¶ Episode intro/life updates
yeah
all right here we go oh yeah what's up guys happy tuesday welcome back to another episode of eight train prosper i believe this is episode actually eighty six brian it's crazy to think that it has been going on for this long it seems really just like kind of yesterday we were having the conversation about starting it and here we are coming up on two years i think in a couple of months in this far deep but we are talking a little bit of a follow up episode to last week's episode we were
talking about just kind of some hindsight in our training careers so today we are going to talk about i don't think i could really use the word eating care but what we're terming nutrition
m
through
yeah
the years just to give a little bit of insight into kind of how brian and i found ourselves here and just to share a little bit more around where we were at our and kind of perspective um eras or phases through how we ultimately found ourselves here as always before we jump into today's topic brian can you kick us off with some updates
yeah for sure i think it says this is episode eighty seven so you may be underwhelming us by an episode but
son of
either
pitch
way i know we took we took a couple ks off here and there for different things so um january either way january one will definitely be two years for us which is pretty cool and we're now averaging you know well into the thousands on downloads per week which also really cool too because that was one of our kind of initial goals so
oh
i'm super happy about that but either way i guess my big up date for today i have a few but the big one is i did the p r p in my knee last tuesday so one week from before this episode is recorded and i guess two weeks before this episode airs is when i got p r p and it was extremely excruciating ly painful for about three to five minutes after completion and that was the thing that i think surprised me the most the doctor told me that the first three five
minutes were going to be really painful but i don't know that i could have possibly been prepared for feeling like there was so much fluid in my knee cap that it felt like my knee cap was going to literally pop off for a few minutes um i remember just like sitting there in the bed with an ice pack on it after he finished and he's like i'll check you back in five minutes you know just just try to chill out and like big breaths and like squeezing my hands and like just trying to
get through the pain it was awful do you remember feeling similarly
yeah i do actually now i kind of feel like a dick for not saying that or maybe maybe i shouldn't have said anything but
it was better it was better
to the point where i was like i don't know i think something wrong right or it's just
yeah
like it's a small area that there's not really room for all the fluid that gets injected and it's just like intense intense pressure
yeah that's how i would describe it as well so literally three to five minutes later it's like it kind of went down to like a three out of ten pain and then it kind of just hung out there for a couple of days um i feel and i don't i don't want to blame this on my doctor but i feel like i was slightly misled in how i was to handle the period after p r p in that he told me like he definitely did say avoid you know most activity for a week to his credit but he also said
the main thing is just avoiding anything that you more than a three out of ten pain so in my mind i may be just heard the second part and didn't hear the don't do activity for a week thing and so i was like well as long as it's under a three out of ten i can do whatever and so i think ye basically what happened is i had had this trip planned to go to s tis park solo which is kind of what i do for my birthday ear i like to take a trip into the mountains and have a
day of hiking away from the family and just kind of have an interospect period to reflect on the year and things like that so this year i'd planned on estes park and doing like this big hike i didn't really think about the fact that it was going to be five days after my p r p so i had already had the trip booked and everything like that i ended up doing the hike anyways it was over a thousand foot vertical it was like two and a half hours four miles round trip and
on the way back down my knee just started talking to me i wouldn't say it was more than three out of ten but it was certainly closing in on that three out of ten range and then i finished the hike and it stiffened up a lot after i stopped moving and i would say at that point a good solid three out of ten so i started having all these like negative feelings wondering if like you know hey this doesn't feel right like did i work too hard should i not have done this started
getting on google which is never a good idea you have a condition and all these websites basically saying that any activity that compresses the joint in the first five to fourteen days of the p r p s specially the first five days the term they used was render it useless and i was like literally in a state of freaking out kind of because i was like man i just went through all of this and what if i have rendered this useless the rational being that the plate let's can't attach if the joint
is compressed and so you really want to leave that joint kind of unstressed first five days so the plate let's can attach and start doing their work and then after five days you know they've mostly attached and you're pretty good from there so anyway i still kind of feel like i don't know if i rendered it useless i'm a little bit down about it the pain from the hike persisted for two days after and it's just literally last night before bed and then into this morning
that it finally started to feel like it's in moving again um so i'll keep everyone updated to see if maybe you know i screwed this up permanently and it just won't work now which would be a shame but at least my hope is that it gets back to where it was at a minimum because i've heard horror stories on line of people doing activity too early and then their joint ends up being unstable for eternity basically until they either get pr p again or surgery so m i have a bit of trepidation on
the whole thing but i'm confident and optimistic that hopefully it's going to be okay especially that it's starting to feel a little bit better so that's my big update and i have a few smaller ones that can fall follow that how about you i know you're leaving bolly here shortly
i leave by the time this episode comes out i will be back in the states i leave on thursday like midday we start
okay
we head up to jacarda because we could get better flight options out of jacarda which is like the capital of indonesia and then we fly
oh
first flight is to i want to say to buy and then we have like a few early over in to buy and then we fly into dallas in d c
ah cool
i'm i'm excited
yeah
kind of for the travel day just for something like different like i feel like travel days or where i get to break my rules i'll just have coffee like whenever because i'm like i got a ten hour flight and
uh
like a four ten hour flight like
uh
you
yeah
know it is it is what it is so m definitely excited to hit a starbuck as kind of corny as that sounds and just get like a straight you know dark rose black coffee um i'm going to do some work on on the flight as well and then in a book to read and then i'll have like a couple show series things to watch i mean it's a lot of sitting and sitting in one spot you know over those
yeah
three flights i at like over twenty hours well over
yeah
twenty hours so
at least they have great entertainment options
ye
on those international flights
yeah yeah and that's kind of the reason like we've done enough of it now like any time we're flying big across the world we're pretty much going to fly like merits or guitar even though it's
yeah
generally going to be a little bit more expensive it's just up better just there's no bullshit like as much as i fucking hate to say it like flying the american airlines not specifically american but like the
united
us airlines
or like yeah yeah yeah
hands down the fucking worst like across the board the absolute worst um so once i learned that i was like oh this is a
yeah
game changer now what i know to look for which is the opposite
yeah
of what you may otherwise would kind of think but yeah excited for that i'm excited to be back in the states will be back in the states for like ten to twelve
m
weeks about before returning to wally see my family one of my one of my friends is getting married that's like the real like that was like the catalyst for us planning around this so i'll be back in the pensylvania area um for that that's kind of like the big biggest up date so getting rid of things scrambling around you know tying tying bits in but my fun up date is i hit my hack goal today
yes
so i got my ten raps at a hundred and eighty k s which is double the reps that i ended my strength block with which was fifteen weeks ago and then i had a period in the middle where i didn't train the metabolic phase in the middle weight didn't train the hack squat for like four weeks um so that's been super super cool because it's like a very cut and dry progression right there
did you get video
a video yeah
nice
yeah one of my one of my friends matt was here with me and we actually trained together today and then i pushed it made sure i pushed it like pretty good because i had him there spot me um and then i was going to take an eleventh attempt because it was moving like okay but my core broke down on the tenth
m
one and that's like
m
kind of when i know like it's going to be if that's if that's buckling it's going to go into
yeah
low back and different things it's kind of just
hip
not worth
flexion
it for
a little
me
more hip flexion there
exactly yeah
yep
so i'm really really excited about that that was my big one
well i don't know if you have a youtube channel but if you don't i can throw it up on my youtube channel if the people want to see
i do have a youtube channel actually that i don't really ever use it'll go on my instagram and stuff so i'll
okay
put something on there but yeah i might throw it over on youtube or whatever to
yeah i'm hoping to watch it good stuff dude congrats
thank you
cool well quick
oh
finishing up dates for me initially i spoke last week about you know with this p r p happening that i was going to train my right quad and not my left and just do hamstring work normal and i've kind of just decided that i'm not going to train my right quad it's already bigger than my left quad is per my tex a scan a month ago and so i just i'm just going to take this time to not quads for a few weeks will use it as like a quad recensitization phase and it will keep me from being i don't
know it's the word i'm looking for here too neurotic maybe so so i'm just goin to stop training quads and when i have leg days they're just going to be hamstring days for right now and ab's maybe i'll actually train um so i think i have another week week and have maybe two weeks of not training quads and then they want me to start doing some like light single leg leg extensions so i'll add those in and then maybe by week three or four i'll be due some like light goblin squats or
funk in my case maybe it's just like an empty carriage pendulum squat or something like that so that's my plan there and let's see what else is coming up kim is leaving me for five days in two days so the day that you leave for for actually the day before you leave for the u s she'll be leaving for mexico for a yoga retreat with a couple of her girls so i have five days coming up of double dad duty um well see how workouts fit into this whole thing the kids school
is also closed on friday which is like they just have like this random closer day for no reason like it's a boulder monesory like reunion professional development day or something so i'm like sweet glad i'm solo dating on the day where there's no school um so friday should be fun yes sir
uh kind of related kind of unrelated
m
are the kids
m
in a monte store in a montessori school
yes they are a
okay we will have a conversation off line about this actually
okay
but i'm very excited to talk about it
right sweet yeah i grew up in a waldorf school
yes
which is somewhat similar to montessori so when that was presented as an option here when we first moved to boulder
oh
as something that we were
yes
were retty into so
cool
um i'll save this next topic for next week we'll tease it but
oh
rep ranges and the idea of six through thirty raps being equal across the board
oh
you know um and in my preference for lower reps and kind of why so we can we can cover that
oh
maybe that will be like a half topic for next week or something along those lines because i think it's gotten a bit of a bit of focus in the instagram these days
i think let's let's late that up for next week too because i have my kind of preferential feelings around that and we'll have a great open discussion about it i'm interested to
wet
hear more about yours too
sounds good well that's really all i have for updates then
cool i guess the last one i always forget to talk about this and it's really really silly because we just get into it you guys can kind of tell i'm probably not a great marketer at heart
yeah
i've coaching roster slots
yeah
available so
yeah
i've a couple of really great clients who have been with me for a very long time wrapping up as we've wrapper wrapping up like huge fat lost phases and those sorts of things so those guys will kind of go into maintenance some of them fade off into the sunset which means that i have ruster availability so you can check my website strike or nutrition coe dot com i have some information on there if there is an application on there you can obviously d on instagram and
then by time this launches i will have one slot opened in my coaching capabilities container is a mentor ship for new or existing coaches in the space who would like to improve their coaching service fulfillment delivery side of things so we're focusing everything on the back end and then improving
yeah
your systems and i give you all of my systems and the things that i used to run straiter nutrition co so that's always a small group two hours weekly calls bring lots of value sort of thing so reach out that just email me or d m m for more details on that for that final slot and that is my coaching pitch right there brian would you like
oh
to plug any paragon stuff while we're at it
no but i'm ready to sign up for your coaching that was amazing
perfect
so so i don't have any paragon stuff to plug but i do i did just get hit up
oh
by a sixteen year old kid named oliver from sweden and he and his mom actually hit me up collaboratively because
probably for
their
the best
interest they're interested in my in my coaching one on one this kid has been training for six or eight months and we had a really cool consult call i actually don't officially have any like one on one coaching spots open at the moment but i'm going to take him on just because
es
this is it's somewhat of a new experience for me like i was once fifteen and sixteen as we're going to discuss through the eating period here through nutrition but i haven't worked with anyone that has been he made your since the cross fit days when we had like a cross it kids class and stuff like that so this kid purely wants hypertrophy like that is his number one objective and he just wants to get as big and massive as possible and so
yeah
i'm kind of excited to
yeah
do this and it'll be a you know an unique experience for both of us
yeah that will be really really cool i'm sure you'll share more as he progresses and especially how fast and stuff like that which
yeah
is kind of getting me to my last update i have officially start a gaining phase um
nice
i bastardized one last year work really i just problyoritized it and i was super
yeah
high stress period and it really and then i hurt my back and stuff and it just i half asked it and it showed itself this summer as i reach the same weights i was last summer it did not look nearly as good so i'm excited for that i'm excited for just to have a lot more fuel on the fire to facile take progress in that sort of thing and just try and get big again and just really push quality food in that sort of thing in that with that with the gym that we will train that back in the state
it's just very very basic so i'm writing back to basic style program and going to have more barbell work than i normally otherwise would just simplify things lower ranges which it sounds like we're going to talk about more next week
mhm
and kind of just go back to some of the some of the kind of directional stuff that i kind of started
m
my lifting journey with and i'm hoping that i can happen to some of that nostalgia to help drive desire there
so you had mentioned few episodes ago that you were going to take some of the progression model approach that i've been using in in mind so i assume that that's going to probably happen when you go back to bolli and not as much with these like
yeah
barbell basic move men
no i will well like some of the i will write i will leverage that for this program but some of the compounds and stuff i just won't be able to like i'm still going to train like a extension like curl you know fer completeness type thing but it will be kind of my introduction into that that that will use more for like shortened overload smaller stuff for sure
exactly
yep
you just can't do that with like most of those lengthened barbell movements
yeah it's just
um
too hard
cool well do you want to kick
oh
us off with your your early ten years of nutrition
yeah let's do it so kind of the first semblance for me
ye
of nutrition was i grew up a very tall lanky skinny kid played basketball um and then and
yeah
at some point i decided i just really wanted to play like football instead of basketball i played both for a for a few years but i decided like i'm going to play you know football now and then kind of ironically with that i
oh
got moved to play tight end being very tall and skinny all of a sudden just getting like
hm
thrown around by the line because you practice with the linemen pretty much you might run some receiver drills and stuff but i realized it like i need to put on fucking wait so basically i think how we kind of broke it out is like my fifteen through like seventeen um right before my eighteenth birthday was just a permabok like i just ate anything i could get my hands on like i said i was hanging out with a lineman who for all intents of purposes not to sound mean or just like your overweight
teen agers
right
um
right they're just big and big boned
exactly yeah
yeah
so i put on
yeah
twenty pounds every single year through high school and that was just eating pretty much anything i can get my hands on and that was that style like i knew i was had some like muscle you know some like the muscle and fitness magazines and that sort of stuff so i knew like the importance of protein but i think i told this story before like super early on the podcast but my step
¶ Aaron was naturally tall and skinny - gaining 20lbs each year in highschool football without any real structure
dad once i got like really into lifting
ye
would come home from like a local supplement store
m yeah
and they had this product called grow tine x x l and it was just
oh
like a huge picture of a gigantic four arm on it and it came in a ten pound bucket like a straight up bucking bucket with a handle
yep
and he would bring that home and i would have just like two of those a day and i don't even know if i ever looked at the label to see what was in it
they had to
but
be like a thousand
oh
calories each
had to be yeah
yeah
and i would just have those in just eat like everything that i could and i like i said i put on a lot of weight i went into my senior year football season at two fifteen and i entered high school and in the one thirties so like i did a lot of eating
yep
but there was zero structure and i was probably like low twenties body fat sort of thing but then like by the end of football season i was lose a fair degree of that just because of so much activity and stuff
yeah my early years were actually the complete opposite so i started training when i was fifteen
a
years old and i was only five two at the time
wow
five two and a hundred and thirty five pounds
yeah
so like that's that's i would say that like festively plump like i was i grew out wide before i grew tall and
oh
so like i wasn't i wasn't a chubby kid but i had what would be
¶ Bryan was the opposite - started training at 15years old, turns baby fat into muscle gain with 6 meals a day
called like baby fat that
yeah
just hadn't you know lengthened out yet and so there were two big
oh
impetuses that got me started
he
in training
oh
and one of them was i've talked about before this kid at the beach that started training a year before me and i showed up the next summer and he just looked like he'd been training for a year he had good response genetically and so that motivated me to train but that was also right on the heels of getting in my first and only fight with a kid in school because we were in science class and we were bored and something happened and he called me the pillsbury do boy and i punched him
and he threw me to the ground and in the iddle science class we we threw down and so that was an impetus for me to start lifting too but my main objective was to get a six pack and be leaner it was not to get bigger even though i was this massive dude at a hundred and thirty five pounds you know i wanted to be smaller and so what i found was the six meals a day even portions type thing and so as a hundred and thirty five pound kid man if i'm eating six meals a day each meal was
really small like i really remember a meal like going out for lunch and getting a quarter pound of turkey a quarter gallon of skim milk and some sort of fruit like it was like a banana or something like that and so that was literally my lunch a quarter pound of turkey no bread a quarter gallon of skim milk and like a piece of fruit and so that would be kind of onsistently what i would eat throughout my six meals through the day and as i did that and as i
lifted weights and played basketball i began to grow and eventually i was a skinny ish kid with a six pack who kind of looked like he lifted and so it was all these like six meals a day that kind of got me to this point but there needed to be a change cause i couldn't just continue feeding myself like i was a hundred and thirty five pounds even though i was now more bone structure a bigger person and a larger human in general so i had to shift kind of away from that six
meals a day or at least start eating bigger portions of food during that time
did what i'm like i'm very i'm really kind of admiring as is the word that comes to mind like the actual like fortitude to be able to do that because that you're gonna be eating at different times and other people and that's that's really impressive at that age to be completely honest
yeah i brought so it wasn't in my very first year but i want to say my second year i found
i
at the time a company called as sports nutrition and they're
oh
not really around any more i mean they are but no one really like as supplements the guy that owned the company was bill phillips who was did as a natural body builder at the time and he put out he was a marketing genius basically and he put out
oh
this
yeah
video in the late nineties called body of work which was the first presentation of body for life challenge
that was
so
okay
so the body for life challenge was a twelve to sixteen week period where you basically try to change your body as much as you can through nutrition taking as supplements and training
he
um and they had a book body for life that was put out but body of work came out a year before body for life was created it was like the first iteration of body for life before you know it was marketed in that way and put other is this cute little package and so i was extremely
ah
inspired by that like there was a video of these ten people going through the inaugural transformation challenge
so
and across all age groups and they would all they all were invited top ten champions in each age group they were the one top champion in each group ten total people were invited to gold in colorado which is literally like ten minutes from where i live right now and they were at as headquarters and they you know got to to do this like filming and talk about their journeys and meet bill fill ups and the whole as team and get like a year of free supplements and like to me at sixteen years
old i was like oh my
oh
like this is amazing like i need to do this you know so i was so inspired by this that that's kind
thanks
of what i did like their main product was mioplex which is like a meal replacement
is
thing it was i remember this literally explicitly was forty two grams of protein twenty six carbs and two grams of fat
oh
and so their advice was three mile plexus a day three even meals a day and so
a
i i couldn't make my plexus at school but i would make one and bring it to school and i would have one when i got home so i had two mioplexis each day and then i had three or four you know of these small
i
small meals um and so it worked like it was certainly probably underfeeding me which i think is kind of the nature of when you start replacing meals with like three hundred calory
oh
meal replacements you're probably going to be underfed
yeah
for the most part depending on
yeah
how big your actual meals are
yeah
but what it did is it made sure that i was getting sufficient or even more than sufficient protein which
yeah
was probably something i wasn't doing
yeah
prior to that and so the inspiration from
she
this this whole body of work body for life challenge and watching the people and the way that they eat like i derived so much inspiration from this
yes
that was kind of what propelled me into in those early years
i really like that i think like in it was an unhealthy like i mean you put male teen agers american football players in the way it's just it's straight ego in competition sort of thing and then that was pretty much what eating turned into as well right we would see who could eat like we had a like
uh h
man hard walk it was all you can eat chinese buffet and like we would go and just to i got sick that was like
m s g
regular
baby
oh yeah like regular occurrence type stuff
yeah
um but i think like that as much as it was i could probably even say fair fairly healthy i put on a lot of size through just that perm a bulk and training as hard as i could sort of thing i truly do firmly believe that that those years we're very formative in
hm
the amount of size and stuff i have now especially as you know in my my like you know what many people consider to be like your golden years of like you know mid twenties training mind was far from optimal for body
yeah
composition type stuff yeah so anything else with with those high school years you're ready to kind of push through to some
yeah
college
i'm gonna actually
stuff
if you don't mind i'll transition into my neck because i think transitions
yep
from what you said and then we'll come back to you so
perfect
so what you did in your high school years of kind of doing that unhealthy
oh
surplus of calories just helping you get bigger type thing um that is the
yeah
approach that i began taking
i
i would say towards the end of
oh
my senior year of high school and then into call
oh
so i was this like skinny kid who was eating these six meals a day and then paul
oh
carter basically
yeah
told me in the late nineties online that i was small and was never going to be anything unless i started eating so
yeah
so that's what i did i literally at the time there was this notion
yes
that if you get up in the middle of the night i don't know if you remember this
uh
but in the late nineties earlier that s was like if you get up in the middle of
yeah
the night and have a big protein card meal you're going to spike your in
ah
sling you know get the m p s signal all these things
yeah
so this was the thing that people were doing you were getting setting your alarm for two a m so you could get up and have
yeah
a big feeding and my big feeding was a way protein shake with whole milk double scoop so it's like you know seven de grams of protein
oh
there and then i had two massive bowls of grape nuts which if you all know anything about grape nuts it's like the most dense colorically filling carbohydrate serial that you can possibly eat right and i would put raisins in it so i had tis meal at two a m
yeah
that was like a hundred grams of protein and like three hundred carbs at two a m and then i would just
yea
like walk my ass back to bed and go to sleep which is something i couldn't even ama gen doing at this point
oh
in my life like getting up and putting that many calories in my body and then just passing right back out again
m
so i started doing that toward the end of my senior year and i finally started to gain weight surprisingly enough um
yeah
and then that kind of transferred over into college where
oh
i think my experience resembled much more your high school years where we had the cafeteria and we had all the high protein but fried
ye
food which sounds like your chinese buffet like it was these you know little fried chicken sandwiches that you serve yourself right and so i would make like a triple stack of fried chicken sandwich with like a bun and some cheese and then get like a whole plate of fries and like a piece of pizza and that would be my meal like at least once to day if not twice um and so there was plenty of proating but there was also plenty of fat and stuff like that so that is kind of how
i went through college at least for the first couple of years and i've reference this before but like when i started college i was around one seventy and pretty and i have some pictures that maybe if you all actually look at my story i have a sequence on my my instagram story that's called early physique i think so you can scroll through like some of the pictures of me from my first a few years of training and eating but if you look at like the pictures at the end of high school i was
relatively lean um and i was about a hundred and seventy pounds and then in the first four or five months of college i went up to hundred pounds so that means i was gaining at seven or eight pounds
oh
a month in that first semester of college and that got me up to two hundred
yeah
and that is where literally all my strength and muscle gains came from like everything that i can now look back on and say like i am a two hundred pound ish guy like a mid to high one nineties guy and i have you now fourteen percent body fat like at that point i was a two hundred pound guy at
eh
low twenties body fat or something like that you know so since that point like freshman year of college let's just theoretically assume i was two hundred pounds at twenty two
yeah
percent body fat and now i'm basil maybe two hundred
yeah
pounds at fifteen per cent body fat so it's like fifteen pounds of muscle literally that is what i've put on over the last nineteen years of lifting has been fifteen pounds of muscle and you can kind of look at that initial period as the period that sparked my initial ascent to you know two hundred pounds and being considered a relatively large human so um so yeah that was kind of like the way that that all happened and that kind of continued through college along with drinking
and going to eat all those things
i wish i could provide a little bit more with college myself but i mean it's crazy as it is like i really don't remember um i know there was a zero structure i did i was actually i weighed less in college than i did finishing up high school because there was just like i went to the jam but i knew i didn't need to eat like that any more and i settled in and the like one nineties
yeah
to low two hundreds through college m zero structure i was probably only eating three
yeah
like three meals per day max um probably and even having breakfast i really really don't remember but yeah unfortunately do not have much to add there but i definitely lost weight then where i
m
was in high school for sure
maybe just you act mostly food based like you made maybe not didn't lose muscle but you just had like maybe access fat from all that food you were eating during high school eh
yeah
yeah
but yeah not not too much there unfortunately to provide
all right well what about post college take
yeah
us there
yeah so i mean
yeah
post college is really what i would say was my like my introduction to cross fit right in what i would say like the like the second reigignition of training in in like a healthier life style like in my life i moved to san diego within like two weeks of graduate in college and was just like found self emerged and you know burgining southern california cross fitscene introductions to palio really intense training and that's when i first added a decent structure of sam lance in my diet
m
um one i remember one of the the simplest things i did was i removed red it was like
yeah
one of my main things was like okay i most umpliowish alcohol became mostly to kila because that's what everyone did and i started eating a lot of bacon because
¶ Aaron at 23-24years old - CF & Paleo, first real structure of diet. Dropped weight down into the high 170’s
that's what everyone at the gym did
yeah
and i dropped a lot of weight and i remember that in that first like six months there was one point i stepped on the scale and it was a hundred and seventy eight something pounds and
wow
i was like holy ship and i was like and for the first time i'm now twenty three since i was probably like fifteen um
yeah
and that was just like a lot of that and it was it was really cool to see i felt really really good to m with a lot of things even though alcohol was still regularly in taken stuff but it was really that was the first time i could really see though like the the change in physique from nutrition because those younger years depending on the circles and stuff you run with the information sources you have i still thought it was like so much training right if i just train hard enough like you
know i'll get threaded sort of thing and it kind of never happened it wasn't until
hm
i really started paying attention to nutrition and having a lot of similar meals because i was that's right kind of founded my structure of like realizing i can eat the same food every day and i'm perfectly content in doing that especially when you're providing your own food for yourself i started doing that and that's when i got like real lean for the first time and ended up really over skinny for sure as
hm
i was in the one seventy nine one eighty area
yeah i would say when i went into palio in the cross fit days i kind of had the opposite effect but we'll get there in a second i want to back track real quick to just post college because i entered corporate mar for a few years before we started the cross fit gym and so in those years from two thousand seven to two thousand nine late two thousand nine
oh
early two thousand ten i was in corporate america and i remember the main place we would go for lunches would be red robin
oh
and uh red robin is super fatty i mean it's amazing it tastes incredible but i
oh
remember our lunch usually would be either like a double cheeseburger or a double like chicken sandwich of some sort with bottomless fries and that was the thing that red robin was known for was bottomless fries
oh
you could eat as many as you want and they had the most incredible
m
ranch dressing
yeah
and so so so even to back track a little further at the very end of college i went on my first like diet because we were going on spring break my my super senior year and and so i was look around two hundred pounds and i cut myself down to one eighty two for this for this cruise that we um and and i have pictures i'm super shredded it was probably the most attention in like one small period of time that i got from girls which was very kind of motivating to be like oh look s like me at one
eighty two more than they like me at two o five
ye
go figure you know um and so so i have some pictures of me shortly after the cruise where i'm like you know one eighty five one eighty six and i still use those pictures today to compare to me when i do my photo shoots now because i'm also one eighty five one eighty six in my photo shoots now and there's this picture from two thousand six or two thousand seven where i'm literally the same weight
yes
that i was three months ago at the end of my my diet
oh
so it's cool to be able to compare those fifteen years apart at the same body weight but i ended
ah
needless to say i got myself down there got a cool picture that i still use which is awesome and then graduated college and in the first four months work in corporate america i went back up to above two
oh
hundred pounds so i was like mid one eighties and then it was almost
right
like a replica
oh
of freshman year all over again where i gained this incredible amount of weight in such a short amount of time because of these corporate lunches and
a
i remember working out less because i would get home from work and i'd be so tired that half the time i would just push my session to the next day or whatever and it wasn't until a few months later when anders and i started doing am workout so we started getting up at five a m and going to the gym
yeah
before work and then i was able to kind of get things back under control at that point because i was working out more regularly and then when you get up early for me at least it helps me dial in my nutrition throughout the day because i'm like you know if i'm funking getting up at five a m to work out like i don't want to do this for not um so so for me that was more mode aiding to get my ship back in order and so i kind of became back to a normal person as far as size goes
i wasn't that ballooned
oh
up to andre
yeah
plus pound version of corporate america brian and then
a
yeah i found
m
a balance
oh
when i moved out to san diego even before we started to cross it gym i remember finding balance where i was like okay i'm going to eat crap and i'm going a drink on the weekends so i'm going to be perfect during the week and that's
yet
this like typical five and two that you often see right five days of immaculate eating two days of kind of freedom but whatever and so for the most part i just treaded water and i hung out
m
like the high one nineties for most of that period of time before we started cross fit at which point palio was the thing that that was the thing to do and you know i'm sure you have these men marie's we've referenced it on the podcast of anders and i in the gym the first year with our foreman grill and basically every meal three times a day was one pound of meat with guacamoli
yeah
and cheese that was literally like like that's what we did like we just fired
¶ Bryan at 25-26years old - mostly corporate america lunches. Settled into pattern of 4-5 days immaculate and 2-3 days eating bar food and drinking
up the foreman put a pound of meat on there like take it out of the package and just turn it upside down right on the foreman and shut the foreman like we didn't even make it into burger patties or anything take a pound and put it on there and close the foreman and five minutes later it's done and you throw some quack and cheese on there and
oh
you have a fat bum um and so that's what i did and actually i gained a bunch of weight during leo i thought i was going to lose weight because i'm cutting out carbs and all these things and
oh
lo and behold look calories
oh
matter guys it's not just carbs
yeah
um so so palio was an interesting experen it's for me and because it ballooned me up so quickly um i became an if proponent and that happened very soon after the cross fit days so i would say early two thousand twelve i started if intermittent fasting and that really took me through until almost two thousand nineteen so i have like seven or eight years of straight up if and as i went through it i got more and more extreme so remember first starting and it was
i
being you know a typical
yeah
sixteen and eight that was what worked for me and
yeah
um and then i remember as i would go and be like maybe i can
yeah
do a six hour eating window okay maybe i can do a four hour eating window and i would get like very very very into this and i remember even doing periods of time where i would be doing longer fasts like this is going to be a twenty four hour faster this would be a seventy two hour fast and stuff like that and so that that was a lot of the period of time that i was doing cross fit which is kind of wild and retrospect as we now know that cross fit is aclaalytic sport is powered by carbs and all
these things and so
m
i didn't perform super well and cross fit i was always limited by the energy supply not surprisingly enough i was bad at conditioning work which you could say is an inherent problem me possibly genetic but also probably related to the fact that i didn't have any carbs coming in
oh
so um that was an interesting period
i
of time
ye
and one that i would say if i changed thing in my history it would a hundred percent be like the dedicated palio intermittent fasting period of the cross fit experience
i it's interesting that you say that because those same years i would say like i guess the later years of that for you i put in i think the note i have here is i think these are my worst years
yeah
considering everything it was nutrition religion for me as in palio plus you know drinking on the weekends carbs
hm
were bad under fueling that's when my injuries were always my worst all of my two of my three
yeah
surgeries we're during those years yeah it was just a lot of underfueling and improper feeling and then very inconsistent bouts of calories there wouldn't be a lot of calories throughout the day and then i would like you know binge on things post training at the end of the night sort of thing
yep
the weekends
yep
were the weekends and then in the monday were you know um all hell breaks loose sort of thing i mean you would go to wing night and i would literally see how much i could eat every single
fifty
monday
baby
i winged
fifty of them
yeah like that that was
oh
all things considered was like my worst
ah
period nutritionally and just i just didn't know you know i would
yeah
say it was that coupled with the intensity of the training end other poor life style factors have really led me to what ultimately was like really just i don't want to suck and do this ship anymore
yeah
um so yeah i would say that's kind of like twenty that was like mine age twenty four through like twenty seven sort of thing
yeah so i was definitely i mean i'm older than you so that was probably six or
yeah
seven years further in my history but the same time frame of years i was just older than you were during that time
yeah that's a really
we have
good
like
distinction yeah
ah we have a
yeah
like five or six minutes left so i'll quickly just get through
yeah
basically after the palio if period like i dropped palio quickly i would say quickly in the grand scheme of things i would say palio stopped for me in the mid two thousand teens like two thousand fourteen two thousand fifteen ish and i began eating carbs as kind of the education came around but i still was doing if so so that i think limited me in many ways given that i was only getting these two protein feedings a day like a really big robust protein feeding at night like a smaller one in the
latter afternoon period so it wasn't until two thousand nineteen or two thousand eighteen maybe where
ah
i finally broke out of the i f and the reason for that was mostly the evidence based space here in that we're in right now with all the education that we have access to and you know the understanding that we
yeah
need to spike m p s every three to five hours to say but that still means that you need at least three meals a day probably four is going to be better for most people and so when i started my my diet that i do every year where i you know i'm basically in a surplus for eight to nine months of the year and then i'm in a deficit three to four months
oh
of the year when i started doing that that is when i broke out of palio because during those dieting periods i wanted to make sure that a palioofif is
¶ At almost 30yrs old, Aaron - Another permabulk. Post- crossfit focused, powerlifting phase and the biggest he has ever been
what i meant to say um because when i was doing those dieting periods i wanted to make sure that i was retaining as much muscle as i could and i knew that if i was doing that v two larger meals a day that there as gonna be a long period of time where i was potentially in a catabolic state not to mention that i built my home gym during the pandemic and i began training in the mornings so it was no longer conducive for me to say hey i'll just eat around my training because i train at one p m
or two p m at the cross fit gym or
ah
whatever it was now i was training in the mornings so i had to feel myself in the mornings and this is for sure the last three years has been the most balanced that my diet has been in my entire existence aside from maybe those first three years when i was doing six meals a day small meals with meal replacement shakes in between meals and things like that it's now wild to think that twenty years later it took
yeah
for me to get back to this balanced place where i am you know eating mostly well and consistently and getting a balance of micro and macro nutrients and things like that
yeah that is really funny to think of that that's where you started and then more or less obviously
yeah
nothing perfect
yeah
at those early ages and then settled back in i guess for me post the kind of i realized that i just didn't want to do cross fit any more because i was so so beat up i decided to like swap
yeah
one really strenuous training
oh
modality for another and then
uh
got into a secondary
uh
power
yeah
lifting phase um and embark on another permabulk fortunately
uh
i was aware of like macro's
yeah
by this point um and was tracking using my fitness powel but really subscribing to some like really kind of just not smart things i was doing a lot of back loading with like rice's puff serial different
uh
things like that
yeah
and that's when i was the biggest i
yes
ever was in my life i was up to two twenty seven which is insane
¶ Byran at 38- current, most balance in general, 4 years running of 8-9 month surplus + 3-4 month cut
for me to actually sit and think about now but it was really really i was warm all the time which was nice
uh
when it was cold i didn't have to worry about it
uh yah
at all there was definitely upsides but it was pretty wild and um the thing that the catalyst that changed everything right at this point when i was that big i was already i had already been through precision nutrition and i was learning in that sort of thing but i always i feel like i didn't quite get it fully yet and i find this is a phase that a lot of people find themselves in because it's human nature we want to justify things to ourselves it's not
¶ Straker Nutrition Company. Nutritional science, periodization - changed Aaron’s perspective on food to be health first
that bad you know blahblabla it's diff when it's me i get that like with certain clients come to me with that like i know what i'm doing but like you know something something is off something's not right with me sort of thing and it really means like like you know what you're doing on paper but practicality that they're not lining up because i was that person so because i was consuming so much nutrition coaching content because that was you know the plan was my kind of
side business at the time i had listened to this episode
yeah
of a wasn't like a podcast but it was like an interview sort of thing and it was with jason theobald and
m
he was talking about tracking your blood sugars for like so in resistance had to know you've pushed gaining periods too much sort of thing i was like man this is super super interesting i'm going order one of these things right so i order it comes in i like prepare you know my fasted blood sugar and it was like one eighteen and i was like
oh
oh fuck me
you're going to die
i was like oh wow i am a ring close
ah
to you like clinic type two diabetytype two diabetes level numbers so immediately email them and i'm like hey um
right
can i can i can i set up for coaching sort of thing and it was it was catalyst everything changed after that i appreciate you know jason so so much he was just a super super straight shooter he was like
oh
okay baby bye and i remember telling him like i want to get lean but i don't want to lose weight because i was really a tied to being over a hundred kilos
m
and i remember he said he lives like listen you're a natural at a hundred kilos you're like twenty
right
four percent body fat it doesn't fucking work that way like
yeah yeah
you're just it doesn't work that way like you need to
yeah
drop twenty thirty and and i was like
ah
okay i bought in and he just led me through it and everything changed everything everything changed and that was right around when i turned thirty and then nothing has ever been the same since it's when i actually was like okay no more bullshit articles that sort of thing like i'm learning the real way things are done and i really never looked back and now is you know what i call my like thirty plus post phase for listeners i'm thirty four now so it's been like four
full years of this umperidization i shifted my entire view point with nutrition to be you know health first um and it's become like really really fun and i've even left parts of my old life behind through distance and over time and stuff and that sort of thing but that is kind of the phase that i find myself in now i absolutely love it i have so so much fun with it and it really has given me so much of what my life is now pretty cool
the catalyst for your career basically who as
it is
was that
one hundred
experience
per cent
with jason and diving deep into the nutrition and all that so
yep
m yeah very cool man very cool
yeah
well i think
cool
that's it we're out of time
that is and we kind
yeh
of tied it in nicely there so it sounds like next week we will be talking around a little bit more rep range stuff we will prepare and have a fantastic comfort ation with that as always guys thank you for listening brian and i will
my
talk to you next
oh
week