What's up guys. Happy Monday or Tuesday. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. Today is Brian and myself and this is episode 217 and we are talking the impact of effort in your training. So we are going to dive into this. I will extrapolate more as we get into the nuts and bolts of the episode. But as always, Brian, what's going on? Yeah, a couple of quick updates here. um That foot thing that I was dealing with a couple of weeks ago that I noted kind of derailed my Moab trip seems to have popped up again. And I now think a little bit more confidently that it must be the result of the lunges that I did or the Cossack Squats. So Cossack Squat is kind of like a lateral lunge where you go into like a deeper position on the foot. So I did those a few weeks ago and then two days later my foot started hurting and then it felt way better, like almost fully better probably for four or five days. And then four or five days ago I did a leg workout where I did some reverse lunges, not even lateral lunges, just normal sagittal plane forward and backward lunges and woke up the next day and my foot was hurting again. Literally the same injury I had before. This time it was less severe. It felt like I was kind of. on day three or four of the injury instead of on day one or two. But uh anyway, it's been now three or four days of my foot being kind of not fully incapacitated, but I still can't really walk distances on it. So this has been interesting because I now have two separate like four to seven day periods where my foot was messed up and I couldn't really move much. So I was, you know, getting a lift in every other day and If I could bike, would bike, but I've been with the weather this time I wasn't able to bike. And then with being in Moab, I didn't have my bike. So my activity level has been drastically reduced because of my foot thing. And I've been eating significantly less. Like my appetite has completely disappeared. And this was like kind of a wild revelation to me because I've had this feedback about TRT that the only real negative is that my body weight just keeps going up and I can't get my body weight to stop going up. And I'm wondering now how much of that is correlated specifically to this high extreme level of energy expenditure that I was having. You know, I was doing 60 to 120 minutes of cardio every other day and then lifting every other day, doing 15,000 steps a day either way. So my activity level was huge. and I was eating so much and I was gaining weight and now I've been incapacitated and my appetite has completely disappeared and my body weight has plummeted. So where it was like 210 to 212 in the mornings, now it's down to like 206 in the mornings and I just have no appetite. So on one sense, I'm like, wow, this is cool that my ghrelin and leptin signaling seems to be good. Like when I'm hungry, I eat or when I need food, I eat when I'm... unable to be active, my body's like, hey, you should probably eat less. That's a positive, but it's making me curious about maybe my optimal dose of exercise is actually way less than I've been doing. And maybe my appetite and my body weight will find a more accurate homeostasis if I'm exercising less. So anyway, that's been on my mind a little bit. I would agree with that. what I've found and experienced with myself, clients, and then close people in my circle that are not natural, let's put it that way, the magnitude scales as your body weight goes up. So let's say you were, I don't know, whatever, an open class bodybuilder or a classic physique competitor who's on PEDs in your off season, if you have something like this, it's not six pounds, it's like. 11 pounds, a 12 pound swing. Even me, right? When I got, when we, when we, so we left Bali Wednesday. By the time I got a scale and stuff, you know, back here, we got to, you know, we got to our home here in Utah on Friday. But by the time I got a scale, I think it was Sunday from Wednesday to Sunday, just traveling and like eating normally and moving things and stuff. I went from 231 pounds to 220. Yeah, that's insane. will and I wasn't trying I was literally just doing things right. So but now I've been back training again my step counts where it is my activity I'm about like 11000 steps per day. I'm 230 again. So It's interesting, in my example, and it seems similarly with yours, that the more active we are, the more we're gaining weight, because we're then eating to account for that. And maybe in some ways, that's actually creating a caloric surplus. Whereas when we're not moving as much, the appetite naturally declines, and maybe we're actually in a deficit without even intending to be so. Yeah, very interesting. And then I guess my only last update here is that I talked about the IPO and the updates last week that this company that Kim has been working with had their IPO last week. It went extremely well. mean, way better than we even could have hoped. It was like pie in the sky level of success. This stock opened at 185, which was like way higher than they expected it to open. And there was so much demand that it shot up into the mid 300s within like minutes. after the IPO. it essentially like two X'd in the first like few hours after it dropped. So that was insane. And then I just wanted to pull out this aspect of novelty. You and I were talking about it a little bit beforehand and just your experience being in Salt Lake City, not being in Bali anymore is that, hey, there's weather things. Like you woke up and you thought it'd be 80, but it was snowing. uh How crazy all of that is and how novelty is truly the spice of life. And this IPO. sent me directly into novelty again in a way that I haven't experienced in a long time. And it was really refreshing and really kind of makes you feel alive. So I just want to kind of inject some novelty into things a little more often and to tell you guys that I think that the more novelty you can get in your lives, the better that will be as well. I would agree with that. Well, in a very similar note, I've it's been on my to do list for quite some time now. I want to put together a little bit of a recap post of my years spent in Bali, you know, and the things that we've done and the opportunities and stuff that we've had. And what was really interesting is as the years went by, there was just less and less things that I did to where is the final from effectively, let's call it May of 2020. And I know even before like February of 2025, to the time that we left there was nothing in my phone but check-in photos and like progress stuff or things that I needed to take photos of of like problems at the gym so there was no more like rice fields that we went to or like different coffee shops it went from like this you know very novel life experience and literally just like bodybuilding and in the gym and nothing else so it was pretty eye-opening to like just go back through and see that in real time Yeah, and then now your phone's probably filled with like snow capped mountains in the distance in June or whatever. All right. Never. Yeah. All right. What's going on? So first things first update from me in September, September 18th, 19th and 20th. I am hosting my first in-person seminar in the United States with my friend Ben Broughton from Singapore. He's also he has a forged gym in Bangkok. It is called refining hypertrophy. It is here in Salt Lake City at the refinery gym. Three person or sorry, three days in person. If you're interested, uh DM me or email me and I'll send you over our brochure. The reason that we are hosting it here at this specific gym is a lot of the things that we are going to cover and teach around uh resistance profiles. And specific equipment selections for those and you need a facility that has enough of the equipment that allows you to modify resistance profiles and things like that to really really grasp it at a understanding that you get in person on your own body. There's a lot of these things that we can understand in theory but the application hits different. So we have it structured as a push day a pull day and a leg day. We take some theories and things like that in person in a classroom setting and then a meeting go demonstrate on the gym floor on the respective equipment. So again, that is in September. If you are interested, drop me a DM or an email and I will send you over the full details on it. I'm so, excited for it. So, so, excited. And then I had a training revelation which Brian you and I talked about a little bit. I have fully accepted defeat on the rib cage positioning for pressing and rowing. It's things that I've known about. My good friend Kyle Baxter has talked to me about it for years and I just I don't know sometimes you know where you will try something and then you're like I'm so much weaker or it's new and you don't really take it at face value but I effectively reached a point where I realized My upper back and my chest are now weak points. My chest was a strong point as a natural and then it kind of just didn't really grow relative to everything else once I became enhanced. ah There's something I'm doing wrong, right? I believe that we have these things of weak body parts, strong body parts that are... uh More genetic based but I don't think that there's anything that you cannot surmount and I realized I've had you know, two years at this now I'm missing something there's something that I am NOT doing the stimulus that I am generating is not matched what I would expect it would for my Frequency my effort my volume. So there's something that I am doing wrong so I went searching a little bit uh and The of it what sparked it was initially a video from Jonathan Warren We very briefly spoke about on the podcast, maybe three or four months ago. And then that sent me down a rabbit hole of things and it's, it's clicked at least sufficiently where I'm able to generate the stimulus that I want much stronger contractions. now. Hope is that with enough time, adequate substrate, via carbohydrate, caloric surplus, those sorts of things, I can bring up these lagging body parts and that is very, very, very exciting to me. Again, because it's like you said, there's something new that I can act upon to hopefully generate more than I was able to generate with my prior approach. Yeah, yeah. Well, just to give the listeners something practical, what do you think is like one or two main cues that you could use to kind of describe the changes that you've made in your positioning to amplify these elements? the rib cage stack. before I was an arch presser, very much like Dr. Mike style, sticking it up. You get that kind of, uh, that, that thoracic kind of contraction in the back sternum up. Now it's bringing it down, trying to keep my pelvis and rib cage, uh bracing the abs just a little bit to keep me here, right? I'm not like super crunching them down, but just enough contraction to keep me uh stacked and then trying to just breathe into my lungs and expand that cavity. So like I'm braced, but I'm breathing in trying to make that really, really big. And then as I'm pressing, not, you know, pushing away from it or anything, just staying there and allowing like my chest muscles and, you know, joints to kind of move around the chest as opposed to purposely like articulating them back and forth. And is it the same idea in kind of keeping the app sucked down and all of that when you're rowing as well? Yeah. exact position, same exact bracing. It's just, you know, move one movement versus the other. Yeah. the nice part about that, as I've been experimenting with it for the last couple months as well, is that the amount of load that you need is so much less, that there's actually a lot of less systemic fatigue. It's like, it's similar to what I talked about a few months ago from Jonathan Warren again, of instead of squatting with, you know, your toes pointed out and all the way down, ass to grass, and then being able to use your reductors and all these other muscles to get you out of the hole, you keep the legs a little straighter, internal rotation, knees don't splay out, and you're just going down to about parallel and back. And the load reduction, it's like 35 % less load that I'm using to get the same stimulus. So you're getting a ton of stimulus and less systemic fatigue along with it. So therefore you can do more volume, get more out of that volume. Yeah, it's been, it's been really eye opening. And what I would say, the exercise that it, that it first where I was like, wow, that's different. I did a seated machine fly just like a regular peck deck, but I didn't arch. didn't try and get like super, super deep. kept my elbows pretty much straight stacked it in. Like you, you only get to about 90 before like, can feel like there's nothing more in my chest going. and one set of 15 there and it was blown up and on fire and I was like okay something is something's different there's something worth continuing to explore here which has been cool. Yep, very cool. Well, glad to hear that and excited to see all the gains. End of the topic, which I'm very, very excited to talk about. what kicked this idea off is I've been having certain conversations with clients that reach out and then also people in my Instagram DMs. And they are, I would say their expectations are greater for the return that they think they are going to get. than the effort that they are putting in. And their fears are also a little bit overplayed. fears, maybe not fears, concerns, I should say. So concerns about sets to failure, skyrocketing fatigue, and what that means, and if they're going to be able to perform in another few days uh relative to the goals that they have. And these each... each person that reached out, individually assessed their current level of body composition, their current physique development in my formulating of this, this kind of understanding. We are talking very intermediate, very early stage intermediate. So people who still have a massive scale of, I don't really believe the genetic like Limit exists, but let's say you know once you reach a point of where diminishing returns start to weigh in pretty heavily still very very far from this point and What it kind of led me to believe and why I wanted to talk about it Is I remember back here? Let me let me back up a little bit right now. We have this this explosion of research in the fitness space over the last like really since like 2013 ish, I would say is where it really started becoming a lot more prominent. So we have about like 13 years. The amount of people majoring in this as online coaching and stuff has provided, you know, much more opportunities in terms of career. And I would say from a generational standpoint, gym is way more popular now with the younger generations than it was with our generation. So there's just much more people into it. And then the education and the content around it is also much more prevalent. So there's much, there's much more eyes on it, much more research being done. And I think a lot of these things are in certain situations, I'm not saying all getting miscontextually applied. And then people are concerning themselves with things like fatigue management. um What's another note that I have here? Things that apply to natural bodybuilding. ah Context at very very very low levels of body weight body fat percentage being applied at 12 15 way above the population that the research was done upon and we have a fear of kind of effort because of some of the research stating that Your effort it doesn't need to be to failure So then we have a lot more of the RIR which again is very very appropriate when used in a contextually appropriate situation but we have people just not really training that hard because they're afraid of things like fatigue management and they still have so much more to gain just by trying harder. Right? That's the first part. Contrasted with, and I think this is very relevant to you and I, Brian, we were fortunate or unfortunate, I guess, to kind of cut our teeth, spend our early and mid 20s in the very early years of the explosion of CrossFit where we had quite the opposite. information was, you know, not great. Let's put it that way. And you were very early on of uh a coach and a business owner bringing more of the, solidified science of it into the space and we were fortunate that you you were doing that but effort was 11 out of 10 so we had kind of quite the opposite and even though our nutrition was poor I mean for what we know now what we were doing then especially myself horrendous but the effort was so high it still worked really really well um and I The goal of this conversation is to kind of meet in the middle a little bit, right? So what are your thoughts about how I kind of introduced that? Yeah, I think you can even go back before the CrossFit days to kind of just the way that people perceived training in the when I got started in the late 90s and then I guess the early 2000s for you. um There wasn't such thing as RIR. Nobody knew what that was like. You either took your set to the house or like it was a wasted set. It was kind of the the mindset around it. and everything was like blood and guts. It was like the Dorian Yates style of just like taking it to the house. And it sounds like kind of what you're saying a bit is that without having had a period of time where you trained hard and went to failure, it's almost impossible to get enough out of using RIR to even make it worthwhile because your calibration method doesn't exist. And so, Like what I see when I hear you say that and when I look at people in standard commercial gyms that are at the intermediate level is a contrast to the way that I think I learned RIR to begin with. And I'll clarify in that when you only know taking things to failure like I did for five plus years when I started training, if someone told me to train with two RIR, it's likely I would probably end up at one because my calibration method was to go to failure. So to leave one RIR feels like leaving so much that it's probably two, even though it's not two, it's like, it's not failure. So we'll just call that two. It's like, I'm more likely to work too hard than I am likely to work not hard enough. And when you look at the intermediates in the commercial gym today, or those, you know, spinning their wheels and not getting results, they look at the science and they're like, look, this study that was done on people that train shows that you can train to one to two RIR and basically get the same results that you get by going to failure with all this less fatigue. But then they go to train to one to two RIR. And because they don't have the calibration of training to failure, their one to two RIR is actually not quite one to two RIR. And they're on this slippery slope. of not working hard enough, which then cumulatively over time adds up to them sort of spinning their wheels and not getting the results they hoped for. spot on. And I think why I love to talk about this like with everything, everything that we've built this podcast on is nuanced approaches. And There are times where being more conservative makes a lot more sense. Leg press, deadlift, things that you can get pinned underneath on, right? Where there is an actual risk of hurting yourself, right? There's a video, this guy that I met at Forge in Bangkok, he was uh doing a unilateral leg press and tore his adductor and just got pinned in the machine, right? Those are times. in the best part of the video. actually, it's a kind of a sketchy video. Some guy like runs over and was like, do you need help? he was like, what the fuck do you think, dude? He's pinned in a leg press, of course he needs help. So anyway, um those are things where exercising caution is great. There's actual risk of uh a misfortunate event. If you're doing, shoulder press in a machine a seated row these sorts of things your risk or the fear of the the the Caution that is necessary is significantly reduced because the risk is effectively nil Whereas I find where people just apply fear of fatigue, fear of that across all exercises. And it just does not apply across all. is typically if you can get crushed under something, yes, exercise more caution. If that fear is not there, especially biceps, triceps, like there's no fatigue. You get some temporary localized fatigue, but there is minimal systemic fatigue you are accumulating with the extremities. Yeah, I think of it kind of as the number of joints that are at action. So when you have something like a deadlift or a back squat, you're kind of you're extending it three joints, your ankles, your knees and your hips. And so those movements you want to just be a lot more cautious with than you would if something with two joints like a chest press or a shoulder press or a row. And then obviously something with one joint like I can't see a reason why you wouldn't just take that one to the house because the risk is low and the fatigue cost is low as well. Yeah, the one of the kind of two situations that I wanted to talk about that in training and then we'll kind of bump over to nutrition as well. We're fortunate, like I said, that we have pretty decent data that's come out of and the more, you know, last hand decade or so on natural bodybuilders, right? And the rise in popularity of natural bodybuilding as well, which is very, very cool. There are physiologic adaptations that take place during very, low levels of body fat when they are, let's call it eight, eight weeks, maybe 12, 12 weeks and under outside of contest prep, which again, if you're unfamiliar with natural bodybuilders, if you see a natural bodybuilder 12 weeks out and you are not in the natural bodybuilding world, you will think they are probably stage condition ready in that, in that is not, there's still like three gears they have to go. There are things like tremendous down pressure on sexual drive. And in some certain situations, straight up usage, your shit will not work. uh Can play a role there. Extreme fatigue, extreme lethargy, uh extremely driven food focus uh behaviors because you are dangerously lean. Those are very, very reals. They are also only that show up in, like I said, very, very, very low levels of body fat that I would even argue 99 % of your gym interested population will ever achieve. So if we're getting, if we're going from 15 % to 12 % or something like that, These are not concerns that you have to worry about. Same thing with like muscle wasting. That's another really popular one. At 11 % body fat, you will lose some muscle mass, but it's only a necessary amount that is required to be catabolized as you lose a much larger proportionate percentage of your body fat to create the physique you want. those are things that I feel like really show up or people are... overly cautious around a rate of loss or something because of these miscontextually applied concerns. And then what ends up being what should be an eight week diet, a 10 week diet to go to maybe 11 % body fat takes 26 weeks, 30 weeks because of concern of maybe, you know, 300 grams of a fat free mass tissue lost, whereas if you just did it quicker and then reversed out, those 300 grams are back on in three weeks anyway. So that is one context I see to a lesser degree. And then the one that's worse ah that I think people really should stop putting as much emphasis on is examples from enhanced open class bodybuilders applying to naturals. because we have these individuals who are as far from natural as we could realistically get with insanely high levels of body weight and strength. And I think that is the piece that is missed. When you are a 280 pound open class bodybuilder taking one set of leg press to the house with 15 plates per side on the fucking leg press, that amount of systemic fatigue is orders of magnitude higher than if you're a 180 pound natural with four plates per side, right? And that's one where I find this conversation landing a lot and... the impacts on the CNS because of the super physiologic levels of hormones, androgens allow you to dig a hole that is significantly greater in depth than you can without all the uh super physiologic uh environment that comes along with it. Yeah, so there's obviously a huge factor in the like, CNS systemic impact of using heavier loads and being significantly stronger. then with that in mind, is the operating theory then that the natural needs significantly more volume to be able to reach their objectives as compared to someone that's enhanced? We've talked about this before, I think it depends where you are on your journey. I think the volume needs increase as your ability to derive very efficient stimulus increases and then once that reaches a threshold I think your volume needs actually decrease because your stimulus per set increases because your skill set increases. Yeah, so essentially, as you get bigger and stronger and have more experience, you move to be a little bit closer to what an enhanced bodybuilders would be like. So being an enhanced bodybuilder is essentially just like being a natural because you have all this experience and time under the bar. And then you just happen to take some drugs, which made it a little bit more sensationalized or whatever. But I guess then my question would be, you know, you bring up the the naturals taking lessons from enhanced bodybuilders and this being a problem. So what would be the lessons that you would want to pull out of that and extract and be like, hey, natural, like you should not be doing these things that these open class bodybuilders are doing. I think it's the acuteness of things, right? So let's say someone is in an off season and they're using like a uh weight ramping approach or something like that, like a loading approach, uh a load ramping approach at week over week. if I, like right now I'm on 140 milligrams of testosterone. That's my baseline TRT for my fertility program. Tomorrow, if I went to 300, I could probably put 10 pounds on all of my lifts in 10 days. And then the week after I could probably go another five and then another five and another five as a, as a natural, even, you know, myself, if I was a natural, you get like two weeks of that and then your forms compromised and things like that. So I think the rates of, of which things change, I think things around fatigue management. Definitely do not apply nearly as well um and the argument that I always love to use for my natural is when I get pushback from people is Go look at what the best natural bodybuilders in the world are doing right a lot of the training philosophy is going to be identical But there's things around volume fatigue management and rates of change and that's what's what I find ultimately uh But if you this is the argument that I always make when Sometimes I get pushback on well this you know study says that you only need this If you look at the best naturals and the top, you know enhance people Things are nearly identical minus drugs the delta, the dichotomy of caloric intakes and things like that. But I would probably even argue that the best naturals do more volume than the top enhanced guys. Again, because of that fatigue accumulation, they can just skyrocket with the androgen load. Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's a good point. And I tend to agree with that. One other thing that I think I personally find interesting and you can confirm if you've noticed the same, but you you were talking. It was two weeks ago, I think, where you were talking about training with the uh brawn, the guy, Rian, brawn was. at Breon. Breon, I said Rion and Bron, Breon, right? So, and he was training with like all 20 rep sets, like really high rep sets. One of the things that I always hear through discussions in the gym and et cetera, is that enhanced bodybuilders tend to train with higher reps in general. And you hear a lot about these studies now showing that... Well, I wouldn't call them studies. You hear from Paul Carter and a bunch of other voices in the space like Beardsley and stuff like this, that training in the five to eight rep range is really all that you need to do because you're maximizing stimulus from the first rep. uh You know, it's easier to calibrate how close you are to failure, uh less metabolic stress, which doesn't even lead to hypertrophy. So why would you cause all the extra fatigue? Like there's all these things that basically kind of. hone in on the five to eight or five to 10 rep range being all that you need to do. And throughout my natural training years, I've pretty much trained in that rep range and found that to be the optimal rep range for me as well. um Not that I'm enhanced now because TRT is a low dose enhancement, I guess, and I'm on a relatively low dose of that, but already I've found myself gravitating a little bit more to having some higher reps in there and not necessarily that all my sets are higher reps, but that I've even found that pyramiding now going like 15, 12, nine, six is a much preferred approach to two warmup sets and then jumping into heavy sets of six. uh Something about having more blood flow and pump into the muscles. Who knows if maybe that's also part of age. Like it could be age, it could be experience. It could be a number of these factors, but just on a base case, you know, zooming in on it. I'm wondering if in general the optimal rep range for a natural might be slightly lower than the optimal rep range for someone that's enhanced. I would agree, but I think there's confounding variables that make me agree with that. I don't think it's the rep range themselves. I think there is, as you get stronger, for example, if I'm lifting in the five to eight rep range, I am much more likely to make compensations in my execution of a rep because the weight is so heavy. Mm-hmm. Right, so I might arch my chest a little bit more or I might be struggling and the left shoulder rolls in or something like that. So I think the likelihood of modifying your execution for the worse, you know to get the rep is higher and I think there's also with that higher risk of injury. Because you're stronger because the loads you're exposed to from an absolute level or higher. So I don't I don't like if you could take I Don't know, you know to 18 year olds who have been both training for one year one is natural one is not I think the five to eight wouldn't probably change there But again if now if we're speaking 20 years later or something like that I think it changes it but not because not for that specific reason for other reasons that are almost avoidable in in the comparison Do you and I've heard this kind of teased as well that maybe there's actually like something hypertrophic advantage when you're enhanced to training in higher rep ranges and, you know, amplifying the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy response uh a little bit more than the myofibrillar, which you would get from those lower rep ranges. Yeah, I've seen what you're talking about. I can't confidently say either way. I what ends up happening is uh you gravitate what appears to be more productive for yourself. And I completely understand there's the subjective aspect of that. And that's not a very, very strong argument. But I would generally say that most people gravitate towards a way that they perceive is more productive for themselves. And one of the things that Breon did say in the Q and A about this specifically, because he's been competing for 16 years with 10 straight Olympias is he said, all the guys that got started with with me, who did the super heavy, you know, lower body of lower rep range training, very few of them are still active today because their bodies are in shambles. Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. um I just find it really interesting. I don't exactly know where I stand on that because it's more recent to me that I've even found some benefit in the 12 to 15, at least as like activation sets of sorts. um But psychologically, like I very much still prefer that five to eight rep range, like even though physically maybe it doesn't feel as smooth and crisp as it did as a natural. uh Psychologically, just, still enjoy training more doing those short sets than I do having to settle in for like a 15 to 20 rep burner. So is there anything else from the effort standpoint that you would like to talk about from a training uh aspect before I shift to nutrition? Nutrition will be shorter, of course, but. No, I just, I'm wondering if before we wrap up the training, if there's just any other aspects of training enhanced versus natural that you would want to pull out and discuss. um Cause I think it's actually like a super interesting topic and it probably SEO is a little bit better than the impact of effort in training, which is our current working title. uh So not that we have to expand on it, but if we want to. uh to do a little expose of enhanced first natural training. think that that's just an interesting category. volume is one that I think what I think is challenging is as a now is in an enhanced lifter I think you can get away with less volume but you can also still handle more which Ultimately just makes a very very convoluted statement. But for example, I just love training, right? So something happened last week. I went to a new gym just to just to see it There was another cool gym here Jenny had Jenny was meeting with some some friends up in Park City So she was gone and I just had the afternoon free I trained for like three hours because I was just having fun and there was all these new machines that I had never seen before and stuff It was way more than I needed but I was just and of course I recovered perfectly fine There was no massive doms or anything like that. So I think you don't need as much, but you can still get away with it without immediately perceivable negatives. Let me put it that way. um much of that is about the rep range too, because like even someone who's enhanced, I could see like if they're sitting in that five to eight rep range, I could see them doing eight working sets and being like, oh my God, like I am destroyed. Whereas, you know, if I'm using the 15 or 20 pound dumbbells and doing lateral raises, there's like no number of sets that I would have to stop at. Like I could do 30 sets. of lateral raises for 20 reps and my shoulders would be blown up and they'd probably be sore the next day. like the fatigue cost feels relatively minimal compared to heaving around five to eight rep max loads on some. Yeah, and that's a very, very good point. The body parts, think, and lower body, I don't think I could make that statement, right? For example, my lower body sessions have been, I start with a seated calf raise, and then I go into two or three sets of a seated hamstring curl. I think I do three sets of adductor. two sets on the leg extension and one or two sets of a bilateral squat pattern. And what I've been doing is just rotating to the different leg presses because there's eight leg presses and I want to try them all. And I am getting like last week I did the original pendulum hip press. So before it turned into like Rogers and stuff like the original one, it fucked me up so bad. was like holding onto the machines and stuff walking out of the gym. uh So like on a leg, like I couldn't go do one leg press and then a hack squat and then a pendulum or something like that. I'd be an absolute shambles. But for a row of a back day, yeah, it's exactly what I do. I'll do like four pull downs and four rows and just be chilling, hanging out, having fun. is Breon's leg day look like? Like if anyone's curious, know, an episode or two ago, Aaron went over his shoulder day with uh Breon and it was like 90 minutes of shoulders basically. uh So I'm curious, know, if you can build up the capacity to do something like that and obviously, you know, short overloaded movements for the most part, legs are generally lengthened, overloaded, systemic fatigue a lot higher. But I wonder if you can work your way up to doing, you know, 20 sets of 20 reps on legs because That's just like what you do, you know? uh guaranteed it's it's an exp it's it's a tight-treated exposure to things for example back when I first started training with Jackson the leg days were absolutely absurd and I was a natural at the time So, but natural air and after four or six weeks, like that was just, that was like every fifth day we trained legs and it was perfectly fine. If I now, or even you put me at peak, you know, gear usage during prep, if I jumped into that leg session, I would be ruined, ruined for probably like seven or eight days. So I think there's, there's, there's a, an adaptation model to, to, to an acute stressor, right? We're speaking like general adaptation syndrome as part of human physiology. It's just. know, titrating yourself as an exposure or you could just jump into the deep end and pay for it badly for like three weeks before you start to adapt. But yeah, I think it's just an exposure and what you expose yourself to in an iterative process to get what you are either signing up for one necessarily need uh each of those. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, yeah, move on to nutrition. Let's finish out there. There's one final thing that I wanted to say about the enhanced versus non-enhanced. And an argument, and this is an argument that I never understood how it made sense. There's oftentimes the natural crowd when an enhanced lifter will make a statement and they say, yeah, but that only works for you because you're enhanced or something like that. And that's their rebuttal. I've always... That's that argument has never made sense to me because if if we have we have two people right? Let's say like you and I right you and I have both been natural and you know me I guess all the way enhanced your own, you TRT you have Experiences on both sides. You have lived your life on both sides Whereas the natural has only lived their life on one side. So me For example, I trained for 20 years as a natural. I've trained for two years not natural, right? and then I'll get straw man saying that doesn't that only works for you because you're enhanced. I'm like it worked for me as a fucking natural in my mid-30s. So that always bothers me and it's the exact same example as let's say a super wealthy person. who's a millionaire, right? Or says, this is how you create wealth in your life. And someone's like, that only works for you as a millionaire. It doesn't work for people who are non-millionaires. But that person got to being a millionaire, like using these strategies where someone's straw manning them from a place where they have no experience. So again, as a listener, as a person consuming content, you can usually tell. how someone's speaking and if they're adding the necessary nuance and stuff but just because someone's on steroids doesn't mean that they're necessarily information does not apply to people who are not on steroids. Again back to my example take the best naturals they are going to train very similarly in a way to someone who is not. Yeah, sorry, I don't wanna derail you, continue. Okay, cool. Yeah, I do agree with that and I think in general it is taken too far. But as I've alluded to, as I started this journey onto TRT is there's certainly a place of ambiguity where I suddenly was getting great results in my training after many years of a rep. every three to six months or something along those lines. And then suddenly I started taking TRT and like my training's working again. And it's very easy to get myopic in the way that you then communicate to your audience and be like, I started this bro split where I was training one body part a day in December and I made all these gains and I haven't made gains for four years. But now look at me, I'm making all these gains and it's because I started this bro split and blah, blah, blah. And so like, Like I do think it's important to understand that while a lot of the training is the same, you wanna make sure as a communicator to be a bit tepid in the way that you talk about things. very, very well put, yeah. and I don't have much more to add. Okay, into nutrition. So the thing with nutrition is it's much less, the magnitude is much less, but one that I've gotten, I've had to explain to clients recently is again, more recent soft, the softening of the fitness information. That's a really, really good way to put it back in the late 90s, early 2000s. It was very hardcore type of thing. Everything's really, really softened. I think that's very positive. In certain situations, it gets taken too far where people, in my opinion, over soften what is required to produce the physique that you want, specifically in the context of fat loss, right? Where we have people using these sales tactics of build your dream body without ever restricting any of the foods that you love. Unless you're me and your love foods are fucking ground beef and white rice. I don't think that's gonna hold true, right? And I had to explain this to a client who was really, she was frustrated because we're in a calorie deficit. She works a very erratic schedule. So her sleep is very, very up and down, which provides its own challenges. She was flat on the week. She had a friend come to visit and... was pretty active. She was very active in her words from our, you know, interpretation steps were like nine to 11,000, which we would not consider very, very active, trained two times and had, I think three meals, you know, out on the week. And she was like, but I didn't lose weight. And I was like, yeah. I think your expectation of what it takes to get there is just a little bit upside down because a lot of the softening of the message or people who I don't know why people say that, right? Build your dream body and never give up any of the foods that you love and you're marketing this to your, your, your Jen pop American who is let's put it for what it is. overweight, like considerably overweight, it's just not true, unfortunately. Unless, like I said, your love foods are just chicken and rice. In which you probably have to restrict your rice intake at that point anyway. So, yeah. How do you think about this from the point of like big rocks versus precision? And so meaning like, you know, I talk a lot in training about how if you just recover sufficiently, you know, eat enough food and train with sufficient volume and effort, like those are broad categories of like, hey, if you do that, like you're probably going to get pretty good results. And I think there's a similar analogy or metaphor for nutrition. Yeah, how do you think about it that way and where does that fit into kind of this paradigm? I love it. I love it. That's a very good thing to put up. Let's break down the training one a little bit. If you take care of the big rocks, right? You train hard, hard being a little bit subjective, but let's say closer to the definition that Brian and I are using in today's episode. You train hard, you give it five or six years. You generally take care of the big rocks. You're gonna build a pretty decent physique. You're not gonna be 10 % shredded. Do that. You're gonna be... that 13 to 15 % have a good amount of muscle mass, but you're still carrying a good amount of body weight on top of it, preventing you from looking, which probably how you want to look. And that's that kind of missing piece. If from a nutrition standpoint, yeah, if you just take care of the big rocks, eat, let's say we're eating 21 meals per week, right? Let's make a basic example, three meals per day. And you have what four meals off plan per week or not like on meal plan, like four meals off per week, you sleep seven ish hours per night. Maybe you keep alcohol to four drinks per week or something like that. I don't think you're going to be, if you started from not overweight, I don't think you're going to get overweight with that approach. But if you're starting 40 pounds above what would be a 12 % body fat for you as a male, That approach might take you three, four years to get that all those 40 pounds off. And that's the part that I think people miss. It's really a rate of loss or time. It's like the re-comp argument. Does re-comping work? Yes, it does work. It's really slow. It would be much faster to get to your goal with a deficit and then a build as opposed to a re-comp. There's no argument against that, but I'm not saying re-comping doesn't work. It's just slow relative to the alternative option. It's the same argument that I would make with the nutritional big rocks. Yeah, cool. I like that. um The one final thing I will say there in terms of the effort, another thing that I get with certain clients is the one foot in one foot out method, which again, I'm not saying will not work. It's just time to goal, right? And I'm very big on communicating this early on with a client because everyone's opinion in kind of chosen route is different. I, if I were to read, much more in the camp of rip the bandaid off. We get in, we tell our spouse, parents, friend group, et cetera. I have this big goal. I want to do it in whatever 12, 16 weeks. We get the fat off and now we can start having three glasses of wine again or something like that. Being much more flexible as opposed to trying to do the one foot in one foot out method. And we're dieting for nine months now and you're still not, you know, where you want to be. So. Again, it's where you place the hard. The hard is either all up front at once and then the hard is kind of over and then things are much more, you know, green on the back end or we baby distribute that hard intermixed throughout, which again does work. But I think the potential downside or the most likely downside there is, how do I want to put it? the psychological evaluation of, had a glass of wine last night. Can I have one again tonight? Should I have one? I went out to eat last week, my body weight didn't go up. Can I get away with it this week again? Like that internal psychological battle, I think that we as humans are just very poorly set up to win over a long period of time. Yeah, I actually really love the framing of it's not that it doesn't work. It's just how long it's gonna take you to get there. And I mean, that's like 100 % right. And I think it resonates with me super well as well because like I correlate it to the training idea of, know, if we just. do those big rocks and you do them long enough, like you're gonna have a pretty damn good physique. You're gonna have a pretty good amount of muscle. You just have to wait a long enough time. And for me, it's like, shit, I've been doing this for over 27 years. Like I waited long enough, you know? And it's kind of similar with nutrition. you and I have a very different. approach to nutrition and that you are very regimented and you're very specific. And I'm very much the big rocks guy, which I kind of am with training now too, you know, it's it's in a way it's a little bit nihilistic. It's also a bit of a, a nod to like, lifestyle and being able to like things that are important to me, like being able to go out and get fucked up and have social events with friends and stuff is like, kind of an important piece of my life and maybe a little bit less so for you at this time. But it's accepting that, okay, if I want my physique to be eight to 10 % body fat and I want to do a photo shoot, shit needs to get dialed in. But if I'm just comfortable being 13 to 16 % body fat, being strong in the gym, having a balanced life, then taking that big rocks approach is enough. And I did it for long enough that my body is still more or less where I want it to be. Exactly and the one final thing that I will say that I think people kind of miss Get get wrong You are already at that 13 percent body fat, right? So staying the same you have a lot of auto regulation Where I find people run into the frustrations is they are 20 percent body fat They want to get to 13 percent body fat and they're having issues with the auto regulation And what I typically say to them is like you've been 20 percent body fat for three years Yeah. If you just had to stay at 20 % body fat, how easy is that for you? Exactly. Cool. ah That is all I have for this episode. But the one thing I do want to say to kind of wrap up with is what I really wanted to get out of this episode is if you have been feeling a little bit frustrated, things have been slower than you would like. I would encourage you to give it a dedicated period of six, eight weeks, something just increase your effort. Try harder. take more sets to failure, really, really dig deep and see if you notice things are starting to slide or trend more in the direction that you would like. The final thing that I will say in very few aspects of life does putting more effort into something or trying harder yield worse results. So. Yeah, I'll add as well that we are not glass dolls and uh we are resilient human beings that can recover from a lot more. And so you don't need to be super scared that if you're recovering fine from 12 sets a week for a muscle group now at two RIR, that if you took six of them to failure, it's not like you're suddenly gonna break apart and uh crumble. So. give yourself a little bit more credit than that. my last thing would just be if you don't know effort, like if you haven't trained to failure across your years thus far, just do it. And if that even means that you have to do less volume, I think for a short period of time for you to calibrate what true failure is, that that's going to have exponential benefits for you down the road. I could not agree anymore. Cool. As always guys, thank you for listening. I think we will be back next week, but we have to see we both have some travel. So talk to you guys when we when we link up again for episode, which will be 218.