Alexander JA Cortes
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, squats, exercise, fitness, pain, eating, training, healthy, week, health, lift, practices, good, years, science, point, online, gym, train, simple
SPEAKERS
Female Age 61, Dr. Philip Ovadia, Alexander AJ Cortes, Jack Heald
Female Age 61 00:10
He was a morbidly obese surgeon destined for an operating table and an early death. Now he's a rebel MD who is Fabulously Fit and fighting to make America healthy again. This is Stay Off My Operating Table with Dr. Philip Ovadia.
Jack Heald 00:39
And we are live well welcome back. It's the Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. I'm your cohost Jack Heald with Philip Ovadia. Joining us today is Alexander Cortes otherwise known online as AJAC. Phil. Why? Why the heck do we have this bro science guy on here? Well, he's never been fat.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 01:04
Exactly. Probably too much of our audience, AJAC won't need an introduction. Honestly, Alexander was one of the early people I came across in this space. And as the world tends to work out, we ended up interacting more and more and getting to know each other through some mutual connections. And he's one of the people who I've certainly been wanting to get on the show for quite a while. And we finally made it happen here. So, Alexander has really been one of the, I would say, leaders in the online movement around health and fitness, in particular. And he's really done some what I would say are groundbreaking innovative things to bring the fitness movement to the people as it is. So excited to hear about his story and to get into that. And with that, I'm going to turn it over and let Alexander kind of fill in a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your background, how you got involved in the fitness space. And then we're just going to have a great conversation from there. Yeah,
Alexander AJ Cortes 02:21
We're gonna be here, guys. Background for those who don't know me. So, I'm 33 now. I've been a personal trainer since I was 20. So, it's the only professional job I ever had, my professional role. So, I've been working with clients for going on essentially 13 years. And I started personal training when I was in college. And I didn't originally plan on making a career in fitness. But as it worked out, still to this day, and I trained probably well over 10,000 clients sessions, hundreds of clients online, I've certainly worked with tens of thousands of people. And I realize many years ago that there's sort of three, there's three fundamental desires all human beings have, those three things everybody wants. We want health, we want relationships, and we want wealth. Relationships and wealth, those are not my areas, but health is and as the saying goes very cliched, “If you don't have your health, what do you really have?” So, trying to get people healthy, that's my, that's my MO. That is what I strive to do. And the relative to the general population, as I call it, regular people who are not super fitness enthusiast, but regular people, if you're going to help those people, you have to make your solutions very workable, very practical, pragmatic, and the play on bro science, as I call it. It's this idea that if you take hard science, clinical data, clinical evidence, research-based study, and you combine it with real-world, real-world practicality and application, you get this mixture of bro science, where you're gonna have a lot of anecdotal evidence, you're gonna have some stuff based on the current state of the evidence, you're gonna have a mix of n=1 kind of situations like you want it to working for this person. Keep doing it if you’re seeing the effects we want. So that's sort of the crux of my practice. Maybe that’s also like a pun on itself since bros, as a term, there's a connotation to it, you must be an idiot, especially if you're in fitness, this assumption of personal trainers and guys who are like bro enthusiast, bro culture that everybody's dumb. Yeah, it's just like it comes to the territory. So that's my way of sort of flipping it.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 04:31
Yeah, and I'll fully admit that bro moniker kind of is a way for the healthcare professionals, all of my colleagues I think to try and look down and discredit guys that are doing this, that don't have the proper letters after their name. And fully admit, I've admitted many of my past mistakes thinking that same way. And then as I opened my mind, as I started asking those new questions, those different questions that we talked so much about on the show, I found guys like yourself, the bros teaching me about the actual science and how people work and how to bring this to the real world. One of the things that I've always found interesting about what you do is how you were able to translate that from the one-on-one sort of traditional personal training model in the gym, working with someone, to bringing it to the masses, the online programs and everything that you've been, you are so good at doing. So, talk a little bit about how you kind of got into that space. How did you get from personal training in the traditional sense to being one of the leaders in online personal training?
Alexander AJ Cortes 06:03
So, personal training, as you said, it's a one-on-one job, you're talking with somebody for an hour, it's a coaching experience, it's a highly personal experience. And over the course of a week, optimally, maybe you see them three times, and they come in on their own as well, more likely, once, or twice, and you're hoping that you're instilling these good habits and practices in them. And that experience, of course, doesn't scale. But as an experience, in itself, it's an educational experience, you are acting as an educator, you are a teacher. So that's all I did for seven years straight. The first part of my career I just only trained in person, then didn't do anything else. Yeah, right, a certain point, like, okay, how can I turn this into a business? How can I help people ethically and profitably? The way I see it fundamentally, I cannot guarantee a positive change in your mindset, or your motivation, or whatever your psychological obstacles are trying to deal with psychology can be very nebulous, very big. There's many theories on personality, and how to cultivate intrinsic motivation, self-determination theory, are your issues with childhood? Do we need to apply more cognitive behavioral approach and talk through them with solution-based practices? Like, that's not my role, obviously, that's the role of a psychologist, therapists, psychiatrists, it's not my role. My role that I know I can objectively help you and as I can give you really good effective information that if applied properly, will have a positive effect. So, I want to make it as simple as possible, where if I tell you to do A and that gets you the outcome that you want, awesome. What we're doing is working. You know that's working, now you have some confidence in the process. So, I want to make it as action based as possible. So, with online training with the online education, what I realized is that most people in the online, we can get to their deeper issues, but fundamentally, everybody's just looking for good information, useful information. And I knew from my days, as a teenager, I was 15, 16. That was going to the go to the drugstore, looking at muscle magazines. What most people look for, certainly most men, is good workouts. Yeah, it's very cliche again, but like we all have a magazine, it's like, let's scroll through the workouts, what am I gonna do for a workout? I know I did that behavior. Many, many times over. I see guys to the gym; I see people coming into the gym and they do the same thing. They'd be on the phones, it'd be in a magazine, they deploy out a book, something like rolled up a newspaper, whatever it was, some kind of literature, and they'd be looking for a workout to do, for a routine to follow. Just give me steps. Tell me to do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Tell me to do what exercises. Okay. And so, when I started working the online space and like what's, what's the best way I can educate people and help them. I can give them a plan; I can give them a workout program a blueprint that tells them very clearly what to do. And it's a course on them if they follow it, don't follow it, but the actions are there. And if they do them, they get positive outcome. They build muscle, they lose body fat; never all physiological change takes place. So, I always oriented all my online marketing, all my online offerings around crafting and spreading those simple solutions to people and it's been extremely successful. Now there's another word for it. At this point, if I look the stats, I've had something like 80,000 people purchased my programs the last five or six years and I've gotten feedback from obviously not all of them, but I've gotten feedback from probably close to 2 or 3% of them, pretty good conversion rate. Thousands of people have before and after photos. I lost 40 pounds. I put an X amount muscle mass. I improved my blood, my blood pressure went down. My heart rate decreased. My blood work improved now to see my position. I solved my pain. I don't have knee pain anymore. I don’t have back pain anymore. I'm older and you helped me train pain-free, my shoulders haven't, are not hurting for the first time in 30 years. So, I get positive feedback constantly, and of course, mostly trying to refine what I'm doing, and offer people better blueprints and practices. But having that solution-based approach and relying on more of a technical offering of actual instructions, versus let's say, more of like a bro marketing aspect of like, over promising I'm gonna put 40 pounds on you, here's how to add 3 inches to your biceps like none of that's actually happening. For anyone that actually works with the human body, there are obvious physiological boundaries in place that preclude superlative results happening overnight. It's a long-term process. So, I sell people on that, and they apply it, they use it, and it works.
Jack Heald 10:53
And I'm fascinated with; Phil, you missed it. I told Alexander, I think I've probably followed him on Twitter longer than anybody else I followed on Twitter. And I've watched, I was even there when you got banned. And I was I was part of the free AJAC community. But I've been fascinated by your success in particular. It's not like there aren't, I don't know, 500 million fitness trainers on Twitter? Why AJAC? Why is AJAC successful? I'm asking you; I don't know the answer. I have some theories, but I want to hear your idea.
Alexander AJ Cortes 11:44
I believe the reasons I am successful, if I let me try to pick three things. Foremost is that I have what you could almost call it a clinical experience. I have applied practical experience of working with people one on one. And very few people that I've seen the fitness industry actually have that. Because of the social media digital marketing tools we have available, you can have very good physique, you have a great body, you’re a guy and you have a great body. That already gives you authority. If you have a great body, and if you market yourself, well, you can sell yourself, you grow an audience and you do okay, like you're successful within that lens. Whether your workouts or your information is good, whether it's actually valid, that's a whole different question. For myself, I never want to be known on the basis of what I looked like, I don't show my physique too much until very recently, even I never really, I didn't really show my physique, I didn't show myself working out so much. I want to be known for having practical knowledge that is proven out in the real world. And if you apply it and use it, and you know it gets the result, oh, wow, this guy knows what he's talking about. So, I want to build reputation based on my knowledge, my intellect, and that the offense comes from working with people. And I think I've done that pretty successfully. And yet at the same time, because I have that practical experience, being able to express yourself and articulate yourself well, especially online, how you write is expressive of your ability to think. If you've never spoken to anyone, if you've never talked to anyone, if you if you're not someone who's a teacher, and you've spent years teaching a subject, it's very unlikely you're going to be effective at teaching that subjects in mass online, maybe you will, it will probably be very scripted. They're probably, maybe someone else taking over that process. And for my situation, I've been teaching for years, and I still teach. So, I'm very much at ease with talking about what I'm doing or instructing people, whether it be verbally live, whether it be written word. So, the ability to express myself through writing, that's probably, more than anything else, really built my career. This means I can tweet a lot. I write a lot basically. I send a newsletter every week, multiple times a week, writing to people. My programs, I've very high output of programs solutions for people something around... Now, I've lost track of this point. Something around like 60-something programs I've written the last five years or so like every month I'm coming out with something else, whether it be for the back, or legs or knee pain or shoulder health or chest training or something oriented for the over-40 crowd. I'm always crafting something of a page, here you go this works for you, go use it. And all that has a network effect over time where people know like, wow, this guy - his outputs really high. He's always answering questions. He's always sharing useful information. He seems at least like he knows what he's talking about. I'm going to continue to choose to follow him and he's also not resorting to viral marketing, or I call it like bonehead marketing. I'm not trying to pick up on the latest trend and piggyback on it and make it about myself. I'm not doing TikTok challenges. You'll never see me doing anything grotesque that way. As I look at it. Over time, it builds credibility.
Jack Heald 15:00
That leads to the next question, which is, and I want to lay the foundation here. You have a fairly eclectic set of interests for a gym bro. In other words, if somebody didn't know that your bet yeas fitness and just read the non-fitness types of things that you write, they think you are a college professor. Maybe you've kind of really deep and broad set of interests that you've shared. I can remember in particular a set of tweets that were referencing some of the ancient Greeks, you've done a lot of research into fitness historically going back that looks to me thousands of years. How in the world did you get into that? I mean, when I realize it's bugs, and there's libraries, and you can go find those things. But, but why you when those other half a billion trainers haven't ever done that? You're literally the first guy in your realm of the woods that's ever done that and to me, it just, it levered your credibility up in my mind. Massively. Oh, this guy is really interested, not just in making big muscles, but in the entire history of fitness, and how it's developed over time. I just love to hear you talk about how you how you got into that. And one of the fun things you found, and maybe some of the stupid things you found.
Alexander AJ Cortes 16:50
Yeah, so yeah, I've always had this obsession. It's like overall, like personality obsession with like, why did this happen? Why do we do these things? Whatever it is, I want to know why. It's like a little child. Why? Why? He's keep asking why? And he's like, shut up. Like, I can't I don't have an answer anymore. So, I was always asking why. Contextual to fitness, there's lots of things we do in fitness. I mean, the scope of fitness practices from the exercises like why squats? Why deadlifts? bench-press, why compound movements? Why are these things that we believe are good? Like, why do we think they're good? What are the premises behind this? So, as I was asking this question, why, and I mean, I've had this attitude my entire career, like, I'm always trying to self-examine my knowledge. And fitness, you realize is a very broad field, how do you even accurately define health? Like, what does that mean? What does it mean to be healthy versus fit? There's all these sort of philosophical questions that arise. And I've always been a student of philosophy. And so, the first few years, I was studying fitness beyond the technical information, which is to clinical stuff. And a lot of that's even very vague and not very well known. I realized, like, you have to purchase a philosophical field, you have a combination of science, then you also have the application of art. And your ability to think about it is going to determine the quality in which you practice, you have to be a good thinker. Now, if you want to be a good thinker, the best thing...
Jack Heald 18:11
I’m sorry, don't just go blow and write by something that profound. I like to put a pin in these things when somebody says something that is profound. If you want to have a good quality of life, you've got to be a good thinker. I think I quoted you correctly there. With my head injury right now, God knows what you actually said. But that's what I heard. All right. I know, that's big stuff. Seriously, big stuff.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 18:45
Yeah, and just to kind of follow up on that, to get your perspective of how do you figure out the good information out there because fitness, nutrition, the reality is that you can find the data, the science as it is to support just about anything you want to believe. No one's really done a whole lot of randomized controlled trials on fitness routines. So, how do you decide what is useful? And what is good information, which you then incorporate and you pass on, versus the garbage that's out there and 95% of the half a million trainers, like Jack said, are out there are garbage. So, how do you get through that problem?
Alexander AJ Cortes 19:41
So, so to answer so to answer that question, sort of reference back to Jack's question about the history of like, why I got so deep in the history, the way that one of the primary filters I use is always looking at historical evidence. So, we know quite probably that people have been healthy before in the past, this is not like an arguable point. It's like, how do you have people live to be the age of 80? Yes, we know that they have, okay. Have people live their life physically after a whole life? Yes. Like, yeah, we can go whether it's archaeological evidence, whether it's...
Alexander AJ Cortes 20:18
What’s really the term for it? Not archaeological, but sort of like Cultural Historical evidence, written evidence, like, okay, people are living a long time, we know that exercise has been done since really the dawn of recorded history, we can take the evolutionary biology approach of like, okay, what were we hunting in 1000? BCE? Yeah, what was ancient stone age man eating? Like, we know roughly approximately what it means to be healthy, you have to be able to move, you live a long time, you're not dying horribly from disease. Okay, so my bias, my main filter is what has been done over time. If there are certain practices have been done for decades, centuries, hundreds of years, thousands of years. And we can see these training traditions, or these eating practices even, they have been done for very, very, very long periods of time. They routinely produce exceptional health outcomes, we should study those things, we should weigh that as like, okay, that's significant. Something in there is right. It is correct. It's truthful, it's good information, it’s good practices. It's reflective of our biology, like there has to be investigated. In the 20th century, I mean, this gets very meta as I call it, with the shift in medicine and like making 1930s - 40s, where there was this push towards like a molecular view of biology. So, this idea, this is like sort of a rocker, you could get very conspiracy theory, but this part is true. Like it, there was a big push 1930s 1940s 1950s, where the Rockefeller Foundation funded many science departments across the United States to push towards studying, basically, like molecular theories of biology. And this was reflective of like the petrochemical industry of like, okay, like, we've got this ability to manipulate petrochemicals and matter on this very minute level. That's pretty cool. Like that is super cool. A lot of great stuff come out; I'm not critiquing it that way. But because we can stay these things. And because it's so profitable at the same time, we want this to be the emphasis. I think what you saw the last so many decades, because of that is that there was this divorce from anecdotal historical evidence to clinical evidence and study. And the issue that takes place within academia and within the clinical academic environment is it's very easy to come up with what I call sort of like medical jargon-based theories, and ideas about how something works. And then you start crafting studies and you start doing research, for the sake of proving out your premises being correct, then this is always the battle in science of like, okay, I have a theory, I really want my theory to be right. How can I massage the data and massage the study? And how can I how can I view the body in a certain way that will prove what I already think to be true? If you're a good scientist, whether you whether you have credentials or not, if you are an honest, good ethical scientist, you're always trying to prove yourself wrong. In everything that you do, you're not trying to be right. So, and then now, based off of that, we saw, like I said, less than two decades of medicine was low-fat theory, cholesterol theory or it deals with calories in calories out, which calories in calories out is true on thermodynamic basis. But now, we know today that there's more factors to it than just the calories. There's their satiety. There's the quality of the food. There's where the actual macronutrients are being eaten, does that play a role? Yeah, so we're getting better, that when you have these certain essentially pet theories that then become an industries unto themselves, that then a bunch of drugs are built off of to treat, you got like a multi headed monster at that point? It's like, well, what's the problem there like? I mean, if you backed it up a whole bunch of steps, like the problem was the premise from the very beginning, like, are we sure that cholesterol is the issue? Is it just the is it just the cholesterol? Or is that a side effect of the systemic inflammation and the excess calorie intake and the lack of activity in the food choice planning role or no, it's just cholesterol. Like now we're getting very isolated, in the human body is like a complex, multi-modal system, reducing any complex system down to a single input, single factor. You're either going to be incredibly brilliantly right or more than likely high probability you're gonna be incredibly wrong.
Jack Heald 24:36
I can remember back in the early 80s, when some of the first of the really incredibly stupid medical advice became popular. I remember in particular eggs are bad for you and butter is bad for you. And I had two thoughts: thought number 1 was that's just the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But the second thought was as long lives you talked about the human body is an almost indescribably complex mechanism set of interlocking systems. I want to hear about the test they've used to nail down this particular conclusion. And the reality is, most of the time, the tests are bad. I've got a friend who makes a medical device. And he's working on building clinical trials. And one of the things that he found out is that the average number of participants in a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, yes, the NIH, guess that that number is? Average number of participants in an NIH sponsored clinical trial: 19. Nineteen. So, all of that is saying that there's an awful lot of just shitty research that's passing for science out there. Yeah. I love the approve it in the gym point of view that you bring to the to the table.
Alexander AJ Cortes 26:27
I mean, this is the replication crisis. Of course, in science. I mean, this is not a new thing. Like I remember reading articles about this. I mean, probably about a decade ago, and it's across multiple fields, the social scientists are the most notorious. Sciences, psychology, is that really a science? So, we've talked about that but even the hard sciences, even biology and medicine, and I'm not the first person to... This is not me a statistic on my part, like, I think I recall, something like the, like, the head of a Harvard research review was openly saying, like, at least half, if not more, all studies done today and look at all fields are bullshit. They can't replicate. It's just it's a bad study, bad design, like and we've got theories now built off of research done years ago, that's never been replicated in the first place. But we're still believing it.
Jack Heald 27:19
Most recently, we've got that in Alzheimer's, there's there was a theory that was promoted in the mid-2000s. Yeah, about the origins of all Alzheimer's and got some to do with some plaque in the brain. Turns out that the data was falsified. And there have been billions of dollars spent, shed dollars to this nonexistent situation. So, all right, so what do we do? Help us out here? We've indicated there's a problem, let's make it better. How do we fix things?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 27:56
How do we move forward? So yeah, tell us a little bit from your perspective what you see. So, one of the big questions, I think, that always comes up that would be good for us to talk about is the I guess you could say nutrition versus fitness. And although they're not exclusionary, you always get into this conversation about what should come first, what needs to come first? If someone is unhealthy, can they exercise their way out of it? Can they eat their way out of it? Improve their eating to get out of it? Or does it really take both ultimately to achieve good health?
Alexander AJ Cortes 28:34
It takes both like this. Optimally, nutrition and fitness or actually, nutrition exercise, optimally, they run on a feedback loop. Exercise tells your body what to do with the food you consume. Now that is the way I like to look at its way first with people like how do we change our physiological function? How do we change our metabolism? By exercising, we're expending energy, we build our body's overall capacity for energy expenditure, which is critical for longevity, for health, for basically being a robust living system. So, we're expanding our body’s capacity. We're building up our tissue. We're changing how our body metabolizes fat, glucose, protein. We're doing all those things. And yes, it's true that enough exercise can counteract the hypothetical effects of a supposedly bad diet. If your air Jack expenditure is high enough, you can, quote unquote, get away with bad eating. Why? Because if your, the turbine that's used as metabolic flux, or G flux, if your metabolic flux is extremely high, if you're expending 4000 5000 6000 calories a day. At that point, you do need to essentially fuel the machine. You just you need energy to expend energy. And there's recent research on this that for people who exercise a lot, we're talking like double digit numbers upwards of 15 to 20 hours a week of exercise, their metabolic rate is almost always to have the calorie intake, it's very difficult for them to actually gain weight, obviously, or to even eat enough to meet it like over time, they'll still get leaner, their body will slow down. And this is why trading for those high intensity, high exposure invoked individuals goes in cycles. All of that said, that's not most people. Yeah, right like that you are, if you're exercising more than 10 hours a week, you are an outlier, you are in the 1%. The overall picture is that Pareto power distribution 80 to 90% people exercise less than three hours a week, they're largely inactive. And for them, the food that they ingest, that's going to play the biggest role in their health. By far, the amount of exercise you objectively need to be healthy, not Ultra elite fit, running an Ironman and competing in powerlifting profits, just healthy or okay. What I define as healthy: healthy blood pressure, healthy heart rate, healthy glucose sensitivity, relatively mid-range testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and everything is sort of in the middle, like okay, your normal body weight, BMI roughly lines up, okay, that's healthy. The amount of exercise you need to do that is for strength training less than two hours a week. For aerobic activity, maybe about three to four hours a week but largely low intensity walking, if you walk a half hour for an hour a day, and lift weights twice a week, and don't eat too much, eat as much as you need. You'll be healthy, right? It doesn't take that much. But what kills people did of course is a food environment. Like we live in an obesogenic society if you don't think about what you're consuming
Jack Heald 31:53
Obesogenic, did you say? Is that what you said? Obesogenic? I've never heard that word. I’m putting that word into my vocabulary. Obesogenic society. Okay. Yeah.
Alexander AJ Cortes 32:09
That's a good word. My environment is set up to make us obese. It is. Whether you I mean, you can, you can get very particular breaking it down. It's like, well, how well, most people commute. Okay, that's one thing. So, we're not walking much. Most cities, certainly United States are not designed for walking period. Like the quality of the quality food and schools, the way the rise of fast-food industry, even the rise of food on demand now. So, most people over the course of time will steadily over consume calories, they'll end up gradually becoming overweight. As they enter 30s, they'll start to lose lean body mass, and then you end up you end up in that middle age. It's like, well, I kind of go overweight, but maybe you didn't think you were that fat. It just kind of crept up on you. What do I do? So, to counteract this, you have to be mindful of your inputs on your intake. Yeah, that's where getting into like, what are you actually eating, you have to change what you're eating. I tried to make that very simple for people like what's a good diet? Good diet is simply one that meets your caloric needs, macronutrient needs and then hopefully your micronutrient needs. If we break that down further, I make this really simple for people, your body's made out of protein so you need amino acids, and you needed just protein. Protein keeps your really full. Funny enough, there's books going back 19-- there's like Dr. Atkins original kind of theory, which he was quite correct. And always like, high protein eating. It keeps you full, minimizes these rises and falls of blood sugar, ensures stable level of energy, less likely to binge, get cravings. So, we've got protein intake. If you're eating whole protein sources, which is basically meat, dairy eggs, there's going to be accompanying fat intake, that will help with satiety and satisfaction and a lot of micronutrients. Then you have your carbohydrates, which complex carbohydrates are even simple. And when you combine simple carbs with fat source, they do digest slower. And if you can do that, in the reasonable moderation, of eating at maintenance, your weight will stay the same more or less. If you're exercising, or that bit on top of that you should be good to go. Like your bloodwork or anything else your weight, you should be healthy.
Jack Heald 34:21
So, walk 30 minutes to an hour every day. Weight training twice a week. For most people that's going to keep you healthy, assuming you are eating somewhere in the neighborhood. Sounds good to me.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 34:40
But Alexander, it can't be that simple. Should I be doing 4x10s or 3x8s or my drop sets? And yeah, well, too often I find people get caught up in the minutia of how many grams of this should I be eating, how many micrograms of this? Oh, should I be doing the 4 sets of 10, or the 3 sets of 8. And it's just like, well just get off the couch first. And then we can eventually get to that problem to have.
Alexander AJ Cortes 35:15
I mean, the irony of this, if you look at like the actual clinical data, and there's a lot obviously on diet intake, on fat loss, or healthy body with individuals over time, there's a lot to the exercise science. The clinical data indicates that all diets more or less are equal in terms of macronutrient proportions. So, whether you're eating high carb, or low carb, or moderate protein, or high protein or low fat or high fat, so long as you ingest enough calories, and if your weight stays roughly the same, you're fine.
Alexander AJ Cortes 35:46
Like most of staying healthy is simply maintaining a normal body weight, if you can do just that, you are preventing a whole horde of problems that come with being overweight-obese, just normal body weight. So, you're the exact macros of whether you're, was it 40% protein or 30%. Like what percentage of my carbs from, it doesn't really matter. If you just go into by numbers, that becomes very arbitrary. We know what our basic needs are for human nutrition. We know we need protein; we know we need some amount of fat; we know we need some amount of carbohydrates. The arguments about carbs being like essential non-essential, no, I got this is like my best example. Look at the macronutrient composition of human breast milk. human breast milk is 87% carbohydrates. And somewhere around I think like I believe it's like 5-6% fat, the rest is protein. So, it's a mother's milk, when a woman's feeding an infant, she's feeding mostly carbs basically. So, I mean, I would argue like yeah, carbohydrates are preferred fuel source for human beings. Having a ready, a steady and ready supply of glucose is essential for good overall metabolic function health. Like and maybe later on in life, if you're metabolically dysfunctional, if you've been obese for a very long time, you're dysregulated. Okay, like, I'll entertain the idea that maybe completely limiting carbs, being a permanent stiff ketosis, maybe that is better, yet, maybe does. Yeah, sure, we could certainly hypothesize about that. The people who are doing that right now will know in 10-20 years, whether it really works out for them. I'm curious to see that but point being like, we know, carbohydrates are fine, you need protein, you need fat. So, you just need to ingest them in relatively healthy amounts, moderate amounts overall. Yeah. And then the exercise like I've become very critical this in the fitness industry, like the more on Instagram, my newsletter, and maybe on Twitter, but so much fitness and fitness practices, you can create a lot of complexity if you want, but it doesn't accomplish anything more than doing things, the simple straightforward way. If you do use examples gave stuff like drop sets, or cluster sets, or super setting or circuit training, none of that makes any real difference. If you look at the exercise science data, the best most effective way to train is to do basic what's called straight sets, you just do one exercise at a time for maybe one or two or three sets, the minimum effective volume is doing one set for an exercise, if you just did one hard set for an exercise. And he did eight exercises and left the gym twice a week you make gains you'd grow. It's one set, that's all you need. You can do more, of course, but one set, it's not five, it's one. But doing simple, straight sets, one exercise at time. That gives you the best results for strength gains, muscle gains, pain relief, linear progress over time, all the other stuff that you can do, whether it's drops or clusters, or pyramids. I was talking about if you want to, if that seems cool, like have that. Go ahead. But it's not making your training any much better at all. You're arguably might even make it worse because now you're introducing complexity or simplicity with suffice.
Jack Heald 39:04
I like it. I like that a lot. I'm a big fan of keeping things simple, mostly because I just seem to be genetically predisposed to complicating things that I've found that doesn't really work for me. I want to follow up with this idea of keeping it simple. We've had well, let me drill down a little bit. We've had a couple of different guests. One was an orthopedic surgeon, one was a primary care doctor, both of whom made the same statement about people with bone-on-bone pain, who got metabolically healthy, they were queued up for surgery, and ended up not having it because even though they were still bone on bone, the pain went away. I questioned both them about it. And neither of them really had what sounded like a good scientific answer for why they got better. My question for you is because you've trained so many people, my guess is you've seen something similar. Have you seen that kind of thing where people are dealing with joint pains that would typically be indicated, typically would indicate surgery was necessary, they got healthy and didn't need it? Do you see there?
Alexander AJ Cortes 40:40
Oh yes. So, pain is complex, but the way to encapsulate that complexity, so pain is bio-psycho-social. So, there's a biological aspects pain, there's a psychological aspect to it. And then you have a social aspect, which is sort of your main environmental aspects. And all that adds up to the pain experience. Your cells have in themselves, your arm, a part your body. You don't have pain receptors; you have neurological receptors. Pain is an experience processed by the brain. And I mean, this is this is how numbing works. like, when we numb tissue, what are we doing? We were stopping the pain receptors. Now we're just basically stopping the neurological flow from that area of the brain itself. You literally can't feel it. It's not registering within sort of your four dimensional, like, your four-dimensional neurological homunculus that you're about your brain has. For people who had joint pain, joint injuries, definitely, there's a biological component. Your cartilage torn out? Yeah, like your rotator cuff is torn up. I mean, there's lots of things. Your meniscus likely. Michael's got 10 scar tissue, obviously, you can go with any of joints and that hurts. Okay. So yeah, there is there's a biological, physical component where I'm sure it is damaged. Like, if you were to image it, it might look damage. At the same time, though, you can have individuals and this is very common in the radiography with imaging. This is why imaging is actually very notoriously unreliable for diagnosing joint issues. You can have people who supposedly have damage on MRI or X ray, they don't feel anything. It's a surprise. And it's like, hey, did that you have bolts? Just I do? Really? Yeah. And this is so notorious that about... When I say notorious, when imaging is done like, if you take like a massive imaging, and it's self-reported, like because the person experiencing pain or not, half the time people with supposed damage don't feel anything, then half the time you have people with no apparent imaging issues, who are reporting extremely high levels of pain. So clearly, something's not matching up. Or maybe the imaging is not showing what we think it's showing. Human beings are also very notorious and unreliable. I forget what the specifics of this this particular study were. But basically, it was 100 rays were taken. They showed them to physicians, those x-rays were just the same 10-10 images, I think, like over and over and over again, they kept coming up with different diagnosis for the same image just to just to find something wrong. Yeah, the AIs are far better at diagnosing based off imaging than people are. Yeah, so to make that point, like, okay, so there's these doctors are physically seeing something, is that really what's happening? Maybe, maybe not, you have to recognize you might be unreliable, your diagnosis. So, you have a biological aspect, you have the psychological component, where once people get conditioned to pain, they expect to be in pain or in more pain. And that creates a negative feedback loop. Oh, the doctor told me my shoulder is destroyed. Oh, God. Now if I do anything, it's gonna make a hurt more. Am I hurting myself more? Oh, you're sensitizing yourself to a painful experience before it's even happening. You have the doctor told you nothing was wrong. Doctor, my shoulder hurts. But your imaging's fine. Must have just been a random pain. Don't worry about it. Oh, okay. And this, again, there's clinical data on this. This has been proven out with sham surgery studies, the knees in particular, where people have meniscus tears. They go in, we're going to do surgery on your knee. There's no surgery done. They could put to sleep, wake up. Nothing ever took place, knee pains gone. Nothing. There's no physical change has taken place. But because the brain mind thinks that it's been fixed. It's decided that doesn't hurt anymore. So that's the psychological.
Jack Heald 44:42
There’s deep stuff here because...
Alexander AJ Cortes 44:46
So, there's that. And then lastly, you do have the social environment which that's the input from your doctor. That's the input from the gym you train at, your friends, the people that you know, the culture that you live in, different cultures handle the pain differently. I've traveled abroad, like in the United States, we have this molecular chemical biased view that we can treat everything with drugs essentially. It's like okay, this hurts, painkiller. I have anxiety, here's an anti-anxiety drug. I'm depressed, here's an anti-depression drug. I mean, I've had a number of a minor injuries over the years where I thought like maybe fractured something the wrist. It healed on so like I know how to treat my body. Every time I've ever have gone in for anything, just to maybe have an extra done. I always get offered painkillers. I'm not asking for them. It's like I remember last year I thought maybe it's like I broke off like a piece my kneecap from having my knee collide and like it feels weird. We just have a cheap X ray done. Yeah, went to urgent care. Took an image of it. Okay, there's a little bit he busted off a tip. Does it hurt? It’s not that bad. Okay, do you want me to write you, send you a prescription, like, I give you a prescription for whatever? What, I don't want a prescription, I'm fine. Like I don't have to treat the pain. The pain is given itself. That's a whole thing. We could dive into, how we regard pain. Maybe next time, but to make comparison if like so, Tyler and I lived in Thailand for almost a year, I trained Muay Thai, the Thai attitude towards pain is very different to the American attitude. It's a different social environment. If you are hurting there, especially in like a fight environment, unless you are grievously injured, deal with it.
Jack Heald 46:30
Suck it up, buttercup,
Alexander AJ Cortes 46:31
You're gonna be okay. There's a very different Eastern belief that the body has recuperative powers, that your mind is going to affect the experience. So, if you believe your body still strong, and you're willing to work through it, maybe you teach, you modify training as necessary. You don't just quit, like you'll heal. It will be okay. It's very rare to see guys take tons of time off from an injury. Unless they literally broke their leg or something. Your wrist is hanging off and you can't even lift it, okay, yeah, get surgery. If not, you just work around it, do what you can, you'll heal. Believe that you can heal and you'll be fine. Now I'm being reductionist with it, it gets deeper than that because of the religious aspects for them. But you compare that to the US where every minor pain, stomach ache, cough, Doctor, I want an antibiotic, I want it right now. You just you have a runny nose, give me the antibiotic. Like we love drugs. So, to summarize all that. Yeah, so pain is biopsychosocial, all that creates this experience, that mental experience, whether that is impeding your ability to heal from joint pain, joint injury, or whether that if you start training and you start believing you can get stronger, and there is an analgesic effect, actually push for that, there is a pain denting effect from exercise resistance training. That's clinically proven. The most reliable way to treat pain, without drugs is exercise. If you do a general strength training program, with machines twice a week, one or two sets to failure, your body will hurt less, you'll have more energy, your muscles will feel stronger, your flexibility will improve, all these things will improve without necessarily addressing them correctly. And it may be that you know what, your knees, your shoulder stop hurting. And then you don't need the surgery.
Jack Heald 48:29
I love it. Years ago, over 20 years ago, I love to play basketball, I was on the court all the time. And I'm just getting older and came down from with a rebound and my knee hurts so bad. It was, I realized at that point, that the pain was greater than the fun. And it was literally the first time in my entire life that the pain hurt more than the fun felt good. So, I quit playing ball and ended up going to a doctor and I'm searching just when a surgeon told me I need surgery. I was scheduled to leave the country for an extended period of time and said I'm going to postpone. I don't want to get surgery right now. Where I lived overseas, I lived in a three-story flat. My bedroom was on the top floor so I had to climb three stairs multiple times, I did three sets of stairs multiple times a day. The office I worked in was on the sixth floor and I usually just take the stairs. By the time I got home a year later. Guess what?
Alexander AJ Cortes 49:38
They didn't hurt.
Jack Heald 49:40
Me felt fine. Yeah. And that was just one of a myriad of experiences I've had like that but they've made me somewhat skeptical about the accepted approach to health and wellness. Phil. Yeah, I love this guy. I could just sit and talk all day long. But I realized this is actually your show, and I probably need to shut up.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 50:09
Now, I think that was a great discussion, I think to bring that point around, a lot of improving our health really just comes down to stop damaging your health. Stop eating the crap and stop just sitting around being inactive, and the body can heal a lot of this stuff, if we just stop actively doing damage to it. Before we wrap up, though, I want to hear a little bit more Alexander, you mentioned you had spent the year in Thailand, and you were training martial arts over there. And it was a fascinating journey to kind of follow online. And I think it was as much maybe philosophical as it was physical. So, I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you learned over there, what that experience was like, and how it changed some of the ways that you approach a lot of the fitness stuff these days.
Alexander AJ Cortes 51:14
Yeah, so that was in December 2020. So, when COVID was happening, lock downs, that's where I was. So, I had a great year. 2020 was amazing year. Training Muay Thai, specifically. So, Muay Thai is Thai kickboxing. And it's been practiced there for, depending upon who you ask, like it's been done for at least about five centuries. So, it has a very, very long historical background, the kingdom of Thailand's it's very old. That's been a celled area for thousands of years, the culture is very old. So, their trading practices haven't changed in many centuries, they train twice a day. The training is obviously very cardiovascular, there isn't anything that really resembles modern strength and conditioning. In the Thai way, the emphasis is on the skills, building fundamentals, with the movements themselves, and then also encouraging you to run like as often as you can. When I was there, I mean, it was beneficial, like on a personal level, you're a man, you'll learn how to fight, it's reinforcing your masculinity, we could talk about that. But from a fitness standpoint, it was really fascinating for me, because so much of what we believe in the United States about sports training, or strength conditioning, or exercise, it's very, what I just deem weight-room dominant. We want to believe that you got to be in the weight room, you gotta be lifting weights, X amount of hours a week, that's gonna make you a magnitude, orders of magnitude better athlete, that's important. Then you have these athletes there, these Thai fighters who don't do any of that. They just train all day during the sport itself, and they run. And they have longer careers and way more fights and way less injuries. And their approach to training is much more holistic. And so, it led me to question a lot of like, okay, we have this whole strength conditioning bias in American Fitness, maybe a lot of it's wrong. Maybe lifting weights isn't so important for sports. Maybe being muscular, it's not just about being muscular. There's other aspects of physical capacity and ability with your elasticity with fascial health with your ability to bounce and rebound, maybe these things are worth diving into. So, it's a lot of things to list out. But it was a very good welcome from a cognitive dissonance since it just led me to examine okay, like, what am I wrong about with what I currently think. Maybe we're wrong about a lot of things. And that's kind of what got me into actually, that's, in fact, what catalyzed like the ancient Greeks days and like, okay, these guys have been trained the same way for literally 500 years. How are people training 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago? Then you find out cool stuff. You've already learned cool things. One of the biggest ones that I realized was that squatting as we do today, like the barbell back squat, that's a very recent phenomenon in terms of exercise. Only in the last roughly 100 years has the squat become this dominance movement that we're told to, like, we must do it. It's the king of exercises. When I was saying the ancient Greek historical records, but which a lot exist. There's no record of them doing squats at all. Like, I mean, none. You can't find anything at all in ancient Greek that describes a squat motion, I mean, nothing. Now what you can find is a lot of recommendations for running, for uphill sprints, basically, for wrestling, or I mean, there's a whole there's a whole list of exercises, they're actually describing the literature, it's like stuff like again, 2000 years old. I'm like, okay, do this, do this, do this, do this. This is for general conditioning. This is for power. This is for explosive ability. There's no squats. That's a wow. Okay, so maybe this movement that we think is so essential for sports performance? Is it really that essential? Well, I'm like, one of the things I questioned years ago when I was actually training clients every day was, I'm testing people on like their squat mobility. But is this a test where it's set to fail? Is it reasonable to test somebody on something that you already know, they're going to be bad out, and they never do? Like how is that a good criteria of assessment? Once that was sort of its own, like I wrote, probably, I wrote a couple of newsletters and almost treaties on this, like training legs is important, don't get me wrong. Like you want to go up and down, like it's very essential to have strong legs. But this idea that certain exercises are absolutely critical. Like, are there other ways to train legs? Can you lunge? Can you leg press? Could you do split squats? Could your squats just be done with lighter weight? Do they have to be done heavy with weight on your spine? On your back? Is that so critical? I don't believe it is at all.
Jack Heald 55:58
I want to thank you for that. I was back squatting for a while. And I'll confess I loved it and hated it. It was the most emotionally intimidating lifts that I would do. But it was also such an emotional rush to do a big squat. And then I read your you wrote of a may have been a Twitter thread or maybe even a newsletter. I don't remember. But it was something along the lines of 22 reasons not to do a back squat. I don't remember exactly what it was. But you said something along the lines of 100% of my clients who do back squats get injured? I had recently just been injured. That's why it convinced me at that point that there were there were other ways to get the same work accomplished and about as much as I loved it without putting the bar on my back. And am I no longer back squat? I still did lift. But I don't back squat.
Alexander AJ Cortes 57:12
That's good. No problem. Yeah, I mean, this is like an exercise always has to be customized to the highest level. Yeah. So, I mean, I can always be critical of certain lifts. That's not to say that that's going to never be done. There are people where they have very optimal anatomical structure, you can put a bar on them and they go up, they go down, it looks great. Feels good.
Jack Heald 57:31
I’m 6’4” and slender.
Alexander AJ Cortes 57:35
So, you don't have the optimal mechanics, the optimal body structure. But I've always, like I said at the beginning, I've always had a bias for historical evidence. Well, I noticed as I went through my career and studied new guys who could train long time, is it at some point or another, everybody that squats heavy that really made that a focal point of training, they can't do it anymore. They do this, I will readily admit there's no like hard clinical data on this. It'd be very hard to assess a bunch of veteran lifters and ask them this. This is based off gym experience, but everybody that I know who's a hardcore lifter, that's 40 and beyond, it's 100%. All of them have gotten injured squatting, whether it's a spinal injury, whether it's a hip injury, whether it's some combination thereof, whether it's a hernia, whether it's neck, whether it's shoulder, like something hurts, and they really struggled to do it. If they even do it at all. Most of them don't. I have one good friend of mine, Donnie Thompson. He actually beat breakfast for the show. But so, he was the first guy to total 3000 pounds in the squat bench deadlift and equip lifting. Yeah, so he had over 1000 pounds on his back when he broke that record, and he still squats to this day, but the way he squats he uses a specialized bar. He does a very specific warmup movement preparation on his bike to handle that much weight. He squats to like a Bosu ball or a box like he had like he's jerry rigged the lift. He made it very specific. He's very cognizant that he's like I am trying my absolute best to minimize all the potential damage from this exercise. He doesn't squat with a straight bar at all. He has a special curved bar it minimizes the shoulder stress and then my spouse stress legs and upper torso, all these things like okay so that's like that's until it that's one guy. Everybody else has got had horrible grievous injuries from it. Now these are these are high level lifters. Right? These are guys like their iron brothers. Okay. For the average person, average Joe in the gym. Do I want you doing a lift that at some point in the near future is going to lead you kind of injured, that then takes you out of the gym that then breaks you have your training practice and then discourages you from the process, do I want you doing that? Or can I get you stronger and build muscle, build a habit keep you consistent, doing something else that's just as potent and effective, but safer. I'm gonna go the safer option. I don't care about whether you think the lift is tough like, there are far better ways to measure your masculinity and machismo than how much weight you can lift on an exercise. Like it's cool. I love it the heavy weight. It's fun. Every guy loves lifting heavyweight. You like slamming the bar down or seeing place rattling? Of course, that's fine. Of course, it is. You can do all that and still be broke and poor and divorced and kids hate you like it's, it's a poor, like I said, it's a poor method of masculinity. It's very temporal, like, I would not build your identity around that. I really discourage it. Unless you are truly elite. And that's your thing. Right? If that's your thing, that's your thing. 99% of guys, that's not your thing. It's just something you do to have some muscle and hopefully look good your shirt off. Don't take it so seriously that way.
Jack Heald 1:01:02
So, what's next for a jack? What's What do you got coming up soon that we can look forward to?
Alexander AJ Cortes 1:01:10
That short term pipeline, I have a lower body training guide that I'm writing right now. I just released one on back training, which I was really happy with. So, I upgraded for my team, they helped me with my products. So, I've really been able to take this a really life because really phenomenal anatomical approach with illustrations and videos showing very concretely, like I was saying like, this is how you train effectively, these are the exercises, the sets, the reps, here are examples for everything. Here are visual models, like it's a fantastic resource. So, the lower body training guide that will be coming out in about four weeks, they'll be released. My wife just gave birth to our first son like three and a half weeks ago, almost four weeks ago. Yeah. So that's... I’m a dad now. So that's cool. Yeah, that's really cool. whatsoever. Yeah, so I'm looking forward to sort of busy seeing him grow up and being a father. Then long term, just completing that training series essentially, of like how to train products. And I finally have the necessary setup to launch, film a YouTube channel. I have a home gym now, that outfit and equipment and got the cameras and everything. So that will be going this month. Yeah, so basically just trying to create more resources for people, more educational resources.
Jack Heald 1:02:42
Great. Well, I would like to point out that I've seen a handful of Alexander's videos on how to do particular exercises, and they are hands down the best I've ever seen. And I've watched a lot. He breaks it down and makes it simple. What he showed us the right way and the wrong way to do it. I'm usually doing it the wrong way. So, I'm a big fan of Alexander's videos. Thank you. That's good. That's good feedback.
Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:03:16
Yeah, I would certainly echo I think anyone looking for some good fitness resources. I would point them your way. So, I want you to tell people the best place to find those resources.
Jack Heald 1:03:28
Yes.
Alexander AJ Cortes 1:03:30
So, Twitter account obviously I have A-J-A underscore Cortes, I have a Twitter account. So, I tweet pretty much daily. My Instagram has a ton of short-form exercise tutorials. And I think I've got around 50-60 at this point, just how to do particular exercises and train correctly. And I've been seeing a lot of people there because having a visual example, that’s good to learn, right? And then I have my newsletter on my website, cortes.site, and newsletter usually goes out about two to three times a week. And that typically will cover various fitness topics, subjects more in depth, whether it be progressive overload for nutrition, or pain, like a biopsychosocial model I've talked about, load treating or treating low back pain. That's more of a long form content of how to solve specific problems, issues that arise and what to do.1
Jack Heald 1:04:19
Very good. Well, we'll make sure all of those show up in the show notes for both the audio and video versions of the show. We'd love to sit and talk with you about historical ancient sources and what you've learned, but we're past time. Okay. Phil, anything else we want to do before we wrap it for today?
Dr. Philip Ovadia 1:04:44
Another great conversation this week. I think people will get a lot of useful information out of this and keep moving forward towards better health.
Jack Heald 1:04:58
Absolutely. So, All right. Well, Alexander, I appreciate you being here with us. I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since. For Philip Ovadia, I’m Jack Heald, this Stay Off My Operating Table podcast. You can follow Phil on Twitter and @ifixhearts you can take his metabolic health quiz at ifixhearts.co And you can contact him and so you can get into just take care of your health in general, ovadiahearthealth.com And we'll talk to you all next week.
Jack Heald 1:05:38
America is fat and sick and tired. 88% of Americans are metabolically unhealthy and at risk of a sudden heart attack. Are you one of them? Go to ifixhearts.co and take Dr. Ovadia's metabolic health quiz. Learn specific steps you can take to reclaim your health reduce your risk of heart attack and stay off Dr. Ovadia’s operating table. This has been a production of 38atoms.