Brandon DaCruz: Bridging Hypertrophy & Health | ETP#110

[Aaron Straker]: 0:30

One thing guys before you hop in when you're not speaking if you can just like mute yourself so that we don't have things coming over over top

[Brandon DaCruz]: 0:36

Sounds good.

[Aaron Straker]: 0:40

What's up guys, happy Tuesday. Welcome back to another episode of Eat, Train, Prosper. Today on the podcast, we have back for the third time, I believe, Mr.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 0:48

Yeah.

[Aaron Straker]: 0:49

Brandon D'Cruz. Going back to the first days of the podcast, I know Brandon was our first repeat guest. He may have been our very first guest as well, if I can remember correctly, but we're super stoked to have him back on. And today we are talking about something that Brian and I have been kind of hinting towards and in skirting around kind of shadowy language about in a little bit, really just on like health span. And some of our questions that we've kind of had on air, off air around bridging, you know, our love of gains with our love of wanting to be healthy for a really, really long time as well. And then some of our potential concerns around some of the decisions of our period spent in bulking and, you know, really, really pushing that mTOR pathway and those sorts of things. And could that have been or can that maybe be detrimental for us? us in the future. So we wanted to bring Brandon on just to have an open honest conversation about it. As always, before we jump into the topic, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates, please?

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:51

Yeah, yeah, we were joking off air about how we need to keep these short because we have a big topic today and I know Brandon and I both are talkers. So, so, so I will do my best here. I know we didn't even have an episode last week. So diving right into this thing, we drove back from San Diego a little over a week ago now. And it was a great drive. We stopped in Yuma, which was just a stop. happened there and then we actually had a really great trip the rest of the way through Sedona and Moab. I've been to Moab a bunch in Utah never been to Sedona so that was incredibly beautiful we were only there for 30 hours but I really didn't want to go back to Sedona and get some more some more biking and hiking and stuff like that and because it was it was really just epic if you ever guys ever get a chance to go there do that. One of the weird kind of things that happened to me around that time. A day before we started driving back, I started getting low-grade headaches and this is not like I don't get headaches. I don't get headaches. I don't get stomach aches. For whatever reason, I just have like a metal head and a solid stomach and these things just don't usually bother me. But these headaches persisted for eight or nine days and to the point that I started wondering if there was like something wrong with me and I would like headache. I'd deal with it all day long until it just got worse and then finally I'd take some ibuprofen at like 4 p.m. so that I could kind of wind down and go to sleep at night and then I'd wake up again with another headache. And I couldn't really figure it out. I didn't know what it was. I had a couple underlying assumptions but luckily as of yesterday it seems like it's turned. Yesterday it was like actually two days ago it turned. I think it was about 50% and then this morning I woke up without a headache. So I don't know if anyone has experiences with weird low-grade headaches that just persist for over a week I'd be curious you know what potentially was the cause of that in case you know it comes back but mostly I'm just really thankful right now that that it seems to be on the tail end of this thing. Moving on my my body weight has been a point of interest between Aaron and I because as we talked about Decided not to track food and not weigh myself a single time for the six weeks that I was out of town I left for San Diego at 194.8 that was my last weigh-in and then I returned from San Diego and my body weight was 195.0 the day that I returned the next day it dropped to 193.2 So I'm thinking that there must have been kind of just holding on to some water from like a four-day road trip and just kind of the distress of being on the road and in my bed and you know, meals eating out and all that stuff. But body weight's exactly where I want it to be right now in the like 193, 194 range because I have my DEXA coming up on Thursday which is gonna be two days from now. It will have already happened when this podcast released, when this podcast releases. And the reason I'm doing the DEXA is twofold. One is to see whether my one arm training experiment my right arm after training only my left arm for six months. So that's kind of purpose number one of the DEXA. And purpose number two is that right around the same time I started doing this one-arm training experiment I also started ramping up all my cardio. And I am just dying to know if with my body weight consistent still in that 193-194 range where it was when I did the five hours of true cardio a week. If that has had any kind of mitigating impact on the amount of muscle I have, and this is one of the things I was going to talk to Brandon about on the show, so we'll table this, but I do have a question about this as well that hopefully I remember to bring up. So that's coming up and then obviously the end of the one-arm training experiment where I will be doing measurements, the DEXA scan, as well as some strength testing left arm to right And then my final update is that it feels really really good to be back in my home gym. There was really one machine that I missed from the commercial gym. The leg curl, seated leg curl was phenomenal, but my home leg curl is almost as good and all the other machines that I have there are better in my opinion. So training has been great the last few days being home. And then yesterday I had the privilege and honor of being invited up to N1. to train with Cass and learn some of the new stuff that they've been working on on the pullarounds and kind of the the shifting of the positions of the arm. So very very subtle changes in some ways and and a little bit more dramatic I think when it comes to the iliac region where they're kind of going up into scapular elevation and reaching across a little bit more. So I know he's planning upcoming weeks. He recorded maybe 20 minutes of kind of teaching when I was there, kind of explaining to me all about the different regions and the new information that they have on it. And so I'm really excited to share all that but I don't want to jump the gun and do it before CAS has a chance to drop all that for everybody. I want to make sure that you know the proper information is out there before my interpretation of it is out there. So I'm just gonna leave it cool work out there yesterday and we can pass it on to Brandon for updates from here.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 7:58

All right, guys. Well, first and foremost, I wanna thank you guys for having me back on. It has always been a pleasure talking with you guys, being on podcasts, and just going back and forth on a lot of like-minded topics. And I think that a lot of the things that we've spoken about over the years, we have a common interest in, and it's really good that right now, for the audience to know, we're on three different time zones, and we're able to connect, and this is the beauty of the internet, the podcast space, and especially, I'm real big into deep intellectual conversations, and I know you guys are too. We like this long-form content. opportunity to be drawn to each other and be able to engage with each other. So first and foremost, thanks for having me on. But in terms of my last week, it's been good. I spent pretty much the last week deloading as I got in like six months or six weeks rather into my mesocycle and I started noticing like my sleep was disrupted. My resting heart rate was increasing and climbing and my body was just starting to feel worn down and these are for me, my classic signs that I need to deload. It's never like, I'm going to be honest with you guys, I've been training a long time as have you guys. It's either psychological or usually it's like these physiological indicators that a lot of people don't track. So I'm seeing some of my autonomic markers. I'm seeing that I'm more in this shifted sympathetic state. And so I just wrapped it up Sunday. I restarted on MesoCycle yesterday. And then besides that, just been focusing on client work. One of the major things, I don't know if we've discussed this, but especially since last time we were on a podcast together a few years ago, I had left the corporate world. So, you know, I spent 14 years in the supplement industry. full time in conjunction with nutrition coaching and I've went full time as of this past summer. So, you know, really just my whole focus and especially when I get a deload week, I don't know about you guys, but a lot of times people are looking at a deload as like, hey, I'm gonna really relax and I am from a body perspective. But anytime that I'm taking a little bit, a step back from training, I'm always ramping up my workload. So the last week was pretty much just, you know, really focusing on onboarding new clients, you know, cause I'd recently reopened my coaching roster. So I just spend my week kind of focused on that consultations as well as just really getting into the depths of training programming. But besides that, I'll keep it short. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

[Aaron Straker]: 10:08

Before, man, I feel like there's so much I want to talk to Brandon about.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 10:12

Yeah.

[Aaron Straker]: 10:12

I want to at least briefly cover the transition into coaching full time. Cause it's something that I'll be, you know, super transparent just from a purely my own personal, um, curiosity. I had wondered why you had held on for so long because of like your capabilities as a coach and I know that you're, you were more than capable of, you know, running a full-time roster sort of thing. So I'd love to dig into that a little bit. If

[Brandon DaCruz]: 10:35

Absolutely.

[Aaron Straker]: 10:35

we can. Um, I will keep my updates very, very brief. one. It's been like Brian mentioned two weeks since we got together. I in I guess two weeks ago just about wrapped up the first cohort of my online coaching upgrade project that I'm in with Jackson Piaz and it was really really cool. We opted to have kind of the end of the course is like a two-hour call with Jackson and myself and we opted to kind of set it up as like a production and I was super, super nervous about it and everything went really, really well. Amazing questions. We ended up going over by damn near 40 minutes because there was just so many good questions. And more so than that was just like, whenever you're starting a new business or whatever, there's always that like, well the first thing is like, what if no one buys it, right? That's always the first thing. Did I just spend all this time for nothing? The second one is then immediately when we did sell it, we sold out in 30 hours. and I was like, holy fuck, I hope it's good enough, right? And everyone was super, super stoked and appreciative on it. So that was like a big relief on myself. I'm definitely like a, am I ever gonna be good enough sort of persona? So that was like a very nice relief of like, we hit the mark. This is super, super valuable. Everyone was very, very happy about it. So I'm super, super pumped about that. And then the second class, very very soon. So probably by the time this episode is out there will be details out about it. But that's

[Bryan Boorstein]: 12:13

Very

[Aaron Straker]: 12:13

it

[Bryan Boorstein]: 12:13

cool.

[Aaron Straker]: 12:14

for me.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 12:14

That's awesome, dude. Yeah, it looked very professional

[Brandon DaCruz]: 12:16

you

[Bryan Boorstein]: 12:16

when I saw this setup and everything.

[Aaron Straker]: 12:19

Yeah, that was cool. Okay, so moving on quickly, here's what I think we should do. Let's cover the few remaining questions that were left over from last week. We'll dive into Brandon transitioning into the online space full time, and then dive into the topic. You guys good with that?

[Bryan Boorstein]: 12:35

Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 12:36

Sounds good.

[Aaron Straker]: 12:37

Perfect. So the first question we have is the true effect of alcohol on your gains. Who wants to take it first? guest, please.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 12:49

If you guys don't mind, this is something that, you know, honestly, I think this is a great topic first and foremost because this is something within our industry that has been minimized especially with evidence-based industry because a lot of times, these topics come back to energy balance. So, a lot of times, we'll hear people or we'll even see coaches that will promote the idea that as long as the calories and alcohol are tracked, then you're fine. And from an energy balance perspective, that is true, but I think it really when it comes to consuming alcohol, there are so much more to be taken into consideration than just the energy density of this liquid calorie that you're consuming. And if you look at like the whole body of the literature on alcohol consumption, this is stuff that I've personally done deep dives into because I do have clients that want to drink, but they also they're trying to blend that that model between what's optimal for their their gains or for their goals and then what's practical and what's applicable for their lifestyle. And so when we really look at the literature there's really not all that that's good about you know when we're really looking purely at alcohol consumption and protein synthesis, we see reductions in anabolic hormones, especially for men. Actually, men are more susceptible to the hormonal perturbations, the negative downstream hormonal effects of alcohol than females, which is quite interesting. We see increases in catabolic hormones. And then even if we just think about it from a lifestyle perspective, what are these downstream effects besides just the post-absorptive window of consuming alcohol? We see diminished sleep quality. We see reductions in inhibition. It's not just you taking in those calories then. It's like what food choices, what dietary decisions, how does it skew your choices in the hours after that? It also, if we think about it from like, you know, you go out drinking the night before and we were all in college, I was in a fraternity. I know Brian, I've heard you talk about this. Like back in the day, we were able to go out, get hammered and then train the next day. And I'll tell you, I've been sober for 10 years at this point. So this has not been something that's been in my life for an extended period of time. However, I'll tell you that even though I was able to do that, my training performance were still impacted. lacked recovery, I still felt trashed. And I see that with the clients that I work with on my own. And so we're seeing impacts on recovery. We see that it's inflammatory to the gut. So if anyone's going through a GI health protocol, a digestive reset, something like that, we obviously want to steer away from that. And obviously that's away from the muscle gain perspective, but these are all downstream effects on things that will ultimately impact body composition, muscle gain, training performance, and recovery. So really when it comes down to it, I'm not trying to to make this like an, you know, it's all one thing or another. Like you have to avoid alcohol. But what I would say is the choice comes down to the individual. But I think of gaining muscle is your goal. That's a primary priority for you. Then if you're going to drink alcohol, just do it in moderation and be aware of the effects it has. Don't like put your head in the sand. We do this with a lot of topics within this industry where we don't want to know about something or we don't want to know the negative impacts that one of our decisions may make on us. So we kind of bury our heads in the sand and we don't look into it.

[Aaron Straker]: 15:48

Yeah, the the ignorance is bliss thing is huge. I mean, there's things that not to really derail us, but there's things I wish I didn't know, because it changes how I approach things on, you know, pretty much the topic of today, to be completely honest. Brian, do you have anything on the back end of that? I really kind of don't, to be

[Bryan Boorstein]: 16:08

Yeah,

[Aaron Straker]: 16:08

honest.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 16:08

I don't have a ton to add. I was going to actually reference what Brandon said about how when I was in college, I could literally drink 15 beers four nights a week

[Brandon DaCruz]: 16:15

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE

[Bryan Boorstein]: 16:15

and go train and make gains. And it was amazing. So I really just kind of relate that back to my overall ability to recover was so much higher that I could get away with these things. And as you get older, your ability to recover just isn't the same. You have stress, you have a family, you have a job, you have all resources and so you just have less of it. And then the other thing is it's disruptive quality on sleep and so it's unfortunate that when people drink it's almost always at night because my personal preference has always been day drinking anyways. Like even all the way back in college I'd much rather drink from noon to 4 and then go home and eat dinner and go to sleep early where the alcohol is like you know beginning its route out of my system than to be the go to sleep because you're drunk, you just like pass out and you wake up and you're hung over. So it's very, it's two different approaches to drinking and they're both bad in many ways, but I think the earlier timeframe of drinking probably has less negative impact on the results if that's the route you want to take.

[Aaron Straker]: 17:26

Definitely. Okay, this one I feel like we can each kind of take one pillar and we'll cover it that way. Where to start if you have no clue about all the options methods of getting healthy, like analysis paralysis sort of thing.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 17:43

You want to start it Brandon? You're on mute. You're on mute.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 17:51

All right, got to get used to that. Not used to meeting myself because I talk so much. But

[Bryan Boorstein]: 17:54

Hehehe

[Brandon DaCruz]: 17:54

since

[Bryan Boorstein]: 17:54

Hehehe

[Brandon DaCruz]: 17:55

I'm first up at bat at this, I'm going to take full advantage. And I'm going to say, seeing as we're on a podcast right now, I think honestly, one of the best places to go, if you have no clue about where to get started, would be to consume a podcast like yours, like Eat, Train, Prosper. Even I have a podcast now called Chasing Clarity. And these are great options to get long-form content that like on my own show, I always say, I'm trying to bridge the gap between research and information and then practical application. So these are abilities or and get information. But if we're really looking at like how to get healthy, I think another great resource, I'm really into books, but we have to really scale things to our abilities as well as what our experience levels are. But I think a great like introductory book would be, let me think of the name, it's by RP Strength. I think it's called Understanding Healthy Eating and it was by Dr. Mike Isretel and the RP Strength crew. And that's a great resource, especially like an introductory course to healthy eating principles and to really optimizing some things, especially when you're started and you're not, you don't have a program in place, you don't have the habits and the behaviors that someone that's much more experienced already has.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 18:59

Yeah, no, it's great. I think that's a really great place to start. I was gonna take it maybe from a slightly more practical perspective and just say, if you can lift weights twice a week for 30 minutes and you can get some cardio two or three times a week for 30 minutes and just kind of try to move generally, get some steps in throughout the day, try not to be sedentary, try to prioritize getting probably more protein than you're currently getting then getting more fruits and vegetables than you've been getting are probably good places to start and then to kind of continue that journey through. I love everything that Brandon said too.

[Aaron Straker]: 19:42

Yeah, the I I was gonna take the the practical kind of action item standpoint and the two things that kind of came to my mind Find a way to get sweaty in a manner that you enjoy, right? And I think something when we say like oh go do cardio People like go out and run, you know, and I'm not trying to bash running But I would say like of the clients, you know that that I on board are like, ah, well, I'm running and I'm like Do you want to be running and they're like no, I fucking hate it I'm like then that's not run right because if you hate it, it's always a means to an end

[Bryan Boorstein]: 20:11

Yeah.

[Aaron Straker]: 20:11

Like find a way to get sweaty in an activity that you can enjoy, right? That may eventually transition into lifting weights, but it might just be like an adult basketball league or something for now. Like just start somewhere. And then second on the diet thing, start adding things in before trying to remove things. Because something that you probably don't realize is your palette will shift as your food quality shifts. If you try and go from just eating like fast food all the time to you're probably going to be miserable. But like let's start with the low-hanging fruit, you know, ironically, add in some fruit that you like, right? Start like add it in three times per day, pick like the three fruits that you like, start there for like a week or two, then add something else in, then maybe reduce the fast food from five times a week to three times a week or whatever. Like make small iterative changes that don't jackknife your life so that you can actually stick to it and start and the things that you enjoy doing will slowly begin to change as well. Cool,

[Brandon DaCruz]: 21:19

Absolut.

[Aaron Straker]: 21:19

we good there? Fantastic. All right, let's move on to this last one. This is a good question. This, we'll have to cover it shortly, but it's a big one. SIBO and bodybuilding, any advice or solutions?

[Brandon DaCruz]: 21:35

All right, so I guess I'll take this one first. Really when it comes to small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which is essentially a condition of dysbiosis where we're seeing a lot more opportunistic or bad bacteria in your small intestine, I think one of the best interventions that I could think of, we obviously have to get a diagnosis for it, but I'd potentially recommend looking into like a low FODMAP diet to eliminate one of the potential root causes of the issue because a lot of people have what are called FODMAP intolerances. So essentially, these are fermentable carbohydrates that can often exacerbate a lot of the, like if you guys are familiar with SIBO, a lot of what we see is distension, excessive bloating, things of that sort, you know, it's a gastrointestinal dysbiotic condition. And so, a lot of these fermentable carbohydrates that in someone with a healthy, you know, gut microbiome is not going to cause any issues, you know, fermentable carbohydrates are going to be a root cause or going to be something that exacerbates the symptoms. I'm not going to give, I can't give general recommendations on this, but really if you look in the SIBO protocols or you look at ways to eliminate or I guess kill off some of that bacteria, there's a kill phase. And so that would be utilizing things like killers or antimicrobials. But this is really person specific. It's based on

[Bryan Boorstein]: 22:52

you

[Brandon DaCruz]: 22:52

what type of SIBO that you have, what type of like methane gas that's producing that. One thing I will suggest though, because this is something I've often heard other people promote and I've seen people utilize when they're dealing with some of particularly SIBO is I would avoid initially prebiotics and probiotics. I see a lot of people just throw like they I came from the supplement industry so I used to see a lot of this and so they'll just throw like supplements into the equation but a lot of times what that's going to do is you're going to actually feed a lot of that bacteria and you could be feeding or essentially causing more overgrowth of that opportunistic bacteria that we want to eliminate through the killer so it's almost like you're taking two steps forward with these killers with these First, you know, there's four-hour protocols, five-hour protocols that you guys can look into and I would really suggest working with a qualified, whether it be coach or clinician, to really get to the root cause of this because it is something that is prominent especially within females that compete. I've seen that quite frequently and it is something that's going to limit your digestive capacity, your absorption, how you feel. I mean obviously even towards the cosmetic aspect, if you ever look at someone that has SIBO, it's a very noticeable protrusion. It almost looks like someone's pregnant to be honest with you. You will ñ Iím saying like you obviously have to get some type of testing done. However, you often ñ the symptomology that is unique to SIBO is something that a qualified coach or an experienced coach will be able to spot out.

[Aaron Straker]: 24:18

That last part that you said is spot on, right? When you speak with someone who's aware, it is blatantly, blatantly obvious. The only thing that I will kind of add on the back of that is, in specifics to the question, is SIBO and bodybuilding. You pretty much need to put your bodybuilding pursuits on the back burner while you address the SIBO, or it will show up at the worst of times and completely derail a prep or something like that. especially by the nature of the name, bodybuilding, we need more food, we need a hypercaloric standpoint. You take that hypercaloric status in with SIBO and it's a recipe for disaster. Things will get much worse. Unfortunately, you need to take a detour, get your SIBO addressed, have everything in a much better state and then transition back. Like Brandon said, reach out to a qualified coach, right? You should be able to ask them lots of good questions and understanding best of luck there. Okay, sick. Thank you guys for inputs on the questions. Now,

[Brandon DaCruz]: 25:28

you

[Aaron Straker]: 25:29

Brian, are you good with covering Brandon's transition a little bit before we dive in? All

[Bryan Boorstein]: 25:33

Yeah, yeah, of course.

[Aaron Straker]: 25:34

right, we'll keep this one short. So, Brandon, I kind of framed this one up before the questions. What took you so long to make the jump, my friend?

[Brandon DaCruz]: 25:42

It's both a personal question and then also there was a lot of logistics behind it. However, I was in the supplement industry for 14 years. This was a very large passion of mine. This is how I got started into the industry from a professional standpoint. I worked within the corporate aspect and I had – I'm going to be honest with you, I started coaching 10 years ago but at that time the only people that I knew that were making a living out of this was Lane Norton, Shelby Starnes and a few other individuals. Everyone else had another job. And so I initially got into it because I was passionate about coaching. At that time, we weren't charging a lot. My first year of clients, I was charging$50 a month. This was just side cash for me. And I had a full-time corporate position to really finance the things that I wanted as well as my lifestyle and my family and things of that sort. And so really, I just got into that mindset. I looked at my corporate profession as what was going to pay my bills and what was going to keep me financially secure. And then coaching was always a passion. And I'll tell you, at one point when I was doing both roles, I even got up to like 50 little bit overwhelmed so I pulled back a little bit. But I had a conversation and it actually comes from two different individuals which I have an immense amount of respect for. First was John Meadows and then second was Jason Theobold. And so I asked them. They both came from corporate professional backgrounds. And so at a seminar in around 2014, I went out to train with John as well. It was a two-part seminar essentially. So he did an educational seminar and then we did a practical in the gym. And I asked him, my personal question to him was he had just left the banking industry. JP Morgan Chase, I believe. And I asked him, when did you decide? When was it enough? I work corporate job. This is something I'm passionate about. Now, mind you, this is two years into coaching, so I'm nowhere near where I was able to leave. But he waited until he hit a certain financial goal. And for him personally, it was to be able to pay off his mortgage. That was a big thing that was weighing over him. And his landmark goal was $200,000. And so once he made that, he had that in the bank. He took it out of the bank and he went and paid off his mortgage and then put in 30 days notice to the bank and essentially left his corporate career and went full-time coaching. So that was early on and that was a great idea. And then the second person is a good friend of mine that I've spoken at seminars with. He's a mentor of mine, Jason Theobald. And I asked him because he came from a, he was a lawyer, an attorney. And so I asked him, Jay, like when did you decide to leave? And he only left maybe four or five years ago from the corporate world. And he told me when what I was making from coaching on the side of being an attorney what I was doing within my corporate background, my corporate career. And so that was really one of the impetuses. I set that as a goal and I exceeded that last year. And I'm very fortunate to be able to say that because I had a career which was very financially stable. And also I had already reached that at the beginning of last year. And so the beginning of 2023, however, I stayed in it another six months, not only to give my employer, who I have immense amount of respect for and we had been together for years, the time to be able to fill that position. But also I'll tell you, to be honest with you, a little of uncertainty because I'm used to making a certain amount per week, per month. It was always secure and stable. And I'm sure you guys can relate to this or anyone else that is in the coaching industry. It's not always stable. It is, they fluctuate month to month. Clients might fall off. They might come back on. There are times that even within the course of the year, like, you know, I mean, we go into the holidays, we see a drop off in clientele or people, you know, sign ups or even leads. And so from my perspective, given my background, I've been supporting two households for a number of years. So my pre-COVID, I've taken over my mother's mortgage and all their expenses. And so, and also, you know, his medical expenses from being, you know, he was in a very bad state for a long period of time. And so I had not only myself to think about, like, and I really say this from, if it was just me, I would have left years ago, but it wasn't just me. And I had to make the conscious decision and the responsible decision to provide for my family first and foremost. So even though I really had more of a passion, I was starting to lose the passion for supplementation and for that industry, especially since COVID, we're looking at raw material prices increasing. We're seeing freight forwarding prices increasing. I'm getting really long overlays where I couldn't get product and really couldn't serve a lot of my accounts. It really came down to putting my family first and putting some of my aspirations last. And so I always go back to this dichotomy between wants and needs. And I always say, like even my clients, so like I'm gonna give you what you want, but I'm also gonna give you what you need. So I'm the type of coach that I'm not just gonna sugar coat things. I'm not going to just, if you wanna go into a fat loss phase, a physiologically good position to do so, I'm not gonna put you in that. And you guys know this, this is one of my mottos behind my coaching. And it's a healthy body is a responsive body. And so if a client is not in a physical or mental position to go into a dieting phase, that's not what they need right now. We need to work on all the background habits. We need to work on their psychology. We need to work on the relationship with food. We need to feed them up potentially. And so really I take the same, like how I do anything is how I do everything. And that's really what it was somewhat hesitation, is also providing and being able to say like, I'm gonna walk away from this career that I've put my all into for 14 years to pursue my ultimate passion, but I wanna make sure that I'm in a good enough position to be able to do so. Aaron, I can't hear you.

[Aaron Straker]: 31:01

Sorry, I was muted. What you said there with the family, that's the reason right there, right?

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:05

Hmm?

[Aaron Straker]: 31:06

So I was like, because from my standpoint, I'm like, I know, I obviously is very, very good, very knowledgeable, we've had a ton of conversation. It seemed strange to me, but what you said, like, hey, I support, you know, my mother and

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:16

So, thank you for watching.

[Aaron Straker]: 31:16

I'm a second mortgage as well. That's the answer. And that's a very, very, very respectable thing right there. But I'm very glad that you were in a position now to make the jump and things have been hopefully as good as I know they can be space.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:32

Absolutely. And I appreciate that, my man. I will say that it has been the best decision that I ever made. And what's funny about that is one of my close friends, Jeff Black, he's my cohost on Chasing Clarity. He was telling me for years, he's a friend and a mentor to me, especially from a business standpoint, for years to get out. And the week that I left, obviously that was, I was leaving something that I poured my all into. You think about like when you left your IT job, or, you know, Brian, when you left the gym, like these are things you've given your all into. And so it is, you know,

[Aaron Straker]: 31:59

I don't

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:59

it's

[Aaron Straker]: 31:59

know

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:59

kind

[Aaron Straker]: 31:59

if I

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:59

of

[Aaron Straker]: 31:59

could

[Brandon DaCruz]: 31:59

like,

[Aaron Straker]: 32:00

say that.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 32:00

you know, sweet to say the least, at least with what I did. And so when I left, I, at first, you know, I was really nervous about it. And obviously there's all these different feelings that come along with it, but it is without a shadow of a doubt, the best business and career decision that I've ever made because I, my goal in life is to be able to learn more so I could serve more. And this has been allowed me to direct my focus towards that because I will tell you the biggest bottleneck in my career, my coaching career, at least my business for the last nine years, previous to that was the fact that I, a lot of times I had to turn I just didn't have the accessibility. I didn't have the time. And I wouldn't, like I said, how I do anything is how I do everything. I'm never gonna give someone less than my best. And there was times that, like I said, I had gotten up to 50 clients working as a full-time corporate job and I had to scale back because it just wasn't sustainable or realistic. And I wanted to give everyone the service that I know that I'm capable of providing.

[Aaron Straker]: 32:54

Yeah, yeah, I feel that there's a... I will not say that I felt the same leaving my software job by any stretch of the imagination, but it's different means to an end for sure there. Cool, anything on the backend of that, Brian, before we move into the health span?

[Bryan Boorstein]: 33:13

No, I think it's really interesting. Yeah, I definitely had some more bittersweet feelings like Randian was talking about, I think, leaving the gym since that was something that was ours and we started from scratch. And

[Aaron Straker]: 33:25

Yeah.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 33:26

I also didn't know what I was gonna do next. Like it seems like both of you guys, you stayed in your careers until you had the other stuff like really set where you could make that leap. And so I did that moving from corporate to owning the gym, but moving from owning the gym going online was almost a more scary transition for me just because the gym ended somewhat abruptly and I didn't really have a plan for what to do after that. So yeah, very interesting stuff. Cool. Well, when we jump into this next topic, just to really quick introduce kind of maybe one viewpoint of a way to take it, would be you can look at this impact of the impact And I think it can come from a few primary directions. It can come from the cardio and the training side and its impact on health span. It can come from the nutrition side and its impact. And then there's obviously all the lifestyle components that go into it like sleep and stress and stuff like that. And so what I think would be a really cool place to start if you guys are down is to on concurrent training in the last five or six years? Are you comfortable with that, Brian or Brandon? Um, or yeah. Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 34:49

Yeah, you know,

[Bryan Boorstein]: 34:50

Okay.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 34:50

maybe I could start broadly with how I look at health spin because it might differentiate from what you guys do. So maybe define that and then a hundred percent go into some concurrent training and really looking at the relationship between resistance training and aerobic training and whether the interference

[Bryan Boorstein]: 35:04

here.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 35:05

effect is all that it's been made out to be because I think we're going to agree on that matter that it was often extrapolated in the past. And so really when I see, you know, we're talking about a lot of topics so this is a really broad-based topic but I really see muscle and movement almost as medicine. I like to kind of you like express this as hypertrophy training is a vehicle for building metabolically active tissue, increasing strength, improving function, and then improving lifespan. And I know that we had discussed this a little bit offline, but I'm far more focused on like health span and focused on improving the quality of the years that we have on this earth than I am on purely extending life by any means necessary. So there is this dichotomy between health span and lifespan, and oftentimes it's or in longevity as well where it's often thrown in one pile. And I don't believe, I think we have to tease it out a little bit more. So to me, health span is multifactorial. So it's gonna be, it's gonna include physical health, including your muscle mass, your strength, your function. Metabolic health, so that's gonna include cardiovascular fitness, aerobic capacity. And for me, something I really focus heavily on is blood sugar management. And then also cognitive health. So that's gonna include optimal brain function, focus, cognition, things of that sort. So based on what I've seen in the literature and what I've done myself throughout the, I've been training 17 years at this point, these past 10 years, I think the best way to improve health span is essentially through engaging in both resistance and aerobic training. So resistance training to build muscle, aerobic training to improve aerobic fitness. And then on the back end of that, you guys know I'm a big fan of steps. So if anyone hasn't heard on energy flux, we did a whole podcast on this about two years ago, but I'm really into consistently moving that muscle on a frequent basis to maintain a high level of physical activity, which will thus improve metabolic health, especially from a blood glucose management and insulin sensitivity perspective. And another reason I'm really into this and I like to speak about this often is we really want to help offset the many health downsides that we see from today's modern sedentary lifestyle. And I think it's just from my perspective so the audience understands this. I kind of come more from like a muscle-centric and a glucocentric perspective as these are the areas that I'm the two areas that I'm most interested in and that I've worked with most. So I kind of see the lens that I look to improve health is going to be more from like resistance training and physical activity. And Brian, I've listened to you on a few other podcasts. right now how your perspective is, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, is you're really leveraging resistance training. So we're right on key with that, but then also aerobic training. Like you're doing specific cardio training. So your perspective is a little bit more in that regard. But I think there's going to be a lot of things that we're going to be able to agree upon, go back and forth on, and then really be able to come to what is the best blend of both. Because we could chase optimal all day, but if it's not practical,

[Bryan Boorstein]: 37:41

Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 37:43

it's not sustainable, or it's not applicable, it doesn't – it's not going to matter for anyone that's listening to this podcast. But I think there's a lot of things that can discuss topics like concurrent training, like the benefits of muscle mass, things of that sort, that are really going to be able to benefit the audience and also even stroke our own intellectual curiosity. Because that's a lot of times why we do these podcasts. We like exchanging ideas. We like going back and forth on topics and really hearing what someone else that I respect or that we respect, their perspective or their point of view.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 38:12

Yeah, no, that's really well said. I'm glad that you kind of walked it back a step there to talk about your perspective on healthspan. I think as you were talking, I think the one area maybe where I diverged slightly is in healthspan and lifespan kind of meeting at this point where I want to be like this kick-ass 85-year-old grandpa that can still like run around with his kids and like do whatever, depending on how healthy you are throughout the course. And so it's not just about optimizing my health in this decade or the next decade, but it's about continuing to be as healthy as possible as lifespan continues, if that makes sense.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 38:58

No, 100%. And

[Bryan Boorstein]: 38:59

And so yeah,

[Brandon DaCruz]: 38:59

I'm

[Bryan Boorstein]: 39:00

yeah,

[Brandon DaCruz]: 39:00

in alignment

[Bryan Boorstein]: 39:00

good.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 39:00

with that.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 39:02

Yeah. So I'm basically starting with the cardio piece. That's why I mentioned concurrent training going as much as turning 40 and this desire to extend my life in a healthy way and all this stuff. Like the research on concurrent training was the big thing, the light bulb in my head where I was like, okay, so cardio was this mitigating factor on building muscle and strength and like you really wanted to avoid that because it's catabolic and there's going to be a muscle fiber conversion potentially. We can get into that later. Um, but now it seems that the research on corner a little bit. So if you want to delve into that at all.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 39:45

Absolutely. So I think this has been one of the most fascinating topics because I know you guys originally came, especially Brian, you came from a CrossFit background. So you did CrossFit competitively. So I think you might have been more in line with some aerobic training than I was because I came from a bodybuilding perspective. I competed 15 times over six years. And at that time, it was like people used to literally wear shirts that said, you know, Cardi, no, or no cardio crew or like, you know, the F cardio crew. I won't curse on your podcast. But, you know, that was the sentiment essentially that these were polar opposite things. really came back from mechanistic data, which showed that cardio activates AMK, you know, resistant training activates mTOR, and they're antagonistic to each other essentially. But if we really look, and it's really interesting because the research has evolved so much and there's been so much research done on the topic of concurrent training just within the last few years. So these are things that we could dive into. But, you know, one of the most recent meta-analysis that I've read on this topic was by Schumann et al. I believe it came out last year and they looked at the effects of concurrent training where someone training and its impact on muscle growth and strength. And what they found essentially was that concurrent aerobic and resistant training does not compromise either muscle hypertrophy or maximal strength development even when compared to just resistant training on its own. So essentially what that means for us in this audience is that you can add in aerobic training and you're going to be able to get the same gains both in muscle as well as strength development as you would if you just did resistance training by itself. Now the one thing that is impaired, and we do see this in countless... across countless bodies of, the countless body of the literature essentially, is that it will diminish peak power output. But unless you're really doing like weight, like Olympic weightlifting, it's something that's really not going to be applicable to us. But then I think we gotta tease out because that's just talking about cardio in general. We really have to tease out, you know, low intensity, steady state cardio, and then hit cardio, because these are two different ends of the spectrum for aerobic training essentially. And there was another recent meta-analysis that found there was a difference in muscle growth that included both resistance and aerobic training. However, these were minimal. It was like very minimal decrements in muscle gain, but it was only shown when they combined HIIT training with resistance training. And that found that effect was not found in lower intensity forms of steady state cardio. So we see that, you know, when it's higher intensity, it could have, you know, diminishments in recovery capacity. We see a much higher elevations in cortisol, so catabolic hormones, essentially. It's also going to deplete more of our energy substrate. You're burning more calories within that session. So just from anyone that's done it, believe me, I came from the bodybuilding era. So we used to do HIIT like it was going out of style. And I'll tell you, any preps that I included HIIT, I felt trashed. Like it was just, it was impeding my ability to train legs effectively. I felt, you know, especially in a dieting scenario, it was something that I'm glad that we've gotten away from that. I remember Lane Norton was huge on it. Eric Helms was huge on it. All these guys that I'm, I was following coming up as a competitive bodybuilder, they were all promoting that this was better for muscle growth or better for muscle retention rather. Let me clear that up. deficit, so we're not really building muscle. However, we've seen that the tides have turned on that. But then if we actually look at like, let's see, we see in the literature on meta-analytic data that there isn't this interference effect anymore between resistant training and at least lower intensity aerobic training. However, now we see that there's many beneficial adaptations that come with aerobic training. And some of those we're going to see increases in mitochondrial density. We're going to see increases in capillary density in muscle tissue. And all these things are going to allow for better nutrient better blood flow, and all these other aerobic fitness increases which are going to help with recovery capacity. And there was just a recent study which is really interesting. It came out of Stu Phillips' lab and they looked at or they found that short-term aerobic conditioning prior to resistance training increased subjects hypertrophic response. So essentially what they did was they looked at taking healthy young men and women and they had them do a six-week aerobic training intervention done via unilateral cycling. So only one leg got this intervention. each subject was able to act as their own control. And so on one leg, they had them do three 45 minute moderate intensity sessions per week. And then after the six week aerobic training intervention, they had them engage in a 10 week bilateral, so both legs, lower body resistance training program. So now that one leg that had been trained aerobically was now being compared to one leg that did not get those aerobic benefits or did not get that aerobic training. And what they found was the leg that did both aerobic and resistance training increased type one muscle fibers, whereas the leg that only did resistant training on its own only increased type 2 fiber size, so essentially fast switch fibers. And so, in the leg that did both, essentially it experienced more growth and they also saw different downstream effects. So, they saw better satellite cell content, they saw better aerobic capacity within it, better mitochondrial density. So, there's all these downstream effects which extrapolated over the time course. You don't want your aerobic fitness to be a limiter on your hypertrophy or on your training. intervention, but we also see that it could be, it's not taking away like we used to think, but it might be additive. And that's what I find really interesting about this topic and about concurrent training because we've really shifted the paradigm on it.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 44:58

Yeah, no, it's super interesting. I have some things to say, but Aaron, you want to jump in real quick? All

[Aaron Straker]: 45:03

No, take it away Brian.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:04

right, cool. Yeah, so I think that study specifically is really interesting. Do you remember if that was done on trained or untrained?

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:13

it was on untrained individuals. So we

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:15

That's

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:15

do

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:15

what

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:15

have to

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:15

I

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:15

put

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:15

thought.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:15

the caveat

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:16

Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:16

of that. So they're gonna be more responsive. But remember, when we do within subject studies where they're utilizing like these unilateral designs, that person is their own control. They're getting the same nutritional intervention. They're getting the same sleep. And so we just

[Bryan Boorstein]: 45:28

Bye.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 45:29

see a better response to that. And so what I kind of take away from that, I always, you know, it's one, you know, study. We can't extrapolate everything out to that. What we can say is that if this has, you know, affects mechanistically as well as in, you know, actually tangible research, like they're actually seeing it in the lab, they're seeing it in their performance, that it might not be as drastic for someone like you or I or Aaron, who we have years of experience, but it could be beneficial if, like I said before, if aerobic conditioning is your limiter, because I'll tell you, I've worked with a lot of very hyper-muscular individuals, competitive bodybuilders, and they're the guy that they can't do a 20 rep set of hack squats without dying, like literally dying in between sets. And they, you know, we obviously know that you don't have to take short rest intervals. That's not going to benefit hypertrophy. minutes on a compound set like a hack squat would be ideal. However, if cardio respiratory fitness is your limiting factor and you can't even get to the point of fatigue, you can't even go to failure because your aerobic fitness is that limiter, I would dispute or I would argue that it's going to limit your ultimate hypertrophy potential because your fitness is that bottleneck. And really how I look at everything within the context of coaching is I need to look at a client's bottleneck first and foremost. So from a nutritional intervention perspective, They're emotionally eating. That might be their limiter. We got to work on that before we work on any other body composition goals. If someone comes to me in a state of insulin resistance, that's their bottleneck, limiting their health potential or being able to optimize a lot of things from a metabolic health perspective. We're going to tackle that first. And if someone comes to me and they have shit aerobic fitness and that's their limiter, they can't do... They're having the inability to recover between sets, between workouts. They're not able to utilize maybe higher frequency training or they're really capped on the amount of weekly volume that they could do. Here's one thing, it's not about just titrating up volume. However, if it's not that your body is non-responsive to higher volume, it's that your recovery or your aerobic fitness is limiting your ability to do the volume you may need to do to continue to see gains, that's an issue.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 47:29

Yeah. So you touched on a number of things that I was gonna touch on too in the prior stanza where you kind of talked about mitochondrial function and density and stuff like that. And so from my understanding, and I don't know how well versed you are in this, but most of those changes, or at least they're optimized in the state of doing like a zone two type training, meaning that heart rate is gonna be somewhere between that like 65, 70, maybe 75% max sustained for, you know, 45 to 60 minutes. And so that's been the main route of cardio that I've been pursuing recently. And that leads me into kind of my next question, which is if you have any thoughts, I don't know if there's even any research on this, but just maybe your personal thoughts on how doing that type of cardio may differ in its impact on your sleep, your quality of life, your training, uh, adaptations, uh, that compared So some person is like, hey, I'm doing 15,000 tech 12 to 15,000 steps a day. Like I'm really

[Brandon DaCruz]: 48:35

Thanks for watching.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 48:35

moving a lot. And then somebody else is like, hey, I'm just going to, you know, get five to 6,000 steps a day, just moving around daily life, not think about it too much, but I'm going to hit my four or five times a week zone two for 45 to 60 minutes on a bike or something like that. Um, do you think that there's a, a tangible difference between someone doing this via steps, just walking at a really low intensity versus upping that intensity? know a zoner too.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 49:02

I do think from an efficiency perspective, I think you can get more benefits from a shorter amount. So say we're looking at a daily step count and someone is titrating

[Bryan Boorstein]: 49:12

you

[Brandon DaCruz]: 49:12

up to 10, let's go 10,000 to 12,000 steps per day and they bring that back down. So they're doing that daily. That's seven days a week. That is their target of, you know, that's their average of 11,000 steps per day. And then they cut that back and they decided to say two to three zone two cardio sessions. going to be able to build better mitochondrial density. They may be able to optimize some of their blood markers a little bit more, some of them a little bit more efficiently meeting in a shorter period of time. I think they, because we have to think about it from like the body, you know, our entire system from a physiological perspective is meant for adaptations and our steps going to push adaptations to cardiovascular, cardiovascular adaptations as much as zone two. They're not, they're at a lower intensity. However, I think there's, there's two sides of this equation. So I think cardio, you know, and I do like this out because I have clients do intentional cardio and then I also have them do steps. So I'm trying to hit, I like a multimodal type of approach to a lot of these things. I believe that if we're able to get, say there's eight slices on the pie and you know, maybe I shouldn't have one with eight, but say like nutrition, resistance training, steps and cardio, the four slices of pie rather. And I want them to get all of them instead of just, you know, if they have the time, they have the interest and they have the ability to do so. And so I'm trying to take every approach to optimize what their goal is within the of lifestyle. And so the only thing that I see oftentimes, I think cardio has a really great place when someone has the interest to do it, the ability to do it, and they'll consistently do it because adaptations take time to cement. And although cardio interventions, say a Zoom2 cardio, will elicit those adaptations quicker, if the person is inconsistent with it because they don't like cardio, they're not going to get those. And I could probably get those utilizing steps a little bit in a longer format. They're still going to get a lot of those aerobic capacity benefits. They're going to see increases in mitochondrial density, things of that sort, increases in capillary density. They're going to get the nutrient delivery perspective. They're definitely going to get the metabolic health perspective. I mean, without a shadow of a doubt, from a blood glucose and insulin sensitivity perspective, post-medical walks are one of the best interventions that we have for regulating blood glucose because really what we see, even in lower intensity activities, even steps, just the movement of muscle causes an increase in non-insulin mediated glucose uptake. to the edge of the surface and they're pulling in glucose without the need for insulin. So automatically that's lowering our insulin demand or our insulin need to transport glucose. And now mind you, glucose, our muscle is the site for 80 plus percent of glucose disposal. And so if we could do that in a non-insulin mediated fashion, we're going to lower our insulin demand. So a lot of times

[Bryan Boorstein]: 51:49

Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 51:49

what I notice with clients of mine that do utilize a lot of steps, they have low fasting insulin levels because their body doesn't need to overly secrete insulin. However, there's a multi-pronged benefit from an insulin sensitivity perspective to higher So this applies to resistant training as well. It not only improves that non-insulin mediated action of glucose transporters, it also increases insulin action. So it makes your insulin more effective at transporting and in delivering and essentially sequestering that glucose into cells. And so we're getting both non-insulin and insulin mediated glucose uptake increased. And so when it comes to the cardio, I do think there's great interventions. I would like to use a mix of both. However, you know, what I really, from my coaching perspective, and now mind you, I probably work with people that are much different than the people that you work with. I work with a lot of former competitors. So

[Bryan Boorstein]: 52:38

Thanks for watching!

[Brandon DaCruz]: 52:39

what I see a lot of times in my own experience is they're doing a sufficient amount of resistance training, and I'm sure all the clients we get are really engaged in resistance training, but these are usually cardio bunnies. So they're doing cardio sessions. However, they're not nearly active enough the rest of their day. So basically what we'd refer to them is like an active couch potato, and they don't even realize that. And so what we have to realize is even for those of us who resistance train regularly if we aren't active outside of those formal training sessions or formal training times, we can experience decrements in our metabolic health and fitness. And there's something called exercise resistance. And this applies to those that do resistance training and cardio. So, you know, we have to realize that our time spent training and doing formal sessions of exercise, and our time spent being sedentary, send separate signals to the body. And they have different effects on our health, which cannot be made up just by lifting alone or just by formal cardio literature, but even if we just look at like population level data, the average American pre-COVID was doing 5,100 steps per day. So that's their baseline. We actually see that number starting to decrease, especially since the pandemic. But then there's also literature that looks into this. And there was a study, I believe it was by Atkins et al. And what they did was they essentially looked at different states of activity levels. And they looked at how low levels of activity induced resistance to the metabolic effects of training, which exercise resistance. So, what essentially researchers did was they took men and women and put them in a four-day trial where they maintained a high level of sedentary-ness. And then what they would have them do is at the end of each of those sessions or those days, they would have them do a one-hour session of moderate intensity, you know, aerobics training. So, they did a cardio session. However, then at the end of this intervention, so four days of being sedentary with that cardio session at the end of the day, they would give them a high fat and high carb tolerance test to test the effects or the differences in metabolic because what they did was they split up the group. And one group did that exercise intervention at the end of the day, and the other group just stayed sedentary. And what they found was there was no significant differences in metabolic responses between groups, and that an hour of exercise after a prolonged period of sitting did not improve glucose, insulin, or fat

[Bryan Boorstein]: 54:48

Mm.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 54:48

metabolism. So what we really see is that prolonged sitting, or even if you're doing exercise, start and end of your day, if you're not active throughout the course of the day, and really the best way to judge activity, honestly, that we have that's accessible to all of us is steps.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 55:01

Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 55:01

enough of that and they're really diminished. I would say a baseline percentage, I would probably go with 8,500 steps because there is other research that looks at different levels. So you noticed or you named 5,000 to 6,000 steps, we actually have literature that looks at that amount. And so there was a study, I believe it's by Bern et al. And they looked at low, medium, and normal step counts. And normal was considered 8,500 steps per day. And the medium was around 5,000 to 6,000 steps and low was 2,500 steps. And what they found was just two days of lowered step counts, so going in either low or the medium had a diminishment in plasma fat levels and their fat burning ability. So essentially lowered metabolic flexibility, their ability to switch between substrates. And

[Bryan Boorstein]: 55:41

Thanks for watching!

[Brandon DaCruz]: 55:41

so that's going to impact our nutrient partitioning, how we metabolize our food, and how we utilize substrates. And so I think a blend of both, like if we really had to choose, it's really hard to say like, you know, if we look at the CDC, it's 150 minutes of aerobic activity. It is two sessions of resistance training per week. That's like a bare minimum. But I know everyone in this audience and I know us. We want optimal and I can't say that I can name optimal, but I would say, you know, maybe one to two cardio sessions. We have to meet in the middle, one to two cardio sessions per week, 8,500 steps plus per day and then resistant training on top of that.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 56:14

Yeah, no, I love that. That makes sense. I have one more quick cardio question before we can move on away from this topic Because I know we're already running low on time. Um, but I um So to become better at cardio you Have to increase type 1 fiber Uh, you have to have more type 1 fibers That's literally the adaptation that happens to make you better at cardio is to increase type 1 fibers Do we think, just conjecturing here I'm guessing, because I don't know if there's studies specifically on this, but that doing more dedicated cardio in the way I'm talking about, doing zone two maybe, prioritizing more than steps, could there be this conversion to type one fibers and may that have a negative impact on our hypertrophy pursuits? And the context I'll add here is that if you're doing more cardio, Like, where does your muscle go? It's not like, like I'm doing cardio, I still weigh the exact same as I did before I did cardio. So I'm getting better at cardio, which means I must be increasing type one fibers. But like, I shouldn't be losing muscle because weight is stable. So like, how do we kind of make sense of that?

[Brandon DaCruz]: 57:35

man, Brian, I got to tell you that is such an interesting question. And I'm going to be, you know, obviously honest and forthcoming. I've never seen literature on that. And I don't even know if they've ever done literature on that, however, done

[Bryan Boorstein]: 57:44

Yeah.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 57:45

research on that. However, I'm going to take it from your perspective, like you're doing DexA analysis. And that's obviously not going to show you your type one and type two muscle fibers. At least to my knowledge, I think you would need to get pretty much a biopsy done to be able to differentiate between that. You need to like go visit Andy Galpin or something.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 58:01

Right.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 58:01

But I think that we can get, you know, there is some, I guess, theories within the literature and within the evidence-based scene that there could potentially be fiber conversion. And so what we see within that, there was a study by, I want to say, Jornson, it's like this guy out in one of the European countries. And they did this fiber type study where it was on power lifters, essentially. And so they gave them blood flow restriction. They saw an increase in fiber, in type one fiber hypertrophy. And they already had no difference in groups. They did one group doing BFR and one group without doing BFR. The only difference that they saw was in the group doing BFR, they got type 1 fiber, increase in type 1 fibers. Now, I think if your weight's staying the same, maybe you're activating, you're utilizing, and maybe you're converting more of those type 1 fibers, especially it would really matter I think we got to come back down to dose. So if you're doing a ton of cardio, say your cardio, the amount of cardio that you're doing in zone 2 capacity. So we're not just talking steps, we're talking say that you weight train for an hour a day or an hour session, five times a week, but then all of a sudden you go zone 2 crazy. You become like an endurance athlete. of times when we look at zone two, that's like what a lot of endurance athletes are. I've worked with some triathletes and things of that sort. They'll do about 80, 75 to 80% of the work within that zone two parameter and then

[Bryan Boorstein]: 59:14

Yep.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 59:14

the rest is in higher intensity zones. Well, if you're doing say now six or seven hours, you're doing an hour of zone two and I know that's not what you're doing currently. I do think that if you're staying weight stable, you may have just essentially converted some of that type two quicker muscle fiber into type one muscle fibers. And we see that menopause, we see that they go from storing more of their fat subcontinuously and they can get more deposition without fat mass increase. They've done this in research studies where they've done analysis of this. It's not that they have more fat mass in total, but they're now storing it more in visceral adipose tissue because of the decreases in estradiol. Estradiol is a hormone that really helps with metabolic health, but also it partitions more of the extra energy that a female is taking in into subcontinuous fat, which is why we store fat more in a gynoid pattern, which is your hips, your thighs, things of that sort as compared to when a woman gets into menopause, they start going for an – or they start storing body fat in an android pattern which is more around the central region like men do where we get more – we know that men store more fat viscerally which is why we have more issues with cardiovascular disease, with metabolic syndrome, things of that sort. Pre – you know, prior when we look at men all the way up until our life span until – with see a lot of much greater increase in likelihood for metabolic diseases from women in and of themselves, but I think that there might be some redistribution, but I don't think you're losing muscle mass especially. And

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:00:45

Thank

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:00:45

this

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:00:45

you.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:00:45

is really a caveat that we have to put into this. Let's think about the best aerobic athletes in the world. None of them are doing this in a deficit and I think this is really where we got to drive home that if you're doing zone two training, I'm all about this philosophy is feeling for the work required. And so within the context of resistant training, if you're trying to maximize muscle gain, especially is we want to be over maintenance. We want to be in a slight surplus to maximize muscle protein synthesis, muscle accretion, the ability to build lean mass. And there's going to be an energy cost required of that. So you want to get these adaptations and not lose muscle mass. I would say you need to be at least at maintenance if not in a slight surplus to ensure that you're not losing muscle mass because what we could see is if say you were in a deficit and you were driving just through zone two training, you were driving yourself weight, you might be at a higher predisposition to losing muscle mass because,

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:01:39

Right.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:01:39

you know, zone two, not that it's the most catabolic activity, it's not as much as HIIT training, but it is, it's not, it's not stimulating as much anabolism. If we look at the differences in protein synthesis rates from resistance training and cardio training, we see an increase in muscle protein synthesis for the 24 to 48 hours after resistance training. But if you look at the protein synthesis increases from aerobic training, it's in mitochondrial proteins. That's not helping us build myofibular muscle, muscle protein.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:05

Yeah. Aaron, do you have anything to jump in there?

[Aaron Straker]: 1:02:08

No, I mean the only thing that I thought of kind of not necessarily unrelated to what Brandon said, but you said Brian that like, hey, I'm adding this cardio in my weight stable. Have you been eating more? Right? I know you're you've been using your like kind of like high, medium, low subjectivity tracking method. I would imagine those subjectivities will fluctuate with your activity levels, you know, days you're more active, you're naturally hungrier.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:32

Yeah.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:02:32

So that you that same amount of food would, you know, what was moderate here for those listening, I'm using my hands to create levels.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:40

Hehehe

[Aaron Straker]: 1:02:41

What was moderate here with, you know, low or no cardio Brian, like moderate

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:44

Yeah.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:02:45

might be here with, you know, cardio

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:47

Yes.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:02:47

Brian. So that

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:48

Yeah,

[Aaron Straker]: 1:02:48

was my thought.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:02:48

it's still subjective. So if I have a day like yesterday where I biked to N1, it was 30 minute bike ride, I burned 400 calories and then I worked out for two hours with Cass and then I biked home another 400 calories. Like I ate more food, but I still called it a satisfied day, even though that amount of food would have been like an overfed day if I hadn't done all that work. So yeah,

[Aaron Straker]: 1:03:11

Yeah,

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:03:12

very subjective.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:03:12

yeah.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:03:13

But yeah, I mean, weight stable is the goal. So man, I really wish we had another like half hour here. But one of the things Brandon brought up was having low insulin if you have a lot of muscle. And so that's one of the things actually that Aaron and I talked about on our podcast that we did about blood work. Because one of my concerns was, man, my insulin is 0.7. That is so low. It's below the reference range, which starts at like 2.4. Is this something to worry about for me because it's 0.7? of people, the essential conclusion was that I'm actually, it's great, there's nothing wrong with having insulin at 0.7 because my glucose number is fine, my muscle is essentially absorbing all of the glucose, insulin never has to rise, all is good. So that leads me into the next question of, do we think that there's a point where being too big naturally, not on steroids or injectables or big naturally to the point that now we're mitigating health? Or is it just that, hey, you're more metabolically healthy as long as you're natural, you know, get all that muscle, go get that, and that muscle will absorb the glucose, you're metabolically healthy, it'll take care of a lot of the like lipid issues potentially that work with metabolic disease and stuff like that. Or like, what is your perspective on too much muscle for a natural athlete? you

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:04:48

All right, so when we look at this, this is actually an extremely interesting question. We have to differentiate what we mean by maximizing muscle growth and how much is too much muscle mass. And this is what I mean by that. We actually see in the obesity literature, we see in even in correlative studies of all-course mortality, that when they look at BMI, muscle mass, and all-course mortality, sometimes we really have to tease these out and they have to do reanalysis of this data because with increases in BMI come increases in fat-free mass. And so often, population-based studies that have the most amount of fat-free mass actually are the highest in BMI, which means that for anyone out there, essentially those that are obese have a high, much higher level of muscle mass than those that aren't obese, that are in normal weight BMI categories. And so if we're talking about people with an R sector, and can you naturally get too big? If you're lean, and this is a big, you know, we have to look at the differentiation. You can't just have all this muscle mass and then all this fat

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:05:44

Right.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:05:44

mass because that's going to, I guess, offset a lot of the benefits, the metabolically active benefits of muscle mass. However, if someone's lean and muscular, I don't know from a natural perspective if someone can get too big and muscular in terms of causing decrements in their health. However, I do think there's a point of diminishing returns. And so what I mean by that is I think that there may be no... It's almost like we're looking at a linear dose response initially when we're going up in FMI and so the fat-free mass index essentially. So as you're getting higher and pre-mass index, we're seeing more and more benefits from muscle mass to insulin sensitivity, to lowering cardiovascular disease, to all these other benefits upon health. However, we get to a point, and actually there's a study, I don't know if it's published, but I know that a doctor named Dr. Wood out of the University of Washington, I believe, had done an analysis of the NHANES data. And what he pretty much showed or found was that what you wanted to aim for as a female was an FFMI over 16, and males, I believe, was like the cutoff for maximizing metabolic health. Beyond that, we're not seeing decrements,

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:06:53

Hmm.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:06:53

we're not seeing decreases, but we're not seeing increases. So it's almost like it should be really, I guess, encouraging to the average person listening to this that isn't a meathead like us, that hasn't tried to max out everything they could naturally, that they can get a lot of the benefits. And it's almost like steps. The majority of the benefits you get come from the first increases, or even an all-cause mortality. And we look at cardiorespiratory fitness. It's like just going from the low level is going to decrease all cause mortality greatly as compared to going like if you look at low compared to elite it's like a 504% difference that's a little bit different of a perspective but I do think having more muscle mass is going to increase if you have low fat mass low adiposity is going to increase your metabolic health your longevity and things of that sort but I don't think it's a linear dose response just like with volume training like we see that there's a linear dose response up until a point and you know there's an I Muscular naturally would cause, you know, decrements in your metabolic health and in your health span. But I also think that a lot of these, these are, you know, theories that we're looking at or these are subjects that we're kind of theory crafting on. But I really think that many people aren't, don't have the ability or the desire. And even in that, hear me out on this, they don't have the ability to get that muscular, that it would cause a problem, nor do they have the time and the desire later in life. And that's where really I look at muscle as a reservoir. to maximize my muscle building potential in my 20s and 30s, but that's really just building a sheet of armor so that we can lose from, because we see sarcopenia start in their 30s if you're inactive and in your fifth, your fifth decade, your sixth decade. So in your 50s, even if you are active, and then we see decrements of up to 10% in muscle and strength per decade. And so really try to get as big as you can so that you have more metabolically active tissue to potentially lose from. The same thing can be said about aerobic fitness.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:08:45

Yes.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:08:48

life so that, yes, we're going to see decreases across the life course. Even if we're remaining active, this is a natural biological phenomenon called aging and none of us can get out of it. Every one of us has to pay taxes and die. However, if we can build up the biggest buffer possible, it's like investing in a 401K. It's like you're making an investment. I say muscle is the best

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:09:10

you

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:09:10

investment into our health that we can make, but also if we look at longevity markers, if you really look at the four leading predictors of longevity, It's muscle mass. It is leg strength and it's grip strength. And these are all things for looking at, you know, aerobic fitness. It's looking at muscle mass, muscle function, and strength. And these are all indices that we should be looking to optimize the best of our abilities.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:09:32

Yeah, no, I mean, that was like a perfect way to wrap it up. I was going to talk about the mortality and the VO2 max and the muscle mass and the strength and all that stuff. So I think that's awesome. We unfortunately didn't get to touch on the nuances of nutrition or fasting, which I know was one of the things on the agenda too. So maybe we'll have to do this again in a couple months.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:09:53

Hell yeah.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:09:53

But I think that's all the time I got for today.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:09:57

Before we wrap

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:09:58

Thanks for watching!

[Aaron Straker]: 1:09:58

up real quick, Brandon, can you let everyone know where to find you on Instagram, if they want to reach out for coaching, and then please plug

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:10:07

Hehehe

[Aaron Straker]: 1:10:07

you in Jeff's podcast as well, please.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:10:09

Awesome. Well, first and foremost, guys, thank you so much for having me. It's been way too long first and foremost, but it's always a pleasure jumping on here, really diving into some topics that many others don't cover. So I will say, I believe because I looked it up, you know, in other podcasting streams, I don't think anyone's covered this within our perspective of meatheads looking to increase health span and looking at hypertrophy as a vehicle for health span. And so, it's a pleasure being on here and I appreciate you guys having me. If anyone is interested in following more of my content, finding more My email is betacruzfitness at gmail.com and then my podcast is the Chasing Clarity Health and Fitness podcast which we launch a new episode every single Friday.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:10:49

Awesome. Thank you, dude. We will plug all that in the show notes. As always, Brandon, thank you for joining us.

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:10:54

Thanks

[Aaron Straker]: 1:10:54

Brian, do

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:10:54

so

[Aaron Straker]: 1:10:54

you want

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:10:54

much,

[Aaron Straker]: 1:10:55

to close

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:10:55

bud.

[Aaron Straker]: 1:10:55

us out today?

[Bryan Boorstein]: 1:10:56

Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I'm really glad we had this conversation. You were the person that I thought most closely would be able to really have this really cool, unique conversation with us about meshing these worlds. And so I appreciate your time.

[Brandon DaCruz]: 1:11:09

Absolutely guys, always a pleasure.