 I'm super excited to welcome Ollie Marchion on to the podcast, we're just going to give him a second to join. Hello. Yes. Are you in the gym? Of course I'm in the gym. Mate. I will live and die in the gym, Tim. I didn't know what you'd be wearing, so... I'm getting prepared, just why you're like warming up. Hang on a minute, I need to come down a bit. But I'm just like, you just tell me about yourself. Mate, to be honest, you're lucky I've just put a t-shirt on. Well, I do think that might be a problem on t-shirts. To be honest, I've just had a little workout, so I'm a little bit sweaty and a little bit more pumped than usual, mate, so... Right, Sunday's Sunday session for you, right? Exactly, mate. Sunday Gandhi. Right, let me just put some stuff in here so people know what's going on. So we've chatted a little bit before this, we'll give it a background. I've called this First Principles and Real Truths of Training. That's what I want to talk about. Ooh, nice. So, we're at Ollie. Here we go, we tag it in. Right, march on. Done. And we tag it, you know how it goes. Right, so for some of you guys who already know Ollie, we've done a podcast with him before. Ollie and I have gone back a little bit back to university days at the start of my S&C career and Ollie's started his S&C career to be fair. So, Ollie, tell the people a little bit about yourself and fluff it up a little bit. Give me the full beans, don't be humble, just lay it on. OK, so to move about myself, I mean, in modern day times I am a gym owner. So I own a gym called March On. We have a bricks and mortar gym and then we also have an online business as well. So we coach people across the world, really. We're in multiple countries and we do online coaching, online programming. And then we have, like I say, a gym where we do small group personal training and team-based training. Rewind a few years, I was an athlete of sorts. So I come from a rugby background, athletics background, played professionally for a couple of years. Rewind a bit further back from that. Being at university, got a degree, that's where I met Tim. So I started my strength conditioning journey under the supervision of Tim as my mentor. Well, it must be 10, 8, 9, 10. 12? Yeah, well, a long time ago. So over a decade ago, I started my journey into being, I guess, a coach as well as an athlete. I realised that athlete careers are short-lived in some cases. I'd gone to university off the back of an injury, which had put me outside like me for about 18 months. So yeah, I mean, I've kind of whizzed through that. I guess right now I'm a person of fitness. I am a coach. We also do coaches education through a company called the Professional Fitness Coach Association. So my passion just lies within still being an athlete of sorts, still training very much myself. Coaching is where I really find my flow state. I love coaching people and now looking to sort of pass on information and support and guidance to new coaches coming into the industry. I guess you did with me 10 years ago. That sort of led me to where I am today. So I think coaches need good supervision, good guidance, good mentorship when they first come into the industry. When I started 10 years ago or 10, 12 years ago, it was very different back then, as I know you know. Now there is people coming into the industry as coaches from the top level and the bottom level. And it's just this big melting pot of talent. Sometimes we just don't really know how to decide for our way and make the first steps towards what we're trying to achieve. So I was very fortunate that I think I got good guidance very early on. And I found my why quite early on and it's led me to where I am today. Hopefully that answers your question, mate, but we can dive into it in more detail. Hey, you forgot to mention about, like, Ruby 7's international cap. Well, I've done a load of podcasts over the last few months. And I found myself continually talking about my journey into it. And I don't know, I guess it's just been a little bit humble. Yeah, so I've represented my country. I've represented England at Ruby 7's for a couple of years. I've had multiple kind of stints as a professional athlete for, yeah, ending injury for a period of time with my crucial ligaments. That's when I went to university. And I knew that at that age I still wanted, I still had something to give the competitive athlete world. I still had the drive and the hunger and the passion. I'd got my degree so I decided to give it another go. It took a little while to get back to the level where I could make Ruby a full-time profession. And I managed to do it for a couple of years, I say, with England 7's. Got to about 26, 27 years old and then I realised that I was holding onto a dream for the wrong reasons. So I decided to turn my back on rugby and I've not really looked back since. Did it really enjoy watching it? Awesome. Don't think I'll ever go back to playing it. Better? Right, so that is the... There's been a lag on the time. The thing I think, probably my Jack's probably watching something on Amazon. So that's the serious Oli out of the way. So that's now we've got our background out. First principles and truths of training. So as a man who's been in the industry, Oli will come across as quite serious, very grounded, focused, disciplined, one of your key principles and consistency, which anyone who follows him will know about. What you maybe don't always see is Oli's lighter side. So I want to pull on some of that Oli. So what we're going to do is I've got a list of things, and these are real world examples, right? And I want you to debunk some fitness myths, the sorts of things that get put up on gym walls, on t-shirts, maybe on the occasional mug. We're going to go through a few and you can be as philosophical as you like or just as dismissive as you like. If you dismiss all of them, it's going to be a short interview. Alright, cool. We'll start off. I'm going to ease you into it. We're going off. Common fitness myths. So we're going back to first principles. No pain, no gain. Go. I think we need to acknowledge that we need to get a little bit uncomfortable in order for us to adapt and grow and get stronger, get fitter, whatever it may be. There's loads of cliches out there. So get comfortable being uncomfortable. But I think we understand the notion of aggressively overloading the body where we can challenge it, get ourselves, take ourselves that next level so that we can adapt. To that stimulus and recover and move forward. But I think the mentality of constantly driving that side of our system to constantly push and bang our head against a brick wall and not taking rest days and just not being aware of how hard we are training and just pinning all our hopes and dreams on each individual session rather than how that might fit together over a month or a period, a block of training over a year is a fool's mentality. And I think we probably all realise that at some stage through our training journey when we potentially get injured, get ill and we get sideline for a period of time. So what would you say to people that are like in pain regularly? If they're training with pain as a coach, how do you help them feel that? Because loads of people get into it all the time. I've got back pain, I've got shoulder pain and it's almost just like something you want to kind of wishing that one day is going to go away. But in my experience, unless you take some proactive action about it, pain just doesn't magically disappear unless you change what you're doing because you've got yourself into a situation causing pain in the first place, right? Yeah, completely. I think it just comes down to people's priorities. I think most people's priorities are that they want to be in as little pain as possible and making as much progress with their physique goals, their movement goals, their strength goals, whatever it may be. And that's hard on the list of priorities but they're not really willing to prioritise the things they need to do to be able to get that result. And that becomes recovery, taking rest days, working with a manual therapist, potentially going and seeing an osteopath every now and again. If we're constantly beating up the body through training and adding stress, how much time are we putting towards the mobility or the prep before the training session or a nice cool down? We know coming from a strength condition world when we work with athletes, we're really trying to harp on about the prehabilitation, a good cool down, good recovery protocols. But I think the modern-day participant in fitness, just a recreational athlete, time is quite finite and they don't really see the importance of those bits. So to answer the question, we need to recognise what is pain, just everyday pain, you know, coming from a rugby background as we have, we're going to have aches and pains. Even just working in iron to five, you're going to have aches and pains. We're going to have asymmetries. We're going to have sides that are tighter than the other and this is part and parcel of life. But if something's progressively getting more painful and then becomes a limiting factor to your quality of life, first and foremost, are you in daily pain just moving around, getting out of bed first thing in the morning? Then that's not a pain we really want to be just accepting. We need to reach out to a specialist, either read up on it and then we need to put things into action to try and improve that because training is a journey and injuries are only going to stop that journey or limit it for a period of time. And like we said, the last thing any of us want to do is take a week or two weeks or three weeks off the gym and worst still, the last thing we want to do is then go into, you know, have surgeries and be taking painkillers and all these things that we're bringing into the system that aren't necessary perhaps. Perfect. Right. I told you we could get philosophical. That was a bit more of a serious one because pain is no joking matter. Next one. Now, I'm interested in your take on this one because you've got both, right? So now you have to decide. So education is important, but big biceps is important, sir. Which one? Oh. You've got first degree in sports science. Yeah. You've got pair of biceps which are a bit smaller than mine, which is more important. Because we said that education is important and I agree with that, I'm going to say big biceps are important, sir, because they're both still important. Over the last 10 years, I think my biceps have done more for me than my first class Honours Degree has. There you go. Mate, that's a dangerous statement making today's fitness industry because there are loads of people going out. You're trying to start a business in education. You're just kind of hoping to go and get big biceps. What are you doing? One of the modules is on bicep curls, mate. Module 1. Yeah, exactly. We do that right before we do a corrective workout. Corrective assessments is the second module, big biceps is module 1. You can't actually join the course unless you've got 16-inch biceps, mate. Yeah, because your t-shirt's got fit well. Exactly. Right, let's carry on this theme. This is something that I've been in danger of saying over the years and as you get older, maybe our priorities change. Your body is your business card. How important is it? I think, again, without being too philosophical, the fitness industry has become very much about aesthetics and visual. And I think because there are a lot of people with a really good voice and a really good message to portray in different platforms in which they're using it. Unfortunately, the fitness industry has become a very visual thing for the consumer. So usually if someone looks the part and they're well presented, they have a good physique, people will listen to those people more. I know just from experience, again, just from experience growing my social media page when I first started, when I moved to LA after finishing rugby, back then it was about, if I can say this, it was about tits and abs and ass. And the females were bearing a lot of skin, the males were bearing a lot of skin, and that was how people would generate their social media following. But what you have to maintain is once people get through that bit and you've engaged them, there's got to be some substance there. So I think your body is your business card. I think in this day and age, as a coach, as a trainer, you have to be able to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. That doesn't mean you need to be ripped with veins and biceps and abs and all that kind of stuff, not at all. You just need to... I'm an extreme freak of a person. You just need to be... Yeah, you need to have experienced what you're coaching. Yeah, that's one of the biggest things about you. You go through S&C and stuff and we would always say to coaches coming through, if you don't love the gym, this isn't a career for you because you're going to have to go and try stuff because the value that that places on your ability to coach an athlete because you know a little bit. You don't have to squat as much as they do or bench as much as they do, but you need to know what it's like to go on a 1RM because you're about to ask them to do a 1RM. And I think that experience in the game of training yourself is massive important and you can probably coach to a reasonable level without being mad on fitness and training. But those coaches that really excel, I think that's the understanding of going, I've got to do this myself, whatever that might be. It might be that you're flipping brilliant marathon runners. It doesn't have to be gym based. Completely. I think you're right. Right, next one. This came from my yoga. One of the coaches who works as a yoga dude, she often gets said that people say that I'm not flexible enough to do yoga. Well, it's just that people say, I'm going to get fit before I come and get you as my personal trainer. Yeah. I think this comes down to people's inhibitions or just scared to get started. This barrier that people put up where they're scared to take the first step into the gym. They want to get fit before they go and get a trainer or they want to get fit before they get fitter. Same with yoga. They're scared to feel stupid, because I do yoga every now and again and there are some positions where I try and get into them. I remember actually when I did yoga consistently for a period of time, I used to go into this yoga studio and everyone was a good 10-15 years senior to me and be able to balance on their head, do all this crazy stuff and I was terrible and you do get quite self-conscious because you're grunting, you're panting, you're falling over. I think it's just a case of somehow getting a message across that just get in here, just get started. It's our job to meet you where you're currently at and help you progress. There is no minimum requirement of flexibility for yoga. Let's get started. I think it's that beginner's mentality that people have got to embrace that fact of being a beginner is actually a massive positive thing because it's there where the biggest changes are. It's the law of diminishing returns. If you've been doing yoga for 20 years, what are you going to get if you've been practicing consistently? Same with strength training. Getting an extra 1% on a 20-year career of lifting is going to be flipping hard but to go and get some gains at the beginning just open yourself and don't feel like I think it's people's fear of looking stupid or their own perception of self, like I'm going to look silly if I can't do it so we get the same thing if you're like on the workshop when I can do a handstand and we're like the point is to come to a workshop so we can teach you how to do a handstand and then your process and enjoyment of your training will tell a bit more about how the process is going to fit together. It links back to that very first question of being uncomfortable. I think with any endeavor in life you just have to have that air of just vulnerability willingly enter into that bit of discomfort and vulnerability and that's where growth happens in anything you're trying to do even if you're trying to have a conversation on a subject, politics that you don't really understand go and speak to someone that actually understands more than you and just absorb sit and listen rather than trying to actually have the conversation which is a bit like yoga just sit and absorb what the coach is trying to say to you. Get yourself into a different position, see how your body reacts to it and take that first step. Perfect, right next one No carbs up to six The funny thing is if people follow my stories I don't tend to eat much carbs after six but in the world of body composition energy balance just trying to manipulate your weight or your reduced body fat whatever it may be there's no real evidence to suggest that meal timing or macronutrient timing is that important when it comes to energy balance per se if we're looking at different nuances around circadian rhythms potentially quality of sleep impact more on physiology of the body at that sort of time then there may be a deeper argument but for most people when it comes to nutrition most people just try to look better naked, feel better about themselves and I think the answer here would be find a routine first and foremost with the nutrition that fits you best try and get in tune with hunger signals so when you are actually hungry I would prioritise carbohydrate more around training just because that's probably a better use of that macronutrient pre and post it becomes more important maybe later on in the day if we're going to get up early and do some sort of physical endeavour where we might have fasted through the evening through the night obviously then we're going to try and train early in the morning might be more important then but if we're looking at the context of weight manipulation body composition it's largely irrelevant what do you think about there's been a big rise in fitness we've been through a phase of more complex or dietary approaches nutrition approaches over the years they've come in fads and moved on and all simmered down calorie deficit for me personally we're missing a point because everyone's looking at that and you and I have talks about complexity before and the human body being a complex system for me it's not just as simple as a calorie deficit because the quality of what you're eating is still massively important and if we're eating rubbish you can't just put as long calories and create a deficit then I'm fine thoughts on that you make a brilliant point the nutrition industry over the last 18 months has really tried to meet the consumer where they're at everywhere all the research and everything is into obesity and how we can solve this obesity crisis how we can help people lose weight so all of the research and all this evidence based information that's coming out is geared towards that and it sort of moved away from how we maybe view nutrition as more performance based and how can we actually optimise our health and our performance and there are some practitioners who are now trying to marry the two up they're actually great information at March on it is very much aligned with that but you're talking to someone in myself that spent post rugby the best part of four years monitoring, tracking weighing my fitness power I was a my fitness power whiz understanding calories it was not necessarily from a calorie deficit point of view but just to understand energy balance the laws of thermodynamics, macronutrients what worked what didn't having now not done any of that for the best part of two or more than that three years I've had more success with my training both strength, physique performance, health just mindset around nutrition as well from getting rid of all of that and just getting in tune with what are my hunger signals like how am I feeling, how did I react to that particular food creating routine I think the nutrition industry is the one that's sort of the fastest moving right now and as new things come in and new things get researched and studied everything sort of changes fad diets or the different diets that have come into it they all built around one thing to try and sell it to someone and that sort of like sexy clickbait title but really what it comes down to is just understanding macronutrients how best how to use them what each of them may do when you ingest them into the body and that deep level of understanding is really important and understanding of calories from an energy balance standpoint is important but once you've got that information it's then how do you move on because we can't spend our life if we're going to do a calorie deficit and the goal here is fat loss let's get into a dedicated period of a calorie deficit let's lose that weight and then let's move on I think the problem is for 12 months of the year people sort of like are continually trying to diet and there's that diet culture because they never really spend a dedicated time actually doing it but let's spend six weeks, eight weeks, whatever may be diet down and then let's move on to the next bit whether it's you know build some strength building you know build back some calories so that we can actually perform better I think what's interesting and what you'd be pointing out comes down to education for me we've got so much information available to us and what happens if people are going to go and snip it all the time because we've tried to put out more detailed information on Instagram before on social or education kind of content and there's some formats that work with that and there's some formats that don't work as well like Twitter is a great example right I tried to get a bit more engaged in Twitter but I was going to and I was watching it and I was like all of this stuff lacks context because it's a 280 characters or whatever it is you can do someone's making a throwaway statement and you want to go back and reply but you can't because you don't understand you actually if you understand that there is context behind every statement that people are making then it's really difficult to jump in on that and I think that's what people are getting just lots of different sources of information without actually understanding the first principles as you said underneath it and I think if people just if they're serious about their training they should educate themselves about that as a researcher as a hobby it's something you become invested in rather than something that you just do to get what you deem as being out and just grab and stuff because people just get confused and it's they jump around all over the place this is something you spoke about before of like just train like program hop in from one to another to another and then all of a sudden you just you don't really know where you should be or what you should be doing yeah I think anyone that's had any success in the fitness industry they've bought into something they've bought into and they've actually followed it through for a period of time and I would say to the whoever is consuming or taking this information from all these different places most of the people you're probably following have all the information the successful brands or businesses have all that information for you so just just follow them and listen to what they're saying it's fine to consume other people's content if I come to the school of calisthenics to learn how to handstand and to improve my calisthenics and then you obviously offer yoga and I know if I tapped into your mind about nutrition I'd get everything I need to know from you from you so if I was doing that I would just buy into the school of calisthenics and everything that comes with it because you look at you and Jaco not only you ninjas when it comes to calisthenics but you both have very aspirational physiques and that comes from not only calisthenics not only nutrition but then also how you view lifestyle in general your recovery, your sleep and all these things that actually fit together and what people need to take into consideration when they're trying to get to I need to look better, feel better about myself look better naked whatever it may be it's the whole package it's the whole school of calisthenics package it's the whole, whoever it is that you're following so there's no point coming to you guys I'll come to you guys to look at my handstand and I'm going to go to someone else to try and get the nutrition we're constantly having attention pooled all over the place and I think that's where the problem lies and then once we've got the information it's actually applying it because that's the hard bit, that's the bit again where we have to become vulnerable, uncomfortable and actually apply it and put some effort into it and without the effort without the effort there's no learning and I think that's people's problem we don't really want to learn anymore in life we kind of do, I'm getting philosophical now but we go to school we go to university we do whatever learning we need to do say that next rung in the ladder of what's important maybe career progression whatever it may be but other than that we don't want to learn when it comes to a training program and how best to carry out that training program when it comes to nutrition and how to formulate our nutrition protocol when it comes to how best to sleep and recover we don't want to learn any of that stuff we just want to be spoon fitted you tell me what to do, I'll do it and we move on and I think that requires better results and I think that's where people need to get to without making training and nutrition take over your life because not everyone is a fitness professional but if it is that important to you and you spent the last three, four, five years yoyo dieting, not getting to where you're trying to get spending loads of money and effort on things and sort of not getting anywhere maybe it's time to change your mindset and how you engage in it do you think people's like concept and time around this sort of stuff are a bit warped because our experience I want to do handstand push ups free standing, perfect I want to do a muscle up and I think a lot of people will look at that and it's like 2-3 weeks 2-3 weeks of strength work from where you're at now and the same principle applies for myself I'm thinking 3 months of strength work you've just gone and done a 200kg deadlift the building up towards that has been a significant period of time but focus on strength and the basics of being consistent not for one training cycle of 3-4 weeks but for 4-5 training cycles to build up over time is that consistent across nutrition, training everything that we're talking about yeah 100% because there is always it's like doing your first pull up so you do your first pull up and then you get your chin above the bar so I've done a pull up if the context of the pull up was go from straight arms to bent arms with the chin above the bar now let's change the parameters we'll move the goalpost a little bit further forward so now can we hollow body from a complete dead hang to not just the chin above the bar but can we get our chest to the bar and now we're building strength but we change what the pull up is it's the same with nutrition it's the same with sleep, whatever it may be there's always a next step to take we can always improve our wind down routine we can always improve our training program and I think that's the beauty of fitness or just life is that it's so pure and you can always get better at it to take the reference of the 200kg deadlift I've been training from 32 this year I've been training the best part of probably 15-16 years I was making great progress coming off the back of rugby I was big, I was strong and then I went into some endurance based sport so it's been a four year journey to get to a 200kg deadlift and I've not gone near a one rep max on a deadlift I'll probably maybe go near it once a year so the goal was to improve my one RM but I actually go near that one RM once a year because there's so much ground work to put in to try and get there and it's not just the deadlift, it's the accessory work and improving my posterior chain improving my trunk stability so I can actually take the volume through my back because I've had multiple injuries so again, success leaves clues if you look at my experiences your experiences, how much skin in the game we've put into this it's deliberate practice every day or four, five, six times a week whatever it may be, year on year we accept people can't put that amount of time in but if we just scale it back a little bit because you're not trying to necessarily look at an act like I, myself or you, but if we're trying to aspire to get somewhere near that put the same sort of principles in place nice this is a genuine question or quote that came through from one of our other coaches that I asked around this and this is a client that he works with I can't obviously mention names for this just follow along as I explain how this goes down and then just give me this like off the top first response is if I train upper body, then I'm going to get heavier which means my legs are going to work harder and therefore I don't need to train legs that's a real science, right? that's quite a clever way to look at it something you've adopted you think or not I think I've been adopting that for my car for the last 16 years and let me tell you it's not works, yeah let's brush that one aside, it doesn't work although that's said I'm a firm believer in this I need to be a little bit careful how I say this but I think there is a correlation between kids who are quite heavy at a young age and significant car development and again I've not studied it and I'm putting this out of the air but when I look at some of the people that I know have strong car development they've often been potentially I'm not saying over but fixed set at a young age maybe maybe but maybe there's some logic I guess that's kind of my excuse for having small car and then like I say over the last 16 years having done a lot of upper body training and these little pins had to carry it around they've not grown but like cars is one of those things isn't it like a big car will often be seen on people who are not that fast if you look at basketball players it's not got huge cars but there will be the bounciest in the game what's Leo like is Leo a heavy well set young man or is he a it's hard to tell really of late we haven't really seen him compared to other kids because obviously the current environment so I've not really got any reference point to work it out yeah I think he's I think he's very very average to be honest I mean genetically my family aren't particularly big people both high and physically so yeah we'll wait and see how he progresses the good thing about this is we can do a longitudinal study like Jack my little boy I think he's fairly like his grandfather on the South African side is like a well short stocky kind of quite well set and I think it's a little bit of him in Jack so within 10 years time we'll take a circumference measurement of the gastroc and see how he's doing right I've got a couple more and then I want to talk about your training a little bit lifting weight makes women bulky nonsense how many times have you heard that though yeah and I can see why people why females might draw the parallels with that because for the sort of females that I think say that when they first looked at the picture of someone that lifts weights in print media or on social media they do look they do look potentially bulky and lifting weights was usually reserved for bodybuilders and people that wanted to build muscle and be bulky but then when you dive in deeper into the sort of terminology and the words which they use you know I want to be stronger I want to be more defined I want to be more toned we can only do that if we actually stimulate a muscle so you're going to need to lift some weights but getting bulky we've addressed the nutrition piece down to pounding the weights but also eating too much food yeah but CrossFit hasn't done that dogma many favors has it if you look at the female high-end female competitors but I think where people forget around that one is that it's the form of the exercise the volume that it's doing the intensity that they're doing the frequency that they're doing are way way higher than most people who are worried about walking up a little bit by going to the gym and you exactly hit the nail on the head there if you think about the amount of muscular contractions that those athletes put out daily, monthly, yearly it's obscene those sort of athletes are training three, four, five times a day and I think the difficulty here in terms of like trying to relate this to us is if you take someone like a Matt Fraser and I think if you take someone like a Usain Bolt they are on the same level when it comes to like how good they are we would never if I'm a runner or a sprinter I would never even like compare my physique or my running to Usain Bolt because we just like he's obscene but because I'm a person because people are people of fitness Matt Fraser he lifts weights or he does the same exercise as I do if I just do a bit more I might look like that like no way you will never ever ever ever get to that sort of level and it's the same with the females like you see a female CrossFit athlete and they are 10x what I am as an athlete so they are a million miles away from what the everyday two to three times a week four times a week female gym goer will ever achieve so don't worry about that lift some weights last one and then what I do this on and I've got a few questions for you just about training in general your training that sort of thing if anybody who's watching has got any sort of like any miss or they've got the reggae t-shirt that says something or this up on the wall in their gym like you can go ahead and ask questions type into the chat box and we'll see if anybody else has got any cliches or fitness dogma that we need to just kind of address and deal with so my last one and I've got I've got a flipper coil in this one this one made me laugh more so I'm going to go with it Sweat is your fat crying is that a physiological thing or not I've seen it in a textbook again it's a load of nonsense I do like it I mean that's the thing with all the now fitness apparels become so popular particularly like athleisurewear and females love it whether they're going to the gym or not all these cool slogans have sort of come into it and it just makes a lot of hardness of fitness and training and that sort of stuff so I do appreciate all that stuff but you just need to be a little bit careful what you're reading the only one that I was tossing up between was that and Sweat is weakness leaving the body leaving the body it's brilliant isn't it as long as someone's not using that it's like their real motivational piece and actually trying to be too serious about it yeah alright we've left a few questions coming and we've got some sort of fire we'll get another 10 minutes or so and then we'll maybe just get a few people asking to see what questions are coming through you've got a very it looks like you've got a very complete approach to training your fitness your business and your brand is built around train everything so you're ready for anything what's missing from your fitness or from your training because it's very very difficult for people to do all the things all the time consistently and even I think that's where some people will find it a bit overwhelming that there's all this stuff I'm supposed to do how do you get to a point where you can do more and then also what's missing from your training is somebody who's got a pretty complete setup yeah so I think first thing I'm going back to the CrossFit athletes or my experience or how I came into the industry I'm very lucky that I have multiple muscular contractions and training phases that I've been through in programs that I've committed to over the years that I have a very big base so I've moved weights and done different modalities of fitness whether it's sprint base work, plyometrics, endurance base work, lifting weights power lifting exercises that sort of stuff I've done loads of it over the years so I have a really big base so it means I can be a little bit more generalised now that I'm a little bit older and a little bit further down my training journey also because the reason why I engage in fitness is for more just being a bit more of a generalist right now because I'm not a competitive athlete anymore if I was then I would need to be a little bit more specific around whatever the sport it was that I was trying to go into potentially something like a fitness event where I'd come unstuck then and what's missing is potentially better gymnastics I've got good body weight skills when it comes to that body weight strength but like gymnastics I'm not that great at and Olympic lifting because I've never, although I can coach it and we used to do it when we worked in synthetic conditioning and I can do it to an acceptable level I would probably fall apart in competition and I don't really have the top end numbers because the juice isn't worth the squeeze for me in terms of how much time I need to put into it so does that answer the questions or was there a third part to it? What's lacking is there anything that you wish you could do more of that you think would actually make a difference because you're right, I don't do Olympic lifting very often I occasionally just drop in do some cleans or something just to keep the movement pattern fresh but for a number of different reasons that we don't want to bore people with now it's not something which is a major part of a training program but there's always kind of things where you're like I should probably do more of that but these things which are potentially of more value to where you're at and moving yourself forward is there anything you wish I could have more time or I'd probably sometimes get distracted by other work and that takes me away from something else which I know is of that um not no there is there probably is something here and it's probably more around this if my goal was really to build strength which it has been to get that 200 kilo deadlift and it's been a four year journey it didn't need to take that long so I probably get because I'm a bit of a generalist and I like different bits and pieces and I probably see someone going this morning I've ran a 10k first thing this morning but then tomorrow I've got heavy front squats so if I really wanted to take my front squat and take my strength training that seriously I probably shouldn't run a 10k this morning but for one reason I've again won bore people things I saw about you know in London it was going on yesterday and just time just to sort of compute what's going on with the world and go and do something that is a little bit different and it doesn't really take much um I don't need to be too aware of what I'm doing in that time and I can just go and be mindful in another way I went and did a run so I probably because I'm such a big consumer of fitness and just sort of this generalist I probably end up just doing a little bit too much sometimes I can facilitate it and I can recover from it and I can still have good quality sessions but for that reason I probably limit myself being able to get to these milestones in terms of my strength that little bit sooner cool all right let's go down to a few questions that just come in a real simple one that I go through does more reps equal more definition uh so if we look at sort of hypertrophy as being one element of trying to build muscle um because definition is probably going to come from having a bigger more prominent muscle and then having less fat around that muscle so more reps if we're talking in concepts and concept from going from maybe like the sort of one to six rep range moving towards more hypertrophy six, eight, 12, 15 potentially even a little bit higher than that when we go into metabolic pump work that's combined with trying to reduce body fat which is going to come from a calorie deficit for people who are a little bit further down their journey or if you're very new to it you can actually produce body fat and gain some muscle as a novice lifter then you're going to look more defined and more toned and of course the more we can raise our metabolic rate through exercise it's probably going to come from more repetitions because we're working hard at that again, confinement nutrition will help you look more defined it's a better use of training time if the goal is to define muscle yeah and touching on that point about complexity as well it's not necessarily just one factor there's going to be a number of different things that you have to bring into play would you say a body type e.g. endomorph comes into account when trying to build muscle Joe, back when I was sort of like really on the ground with what was the latest research and everything like that I was really into sort of maths types and that sort of stuff I don't know where it's currently at now I think genetics are predisposed to probably hold muscle and our frame be built in different ways but really when it comes to building muscle the thing that probably holds a lot of people back is the fact that they're not engaging in a progressive training program so they're not trying to progressively overload their body and lift weight seriously enough and two, again, they're not addressing the nutrition and the recovery side of things in order to simulate growth I think if people just dive into a little bit of detail about what they're actually consuming consistently, not on the days in which they're consciously trying to consume more food but what about the days when just the everyday things, so on average how much are we actually consuming are we hitting adequate protein because we know that's going to be very important for muscle growth in a progressive strength training program we know that's very important for trying to build muscle and in totality are we consuming enough food Nice I think with that one is if people can get a little bit hung up sometimes on what's my body type and it's important that you've got a recognition of it but ultimately the benefit or the value is in finding out how you're going to respond to training and that goes back to your previous point about trying lots of different types of training be a student of your own training and see what works take a periodized approach to it and then you're going to have a recipe and there's some interesting stuff we did a podcast recently about hypertrophy and some of the research that Brad Schoenfeld has done around just volume often they're saying that low responders to hypertrophy work just need more volume in the training program it's been shown it works in cardiovascular training or endurance type training so if you're doing this idea three sets of ten will work for somebody but it might not work for everybody so you might want to go and try six sets of ten and see what happens but you won't know until you know until you go and try it and then you get into things about well rest periods intensity volumes and that sort of stuff but I think it's just become a student of your own craft isn't it really yeah and I think if we look at the best people in the industry at building muscle i.e. bodybuilders they'll always have like a training log they'll always have their training program and then monitor how many sets of reps did they do for chest over that week and how can we then progressive overload is something that I think people get a little bit caught up on more work into the system so by tracking these things and not just going to the gym like we said pitting all our hopes and dreams in that one training session so now I'm just going to bang out a bit of chest and the next day it's going to be whatever it is and then it's actually following through with the training program tracking and monitoring and being a student of your own body and your own training and then learning and then progressing some things will work, some things don't and things take time yeah right a couple more and then we'll start off we've got the guys at redlight rising who have been a very kind to sponsor our podcast recently they also sponsor in the podcast live event today so a massive shout out to redlight rising you can go and find those guys on social you just type in at redlight rising you're going to see what they're all about the benefits of redlight therapy and they say hi Olly do you focus on time and attention during your programming especially to stimulate growth time and attention again so if we are looking I've kind of moved away from worrying too much about tempos and things like that in my own training but for people who do come to us that are looking to build movement competency first and foremost because positional work in tempos help people just get a little bit more kinesthetic awareness of where their body is in space and how they're moving and they're also you know more time under tension is a way to progressively overload the body rather than chucking on more weight and things onto the bar so it's just a training tool that is definitely important particularly when we're trying to jump in particularly when someone is a bit newer into training particularly when someone is trying to build some hypertrophy and muscle growth into the system it's important last couple of quick fire ones any standard books you'd recommend for fitness or nutrition education nutrition stuff I think starting with precision nutrition I think is really good so John Berardi stuff I think that's sort of like a good entry level nutrition course and then the Mac nutrition stuff I think is brilliant it's something that our nutritionist that March on she's just graduated through MNU I think that's really good again they're sort of at the forefront of evidence based research for nutrition so I think that's brilliant and then I think John Berardi he's got a book out called game changes at the moment that's brilliant a lot of the work I'm doing as you know reading around is the breathing stuff you've got Patrick on I think a little bit later today is he on later 2 o'clock yeah so again I've come under fire a little bit of late of people saying where's the evidence and where's the studies and where's the research into this but Oxford Advantage I think is a brilliant book I think breathing is a really low hanging fruit it's worth exploring more than anything else even if you don't really buy into it it's worth looking for that 1% or 5% or that next thing that I can maybe improve my performance or even just how the way I operate in everyday life breathing something I've never really I hadn't really looked into until maybe two years ago and over the last sort of eight months I've really dialed into and it's making a big change in my life so I'll give it a go one of the things that I think is relevant around that is that everyone's quick to kind of go show them the research and that's important don't get me wrong we obviously got to match that with the fact that we're doing stuff in the gym and fitness moves forward training moves forward because people are testing stuff and the research is actually slow to get to a point where there's enough sort of noise around it for the academics and the researchers to go and actually study it and create a study to publish it like maybe we had that in Paralympic sport all the time we were doing stuff that we had no evidence based because we had to because there was no it was too slow it doesn't fit in the traditional model of doing a scientific paper because you've not got a big enough population size so it doesn't mean you can't do it but it just means that there's some type of lag between actually what you've been doing like phone rolling was one like everyone's phone rolling then now there's loads of studies you can go and read about it but it was being done to with some decent effect for a long time so it was frustrating when people showed me evidence I'm like well if we only have a base on evidence we're never moving forward so you've got to have some people that are out there pushing the field a little bit it's always going to be based off a particular bias as well so it would be one study one thing and then the other person's bias will be able to find a study that shows the other and like you said right now particularly in breathing I think sample size is a bit of a limitation I think the fact that it's uncomfortable and it's unconventional and it's hard for people to do that's why people don't take it on but it's it's been very beneficial in what I've been doing recently Alright guys I'm so sorry to every of us who ask questions but we're running out of time because we are going to get Tony Riddle natural lifestyle is hitting on two o'clock I need to get ready to change the scenery get ready to go and do some ground-based movements so thank you to everybody who's asked questions sorry to get to answer them all I'm sure only gets pepper with DMs but if you want to drop them a question or follow anything through to us afterwards then feel free to do that as always we could chat for probably a good few hours and post lockdown we're doing that I'm going to come down and see the gym and have a little bit of a chew on and I need to hit you about something else so I'm going to send you a message later on probably today or tomorrow just an idea for today Oh mate before you go so this might have crashed my audio last time but what I wanted to do is walk out music for everybody so I've picked a track for everybody that I'm interviewing today specifically right so I've got one for you but I didn't want to play it at the beginning because it might have bodged the audio because I had a few problems before so I'm going to play you your music now and just sign you off and you can see if you like it you ready yeah great tune love it mate actually I've got one last question before I go at what point do you get to where you can refer to yourself as a fitness and a third person how have you made to do that are you the rock I don't know I always I do stupid things and they seem to just catch on well I think after you've got two good initials that sound good together OM it's kind of ridical it's got a rhyme to it FW I now I actually call other people I call other people that have two initials that fit well together that as well I call one guy just TK MB yeah it's just kind of worked anyway you keep doing your thing mate I love it cheers Tim thank you for joining us see you guys bye bye