What is going on, guys? Happy Monday or Tuesday, wherever you're tuning in. Welcome to Eat, Train, Prosper episode 176. This is Brian and myself. And what we have is our first episode after a little two week hiatus. Brian had some traveling he was doing. And this episode is titled Identifying Your Goal and Achieving It. Given that we are on the cusp of 2025 starting, everyone is typically very enamored with the beginning of the year. and setting and achieving new goals. However, we thought it would be a very, very good idea to help some of the podcast listeners out there break down and understand what their goals actually are, especially as a lot of companies and unfortunately coaches will kind of use some less than very high integrity marking and using a lot of like industry buzzwords and things and that really just end up confusing people, right? So we wanted to kind of peel that back a little bit, get out in front of things so that you guys who may find yourself being marketed to or unsure of what you actually want help with a little bit more direct and targeted information on that. But more on that to come as always, Brian, can you kick us off with some updates? It's been a little bit. Yeah, we've taken a two week hiatus and I think like even in the episode, the two episodes before our hiatus, I think we skipped updates. And I know how much you guys love updates when we just talk about ourselves for 20 minutes. here we go, you know? I just had an impromptu trip to Costa Rica. That was kind of what Aaron was referencing in the beginning. So the real quick backstory is I was talking to my buddy. two weeks ago, we had a playdate with the kids out at the bike park and he's getting let go of his job and kind of in a period of transition and was mentioning to me that he booked this like solo trip to Costa Rica to go kind of self exploration and figure out what he wants to do after he leaves his current job. And I thought that was intriguing. And I've also been battling with similar thoughts, not that I'm about to be unemployed, but You've probably picked up on this too in my mention of the podcast I'm starting and stuff like this, but I I've been in the fitness industry professionally since 2009. And fitness has been a huge part of my life since 1997. So we're literally approaching 30 years almost at this point, 17 years of working in the industry. And I just feel like there's a part of me that wants more like there's something that I want to do that. that I want to grow and I don't want it to be directly related to the fitness industry, though I think tangentially that makes sense. And so I came home, told Kim that he was doing this and she immediately was like, you need to do this trip as well, which is such a legendary move from a wife with such an impromptu agenda. So literally the next morning I woke up, I booked my flight in my domicile in Costa Rica and six days later we left. So it was like super fast turnaround. Went to Costa Rica, spent three days there. Had a lot of really quality introspection. I am gonna continue with the podcast. I'm gonna talk about that in a second here. But I also had another kind of somewhat large realization that I'm not quite ready to discuss yet. But overall an extremely productive trip. And I feel a renewed sense of passion for these new things that I'm going to be working on. So I'll just kind of leave it at that for the moment. And we'll bring these back here in a number of months or maybe a year as my projects kind of get going a little bit further. on that note, my first episode of the Life Reflected podcast, which is the official working name for my new podcast, it should be recorded in the end of December and so I'm hoping that that will drop sometime in the early new year. I'm still debating whether I wanna pile up like four or five episodes before I drop the first one or if I just wanna kinda release them as they come and not have necessarily a strict like weekly schedule like we have here or something like that. So working through that but I think it should be pretty cool. The first episode is gonna be with my good buddy Greg here in Colorado and. what makes Greg unique because my premise of the podcast is I want to interview real people that have real stories and real lives, not necessarily experts that are hard to attain or to get onto your podcast that sell millions of copies of books or anything like that. But I want to interview real people that have something unique to offer. And the thing that really is interesting to me about Greg, among other things, is that he's the super extrovert, the super friend of the group. And every group of friends has this person that seems like they keep everybody else together. They're always organizing the activities. They're always reaching out to people. They somehow seem to have more friends than everybody else in the group. And he's a super connector is the term I was using. And I think that's an extremely unique quality. And I want to kind of delve into some of the more deep rooted facets of that person. So that's episode one and then we'll kind of continue in the same line interviewing other people with similar attributes, similar interesting attributes going forward. that's kind of the first two updates or no first update for me. Second update is I've kind of become obsessed with running. Man, y'all know me, I get obsessed with things pretty quickly like I did with biking or with lifting or anything else. But I've run. six times in the last two weeks, which is a personal record. I don't even know if I ran that much even when I was like a teenager preparing for basketball. Six times in two weeks is a lot for me and just really enjoying getting better at it and realizing how conducive it is to being in the colder weather months because biking is completely out. The wind in your face like it's just too cold. My hands freeze even with gloves on and it's uncomfortable. running however is the complete opposite where I can go out in 30 degree weather and be cold for all of two minutes before I start running and realize that I've worn way too many layers and run home to strip them off and then continue running. So I've very much enjoyed that aspect of it and something that I think will likely continue over the course of the winter and hopefully I'll see some cool improvement there. hybrid metabolic cycle starting for Paragon in early January. We love this cycle. It's a bit different than our normal hypertrophy work. It has that metabolic flare to it where we include structured cardio, a few circuits and some same muscle group supersets and stuff like that. So that'll be starting in early January. And then final update for me is I am just loving my new upper lower split that I briefly mentioned the last time we did updates like six weeks ago or something. It's been really nice. Workouts are still 45 to 60 minutes, still getting super sore from them, even though the volume is super low, as I've discussed with this new abbreviated training approach. Still only doing one exercise per muscle group per session. So never doing a second exercise for the same muscle group. And along those lines, chest has been a pain point for me recently. because I only have dumbbells and a cable machine. And dumbbells are great. Like I enjoy dumbbells, but I don't like, are you making, sorry. Can we get you closer to the mic, please? yeah, yeah, my bad. Sorry. Man, this new setup that I have with my computer is lower. So I keep kneeling and then I'm tired of kneeling. So then I stand and then my face moves further away from the mic. chest has been a pain point for me. I've actually reached a point on the cable chest presses where it's tenuous as to whether I can even get myself into position. So I do this weird like kind of clean and jerk thing where I like push my butt against the bench and then explosively bring the cables forward. And I've reached a point where I actually missed last time. And I went to try to get into position and it kind of like threw my shoulder back and I released it. So I didn't like tear my shoulder out of the socket, but it was kind of scary. And then in that moment, like literally a few, a few moments later, I was looking at my email and Titan had sent me an email being like, new products on sale for Cyber Monday or whatever. And one of them was an adjustable chest press machine that has an incline, a flat and a decline chest press with neutral grip and pronated grip. And I just couldn't help myself. I pulled the trigger on it. I have no room in my gym for it. It's gonna spill out into the basement. Kim is not the most happy about that, but. I needed a chess machine and it's so I did it. and that should be coming here in the next few days. So hopefully the next time we talk next week, I'll have had a session in with that chess machine and I can provide a review. A number of people have asked me, you know, Hey, let me know how that is. Is it good or not? Cause one of the things I'm worried about is that when you have something that's adjustable, incline flat decline, you're likely giving something away as far as the quality of any individual pressing angle by having all the pressing angles. so That's something I knew going into it and I'm going to let you guys know how it is, you know, overall, once I'm able to do a couple working sets on it. So that is all for me. What is going on with you, dude? biggest thing I would say is like my body finally feels mostly like pretty good. There's always going to be like little things. I have like some back tightness that's kind of seems to be there whenever I wake up in the morning. But I've been really working through like my internal external rotation of my hips. And that's positive. I can at least like train legs. No problem. No knee pain anymore. I had like a two month period where I was just getting like gnarly patellar pain and like really achy knees for a couple days. That's gone, which is obviously wonderful. And I'm able to produce like really high quality training again, which is nice. I am right on the cusp of like consistently cracking 230 pounds fasted first thing in the morning. I'll have like a couple days over and then like a couple days under. So this morning I was like five tenths of a pound under I was like 229.5. So that I'm like right on the cusp of and then almost officially at the final five pounds left of my gain season. So 235 was kind of like the the cutoff point that I wanted to get up to. That should have me attaining all of the size that I think I need for like once my first prep will start. So that's exciting. Especially considering I started the build at 190 pounds in January. So I am officially up 40 pounds, which is like absolutely wild to actually think about. and have about five pounds left. How do you feel your body fat is compared to 190 to where you are now? I mean, was definitely, I definitely have more body fat. Like at 190 pounds, would, I feel confident I was probably like 7%, if not a little bit leaner. Like I was shredded. I would say maybe 11 now, maybe. That's insane though. mean, that's literally like eight pounds of fat and 32 pounds of muscle. That's crazy. I mean, I know you went on to TRT and all of that, but what an insanely productive building period. Yeah, just to back up a little bit for transparency, like we I couldn't call what I'm on now TRT like I am just straight up on PEDs for full transparency. But up until I was literally just on like what would be a prescribable TRT dose until 218 pounds. So like it carried me through a very long period. So just again, to be completely transparent. And then the last thing a little bit more business related is I have set a goal of finishing two new training programs to get released before the end of the year. I have been dragging my feet on this. I have had multiple, multiple people ask me for like a follow up to no man's land. So that I'm putting out and another end of my first female specific training program is like the only month that I can realistically get it done with January. A bunch of clients start obviously in January. And then the gym should be opening in January. So that's going to have a lot more of additional tasks. So I'm committed to getting them done now, or it's like not going to happen. And those are my updates, I think. That's so exciting about the gym. mean, that's been such a project for the last, what, 18 months or more at this point. And it's so cool to see it finally coming to fruition. Yeah, we're in the like later stages. We still have one more equipment order that's about to leave a port. We've been, I've been adding little things to it. So he's been like holding it to like ship them all at once because it's just so much cheaper on shipping. But there's literally like 32 pieces of equipment just up there under tarps, which is like killing me because I want to use it so bad. And it's just like sitting there ready to go. But they're like putting in the floors now. There's like still a little section of the roof to be or the ceiling and not necessarily the roof to be painted, which is like where all the equipment is. And they're obviously not going to paint over top of where the equipment is. So it's we are I think I'd say with a little bit of luck, I may be able to avoid the New Year's gym rush and we'll have like private gym where they're still like. working on some of the parts of the recovery center and doing like the landscaping and stuff, but like the gym will be like ready for like us to train at. And that will be like as about as good as it gets, avoiding the, the gym rush and being able to train in like your own private gym for a couple of weeks, hopefully. Have you guys already sold memberships ahead of time? No, that's something I think we're talking about starting out at like the end of the year sort of thing. Cool, cool. And then my last question is, if you're willing to discuss it, because I'm curious, what people could expect different in No Man's Land 2 compared to No Man's Land. So what I'm, No Man's Land one was one phase of training. It just escalated. My rep sets. So like that, that's how we stacked on a little bit of volume and a little bit more of like intensity by more sets to failure. And in this no man's land to I have it set up as a new training split. So I used a little bit of an unconventional split in the first one. The second one here, I have two phases of training. So it's really like two different programs built into one. So the first one is still five days of training, but it's going to be a Push pull legs up or lower. And then the second phase will be a rotating push pull legs. Two sessions like a push A, pull A, legs A, and then a rotation there. And then I'm not going to have the myo rep sets like escalating. It's gonna be a little bit more straightforward, a little bit lower volume. And then just less, a little bit of a RIR ramping. Sweet, I like that. That's the plan that I have laid out now. All right, we ready to dive into the episode or do you have anything else to share? No man, that's good. Let's do it. All right, cool. So what we thought to do with this topic around identifying goals, it's something that it's very, very common when I'm having like client consults. And I'm sure Brian's explained this like a number of number of times in his groups and stuff. And in it, what I hate is that it stems from people's misunderstanding or confusion stems from a lot of the less than a little bit slightly disingenuous like marketing that's very, common in the fitness industry. And it's like, buy my six week program to like, bulk up, obliterate fat, and you know, all these things like, and it just, it just does not work that way. Like, I guess, you know, if someone wanted to make an objective statement, like they could argue that you are up 000.1%, you know, total body mass in down zero zero zero point one percent body fat, but nothing appreciable. It would be visually noticeable, anything like that. So we just wanted to present a couple common scenarios and then walk through kind of a couple key points from each scenario or the wrap up of it is what is the actual goal in this scenario? What specific point of discomfort? is presenting the sticking point in the goal, which is really the big kicker that a lot of people find themselves in. How do we get past that sticking point of discomfort and then a high level plan creation for actually achieving the goal? So I'm going to lay out the kind of three. What's the word I want to use here? Examples, case study examples that we're going to walk through, and then we'll get started on the first one. So the first case study example is constantly changing from bulking. or what I should really phrase to as like building, which I think is just a lot more generally accepted and softer term for all. So constantly changing from build to cut because they feel fat or too skinny at any given moment in the process. So that's the first case study. Second case study is going to be oscillating between strength and hypertrophy goals. And what is the best way to attack that to actually achieve both? And the third case study is the hybrid athlete who wants to get cardio fit and build strength and hypertrophy at the same time. What would be the best approach there? So jumping back to the first case study here, constantly changing from the build to the calorie deficit, because you start to feel either a little bit soft and fluffy in the build or too skinny in the cut and you decide that you need more muscle. So with this first case study, Brian, what would you say or what would be some of the questions you would ask on what their goal actually is? Yeah, you know, the when I when I wrote this one down, which I think is probably the most common one where people kind of oscillator fluctuate and it creates problems for their goals. The reason that this this came about was because I actually am currently talking to a 15 or 16 year old kid from PB, one of the sons of an ex member of the gym. And he's been texting me emailing we even had a call kind of talking about his goals and what he wants to achieve. He seems very confused, much like this question is. And I think that when I think back to the way that I was at 15 or 16 years old, I 100 % relate to everything that he is feeling. Like he's literally, you know, just entering puberty kid who doesn't have a ton of muscle. And he, much like many kids at that age, wants abs. Like his main goal to me was I want a six pack abs like that. That is it. He's like, I don't care about being strong. I don't care about having tons of muscle. I just want an aesthetic physique with abs. And, and it's, it's so hard. Like I was that kid. It's, it's, can't even tell you how real that is to me and how much I feel that because when I used to get made fun of in the forums by Paul Carter and other people back in the day, it was because I would say things like that. And so, so in this conversation with him, the way that I tried to remedy that frame of mind for him was that the body that you want with the abs that you want has more muscle than you have. And I think it took a minute for that to resonate with him because what I asked, like he, he, he then came and said, well, I have a really blocky waist and so I don't want to put a bunch of weight on that's going to make my waist look more blocky. And I was like, understood, I got that. That's a really solid reason. Well, guess what? What makes a blocky waist look smaller? And he was like, I don't know, being lean. And I was like, well, maybe, but what really makes it look smaller is having bigger developed upper body structure. So if you have a large upper back, shoulders and chest, then that is gonna provide that V taper. which is gonna provide you that aesthetic look that you're looking for. And so he seemed somewhat receptive to that, but much like many fickle teenage kids, you know, after I gave him the prescription, he came back and was like, well, actually, I think I just want abs. And I was like, no, no, no, like, like that, that's not, that is not, that is not actually like, like if you try to get abs, you're just going to end up looking small and skinny and you're not gonna have any muscle. So those abs aren't gonna actually be aesthetic for you. And so I feel like those types of questions and providing different frameworks of understanding of, what is going to make your body look a certain way is important for these people to potentially allow them to commit for longer than two or three weeks at a time to one of those two pursuits. Yeah, that's such a challenging age to have those kind of desires and stuff. I'm it's it's like statements in situations like that that make me feel very happy that I grew up in the like pre social media age and stuff, because like there were there was none of that. It was literally just me being afraid of I couldn't put on enough weight. for football and the coaches would get mad at me and stuff. So. honestly the way that you should be training to gain muscle at a young age is to throw the abs to the wind because you're like, tried to relay to him that these are his prime muscle building years, like never. I even correlated. was like, look, the testosterone that's flowing through your body right now is never going to be at the level it is. Like you are literally akin to being on anabolic steroids right now. You will never feel like you're on steroids more than you are right now without actually taking them. And so I think some of that resonated. Then he thought on that some more and he came back and he was like, okay, well, if you're right, and it really is just all about the back, the shoulders and the upper chest, then why do you have me training legs? And I was like, man, now we have like an entirely new rabbit hole to go down on why this is important as well. And so to spare you guys the lengthy discussion. I mostly was just like, look, you're an athlete, you play lacrosse. Like if you don't have strong legs and you're not explosive, it's not gonna help your sport. And it may even hinder your ability to build muscle in the upper body. So I said that. And then I said something that I don't even know if it's true, but I feel like it was commonly stated when I was at that age. And I just felt in the moment that maybe this would help him as well. So while it might not be true, I thought it was quite useful for the situation, which was that 75 % of your testosterone is located in your legs. And if you don't train your legs, none of that testosterone is gonna get to your upper body. And I don't actually believe that's true. I think science actually has shown that that's actually false. But when someone told me that as a 16 year old, I was like, well, of course I need to train legs. And the end result is that if you train legs, you will end up with a better physique. And so I was okay with that little fib. to kind of get him to understand the importance of training legs as well. Yeah, that's funny. So I think now coming back to the case study a little bit, when I have clients that are kind of presented in this kind of dilemma here of I tried to build and I got uncomfortable or whatever, the thing that I like to say, like, what kind of what more information can you provide me about the build? Right. What were your calories? How many meals were you eating out? Like, what was your rate of gain? Oftentimes they don't have any of that. And I'm like, you were just throwing calories at the wall, seeing what's stuck and your rate of gain was like too fast. Your macronutrient distribution, your timing was not optimal. And you just got fat faster than you wanted to because you had a very loose structure for the game. So that's like one part of it. When someone comes to me and I know they're a little bit body fat percentage is a little bit higher than I would really like to start someone with a gain and they say that their goal is to build muscle. I say, okay, that's fine. We can build muscle, but you're only going to get fatter than you are right now. How do you feel about that? They're like, I don't want that at all. I'm like, okay, well that completely eliminates that first goal and that likely means we're starting with one of a re-comping period, which I really don't like to do. I think there's situations where it has merit and we can dig into that a little bit, but mostly we're starting with a period of calorie reduction to reduce body fat so that they can get to a level of physique that they typically feel best at or are happiest with. Now to play devil's advocate in the middle a little bit. that period of kind of recomp where I think it has value is if someone is coming from a period of either not necessarily lower training volume but a little bit of unstructured training volume or they have not or unstructured training or they have not had a period of higher volume in let's call it, I don't know, two years, something like that. And they've been under fueling themselves, right? If you're unfamiliar with that concept, Go find the episode we did with Jeremiah Bear and he talks about that at length. Being able to work someone's calories up while giving them higher training volumes so we can feel pretty confident that a portion, a fair portion of that caloric partitioning goes towards muscle building activities and expenditures. We can get some decent re-comping. Again, it's still slow. It's nothing earth shattering. It's still not going to be as visually impressive or noticeable as a calorie deficit, but it buys you a little bit of time if someone is not ready to dedicate towards like an actual calorie deficit. So those are the ways I typically approach that scenario. Are there any more that you would kind of sit in or ways that you would help people decipher what that ultimate goal is in that scenario? No, I I guess my only question is in determining the starting point being a cut or a build. And then asking, I guess, whether there would be a point, what situation would dictate someone spending time at maintenance before committing to either. increasing or decreasing because I feel like that seems to be common as well as you have people come in where their nutrition is a bit dysregulated. And so as a coach, it's sometimes hard to know what they've been doing. If it's a bit of like, yeah, the scale was up and then I dieted for three weeks and then I felt like I was too skinny. So I ate more for three weeks and they're kind of in that oscillating pattern. My usual approach in that situation is to try to find their maintenance and start them at a month or six weeks of maintenance so that we know confidently where that mark is. And then we can make the adjustments. in a more structured manner. Because I think part of the problem with the person that bulks and cuts and oscillates every two or three weeks is that they're bulking or building with too many calories and they're cutting with too few calories. And so these changes are very drastic up and down, which is why they're feeling bad and seeing themselves in a negative light. And so where in this situation would you maybe start someone at maintenance? Is that a tactic you use? What are your thoughts there? Yeah, it's a really good point. And I'm glad you brought that up. Unless someone can provide me like a history of food log, a history of consistent weigh-ins and those sorts of things. And I feel very confident in their ability to choose foods consistently. That's exactly what we do. We find maintenance, right? I like a prove it to me model, right? Prove it to me that you're ready for a calorie deficit or ready for, I mean, which would be even riskier, I would say is the is the build because if you don't have those food sources and stuff or know what your effective caloric intake level is like, we're likely going to get it wrong. And we might just week one start accumulating needless body fat because our estimate is too far off because we don't have a good baseline to start from. So that is always a very, very intelligent approach so that you know what those baselines actually are. And we know you run the little calculations and those sorts of things and it spits out numbers. Generally, it works pretty well, but you will get you work with enough clients, you're going to get outliers and they can be pretty profound there. So it does not always work just like with all research and stuff population means but you're going to get people who are outside that second standard deviation or something and it will not work for that person. Yeah, I think, I don't know if this is where it necessarily would be the next step in this discussion, but I feel like it's also important to relay to the client that as you begin to build or as you begin to cut, there is actually going to be that period of time in the first few weeks when you change directions and commit to a direction where you will likely feel either slightly too big or slightly too small and emaciated based on where your your center is like where your maintenance is. When you first begin one of these and commit to that direction. It just it just happens like I think it might even be worse going down for males, maybe. Yeah, because like you you end up you end up quite flat. And so it's like there's this paradox where you're losing weight or you think you're losing weight because you're in a caloric deficit, but the body weight on the scale hasn't quite dropped yet. And you just look like a smaller, flatter version of what you were and your body weight hasn't changed. So you then begin to question everything and you're like, wait, my body weight's not even moving. So I must be at maintenance, but I look way worse. So it would make sense for me to just say, screw this and change direction and start eating more because then my muscles will fill up and I'll look. And so it's the most critical point in any cut or build, really think, is getting through the first three weeks. Like something about three weeks really sticks out in my brain as a really important number there. So yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, you're spot on when you first start dieting, you're flat, but you're still fat. So you look literally worse in the first like the first section of it. You look worse or the weight is moving. But because you appear to look worse, people get scared and think that they're just losing muscle because I look I look worse. My pumps aren't what they were in those sorts of things that in the diet is definitely that commitment phase because you're getting negative. know, feedback of the actions, but there's none of the positive yet or where you can notice actual reductions in body fat or being visibly leaner, clothes fitting looser, you know, things like that. So I would say in the calorie deficit that presents itself sooner. The sticking point that I find is around the like 5 % reduction in total body mass. So if we're talking about a 200 pound person getting through about that like 190. Because we know the first initial few pounds are gonna just be glycogen depletion, right? Or reduction, not necessarily depletion. And therefore when the diet's over, we're gonna rise a couple pounds, right? So something that I think can happen is people... They think they only need, I only need like a 10 pound cleanup or whatever, but what happens is we spend whatever, let's call it 10 weeks a pound per week, that would be like a half a percent rate of loss. And then we just don't lose enough to look any different, right? And we might've started at, let's say 200 pounds, we diet that three, let's call it they're not making a 5%. They're only going to like a three and a half or a 4%. We get down to like the 193, something like that. That glycogen comes back up, we're immediately at like a 197 again, and we effectively spent 10, maybe 11 weeks going down and up, and we're down like two and a half, three pounds, and you look no different. whatsoever. So that's one doing a diet that is too small that you end up just kind of burning time a couple months with that. Now with the opposite of the build, it's actually kind of flipped because immediately you get the positive, the positivity of the glycogen fills out. You get these like better pumps in the gym. We get a little bit of that. It's not cellular swelling. It's a little bit of the, what is the word I'm looking for here? Like sarcoplasmic kind of fluid builds up as you're shuttling like, you know, things in, and it's not, it's not tensile contractile tissue yet, but it's kind of just more fluid in the muscle cell, which is technically more muscle, but not lasting muscle. You get a very positive response. Like you fill out. And then, that right that wave you ride a little bit, but then starts to come the additional body fat and everyone has that kind of reflective point of where they get uncomfortable with the amount of body fat they have in very similar to the example I gave with going down. You need to commit to the build. In my opinion, right, everyone has, of course, different opinions on this. You need to commit to it long enough to have an appreciable difference. in muscle accrued because you're also going to accrue body fat, right? Let's say we're starting at like 12 % body fat, which is like pretty lean, like for a lifestyle person, right? You put on 10 pounds. And let's say we go from like, you know, 12 % body fat to like a mid 14 high 14, something like that. If we are not up an appreciable amount of muscle accrued, like at least let's call it three, four, five pounds. Not all of that weight, like I said, is going to be actual contractile tissue. So then if we go through that deficit or we stop, we have body fat accrued, that's probably not even at a one to one of the muscle mass that we accrued. And it ends up being a little bit of that wasted time because now we might be up two pounds or something like that, but we're up equally two pounds of body fat, maybe more. And now we would need to diet that body fat back off. And you go through this cycle, it's not gonna get done in eight weeks, 10 weeks to be up a pound, you know? Unfortunately, that is a reality of like natural bodybuilders that are like pretty near their genetic ceiling and stuff like that. But they're over much larger timelines and a lot more variables. I'm talking about like a 12 week, 14 week, 16 week sort of build there. So you need to commit long enough through that uncomfortable period where your body fat is higher than you want to be. And you're probably not going to be look aesthetic or anything like that. but the silver lining in that is you will probably make your best gym performance gains at that body fat level that is a little bit uncomfortable. And that's something that I found 100 % true for my last natural build. When I was making like really good gym performance, I was probably around that like 13, 14% body. Yeah. I do think it's important to know, and you kind of alluded to this in that if you're a, you know, advanced natural bodybuilder that maybe that one to one ratio is kind of acceptable. I just think, you know, that to me, that feels like the norm. And maybe it's because I tend to work with like a higher training age population in general, but like I think one to one muscle to fat is pretty solid. Like if you gain 12 pounds and you get six muscle and six fat, that's pretty good. Like then you diet it off and maybe you lose all the fat and then a couple pounds of muscle and you're left with, you know, three pounds of muscle at the end of that or something. I'd consider that quite positive. So it's just important to frame that in relation to the population you're working with. I thank you for bringing it up. think I missed what I wanted to say. I agree, but for it to be worth it, I think there has to be a total amount accrued, right? Like I think 12 pounds, six and six is solid, but if you're up like four pounds and you go two and two and then you die it off and you're up like what, a third, 0.3 pounds of muscle, like you're kind of wasting your time to do that cycle. Yeah. root of like this entire thing that we're discussing right now is people committing to the journey for longer than a few weeks at a time. So that really is the solution when we talk about like, what's the plan? Like, what's the solution? It's literally as simple as like, just commit for longer. And hopefully, we've been able to talk through this in a manner that allows you to accept that whichever direction you choose, there's going to be some undesirable effects along Definitely there there will 100 % be a discomfort point. And if you're in that discomfort point, that means you're at the point where you need to be and just lean into it. Yeah. Yeah. All right, cool. Well, we're we spent like way over time on that one. I don't even know if we're going to get to all three of these, but let's move on to the next one and see what we get through here. Yeah, so I'll read this one here. Oscillating between strength and hypertrophy goals. And what is the best way to attack to achieve both goals? I think this one makes the most sense to kick over to you to start. Yeah, it's, you know, there are two ways, two primary ways that someone might go about this. And kind of the way that maybe was super popular five or 10 ish years ago was what would be the power building model, where one would work up to a heavy single on one of the power lifts, maybe like a 90 % max. And then they do a couple back off doubles or triples. And then boom, their strength work is done and they can move into their hypertrophy work. That way is fine. It's been working for years. A lot of people have had great success with that, but I think that a better approach is to periodize your year, which is the way that I will program this for my groups or for any of my clients that have these kind of dual goals. And so in this manner, you have a six week period or so call it four to eight weeks where you're going to focus more exclusively on strength. You're going to keep your rep ranges under six or five on most of your lifts, really work on some of that neuromuscular grooving where you're using strength as a skill and actually getting better at power creation through the various positions of each movement. And so then you would come out of that strength cycle. And the idea being that you've potentiated some some gains for hypertrophy. And there's a study that we can reference from a couple years ago that looked into this where they had one group train hypertrophy for I think it was 11 straight weeks and another group did strength work first and then finished the 11 weeks with hypertrophy work. And they found that that group that did strength and then hypertrophy ended up with slightly better hypertrophy than the group that just did hypertrophy all the way through. I don't have a whole ton of scientific rationale for why I think my way is better aside from potentially signal confusion. And I don't know how, like, I don't have a paper to reference for this, but in my brain, feels like if we're telling the body to lift really heavy and work on this neuromuscular grooving, and then we're switching course and going directly into this like kind of slightly higher rep, pumpy type hypertrophy work. that there's a bit of signal confusion there as to what the body really should be manifesting. And if you look at actual case studies of people that used to do it in the power building way, and then switch to a more periodized model, someone like Eric Helms, who was trying to do both dual strength goals and commit compete in powerlifting, but also do bodybuilding. He realized, much like I'm arguing that his hypertrophy goals were significantly more benefited by strictly focusing on hypertrophy. And that's more or less what he's been doing for the last year since kind of making that decision. And I think that we've seen similar examples across our population of people in the industry over the last year or two. Yeah, I think is corny as it kind of is to say, I think this is really a classic example of the like chase two rabbits. You catch none, you know, from a from a at a high level. Right. Yes, it can be achieved, but I think in a pursuit of maximizing both, I think the periodized manner just works a lot better. And I think it's it's a classic kind of human. I don't want call it human nature, but like a human goal to be like, I want to do this and I want to do this and I want to do this. It's like an and and and and and you just kind of get like spread too thin. And it's not that you can't do all of these things, but it's like choose one, work on it, get really proficient at it. Then you bring in like the next one while maintaining some of the large majority of the proficiency of the previous one. And I think it helps with. A little bit of intrinsic motivation to. Like something that would happen for me, I remember following like in the mid 2010s following that power building style training is Those major lifts, they're very centrally fatiguing. They beat you up, they beat up your mind a lot. And it's hard to really take my bicep curls seriously after I was just doing heavy triples on a deadlift. So you end up just checking the box. And checking the box never provides an optimal result. Whereas if you just have a back and biceps day, you're not crushed from doing heavy triples on a deadlift and you can actually put. productive work into those those biceps as opposed to just like checking the box after much heavier strength work. Yeah, dude, 100%. That was actually going to be my next point. And I was going to phrase it almost identical to the way you phrased it that the central nervous system fatigue that comes from those big lifts has a mitigating effect on the focus, energy and performance that you can put into the subsequent hypertrophy work that follows. So I feel like if you're following that strength plus hypertrophy model, you're almost going to be doing that with your number one objective being strength. because whichever thing you do first is going to be the one that absorbs the majority of the stimulus that provides you the majority of your results. So no one would ever do that in reverse. No one would ever do hypertrophy work and then be like, well, now I'm gonna throw my strength work in because, you know, hypertrophy is my main goal. Like that just sounds so silly to be like, I do my leg extensions, I do my hack squat. now I need to one rep max back squat. That makes a lot of sense. So anybody that is actually following that power building model is doing so with strength essentially being the number one goal. And so that's fine. Like if you're a power lifter and you feel like doing some hypertrophy work could enhance your power lifts, that's one way where I think that that model works. But for that person who's a ultimate objective is aesthetic, physique, increasing muscle mass, et cetera, and they still have ties to these strength lifts, that person would be benefited much more by separating out their hypertrophy and their strength work into separate periods of time. So yeah, I don't know that there's like a whole ton to say beyond that. Where do we want to go from here? Yeah, I think the what you were saying right there makes a lot of sense. Like this is the definition of like dissecting the goal. Right. And understanding which of those two has a higher priority focusing on that and then using the other, which could probably come in is like, I don't want to call it like a deload, but a probably more of like a psychological reprieve from the primary goal, because no one stays 100 % motivated. Like, well, I can't say no one. I'm sure there are people that are like year round and it would be probably nice if you're like finish a big powerlifting meet and your body's like kind of beat up and your CNS is fried from all the heavy loads to take like, hey, I'm gonna go eight weeks on this like lower intensity hypertrophy program to take myself a break from all the heavy loads and resensitize my desires a little bit to some of those goals. I think that works brilliantly. Yeah. I also, so in, my programming with the clients that I work with and with my group programs and stuff, the majority of the time we spend is in hypertrophy. And that's because it's, it's just more conducive to lifestyle for most people. It's more forgiving. So if you're traveling for work, you have a family workouts, get moved around for a number of various reasons. Hypertrophy is just going to be a stimulus that you can achieve more readily with. issues that come up as part of daily life. Strength requires a bit more of a regimented and structured approach. You kind of need to be using the same type of equipment environment, session to session as best you can. And to one of the things that you said is that, you know, it's nice to break up the monotony and the example that you used was a power lifter coming out of a power lifting meeting being like, Hey, maybe I'll spend eight weeks on hypertrophy. I actually look at it as the opposite because the majority of the time that I spend in my training or in programming for others is in fact in hypertrophy. And then the strength is the stepping outside of the norm and breaking up the monotony and doing something different. And so in that case, we found that like four weeks, five weeks, six weeks, like you don't need a ton of time, but just changing the movement patterns that you're focusing on, changing the rep schemes you're focusing on and sort of changing the objective overall for a few weeks. really has a lot of mental reprieve that can kind of reinvigorate you. So aside from any potentiation that may occur physically by doing strength and hypertrophy cycles, you also have the sort of mental or psychological reprieve that keeps you fresh and excited to come in each day and train. And I think that's the true benefit in it right there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Should we move on to the third one here? I think we should. So I'll tee this one up again for you. The hybrid athlete who wants to get cardio fit and build strength, hypertrophy, strength slash hypertrophy at the same time. What's the best approach? Yeah, so we actually did a whole episode on hybrid training a while ago. Not entirely sure what episode number that was, but you can search through it sometime in the last year. you know, the hybrid athlete thing is gaining such popularity. So many people are looking to do both. And even people that aren't considering themselves hybrid athletes, kind of like yourself, Strager, you're incorporating cardio on a significantly more regular basis. And so it's almost as if in some ways, like all of us are hybrid athletes, even though your cardio is not necessarily in the pursuit of competition or performance, it's more in the pursuit of health. It's a very fine line between those two. But the way you're doing it definitely creates less of an interference effect or anything to almost, I would say even a non, no interference effect. And we, as we argued in the hybrid episode, even could accentuate your hypertrophy for a number of reasons through improved cardiovascular conditioning, parasympathetic elevation, a better recovery between sessions, et cetera, et cetera, a better nutrient partitioning. So a number of different reasons how doing it your way is great. think where things get complicated and where you have to be a little bit more nuanced in the way that you put together the programming is for the person that says, Hey, I want to gain strength, hypertrophy, or some sort of muscle building objective. But with my cardio, I also have a performance objective. And so in my mind, when someone says I'm a hybrid athlete, it's not that they just do cardio and they do weights. It's that they have performance objectives for each of those independently. And when you do it that way, there's a lot of interference effect that can occur between the two if you're trying to prioritize both at the same time, where both are your your angle or whatever. Like, yeah, I'm gonna go do this men's physique competition and get my upper body super swole, but I'm also gonna go run 25 miles a week in preparation for a half marathon or something along those lines. So I think that's a decent way of kind of opening it up and framing the conversation, yeah. I think it's the perfect way. And that is the difference. Like I have no performance goals, anything like that. Like I'm going into my cardio sessions purely from a health standpoint. I know if I just make this hurt really badly, it will support me from a from a health perspective and cardiovascularly. And that's like my metric there. But like you said, once you start chasing performance, it muddies the the the environment. a little bit and you may start to make some compromised decisions or sorry, make some decisions that will compromise, you know, optimality in either as you kind of battle stacking those those goals on top of each other. Yeah, so I'm sure you guys won't be surprised by my take on this, but much like the strength and hypertrophy conversation that we just had, I think that periodizing out your year also makes more sense if you're doing the hybrid athlete approach. So that's not to say that you have a period of time where you're just lifting and you ignore all cardio, but it's like maybe during that time of year where you're focusing on the weights more. your cardio looks a bit more like Aaron, where it's more of a health pursuit or call it maintenance. And given what we know about maintenance volume research, you can maintain the majority of your gains with significantly less volume than it took you to actually get those gains. And so we can harness the power of that research with that knowledge that we can spend six months of the year potentially focusing on getting stronger, adding more muscle and making our objective to build so to speak in an anabolic state. because when you go to the point where you're now prioritizing cardio as the goal and your performance driven and trying to improve race performance in some cardio pursuit, then now we've reached a point where we're almost putting our body into a catabolic state. And that's certainly nuanced. Like that's not a, an umbrella statement. like even in my situation this last year, I biked for six months from March through September. And I actually, maintained or gained body weight because I was burning so much. was eating so much. So I wasn't actually in a catabolic state. And most interestingly now that I'm doing less cardio, I've, you know, gone down to my three runs a week or whatever. So I'm doing cardio for an hour and a half or two hours a week instead of eight hours a week. And I'm actually losing weight because, because I'm just not, my appetite isn't as ramped up as it was when I was doing eight hours of cardio a week. so, so it is a bit confusing sometimes to say that cardio is catabolic and lifting is anabolic because both of those are mediated by what nutrition we're putting into our body. as long as, as both are happening. So, ultimately all I'll finish this, this monologue by just saying that, when you periodize the year, You can more directly put yourself into an anabolic state during the period of time where you're building and focusing on the weights. And you can accept that there's going to be a little bit of catabolism during the period where you're focusing on your cardio pursuit, because let's be real, cardio is also benefited by being a smaller human in most cases. Maybe rowing is would be the one where power actually really matters more, but something like biking, running, Nordic skiing. Any of these ones where you have to take your body weight and go up a hill with your body weight, much more benefit in being a smaller human. And so if the goal is performance-based cardio, you accept that there's a little bit of catabolism that's gonna occur during that period of time. Yeah, I think it's wonderfully well put. I also think with this one too, and in many cases, right, we take the extremes and we try to extrapolate them to us, right? They take, I mean, I don't even wanna really go down this road, but you take the sensationalist, the present day sensationalist social media content creator that takes like a picture of some champion marathon runner. And they're like, see, this is why running's bad for your gains, right? You're taking a 1 % or like freak athlete of the entire population of the world who doesn't care about hypertrophy because they get paid millions of dollars to run marathons really fast. And you're trying to apply it to like some 24 year old like software engineer who's in his first year of lifting weights or something like it doesn't apply remotely. So it's again, understand that you're probably not at extremes and like, yes, you can. improve your cardio, you can probably improve your, is it a 5K runtime or whatever that is, like while still building some muscle because you're still operating very much in the middle, but as your performance, it starts to get out of that just like dead center generalized zone, you're gonna wanna periodize because they aren't necessarily mutually beneficial at the same Yeah, no, really, really, really well said. I love the marathon example because like to your point, that person isn't following a hypertrophy program and eating in caloric excess trying to build. They're literally doing everything they can to be a smaller human so that they can move through space faster. And their training is almost entirely geared toward actually improving their running with maybe a very small smattering of like some, some rehab based injury. injury, injury blocking. What is the injury prevention, injury prevention, type approach to any sort of weights that they might do. So it's a very different human. That person's not periodizing their year year. Their year is, is marathoning. so in our example of, of our avatar, who's trying to do both, one of the issues that we come across a lot is the interference effect of the specific muscle group being worked. So I'm not talking globally systemic interference effect, because to Aaron's point, like I really do think you could train for a 5k or some sort of 20 to 30 minute race and still build muscle. And it should be a non-issue for the most part. But we do see some of this interference with, know, I just did a really hard, you know, zone four, 5k the day before. And, and now my legs are a little sore. My calves are tight. and I'm supposed to go in and do this like hard leg day the next day, that's just probably not the optimal place to put your leg day. Alternatively, you may not want to do your leg day and then do your really hard run the day after leg day either. there's a little bit of nuance that goes into where you're placing that stuff. And that's just another reason why I love the periodization of the year instead, because it almost mitigates the need to worry about. things like that. Like if you're in your build season where lifting weights is your focus, then you're still going to run. Sure. Like you don't want to lose all your running gains, but you're probably not going to go out and do like a 95 % effort 5k. or maybe you will, but that's once a week instead of being multiple days a week or something along those lines. And it just, it allows you to bucket your stresses significantly more effectively, which at the end of the day, not only allows you to create better results, for your goals, but it also mitigates a lot of the pain points and frustration that could occur by trying to combine these two year round. Very, very well said. I don't have anything else on the back end of this one. Is there anything else you wanted to add to this? No, that's good. I'm glad the last two were a bit shorter because we kind of spent a good chunk of time on that first one, which I think is honestly probably more relevant for the majority of people anyways. Yeah, so I mean, to kind of wrap this one up, like there is going to be that sticking point in any thing with the the goal related. And if you're at that sticking point, it's just the gentle reminder that that is exactly where you need to be and to get a significant or substantial amount of of. Keepable progress, right? Long-term remaining progress, whatever that word is I'm searching for there, you need to get through and push through that discomfort point. hopefully that helps for the New Year stuff. Of course, any follow-ups, you can ping either Brian or myself on Instagram. And next week, Brian, I think we are going to do our Instagram December Q &A for the final one of the year, is that correct? Yep, correct. And then I think after that, I believe I'm two weeks off. So we would be back in whatever the in early January would be. So. Yeah, 2025. So we're what was this episode 176 or something? So we'll have been through 177 episodes in in four years, which is pretty crazy. Pretty crazy. Yep. We'll hit that next year, which will be cool. yeah, we'll come back with the December Q and A next week. And we've already got four questions from DMs from people. So really, really great four questions already on the books and hopefully we'll have some more quality ones come in. Definitely. As always guys, thank you for listening. Like Brian said, we'll talk to you next week.