Holy moly! What is today, Sal? Uh, I think it's the final day. It's the final final! Not again. Yes, again, again, again. It's the final day for the Maps Prime Bundle, which includes Maps Prime, which is our program designed to help you figure out how to prime your individual body for your workouts, and believe us, it makes a tremendous difference in your progress if you prime properly. That's right, believe us. It also includes Maps Prime Pro, which is correctional in nature.  Based on those tests, it helps direct you to correctional movements and exercises that are unique to this program that will get you moving better, alleviating pain, and, of course, working out better. Both programs are put together in this bundle, and they're discounted tremendously, and today's the final day for this discounted bundle program. You can find this at mindpumpmedia.com. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump, mind pump, with your hosts. Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So, something we did a little bit different. This is kind of cool. We were interviewed by a couple guys, very, very cool characters. Man, Christopher Kelly and Dr. Tommy Wood are both the CEOs and the chief scientific officer for Nourish, Bounce, and Thrive. They interviewed Sal and I on Saturday, and it was a really good conversation, and we decided that we would throw this up on the Mind Pump podcast also for you guys, because we went back and forth. Even though they were interviewing us, we got a chance to actually dive into their business and some of the things they're working on. And great conversation, man. Excellent conversation. Two very, very intelligent gentlemen who are what we believe to be working on really the cutting edge of analysis for performance. I mean, I called it the holy grail of what they're working on is potentially the holy grail. Really keeping an eye out for these guys. They've got an excellent podcast too called Nourish, Bounce, Thrive. Well, what you see they're doing is it reminds me of Uber and Netflix and these businesses in the future that are cutting out the middleman. Nowadays, what happens?  You don't have energy, you're grouchy, whatever. And you start to notice that for a long period of time. So what do you end up doing? You go see your doctor because you're not sure what's going on, where they have actually been working on this for the last three years of gathering all this data from people and testing blood and urine tests to go with, to correlate with a series of questions to help predict what you may be lacking in. Yeah, so literally, I mean, I call it the holy grail because it's like it's a questionnaire that then is been pretty accurately predicting in terms of where they would want to go now. High 90s, I believe he said like 98. He says it in this episode. So you'll see, I believe it was 98% or something like that. He talks about it and we get into a lot of different things. We talk about gut health and the science of exercise and they interview us about, you know, why we started the podcast and what went behind the creation of our programs had a lot, a lot, a great conversation with these two gentlemen. Two of my favorite podcast hosts that I've met so far. And the cool thing is they're in our backyards. They're based out of Santa Cruz. So we're going to be posting in the show notes a link to their seven minute performance analysis, which is free. And there's going to be also a link to a video that explains how it works in the show notes. So without any further ado, here we are talking to Christopher Kelly and Dr. Tommy Wood. Food quality versus quantity.  I want to start with something like that. What's more important? Food quality. Why? You say that so, so sure. But there are people in the fitness industry who will say no. The most important thing is calories and then macros and then food quality somewhat important, but it's not nearly as important as the quantity. Just don't overeat. Why do you say quality? Because it makes doing the quantity bit that much easier. If you start with the fact that the food that we're eating today. So if you do like an, if it fits your macro style approach, the food that you're eating say you're eating a lot of junk food, processed food, the hormonal effect that that food has is completely, it's been completely disconnected from the macro nutrient content. So you can process a food and it will have a much greater effect on your physiology without changing the macro. So you're doing something. You're manipulating the food. You're telling your body that there's something in that food that isn't there. So you have a much higher say glucose spike, insulin spike with a completely the same macro content. And so you're telling your body to try and adjust based on that when it doesn't know how to do that. So the problem that we're seeing is that people are putting their body in a scenario where it doesn't know how to control its calorie intake. And yes, the important thing is to have a net calorie balance. It's impossible, literally impossible to figure out exactly how many calories there are in a piece of food. Like you cannot do it. That's such a great point. Because people like, Oh, no, I count. I know exactly how many calories I'm eating and which I tell people this, you go to let's give an example of a popular place like like Chipotle, right?  They have the serving size. What it is anybody who's ever ate there more than once knows that there's always the chick that hooks you up. There's always the guy that doesn't hook you so much up and and how much of a difference. So each one of those rice first that first the white rice then the black beans then comes this chicken serving each one of those easily can be off anywhere from 80 to 300 calories. Each one of those scoops which can now be a net difference of like a thousand. That's a huge difference. But even if you go back to the actual calculation they did in the first place, you've taken the food and you have like a standard portion size, right?  But then so you can do that with with a food, right?  So say like I said it's been ground down compared to how it was as a whole food if it's raw or cooked compared to what the calorimeter says when you set fire to that food and it tells you how much energy is in it. That can vary by almost up to 50%. So the error compared to what the back of the packet says versus what your body actually absorbs is so large that when you're stuck just trying to calculate calories macros from what's on the back of a packet, it's literally impossible. And this is, this is why, cause let's be honest here for the last, I don't know what, four decades we've been told, we've been told this model eat less, move more. It's all about calories in versus calories out and calories or all that matters. And what's been happening is the opposite in terms of the results that we're getting. People are heavier, people are sicker and it doesn't seem to work that way. And in fact, when people are told to make general healthy decisions versus just cutting calories on the longterm, the ones that make the healthier decisions have longer term success. And there's something else that we don't talk about a lot and mainly because we don't understand well enough and maybe you do because I know you have a background in neurobiology, but the palatability of food, the signal of taste, even if it doesn't have a calorie attached to it or a macronutrient attached to it, that is another signal that is telling your body different things and it is a driver in the sense that it does drive behavior. So if you're constantly just counting macros and calories and it's consisting of these super engineered, highly palatable foods that you would never find in nature. And let's be honest, the body did not evolve. Wait, wait, wait, there's not a Pop-Tart treat? Yeah, exactly. The body did not evolve even understanding what these combinations of flavors can do to the body or what they mean because your body translates taste from an evolutionary standpoint to nutrients, right? Like sweet means this and salty means this and bitter means that and the combination of these things mean this. It doesn't mean that anymore. We don't even talk about the taste, which may be why lots of studies are showing things like calorie-free sweeteners actually have a negative effect on weight and metabolic function. And it may be separate from the fact that it affects things like your gut microbiome and maybe just that you're sending this sweet signal that's not accompanied by sugar or other types of things that you normally get from those things. So all of this stuff is very important to take into account and you'll find, again, working with clients like we have, I've worked with probably thousands of clients and hundreds of trainers who've trained clients and every time I, you know, we change our message to focus on food quality, it seems like the rest of it follows along whereas the other way around doesn't always work that way. And there's a simple reason for that and it's because, so like you say, there's a whole, there's a huge industry and science behind making food hyperpalatable. So you want to eat more of it. So you could, if you have the patience of a saint, you could manipulate the calories in that food so that you eat less of it. You could do it.   So it's supposed to, like it's supposed to. Exactly. So if you put the body in an environment where it actually, which it actually understands, then if you eat 5,000 calories one day, you're just less hungry the next day and you eat less food and it all evens out. But you have to put the body in a scenario where it can do that.  That is not an environment where you can regulate calorie intake. And so it's just, you can do it. You can cut calories if you really want to and do it long term and that works for some people, but it's just really hard. Well, here's the challenge is, and I know this is anecdotally speaking, but I know we've also had tons, you guys too have worked with lots of people. When you grew up like myself, like I grew up allowed to eat all the sugar, candy, cereals, ice cream, all these things, all these palatable foods that we're talking about. So as an adult, I didn't want fruit and vegetables.  I would eat a strawberry and a strawberry doesn't taste like anything to me.  Like this is awful. And I remember as a trainer, I would start to get these clients and they would express the same thing back to me. And I'm like, inside I'm trying to, as a trainer, tell them what to do, but I also understand I'm going like, I know I hate that food too. It took me a long time before, and this is why too, I always recommend like an elimination diet to people at first, if you've been somebody who's been poorly eating for a very long time and you know that and then to slowly reintroduce foods back.  Now, after I've done this and I go, whoa, an apple, a strawberry is so powerful and so sweet and tastes amazing. Then go try and have like a sour patch cake and see how crazy strong that I was just sharing with you guys at breakfast why I can't eat at this breakfast spot next to me because I bite into it and I could taste the sugar that they're pouring inside of it. And I think, wow, a lot of people love this because they're, but they're used to that. So now there's this, what's happening with all these foods that are being processed and made is it's like we keep- Competition, man. It reminds me of the pre-workout game right now, right? When pre-workouts first entered the market like 10 years ago, it was like, hey, throw a little bit of caffeine in there. People are gonna feel that. Well, now it's like 300 grams. Now 400 grams. Well, now some nice- Now some of them are getting banned because people are dying from taking- Right, and the food industry is the same thing. It's like, who can make it sweeter? Who can make it stronger because we're getting so adapted There's a balance there. They have something called the bliss point. That's the technical term.  You get flavor fatigue.  That's right. One of the best ways to do that is to get send your body, your brain, different signals of taste. So if you're eating something that's really sweet and you're eating a lot of it and let's say you're in a food competition and you need to eat more but you just can't stomach eating more of it. One of the most effective things you can do and professional food eaters will actually do this is they'll introduce something salty. Have you seen the show? You guys seen the show Man vs Food? Yes, so Rob Wolf, he told that story on your podcast, didn't he? And actually I've done the same thing. So when I did the 100 Nugget Challenge I heard of vanilla milkshake with me because I know that I would get bored of eating chicken nuggets. This was not recently, but I would get bored of it. He was like, yes, today I was doing this.  Isn't that crazy? I mean, I find like that's so fascinating to me. It's what an interesting paradigm to think of that the human body has got such an effective and efficient regulatory system when it comes to food. Actually your body systems are all very, they're all very effective and efficient when they're healthy and when they're in an environment that they kind of evolved to be in. But because we've changed our environment so drastically it throws those things off and the side effect of that is chronic illness or obesity. When we allow them to work the way they're supposed to then we find that food regulation isn't that much of a problem just like other types of regulatory systems. You know, Rob Wolf talks about, he's the example of pornography and how that literally rewires the brain to be so responsive to extreme novelty that you've got 20 year old man suffering from erectile dysfunction because their brains have now been wired to respond to a situation that would never have existed. Because their girlfriend doesn't wanna be like tied up, bent over the table.  And videoed from like some gynecological standpoint. Or just having like access to a million different, you know, women in pictures and all these different things. And so it rewires the brain. Well that's what's happened with food. That's what's happened to us with food. We're in an environment where I can literally have any flavor I want within five minutes. And this has never existed ever in human history. And because of that, we know that's the driver behind the market that the market responds by feeding just that. So when you look at the foods that you buy at the grocery store, especially the processed ones or in particular the processed ones, the vast majority of R&D, you know, research and development money goes into two places. How the palatability and the marketing behind it. Very, very little goes into nutrition. It's literally, this is how much goes into nutrition. Okay, cool. Everything's done. Throw in some vitamins so we could say it's vitamin fortified and there we go. But it's not even vitamins. It's, I'm thinking of iron particularly. They throw in iron filings.   Yeah, and then it's iron fortified because they've thrown in iron filings and you can actually do this. I did not know that. There's some awesome YouTube videos. You can watch people extract iron filings out of corn flakes.  No, you should watch it. I didn't want to magnet that. Because, you know, then you say, well, there's iron in these corn flakes and it's, yeah, it's like eating some of your cast iron cooking pot. Like, did you know that? I had no idea. I did not know that. Wow. That's terrible. Wow. I'm going to do that right now. I have to do that. I feel like I have to go test that out. That's crazy to me. That's terrible. So we've talked about like protein spiking and stuff, right? We've talked about that. Oh, yeah, protein powders. There's a, you know, independent laboratories have gone in and tested some of these protein powders and found what's called protein spiking where they will add individual amino acids because of the way the testing, right? So when you test the protein powder to see how many grams of protein there are per serving, you're testing individual amino acids and based on those, that'll tell you, or nitrogen or whatever will tell you how many grams of protein. So what these companies were doing was just putting those in their powder so they could say 45 grams of protein per serving when in reality it's 25 grams of protein per serving with like extra, you know, whatever amino acids just to show up on the test. And so it's a problem that we're running to, especially in the cosmetic fitness industry because so much of it is driven by supplements. How do you guys deal with that working with? I know you guys do online coaching quite a bit. How do you deal with people who come to you and ask you like, I want to take all these supplements. I want to, these are the things I know to work. Like what are some of the things you talked to them about in that regard? Oh, we talk about the testing, right? So, I mean, I mean, I think everyone that's been through a bad health experience has tried taking a whole bunch of supplements to see if they help. And you realize that you just can't guess. It's like shooting a shotgun from the hip. You just can't do that. You've really got to do some testing and find out which things you need and which things you don't. And so that's our approach is we use urinary organic acids and we use blood chemistry and we use stool tests. Oh, very individualized. Yeah, so it's totally, every single plan is bespoke. We're like, we're only going to give you something if we think you're going to benefit because we've done a test. Now you said you had a personal story for how you got into all this. Did it start that way? Or is that where you just kind of came to after? Yeah, yeah. I would sometimes wonder about that where I would be now if none of this had happened whether I'd still be sat in the back office of a hedge fund somewhere as programming computers, which would be quite sort of awful and brilliant at the same time. So yeah, I'm British obviously. I came to the West Coast in 2001 and I had a fantastic opportunity with Yahoo, the local tech company we're here in San Jose. And so I'm seeing again all some of the, I used to live in Palo Alto. So it's kind of cool to see people with the word Nvidia on their license plate and all that, so it kind of gets me quite excited. My undergraduate degree is in computer science. But I'm really active, fell in love with the West Coast lifestyle, surfing, mountain biking, kiteboarding, snowboarding. It's an incredible place. You can do all these things right here within a very short distance. And so fell in love with the lifestyle, got competitive on the bike, did some mountain bike races, started winning, upgraded, started winning some more, got a coach, started eating more food because I was doing more cycling. And you can guess the food I was eating was the stuff that was getting me into trouble. And eventually the wheels came off the wagon, a lot of fatigue, but not related to exercise, just normal fatigue during the day, like falling asleep under my desk and stuff like that.  And then just terrible sex drive and erectile dysfunction and bloating and all these terrible problems. And I went to my local medical doctor because we had fantastic health insurance, obviously with the big tech companies and he was worse than useless. He said, okay, so here's some Viagra for the erectile dysfunction. And then you should probably go and see a gastroenterologist which I did. And the gastroenterologist was worse than useless. I said, oh, here's some steroid anti-inflammatory drugs. Oh gosh. And you know, when those stop working and they will stop working, then we can start cutting bits out. And... Always treating the symptom man. So I kind of knew as an engineer, you're like, this guy doesn't really seem like he understands what might be causing these problems. You know, any engineer will tell you if you want to solve a problem, you have to understand what caused it. And even as a mountain biker, there's a really good analogy that I think that every cyclist will understand that when you get a flat tire, you get a thorn or something stuck in your tire and the tire goes flat and you pull it all to bits and you pull out the tube and maybe there was no tube in there to begin with. We've got tubeless, but you put in a new tube. You have to understand what it was that made that tire go flat. Because if you just put in a new tube... It's gonna happen again. It's gonna happen again. So why do doctors do something completely different from everyone else on the planet? It's just really strange. I got really lucky. So I had the suspicion, but I got really lucky that I met my wife and it's funny you've just been talking about food quality. So she just finished her master's degree in food science and then you've got two options really. You can either become a nutritionist or a dietitian or you can become a flavor chemist which is one of these people that creates hyperpalatability in foods and makes them into a good business model. And she decided that both of those things were not for her for obvious reasons, right? Like I don't really want to be evil in this world. And so she chose a different... She was actually working for a local company here selling school lunches, but that wasn't really much fun either and she ended up at McKinsey. But yeah, that was where she was working when I met her. And she said, oh, you should really try and elimination diet before you go under the knife or take any of these drugs. And so that's what I did. And of course it got fantastic results. It was absolutely amazing, like the transformation. And I measured some stuff in blood. High sensitivity seriative protein was one of the blood markers that I saw go from seven to less than 0.5 in just a couple of weeks in changing my diet. So, you know, I was eating cereal for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, pasta for dinner, baking my own bread, you know, eating low-fat yogurt with a ton of sugar in it.  And then I went over to the diet that Rob Wolf described, you know, the paleo solution, that original diet. And that was fantastic. And I chose a more refined version of that, the autoimmune paleo diet that was even better for me. And that got me fantastic results. And then later on, I started thinking, oh, what else is possible? What else could I be doing here? Got into some of the advanced testing. And that was through podcasts. My entire reinvention is because of podcasting, listening to podcasts, doing podcasts, talking to people. Heard about these advanced tests that you could do. Excuse me. And yeah, just got fantastic results, fixing the types of problems I found on those tests. So... Isn't it fascinating that it still fascinates me, mainly because I try not to get pissed off about it. So I let it fascinate me. Or you go to a doctor with a health problem, an issue, a chronic problem. Because, I mean, Western medicine is brilliant at treating acute issues. Yeah, so you really have to understand what medicine does well. And that's exact. So I'm a mountain biker. And I feel like I throw medicine under the bus on a weekly basis on my podcast. But I really don't want to do that. Because as a mountain biker, the next time I crash and collapse my lung. Right, if you break, yeah, if you break a leg... Yeah, I want someone to call an ambulance still, please. They do a fantastic job on that. But if it's been something that's been going on for a while, if it's chronic... They're terrible.  It's terrible. It's very good for acute issues.  Western medicine is second to none. It's the best, absolute best in the world. It's a godsend of mankind. But it is absolutely because of its strength in that particular area where they see the problem or the symptom, treat the symptom right away, which makes it really good for acute issues, also makes it terrible for chronic issues. And if you go to the doctor and you talk about having... If you go to the doctor right now and you say, listen, I am exhausted all day long. I'm just tired all day long. They will run a battery of blood tests. If those blood tests come back and show nothing's wrong with you, according to the blood tests. In other words, you don't have any major nutrient deficiencies and we can talk about the ranges, by the way, that they use on blood tests. Yeah, you fit within 95% confidence intervals of the mean of the average person that takes... That does the blood tests. That does the blood tests. Right, we could talk about that. But let's just say everything's within those ranges, but you're still really tired. They're literally going to tell you, you're crazy or no, you're fine. I think you're absolutely healthy.  And at no point during our conversation, have you asked me my diet, my activity level, my sleep, my stress level. At no point have you ever asked me those things, which are by far, the most important things.  The first and most important thing you should look at when you have a chronic issue is, are these things I'm putting in my mouth affecting my chronic health? And none of them will even ask that. I have a cousin who, young cousin, teenager who had really bad acne, went to a dermatologist and was getting treatment for acne. And I don't see this side of my family that often, but then I saw them for a family function. And we were talking about this and she's like, oh, I heard you have a fitness podcast, whatever, mind if I ask your opinion. I said, absolutely. And so she asked me about her skin. I said, look, I'm not a dermatologist. I'm not an expert in skin. I said, but nutrition can play a very large role in what happens to your skin. And she's like, she laughs. And she goes, no, it doesn't. She goes, I already asked a dermatologist. And they said, my nutrition has nothing to do with my skin. And I couldn't believe that they still will say something like that. And what's funny is people will say there's no science to support that.  Some of them, there's 70 year old studies that talk about the acne gut access. They actually referred to it as is how what you eat can affect your skin, but what you eat can affect everything and your thoughts can affect them as well. Here's another one that's great. Doctors don't ask you about your thought process and your mindset, except when we do scientific studies, what's the thing that we control for every single time? The placebo effect. The placebo effect, in fact, is so powerful. We have to make sure we control for it, but they will not acknowledge the fact that your thoughts may in fact affect your fatigue or your bloating. This is why we speak to the cycle. It took a long time for me as a trainer. It must have taken close to 10 years before I really, you know, it took me not helping thousands before I started to help thousands.  And it's because you're not addressing those. You're not addressing the relationship with food, the relationship with themself and the relationship with exercise. It has to start there. If not, even if they see the results they're looking for right now, it'll be short term. It won't be long lasting. And I think that's such an important topic. And from an exercise standpoint, you know, we talk about relationship with exercise. We've also been fed, it's the same message, right? Calories burn versus calories taken in. And so what people have deduced from that, from an exercise standpoint is I just need to burn more calories. Not about changing the way my body uses calories, but just about burning calories. So it becomes this very manual approach to calorie burn in which the more I move, the more calories I burn. Therefore, I'm just gonna keep moving more and more. I'm not realizing that the body's very, very effective and efficient at adapting.  In fact, there was some interesting studies done recently, not relatively recently over the last couple years where there were some scientists that went to study some modern hunter-gatherer societies. And I forgot the method that they used, but it was pretty accurate method is the way that they talked about in the article where they were measuring the metabolic rate of these hunter-gathers.  I mean, they didn't sit at desk, they didn't work at computers. They were moving all day long throughout the day. So like, oh, we're gonna see these guys burning like 4,000 calories. And the reason why they went to test them is because they knew how they ate and they didn't eat 4,000 calories. So like, how are these people not disappearing? They're not eating 4,000 calories probably because they're hunter-gathers and it's hard to eat that many calories and yet they're super active. And what they found was their metabolisms adapted so well to where they were burning not that many more calories than the average person. And it was because the body adapts to all that manual activity. And so when you talk to people about this and I talk about resistance training, the importance of resistance training to modern humans, mainly because, not just because of strength and your body improves mobility and all that stuff, but because one of the main problems we're suffering from in modern society is over-consumption of food and it's probably gonna benefit you to have a faster metabolism. Nothing does that like resistance training. If we can turn the adaptation and switch it so that your body becomes less efficient with calories, it's gonna benefit you more in modern societies. They've done some even better modeling recently looking at what they call the constrained versus the additive models of physical activity. So what the traditional person, doctor, personal trainer will think is that every calorie that your treadmill tells you you've burned, you can eat on top of what you would eat normally because that's a calorie that you've burned. But if you actually look at what truly happens, it hits like a point where you only, through physical activity or exercise, you can only maybe increase the amount of calories, extra calories you burn in a day by about 200. So even if you keep exercising more and more and more, what your body will then do the less the time is you'll sit more still or everybody sort of fidgets, does these sort of like small movements, maybe they get up and go and do something. They feel motivated to do something. The body just stops doing that naturally because you don't want to burn those extra calories. You can't do it. So actually the only, you can burn about 200 extra calories. If you're looking at these studies and we're believing in calories in, calories out purely, that's about all you can add. And beyond that, your body will either reduce the amount that you move the rest of the time to adapt and you don't even know you're doing it. It's completely subconscious or you will produce less thyroid hormone so you'll turn down your metabolism. So none of that, you know, anybody who thinks that they can burn a thousand calories on the treadmill, you know, 800 of those calories you're gonna make up for them somewhere else and that's not gonna make a difference.  The second most complex thing is the metabolism and it's extremely complex and we think we understand all of it but we understand very little of it. There's so much we don't understand. I mean, 20 years ago who was talking about the microbiome and its effect on metabolism, nobody. Nobody was really talking about the effect of the microbiome. We have animal studies now where they'll take mice and they'll do a fecal transplant from one mouse to the other from an obese mouse to a skinny mouse or vice versa and then all of a sudden this skinny mouse gets fat and this one gets skinny. I mean, you gotta be, I mean, it's way more complex than we think. So there's this huge hubris in, so whenever we talk about doctors and scientists, I feel like, well, first of all, I kind of wanna say, you know, we want to help, right? So I'm a traditionally trained medical doctor, you know, they're in a system that prevents them from being able to give the help that they want to give. Like if they had an hour to teach you about nutrition and like lifestyle and they've been taught that in medical school in the first place, they'd love to do that. They'd love nothing more than to do that, but they have seven minutes and they have literally no way to be able to help you do that. But now I've completely forgotten the point that I was gonna make, but I was gonna say this story.  He's a real medical doctor.  And he has this great story about Angry Birds and this is his analogy for modern medicine and modern science. And it's, so imagine these aliens come down to earth and they see that they find the game Angry Birds. It could be any game, right? And you know, they decide, okay, we're gonna see who can be the best at Angry Birds. We're gonna have a month, right? And then we're gonna split into two groups. We're gonna have a competition and we're gonna play against each other and whoever wins is obviously the best. There's two groups. One group is like, we are going to dig down into the code of this game and understand it as well as we possibly can. And then when it comes to the competition, we're gonna manipulate the code in real time and then we're gonna be able to win the game that way. And then the other group says, we're just gonna play the game a lot and then we're gonna win it that way.  And it's exactly the same with pretending that you understand the level of biochemistry or physiology and we pretend that we do but we really, really don't.  What makes you healthy? Eating real food, moving, getting outside, having a connection with your family and do I know the exact biochemical pathway of everything that happens when you do other things? Actually, no, I don't. But I know that it's gonna help because you're playing the game. And even if you did, that's so uniquely different to each individual. So that's such a great point, that's a great analogy. I love that saying, I'm gonna use that. No, I must steal that. I love that analogy. And so when I start coaching or helping somebody, this is what I used to do is I'd say, okay, because right away the assumption when you hire a personal trainer is, okay, where's my diet? Where's my workout routine, right? That's what I'm supposed to do. You pay me for that. I tell you how to eat. I tell you how to exercise.  So they hire me and I say, okay, this is what I want you to do. Don't do anything special and new for me. Don't try and eat any different than what you do. Don't try and exercise anymore just because now you have a trainer. Just, I want you to pay attention. We're just going to track it for a week or two and then we're gonna come back, sit down together and we're gonna discuss it. And then I pick one or two things that's happening either nutritionally or in their lack of activity and exercise and I approve upon it. And most of the time it looks something like this because as Americans there's some things that we tend to do. One, I see a lot of over consumption of sugar and carbohydrates. We just don't need it that much and we eat a ton of it and then the lack of movement and exercise or the lack of fiber. There's a bunch of little things that people tend to do and I'll pick one or two things and they're normally very basic and clients at first they always would push back like that's all I'm doing. I'm like absolutely for a very long time now you've been eating 70 to 90 grams of sugar.  We're going to cut it back by about 30 grams every day. Let's see how your body responds.  All I want you to do is to walk for a half hour every day. That's it. That's all we're doing. Nothing else for right now and then we're going to build upon that. And when you start to set these realistic goals for people and you start to help them connect those dots it becomes a lot easier and I think a mistake that a lot of professionals make is we get so caught up in which program is better and this diet is better for this and getting it all these, you know which one is the science shows that there's a little bit better if we do it this way it's a little bit better if we do it that way and it's like Jesus that's way over a complicated.  Let's start playing the game and let's you know what when you die when you die the first on the first level we're going to learn from that mistake and then the next time we're going to get past that and then you're going to hit another little road bump and then we're going to talk about that and we're going to get past that and it's amazing you just slowly build on that. Adam can you talk about some of the clients that you work with and I don't want you to use the word clients. I want you to talk about a specific person that came to Mind Pump and what were their specific goals. Well, you know who you should talk about? You should talk about one of our OGs. Talk about Rochelle. I mean, there's so many people. First of all, there's so many people but let me, let me, you can't talk in the general terms as you talk to no one, right? You have to talk to someone specifically. I will give you an example of something that just happened literally like what three, four days ago. So I had a client. Now we don't just so you guys know so in the audience understands Sal, myself and Justin. We don't train clients anymore. So we don't handle one-on-one cases. That's okay. So you can talk about the programs. So I had somebody about a year and a half ago and it was a friend of a friend, real smart girl hire me to help her coaching and just like I just explained the process, her name was Jessica and she probably needed to lose about 25 to 30, 30 pounds right in that range. And when she hired me I had to have this long conversation of I'm not going to put you on this extreme diet.  Gave her the same exact advice that I'm giving right now now. And what does she want? What was, what did she want more than anything else?  Right. Right. Most people want to look better. That's fine. Right. It's okay. And it's okay. But what I like to do with someone like that is I like to help them make that connection with themselves to that and like Sal said earlier at breakfast that, you know, I want you to train because you love yourself not because you don't love yourself right now. So helping them make that connection because otherwise what happens and this has happened many times where you get a client in great shape and it hasn't changed for them. Right. So they're thinking I'll be happy when Exactly. And then they have to be happy now. Exactly. And this is so this part is important and then also teaching her.  And by the way what I used to do as a trainer was it was mandatory that you had a minimum of three months with me because I learned really quick that I wasn't going to be able doing it the right way. I wasn't going to give people that 30 day change turnaround that they wanted which would normally convince the average person to resign and keep training with you. So you had to be locked in a contract with me and I knew that because I needed time to show you how this is going to work. And so that's what I would do. So she's locked in three months with me. First month goes by. And mind you, she wants to lose 25 to 35 pounds. And I'm telling her when I first assess her diet because she's only eating about 1,500 calories. 1,500 calories, she's about 160 pounds at the 160, 163 pounds at this time. And she's only eating about 1,500 calories and she's only moving I think a four to 6,000 steps a day is what she was because I have all clients use wearables to track so I have some sort of a feedback on their movement. So this is where she's at. Month goes by and we haven't lost a single pound but I have her eating 1,900 something calories. And I explained to her, I said, I know that your ultimate goal is for us to drop you down 25 plus pounds but I need to explain to you what's going on and what we're doing and why we're doing this. And that's, I could have lost you 10 pounds this month. I could have reduced your calories from your 1,500, 1,600 down to 1,100.  Right, but I mean this is what happens though. This is what people that become so hung up on the calories in versus calories out mentality. This is what they end up doing and this is what she would do or this is what like most yo-yo dieters do. They're either on the wagon or they're off the wagon. When they're on the wagon, they're restricting calories they're exercising like crazy and they lose their weight then they realize they can't maintain that then they bloom back up and it's this vicious cycle. And what I'm trying to do is break this cycle from her and explain to her that this is what we have to do. Now I'm gonna fast forward this story because what ended up happening was she was with me for about five months. I eventually got her all the way up to where she was consuming about 2,600 calories a day and not putting on any weight. So you're introducing these gradually you're not saying an overnight change it's a gradual reintroduction. It took along with good resistance training. Yeah, of course, I've introduced her into maps which the foundation of maps I'll tell you what's so special about our programming is we learned really quick especially in talking about a female right now. Most women gravitate towards high repetitions isolation type exercises target my booty target my arm fat my belly fat and that's their kind of mentality training will maps the foundation of it is strength based compound movements deadlifting squatting overhead pressing the big the big movers that give you the big bang for your buck and we know that when we introduce those to this type of a client their body responds because it's never moved like this is there and because they've stayed away from it because they don't want to get big bulky muscle you know like oh I don't want to lift those exercises that's going to make me big and bulky so you got to dispel all that right so we've done this right so she's at 2,600 calories I think at that time we'd only lost about five or eight pounds so we're nowhere near yet her ultimate goal we end up having to go different directions she ends up moving across the country and we go separate ways for about a year and a half now her ultimate goal why she originally hired me was to get her ready to compete for a bikini show that was her goal oh wow she wanted to lose this 35 pounds and then she wanted to get ready for a show and I refused to train her for a show until I fixed her metabolism that's what I told her I said listen I'm not going to throw you in a show in 12 weeks when your metabolism is like this I will just destroy you you know and so she trusted me and she allowed me to do all this with her but eventually what she did was she wouldn't hire a coach that would so she hired a coach about this is just as a recent story right this just happened three months ago that she hired a coach she just competed two weekends ago and she did a show and she got all the way down to 120 I want to say 123 was her weight right and she was the smallest she's ever been people complimenting her like crazy now meanwhile she's close she's connected to my girlfriend Katrina and they communicate and they talk and she would share with her the things that she was doing to get ready for her show two hours plus of cardio every single day eating 1,300 calories no fruit in her diet just whatever it took to get her down and she got down to this goal she's never seen her body like this not since she was a kid so she was excited she did something that I was very proud of her and then I thought was really smart though she actually took her body fat test so she went and got a hydrostatic way which is what I made her do when she was with me so I wanted her to test so we could look at her lean body mass and can show her what her fat mass was and that way over time even though she might not see the scale move down I could show her that we've changed her body composition so she knew what where she was with me and I had gotten her down to about I think 15.8% body fat was where she at so mind you she's down 25 something pounds or whatever she's hit stage she's the small she's ever been she takes her body fat test but she doesn't want to see the results she doesn't want it to mess with her getting up on stage later that night so and she emails me and says hey I really want to open up my body fat test and I want to look at it with you and I want to talk about it but I don't want to look at it until after my show so I go to her show and I watch her and I see her and we stand there and we open it up and we open up the email and she's all excited to see how low she's gotten because she's down to this small she's ever been and she and I and I see it right away because I've looked at these tests a million times so I see the number and I'm waiting for her to see it and she looks and she looks the number and it's 17.9% body fat and she's like is this right this can't be right how am I I when I was with you and we weren't doing any cardio and I was 20 pounds heavier I was at 15 something percent body fat how am I I just got off stage how am I at 17.9% body fat this doesn't make sense to me said yeah because what we what ended up happening was you were doing so much cardio and you're eating so little that you were telling your body it doesn't want any of that weight so it was losing muscle and it was losing fat it was dropping everything like crazy and she had absolutely and I said now this is where this is really important so I'm helping her right now as a friend like she's not she's somebody who's a close friend of mine and I'm really nervous for her because she is now let her body get adapted to two to three hours of cardio every day and consuming 1,300 calories to have this body and I said you know more than ever what you do now is extremely important because I know you hit a goal of yours which was really important of you to get on this stage but you have absolutely just killed your metabolism and if you don't maintain this activity level in this low of calorie you're going to see your body just balloon up really quick so there's a point there which is that so at 17. something percent of 120 is less than 15% of 160 right so she has lost fat but she's also lost lean mass right she's lost a lot to try and get down to that weight so in terms of her body fat and talk about a mind fuck for the and this is what happens now this is I wanted to use share this story with you because I think it's a great extreme analogy what happens to everybody I really believe this happens to a majority of people that exercise is but she's just the extreme example is we come into it with this idea of you're either on or off I was eating all this bad food I wasn't paying attention I wasn't exercising now I'm going to go after my goals and I'm going to hammer the it's you know no days off beast mode get after it as hard as you possibly can restrict calories and what we don't what people don't realize is how much damage they're really doing to their body by approaching it this way and then you actually lose weight because you'll lose weight that way take somebody cut their calories in half increase your exercise by two times of what you're doing yes you'll get smaller 100% you'll get smaller she did she lost body fat you know she has less fat on her than she did when she was at 15% and heavier weight with me but the ratio of muscle to fat and what and a lot of people don't understand her metabolism is well yeah because people don't understand that okay so for muscle and for fat to be on our body that they're both tissue and they both require calories to stay on there and muscle requires a lot more calories than fat does to stay on our body so now that she's dropped that 20 something pounds she's lost a ton of expensive tissue that requires a ton of calories to sustain on her body in turn doing what Sal said slowing your metabolism down so this is it's all about the signals you send you know when you're when you're training and eating it's what type of adaptation are you asking for of your body if you're asking for your body to become more efficient with calories when that's the adaptation is going to go towards and it's going to slow itself down this is why if you train for endurance lots of endurance athletes their their metabolic rates tend to slow down they tend to lose but it's not you're not burning muscle I want to be clear too because sometimes people don't burn muscle it's like you're not burning muscle your body's just adapting in a more efficient way you're telling it today exactly exactly you know and to bring it back to our programming and how we've decided things this is you know we've been playing the game of angry birds for 20 years we've been playing so we fucking know how to play this game I might not be able to write the code for it that's for sure but I've I've played a lot of levels and you know so is Sal so is Justin and so when we created maps the real magic and so we've got all these crazy reviews and results like oh my God just mind blowing everybody thinks we're like this magician we've figured out the perfect program but no it's not the perfect program we just understand we understand the average American and the average American especially somebody who's trying to lose body fat reduce weight which we know is the majority of our audience so that's that's who you're programming for in general right because because you yeah so which was the target who's the who so if I'm Jessica now listening to this which program would I if I go to mindputmedia.com what program would I sign up for if I had this aesthetic goal to fix our metabolism maps anabolic would be the program because it's more we consider our foundational program because it's strength and muscle based maps aesthetic is your we have a more of a competitor program for when you hit stage but it's much higher volume of training requires it's much more taxing on the body and for someone whose metabolism is been damaged through competing they are better off taking a step back focusing on those kind of routes our programs are designed to work and so we've maps anabolic so you that's a tough answer which you're asking right now so you're else you're asking me to give you a generic answer to something that we we can be specific and say Jessica Jessica listening right now what would she sign so Jessica now the maps aesthetic program but it Jessica just getting started with me I had her on maps anabolic and that's because all the programs we we slowly increase the volume and it's designed to go over an entire year okay so we try and take people we reduce the amount so the maps anabolic program is either two or three days a week of lifting that's it two to three days a week full body routines and the big compound lifts and we know we know that most people are one missing missing those lifts two don't train for strength because people attach strength training to power lifters or Olympic lifters so they so that's so if I had an Olympic lifter I wouldn't start them on maps red because he's been training that way for such a long time he might benefit more from like our maps performance program which is how do you figure this out though that's why I've been so I've been listening to the podcast probably 20 hours last month and I'm like what that you know so I'm a mountain biker my back Kurtz where do I go this is a great this is a great question and this is actually something that we're in the process of improving because what we did we spent so much time on creating this great content this information all the podcast that we have a horrible sales funnel like we we're not big marketers we did not we did we weren't marketers and built it like most businesses like us that are our size built a great marketing tool or system right and then they came out with all the stuff later we're the opposite we're just now capture people just dropping in on us you have to been a listener for a long time to have put together all this information that you're asking me right now because we've we've prided ourselves on trying to individualize it for people and we don't want to just offer generic programs and say this is for everybody so well you must have had some but you must have had somebody in mind when you were designing the programs right yes yes so you know who you design to come in and then recognize which so it's really really the best way to do it is to come out with a specific type of adaptation or avatar that the program is designed for but that doesn't mean if you want that goal that that's necessarily the best program because it depends also where you're starting from so if we take it all the way back to the first maps program and I have a I can tell you a client story and actually he's sitting in here right now so Doug the way I met Doug Doug came to me through a chiropractor that he saw because he had back pain and the chiropractor told him you got to see Sal he can help you with fixing that pain now when I met Doug Doug already had lots of experience with resistance training he'd been working out since he was a teenager lifting weights he'd follow he'd followed all the bodybuilding routines always wanted to look muscular and be strong followed body for life I don't know if you guys remember body for life by Bill Phillips followed that to a T took all the supplements and so when I sat down with Doug and we talked about this first he said I have back pain but then we talked about his other goals which were I want to build muscle I want to have a six pack I've never looked like that before and I've been working on my entire life I just think I have bad genetics and so I asked him what do you routines look like well I do body parts splits I'll work out four or five days a week in the gym and so said okay you're going and I don't want you go to the gym after that and we almost I almost had I really had to sell that to him because he was in this such disbelief when I said that to him I was going to say so I mean and you did it as well I mean there's this woman Jessica who thinks she needs to restrict calories and work on specific body parts and then somehow magically you got her to stop thinking that and do what you said yeah how do you do that how do you do that how you've got someone's got it fixed in their mind they got to do one thing and then you're telling them I'm a very very good salesman Oh really yeah so so we set well I mean we sat down and I explained it to him and at the end we've played this game a lot at at we didn't come out being great at the game took us some time at the end of the day you know I'll sometimes have to tell people like I'm going to ask you to trust me one time but I promise if you trust me right now okay I'm not going to have to have to ask for your trust again and so luckily Doug trusted me we did two days a week full body focused on compound movements and little by little progress into three days a week of full body type routines we phase this workout so Adam talked about the the programming of maps anabolic but it is more complex than just you know full body workouts two or three days a week there's also phasing of the workouts where we focusing on different types of adaptation where one phase is we're training in the central nervous system adaptation phase where we're in the one or five rep range for example or we're training a phase for hypertrophy more of your classic you know eight to twelve reps or more of your sarcoplasmic hypertrophy where we're trying to build more of the non-muscle fiber structures within muscle you know increase its ability to store things like glycogen and blood flow so you're getting more of the pump and then there's what are called trigger sessions which are unique to maps programs all of our maps programs have some kind of a frequency builder in them in the maps anabolic program was the first one and I injected what are called trigger sessions and trigger sessions really that you can send a small muscle building signal to your body without having to cause muscle damage and a lot of people believe that the only way that you tell the body to build muscle is by causing muscle damage that's one way and that's also one of the biggest ways you can do it but there's lots of little ways right you can change your hor we can change a hormonal signal that's an easy one I can give you testosterone change nothing else about your routine and you're going to build muscle but there's also other signals that you can manipulate and one of them is simple mechanical signaling through this low these low intensity kind of frequent type of movements and we see this we observe this in every day every single day when you see people who for example you look at mechanics or plumbers who don't lift any weights but take a look at their hands and forearms very very developed and they're and they're not breaking muscle down they're not getting sore it's that frequent signal of simulation so I I figured that out and I said okay how can I add that to some of these other things that I've learned about resistance training and we came up with the trigger session concept which in a nutshell on your days off you do these very light pumping sets with maybe resistance bands that you can do anywhere to and there's a specific way you do them that we found that works real effective but you do these on the days in between and what ends up happening and we know there's a little bit of this now through science is that when you send a really loud muscle building signal like let's say today I work out really hard and I lift weights and I do everything right I'm going to elevate the muscle protein synthesis signal for about if we add trigger sessions to that the theory is I'm going to keep that signal elevated for a little bit longer and in practice that's exactly what trigger sessions seem to do well not to mention you're also increasing blood flow you're increasing oxygen movement nutrients to the muscles because you're moving them all you all of those things and so injecting these this simple technique which by the way if you're listening and you don't want to change your routine you don't have to just throw this in there just on your days off or whatever do some pumping sets for target muscle groups five to ten minutes I'm not sure I know what you mean by pumping sets I've been lifting weights since I'm seventeen I've no idea yeah but have you read many like bodybuilding magazines so that's why so that's short like real short you're talking five to ten minutes you know with rubber bands bicep curls you're aiming for a little bit of a burn get a little bit of a not trying to do damage you're not trying to get sore feel it but you're not trying to work out and what you're doing is you're keeping that muscle building signal elevated and you're also sending other singles and you're also facilitating recovery because what I found with trigger sessions through lots of experience now through clients for example one of the first things that Doug noticed when I had him apply trigger sessions was holy cow like I'm recovering faster from my hard workouts and he's able to increase his his intensity and volume even further and so these are some of the core concepts of our maps programs if you look at our maps programs the workouts at least the workout ones because we also have maps prime and maps prime pro which are more of your assessment model type programs but the actual workout based ones they all follow this this this formula this concept of you have your your main muscle building signals your frequency building signals that you inject in between whether it's your trigger sessions or focus sessions or mobility sessions and you phase your workout so that you can focus on a particular type of adaptation for a particular period of time it's usually two to four weeks before moving to one that is that is complimentary to the previous one and so when you plug that all in what you get is you get maximized programming and it's a lost art unfortunately with working well that's the reason why it works so well and why my pump has been so successful is because we know there's a huge issue there's an over application of intensity and under use of frequency and in our opinion it's one of muscle building yeah when it comes to building muscle when people want to build muscle burn fat there is the over application of intensity the under application of frequency and simply teaching people the way to do that correctly is a major game changer for about 80% we would say people there's always going to be an exception to the rule right if you got if you have a guy like I gave that example if you were a power lifter and you all sudden just purchased our maps and a ball program and you did phase one you're not going to see that there those first three weeks you're not going to see the same change as the average person the average person doesn't lift and train that way it'll be such a different adaptation on and that's what happens and we knew that we knew that when we created it and we phased it that way we knew that a majority of people the soon as they started that program instantly they would see a change in their body never done trigger sessions before never trained heavy compound type lifting I mean and then people are just getting a response like crazy then now we've built that trust now we can teach you all the other programs the other phases what they're for and I think in my opinion the most revolutionary thing that we've done is maps prime pro and maps prime which that was the biggest piece for us was creating a assessment to make it more individualized you know hard that was by the way did you imagine trying to create a self assessment tool for the average person where they have to be able to assess themselves following kind of instructions very very difficult thing to do so tell us about the types of assessment that they do so with maps prime what we did so maps prime the the first not prime pro but prime we were we came together and when we when we put programs together what we're going to do until it starts to come out of us until we start to put things down and with maps prime we've really realized that people when you think of warming up for example what do you what do you think you're doing when you're warming up why am I warming up because the dog needs to go out and take a pee that's my warm up it literally is I hate warming up yeah so people most people prevent injury that's a prevent injury get the blood flowing get the heart rate going but that's a crust out of my eyes right that's what most of us think of a warm up that's what we're taught we're taught like okay it helps prevent injury at the absolute least a warm up should do that but what it can do at its most is is groundbreaking when you properly when you properly prime the body now when you do your very effective exercises like a squat or a dead lift or a power clean or an overhead press or whatever you're going to maximize the signal you get from that by priming your body properly the problem that we encountered with neurologically yet so that's what we're doing we're we're teaching we're trying to teach people the proper recruitment patterns and we we have known again from playing the game for so long that most people that come in and hire you have poor recruitment patterns because they've sat at a desk for many years or they've played a sport a lot and they so they have these issues they have this chronic pain going on and they have they don't have a bad back they don't have bad knees they have poor recruitment patterns and so now their joints or just dysfunction right and then their bodies not moving if you take somebody who has got really bad recruitment patterning and they're not getting good hip extension for example and you just say oh good okay and they come to you and they say I want to work on my butt I want to build my glutes and you just have them squat and dead lift because those are traditional you know butt-building exercises but they don't have a good recruitment pattern they don't have a good connection to their glutes they're going to find very poor results from those exercises they're going to get lots of quads just bigger quads and so a thing that we would do is trainers is I would prime them before squats and depending on the individual but generally I do something like a hip thrust or something that I'm going to get them to fire the glutes and squeeze them and maybe maybe kind of take hip flexors out of the movement and change their posture a little bit then we do the squats and deadlifts and now they feel them more so that but the challenge we encountered with prime was priming is so different from person to person like I can't prime a bench press the same for everybody overactive lats and this person might have an issue with shrugging their shoulders and they have a poor equipment pattern their shoulders and how do we prime each person individually and so what we did is we broke the body down into three zones three movements that kind of generally cover everything you do these three tests which we call the compass based on whether or not you pass or fail so it's very easy so rather than saying this little part right here is not working whatever pass or fail if you fail it points in this direction and then this is what you do to prime your workouts because regardless of the movement you're doing this is the recruitment pattern that you're demonstrating so your priming should look like this so that's what prime was now with prime pro prime pro was correctional is correctional in nature so rather than teaching at a prime your workouts what prime pro is doing is we're examining areas of the body you may have pain and dysfunction in and we're trying to correct those problems separate from your workouts and the reason why it's separate from your workouts is when you're trying to correct a true hips I have dysfunction my hips and it's causing me pain the best way to alleviate that or not alleviate excuse me to correct that is through lots and lots of frequency it is not through intensity so if I'm trying to correct an imbalance my show I need to practice that all day long because that signal then needs to win out the other signal that I send all day long which is sitting or you know whatever and so prime pro is designed differently in that if you look at each one of our programs they each of them from maps anywhere prime prime pro the aesthetic each one of them was an answer to what we thought was a problem in the industry I'll give an example one of the first episodes that we came out and said was why we don't CrossFit so we create a bunch of shit because we said we don't CrossFit here are the reasons why we don't CrossFit so then we got a lot of people saying back to us well then what if I like that way of training I like I like the way it's I like those exercises I like well how would you guys put it together so we created maps performance and that really was the answer for the someone who likes those type of movements but it's programmed in a much smarter way than just doing the wad of the day and so maps aesthetic was inspired by when I got ready for a show and I competed and I saw all this pro this poor programming on all these professional athletes all these bodybuilders all these bodybuilders and men's became men's bikini women's bikini that's what they call them all these competitors we're having they had terrible programming these coaches would just over apply intensity train the shit out of them starve them to death to get them in shape and I'm like no there's a smart way to progressively overload the body to get it ready for a show and so that's what inspired that program when you get maps anywhere you look at what are the most popular programs at home are these insanity and P90X and plyometric like get the fuck out of here not everybody should be doing that so our answer with what maps anywhere our maps prime and prime pro really was the answer to all the poor chiropractors I feel like because how many people get stuck in that go see a chiropractor he adjusts me two to three times a week I feel better I go back see him next week adjust me feel better when they're not again we talked about this earlier addressing the root cause of something they find the pain they adjust them for a little bit they feel better for a couple days and then they go back to their poor recruitment patterns and again this happens again so we are trying to help people and tell them listen that you need you need to move better and if these are the areas that you're having joint pain here are some movements that are going to help you move better and we teach that through the program so if you were to kind of give a generic cause I I know I was dodging you a lot on giving you like this yeah I know you want to speak to everyone but by speaking to everyone in a way you're speaking to no one yeah it's a very good point and I yeah I get really terrified by the complexity of it all you know I've been we were talking about this I've mentioned that I've been working with Mike T. Nelson and his initial great guy by the way he is fantastic he got great so I'll I'll tell you this story I'm at the beginning of this year my back was hurt in my lower back was hurting quite a bit it was seemed to be getting worse and my ankles were hurting and so I went to I'd interviewed Mike a couple of times not easily really great guys got an ms in in biomechanics and we spent a bunch of time on the phone and I sent him some videos and he put together a program and I didn't get a lot of it done because it was so complicated I was terrified by the complexity and I'm one of those all of nothing people where I'd like oh shit if I can't do all of this and I'm not going to do any of it and so I worry about these online programs I'm like oh my God is this going to be really complicated and I'm not going to be able to fit I won't have half the equipment and so this is one thing that we that's what we pride ourselves exactly this is why you would love and this is what we try to do we're trying to bridge that gap because of the brilliant minds like like who we're talking about and others out there we I mean we partnered is disseminating information that's because we've been playing the game so well I don't know the code that I can't break the science and the code down really well but I can play the game and so if I've got somebody who's explaining it to me I can take that information go like oh you know what I know how to help this apply to the average person because otherwise you can lose them and all of this overwhelming bits of information which is why I just gave you that analogy of you know our programs are far more in depth than just it's the answer to this it's the answer that but I think that's an easy way for people to think about that like you know hey these are how bodybuilders train a lot of them train the wrong way if you wanted to look like that this is a better way to program chiropractors you know CrossFit mentality like these are better ways to program there's a lot of science that goes into it which Sal was starting to get to but sometimes I stop him when he goes that far in depth because I feel like some people get lost like people don't understand of us going back and forth and you know the community I should finish that story actually because Mike responded beautifully to my objection to his complexity and he greatly simplified the program and he did a really good job of working with the weight the equipment that I got off Craigslist right just like one bar and a chin-up bar and that was it and he got fantastic results to me and I've done a bunch of bike races this year where my lower back didn't hurt and that's what I really care about and I wanted to hear you you know listening to the mind podcast I wanted to hear you talk more about that like because that's what people really care about like what I really cared about was completing this hundred and thirty three mile bike race with my lower back not hurting and that's like worth any amount of money to me you know what's tough to in in fitness in particular because we were you know born in the fitness industry and and one of the motivations behind my pump was some of our anger towards how the fitness industry tends to market and do things that we are very it's very difficult for us to do because we know I know most effective way to sell anything in fitness is to show a before and after and show a personal story yeah we have done none of that yeah Facebook won't let you do that have you noticed that you can't like even I don't know I don't let you do that anymore yes if you can post something it's not actually a before and after it's just two pictures of the same person in an algorithm will say hey that's a before and after and they won't let you wow I didn't know that oh wow but that's a very effective way of selling yeah of course and to tell a personal story right and it's tough for us to do that specifically because we hate it so much because it's been to mean it's been manipulated for so long like you don't realize people that's why we dance around stuff we do so when people don't realize people don't realize this but like when they take when you when you do before and I know this because I know people in the industry when they take it before and after usually what they'll do is I'll go to someone like Adam he's a professional IFVB Physique competitor and he just finished a contest and I'm going to take his pictures well that's is after people don't realize this that's is after then I myself Adam we're going to pay you X amount of dollars and I want you to get really fat gain like 30 pounds so I can take your before picture and there's your before and after a lot of the photos a lot of the photos are done that way not to mention the you know you know makeup for programs for supplements for what they all do that Photoshop the Photoshop they all do that however human nature people I could talk about science all day long to talk about how things work all day long but people like testimonial that's just what registers in our brain is like you know I could hear a thousand random people tell me how awesome a restaurant is but if my good friend tells me that restaurants awesome I'm probably going to go there you know and so it's just it's very difficult for us because we want to do things differently but we also know that this over here is the most effective way to do I would encourage you to get over that because I know if you're sitting on something that's powerful and has the ability to help a lot of people then that's good you should be using those whatever means you need to we're getting there we just we just hire you talk about this this is what we're in the process of doing right now we hired but it was very very important to us when we started this that we weren't we'd all we'd all had other we're all serial entrepreneurs we've all had businesses doing other things we started this not because we needed to make an income off of it so we all agreed that we were going to keep our integrity through and yes it has fucked us financially for quite some time yes it has yeah and we are very very aware that that's okay though and we were we were okay with that because we knew that and that's right now the people that buy so you know give people that understand and pay attention and numbers and some of that we do somewhere between 75 to 100,000 unique impressions on our website every month the people that purchase 100% all of them are people that have listened to the podcast for a long time and and we're okay with that we're okay with that website shit right now it's not it's not designed to catch to someone to land on it and go like oh my God this is for me yeah it's not cold traffic it's hot coming from the podcast right and and we're and we're working but we waited until one we had the revenue to where I've tired them paid them fired them right out because if you don't understand our message and you don't see what we're cause we're trying to change this we're trying to be different we're trying if we want to just do what everybody else is doing absolutely we can make we can increase our income easily by 30 to 40% more revenue just by playing that game clickbait shit using transformation given you generic answers for what what the this program is for you you got back pain you want to lose weight this is for you with make a lot of money but none of us want to make money that way you can't need to do it before and after picture with back pain you just got to take the bus really I was I was wondering about this because we were talking about fighting fire with fire right because there are people out there and they're doing exactly that so at what point do you realize you have to use the same tactics of the shisters are using to try and muscle out there message so what here's what we also have noticed is that the trends are starting to change a little bit you're starting to see now because of social media because remember now all of us are we're all not kids right we all grew up in an era where we didn't have social media internet and we're lucky enough to grow up to where we're not so old that we don't know understand it but we weren't we're not so young that that's all we know and things are starting to change in the sense that with starting to be more effective now is what we're really good at which is transparency you're starting to see companies try and be more and more transparent and people become more and more connected to their consumer because consumers are demanding it so although we're doing things differently now I think the way we're doing them is the way that they're going to be done the average consumer is also far smarter than they were before as dumb as or as ignorant as the average person is when it comes to fitness and health trust me they know they know a lot more now than 20 years ago when I was in gyms 20 years ago man were clueless now people are starting to question things like like that's that whole debacle that came out where they said oh coconut oil was always unhealthy and blah blah blah and that you had a lot of everyday people going um actually I don't think that's correct that you guys have actually been selling some bullshit for a long time now and getting people and these are everyday people I was getting messages for people who are like sell I think that they're wrong and I'm like well how do you know this well I've read this infrared there's a lot more information that's out there that's better and transparency starting to win and I think the battle Tom Tom Bill you said this really well you know he said we've all been shot and we're all bleeding out and just some of us know it and some of us don't and you will have to get on board with that we the power of social media and digital streaming media right now is anyone could almost period almost all your celebrities now to peer into someone's life and find out if you're full of shit or not it's becoming easier and easier so we would much rather lean on this message keep our integrity know we're going to make a little less money right now because we know in the future you'll have to play by the you'll have to play by these rules because it'll be too easy to expose people in the bullshit and we're watching it happen the pendulum swinging back we've had the same thing on our podcast to and Chris has always been very open about the process what he does what goes on behind the scenes the struggles and I've had some people who sort of like traditionally trained in marketing you're like you're showing weakness that's going to make people not want and that's just not fucking true like people like I know you I know what you've done I know how you've learned how you've grown like I've really connected with you and your business model and then that creates not only does it create a much better connection to the person when you then work with them they also like want to work through it with you that's like you create this relationship that makes it and they're also more likely so you're going to ask them to do something that maybe they didn't want to do to create trust you're much more likely to get and then they're also going to get better results right because they are more invested in the process the more invested in you as a coach the person you're working with so I mean I completely agree with you it's just you know it's it's a challenge on that typical here's how we here's how we do it you know our our we're first off we're lucky in the sense that you know Adam calls us idiots of idiots of ons all the time because you know when we first started the podcast we were very raw we would just go we still do it this way we just go we we just start talking a lot of bullshit goes on in the beginning which turns out to be quite entertaining for some people people like that part of our show and luckily it's been part of our the form of success so we've got the entertainment factor there on accident so that works for us and and again we we can take complicated information and kind of communicate it to the average person so that kind of works for us and again because we because of the way technology works nowadays we didn't need massive corporate sponsors to deliver information you just don't need that anymore it's the great what we're what we're witnessing right now is the greatest decentralizing of power that we've ever seen in mankind ever the distrust in news media today is greater than it's ever been and people don't even get their news anymore from these from from news networks because of social media and the ability to share information the funny part is people think Donald Trump was the one who started that Donald Trump was just smart enough to see that and campaign on it yeah I mean that was just bro when you dissect that that was just brilliant campaign that was and so now you're sitting so when it so transparency if people aren't getting it now they're gonna have to get it later on because the consumer starting to demand like a realism in fact when we first started the podcast two and a half years ago most of the fitness pictures I saw online were and you still see a lot of them but there were more before highly doctor up highly highly photoshop Photoshop pictures I'm seeing people now who've been around for a little while who've been on Instagram for a little while are now posting pictures of themselves this is what I look like in perfect and this is how real I am and whatever it's like those fuckers you're trying hard now to get jump on the transparency train because they see that the consumer starting to demand it so it part of it's a gamble that's where we think it's going a lot of the signs are showing that it's going in that direction but we think we're right and we'll find out so you mentioned something about sponsorship right and Chris's Chris is the main guy of the Norwich Band's podcast and there's no sponsors and I know that you guys for a long time you didn't have any sponsors and one of the most boring things of podcast is having to skip to the first 10 minutes while the person proletizes about their about their sponsors and I'd I mean I truly hate it I can't so there's some great information that's coming up but then you just have to sift through that nonsense first so how did you guys make that decision to accept a sponsors so like somebody who's then taking some of your airways there's a couple ways there's not just like a a single formula yet to like the product and you have to really like the people and then they also have to be okay with how we decided to deliver that message to because and we we decided early on the exact same thing you just said we all said like I hate when I listen to a podcast and the first eight I mean I love Joe Rogan but the first eight minutes of his every podcast is pretty funny though isn't he when he does those that listen to it he's pretty funny he is and he does smart that's how he gets people listen exactly he does a great I think fighter and the kid do an incredible job of doing their commercials also where they and we did a little bit of that also like we do a little bit of humor and this and that when trying to trying to make commercials not sound so blah all the time but it had to be a partnership and a relationship that we saw more than just a supplement just like the person had to be something else that we see them so like for example Chimera has been with us for a very long time we are we talk about supplements on our show a lot and we talk about them as splitting hairs as far as a difference in your overall physique or your goals very very small and we we talk that there's much bigger rocks to focus on before you're looking for that in fact we give the analogy of its it's like putting high octane gas in a pinto you know and your drag racing like the difference that you're going to get a performance from that high octane gas in that car build a better engine first you know build a Ferrari engine you're going to get down that track a lot faster so you know when it comes a supplements we got nobody who wanted to connect to us but chimera is a coffee company we all drink coffee we all love coffee and all the science that's coming out on new tropics is very fascinating we dabbled in that a little bit this was before chimera I didn't like any of the synthetic stuff same thing for Doug Doug got headaches I did I react I didn't like it at all so I was super anti I'm a fan Sal loved them Justin was neutral on them so we agreed back then that okay when we like new tropics we like well everything that's coming out with that but I'm not a fan of the synthetic stuff so when chimera came around and they had a coffee that had the natural new tropics infused in it it was like oh this cool and then we're like let's call and let's see what these guys are all about met with them hit it off instantly like just really good guys really good message and so that's how we made that decision and almost every single thing that we've done as far sponsorships has been the same way do you guys use new tropics but I know your your background is in yeah so I've tried quite a few things just out of interest and in general I went through a period where so I tried like a full month of qualia because that was that was the one that it was really out there all the different they've sort of taken a shotgun approach would just throw everything in there and hope something sticks and some of the stuff I think is good and well back some of the stuff actually if you look at the the research suggests it probably won't do anything at all it has DHEA so if you're a tested athlete you can't take it but anyway so I tried that for a month I did some organic acids before and after to look at my neurotransmitters before and after so I wanted like a metric that I could actually measure and you better explain what organic acids are because mostly people won't know yeah so do those reflect things like dopamine serotonin yeah absolutely turnover not the actual the turnover itself and there are some tests where they look at you the actual neurotransmitters in your urine and then not very well validated at all but particular particularly the turnover the metabolic breakdown products of dopamine and the catecholamine so norepine epinephrine epinephrine and then serotonin and its breakdown marker 5-hydroxyantylacetic acid and also the other side of that pathway which is it's sort of like a can be pro-inflammatory it's sort of like a metabolic some metabolic pathway that gets you can sort of get stuck in if you've got some information going on quinolinic acid and you can look at the balance of those things and that's fairly well validated so and there are some other things in an organic acids test you can look at intermediates in the Krebs cycle you can look at markers of overgrowth of certain yeast and bacteria some some of so this what we use for a lot of nutrient deficiencies so if you if you imagine there's a pathway that requires a certain B-vitamin right and if you don't have enough of that B-vitamin then one particular intermediate builds up and so you measure that intermediate in the urine and then you know that you probably need more of that B-vitamin so that gives us a better idea of how so we're talking about targeted supplements again we work with a lot of people who are on low carbohydrate diets want to try ketogenic diet we often see raised a requirement for something fat and to the most quandary better but we'd rather measure it in the urine rather than just tell you to take carnitine because we don't know it's going to work well you almost good at this point right we tested so many if you're on a ketogenic diet you should be taking carnitine yeah very much yeah definitely and and you know it works to boost performance so if you if you if you look at the guys talking about IVs in professional sports so Mo Farah who's a UK in distance runner multiple time world and Olympic champion he uses carnitine IV infusions we a lot of the Tour de France cyclists do it too and because they're going to rely on a lot of fat metabolism they need to make sure that fats getting into the mitochondria makes perfect carnitine you know is like magic so sometimes if somebody struggling on a ketogenic diet you tell them to take a few grams of carnitine like it's like something switch the lights on wow so I did some of this stuff quietly before and after and I've tried some of the other stuff and a lot of it feels very artificial to me like it's like I know I'm more focused I know my brain is working better maybe but I also know from just playing the game for a long time that there's no such thing as a biological free lunch so something you ask your brain to do now which you wouldn't want to do normally you're going to pay for that later so if you're not sleeping properly recovering properly you know doing all this other stuff then I think you're going to see a negative downstream side effects and and that's that's a big part of it too did you notice a change in your out when you did the testing before and after just what did you see tell them what you were doing whilst taking though yes so it was it was it was an interesting time to take it because it was sort of like super high risk but also super high reward so I I I I like the story already so so I took quality in the month before my PhD defense and your PhD defense is basically that you stand up in front of so this is the way that so I did my PhD in Norway so I did it in Norway but it's like I ended up with like the true true tops in the field that I did my PhD and who were basically gonna grill me on my PhD for three for three hours publicly in front of all my friends and family so you basically spend a month and you go back over all the research that you did so you like so you really remember one of the biggest mistakes you can make is not reading your re-reading your thesis before you get grilled on it you're like oh shit did I write that? so you need to read all of that but then you also need to read all the research around it and then also the more the more up-to-date research because it had been like six months or something since I submitted my thesis so that the you know it's moved on so yeah so I did all of this stuff in that month and then also you know like I was sleeping terribly because I was terrified of this thing and then I also had to fly I was in Seattle at this point I had to fly to Norway and I arrived literally the day before my I do think that it helped because I mean I did really well in the defense despite being completely sleep deprived but I was I was pretty trashed for like a month or two afterwards and I think I just asked so much of my body including pushing it cognitively for that long period of time so I think it helped me in the short term but maybe I did pay for it again later on and I I did notice the thing so when the first one I took it it was like taking MDMA it was it felt exactly the same I had that same I had that same you know I think it it felt very similar and then I would also have like a come down like a crash late in the afternoon and that kind of left like towards the end of the month that kind of disappeared and so that I was so then I feel like I maybe wasn't getting as much out of it they'll tell you that it changes over time because you're building these things up and you know it's difficult to tell whether that's true or not so so this kind of benefits and downsides but I've after playing with most of the ones of the market and trying them out I've kind of decided I've kind of stopped using them I agree I've I've done a lot of personal experiment experimentation with the the race attempts in particular peristatum anirisotum oxyracetam and the new peps and all of those and what all what turns me off of the synthetic neutropics is and what turns me off anything that I take that synthetic is I notice a tolerance building effect and then I notice increased side effects as I you know continue to take it which tells me that my bodies adapting in some way which usually means there's some kind of negative feedback and then it's then it's not a true and a tropic because if it's a true and a tropic you shouldn't become right resistant to the effects you should get the same effect every day every time you take right that it's it's an acute it's more of an acute and here's a thing is it really a new tropic or is are you is it perceived are you perceiving that you're better off like caffeine for example people say it's a new tropic but not it's really not it's a stimulant but people will perceive that they're smarter or you know Ritalin or Modafinil which are more just kind of stimulants right so that's why I'll mess with them here and there when I when I'm going to have some fun or if we're going to go to invent I'll take a few of them but I notice this tolerance building and then I get this kind of these side effects that start to build and I don't really like them I also notice a little bit of neurology from some of the race attempts which is I don't I'm completely connected them to that but these are say the same thing which you don't necessarily fuck with so do you guys do you guys do this testing for clients I mean yeah so everybody comes in the door gets one of these wow it's we're going to have to do some stuff together oh you definitely should because you know just you guys know a big reason why we have been so anti something's not because there's not there's research for lots of things that work you know and you don't know if you're taking what you need like I just none of we've never felt comfortable I'm not going to positively about something like creatine but you may not need it you know you're certainly like 30% and non-responders is something like that right so you know that if you give that general recommendation most people are going to benefit from it but you you know not necessarily or if you have some clues with that right with the methylation so if you have if you have methylation difficulties then I'm almost certain that creatine is going to be beneficial because creatine is one of the major creatine production is one of the major things you use methylation pathways for so if you if you're not doing well in that department then creating is just going to offload some of so let's let's walk through this right now I know this is something that we probably would normally talk off-air but I love letting our listeners in on the behind-the-business stuff how would we work this out like how does it walk me through the process of somebody coming like let's say for example we wanted to say I say okay let's let's take let's agree on some supplements that especially with your guys experience that you tend to recommend a lot we decide we're going to take them on as a sponsor now because now we actually have a resource that can test them and say these could be potentially good for you how does that work I I call you I email you and then I how much do I pay to either test like how does this so I back up and give there was a story from last week that just totally blew me away so I did an interview with Rob Wolf on his podcast and I talked about some of the machine learning experiments that we've been doing with our data so most people won't know what that term is and maybe I won't go into it too deep but just know that we've been collecting an awful lot of data over the last three or four years from a thousand athletes and I found a way using an algorithm to predict the results of a blood chemistry or a urinary organic acids test or a stool test or a urinary hormone test using just health assessment questionnaire data so I can get you to answer 51 questions close-ended questions with radio buttons and then I can use that data to predict what we're going to see with dopamine turnover say and so I talked about this on the Rob Wolf podcast last week and somebody heard me on that podcast they talked about they heard me talk about my health journey and they're like holy shit that happened to me what did you do and then he came and did the seven minute analysis which I'll give you a custom link that you can put in the show notes it's important that I understand where everyone is coming from because my algorithms may not work as well on people who come from a different audience you have to understand that all of our clients they came mostly from Rob Wolf from Ben Greenfield and I don't know the endurance athletes a little bit of a self-selection exactly so it's it may I don't know how the important this is so I'll give you a custom link to put in the in the show notes that people want to do this analysis but anyway this guy did the analysis and he knew his main complaint I know this because he wrote in there's like a text area his main complaint was elevated sex hormone binding globulin and low testosterone and then my algorithms predicted perfectly low testosterone and then on the next page after we finished the analysis I showed him a whiteboard explainer video on the effects of cortisol and testosterone that Tommy and I put together and he's like holy fucking shit I need to talk to this guy like yesterday awesome so that's the process he kept going Tommy and I was going to say so this is based on so it's 53 question is 50 three questions but it's like talking about sleep talking about sex drive talking about mood and digestion and so anxiety and we focused on five different things so gut dysbiosis circadian rhythm and what was the fifth one I can't remember anyway so it's like five broad categories that we know are probably going to be reducing performance in an athlete because that's those are the guys from our experience from our from our experience these are the things that for the most part kill the performance in the athletes that we've been working and then so everybody who's come in has done this health assessment questionnaire and it allows us to better understand what's going on in them it's like you know you're a doctor you take a history right so this is part of us taking a history and then they also did most of these tests and then if you if you train the algorithm and you give them the the initial questions and you give them the test results then the algorithm can predict what you're going to see on the test results and most of the people that we work with will still get these tests because they're a you know we want to nail down certain stuff I can't I couldn't predict everything we test everything exactly so we're collecting hundreds of biomarkers some things are very predictable other things not so much I'll give you an example the PCR DNA stool testing that we do it finds a multitude of different parasitic infections so Giardia Crypto Entomibia Histolitica Cyclospora Cyclospora yeast and C. diff over there's like so many different things and when I say machine learning specifically what that means is I'm training the algorithm by example I'm actually showing here's an example of somebody with a Entomibia Histolitica infection here's an example of somebody with a Cryptospiridium infection well I don't have that many examples even though we've worked with a thousand athletes I think I've only seen Entomibia Histolitica maybe two or three times that's not enough training data for the for the algorithms so there's only certain things that we can predict but still but with enough data you should be able to yeah so this is the thing if we were to get together if I was to start say a data co-op and so you've interviewed Michael Ruscio maybe we could get together with him maybe there's some other guy over here that's collected a lot of data and we put all these data's together into a co-op like maybe we could protect fuck fuck the main reason why we are so anti-supplements is for that exact reason because it's just it's small but it could be big for somebody right right I mean oh my god if you have if you have a basic deficiency in a nutrient it's like life-changing discipline right right that could be a game changer now we believe that that's a minority that most people if you're eating good well whole food balanced diet exercising properly you should be okay and these little supplements that everyone's pitching as the next best thing to get you leaner or build muscles a crop of shit but if you got something where we could test and be very individualized even before even more than that that's freaking awesome one of the problems with testing in the in the past is that it requires so much collect you know lots of blood urine school like if you can if you can narrow that down to a questionnaire holy shit that's like the holy grail right freaking yeah it's that's like a billion dollar idea so it could be it could be it could be it could be you know we came up with this idea so we were gonna first it was gonna be we're gonna try and predict so people don't like doing stool tests and urine tests are easier blood tests I mean blood tests are like the gold standard because they've been used for the longest time we understand them the best so we were gonna try and predict say stool and urine from the blood and then we sort of like move further and further way so like we have all this questionnaire data like could we could we could we predict that somebody has a lower than optimal hemoglobin level or lower than optimal testosterone level because we back the results with like the sensitivity and specificity so the likelihood that a positive result is positive is truly positive and a likely likelihood that a negative result is truly negative like I was like this just can't be true like I just I don't believe that it's actually that good but it's at sort of it's almost the gold standard levels like 90 so if anybody understands that statistics yeah so 90 plus percent sensitivity and specificity in general like not for everything but for most of the things and you're like if I can if you can just do that from a a questionnaire and yeah so we'll maybe fuck me that's money right there hell yes and so maybe we'll say that somebody has a gut dysbiosis but yeah then maybe we need to do some stool testing to truly figure out what the problem is but if we know where to start right already you've you've reduced the cost and the access the entry point and because you know some of these tests you know some people like the live in other countries don't have access to them so we're gonna we're we're trying now with people abroad just working from the algorithm you've done two things and when you look at economics and market two things that are and you've done them both that are huge and usually people will do one or the other which is increase accessibility and increase efficiency and you've done both there right if that if that works out the way you're saying it is now you've made it very accessible to people and and it's very efficient so it's become less expensive pretty exciting I mean okay so now you got me all excited about this right I know it's a thing I was just thinking about this when you were talking about in your tropics like how can I are sufficiently to concentrate well holy shit when I first started doing those experiments on my laptop with that algorithm XG boost and those success rates are coming back the the sensitivity and the specificity I was like my eyes are popping out of my head you know talk about you know that's my new tropic is giving a fuck about what you're working right balancing your body the way it should be so can you tell me like some what are the some of the most common ones that you guys tell people are people major deficient and iron or you see the opposite with I talk about I know yes I was too much you see that too high yeah so we well now that we know that it's all in Captain crunch I get it now this is actually yeah so we we went on the Ben Greenfield podcast and we talked about iron overload and we did like a mini sort of program people come to us get a blood test and we sort of look over things and what we really found was that most and it tends to be also masters age athletes so you know maybe 30 35 plus males and they almost all if you're a successful athlete there's definitely a trend towards you know if you if you have a tendency towards iron overload you also have a tendency towards high hemoglobin levels and you know high performance so you kind of like you're self selecting into that population because you're already somebody who's going to be performing better but in the long term it's potentially going to cause issues so we actually see you guys you guys advocate like bloodletting yeah absolutely it's true yeah blood is one of the best yeah and we recommend it to loads of people go go to your Red Cross and donate blood the problem is that both Chris and I are Brits and in the US if you're British or you grew up in the UK you're not allowed to donate blood because they think we all have BSE you know mad cow disease so I so my ferrity I know is a little bit high I'd really love to donate blood but I can't you just play dude you just you just yeah so I've I've got the equipment at work I think I might lead your yourself yeah and I've I've gone sort of like a vampire and your cabinet's full of blood I've gone full circle so when I was sick I was in the hospital having iron infused into me because I was it's adorbing it so badly from my food and now I've got to the point like Tommy where my ferrity and starting to creep up and there's no other signs of inflammation so interpreting the blood chemistry is a little bit tricky but ferrity generally is the most stable storage form of iron right yeah ferrity and transfer in between the two you can have a good idea so what what do you guys see the most what's the most common you see right now amongst your biosis so I mean if you're an athlete so common nowadays so especially the endurance athletes right they're really and this includes me by the way I'm still going out and doing this that's exactly what I'd be doing right now if I wasn't recording this podcast is I'd be out on my mountain bike thrashing the hell out of and what I mean by that is when you exercise it's normal exercise physiology for the blood to be diverted away from the gut towards the exercising muscles and think about it from an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense you've been chased by a tiger what's the point in investing in digestion that's a long-term building project let's just get those muscles going get the fuck out of here and then in fact if you get scared hard enough you literally shit yourself throw up yeah like everything just get it out because you don't yeah you've got you've got you've got nothing to do with it yeah but yeah so what happens is you divert blood away from the gut and then when you stop the blood comes rushing back in quite quickly and you can see a reperfusion injury maybe you should talk about that time I think that we're talking about that yeah so so my am so the research I did part of my PhD was in like stroke models so particularly pediatric newborn babies was actually my there I did my PhD then when you get a build-up of metabolites so it's actually you benefit from this when you do like blood flow restriction training right you get a built an increase in metabolites and then when when you when you remove the cuffs say you get sort of like a rush of blood back and that's kind of sort of part of the adaptation to but it cause it's part of the injury process in a stroke or heart stack or and when you look at particularly long-term endurance exercise if you're going sort of say 80 plus of via to max or so very intense for a long period of time or just going for a long period of time if you look at ultra-endurance marathon races they've done studies and like most of them have blood in their stool afterwards right so you've had this injury to the gut that's so severe that you're actually bleeding into your gut and it's on a it's on a small level you have to see on a stool test but having that continuous you know that long period of time where you're not allowing blood to go to the gut and then the blood suddenly comes back and then usually you throw a bunch of crap food down the hatch afterwards because you need to recover so you're in your in your in your feeding window and then you actually probably just you're just adding insult to injury right the guts the guts not ready and then you're throwing loads of food down so if this is happening continuously then you're you're absolutely in the in the right stage to build up some holy cow because now my mind is getting blown because fat loss one of the most lucrative aspects of the supplement industry is is taking advantage of the invented post-antibolic window the 28 nanosecond 30 minutes after your workout you have to consume something because of course that sells their the process mind you we're training them to that b-smo too and so here you got someone busting their ass really really hard probably on stimulants which is already fucking with blood flow anyway because they're all vasoconstrictive right they're diverting blood from the gut they stop the workout blood is going back to the gut and what they're putting in their in their gut is highly processed artificially flavored garbage to no wonder no wonder you're seeing so many problems yeah and the perfect workout is and you know we love to work on CrossFit I used to do CrossFit a lot but it's that kind of when you're crushing yourself like for like 30 plus minutes or an hour yeah in that kind of in that kind of range or so we work with a lot of obstacle course races and they have like two-hour sessions where they're basically like doing burpees and then right and then you finish that and the first thing you do is you throw back a large meal of just like all this nonsense or shake whatever like that's the last thing your gut needs at that point wow wow no and so you're that's crazy it's so it's like it's like this perfect storm you're kind of creating you're in this environment where you're much more sensitive to things that are probably are not good for you and on top of it you throw things that are not good for you it does play into what you said earlier about frequency right you're tapping into that frequency thing if you could go less hard maybe shorter but more often that might be an advantage in this situation because I don't think how hard and how long do you think you have to go before this becomes a problem so it's I don't think anybody's looked at that directly but we you know if you're going for multiple so I'm more than two or three hours it's a definite but it's also the blood flow restricts a certain amount once you're above a certain amount of intensity so once you're out of that sort of like 80 plus 85% plus a VO2 max if if you're an endurance athlete that's kind of like what you spend a lot of time looking at and so like if you're really around say your lactate threshold anabolic threshold sorry anaerobic threshold for really long periods of time that's exactly when it is so it's that very high intensity for a long for a long period of time where where you're really going to be getting those problems and that's got to be very individual right so we have a lot of OCR listeners too so what do you typically recommend then do you tell them to wait an hour or two before they actually consume food or well yeah and I think that's you know if you can you know wait half an hour an hour and then have like a real real food meal that's going to be digested more slowly it's not going to sort of lead to a huge rush of you know hormones because it gets into the gut what you know because of the processing all that stuff then it's going to give you more time for it to move through all the various stages and I think that that's definitely going to give you the most bang for your buck the other I mean the other problem is we see a lot of people who under eat right so they're really worried about calorie intake and they're doing this stuff. So then you you do have to balance the two. So you may have to find a way to get more calories in the rest of the day and we definitely talk more about eating more food rather than eating less food because that's what we see super hard to balance all these things yeah no so I mean I mean it's not always easy and but one of the one of the benefits of and often we see people go you know low carb or keto and then try and do crossfit or obstacle course racing and that's just like a recipe for disaster never seen it work never seen it work you do like some sleep low so you know you deplete glycogen stores and the next point you just do something light and aerobic and so you you increase your ability to metabolize fat you're also then going to increase your tolerance to longer periods without food right and so then I think one of the benefits you have of being somebody who's metabolically flexible if you want to call it that or if you want to call it fat adapted or you know whatever your terminology is if you can go longer periods without eating then you're actually going to give your gut arrest some of the time too and not only that but you increase which for example like protein is another one like constantly consuming high amounts of protein all the time there's actually some studies that are suggesting that every once in a while restricting protein and then reintroducing it increases protein synthesis your body becomes more so are you are you familiar with some of the and and I think that's the same I mean you can you can come back to any basic physiological principle is of homeostasis right so you try you're trying to get to to some kind of balance point and if you constantly stimulate the body turns down the message right and so you could you can say that about almost everything right so if you take if you take heroin you need more and more heroin to get the same effect if you if you take protein you know there's certainly a point where if you're continuously stimulating that it's just going to say okay well this stimulus is coming all the time I'm just going to turn down the message slightly because I don't want to be constantly forced to do something that I want to do so there's there's always going to be this balance of so if you talk about protein you could also talk about carbohydrate you know feast and fast right you want to give the stimulus occasionally but also you need to take it away to get the best benefit from it Wow fascinating now what what do you what do you think about in terms of to prevent gut dysbiosis in athletes comparing things like a you know ketogenic diet versus they know for long distance endurance ketogenic diet being seems to be okay for a lot of them right yeah what do you what's better for it or is it entirely individual I mean my experiences can be very very very individual yeah really individual and so you you always going to come back to it depends and you know if you try it and you feel like shit then you're probably not doing the right thing that's tricky though because you might feel like shit in the beginning in the short term and there's definitely some studies so my my background when I first got into some of this more kind of holistic type health approaches health engineering we like to call it rather the medicine it was through multiple sclerosis so multiple sclerosis research and my step brother has multiple sclerosis and we kind of tried to deconstruct the disease to figure out all the kind of things that could be happening and in some of the ms research they've kind of shown that in the short term if you go to Kees genetic diet the diversity and certain you know so diversity isn't always good but you know in general it tends to be better but the you know some of the beneficial species the ones that we think of almost certainly beneficial they tend to decrease in the short term but then they increase again the long term so you know what you know sort of early on maybe you don't feel so good maybe you're not getting quite the same performance been the long term you might see a benefit and it's kind of I always use the analogy of heart surgery right so if you look at heart surgery in the middle of it it looks like a murder but you went if you went if you went to the end actually you stone the guy up and he walks out the door so so some things will take some adaptation but you know in terms of in terms of preventing that kind of dysbiosis we know so so treating what you use to treat and what you use to prevent are going to be slightly different right so we know that if you're reducing symptoms you know something like if you go as far as an elemental type diet I know Michael Roushio talked a little bit about this stuff on your show too but you know one of the big problems is going to be that food processing so the food is coming into the gut in a state that the body isn't used to and then you're going to drive a certain bacterial population in a part of the gut where you don't want it so that's that's a big part of the problem too so if you're just eating actual real food that's going to be that's going to be really beneficial to start with and that's going to prevent you causing those problems down the line and then also just that not like you said that continual stimulus like you come straight off you come straight off the track or straight off the training session and then you just suddenly throw a bunch of food down the hatch you know I think you know if you can wait a bit then you're going to give that gut in the bodybuilding world it's normally a protein shake or a bar you know some process bar or process shake that I don't know how many times the flavor to superlose right I don't know how many times I've seen the especially carry their their drinks and shakes and they literally go to the bathroom they don't even wait till they do they're trying to catch that anabolic window so quick that they go to the restroom when they're done with them so they still have this then they're thinking oh I got this big pump I've got to get the nutrients in there right away and they shuttle this you know liquid sugar drink down or shove this bar and you've got because it's so because of the way it's processed you've got these you've you've got the the macronutrients or you know the building blocks so you've got like glucose or you've got amino acids in a part of the gut where they shouldn't be because they take time to be digested and then absorbed through the gut but if they're ending up somewhere where and they sell that by the way they sell that so if you faster digest yeah if you take the target then it runs straight through your gut and then it's gonna be you know you're going to get that glucose spike even even faster you're like well hang on a second is that actually a good idea but it's probably not Holy shit you're blowing my mind right now that's crazy the more I learn about this stuff the more I realize why I have so many gut problems is there was years of me and I doing all these things did it too yeah absolutely and you know we've both done it and that's just yeah as part of what you become this broken athlete because you you train the way you're told to train and you you eat the way you're told to eat more of the same food that was causing you trouble in the first place yeah I think everything that happened to me was entirely preventable if I just not eaten wheat in particular and probably dairy too then I would have been fine it's not necessarily the amount of exercise I was doing so I was doing 20 hours a week of exercise which is is is too much oh well what I found that work for me is I had to do an elimination I did a food intolerance test which isn't a hundred percent accurate but it's a great starting point I did food intolerance test elimination diet and I had to avoid completely avoid and what I mean by avoid is like it couldn't even I couldn't even have a single breadcrum on my food I had to avoid gluten I had to avoid and dairy I had and then I used probiotics and I had there were certain kinds of probiotics that seemed to help and I also used this is when I started using medicinal cannabis cannabis also had a profound effect on my gut health so is that as to like a THC CBD mixture or just like the the plant itself so so I had never gotten I'd never really gotten the results I later on gotten from cannabis until I went down to Belize with him and I'm down there and I had made the decision that I'm like you know what I'm on vacation like I've been dealing with these gut problems I'm just gonna fucking enjoy myself I'm eat whatever I want we also had bought a bunch of shit dirt weed off of the cab driver and when I say dirt weed it's like like when you you know this if you you smoke weed it's like a bag of like looks like you know crappy we hey and you gotta smoke like two joints to feel like you're getting anything so I'm smoking the hell is like fine there's not a problem at all so I get back to the states and I'm not doing that anymore cause I'd never really used cannabis before I'd use it occasionally but wasn't a thing I got back to the states and within two weeks my gut problems came back in a hurry and I started thinking like is it because I was relaxed on vacation is it because this like what was it and then I read some articles on cannabinoids and their effect on the gut and on the immune system and how they have immuno modulating effects and so I tried cannabis again however the cannabis that you find normally especially here in California which is like the mecca of of marijuana the cannabis that I found was this super high THC strain and a CBD and it didn't really do it for me and so I did more research and I found that really what I needed was a predominantly CBD strain with a little bit of THC a little bit of THC he's got benefit to but I need to have a be able to have a high cannabinoid load and I can do that with THC because the cycle active effects just get bearable for me I don't like getting super blazed at least not on a regular basis not on the podcast yeah so occasionally actually we're sober on this one actually so but I found but I started using high CBD cannabis along with you know eating a certain way using probiotics and man it was like a gods and now I use cannabis not super regularly but on a medicinal basis because I do find that it makes a big difference when it comes to my gut inflammation you know as a like after I notice a little bit of a you know gut inflammation whatever I'll start to use it whereas before during that whole heyday I had to use it pretty it was like every single night I had to use it so in the endurance world I know athletes are starting to use cannabinoids now as performance enhancing substances which I found absolutely I find absolutely fascinating are you guys running into that at all working with we don't get no we don't get a lot of that actually so sometimes but so it can you know both animal models and some human studies suggest if you get the right ratio of CBD and THC and you'd need the TSE THC because the CBD sort of potentiates they sort of potentiate each other's effects can definitely you know improve like gut inflammation and things like that so you know we we see occasionally but it's not something that we come up very regularly but I do want to go back you you mentioned that you know the food sensitivity suit food sensitivity testing and elimination diet and we very regularly use the elimination almost everybody gets on some version of that depending on where they are and we don't actually do food sensitivity testing because it's really expensive and the elimination diet if you look at even you go to traditional traditional medicine traditional rheumatology and they'll tell you that to figure out what food intolerances or allergies you have the elimination diet is the gold standard yes still period and it yeah and so that's but you know it's time-consuming but what it also does is it makes you be mindful about how the food affects you so you remove food and then when you add it back in you have to think oh hang on a second how do I feel after I eat this oh I feel like shit so I shouldn't eat that teaches you so much more and so yeah the process of being mindful and then this is something that Chris talks talks about it was my wife so she my wife had done spent not quite a lot of time in the in the lab studying dairy allergies and she was like yeah no you don't need to do a food sensitivity test this is bullshit and and in fact if anyone listening if you want to I'll just send you the list of foods because what it's going to be is it's you're going to be sensitive if you if your gut is messed up and inflamed you'll be sensitive to what you're going to be sensitive to what you're ever you're eating a lot of whatever exactly exactly and then there's there's definitely some some regular offenders so gluten dairy nuts seeds nightshades and by the way if you just started eating a paleo diet you may still be eating some of these things right so what I did was I eliminated wheat and dairy but then I started eating tons of nuts and eggs and seeds and my wife is like looking at my diet going um you just kind of got out of the frying pan and into the fire like why don't you just try eating this and it's like okay yeah and that worked really really well well I love what you said about the elimination and then and going through that process so you can start to connect those dots because we talk a lot about people don't think they don't even they don't you know it's amazing to me and and I know this from my own experience like growing up as a teenager you know some days you have really gnarly shits some days your gut fills all bubbly some days you have random headaches some days you don't sleep very well connect but you don't connect to anything it's just you think there's like this this fairy that just gives you a headache or a bad shit eve