The Truth About Creatine, Belly Fat, and Getting Shredded! Jeff Cavaliere (The Muscle Expert)

Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength but also improve brain health and performance. sleep-deprived with high-stress states. But there's some new research coming out showing its ability to slow, prevent things like Jeff Cavalier is the physical therapist and strength coach trusted by the NFL, MLB, WWE. Global reputation for science-based training that delivers. What do people want?

When we poll our followers, I found that for men, they want their six-pack abs, getting bigger arms, develop their chest. And for women, they want to have better legs and they want to develop backsides. So we'll get into those exercises. But the biggest problem most people have is the struggle to get started. So become paralyzed by an activity and say, I'm not going to do anything at all.

I get emotional, but it's sad when people don't ever find that drive and motivation because the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body, they call it the new smoking. If I take away your health, you're done. So finding the drive.

Get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything. So if I was one of those people struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me? I would start with... And I'm not done yet. Lower belly fat. How do I get rid of... Well, surely you say that there are five key exercises to maximise your longevity. Can you show me these workouts? Sure.

Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie? This is Raymond, and I use him to show one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and all their channels. The majority of people that watch this podcast

haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.

I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button. wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.

you're very much known as the the king and the og of online fitness training advice support In terms of the mission that you're on in particular and how your perspective differs from other... people out there in the market. What is it that you think makes your perspective different, unique, and more important potentially than a lot of the perspectives out there as it relates to how to build up our muscles, how to have a strong, healthy body?

and how to prolong our health span. Everybody, for the most part, that's out there trying to put information out. they should have a level there's a level of respect I have for everyone doing that because they're all trying to help people get better or improve themselves I think we're was really heavily focused was on a more comprehensive more multi-faceted way to do that because my background wasn't just in let's say strength training or

aesthetic appeal of training but also as a physical therapist and having a physical therapy background I understood the importance of not sacrificing the body in the process of trying to aesthetically improve So I believe that when people understand the why and they do become empowered to sort of make this their own journey.

The benefits are so far reaching. It's not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you improve. It's so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves. Mental health is directly related to... people's physical health. If you look better and feel better about yourself, your mental health improves too. Every element of life is improved, I think, with improved levels of fitness and health.

My why has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to understand that even the smallest investments, it doesn't have to be every bit I do. And I try to stress that in all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition, like you don't have to eat. the way I do. to get as lean as I am to still benefit from being lean. You could have body fat levels much higher and still see the immense benefits in terms of overall health.

So you don't have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the information and apply it to yourself. that to me is the most rewarding part of it. Because if I can show you how to do it, it's the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right? If I could do that, then I think I've done something right. I say all the time, I could take everything away.

I could take all your money. I could take houses. I could take everything away. I could take even relationships away because we could always find another relationship potentially. If I take away your health, you're done. Health is everything. And what did you study? I saw a few things, physiognomal.

my initial degree and um i became a physical therapist which required another three years and you became a certified strength and conditioning specialist as well Most of the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that regard, so you'd have to have a college degree, but then you'd also have to have...

a certification. In this case, it was the National Strength and Conditioning Association. And over the last 25 years since you got that certification, who have you worked with, who have you helped, and how many? The most important thing that came from that certification was that it qualified me to work for the Mets. What's the Mets for you when that doesn't matter? Southern Mets or the New York Mets.

professional baseball teams. I worked with some of the best baseball players in the world. I had a chance to work with some of the greatest football players in the world. it's wrestlers i'm a big wrestling fan growing up i have a lot of wrestlers that that come through and that's a cool thing because wrestling though some people may not like the storyboarding of wrestling.

Athletically, they're some of the most gifted athletes in the world. I mean, the travel schedule, the amount of days that they wrestle every week. The rigors that they put their body through, whatever you want to say, the outcome might be determined, but the bumps and bruises are not fake. And, you know, they also have to have that aesthetic appeal too.

So it's this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me. When I look at someone like you and I see these bulging muscles and I see how lean you are, it's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, you were just born with extreme motivation. And that's why you are the way that you are. Well...

I think motivation is extremely overrated, right? Because like motivation isn't what produces the results. It might get you to the show and get you to actually show up at the gym. initiate the work, but only discipline keeps you there. And being disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have now. Discipline comes with finding success.

So at an early age, if you can, or an early training age, if you can experience some success early, you do become motivated, again, self-motivated to continue on down that path. My genetics were never great. My mom was five foot tall. My dad's five foot nine, five foot eight, 160 pounds, not a lot of muscle. I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle.

I didn't come from this genetically gifted pool of cavaliers. There's no way. But I did have this desire to do something in terms of training and taking my body as far as I could. But I really found the discipline through the fact that I liked it. And I found that this was feeding me in other ways. It was making me feel. fulfilled. So it was easier for me to stick to it.

You must deal with so many people that are struggling, that come to you and they say, listen, I've got these big goals, I'm overweight, I don't feel good, I've got diabetes here, cardiovascular problem here, inflammation here. And they say to you that they want to change. You know, you can see it in their face, they're desperate, but they don't change for whatever reason. We live in an age now where you have access to the internet, you have so much access to information.

use it in whatever way you can to get started on your journey. Because the earlier you start, the better. But it is quite sad when people don't ever find that spark in trying to play catch-up. There's no lie to it. It's going to be harder as you get older. Starting or initiating a training program in your 40s and 50s, though way better than not starting one, is much more difficult than if you had started in your teens and 20s. You know, to develop that habit, to maintain that.

It's very difficult to initiate that the older that you get, but I do think that it's possible. So my best advice to people who have that, struggle to get started. is to figure out ways that you can eliminate thinking. Because the longer you think, the more likely you are to not be able to do it. The thing that stops most people...

at saying the start is what stops most people, right? But at the same token, it's not the obstacle that's in your way. It's the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting. So you wind up saying, well... I don't know. I can just sit on the couch and watch this. I'm not going to go. And believe me, there's even nights now for me where I'll be with one of my sons who will be in his room putting on the bed. I might fall asleep in there, you know, and wake up and it's late at night.

I don't even think I let my dogs out. I go right outside. I walk. Sometimes I'm literally half asleep as I'm walking, but I know if I can get to the gym, get in there, turn on the music and kind of put the lights on and do one warm up set, I'll be good. And if I even sat down for a second. I might find that path of least resistance to be a lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable. And then once it becomes... something that you enjoy.

Because for the most part, I think you probably enjoy it now, right? The process. It becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step. But there's still going to be days, you know, maybe a long day of shooting, you know, and you're going to be like, maybe not today. But if you stop the negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that's all it usually takes to get you through the door. And you realize that, you know.

were set out to do. When you think about all the many millions of people that have watched your videos, I mean, it's actually billions of people that have watched your videos and consumed your content. you must hear a lot of different types of spark. When I say spark, I mean the moment in someone's life where something happened and...

It stuck. It finally stuck. What are the kind of things that you hear? Oh, man, they're life-changing. It's part of the why that keeps me going, hearing some of these stories. I had a live event.

a few years ago first one that we ever had so i was i was a rookie i didn't know how it was going to go but part of that event was a competition that we ran so anyway we had a guy who was in his uh late 50s first one to do the competition so he drew number one okay so he goes and the first thing we had was a 300 yard shuttle which is just a 50 yard distance they had to run to the cone and back that's 100 yards back and forth again and back and forth again

It was extremely hot that day. It was like 95 degrees because of course I ran the event in July and it was like, okay, this is not going to work out so well. So anyway. He goes out. He comes back on the last run. He starts to windmill his arms. He's losing his balance forward. And I'm like, oh, no. And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes up his knee, blood all over.

Okay, next kid comes up. He's up now. He goes by the second station. He's overheated. He tried so hard. He has to stand out the rest of the competition because he overheated. I was ready to put a stop to the games because I said, we just weren't prepared for this heat in this first time. And anyway, we continued. So the fourth drill up for the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled put.

And we had put 225 pounds on the sled. But that sled was on the pavement out in the parking lot from this gym that we hosted it at. The friction of the sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted for. It made it even more difficult. Well, again, he's got that blooded up knee. He's pushing it. He gets it to the end, struggling. And now he has to pick up at the end, a hundred pound kettlebell and walk it back.

He goes down there, he grabs the kettlebell after a long multiple attempt to get the sled down. And I finally run down there and I said, his name is Craig. I said, Craig, dude, you don't have to do this. You're good. You're good. It's okay. And he's like, no. He says, I'm going to do it. And I starts walking. crossing the legs over each other it looks like he's gonna go down again i put my arm around him i said man listen you don't have to do this he says

And I get goosebumps and he goes, Jeff, I have to do this. He goes, I was diagnosed with MS, you know, four years ago and I can't feel my feet. I got to do this. It's that kind of drive and motivation. And you never know because you don't know what they're dealing with. I get emotional, but it's like that's the kind of stuff that gets me going. We had another guy who...

competed at our event, and he was doing the push-up portion of the competition. It's his second year, and he was doing his push-up. I wasn't going all the way down. So got down to like, I don't know, two or three inches away from his chest. So I go over to him and I'm like, hey, dude, just a little bit lower. Get your chest down.

I can't because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer. And I can't get all the way down because of the port. He wound up dying two months after the conference. So when you realize that people do this for reasons that you don't like, it's not just to go to the gym to get a six pack. It's going there to... for reasons we'll never know. And I think that those kinds of moments...

are more than touching to me, as you can tell, but like they're just, they show the power of will. And that is something that we'll never be able to quantify. Within that, as well, I was thinking about how that guy who wouldn't put that £100 kettlebell down, for him it... It was actually about a story he wanted to tell to himself. It's something that he wanted to do for... reasons that I'm much more about.

one's identity and one's self-story, as we call it. And on that particular point, it's one of the things that I often think about with fitness and working out is if I can be the guy that grabs the keys that day when I don't feel like... then how that permeates through the rest of my life and how I show up in the rest of my life when there's things I don't want to do.

And how that then shapes me over time into somebody who is able to have the difficult conversation, is able to confront the thing, I think is really understated. I actually was reading this. I think Andrew Huberman told me this. He said that they've... neuroscience has found a part of the brain which is associated with doing hard things. Yes, I saw that. And I think he said basically that that part of the brain, and I'll put this up on the screen.

grows the more hard things that you do so you basically build the muscle of being able to do hard things And the minute I learned that, I went, oh, this makes a lot of sense because the more I was able to make the workout stick and the health and fitness stick, and now my diet is like, as we see here now, is extremely disciplined.

I've like changed as a person in other areas of my life. Like I've got more organized with like my, my possessions and. Well, you realize what you're capable of too, right? Cause I think we undersell our capabilities and. I think that in reference to those two men that I just talked about, like when you're staring at the face of something that seems to be much more dire.

again, what level of fitness you have, you realize that there's a much deeper well that you can tap into to do things that you don't want to do. And I think... The people that are lucky enough. like yourself, to have found that, have found the keys to the kingdom to be able to. take themselves to another level of awareness and self-awareness that does 100%, like you said, play out in other areas of your life when you can do the difficult thing.

It's still not and automatic that you're going to be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody. You know that you have the capacity to do things that you didn't really think you could, and it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry those out. Interesting thing on that study that Andrew Huberman was talking about was that...

If you start to like the thing that you actually didn't like in the beginning, then it no longer challenges that area of the brain. That area of the brain starts to shrink again. Oh, really? So it has to kind of, which is cool because it means that you need to continue to seek challenge. I was thinking a lot about this over Christmas and New Year's. I sat down with one of my best friends and said to him,

I said, what exercise and what thing do you dislike the most? And we basically made a list of them. And then we started doing this.

for me it was actually running and I was like and squatting it also made me because when I asked him why he didn't do those things the list of reasons he gave were things like my legs aren't insert excuse my brain insert excuse and we both came to realize together that that was just a bunch of bullshit that we had like made our identities and it was now limiting us are there things like that in your life that you just Oh gosh. Yes.

conditioning, running. I try to address those things and do them knowing that I should do more of them, but there's always more. One of the things you must have figured out from all the content you've produced across all these channels is really like the essence of what people... And I, you know, because you'll see from the views and the engagement and these things, you'll build this sort of mental pattern of, okay, people are really interested in this. So if you had to summarize for me.

the essence of what you think people are looking for? And when I say the essence, I mean like the why, why, why, why, why, the very bottom of that. What are those things? Oh, I think, I think. insecurity is definitely a factor. I think a feeling of wanting to be accepted is part of that. I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable.

Because I think a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are. If the moment arose that they needed to, let's say, protect their family or do something that was physically needed to be done, how capable would you actually be? And I think a lot of us feel. insecure in our preparedness that way. So I think that's a driver. I had this quite many years ago. It says change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making it.

And I was thinking, if you were my trainer and I was one of those stubborn people who were struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me? Like, what would you do if I was super stubborn? I tried for three years. I'd never made it stick. But clearly there was... health consequence Why would you stop?

Probably the conversation. You know, I would start with always with the conversation. I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody. Because if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do, but if you ask the question of like, why? You might say, I'm too fat right now. And I would say to you, what would it mean to you?

well i i would be better because i'd have a six pack what would be important if having a six pack well i would like how Why would it be important for you to like who you're looking at? Because I don't feel like I'm enough right now because I'm letting myself down because I know that I'm not doing the things I need to. Why is it important to not let yourself down? Right, so when you start to ask the question, keep digging.

You find the why very quickly. And a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood. It comes from pain of letting others down. It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either because it was... you know, drilled into from your parents or others or because you just never self-confidence to actually feel better about yourself. I always say that most people who are lifelong gym goers. They all have some level of pain.

in their life that caused them to seek this out because it's the one thing they can control. It's the one area where it's like, I don't have to listen to anybody. I have to do what I have to do for myself, and I'm in control of my body. And I think that a lot of times people...

where you benefit from the endorphins that are released through exercise and it's your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better. But a lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain. So if I had... you're come to me in the very beginning i was started with that conversation and tried to find out why is it that you can't stick with this you've tried and you stopped and i think that understand that. Finding the why to get yourself on track.

with pursuing optimal health is everything. What about the very top? Like, how does it manifest, like, the title of the video? Yeah, I mean, the top is abs, biceps, chest, and, you know, low back pain. I mean... People actually come to me for one of two things. Again, I think it's having the two hats of physical therapist and strength and conditioning coach. I think people come to me to fix something or to improve the look of something.

So we have lots and lots and lots of views, obviously, based around fixing issues, low back pain, postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain. and how it disrupts their ability to carry on in life or through their fitness pursuit. Then there's the other side of it where people, of course, they want their six-pack abs and then they want their arms and they want their chest. And I highlight those because the fact is that is where people are most interested because it's...

You know, it's the beach muscles, but that's a fact of life. People want to improve those areas. What I try to do when I bring people in through that. track is to also make them aware that it's okay this is cool you want your abs that's good you know but obviously this can require a healthier eating plan so i know i can have a much broader impact on their overall health and life if I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now.

So I always feel that you can come in for whatever your top level interest might be. But my mission and goal is to make sure that you understand there's more to it. I've kind of broken everything you've said into three sections, which is people want to look good. They want to perform and whatever that might be. And they also want to. be able to do it for a long time they want to live long yeah so under if we start with looking good as a top line

What are the things that you think are the subcategories of looking good? The amount of fat that someone carries, so how lean they are. Yeah. Aesthetic development of their muscles. what their bodies are shaped like because you know you could lose weight but as you've described before skinny fat isn't really an attractive look um so i think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways

What is the difference you see between what men say they want versus what women say they want? What do men come to you and say that they want as a trainer of athletes? sacrilegious to me, but they rarely discuss anything in the lower body. right they're not talking about really big legs or i want to have you know strong developed glutes i mean it's just not really high on the list so pretty much everything's going to focus on you know from the waist up in terms of the aesthetic desire

bigger neck for men for women it's the opposite right for women they focus first and foremost below the waist they want to have better legs they want to have stronger legs they want to have well-developed backsides they want to like and there's probably I mean, a cultural importance upon that. You know, men are being... judged aesthetically.

on their upper bodies more than women are and women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower bodies. So we're feeding into those desires, especially, you know, one scroll through Instagram and you're just reinforcing everything I just talked about in that category as well of looking. Nutrition. Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted.

So let's start with fat and lean. If I want to be lean like you, and I want to have low body fat, where does one begin? what happened with me and what I always advise people to do. is start just by looking at globally from 30,000 foot view, what do you know you're doing not well right now? Are you drinking excessively? Do you end every night with a pint of ice cream? you know they're doing some things wrong. so you make one pass at the obvious stuff and you just

do it for a couple of weeks. You know, when you see how you progress and what will normally happen is, it's usually those are the most offending, they're the biggest offenders when it comes to nutrition, that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it. What do you think are some of the offenders that we don't realize? I've had so many in my life, even like ketchup. Yeah. I thought white rice was great.

Yeah, I mean, white rice is actually, there's a place for carbohydrates in people's diets, I believe, but you have to have a healthy respect for them because they're the most likely to be overweight. The desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us. But you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some, or pasta and then some, because they are much more chemically pleasing to the body. So I think people need to be cautious of.

overconsumption of carbohydrates and they're not aware of portion sizes really impacting them because they'll say, no, I had rice and pasta. And I would say I have rice and pasta too every day. But like, I probably don't eat as much as that person does. So portion sizes when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness.

The kind of hidden offenders. I mean, there's sugar in a lot of things that is used just to make these things more appealing, especially, you know, like, you know.

right people will have you know fruit on the bottom yogurt but it's like loaded with sugar or my first experience was oatmeal i was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in the morning so of course i was buying quaker oats but i was buying those little packets and they have brown sugar in the bottom and it's like they're loaded with sugar they were not the equivalent of quaker oats from a jug from a like a can

And so here I'm thinking I'm doing something right, but I'm not because there was more sugar in that than there was in a bag or a ball of tricks. cereal what you look for on the package i always look for sugar and fat that's what i look for so

Dietary fat, there are 9 calories per gram of fat versus 4 calories per gram of protein or carbohydrate. There are much more calorie-dense foods. So when you have fats on your plate... way shape or form calorically the that dish is going to increase pretty quickly so you have to be mindful of them if you if you want to lose weight and achieve a hypo caloric state to get there you have to take in fewer calories then you're burning.

That's why I would look at fat content, but sugar is just really not necessary. It's just one of those things that our bodies do not need and tends to be. too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating sugar. So I think that's one of the fastest ways to get yourself on track is to try to minimize the sugar content of food.

And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate. So if you're eating a higher protein food, you're likely going to find yourself feeling satisfied and full faster than if it's just a carbohydrate. So those are the three things I look at every time I turn a label around. Protein, sugar, and fats. And what does your diet look like? I eat...

Breakfast in the morning, and I have usually, again, I'll give you typical meals. I have oatmeal. I even put like some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin just for some addition. vitamins and minerals, protein shake. and some maybe some egg whites so i get good amounts of protein and for lunch i'll have like a grilled chicken wrap again i'm trying to prioritize protein every single meal And I'll try to have a Greek yogurt that has limited sugar in it.

Um... Then I'll have a protein shake usually after work, only because I know that when I get done with work, usually at six o'clock, I come home, the kids are there, they want to play. I wind up just having something to tie me over, realizing that my dinner is going to occur later at night after my workout. What happens, though, is that workout occurs at around 1030 to 11 o'clock at night. So dinner happens at around midnight.

That's always, again, based around a protein first. So usually chicken or steak or fish and then fibrous carbohydrates. So it's going to be. Something like I like edamame. It's, you know, has good protein in it. I'm not fearful of the soy protein that's there, especially in that limited amount. Broccoli. And then I have my starchy carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is sweet potatoes. So I'll have sweet potatoes or pasta or both.

I'm still shocked that you're eating dinner at midnight. Yeah. So what time do you train? So I train around 10.30 or 11 until around quarter to 12 or so. Is that sub... It's only optimal because it's when I can consistently do it. If I could change that, I would probably work out at...

5 p.m. you know but i always find that there's still work going on people still need me at that point in the day why not the morning i have a very difficult time waking up i'm one of those people that act like a zombie for probably uh 15 minutes before i'm feeling ready to go i'm very much the same i probably eat a bit too late i train a bit too late

And as I'm listening to you, I'm almost listening to myself. And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Stephen, if you went to bed earlier and you ate earlier, then you'd wake up and you'd have to train in the morning. Well, how do you feel when you wake up? do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up or do you feel no yeah um i'm very similar to you i wake up late yeah and

If I wake up late, then I feel fine. But if you try and wake me up at 7 o'clock, the chances are that I went to bed maybe at midnight or 1am. So there's not enough sleep taking place there. But having worn this whoop for a while, who are a sponsor, I'm an investor in the company. One of the things I came to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep, my body isn't actually asleep.

because I can see my resting heart rate so high through the night. So my body's actually just working on the food, so it's not restoring my body. So one of my goals for this year is to try and not eat after 9pm. I think it's a good goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or time to go to bed. Because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep, the... Routine.

Even in cases of lower sleep totals, there's actually 27% of people report sleeping less than sleep. And 20% of people sleep 40. I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because I get to bed late and I get up around seven o'clock each morning. I don't sleep track. I did for a while. I don't sleep track. I actually, I've tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved even as my sleep.

time, my total sleep time has diminished. Now, there is And I hold on to this as a possibility, but I haven't tested myself. There are two genes that are actually responsible for... short sleeper syndrome. In other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it optimizes gene expression for wakefulness. brainstem activity that allows you to wake up easier. And the downside to that is...

that only one to three percent of the population has that. So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be playing a game that I ultimately can't win. But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better. lower sleep totals than others. On this point of being lean, one of the things people are most obsessed with getting rid of is lower belly fat, this stubborn belly fat that occurs right there on our little mannequin here. You don't have a pouch.

That's what we call it. Me and my friends, we call it a town. We can be very lean elsewhere but still have a little bit of a pouch there. Some people think doing sit-ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat. What is the answer in your view?

It's the level of strictness of nutrition. And I mean, the level of strictness is not just in the foods that you choose, but the... consistency with which you choose them so how long can you sustain this really clean diet i hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean it's actually the first thing It's a red flag, but they don't.

I think it comes from having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way. When men put on body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off. And one of the biggest areas for that, you mentioned that I don't have one, but... as ridiculous as this is going to sound. When I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it's right there.

And it's because that is the absolute first place to go on. The shamefulness of how your body does this and what it does to us is that. It kind of works in this top-down approach. Like you'll lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down and the last place is here. So it works in this top-down approach.

Well, by the time you get all the way down there, you've lost the fat in your face, you've lost the fat in your neck. So like, you know, I sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, man, you're gone, you know, and I hate the way that my face gets sort of caved in. But it's sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique, especially naturally, because that's how your body starts to lose fat, especially as you age. You start to lose collagen and skin thickness.

more of a challenge. But this top-down approach, is sometimes good because It allows you to start to see like the upper row abs underneath the chest or when you start to get into better shape, you might have noticed this yourself. You start to see like, okay, my lower chest isn't as saggy anymore. It's actually starting to take some shape.

Well, what's cool is that's actually that little spark of motivation that I want to keep going. I can see the top app. Right, I can see the top app. There it is. I have them. I actually have them. I got a two-pack, but I have them. You continue down that path. Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more. Sometimes you take one extra night of socializing or drinking out of the schedule and you start to see it. go even lower and you start to get that second row back.

Then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue. And what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue? And that's the caveat that I always say, I mentioned early on, like, is it that important to you? Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12% body fat. you're going to look amazing. And you're going to look better than 98% of all men.

Whether you have that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you're still going to have your abs, you're still going to have defined shoulders and arms and, you know, some veins popping out in other places. Like, is that, is that good enough so that you... experience the health benefits you already would you be there aesthetically you're probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you came from and you still get to live a life that's not as filled with sacrifice

to get there and that's the battle people have to have to um wage and ask themselves what is how worth it Is the game of weight loss basically calories in, calories out? I just need to have less calories than I burn? Yes and no. So to lose weight, you're going to need to be in a calorie. But... If you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let's just say you ate Twinkies and a deficit, you're not going to get the same outcome because the type of weight loss.

is going to vary depending upon what you ingest. So if you don't ingest enough protein, you're just eating Twinkies, you might lose weight, but you're also going to lose muscle in the process. So if you want to... deter the loss of muscle and maximize the retention of muscle and maybe again even slightly build in that deficit.

then you're going to want to prioritize protein. So it's not just the calories in, calories out. That will get you to lose the weight. But when you ultimately think when people aren't just talking about weight loss, they really want to make sure that they're maximized. lean muscle at the same time they're losing weight. If they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it's going to matter.

One of the big misconceptions we have about AB to get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff like that doesn't work you know um i think that's probably the biggest misconception i always remember laszlo laszlo was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor when we were building he would come up to me because he was like the typical male right he was in pretty decent shape he worked every day active he's like

I got to get in shape, man. And I was like, well, you know, how many days a week do you train? He said, well, I don't really train. I just, you know, do a couple of pushups and stuff. I said, well, you're gonna have to probably train. What do you do for your nutrition?

i kind of eat what i want and i was like all right but he wasn't really overweight you know but it's the typical and he goes just tell me what i could i just want to know what i can do for this what's a good exercise i could do for this for the belly fat and just pointing at his stomach and it's like

There's still that belief that there's just an exercise or two that you need to do for that. That's not how it is. Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise. It's always about nutrition. Nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else. Now, when you get lean enough, if you're not doing any type of ab training, you'll probably have less.

defined abs because you won't have the development of that muscle there's nothing different about the abdominals and the biceps or the quads there's still muscles that can be developed and because of the anatomy of the ab There's that line down the middle in the tacks, right? That's just caused by a suturing down of something called the linea alba. It's just a tendinous shape.

when you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training right even weighted ad work is helpful in this case the muscles are just growing just like a bicep would grow and as they grow that you can't change the suturing down of the tendinous sheath so they're sort of growing out more prominently from that area so you get more visible apps but that's the only way to really do that is through

training to hypertrophy the abs but you're not going to get there if you don't first attack the body fat that's over them and it's only going to come from nutrition. You know sometimes you see older bodybuilders like former bodybuilders and they kind of look a bit Bloated. And that's usually anabolic steroid use that causes that or growth hormone. That doesn't generally come from

natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that. I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within the abdomen, not just in the inguinal groin area. That could cause some of that distension in the asthma, not that global bloating that you get there. That's really usually a telltale sign of like growth hormone use, something that they've abused that causes the...

organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension pushing out of the belly. That's the organs growing. Yeah, it's actually... is a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it's certainly not a healthy thing to have. And there's always a lot of repercussions to going down that path. They might look short-term.

the way they want to look and i would argue that even in those cases The large, super large Mr. Olympia look, I don't even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even a lot of people, but it definitely leaves behind a lot of damage. And people do that at a variety of different ages now. I think even people that aren't training to be bodybuilders. I can think of several people that I'm aware of who have started taking TRT and growth hormone.

pretty young and i'm actually seeing a little bit of that same body shape i don't even know what it is but yeah i mean i think it look at trt is becoming such a prevalent path for people i don't like that that's the prevalent path i don't want to come across as somebody who is anti-trt because i've been i've been reminded of that and that on some of the videos i've made about it that look jeff there's a lot of cases where people have

extremely bottomed out testosterone levels and there's nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone that's not being made.

i completely appreciate that but as you've noted The rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation of people talking about their use of it and how it's... physically changing them and they're doing it at a rate like it's it's becoming option one like what about maximizing your natural potential first you know before Declaring yourself as low testosterone even at levels like I'm 400 and 500 and then go

testosterone like you're going to be on that for the rest of your life if you pursue that Once you decide to replace your body's own natural testosterone level with exogenous testosterone, you're going to have to rely on that for the rest of your life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body's ability to produce testosterone, but that's not a game.

So be prepared that once you go down that path, that's when you're going to have to be on for the rest of your life. Have you ever taken TRT? No, no. Would you ever? If it's proven down the road that it's something that could be beneficial and safe. I'm aching to say 100% safe because that's what I want than maybe I would if I felt like I was really suffering from.

you know, the loss or the change that my body was going through. Because I don't want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can. But up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that... it feels most rewarding because I haven't had to do anything. So I feel like I'm most inspired by my ability to keep going.

What about let's do living long then? When we think about longevity and what it's going to take for me to live a long time but be strong into my later years. What areas do I need to focus on training and staying strong? And where do I need to invest my energy and time? So this is where I think when I say, if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train. because the hallmark of their training is that it's multifaceted.

So you can't just have one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one-dimensional, I'm not saying this to put them down, but one-dimensional as an arm.

right they can have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength you know to be able to actually turn somebody over But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep, poor recovery, they're likely going to lose, especially because your neurological output and grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover. If you don't have more than one element developed you're not going to be your best so when people are looking the general population is looking to become

healthier and feel better, it's not going to be one thing. First and foremost, I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes the building of muscle. So hypertrophy and strength building is going to be really important because we are going to, again, like I talked about before, you're going to naturally lose strength every passing day. up to 8% to 10% per decade as you pass the age of 50.

So you need to make sure that you are doing something to stay that off. You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having... Challenges to your balance. having challenges to your ability to maintain. Muscle recruitment because that's again neurologically your brain your neurons start to fire at a slower pace

You need to train these things. Reactivity, reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that people can do. I always remember seeing this old man. He was in a... He had an obstacle course he built. I don't know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old and he made this obstacle course and he used to add every week or so he'd add one more obstacle to his course and he built it in his backyard.

And it was like a balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day. Wow. And. He said that he would try to find new ways to challenge his bod. so that he would keep his brain guessing as to what's next and again whether or not he was he was

finding this thing to be something he didn't want to do. Maybe it was also feeding into his increases because he was doing the things he hated to do. But the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted. And by incorporating some of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach, because it is important, the fall risk increases. exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we'll talk about.

with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there. But like you need to factor those types of things in flexibility and mobility. feed into that like you can't I always talk about there's a pyramid, right? If you look at the old nutrition pyramid, there's a bottom, which is supposed to represent all the things you're supposed to work on, and then it kind of fine-tunes and works its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength.

right you gotta you gotta maintain your strength and then above that you gotta maintain your your muscle mass like the amount of lean muscle you carry and above that you're ability to perform because of those two attributes so to be able to actually do things And if it was an athlete, it would be like their skill work would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you're a baseball player, you know, how well do you swim in the back? You know, how well do you feel the ground?

It's that top-level skill work that comes up here. Is cardiovascular in there? Cardiovascular is in there as well. Your condition would be right. Depending on who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance in the sport you play, it's going to fall right above or below strength. Now.

I would argue that there's a few things underneath the whole thing. It's just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don't see the roots. And the pyramid sits on the ground, but what's underneath the pyramid, the root. your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person,

They could squat 600 pounds. But now I'm going to put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing. You're not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability. And if you can't obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility or lack the flexibility.

that I've also taken away and I've weakened the strength that you have. It's there, your strength is there, but it can't be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root of longevity and fitness... is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility, and stability. Flexibility is the muscle length and the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the joint excursions, the ability to move your joints.

their full range of motion so it's it's a muscle or joint thing still the same concept but they're working on different elements Do you think people realise that that's so important and do you think they enjoy it? No, I think people hate it. And I think that I mean, some people like it. If you're into the practice of yoga, Pilates, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility.

But for the average gym goer, no, it's either going to get relegated to the last thing they do. before they leave the gym or not at all. And I think that that's going to have a big impact on how well they feel. I think that when they talk about the fountain of youth. Stretching and mobility is probably the thing that makes people feel the best. I've heard that people say that, and I agree to almost a full extent, but I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength.

You are never going to be as functionally capable as you can. to sort of show that like if somebody was just completely flexible right and you were trying to shoot this band across the table I don't have a lot of tension to be able to generate to get any kind of force to do that. On the contrary, if somebody was... strong right maybe even muscle bound i don't have any flexibility here to again really create much of a elastic output here or to get a lot of

But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of... flexibility but also the strength in this case the muscles the tension i can shoot that band a lot further with a lot more force and a lot more ease our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this

But our goal should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and mobility. Because that's only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance possible.

How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my mobility? Not much. It just has to be consistent. So I mean, I think if you were to devote... five to ten minutes a day of stretching the areas that are tight and again this is very individual like one thing that I always stressed even when I was in baseball every player from me got an individual

And it was based off of a comprehensive assessment. So I would go through the assessment of each player and you would find that either based on position and the demands of that position, body type. You would find certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more than others. People have to be willing to A. Stick out.

where these deficits are, and B, to actually pursue a program that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn't have to be an hour a day of doing. You prioritize that list and you focus on five to 10 minutes of extra work with it.

It's funny, I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning, do that every morning, do this every morning. But it's only appropriate to the people that have the deficits that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into a whole separate...

career in order to be able to pull them off that's not necessary you can you find the ones that have the biggest impact but i don't think that having you know doing stretching requires long duration of these things it just simply requires

You say that there are five key exercises you need to be able to maximize your longevity and quality of life that kind of dovetail into this. The single leg Romanian deadlift, the squat and reach, the sumo stance hold, the posterior chain push-up and hip abduct. Can you show me these workouts? Sure.

As you can see from the space, I mean, you don't need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They're incredibly accessible. They're actually scalable with a low barrier of entry. So no matter what level of ability you bring to these exercises, you're going to be able to do it.

All right, so the first exercise up here is pretty simple, but it does demand some balance and it also will teach us a very critical biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it's called the single leg RDL. What you want to do is you want to hinge.

Pretending that there's a drawer behind you that's open, you're going to close it with your butt. Then you reach forward, but at the same time, you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance. So, your goal is to see if you can get even up to 10 without losing.

your balance or having the other foot have to contact the ground. Next exercise is something that we call a squat and reach. What we do is we get down to the ground like this, down to a squatting position. And we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. Okay. And then from here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate. and follow it with your head as you go up as high as you can to the sky.

Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds. That is what is lost when we get into these chronic positions like this.

right with our devices at our computers we get to this rounded thoracic spine this upper portion of the spine doing this will give us the mobility that we're lacking so the next thing is something we call a sumo squat stance it's a squat stance hold and it's based off of something called a horse stance which again we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability right and again we're going to still work on the hip in all three planes so what we do is we get down

Feet wide and squat down into this position here. Now the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs for a little bit of support. But what I want to see is as tall of a chest as I can get, the same way that we just did through that rotation.

to maintain that area of the spine that thoracic spine and getting extended because we know that when that spine is extended the shoulders will go with it and the posture will get away from this position and more to this open upright position If we don't do it in that beginner format, then what we're going to do is cross the hands over, get in that down position, reach up and out. Okay?

That is a 30 second hold up to a 60 second hold, depending upon how far you can take it. The next thing we do is we've got to work on that upper body a little bit. to do the exercise that is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength, which is the pushup. But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits, both front and backside. So we call this a posterior chain pushup.

For a pushup, you want those hands underneath the shoulders. I'll demonstrate one and we'll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes. So, you squeeze your butt together, you straighten your knees out by contracting your quads.

Then, you've got a good firm holding plank position here. Now, when you go down, normally people would stop here or they wouldn't come up all the way. You go all the way down to the ground. At this point, you slide your hands out in front of you. Point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed, tight, and then lift up into what we call Superman.

right from here you're going to train all the muscles in your posterior chain from the back of your heels all the way up to the tip of your fingers right come down slide it back Come up into that good firm pushup. Don't lose any of that stability. Come down. slide up and lift. The final thing is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover. We're talking about this side-lying hip abduction. What we do is we get in this position here.

We position our toe down in front of us. You want to basically point your toe down into the ground. okay from there you're gonna slide your leg back behind you Okay, as far as you can take it, and then lift up. And right when you do that final lift, you're going to feel a contraction right here in the glutes, in particular in the glute medius.

That's the muscle that's controlling that rotational element of your hip joint and the stability and the strength that's needed to propel your body even on a regular walk without your hips dropping down side to side. You don't want to let that happen to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make is in order to feel like they're getting a lift, they'll just rotate their body to let the hip flexor do the lifting.

Remember, we don't need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius to do the lifting, so you need to make sure that you're rotated forward the entire time. and that's it there's the five essentials quick simple and incredibly effective no fancy equipment no gym required just a little bit of space and consistency now back to the diary of a ceo studio

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months can increase foot strength by up to 60%. Visit vivobarefoot.com and use code DIARY20 from my sponsor for 20% off. A strong body starts with strong feet. And what is the context there with those workouts? Why do you choose those workouts and what do these kind of signal? Are you saying that if I'm able to do those, then there's a probability that I have the strength and flexibility? conducive with longevity. Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will measure at a high level.

how much of a deficit you... acquired over the years from not doing them. So you should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they're going to reflect the global approach at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip abductors because the hip abductors if you look at most leg exercise

They're occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all time is the lunge, right? I love the exercise, but it's still occurring front to back in this plane here. Getting exercises that work the other two planes and mostly through rotation, but working this frontal plane, this side to side. is really important.

to producing a complete person with complete levels of strength. And because they're not the primary exercises that do that, like that side-lying hip raise that I show you, is Not one of the big exercises that are most important that are going to be up on your list. You're going to do your squats first.

never do those but it doesn't mean that that muscle didn't matter right that those muscles are there for a reason and they need to be developed I remember so many times taking the most powerful baseball players. leading home run hitters and then testing their hip internal or external rotation strength and it being incredibly weak, like incredibly weak. And you say to yourself, how is that even possible?

because it was never actually directly trained. And does it have a carryover? Obviously they're doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field. I still think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field. But more importantly, one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot of knee pain throughout his career. And they were missed games.

Because of knee pain, what could his career stats have looked like? They're already Hall of Fame worthy. What could his career stats have looked like if he didn't miss all those? So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them. So I think that these types of smaller movements are...

Really revealing of what might be going on underneath and the nice thing about those is that anybody can do them like it doesn't require a gym doesn't require an elaborate setup They're really good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie? The bow tie, I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I'm thinking of my t-shirt, but this...

is Raymond. So X-Ray is his full name and then Raymond became his short name. So I broke him out probably in 2000. 11 or 12 and he became a fan favorite pretty quickly but I think people like the visual and for me he's not the most mobile guy he's lost his lower arm he doesn't have the side and he doesn't really move that well but what it is important is he's also lost his legs he's lost his legs i got a leg over there but the spine see for me again i focus a lot on

the ability to function in space and rotation is probably the area of biggest deficit it's what we lose the most and the reason for that is because The area of the spine that's most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here in the thoracic spine. So what that is, is anybody that wants to measure on themselves, is right at the bottom of the neck.

So at the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders, and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the thoracic spine ends. It has so many far-reaching implications because it shares its range of motion. between two different directions so it's ability to go front to back again he can bend forward and back we can slump forward we can go back right you want to have ideally about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension

And just us sitting here alone, you know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were getting comfortable and talking. We kind of get a little bit rounded out. When you use up motion in this direction, imagine what that looks like when people are... on their phones or at a desk all day. You're going to start to lose the motion into extension. You're going to get too flex. Well, every time you lose a degree into flex... you actually lose a direct degree into rotation.

Because you're sharing that motion. The motion is only available in a combined way. So if you want to take up motion in this direction, there's going to be less motion available here. I have a thing, if you'll let me. over here. Over my back. Yeah, just like this. When press. Yeah. Now... Allow yourself to slump forward. Pretend you're on that phone, right? Get there now. Just turn from the shoulders in one direction. Slump those.

okay now take a peek down the barrel of that thing you know behind you and see where How about how far? Yeah. All right, cool. Now come back. Reset yourself. Now take back. mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine again there's just a rotator cuff so get yourself up right now nice posture act like i'm i'm watching right so get there now go ahead and rotate again in that direction How much more did you get? Yeah, I got another, like, 20%. Right, yeah. So...

Maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space is one of the most important functional requirements we have. When you're falling as you get older, you're likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash down and maybe break a hip.

Functionally as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about rotation. You don't usually just move in one plane like this if you're a football player, American or not. You're rotating all the time. You generate force as a soccer player by kicking across your body, right? By throwing a baseball, it's all about rotation. You need to hold on to rotation, but what we lose is the ability to extend our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60, people will have lost 25 to 35 percent of their ability.

their mobility in this area. You see it as well. You see it. When people get older, they look stiff and they kind of look robotic. Awful. My grandmother, God bless her soul, she lived at 97 years old. Wow. But at that age, she was literally a right angle.

she was literally she had a walker she was completely bent over at that walker could hardly get herself back up she had lost all of her extensions so she could not rotate at all And again, functionally, it's the most important movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to

I think that people need to focus on, again, you go back to that whole concept of like, what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength. But if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you've also lost thoracic rotation, I can't deem you to be a really healthy individual because you've given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain.

Because I thought that aging and then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable. Because you see it in so many older people, they often are like bent over and you kind of think, well, why don't they just stand up? Yeah, well, it's impossible because, you know, you're losing that.

that fight to gravity right gravity is going to win ultimately but it doesn't have to win completely so the more that you work on maintaining your ability through the thoracic spine then you don't develop those downstream adaptations that happen from always being there so what happens once you get in this position you lose flexibility through other joints. Again, if you get in that position again, actually turn a little bit, try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that.

Okay, now just straighten yourself out. Go up tall. Now raise your... Yeah, why because you've literally mechanically blocked your shoulder because your shoulder blade has to be able to Rotate around your ribcage As you raise your arm up overhead. Okay. A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket that's over here.

to get your arm up there. It's the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if I went behind you right now and just held your shoulder. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn't be able to raise your arm up maybe more than here because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top. We realize that.

This epicenter of dysfunction can have these far-reaching benefits where all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can't move up overhead. And then what happens then if you can't move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, Stephen, get your arm up over your head. I can't. No, get your arm up over your head. You would go like this. You'd lean your body.

Because your arm can't get any higher, so you're going to lean your body back. Well, what are you leaning from? Your low back. So now all of a sudden you're asking an area of your spine that's supposed to be stable. The low back, the lumbar spine, is supposed to be a stable area of your body. You're asking it to now become a mobile area.

and you're asking for motion that it's not naturally inclined to want to give you because this area didn't give it to you, right? The upper thoracic area didn't give it to you. So now what does that happen? Now you're asking that to do too much. The muscles can become spasmed. You can damage the joints in your low back. Now you're causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has all these far-reaching benefits.

Another thing that can happen too is when you're down like this, I mentioned that this area of the spine we talk about is actually connected to the ribs. Yeah. If you're in this compressed position where you're rounded forward, hunched over, you actually don't even get good lung inflation. It's like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a box that won't open. You can't get the lungs to inflate properly.

Lack of properly operating lungs are going to cause you to be more fatigued throughout the day and it causes you to feel less rested at night. So this area has so many up, up and down. ramifications that you need to really focus on it. And it's one of those things, again, if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on this area, 10%. At most. What have I got to be doing that at my age? I'm in my early 30s now.

what have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older, I'm not hunched over and I am, I do have that full range of mobility. Yeah. There's a few things like, again, anytime you try to approach any of these dysfunctions, you know, we talk about. The mobility, flexibility part being the foundation of that. But then there's also a strength component because you can free up the mobility and flexibility, but can you maintain it? The strength is just going to help you to maintain.

from a mobility flexibility standpoint you can simply go up against a wall right and what you're supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall

your upper back against the wall and your butt against the wall. So you're going as flat as you can. And you put your arms back up against the wall themselves. So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the requirements to be able to get there is going to have... good mobility or flexibility through your rotator cuff muscles because your rotator cuff as it gets tight wants to internally rotator

Can you get them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward with your arms? You're doing a pretty good job. I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position when I'm there? Can I then raise them up against that wall flat?

And as I do, the only way I'm going to be able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension because what's going to happen is if you lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it's just going to fold you forward from the wall and you're not going to be able to get up there. You can do stretches where you take that dowel that we had there, you would lay on the ground face down, dowels over your back like that.

You spread your legs so you look kind of like maybe an X with your hands out here and your legs spread. And all you do is you rotate around. So you're trying to basically rotate up towards the ceiling. That dial is going to travel back behind you. And you're pretty much isolating the rotation through that mid-back, through that thoracic spine. So you're getting rotation and extension because it's causing you to do this.

There's another exercise I have that's called a bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach over is you push up through, you're on your back, you do a regular bridge, like a glute bridge. But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you.

over the opposite shoulder so again what are you getting there you're getting extension through that spine and the rotation together to see if you can Combine those movements and again take back that range of motion that's being shared between those two functions. These are all things that anybody can do, like anybody can do them. And maybe you won't do them well in the beginning because you are restricted, but these are the types of things that improve as you do that.

And again, don't look for perfection right away. But the nice thing about these drills is they don't have to be done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel what happens when you start to become less restricted. So if I just had five or 10 minutes a day of some of these drills, you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound? Very, very. I think that, again, I think people don't realize...

the minimal time investment that's required. It just needs to be done each day, right? Those little deposits have to be made each day and they pay off in big dividends if you do. And is it important for me to train for a long time or for a more intense but shorter period? How do you think about that? Yeah. So I always say you can train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both. Right. And I think that especially as you get older, I think.

You need to minimize the rotations on the tire right how many tire rotations are you getting because even if i just raise my arm up overhead and i just do it a thousand times a day i'm still moving my arm up in that position And every time I move it off, even on here in this limited capacity to move here with this guy, like you're still getting.

some of that rubbing and grinding in that joint. And if you have any degenerative changes, if you've acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder, and this is rubbing up against that each time, it's like taking a rope. and rubbing it over and back over sort of a sharp edge. Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray.

I'd rather you trade that in the repetitions for the intensity because The tension delivered to the muscle with the higher level of weight they're using or the intensity of the technique that you're using is going to have bigger. benefits in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions. Now, that's not to say that you can't actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle. You can. They've actually shown recently that anywhere between 5 and 30 repetitions.

taken close to or all the way to failure can stimulate muscle growth. The absolute load is... sometimes not even as important as long as the effort is there but i believe that as you get older you gotta kind of spare some of those repetitions because it has that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have ultimately you're gonna have to change the tires and we might be able to change these tires as easy

What about the importance of form when we're training? It's one of the things you're known for is emphasising that form really matters. And, you know, there might be another school of thought that says, listen, it hurts. so it must be doing something. People think that a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting, so clearly it works.

Form is very important because I think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one, it keeps you safe. Most likely, if you can do something in good form, then you're in command of the weight that you're lifting. And therefore, it's likely going to... do what it's supposed to do with the least detrimental effect. in terms of

The leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal that you're trying to achieve. So if you're trying to achieve... muscle growth i'm a big believer that muscle growth is not given it is taken and you need to force yourself you need to force your body to make a change because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis it wants to stay the same and

Getting it to deliver a new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding or is creating more tissue that's going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn't want to do that. Again, homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same. You have to take that. And the only way to take that is to put forth an effort and intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do right now. That's why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure.

Not because I think that absolute failure is 100% necessary, but it's the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language here. Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form... then I'm pretty comfortable in saying, well, Stephen, you went to failure. Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop at an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, passable, same result potentially.

how do i know it's really one or two reps i don't i don't because i i think if if there's a gun to your head you might say oh i could do two more well now it wasn't one to two it was four and four is completely not as effective if not at all compared to the one to two in reserve so when you do these exercises

to this degree of effort, there's going to be a little bending of form. Now I'm not saying that the form should break down. You might find an abbreviated range of motion. You might find a little bit more momentum involved. That's all okay for me, as long as it's still controlled. If the exercise you're doing no longer resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you're not doing it right. Your form has broken down to a point where I don't think you're getting the benefits.

You might not even actually be training the muscles you were trying to train. You might have shifted the focus where you started the exercise. It was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you're done, it's for everything but your chest because you're just trying to move your body through space. That's not effective if you're trying to build muscle.

You want to direct the tension into the muscles you're trying to build. And sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit, but not to the point where you're actually taking it off of the muscle. This is just jumping a bit backwards, but a conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about NerdNet.

Is there a consequence to the fact that we all walk around now staring downwards? Like for this whole conversation, I'll be looking up at you, but most of the time I'm also staring downwards at my notes and stuff. And if I'm not here, then I'm on my phone and I'm staring downwards. And we spend most of our lives now staring downwards. And I just wondered how you think about that.

It's good. It's good. It's a good connection back to what we talked about because I believe that still comes from that. epicenter of dysfunction which is the thoracic spine because when you go like this You're actually internally rotating the arms too. So this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, that's the external rotation. If I do it the way we're just doing it up against the wall, that's external rotation.

More difficult when you're higher than when you're lower. But when you're in this position, once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction. When you start to round here, Nerd Neck is more of a consequence of what's happening back there, because when you're here, what are you going to do? Yeah, gotta look up, right? Because our eyes always want to see in front of...

So it's not that your neck is necessarily being pulled in that direction or the fact that you're looking down. It's the fact that your body is following that. And when it follows, the adaptation is... Well, okay, now I've developed these tightnesses this way and I've lost that mobility into extension of my back. What do I do to compensate? I got to look. So now I'm walking around looking like this. And that's that sort of nerd neck. I think nerd neck is less.

of something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility.

You've made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we're working out and training. What are the most common but avoidable injuries and how do I avoid them? Because I care a lot about this now that I'm getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I've pulled some ligaments in my... ankle and I was at the physio yesterday and I've been on crutches and I've got this big boot I have to wear and It's not until you get injured that you realise how...

imperative it was for you to avoid this yeah because it puts you for me it completely changes my whole it changes my whole life not only can't I like just move through a space normally but then I can't train, I'm going to get weaker, it's going to have an impact on my metabolic health. It's going to therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep, my cognition and everything downstream. So I go, okay, I should actually have an injury prevention program. So what are the most...

Commonly occurring injuries and what advice would you give me to avoid? Let's see. So first of all, I take personal offense to calling yourself old at 32. I don't know what that makes me, but I feel like the Crypt Keeper. But you just start to... You do, though. When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for three or four hours. I didn't stretch, and I was fine.

These days, I have 100% injury rate if I don't stretch and if I don't warm up and if I don't really, really think about it. 100% injury rate. Interesting. I'm on my way downhill, you know? Well, you're certainly going in the wrong direction, but I think... When it comes to injury Preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid it. It's not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm.

When it comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either Built to be mobile. that aren't being controlled or built to be stable, that are being asked to do too many things. So what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right, it's a ball.

at that it's a ball and socket right it's got the ball inside the socket it's supposed to be able to move in all kinds of directions we can move it off if you look at the leg right we don't have the other part of the hip but we have the ball from the ball socket it's meant to be able to go in all directions when those joints the shoulder and the hip are uncontrolled meaning you're lacking strength and the muscles that control the movement of that joint that's when you actually wind up having

So what are the muscles that control that well? We talked about one of those smaller exercises before the glute medius. that muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane. So not just in this front to back squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side plane, it controls the movements of the hips this way. If you don't train them.

they're not going to magically get strong. They have a function, and if you're not challenging that function, then you're not strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot. But I mean, you could acquire the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction. So you could do some of the side-lying hip lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more.

challenging where you perform a lunge. But interestingly, all you have to do is wait on one side. So if I were to say, all right, Stephen, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunches? How much weight do you hold in your hand? When you do a regular lunge. Or do not do lunges. I don't do many lunges. You gotta do lunges. So let's say you do a Bulgarian split squat. Another one of my favorite exercises where you put one leg back on the bench.

I would say hold the weight in one hand. So now if you're doing a lunge and I put a 50 or 60 pound dumbbell in your hand on one side and then you go and you lunge out. That weight, when you're in the split position now with one leg out in front, the weight on this side totally wants to pull you in that direction.

You have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of the opposite hip to keep you in this position. And I can say, I'm going to make it seem harder. Go slow. Go really slow. So now you're stepping out. You're on one leg as you're stepping. So now you're on one leg and you're being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down or the dumbbell wants to drop you down. You stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second or two in the bottom position because your body.

aching to want to move in that direction. I've just trained your hip abduction strength. this frontal plane on an exercise that's truly a sagittal plane exercise front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these things accomplished at the same time you're training something else so it's not always an extra thing that you have to do you can actually do this in a way that you know is sort of part of what you do

So what do you do then? If I were saying to you, I want to have a comprehensive workout and you're designing my seven-day workout plan, what would you give me to do? One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push-pull leg split. And again, if you were to do a push-pull legs, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your chest. because it's your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work. And again, as a pushing muscle.

it would go on the same day. So Monday, what do I do Monday? So you can do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push-pull legs is that it tends to be a lot, right? Like you're doing... shoulders, chest, triceps. Some people don't like that amount of volume. What's push? When you say push, someone that doesn't know. Yeah, so push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing. So if you look at a bench press, it's pushing the weight away from you as the concentric.

If I looked at a lat pulldown, I'm pulling the weight towards me. That's the concentric part of it. If I'm doing a bicep curl, I'm pulling it towards me. Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I'm pushing away this way, pushing away that way. push up i'm pushing away from the ground tricep pushdowns i'm it's in the name itself i'm pushing down through a tricep pushdown

I'm doing tricep, you know, lying extensions. I'm pushing the weight away. They would all go on a similar day. Again, I like the function of that because it's optimal recovery. so why that's why that's good if you could tolerate you know i'm asking you know if that's okay for you to do that because you have you're not naturally adding shoulders in if you were okay with adding shoulders in then you would do your push workout And then what I would do is...

Know that I'm getting enough recovery in between workouts because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday. Come back and do Wednesday leg. So Monday, I'm just doing push upper body? Yeah, just push upper body. Okay, Tuesday, you're going to give me the day off. Tuesday you get the day off. Yeah. And then I'm going to give you two variations of this. Okay. And when I say day off, if you were with me, you'd be doing...

All right, so we'll get into that. Yeah, it's not a day off. No, you give me seven days. I'll take a ball of seven even if I'm just doing ab work on some. But you then on Wednesday would come back and do your leg workout. And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday?

So it's going to be anterior, posterior. So I'm going to train your hamstrings, your glutes, and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you'd have another day off. Okay. Again, likely not a day off. Some conditioning. And then the Friday could be your pull work.

Now, what's nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn't recover as well as others, and this is not everybody but that gives you a really good amount of recovery between those workouts if you could tolerate more than the first step I would do is add a total body workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would just be a little bit light on the pole because you just did that.

Probably did the day before. So my whole body on Sunday. You can do it. When I mean like I would pick very big compound movements that are representative of including as many muscles as possible at one time. And I can shy off a little bit, back off a little bit off of the pole.

that you were doing because I realized that you just did certain exercises the day before so I would if I trained you on and this gets a little nuanced but if I trained you on friday and a pull workout remember i have different planes of motion i can move in so if you were doing vertical pulling stuff like a pull-up or a pull-down i could stress more horizontal pulling exercises like a seated row or

So I could shift the focus a little bit. And then Sunday, Sunday I break. Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I definitely don't advocate Sunday. Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this particular week? So in that scenario, I'd have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And if you had, you know, your goals were more aligned with fat loss and...

overall conditioning and you feel like you're not as healthy as you could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that. But if your priority was the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take... of that a saturday as my my flex day to do training and you don't put the cardio on the same day as the upper body legs workouts it could be but if your priority again is to build muscle

then prioritize muscle building. Put that first. Do your cardio conditioning work at the end of that workout. Something might suffer, and the thing that usually comes second is what's up. If we think just about Monday, which we had down as the push day, so that's me doing like chest and is it triceps and shoulders. How many, if I'm training for one hour, how many reps are you trying to do per muscle? And how many, like, sets?

so set count you know if you can get in and again this is a little bit determined by um whether you're going to train on that Saturday. So if you're going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I know I have an opportunity to maybe do a bench again on Saturday or a variation bench and incline.

so i don't have to get all of my chest volume in in that first day but typically you're looking for around anywhere between nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week so if you're going to do let's say the one workout for chest and you're doing say three sets per exercise you're in that range of around uh three right for chest now you don't have to have that that volume doesn't need to be as high for triceps because

You're obviously training your triceps while you're doing bench press. So you can put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I would put something, my favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension where I lay on my back on the bench and I do the, you know, some people call. skull crushers or nose breakers just take bicep for as an example

how often do I need to train and how intense do I need to train the bicep for it to grow? And conversely, if I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take for me to lose the muscle? Yeah, interesting. I think this is one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered. I actually discussed this with Andrew Huberman at one point. It's very interesting. From person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between the people.

From person to person, we know that there are different recovery rates between muscles. Like you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to recover than I would. What's interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I can train my biceps every three days. But I could never train my back every three days or I could never train my chest.

It's just so intricate because every muscle is going to be different for every person. And even at a holistic one level, you're just not going to find the same recovery rate across the board for every muscle in your body. So a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training intuition to say, hey, like, am I increasing my weights? Is my strength going up on the lift? Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, I'm probably recovering well.

And you can experiment with like hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture, the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are going to be. You have this contraption on the desk in front. thing here. So many people talk to me about this device and It's quite strange how important people say that this device is and what it tells.

I was doing some reading beforehand. It's a grip strength reader monitor. And there's some really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015. Lancet study across 17 countries that found for every five kilogram decrease in grip strength, it was associated with a 16% high risk of death, a 17% high risk of heart disease. and a 7% higher risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that people with low grip strength had a 68% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's.

There was another study that linked it to other cardiovascular and blood issues and another study that shows that older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2.5 times more likely to fall and be hospitalized with their... injuries. And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body strength by 70%. And lastly, adults over 65 with weak grip strength were 2.1 times more likely to become dependent in daily activities within three years. That was in the journal.

Gerontology, grip strength. Pretty important, huh? A lot of that research has been determined to be more correlative than causative. The fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative causative thing is that

What they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life are probably doing so because they're regularly engaging in physical activity. Likely they are lifting weights, they're holding heavy weights, they're having to... manipulate their body in space if they're doing calisthenic exercises so there's a level of activity that remains in

their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level. So you're selecting out people that are just generally maintaining their fitness, in which case they're probably maintaining higher levels of health and lower issues. So it's not the strength in which we can grip that matters necessarily, but...

The thing that matters is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip. So it's just one, it's almost like a symptom of something upstream, which is positive. Right, or lacking, right? You're not doing enough of. That being said, you can actually directly measure your ability to recover from exercise.

based upon having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the over you know weeks or months of training so if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool like this in the morning five mornings in a row and average it out at a time where you feel like you're feeling energetic and good. That will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength is.

What's a good grip strength? So most men would be somewhere between 100, I'll talking pounds, 100 to 120 pounds. So if you look at that, that's around 46 kilos to 54 kilos. If you want to give a shot, see where you stack up. So to do this, now there's some rules here. Don't go like this. Keep it in here. Don't touch your arms to the table at all. 90 degrees like that. And then you're just going to squeeze one good effort as hard as you can. All right, don't blow out now.

Alright, let's see. Ah, gosh, my head nearly exploded. 130 so you're you're above average so doing well on grip strength so now what you would do is and you would test both sides you could average out the size sometimes you're gonna have one obviously one side stronger than the other

You would then have a good baseline. If you were feeling like you weren't sure if you recovered or not, you would test this in the morning. Can I try this one as well? Yeah, go ahead. This is my weaker. All right, here we go. My weaker hand. All right. You got to beat it, Donno. Oh. Gosh, it's a bit slippery. I think you're dead. Oh my god. Wow. 160. You're joking. 160. What the? 160. So, you probably...

If you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did the other side again... You think I'd beat it? No, no, you're not going to beat... You're going to beat your old performance, but you're not going to beat the left side. Are you left handed? I'm right handed, so that was strange. All right, let's hear ya.

150 now. See, I had my predictions right. So a lot of times it takes a little accommodation to the stress of doing that. What's your grip strength? I don't know. I haven't touched it in a while. See, now you're going to show me. Left and right. All right, let's see. I'm going to ask some of my team members if they want to give it a shot. Alright, here we go.

Wow. Wow. 130. Okay. On that side. And your left side. Let's see. Anyone else want to do it? Try to do it with all the popping. That was my bicep that popped, by the way. 110. And I'm right-handed. So it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of that. Not superhuman for sure. Try it. Be almost slightly way stronger than me.

Not in grip strength. But you're stronger than me at bicep curls, bench press, everything else. Yeah, I mean, this is, again, underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually. all right so now hold it like this yeah and then you're just gonna one one hand right just squeeze as hard as you can for kind of a short burst Wow, 100. Now, women's average grip strength is 60 to 80 pounds, so you're actually much stronger than the average woman.

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This has never been done before. A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world's top CEOs. All the time people say to me, they say, can you mentor me? Can you get this person to mentor me? How do I find a mentor? So here is what we're going to do. You're going to send me a question and the most popular question you send me, I'm going to text it to 100 CEOs. some of which are the top CEOs in the world running a hundred billion dollar company.

And then I'm going to reply to you via email with how they answered that question. You might say... How do you hold on to a relationship when you're building a startup? What is the most important thing if I've got an idea and don't know where to start? We email it to the CEOs, they email back, we take the five, six top best answers, we email it to you. I was nervous because I thought,

the marketing might not match the reality but then I saw what the founders are replying with and their willingness to reply and I thought actually this is really good and all you've got to do is sign up completely free. And can I train my grip strength individually if I wanted to improve it as an individual thing when I just have to grip? Yeah, I mean, you know, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old-fashioned little grippers.

squeeze and they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels. have worked on and actually improved when i was young they're pretty easy to conquer with a little bit of training you'd be able to squeeze them because they never really made the resistance resistance high enough but now it's definitely something

you can be challenged by. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we've touched on briefly, but I think is important to talk about because I don't think people realize how. How prevalent it is, is back pain. I was looking at some stats beforehand and it says that 80% of people will experience back pain at some point in their lives. It's actually the leading cause of disability worldwide.

Over 10 million workdays are lost every year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain are related to back pain. It's the most common reason for people under 45 to see a doctor. And chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects about one in five adults in the UK. And there's five of us in this room now in total. And so one of us probabilistically is going to have chronic.

Is this something one can avoid? I ask this in part because I spoke to some anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa and they find that back pain just doesn't exist there. It's not a thing. I think the likelihood that you're going to experience back pain at some point in your life is high, but that recurring back pain, that chronic back pain, I think that's entirely avoidable. 26% of the time at any one time in the United States, people have...

So kind of with the numbers that you just said there, the other thing I find interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back pain behind. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year, my own kids have been in at least four or five times to the doctor for respiratory infection. It starts to, it's an eye-opening.

And this is something that's somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The problem is that it can come from so many different... We talked about before how the limitation in that thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could and therefore cause strain there. Now, here's the good part. Though 80% of people or 85% will have low back pain in their life, only 27% to 35% of the time is a disability.

So we're talking about, you know, if you look back on this guy again, it's the discs, you know, between the vertebrae, right? create that spacing and the cushioning between the vertebrae. When one of those disks, actually this is one of them, dislodged itself, but when the disk that sits above and below these two levels... pushes outward or herniates it could it could push on any one of these nerves that's traveling downward anytime you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure

the disc. You get the radiating symptoms that go down whatever dermatome this is. What that means is this nerve will feed some function of the lower body or some sensory area of the lower body. depending upon where people complain of pain. Like, oh, I feel it in my hip, or I feel it in my leg around my knee, or I feel it down behind my knee, down to my foot. You pretty much know what level of this problem they have because...

it's representative of the level of herniation. When you press on something that is at the level of like L5-S1, right? The last lumbar. Sacrifice. It's going to give you symptoms like numbness, tingling down near the back of your calf, underneath your foot. If you get something more around the hip.

You know, a lot of times people complain of hip pain. They think they have a hip issue. It's actually a back issue that's pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that's an L2, L3, or L3, L4. you get indicators of where that's coming from. Again, the good news is if you don't have this neurological deficit in your lower body, this tingling numbness, we... Um, it's mostly muscle and origin. Now, again, even of the disc related issues, the 27 to 35%, 96% of those are not.

So think about the impact you can have if we're saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you have is going to be able to be addressed. through non-operative strengthening or stretching intervention. Because a lot of times, as we said, what's the cause of the dysfunction?

Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool. Okay. Well, let's work on it. So let's try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a... weak glute right having weak glutes because again the the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip in other words kick the leg back behind

If I can't get my leg back behind me and I'm trying to basically extend my body by doing that when I step through and get behind me, well, how can I do that? Once again, I could do it from the low back by over-exaggerating and stepping in where it's not supposed to. Always remember the low back is supposed to be. The stability center of your spine is supposed to provide stability. If you're not...

getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and above and below, it's going to ask for it from the next place above it or below it. It's going to say to the low back. Please help out. Give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it, but at an expense. And that's where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses. You have to address hip mobility. This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a mismatch.

And when they say mismatch issue, they mean that there's a way that we're living our lives these days that is at odds with. how we were quote unquote supposed to live or how our ancestors lived. And it's interesting because I've interviewed David Richarlon, who is an anthropologist, but also Daniel Lieberman. They've both spent time with the Hadza tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was...

assuming that the reason why we get back issues and the Hadza tribe don't really get them is because we spend a lot of time just sedentary. However, David Retralin said that the Hadza tribe still spend 10 hours a day in resting. but they maintain a straight J-shaped spine, not the curved S-shaped spine common in the West. They squat, they walk, they carry loads a lot, and they aren't in chairs. They're doing more active motion.

Now, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it's at a desk doing this or whether it's in an office. I'm wondering from your experience if you thought... it would be better to have a standing desk? No. No, I think standing desks are great, and I hate to say it because I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it would be beneficial.

too i think that too much time sitting right there's there's people that call sitting the new smoking like the detrimental effects that sitting can have prolonged sitting can have on your body especially when you couple it with the fact that when we do go

nine ten hours like how much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed and mobile position in a day like you're you're working all day there's a big chunk there maybe eight hours nine hours ten hours with intermittent breaks that you're going to getting some water and then you got another eight or nine hours at night that you're doing the same thing like your body wasn't meant to be that immobile like i think the there's an actual

So when your joints are subject to gravity and you're moving through space, you're actually getting a bathing of those joints, of the synovial fluid that's in these joints, like let's say your knees. that you're essentially mobilizing because you're compressed. And again, with your knee, you're weight-bearing, and then you're off of it. You're weight-bearing, you're off. It's like squeezing and bathing that joint in the synovial fluid.

The outcomes are much better when we don't allow that to become stagnant, when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions. Being up on your feet at a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the load that we're getting from the chair and probably discourage some of that really bad posture that comes.

Standing in the net, you're likely going to at least improve your posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above like we talked about, but at least from below. But I still think that the inactivity, just standing alone is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks. I think people need to get up and walk around just a little bit, five minutes. in 30 minutes.

deal but like if you're gonna take a phone call go walk while you're on the phone like one thing i do is i have my office and i have And as soon as I know I'm going to be on a call, I stand up and I walk around the gym while I'm on my call just as an excuse to get up and move. I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I'm doing the rest of my work from the chair. Anything you can do.

I know they're cliche, but park a little further when you're at a store, so you have to walk a little bit more. But I think it's the frequency of the breaks that we're not taking. I think that even if you added up all the time that you're active in a day and then the time that you're not active. If it was the same exact time of an activity, but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you'd have less negative side effects.

grouping it i'm going to be inactive from this period i'm going to be active from this period because again of that effect of intermittently bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting to that then to different stresses than just compression compression compression it's one of the reasons why i talk all the time about the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar, right? To decompress your body, you know, even just minimally, again, not that much, you know, one arm hang or so.

two arm hangs a day is enough to give your body a bit of a break that you're not getting right now. And nobody does that. What about, let's talk about supplementation. I've got a bunch of supplements here with me now. And there's so much said about supplementation. But if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking every day.

versus the ones that maybe aren't so important, but also just like the call-outs of, you know, I saw this thing on Twitter going viral the other day where someone had screenshotted the top creatines on a certain website. And then they had tested them in the lab and found that a lot of them weren't actually...

creatine in the doses that they'd said and in the form that they were selling. So I now have this scepticism around the supplements I'm taking. I've got some supplements here. I've got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be taking? Explain to me one. for building muscle to that rank at the very, very top. or create any form of creation. There's a different form. But creatine and protein.

And some people want to argue the necessity of a protein powder. And I guess if you're getting enough through your diet, you don't have to take it. You're not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you are. that you're not getting through your food. It's just that you're doing it at a much more economic cost. If you look at the price of protein.

certainly becoming a little bit unrealistic to think you're going to meet your daily goals. And for me, my daily goal is around at minimum a gram per pound of body weight and upper. if you're active. Creatine has become all the rage recently. I was looking at some Google search data and it shows just how quickly in search volume creatine has increased.

from the early 2020s to 2025. Now it's exploding. And it's been around forever. Forever. And the benefits have been known forever, right? So that's interesting because that's all related to the neurology. that creating and showing in terms of depression. degenerative neurological diseases and its improvement, its ability.

slow prevent things like MS and Parkinson's and, you know, by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable bioenergetic state, meaning being able to feed the neurons of the brain. with the energy that seems to be lacking in some... Also the other thing that I think has happened, and I did a little test in my office a couple of months back where I asked... who in the team took creating. And every hand that raised was a man.

And I asked the women in my office why they didn't take creatine and the overarching sort of misconception. which also my girlfriend told me about when we were in Cape Town a couple of years ago and I said, baby, you should take creatine. Everyone on my podcast is talking about it. And she was like, no, it's going to make me, I think she, yeah, she sort of, I was like, she saw it as a steroid.

She was like, it's what bodybuilders take. Well, that's going to change quickly because I think that you have a lot of people, highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas that we're talking about. I urged my wife recently to take... to take it she is chronically sleep deprived because of my boys, you know, so she has, you know, she has definitely operating at a higher stress level. It's been shown to actually improve.

brain health and performance in sleep deprived and in high stress states. From a depression standpoint, it's being shown. very effective even when kind of paired up with traditional approaches to treating depression. pharmaceuticals, it's just got a lot of promise. And the good thing is that there's really no downside. They haven't really identified a downside to taking it. There's a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. I actually made a video recently where I talked.

addressed head on what they were Jesse of course played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked but like there is a big confusion that people have when it comes to People think it's a steroid, and they think that because the outcomes of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle, it can increase strength. because the outcomes are the same as, let's say, anabolic steroids.

doesn't mean that the mechanism is the same or the magnitude of what you're going to see from them is the same or even the legality of the supplement itself is the same. We're talking about two completely different...

Two different... and two different things that the body are going to react much differently to when it's an anabolic steroid it's going into the muscle cell bind into androgen receptors that then go into the the cell and change gene expression right to basically convert as i did in that video i said you're taking an ipad and make right you're completely changing what it is whereas with creatine monhydrate you're just talking about providing a more constant flow of energy

to those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance. Well, what happens when that occurs? you're able to generate more work in a workout. By getting more work done, you're creating more of that overload. You're also getting a secondary benefit.

of pulling water into the muscle cell with the creatine because osmotically, when you pull anything into the cell, you're going to bring along with it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the same. Well, that extra water. keeps the muscle cell hydrated and that's a great thing a more hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better longer in the long run just like a flower of water would grow better than one without

And there's lots of different types of creatine, right? There's like gummies now, there's monohydrate, there's all kinds of creatines. Over New Year's again, I was looking at different types of creatine. So I went to the shop and it sounds crazy. types and I just started researching it and I realised that there's like a better form of

And there's some creatines which aren't so good, i.e. ones that have many things added to them, etc. Yeah, creatine is pretty simple. I always present it in sort of two... because there's one creatine monohydrate and then there's one called creatine hydrochloride. And the only difference is what it's bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule and the hydrochloride is bound...

And so what happens when that's ingested in your body is that one's more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloride is more absorbable than the other. So you can take lower dosages of that.

The creatine monohydrate is usually taken at a higher dosage. And now there's some new research coming out that states that I used to think that it was just five grams for everybody. But now they're finding that people that are like upwards of 200 pounds or more, they might be. 10 grams per day so bigger dosages there and people who are at you know 120 pounds or so and maybe some of the females and female athletes like they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creatinine high

Hydrochloride is usually in lower doses anyway, so a comparative dose of 5 grams of monohydrate might equal out to 2. What's all this stuff about loading? Because when I was younger, my brother was bodybuilding. He would tell me that you had to load up. Yeah. I had to have a huge dosage for a week and then thereafter go back to a low dosage. It's just, so your body ultimately reaches a capacity.

storage so if you want to get there faster you load it's five grams four to five times a day so a total dose of 20 Some people are going to find that that's a little bit of an overload. their gut there is a byproduct of creatine breakdown creatinine is what it's called and we get it measured whenever we get our blood test done that can sometimes pull along with it some

water, and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you're using hydrochloride, you wouldn't see that breakdown as much. You wouldn't get as much of that accumulated breakdown. so you might get less of that bloating. That's the only indication why I would ever suggest hydrochloride, is if you are some of that 15% of people that have some sensitivity.

and a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some of that discomfort that you feel that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it so what happens if you don't load you just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace So anywhere from 27 to 35 days or so, you're going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you're taking it because you want to see benefits and performance like power output and performance, let's say leading up to an event.

you know a competition in four or five then you might want to load because you have to kind of get to those full capacities sooner. But I don't really see a need to have to load if, again, in the long run, you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level. And what about the proteins I've got here? Are there any particular proteins that are better than others? I mean, I like to say, since that's mine, that's better. But the fact is that...

Anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein. So in general, your isolate proteins are going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They're still protein, but there's more on a gram per gram basis. It's 90%. By volume, if it's isolate versus concentrate, you're getting more protein.

per volume but they're not all as advertised are they because no there's i mean look i without i don't ever want to disparage other brands or you know I'm not in the practice of doing that, but like there are some garbage quality proteins out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retail. You know, they don't.

They're in it to make money. They're not in it to provide high quality. And again, you're still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what's in there, it's netting out to less than what it could be.

I think the best way to spot garbage would be that there's something called amino acid spiking. People will... include a lot of glycine in their proteins, like adding glycine to it because they can get the label benefit of increasing protein content, but it's actually not a complete protein, so you're not getting...

quality that you would be getting from an isolate protein what are some foods that you would just absolutely never let go near your mouth the real ones where if your kids asked or you know you just say there's no way I really hate the dyes and the food dyes. I think that's a really... I'm glad that things are being done as we speak to try to... I don't know how. Our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it has. In Europe, they've known about the dangers of food coloring and food dyes.

a decade or more and we're still eating these in our foods all the time for what benefit so it looks more attractive package like that's bullshit. What about melatonin? I've got a little jar of it here that I found. A lot of people are taking melatonin now and I've got a friend very close to me. encouraging me to take melatonin do you have a view on it my view is i believe it to be safe i believe it to be helpful for people that are having a problem.

establishing a normal sleep pattern. We actually do give it to our children at night because they do have issues with sleep. But honestly, the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of weight.

And when you know you're on the right track, you generally don't need an alarm clock to wake you up. If you're doing it right and you're getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up within five to 10 minutes of the same time every morning.

Have you thought much about how we're supposed to sleep? We talked about lower back, back pains, etc. Is there an optimal way to sleep? Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side? So again, I think this is individual, you know, and again, there's a lot of conditions that can... to sway somebody in one direction or another.

In general, I think the position that has the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call the corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort of at your side. if you're able to tolerate even more income here with your arms up just because, again, that actually helps a little bit with some of that internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you were demonstrating up against the wall with that position before.

Not as big a deal, but you have to understand that at what other time really, again, we just talked about being static throughout the day, but at least you're getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you're getting up to go get a meal. When else are you pretty much statically in the same position? I don't care if you are on your side or on your back or on your other side or on your stomach. You're pretty static for... seven, eight, nine hours.

There are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping. that are significant. Like there are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain. They did something during the night and they all, I must've done something. I slapped, right? People say that all the time because they probably did. They probably did. They either stayed in one position for too long and weren't conscious of it.

or they position themselves over an arm and it kind of was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren't conscious of it. But then there's the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper, especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position. They pull their knees up.

The last thing you need is more hip flexion. It's like sitting, like you're getting from a chair. You're creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours. like lengthen them out, you know, get some, get some flexibility or at least, you know, get some elongation at that joint and those muscles. Now sleeping with a pillow that is too fluffy.

can wreak havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day, most of the back pain sufferers we talked about before. 82%, I believe, of people that report sleep disturbance say it's from back pain. And what happens? they feel it mostly, 77% of them feel it upon waking. So they're not feeling it when they're sleeping, which is even worse because if they did, they might be able to modify that. They're feeling it upon waking.

And it goes back again to what we were talking about earlier. You see, it all relates. This back pain seems isolated, and we're talking about the thoracic spine, and that's back pain. But now I'm talking about sleeping, and that's back pain. All these things relate to each other. That's why you have to care about all of them. but being in that position is with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of excess flexion of your neck.

which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints in your neck over time. So you might like to do that, but I'm telling you the healthier position is to sleep with a really flat pillow, a really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up. every morning with some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about one or two inches high, just enough to support my head. I never have.

You're not abnormally propping it up, not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues. The on the back position with the head propped up is going to be worse because you're closing down your airway.

bit more you know there are some cases where again that apnea patient might want to be on their side you know it's going to be it's going to be easier for their breathing but in most cases on their back and also too interestingly most people have are how we're not maintaining that mobility.

towards in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head well what happens in a bed you get in bed the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom they're pulling your ankles straight down like that and your feet are pointed the whole night further tightening those calves because they're just short

especially if you trained your calves that day and your muscles repair and regenerate at night. You're basically repairing them in the shortened position because your toes are... I always say if you're going to get in bed, loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you can at least get the ability to move your toes backwards or freely move.

So lots of little tweaks you can make, and some people think they're not as important. I think they're very important given how long you stay in those positions, never in any other portion of your day. Jeff, what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about as it relates to health, fitness, longevity? And I guess just more broadly, just living a good life. I think that... You don't want to stress yourself out thinking of all the things that you need to do.

because there's many, and in doing so become paralyzed by inactivity. because they can't do all of it. I think that's one of the biggest things that I see people do is they talk themselves out of it from the very beginning.

The commitment is going to be too much more than what they're doing right now. Too much to ask and they can't do it. That's a mistake. Chip away. We talked about nutrition again. Make that first pass. Take away the obvious stuff. The stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life. Then make another pass when you're ready. From a fitness standpoint, get yourself to the gym. Try to do that first thing we said to take that first action. Get yourself out.

Getting a habit of doing that over a period of a couple months, you want to start to adopt a more intense training plan or you want to start to adopt a more intricate training split. Fine. After. Don't worry about it. The most important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. I'm really noticing that my thoracic spine is not mobile enough, like Jeff said. Just hang from the bar, do that one little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will...

Pay big dividends when added up, but don't be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you're not going to be healthy. Any investment that you make into your body. is going to be a good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, like you're realizing now at 32, it's going to matter at 52, 62. And so by doing what you're doing now, you're making the right.

step in the right direction that can always be intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do more is gonna be so much easier than when you've adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you're doing. And rather than making that big departure from what you're doing now and thinking you're just going to all of a sudden start loving all these things, you're not. And you're likely going to wind up making yourself not want to do it.

Jeff, thank you for doing what you do, because as I said to you before we started recording, you've been the go-to resource for me over the years. And in fact, whenever I've got a challenge, whether it's like how to build my triceps or how to avoid an injury. other challenges relating to strength or longevity, all these kinds of things. I'm always happy when I find your videos because you're someone that everybody trusts.

You're someone that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way. You know, you're famous for drawing on your own body and showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and the range of motion. But you've helped me for free for a long, long time. Like, I think, I think probably a decade. I think I spent about 10 years. as you being my sort of personal trainer and because this information is free and it's on YouTube you would have helped.

literally billions of people. I mean, I was looking at your channel, I think you've got... almost 3 billion views it might even be more now just on that one channel alone and the clips and everything else and how that's inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube so on behalf of all of those people but also on behalf of me just thank you so much for doing what you do

We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what would you change about you? First, and secondly, now answer, why haven't you? Okay. What would I change about me and then why have I not? Wow. Oh man. You know, there's not much. And I'm thinking off the top of my head here. So when I identify something that I want to change.

I usually do a pretty... of putting in place steps to make that happen. and there are things that are quite personal about myself there are things that from a relationship level there are things from self-improvement standpoint, like I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those changes. And I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I've wanted to do.

I think I always wanted to be more... I think that I'm a bit of a homebody, and I think that I... My wife is a big traveler, and I think that I probably would benefit from being a little bit more adventurous. and taking some vacations to places that... would never ordinarily go to. If I'm looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to want to do that with me. So I think perhaps I wished I would have changed that.

I could certainly use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy, and there's a lot of reasons why I haven't, but it's probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away, but we seem to go back to the same places all the time. You're going to give me two, so that's the first one. I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time. And if anything, just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be open to hearing.

the opinions of others more. The reason why I haven't, I think, is more of wanting to be heard, maybe in a time when I was a kid of not being, I was a third kid, so I was probably not heard as much as I often thought I was. So the opinions come out first as a reflex. But if I could do that, I still wish I could get a little bit better. Thank you. Thank you. I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look Spotify and Apple and all their channels. The majority of people that watch this podcast

haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button wherever you're listening to this, I would like to make a deal with you. If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.

I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see, and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that small favour and hit the follow button. wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favour I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.