immediately. And you have to look at your biochemical responses, your physical feedback, right? And not just inflamed, but also the returns are diminishing, right? And this is what I try and tell people all the time. Like when you, how important that is to transition out of that because, you know, maybe the first three weeks of that programming or that way of training, you're getting these great results. So you get stuck, but I can go to a hypertrophy program for four months and I'm gonna keep growing and growing and growing and where some people go on a hypertrophy program for, you know, three weeks and they stop growing. And it's gonna depend on your ability to contract muscles, right? So the more efficient you are at generating intense contractions will cause a massive fluctuation. You know, your ability to contract is different from mine is different from ours is different from Melbourne. So that's gonna be completely the variable, but it still needs to be within the same realm, within the same rest period, within the same rep range, right? Now you, you, you, I don't know if I caught this correctly. You said something about eating according to the type of training. So what do you mean by that? So I'm training for central nervous system adaptation. How is my eating different there than if I'm training for hypertrophy for where I'm training, you know, metabolic, metabolically. Sure. So it depends on what you're trying to stimulate, right? So when we're training for hypertrophy, we're trying to stimulate the mTOR pathway. So we need to know and we need to ensure that our muscles energetically are replenished. Otherwise you can't get a hypertrophy stimulus. So, you know, you know that you need a high amount of carbohydrates. If I'm training for a strength stimulus, neurological stimulus, I'm not gonna be depleting any amount of carbohydrate because I'm not ever really taxing the cell energetically. It's more of a tension stress or it's more of a mechanical tension stress. So there's never gonna be a depletion of carbohydrates. So I know I'm always gonna have enough nutrients to stimulate mTOR. I just need to make sure that I'm getting a protein to recover enough fat to recover my nervous system, things like that. Because what stimulus am I stressing or what system am I stressing, right? So if I'm doing a metabolic style stimulus, which is like, you know, the high intensity, low rest, sorry, I shouldn't say high intensity, high effort, low rest, fat burning. More your traditional bodybuilding type. Well, HIIT style training, right? If I'm doing like a circuit, if I'm doing something that's gonna be very depleting to my body. No, definitively that's gonna be draining to my glycogen levels, relatively, right? If I'm doing it right, it should be. And then you have to weigh the answer or weigh the equation of, am I trying to get my body to burn fat? In which case you wanna be in an energetically depleted state or if I'm trying to get my body to suck up more nutrients. Well, that would be a good time perhaps to put some back in, you know? So looking at cellular energetics, is that all making sense? Yes, it is, absolutely. So that's how, you know, you just look at, well, what am I stimulating and how do I support that? So strength stimulus is gonna be, I need more protein and more fat. Hypertrophy stimulus is I need more protein and more carbs. Metabolic stimulus is I probably need a lot of carbs, but I'm probably not doing a lot of metabolic damage because there's not a lot of weight. So I don't need any protein. And not only that, but if you try to go heavy when you're training, you know, metabolic stresses, then you're taxing the central nervous system too much and you're not getting the benefit of what you're looking for. And if you're going too fast with the central nervous system, you know, type adaptation training with the rest, you're not getting much of that. You're getting more of the hypertrophy type stuff. It's just funny because you literally are spelling out the first maps program, no joke. It's literally broken up into phases that way. And I'm glad I'm hearing someone that I respect so much like yourself talk about this because it makes me feel good that we're on the right track as well. You guys are definitely on the right track. And then taking it one step further, looking at the cellular energetics is extremely important. This is one of my biggest kind of realizations over the last 12 months is a cell, you're basically looking at two conflicting signals, right? You're either gonna have mTOR or you're gonna have AMPK. And that is often, most often, determined by cellular level of repletion. So if my cells are depleted, I'm typically gonna get more of an AMPK response. If my cells are replenished, I can get more of an mTOR response. And your mTOR will actually be inhibited if your cells are too depleted. So if you're doing a metabolic-style stimulus, you're actually depleting glycogen. And if you do too much hypertrophy-style stimulus, you could be depleting glycogen too much. And then until your glycogen stores are replenished, you don't get that mTOR stimulus. Or at least maybe it won't last as long. Would you mind going into, just for our listeners, mTOR and AMPK, because I know mTOR, what is that, mammalian target, Repa Myosin, AMPK, not quite sure with that. I don't even know the facts. But can you explain the two of them and what they, why they're different? It's basically anabolic-catabolic stimulus, right? So your body's either anabolic or catabolic. It's never staying the same. It's either doing one or the other. And one is more fat burning, right? Yeah, so it's, yeah, it's fat burning, energy burning, basically, energy depleting. mTOR is gonna be more anabolic, more muscle protein stimulus. Excellent. Now when people are, because you do see this sometimes with clients, if they're doing everything right, you see a composition change where they're doing both, building muscle, burning body fat. A lot of that has to do with that delicate balance, I would guess, with balancing out mTOR and AMPK. And I think a lot of people, what they do wrong is they try to do both at the same time and you can't. That's a great point. You can't. And that's why people, oh, I'm gonna go do cardio after I do weight training. Well, that's okay, but are you realizing that? Are you trying to build muscle now? Or are you trying to burn fat? So if I go do this awesome weight training workout and then I go do cardio, you just basically turned off your mTOR switch and you just told your body it's time to break down now. So acknowledging that is a very important realization for people to make is, well, when do I do cardio? Well, it depends on your goal. So you have to always weigh AMPK and mTOR pathways. So it'll be more wise to separate the two even in the same day. If your goal is fat loss or if your goal is muscle loss. I wanna go back to like the stress management. We were kind of talking about stress and like just some ways that maybe, I know you've been on a kick of like interviewing a lot of bio hackers and just some sort of information you've pulled from them and maybe applied in your own common practice. I know for me, I did Wim Hof and that really helped me to be able to kind of get away from my prefrontal cortex and be able to kind of calm down and be able to get to that place where I could actually deal with stress better just through breathing patterns. Dude, it's funny. I was talking about this, I don't know if it was this morning or last night to these guys. It's something that's been maybe my biggest thing to move the needle as far as intra-workout lately is breathing patterns. So most people breathe one breath, one rep. I've been doing one breath, three reps. Try that, it's extremely challenging. So hold your breath and then do. Just really slow and methodical, almost like a yoga breath where I'm literally trying to make it, like I'm doing a 30 or 40 second inhalation, 30, 40 second exhalation. While you're doing reps. I do box where you 555 your box. No, but it's challenging, especially as you start getting your heart rate up. But I find I'm really able to control my heart rate, control my breathing rate. And for most people, that's what fatigues them, right? They get the sympathetic response because their brain senses like, oh, shit, I'm out of breath. Heart rate goes up. There's an oxygen debt, heart rate goes up and all of a sudden people start to panic and they stop. So I find this has been a massive way for me to increase the output on a set. So this is kind of my thing lately, right? My thing is I'm doing a lot less volume, but I'm trying to take sets a lot further. So I try to take them as far as I physically can and I'll do maybe six or eight sets per workout. Different body parts, whatever it looks like. But I want to be able to take that set really far and I never want my heart rate or my breathing rate to be the limiting factor. I always want it to be muscular and that's been massive for me. Wow, so literally I'm doing a set of curls, for example, rather than breathe out on the way up, breathe out, suck in on the way down or whatever like we're taught, you're doing one breath every three reps. Correct, two to three reps depending on the exercise. Well, fuck you not tell me that this morning. Interesting. Try to angle on me because it's outlasted me now. Yeah, exactly. No wonder. I would assume. It's in cheat codes. It's holding on me whenever we're trying to lift. Well, actually I don't even think it's a cheat code because I feel like the first time you do that you're probably gonna be way harder. So is that what you found? Yeah, for sure. And it takes, I don't know how much you guys are doing yoga, but I've been really, even throughout the day, I'm trying to practice a little bit of yoga breath, bringing me back to just being a little more centered, a little more grounded. And that's been massive for overcoming stressful situations in general. And then you apply it to a big stress which is training, but it does absolutely take time for you to be able to like, because you gotta perform the skill while you're doing the breath and both of those can be conscious tasks, which you can't do. So for me now the breathing has become the more unconscious tasks. So I could just focus on keeping that really long, methodic breath and just focus on the one conscious task being the training. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah, that's cool. You also had brought up the study that you had conducted. I wanna talk about this because I don't know if our audience knows about this. I thought I found it fascinating. I was familiar with intra-workout stretching and its effect on muscle hypertrophy and the studies done on it and they show that at least in short-term, for short-term progress like 12 weeks, it has a positive effect on hypertrophy and there were some animal models that had demonstrated this as well. You were talking about intra-set stretching and it was a very unique way. I'd never heard of it done this way before and I guess the results, I don't know if you wanna go over. Yes, so for the record I think intra-workout stretching is stupid. Well, regardless what the studies say, I think it's predisposing an injury because you're accessing a range that you can't control. I think it's a terrible idea. We might have talked about this. Yes. So my protocol that I had studied was loaded stretching, loaded intra-set stretching which means during the set stretching. I had it studied for six weeks in a lab and we had 15 pounds average weight gain across 30 participants. 15 pounds? In six weeks. That was tremendous and blew away my expectations before. Like I told you guys, I was like expecting six, seven pounds and we had an average of 15 pounds. Most of the, I'll show you guys the results. Most of the participants actually got leaner. It's hard. And it's absolutely, it's fucking hard. Like we'll do it tomorrow, whatever we're trying to get, we'll do it tomorrow, I'll show you guys what it does. It's definitely the hardest thing you could possibly do for hypertrophy stimulus. You're gonna be really sore but your body responds really quickly. Now is it for everybody? No, you need to have very good control of your execution. You need to be, I call it, you have a mastery of your execution. Whatever that looks like is subjective perhaps but you have to be a master and you have to be in control every inch of the rep. And it's the most excruciating thing you've ever done but it fucking works. And isn't that life? I would think you would recommend it intermittently like through training. Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. So we do in six week blocks and I only recommend it two to three times a year for most people. Okay. So yeah, it's kind of a progressive thing. So, you know, start off with maybe one set for body part and then we progress up over six weeks. Now if I'm going into a workout and maybe we should do a YouTube video on this demonstrating. Oh, this would be a great YouTube video. So if I'm doing a workout and let's say normally I'm doing chest and I'm doing, I don't know, 12 sets for chest. Do I do, you know, 11 sets of chest normal and then one set of this intraset type thing or do I, does this replace more than one set? Like how does that work? No, it just replaces one set. So I'll do one set for the body part of doing, of this particular technique. To start, yeah. Okay. I mean you could do two, it depends how it feels. So there's two sides of it, right? A beginner probably isn't gonna push himself as hard on something that's new. Okay. So I'm doing, I'm gonna get as much damage as someone who's more advanced. But again, anything new, I'm always a little bit if you have people having control of themselves. So I'll walk you through the protocol man, really simply. So we'll pick a weight that we do for eight reps and we'll do it with perfect form. And at the end of that set, we'll put you into the most comfortable stretch position you can. And then try to increase the stretch a little bit and then hold that for beginners between 20 and 30 seconds. For beginners I say 20. And they immediately drop the weight, grab the next lowest incremental weight which is usually a 20% drop. And you keep going. And you do your eight reps, stretch for 30 seconds. Again, repeat eight reps, stretch for 20, 30 seconds. And repeat, we do that four times. And we always finish on the contraction. So there's been some research from a cellular level which suggests if your stimulus is a stretch, you're gonna give the relaxed stimulus to the muscle, right? To go to tendon. So we want to finish on the contraction. And no, I mean, I'm not gonna, nobody's had any injuries or anything like that. It is definitely a very intense stretch. But it's very, very useful to me. Now, keeping it very simple for our audience, like what do you, why do you think that is? Like right away, some of the things that come into mind to me, like you're in the middle of a hypertrophy set. You put me in that stretch position with weight. I know I'm gonna get a ton of blood that's gonna get in there. So I'm gonna get the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy benefit. Yeah, it's one step further than that. It's actually, it's muscle damage. So it's actually satellites. So that was the mechanism that we found in the lab was it's satellite cell proliferation and differentiation, which is amplified. That's the holy grail there. You keep getting those going on. You can see muscle fiber hyperplasia. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, we're talking about hyperplasia. So. And now you've followed up with these participants. Have they been able to keep the muscle or? Yep. So I've got a few guys who actually say that every time they go back and do it, it gets better. Wow. At least they're adding new muscle fibers. That's the. So the theory behind this for the, for people listening who don't understand, muscle fiber hypertrophies when the fibers grow muscle fiber hyperplasia is where you actually create new muscle fibers. And the reason why that's the holy grail of muscle building is because when you atrophy or when your muscles shrink, when you're inactive, you don't lose muscle fibers. They'll just atrophy. So if you add a bunch of new muscle fibers through hyperplasia, theoretically, it's permanent muscle fibers that are there. So even if you atrophy, this is why we've theorized that we don't, we don't know if you'll be able to get down as low as you think you'll be able to get down because you've built so many extra fibers. That's what's so unique about you. You're not the average person. Right. So we talked about this. I did a podcast with a guy last week and we talked about this, just the idea that, I mean, you know the guys like this Adam. So you go to a contest and you get guys who go, oh man, I fucked up the last couple of days. I took a diuretic or I dropped too much water and I lost 30 pounds. You ever heard that? Why? They didn't have any fucking muscles to begin with. They're all water. They're all water the whole time. All they do is pump. They chase the pump. Exactly. It's bullshit hypertrophy. Nobody has any actual hypertrophy, like protein accumulation from hard, stressful, working out hard, stressful training. Most guys are chasing the pump, like you say. Wow. That's a big, big thing. Huge. Huge, especially. Everybody that says, oh, I fucked up the last week. I'm like, yeah, I just, I'm smiling in my head and being like, you idiot. Like it's because you trained like this. I already know, I already got you figured out. You never had it. You rely on those, you rely on those carbs and water so much. Creatine, insulin, all these other stupid things that they're taking. Yep. It's all hyperemia based training. Wow. So how is the weight loss journey going for you right now? I know. So you don't, how small are you? I'm just gotta tell you. He doesn't look that much smaller than us. Actually, you look bigger. I don't know if it's because of your shirt. That's what it is. Yeah, that's what it might be. How was that going for you? You've been trying to lose muscle, which is just. What's so, I mean, it's a balance, right? So I'm trying to lose muscle, but I don't want it to be, I'm not just trying to be the smallest guy in the world. I still like looking fit and muscular. I still love training. And I think I told Adam, like the best thing about what's happening is I fucking love training again. I find myself doing two and a half hour workouts because I love it and I haven't loved it in years. And that's kind of been making it more difficult to lose muscle. So how's it going to lose muscle? I'm eating a lot less. I'm eating a lot less. What's your pace of loss? Like weight loss, are you tracking it? Since the beginning I've lost 30 pounds and that's since like March. So what's it, three, four months? Four months? So it's pretty good. I've lost three inches off my legs, which is a big thing. So they're only 45 inches now? What? I think they were 34 inches. Fuck. And now, that's my waist, dude. That's bigger than my waist. That's true. Put a belt on those pants. They're down under 30 now, which is nice. So I can actually start buying quasi-normal pants. I was telling these guys on the web, I've got a gold fitness list, 34 pants, but these are 36, that's not so bad. But yeah, that's kind of the goal. My legs is the big thing. I hold a lot of weight in my legs there. I was kind of known for having somewhat decent leg development. And the upper body's coming down nice too. Like I want to train it because I don't want to get soft and flabby. I still want to look good, man. So it's just balance and it's got to be a moving target. It's got to be like, hey, one day, maybe one or two weeks I'm going to go down pretty aggressively, decrease my training volume and then I'll pull it back up for two weeks. Now are there any, because what pops in my mind, when people are trying to lose a lot of fat, there's one thing. But when people are trying to lose a lot of muscle, I'm wondering, are there any complications that may arise for something like that? Psychologically or physically? Well, no, physically. Raising levels of creatine kinase or kidney stress or anything like that. Is there anything that, because this is very different, I mean, you've got so much muscle that you're trying to lose, is there anything that you're monitoring or that you should be careful for when it comes to losing muscle? I don't know, man. I think anybody going in the right direction, meaning down in weight, that's only going to show positive health benefits, right? So I haven't seen, actually my creatine kinase for a guy who trains is actually in healthy range, which is not the same as it was when I was taking antibiotics or when I was really training maximally. Everything is about, I think I've posted my blood results. The only thing that was in the tank was my testosterone. If you guys want to have a laugh. I would love to hear about that. All right, so I hadn't got, like I'd been off TRT for six months and I input the intent of losing muscle and I didn't do so well, obviously, last time. But so my testosterone when I was a bodybuilder was often, I tried to keep it in the range of 12 to 1500. I didn't want to go too high because that has negative effects as well. And my most recent test, I think I still have my man card, it's 28. Oh, shit. It was funny though. So people go, holy shit, like I might have an enema. That's post-metaposal. Yeah, I might have an enema. Post-metaposal. No, but in reality, my sex drive wasn't terrible. It wasn't like I won on my fifth try. Oh, you actually had a sex drive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's definitely, you know what? That speaks to the work you've put in with all the other balance in your life and stress for sure. Because I'll tell you, I just told someone this other day, it blows my mind. So I'm somebody who openly discusses that I take testosterone myself. And for me, I pay most attention to my sex drive. And I've realized that I can double my dose of testosterone and if my stress at work and everything else going on, that affects my sex drive more than synthetic testosterone being shot at me. I completely agree, man. Right? Yep, so I told you I won on my first vacation and about three weeks ago. And my sex drive was fucking phenomenal because I was stressed. I wasn't even taking any testosterone. I was a beast, it was great, man. And then you get back here and you're like, oh, what? Pussy. What's that? Well, it took my girl about six years to put that together, but I used to tell her all the time, like get me the fuck out of here. So she knows, like if I'm bad where I haven't been giving her a lot of attention, she'll be like, hey, next weekend, guess where we're going? And it's like, already planned trip, I had no idea. I've already handled work stuff. You're not going here, not going here. We're heading down here. Every time I left when I go to Vegas, are we going on trips? Are we always gonna come back with a baby or something? Oh man, funny how that works. It took me a while though to put that together because I really thought, I really thought if I were to increase my testosterone that's especially synthetically and as much as it boosted, I thought for sure that would make way more of a difference. And it was surprising, it really surprised me. So I always tell people that. The two things that'll affect your sex drive more than anything is stress and sleep. Sleep, yeah, for sure. Those two things make such dramatic impact. Sleep is one that people don't even pay attention to mainly because, and I've been learning more about this because it's become a subject that I'm a bit passionate about. So let's talk about that, so I wanna go deep on sleep because I think I wanna hear how you're hacking it and how you're improving it. So here's what fascinated me about sleep that was kind of an eye-opener for me. So for a long time, especially throughout my 20s, I thought I was exceptional in the sense that I didn't need much sleep. Like I would go to bed and four hours later I'd be up and I'd be running health clubs for 14 hours a day. I had staffs of 50 people and I'd run these meetings and it was six days. It's like a badge of honor, right? It was like no problem. I was just fucking running on fire, it was not an issue. And I thought, I'm great. The reality is- You need to all stop working. You get a, just Austin on 28. Well, I crashed, definitely got crashed where I'd get really, really sick. But what was fascinating to me was the discovery that humans function exceptionally well with lack of sleep. And what I mean by that is you can have chronic low sleep and do your day. You can go to work. Car is all up. You could, yeah, exactly. You could have a little coffee. You could see your kids. Oh, I need to wind down, have a little bit of wine, smoke a little weed, whatever you do, and go to sleep. But that doesn't mean that you don't have, that you're not gonna benefit tremendously from working with your sleep. And the first thing that I did was I thought that I needed more sleep. So what I need to do is I gotta go to bed earlier and sleep more. Part of that is true. I wasn't getting enough sleep. That's definitely true to an extent. However, it's not just about quantity, it's also about quality. The next level that really did it for me was making sure my room was pitch black, setting the room temperature to be cool enough to where I could sleep, where I had to have a little bit of a bed sheet on top of me so it wasn't heating in the room or it wasn't too hot. That made a big difference. And the third thing, this is what I've done more recently that's been a dramatic change for me, is about one and a half hours before I wanna go to bed. So if I know I wanna go to sleep at, let's say, 10 o'clock, about 8.30, I shut off all the lights and we go by candlelight in my house. And I cannot believe the difference it makes in the quality of my sleep. I find myself sleeping more soundly, waking up, not groggy and just wide awake. My kids, I have my kids a half time and when I have them at my house, we do the same thing, we turn the lights off and they're ready to go to bed. Like 30 minutes after I turn the lights off, I don't even have to push them to go to bed and it makes a huge difference. My kids know all year round they go to bed with the sun. So as soon as the sun goes down, it's their bedtime and I'm trying to instill that in them now and they're up early and they're bed early and their sleep is great. I mean, you know, they're four and five. Wow. Now, what are you doing for your own sleep? You gotta think, you missed on Brain FM for sure because that's a tool that we all use that I love. So Brain FM, which I think it talked to you. Binary beats? Yeah, well it's kind of like that. It's different, it's different actually. It's kind of next level too. But it's similar to that. Most people are familiar with binary beats which is kind of like that. But that and not looking at my phone anymore. So I had a really bad habit of all the way till bedtime, staring at that screen, working till 10, 11 o'clock at night then trying to fall asleep in just the first two hours I wouldn't sleep at all. So doing that and then actually when I lay in bed and I finally settle down, I'll do the, that's when I box breathe. I box breathe right before bed and I do that for maybe a minute. That's it, just one minute. Yeah, and I just boom, lights out after that. I'm similar to you, Sal, where I'm characteristically not a very good sleeper and not a long sleeper. I don't need a lot. I kind of use that as a badge of honor. I'm like, fuck, I'm good, man. I'm ready to go. Let's just get up and go ask him. He didn't sleep for 48 hours. He slept for three hours last night. We're ready to go, let's go. We're gonna go at the gym for three hours. And it's kind of a man thing. You know, it's the man code. It's like, shut the fuck up. I don't hear you complain. Just do it. And I pride myself in being that guy. But when I'm at home, man, I'm similar to you. I hack my sleep massively. So for all of us, there's definitely no TV. We don't even watch TV during the week, but there's definitely no TV. We turn all the lights off. There's no cell phones after seven. And we just, you know, we get into like reading and get into relaxing activities with the families. It's also my bonding time. So I try to get up early. I get up at 4.30. And so I work from six to two usually. And then from, you know, four till eight or whenever the kids go to bed, it's kind of family bonding time. It only makes sense because obviously as humans, we evolved and co-evolved with our environment. And what that means is in some cases, we evolved for our environment. In other cases, our environment evolved around humans. A good example of that is how dogs evolved to, you know, become closer to humans because we helped their survival and vice versa. Well, it only makes sense that we evolved to match or to work with the rhythm of the sun. And when you move outside of that, a lot of problems happen in the body. And what we need to understand is many times when we see a symptom, whether it be, you know, anxiety or, you know, a gut issue or, you know, skin issues or anything that becomes kind of this chronic health issue, it's really the result of the body's systems being out of balance. And I hate to say the body's systems because it's really one, it's one system. But we tend to divide the body up into systems and divide it into certain things like activity, diet, sleep, you know, mental. But if one of those things is off, then it throws everything else out of balance and sleep by far. And I never would have put it up there with training and nutrition as being important. But it is one of the most important things. It's right there. It's even more important. Absolutely. It's a third of your life. And so many people just neglected when we were having the conversation again today about everyone's so focused on stimulate, stimulate, stimulate. And nobody's paid attention what happens after. So you wake up in the morning, you have a coffee. Before a year meeting, you have a coffee. Before you train, you have a pre-workout. The fuck you doing after you train? Like you're always nervous stimulant, you're nervous system stimulated, your genitals are stimulated. What are you doing to calm down? And this is a big focus of mine, trying to create the conversation around, well, what happens at 6 p.m.? You start changing your environment, manipulating your lifestyle, even choosing your foods appropriately, supplements, and then obviously mastering your environment as far as sleep. You spoke about completely blacked out, cold. So there's some research that suggests it doesn't have to be your body. So it just has to be your head, evidently. The research suggests they want your head to be cool. So you can still wear cover. You just want the room to be cold. A few other things, your mattress. Are you paying attention to your mattress? So many guys are using a sprung mattress. If you have springs in your mattress, you're getting an EMF signal. What's plugged in your room? Is there a TV? Is there even a lamp? That's gonna give you an electric magnetic frequency. You gotta get rid of that shit, man. So all that, like my room looks like we've got literally a bed, a couple of dressers, and that's it. There's no lamps, there's no anything. So once we're sleeping, we're sleeping. Blackout blinds, all that jazz. Do you turn your Wi-Fi off at night? Of course, Wi-Fi's off. We've even gone to some measures to try to block the neighbor's Wi-Fi, putting some stuff on the windows. So we talked about getting, they have like a canopy that can block all EMFs. So we talked about getting that. I was actually gonna buy one. I wanted to find stuff. Dr. McCullough had talked about that. You dropped that on that last episode. For me, I'm more worried about my kids. They're developing nervous system, developing brains. I try to do everything for those kids. They're buying the best quality mattresses. People don't realize how shitty mattresses are. Especially, I don't wanna throw names out there, but the Tempurpedic kind of stuff where you're getting like full mattresses. It's all petroleum-based. You're breathing toxic gases. Anything that's got a spring in it, you've got an electrical negative frequency which is gonna prevent your nervous system and your brain from recovering. Even the ones that are not petroleum-based mattresses all have massive amounts of adhesives. So things to hold, they're like binders to hold the mattress together that are giving off toxic gases or they're hot and like shit mattresses. You gotta spend money on decent mattress. So I went and bought the best mattress that money can buy. And I've even gone so far now that part of, I don't know if I told you guys, but part of the equation is I'm developing my own mattress company. So I'm partnering with a guy. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Yeah, dude, I'm partnering with a guy who's been in like a executive in the mattress for 25 years. So we're partnering and we're just literally dissecting every company out there and finding the best, who has the best and finding the limitations with it and then upgrading it. And then we've gone even further to add some additional technologies, some additional fabrics and add some earthing in there and some other like other things. Oh, so you like have a grounding? Yeah, well, option, option. So there's a bunch of things that we're just gonna, we've actually, we're actually creating our own adhesives. So he's done some research and we're creating the least toxic adhesives that exist. So we have organic memory foam, which is not, you know, non-toxic at all, 100% organic. And then people usually use binders that are shitty and giving off gases. So we found a way to do it without that. Yeah, people don't realize that you buy a new mattress. So I had a Tempur-Pedic, right? And I remember, as soon as we got it, they tell you like, oh, it's gonna give off an odor and it'll go away, it'll go away with a certain amount of time. And I remember smelling like, this can't be good. I'm sleeping on this fucking thing. It can't be good. And I swore to God, it gave me a headache. Smells like chemicals. And they're like, oh, just air out the room and then eventually it kind of goes away. And I'm like, well, I don't know how good that is. I'm on this thing for eight hours. It's like the new car smell. I don't find new cars intentionally. I'm like, fuck that. I don't want to breathe that shit. I should have a lot for three months with the windows open. Air it out. Yeah, and then I'll, like. Damn, that sucks. I love new cars. I know. And I love new shoe smell. You know what that smell is that you love so much, dude? Fuck cancer. That's a Xenoestrogens, my friend. Yeah, exactly. You're breathing in a bunch of estrogens into your body. That's great. Damn it. I'll talk some stuff. Here's another one that actually they just, I think they just published a study on, so we've all heard of jet lag, right? Where you fly from another country and now your body has to adjust to the new, you know. Oh, Taylor knows that feeling, won't you buddy? Yeah, I just got back from Europe. It's like three days later, he still looks like shit. Yeah, he's handsome. T-dog looks good. They're talking about what's called social lag where, and I think I'm using the term correctly. I think it's called social lag where people will go to bed at a certain time during the week, but Friday night, Saturday night, they go to bed late and then they sleep in the following day. So it's like going to bed late, Friday night, Saturday night, sleeping in Saturday morning and Sunday morning. And they're finding, even though you think you're still getting the same amount of sleep, they're tying all kinds of health problems to this. In fact, in this study, and I hope I'm quoting it correctly, but there's something like a 12% increase in heart disease for people who do this on a regular basis. And this isn't the only study, by the way. All the studies done on sleep are tying poor sleep or poor quality of sleep too. And not just like insomnia and extreme examples, but like we're talking about, you know, where I sleep six hours a night or I don't sleep very soundly, they all studies tie them to all kinds of chronic health issues. It's extremely, extremely important. It's where your body starts to eliminate inflammation. That's the big conversation, right? Is your body starts regenerating your nervous system and starts getting rid of inflammation. Those are two, you know, so you guys use the aura ring at all? No. So that's pretty good resource for people that's gonna tell you when you're in deep sleep or when you're in REM. So deep sleep has been known to regenerate your body. So you're gonna be eliminating inflammation. Let's start and declare it out. And REM sleep is gonna regenerate your brain and your nervous system. So it's important to have both of those, right? And so if you're not getting enough sleep, you're not gonna get enough deep sleep or REM. So your body's just not gonna have a chance to even come back up to baseline, which means the next day you're probably gonna need just a little more stimulant, just a little more coffee to get through the day. And again, you're just perpetuating this negative loop, right? Rather than just saying, hey, man, I'm gonna make sure that I get enough sleep tonight and I'm not gonna need coffee tomorrow to wake up. People are just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and all of a sudden, oh, shit, I'm fat. Oh, shit, my dick doesn't work. Oh, shit. It's all reality, man. Have you guys, either one of you looked into the research on the float tank and what it says actually as far, I think they compare one hour of the float to four hours of REM, have you seen it? So making comparisons. Have you floated before? You haven't floated yet? No, but I know it'll be beneficial, but I meditate every morning. So I get up at 4.30, the birds aren't even awake yet. Really, there's no fucking birds chirping. So I get an hour of like complete darkness by myself meditating naked in the middle of my living. Everyone you motherfuckers had a picture of that. Hello. I don't believe you, I don't believe you, but you're gonna have to send us a picture. I'm gonna need to see a picture of that. No, as far as the float tank is concerned, and now when they compare one hour equal to four, I don't know where the hell they come up with those numbers, sounds like marketing. However, I've done the float tank and it's very obvious to me as to why it's rejuvenating. It is sensory deprivation. We are overloaded with constant amounts of sensory all the time. In fact, I'm sorry. Could you sleep in there? Oh yeah. I did, I did sleep in there. Could you like make it your bed? That to me sounds like key to that, why? I don't know if it's a good idea to sit and water that long. Pretty sure if you stop breathing, you're gonna wake up. You won't sink. True. You definitely won't sink. It's only like 12 years of water. That's a good question. I don't think you can stay in water that long. I think it starts to damage your skin. I was just gonna say, I would think this- You'd wake up like a prune. Yeah, with the salt and the water. Yeah, that's it. And really high blood pressure. Yeah, exactly. But it makes sense because it's total sensory deprivation so your body just kind of rests and recovers and rejuvenates. And modern life is this bombardment of sensation. In fact, it's so bad that we've become so addicted to it that people don't know how to be bored. And what I mean by that is- So true. Anywhere you go where you see people waiting, and it wasn't that long ago. Look, I'm not that old. And I remember when I was a kid, a teenager, and you're sitting somewhere, you were lucky if you had a magazine, but usually there wasn't, sometimes it was nothing there. So you're just kind of sitting there quietly, thinking with yourself- You're waiting out. Or talking with someone or whatever. And the side effects of being overstimulated really match all of the kind of the psychological epidemics- Because right along, by the way, the obesity and diabetes epidemic, there's a silent epidemic no one's talking about, which is this epidemic of anxiety. It's actually, I believe anxiety now is the number one, if I'm not mistaken, is the top diagnosis now for people going to- I'm glad you brought all this up, man. So floating, awesome. That's one of 24 hours. So I think it's how you learn to manage stress. Those other 23 hours, it's gonna be way more beneficial than taking that one hour, right? Like, you know, it's everyone's like, oh, I'm gonna meditate- There's always order of operation. I'm gonna meditate for 15 minutes. Well, great. What about the other 23 and hours and 45 minutes? Learning to manage stress, learning coping mechanisms, learning to just change your perception of stuff. Like, things aren't that bad, man. And one of the best things people can do, if you don't already do this, starting your day and finishing your day with gratitude is massive. Like, I do three minutes of gratitude every morning. I'll give them usually before I open my eyes. You know, appreciating first the person beside you and maybe even the bed you're sleeping in, the house over your head. You know, all these things are so simple. Fuck, like, we take for granted so many things, but if you just spend three minutes of long time to be grateful for stuff, or it sounds like a long time, but it really makes you start thinking, like, what am I actually grateful for, man? Yeah, it sets you up for the entire day. I know Ben Greenfield, yeah, and like Tim Ferriss and like, a lot of them have been preaching that quite a bit. And I started to kind of implement that myself and do that as a practice, like you're actually writing it down. And man, it really does help to kind of get you in that place, in that zone, like the rest of your day. Anytime you're having, like, people complain about having to do cardio, people complain about having to wait somewhere. I find whenever I get in a situation where I'm like, I don't want to be here, I find things to be great before. It's like my cue, it's like my snapback to reality. Like, when you're feeling shittier, when you're pissed off or overwhelmed, that's my snapback is, you know, I'm gonna be grateful for three minutes. I'm gonna stop right here, I'm gonna take three minutes to be grateful because you can't be pissed off and be grateful at the same time as impossible. No, they've done studies on this. It's actually documented that there's a certain level of material things that you need, like your essentials, your home, clothing, food. But beyond that, there is no measure of increased happiness. In other words, they've actually come up with a number by the way. In the US, I believe they said, after earning about $75,000 a year, which is a decent amount, but it's not tons of money in most places. After that, it's all, you make as much money as you want, you can have as much shit as you want. Your happiness isn't gonna change. It all comes from within. Once you've met those basic needs, everything else is up to us. And again, let's look at modern society. Like, we have more than we've ever had before. We have solved a lot of our big, big major killers and problems. I mean, we can walk the streets now and not worry about having to fight someone for food or get killed for the most part. And yet you've got, again, people and record numbers on prescription SSRI drugs or benzos for anxiety. And you gotta ask yourself, why? What we're suffering from, a lot of what we're suffering from is diseases of the mind. It's our thoughts and the wrong thoughts. Let's flip that, man. Let's talk about chasing performance because that's what I wanna learn about. What are you doing to chase your highest level of existence? Because that's what I'm doing, man. I'm 36. I reach this fucking awesome stride in my life. We're on to keep being awesome for the next 40 years. Seriously. And how are we gonna maintain that? That's the conversation that I wanna have rather than being like, oh, people are a bunch of morons and they're addicted to anti-independence. Well, there's levels to this. And we actually, we get into shit like this all the time, I love talking about this stuff. And somebody asked us a question one time about becoming mindful and becoming more present. Like, well, how do you break that down and how do you do that? We had a great conversation about it this morning which we can, yeah. I mean, so there's, and listening you talk, people have to know that it's, you've put a lot of practice to get to where you're at right now. This isn't something you go, oh, here's what you do and now you're gonna be here. And I remember, I shared my journey of kind of piecing this together. And I used to like, my practice, you say the thankful before and at night, I used to just, at the end of the night, I would kind of like go through my day, right? And I'd just think of all the things that I did and why I did those and all the state changes. So that's what I used to say is like, anything that made me happy, anything that made me sad, angry. So anytime I remember- Are you journaling or are you just doing a download? No, I was just a download. You know, just download and just kind of go over it and I would just start to become aware. And that was the first step of picking up on those patterns. Then you get to kind of the level where you just mentioned right now where you now have that cue that goes off when all of a sudden you're standing in line, frustrated with that, you go, oh, boom, now. But you had to train that. That doesn't just happen overnight. Sure, I think the best thing you can do and which is honestly the reason why we're here is to collaborate with people who are on the same alignment as you energetically, psychologically. You guys have a huge advantage being able to talk to each other on a day-to-day basis about shit that maybe you couldn't talk to other people about. And that's why Alvin and Roland and I are here this weekend, because we could literally talk about the most obscure shit that most people think is like, they'll think we're crazy or they think we're out in, you know, in cloud nine but we all look at you and they go, fuck, I'm thinking the exact same thing. I'm like, man, we're on the same wavelength right now. So, you know, this morning and this is gonna sound, whoa, we're talking about the reality that we're energetic beings having a physical existence. And you're like, so we're just energy, right? So we're talking about that. Most people hear that and they go, well, that's weird. But if you can remove yourself from your physical body and realize that you're energy, that gives you the ability to change it in any situation. So if your energy's low, I can bring it up with my energy is, if somewhere around me is low, I can try to bring them up rather than letting them bring me down. It's an interesting conversation and existence to have. And, you know, he can dive deep into it because that's kind of his area. But I don't know if you guys ever had that thought where just this energy existence, you're just vibrating, man. And if you can realize that's what you are, you're not the meat suit. You're the thing inside of it. And I have actually told some of my students to do this, at least the ones who will hear it, close your eyes and remove yourself from your body for a second. And it's meditative, it's breathing and trying to remove yourself from the physical being. And then realize you're just this energy existence and try to take yourself out of the body and see what it feels like. And then realize that now I can alter that. So if anything around me brings me down, if my energy's ever down, if my mood is ever down, all it is is changing your vibration and changing your energetic existence. If you wanna talk about that, man. Yeah, I know it bends right on the money about that. It's funny, you know, we all use the word energy in some way. Man, I got no energy today. All you walk in the room, did you see that guys energy? But the funny thing is when we bring it up, we're all kinda woo, stay away from it. But we're all using it, like, inadvertently saying it. So, you know, back in the day when I started dabbling with this whole energy thing, I was just like everybody else. I didn't believe, I didn't wanna believe any of that. But for 22 years I've been working on people and I realize it is there, man. Is there, if you wanna admit it or not, it's there. We all use it. And when you think about foods, why we eat the foods we do, it's to get the energy from the sun, which goes into the plant and we either eat the plant or secondarily eat the animal that ate the plant and we get that energy and it's recycled into the earth and back again. So at the end of the day, look at every cell. Take one cell, there's trillions of cells in our body. One cell has enough energy in it to light an electronic equipment. One cell, and we have trillions. So you put that all together and you're gonna have, just put them all together. You're gonna have, we are energy. And take a night vision glasses. Why'd they see you? There's an aura around you and they see it at night. It's everywhere, it's everywhere. Yeah, Eckhart talks about it as being, we are not the body and we are not even the thoughts. We're the observer. And people will say, well, what do you mean? What's the voice in my head? And he goes, well, that, that's the voice in your head. The one that's asking that. And that's not even who you are. And what he goes on to talk about and he has a book called The Power of Now and then another one called The New Earth. And really it's about being in the present because the future and the past are really constructs of your mind. There is no future in past. Once you're in the future, you're in the present. It's always in the present. And so when you sit there and think and try and think and think rather than just observe, that's a lot of times where we encounter problems. And so we talked about meditation earlier and being an awareness and actually having dedicated space to do that. But you can actually do that at any moment. You could do that when you get in your car, take a couple present breaths and you may find yourself being in the moment at four, three seconds and then you drive off. And this is something, this is why people love some of the things that they do and they don't know why. There are certain activities that we do that force us to be in the present. My dad, for example, he loves riding his motorcycle, loves riding his motorcycle. Now, we've had several family members. My family's from Italy and everybody over there rides motorcycles. We have friends and family members that died on motorcycles. And my mom was like, I don't want you to ride a bike and you're gonna die whatever. And he's like, I love it. You don't understand. He goes, when I'm on it, I'm at peace. So I tell him, I said, dad, I said, what are you thinking about when you're on the motorcycle? He goes, nothing. I can't think because the second I think I'm gonna crash, I need to be totally present. And so without realizing it, he's actually placing himself in a meditative state. This also has happened, this happens with athletes. And when bodybuilders talk about working out, when they lift weights and they go in the gym, they're like, man, that's my church. You ever hear bodybuilders talk about that? That's my church. And this is my altar. It's a squat rack. It should be meditative. That's why it's so meditative because they're there and they're nowhere else. And so finding those spaces, finding the spaces to be able to do that really makes a huge difference. You talk about performance. That's a great way to tap into improved performance. In fact, if you find people in professions that are exceptional at what they do, whether it's an artist, a musician, computer engineer, whatever, people who are just exceptional at what they do, really the secret behind their performance is the fact that they were able to tap into that, that when they're doing their work, they are there and they're nowhere else. They're present at that moment. In Rise of Superman, they actually break down. They get into the studies that they've done on this where, and it shows in extreme sports where you're forced to backflipping off of a 60 foot ramp or whatever like that where you're gonna die if you don't land this, that we've seen more progression in extreme sports than any other field or anything else. And they attribute that in this book to the ability to tap into this flow state because they become hyper focused. And if we were able to do that, it would be amazing how that would translate in other parts of our life. I was gonna say, you said something really interesting earlier that you gotta go back on. The concept of time, we created that. We created time. This whole concept of 2017, we created that. The subconscious mind is timeless. It doesn't understand. That's why I can take you back to your two years old and I can have you fire off the same nervous system, the same hormone reaction. I can take you right back and you think you're two year again because you're living it again because it's timeless. We created time. So here you have a 60 year old man wondering why he's acting like a two year old. Well, because it's timeless. I can bring you back there. And the second thing that you touched on is hugely powerful that you can't glaze over is the power of the present moment. So check it out. When you wander forward, you're into anxiety and fear because you don't know fear comes from being forward driven and anxiety comes because you don't know what's gonna happen so it brings up anxiety and fear. When you suffer from shame, guilt and resentment, you're going backwards. So our biggest problem in society is that we time travel. Every time we have a quiet moment, we're traveling either back or forth. And if you can harness right now, you can change your past if you can harness right now. Harness it and, because you can change your past by doing something different in this moment. And you can also affect the future by doing something different in this moment. So you can see what you said is hugely powerful. If we can harness now, I mean, and change what we're doing, it changes everything. Well, to me, what you're saying, it's right in line with the rise of Superman. That's what blew my mind. That was being a kid who grew up in the 80s. Like I watched the movie, Rad. I was in the BMX racing. I don't know if you guys watched that stuff, but I was all into that. And I remember putting this together as a kid, like watching one year, a guy's doing a backflip. And then next year, someone did two backflips. Like we hadn't seen a backflip in 30 years. All of a sudden a guy does one, then all of a sudden we progressed to two and then you see all the stuff. So Roger Bannister. Right. So to see the progression happen that fast, but being able to tap into that, you know, if we could actually tap into how powerful that really is. Did you know that the progression was always there? But they're just tapping into it, right? It was always there, right? Does there a point feel? Everything exists in that zero point feel. This microphone was always there, but we need to wait for it. Someone had to tap into it. Everything's there. So I had an interesting experience years ago that was for me, it felt like a glimpse into feeling enlightened for a second, where I had gone off on a weekend with some friends and I was young, I was a kid, right? And we went hard all weekend. I mean, alcohol and no sleep and just, it was two days of just no sleep and partying. And when I came back, I felt like absolute garbage. And I actually felt the physical, what it physically would feel like to be clinically depressed, which some people would experience after such a heavy exertion and damage to their body. So it's the next day I feel like absolute garbage. I'm trying to work, but I can't. And I'm just like, God, I feel horrible. I feel, and I remember thinking to myself like, this must be what it feels like to be clinically depressed. And I remember I went to get some coffee because I needed something. I was like, I need something to kind of pull me out of this. And I made the realization that the difference between today and last week, there is none. Like nothing has changed, nothing bad has happened in my life. The only difference is I feel physically like shit. And the reason why this was a big realization for me was I realized that I didn't have to feel like shit. Physically I could feel like shit and I understood that, but I didn't have to be depressed. Like there was a difference there. It wasn't, there was no reason for me to feel this way. It was just I felt, I acknowledged that my body, exactly I acknowledged that my body felt terrible, but it wasn't depressing anymore. And I remember I left that Starbucks, I even drink my coffee and I was smiling. And I'm like, I feel okay, sure my body's tired, sure I have a headache, but I don't have that same experience. And it was mine, it was shattering, earth shattering for me. Man, you're dropping some serious bombs. I don't even know if you realize it, but that is so true. It's about choice. You can choose to be depressed or you can choose to be, I don't know, it's gonna be a little bit of a question there, you know, with chemistry and everything else, but let's take the ones who aren't chemically imbalanced. You can choose, the problem with human beings is we end up thinking we have minimal choices. So if you choose to be angry at the traffic, when we go to look in our toolbox for a decision to make about the traffic, we go to the whole habit, the template, we'd be angry. We don't know we have a multiple choices. I can be fascinated, I can be interested, I can be curious, but we choose anger. So it's, you're right, 100% choice. This could be appreciative that you have a fucking car. Yeah, yeah, right? You're not on a camel or walking or something. I'm not on a camel or something, right? Gratitude is the quick, is the quick. In most situations, you have actually at least two choices. If you're in a situation that you hate, you can either A, accept it, and be okay with the situation, or B, change it. Choice two. But most people don't do either one. Most people stay in this situation, feel as if they're being forced. They don't realize that they're choosing to be there. So they don't accept it and they don't change it. And so they live in this constant state of mind. What are some of the things that we do to help that, was it the stoic philosophers that were known for this where they would, one week out of every year, something like that, they would live on the streets, broke and poor just to give them a perspective? Yeah, to give you that detachment perspective, right? So easy we can get caught up in our day to day that it's tough to do that. We're saying that all of us are sharing all this great information, but to put that into practice is really tough. The ego is strongest when the body and the mind feel sharp and strong. Now I've got this big ego, I feel powerful. This is why you'll see these super egotistical athletes or businessmen or whatever and then they'll get an illness or they'll become old and all of a sudden they're peaceful and because they've been forced, they've been forced over there. You can do both. You can be healthy, fit and vibrant and also have a healthy ego. Man, I love that you brought that up about the stoics because I think it's such a shame in reality that we don't get uncomfortable anymore, which is why I'm an advocate of fasting. I call them ball-builder workouts. Do something not because you expect any particular result, other than it's gonna make you a better man or a woman, like fucking work hard. Like we're so used to, I call it beige. Everything is kind of like this shitty dull beige and you're never getting any level of excitement, you're never getting any level of suffering. Everyone just lives this meager existence and if you get a little warm, you put on the air conditioning, you get a little cold, you put on the heat, right? You get a longer heat. Human beings would be so advantaged to step outside of their comfort zone and we refuse to do it. I mean, that's why I'm a big advocate of fasting. I wanna do like a week-long fast and see how shitty it can get and like smile, man, every time it sucks. What's the longest fast you've ever done? 48 hours. A little longer than 48. It's actually, so I did a 72, was a, did I do 72? I did 72. I did 73 starting right now. And it's, you know what's funny? It's not as hard as you would think it is. First 24 hours is kinda. It's a trip, isn't it? It's actually easy after a certain point you stopped wanting food and you start kind of realizing how attached, of course we're attached to food, you need it to survive, but we're attached to food in a totally, in a totally different way. When you're fasting, right? Like the first 24 hours, you think about food a few times and then it's gone and your brain is like on point, right? Clean you are, yeah. Yeah, you talk about like the bays, like I was just having this conversation with my in-laws and we're talking about like basically like, you know, going through life just, you realize like how much time has accelerated. So we give back to time and like your perception of time and what's interesting when you think about it, when you start to kinda get into like your job and you have kids and like things become like protocol based and you don't really have like this novelty and something that's driving you that's different and you're interrupting that process. It becomes sped up. You literally feel like time has increased in speed and I was kind of tripping out on that because it was so true. Like I have gone through periods where you feel like I've gotten so efficient and your body's adapting to this environment and this ritual that you've created for yourself and you know, it really is important that we step out of that and experience it, you know, in new ways. So plan spontaneity, right? You gotta plan to do something like plan vacation, plan to do something that's just way out of your routine or even if it's not planned, wake up one day and go, hey, we're going here. Isn't that the best reality, right? It's like, that's the way I would love to live my life. Unfortunately, my wife doesn't agree. I'm the kind of guy who's gonna wake up Friday and go, what are you doing today? Let's jump on a plane and go to Italy. Let's go to Greece. Let's go to South America. I fucking love that idea, right? And we have the opportunity to do that. We're very fortunate, but unfortunately, like some people just don't see that reality, man. I wanna live a life. I'm like, why not? What else you got to do? Like that's what we're doing this weekend. We flew in and we're like, what are you doing now? Nothing. Let's go to Napa. Let's go have some wine. Like why not, right? That's a pretty sweet existence. And I think people miss that a lot of the time. Yeah, studies actually show that when people invest their money in experiences versus things, they get far more benefit out of it. So, and nobody wants you to know that because they want you to buy things. But so instead of buying that new TV, you know what I mean? Instead of buying that new TV or instead of getting that new car, like go on a vacation or go on a trip. Just look at what you remember from your childhood. Fuck studies. I need to study to tell me that I remember the trips I went on with my family. You were like, that's what stands out in your mind, right? It's never like, what toy did I get for my sixth birthday? Like, I don't fucking know. But I remember the places we went and the awesome things we did, right? That's just reality. Well, that's awesome. Are you, are there certain things that you've put into practice that you're training yourself like, for example, I talk about like, Katrina and I are always trying to do this together, right? We're trying to become more present, more mindful of doing things. And something that I've hacked into that's helped our relationship and me personally is like, we read a book a month together. And it's like, we're, normally we're listening to it, right? We listen to a book. And it's, I've seen so much, not just benefit in the relationship, but myself personally on different levels. That was a small hack for me. Do you have things like that that you've kind of hacked into that have allowed you to become more of a aware person? So speaking to relationships, yeah. I mean, not the current moment, but when we didn't have three kids around on the house, my wife and I would do that kind of stuff where we literally just like at night, I'd read a chapter to her, she'd read a chapter to me. As much as it sounds really cheesy, it's a great way to bond, man. I mean, you know, you're sitting, The sex afterwards is amazing. It's fucking amazing. You usually sit like, you know, skin to skin or lying in each other's arms and you'd read to each other and it doesn't matter what you're reading. It doesn't have to be something cheesy and romantic. You know, oftentimes we're reading things that were relationship oriented or parent oriented because she was pregnant at the time, but like, that's, I mean, just a great way to bond. If that's what you're speaking about. No, no, absolutely. Just things like that in general, you know, and not just in relationships, just hacks. And I shared earlier about the, at night I would sit there and go over, okay, these are all the things I did. These were the state changes. I mean, there's ways for it to help people get or become more aware because I don't think this is something that, I get it a lot because we talk a lot about it on the show. And so I'll get these inboxes all the time, like, you know, how do I, how do I get to that point? I feel like I just get angry or I just get frustrated. Like, and then later on, I don't understand how you do that. Like they don't have things to put, you don't say more tangible. So again, Alvin will talk about this, but the best way to realize relationships or realize your reactivity in life is to always realize it's reflection on yourself that you're looking at. So, you know, I always say my kids are my greatest teacher. I don't, I'm not here to teach them. They're here to teach me. I'm here to protect them. So by looking at them, I see my limitations as a human being. I see my limitations as a parent. And same thing in your relationships, man. If there's something you're unhappy with your spouse or with someone at work, chances are that's probably what you see in yourself. Oh, not chances. I tell people that that's a reflection of you. Every, every time it's a reflection of you. That's why it pisses you off. Right, yeah. Either it's, it's your insecurity. It's your fear. It's your, you don't feel like you're enough. You know, whatever it is, it's all those things and you're seeing it in them and they're, they're pointing at, you know, they're like just sitting there poking at it and you're just, you can't deal with it. And that's always the reality is people always try to point the finger at other people. And I'm just as guilty of this as everybody else. So, so I guarantee you we have a lot of listeners right now who are, you know, they're just into like, I just want to build muscle. Yes. I just want to burn body fat. I just want to look good or I want to perform great. So, so let me ask you this bit. Big by steps. So let me ask you this, because you competed at the highest level of bodybuilding for years. One of the more well-known bodybuilders, one of the more successful ones. Knowing what you know now about what we're talking about, how could you have used this to make yourself a better bodybuilder back then? Like if you went back in time, what could you have applied that you think would have made you better? Internal locus of control, man. You control everything. That's massive. If you can figure that out. So every, how many people you heard when they leave a show they go, I got fucking screwed. I got a bullshit placing. I should have a place to hire. No, you shouldn't asshole. You got exactly what you deserve. Reality, like people don't like me because I'm a realist, but it's the truth, man. Like, or someone influenced my prep or something went wrong on my prep or the last week screwed up. No, you got exactly what you deserve. Take ownership for that, own your life and improve it next time because every time you place the ownership outside of yourself, guess what? I can't control that. That's right. But if I take owner, that was why I was successful bodybuilder, 100%. From day one, if I placed shit in a show and like I know what I did wrong, I could have done this better. It was never anybody else. If I had a weak body part, I wasn't like, oh, genetically, fuck. I'm like, no, I just wasn't trained it right. Or I didn't do enough. Or I didn't do it right. Or whatever it was, right? Did I always have the right solution? No, but I always knew that I was in control of it. And that's fucking step one for everyone out there. Please, dear Lord, take control for everything in your life, whether it be bodybuilding, bikini, fitness, anything, anything business related in life. Like you're the owner of this thing, man. You're driving the bus, you're steering the boat. Well, you said it best. You're the only one that can actually control it. So it doesn't fucking matter. It doesn't even matter if it, this is what I try to tell people. Even if it is the other person's complete fault, it doesn't matter because you can't do anything about that. What I can do is look at all the possible things that. Give me a scenario. If I can't think of a scenario when it's ever anyone else's fault. Well, I mean, if I reached over and punched you in the face right now, that would be my fault for punching you in the face. And you couldn't really. But why did you punch me in the face? Right, exactly. Okay, there you go. If you're a psychotic person, that's fine. Maybe I shouldn't be sitting beside you. But if I did something to instigate it, then maybe that's my fault. And I think that's the attitude, right? Is to, and you're the type of person that that's how you would look at that. What did I do to piss that person off? Or what am I doing even in a room with some jackass like that? So that's the point. But someone else doesn't have that ability. Most people go, Well, you gotta. Some asshole hit me for no reason. But they do have the ability. They just have to realize that they do, right? Like people just, again, I don't have the ability. What did you just do? I don't, I don't, I don't. Yes, you fucking do. Just change it. Just say like, yes, I do have the ability. And I'm going to start right now. You know, it sounds cheesy. It sounds woo, but it's reality, man. And then he's the king of it. Like we talk every Thursday at 9 a.m. And he keeps me on my word. Like if some thing that's coming out of my mouth isn't consistent with my message, like I'm using the wrong words. He's the king of it. He said that, right? And I'm like, he pays attention to every word, man. I hate him sometimes. At the same time, I love it, right? Well, what's good for the, what is it? What is it? What's good for the ego is bad for the soul and vice versa. So did you, were you practicing things like yoga and meditation and mindfulness when you were competing at those levels? And if you didn't, how would they have helped by implementing them? When I started competing was 2005 and I started just because I wanted to get in shape. I got a pharmaceutical sales job and I wanted to get in shape. And I had no intention of ever being a professional bodybuilder. I love competing, but I never wanted to be a professional bodybuilder. I didn't think it was, I just didn't even think about it. So I didn't love competing, I love training. 2007, I started taking it more seriously because I won every show that I entered. And then I met this guy. And then we started this, I'd go see him weekly for therapy. So he was actually my osteopath. And then I would just turn into much more of a psychological session than it was ever physical session. And then we started talking about stuff like that. It's like, so basically every year that I was a bodybuilder after 2007, which is the entirety of my career, I started to be more mindful. And again, it's a journey, man. It's a journey, it has to be, right? Did you practice meditation then? I did, I started right away and I sucked at it like everybody else. And I sat there like, I can't do this shit. My mind just won't stop. And that's part of the reality. And but that's what meditation is. It's like, no, your mind is gonna talk. Cause we need to sell this to some of the bodybuilders listening right now. Cause sometimes you gotta do that. Sometimes you use to sell it to them so that they actually try it. What are some of the benefits you saw in your bodybuilding or your training from the meditation when you started implementing it? Nothing's hard. Everyone goes, man. That's huge. And everyone goes, dude, you're the hardest working guy I've ever seen. Nothing for me was hard. Cause I always realized someone out there was working harder and it's perception. So I always realized like, I would fucking bury guys in the gym. I would be doing two sets to everyone. And I'd stand with a smile on my face. And these guys like, fuck you trained so hard. I'm like, no, I don't man. Like bring in another training partner. And then I'll do what you do and what they do. And that sounds arrogant, but it's the reality. Like I did that when I was trying to, you know, really build muscle, but nothing ever seemed hard. And because I was always in control and I always realized that it's perception is everything, how you perceive an event is massive. So there's a Navy SEAL out there. There's a marathon where there's an ultra marathon. Like, you know, I touched James Lawrence and I did 50 marathons and 50 days and 50 states or triathlons. There's someone out there working harder, man. This is not hard. This is very short term, very acute. It's not the Tour de France. It's like 45 minutes or 70 minutes of like hell, but then it's over. You go eat, chill out, fucking, you know. So perception is massive. And I never felt like anything I did was hard. Cardio, no, do you have to do cardio? No, you get to do cardio. Like it's all like just changing your perception. That was the biggest thing. And meditation allowed me to kind of become aware of that, become aware of being present and realizing that perception controls your life. It's funny when you talk to a lot of pro athletes or you hear a lot of them talking, the real successful ones, they all point to that, the mental side of it. They all talk about that. It's the only reason that was successful. Almost none of them talk about the latest technique in training or, you know, of course at that level, everybody's training hard. Everybody's eating right. Is it given, right? It's the mental piece is what gives them the edge, but it's such a big part because think about it this way. If you're listening right now and you're struggling with your weight or with the way you look or struggling with your fitness or your performance, it's not the training and nutrition that's holding you back. Those are definitely the mechanisms that are holding you back, but what's holding back those mechanisms has to do with your mind. Has to do with your attitude. And that is what you should work on. So speaking to that, man, I'll also give you some more about that. But think about this. Your body, if your eyes are closed and you're subjected to two different stresses. So one of them is a punch in the face. Adam came over and gave me a punch in the nose. And the other one is I'm getting ready to get under a 600-pound squat. It's the same physiological response. Your body doesn't know the fucking difference. So until you learn how to control your response to stress, you don't stand a chance of building muscle because as soon as you get a stress response, what happens? Your body starts breaking down. Your body goes catabolic because it's releasing cortisol. So it's going to start mobilizing energy because it's fight or flight, right? You can't grow in fight or flight impossible. So you need to learn to... And that's a great point because it's not, you're asking your body to build tissue to adapt to weights or whatever. But what you're doing is you're actually telling your body I need to survive right now. So everything else is out the window. Your body doesn't care about building muscle. It just wants to survive right now which is not conducive to building muscle. And that's also why people who train who go, fuck, I hate training. I don't want to have to do this set. I'm so afraid of it. You don't stand a chance of building muscle. You have to enjoy the process. So if there's some work that you go in and you have a bit of anxiety about it, you don't want to do your cardio. And you're like, oh, I'm hoping I'm going to burn fat. It's, you don't stand a chance because as soon as you do that, you got a cortisol response and your body goes into protective mechanism, fight or flight, you cannot have the physiological response you're after. Wow. It's simple, right? Which it speaks more to what we talked about earlier with the way some of these bikini and bodybuilding guys and girls are prepping for these shows where it's just stress after stress after stress. And then like you said, praying to God after this third hour of cardio that it's going to, I'm going to wake up tomorrow and hope I'm a little leaner. And then add the mental aspect on top of the physical stress, right? Cause training stress is a stress but there's different types of stresses, right? You can get oxidative stress and get metabolic stress, you know, energetic stresses on the mitochondria but mental stress is the way you perceive that stress is different, right? Right. There's also a feedback. There's famous studies where people will have botox done on their frown lines. And what ends up happening is they're unable to frown because they've basically paralyzed the muscles that make them frown. So they get rid of the frown lines and they'll come back and report that they feel happier because now they can't frown as much. Now on the flip side, they also become less empathetic because they lose that ability. But it does point to, and there's lots of studies by the way that have been done differently that demonstrate this that what you do with your face and your body will feed how your mind perceives things and vice versa, how your mind perceives things. So if I'm thinking of like, you know, I need to fix my gut health so I need to take probiotics and eat healthy but I'm having all these horrible thoughts in my mind, that is gonna affect my gut just as much. And not only that, but my gut then affects my mind and it becomes this cycle. And so you have to, you can't tackle one piece. It'll never work. It's all or nothing. This is why holistic is everything. It's hilarious, but I'll say this quickly. Every time I get to the most shitty, stressful situation where I know I'm gonna be forced to grow, adapt or I'm not gonna succeed, I smile. The hardest workouts, the hardest business scenarios, the biggest fight with my whomever, I always just, man, I just smile because it's my opportunity to grow. And if you can learn that physiological response and see like, hey man, this is an obstacle, this is an opportunity for you to become a better man. God, it's such an enlightening feeling, man. It's like, oh, I'm in control of this. God's given me or whomever's given me an opportunity to grow. Excellent, excellent. Great conversation, gentlemen. Great having you on, man. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes Maps Anabolic, Maps Performance, and Maps Aesthetic. Nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support, and until next time, this is Mind Pump.