Natural Strength: Dr. Eric Helms' Journey to Pro Bodybuilding

Save 20% on all Nuzest Products WORLDWIDE with the code MIKKIPEDIA at www.nuzest.co.nz, www.nuzest.com.au or www.nuzest.com

This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Dr Eric Helms about body building, the history behind enhanced versus natural, Erics own decision to go down the natural body building route, and the journey it took for him to win his pro card last year in 2023, 19 years after he begun in the sport. We also discuss Eric’s supplement and nutrition strategy for his competition shows in 2023, and what is next for him.

Eric is a coach, athlete, author, and educator. A trainer since the early 2000’s, he’s worked in the US Air force, commercial gyms, private training studios, medical fitness and strength and conditioning facilities. As a part of 3DMJ he coaches drug free strength and physique competitors at all levels. Eric has competed since the mid 2000’s in natural bodybuilding, unequipped powerlifting and dabbled in Olympic lifting. He earned pro status as a natural bodybuilder with the PNBA in 2011 and competes with the IPF at international level events as an unequipped powerlifter.

Eric has published multiple peer reviewed articles in exercise science and nutrition journals and writes for commercial fitness publications. He’s taught undergraduate and graduate level nutrition and exercise science and speaks internationally at academic and commercial conferences for fitness, nutrition and strength and conditioning. He has a BSc in fitness and wellness, an MSc in exercise science, a second masters in sports nutrition, a PhD in strength and conditioning, and is a research fellow for AUT at the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand. He is also co-founder for MASS monthly strength and conditioning review.

Links:

Eric Helms: https://3dmusclejourney.com/about/eric-helms/

Iron Culture podcast: https://ironculture.libsyn.com/

MASS monthly research review: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/mass/

Eric on Mikkipedia https://podcast.mikkiwilliden.com/8

Eric and Cliff on Mikkipedia https://podcast.mikkiwilliden.com/76 

Contact Mikki:
https://mikkiwilliden.com/
https://www.facebook.com/mikkiwillidennutrition
https://www.instagram.com/mikkiwilliden/
https://linktr.ee/mikkiwilliden

Curranz supplement: MIKKI saves you 25% at www.curranz.co.nz or www.curranz.co.uk off your first order

Creators & Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast, I speak to Dr. Eric Helms.

00:16
Eric and I talk all about bodybuilding, the history behind enhanced versus natural, Eric's own decision to go down the natural bodybuilding route and the journey it took for him to win his pro card last year in 2023, 19 years after he began in the sport, which just any athlete will know takes just so much determination and commitment. And so we discuss what his process.

00:45
of staying motivated and involved and just the things that he went through. Eric and I also discussed his nutrition strategy and his supplement regime, which by all accounts isn't that much to be honest, for his competition shows in 2023 because as you will hear, he had several shows in the lineup to the competition that gave him his pro card. So it was super awesome to chat to Eric. And also, of course,

01:13
to ask him about what is next for him. So Eric has been on the show a couple of times before and I've got links to those episodes in the show notes. He is a coach, athlete, author and educator. A trainer since the early 2000s, he's worked in the US Air Force, commercial gyms, private training studios, medical fitness and strength and conditioning facilities. As part of the 3D MJ coaching team,

01:42
He coaches drug-free, strength and physique competitors at all levels. And as Eric and I discussed, he's competed since the mid-2000s in natural bodybuilding, unequipped powerlifting and dabbled in Olympic lifting. And we do actually have a bit of a conversation around that. He earned pro status as a natural bodybuilder with the PNBA in 2011 and competes with the IBF at international level events as an unequipped powerlifter.

02:11
Eric has published multiple peer-reviewed articles in exercise science and nutrition journals and writes for commercial fitness publications. He's taught undergraduate and graduate level nutrition and exercise science and speaks internationally at academic and commercial conferences for fitness, nutrition, and strength and conditioning. Not only that, Eric spends a ton of time both in his podcast Iron Culture and also for Mass

02:40
He does weekly or bi-weekly YouTube live sessions answering questions. So he is a wealth of information and is of complete service to his sport and enthusiasts like us who are super interested in learning from him. He has a Bachelor of Science in Fitness and Wellness. He's got an MS in Exercise Science and a second master's in Sports Nutrition and a PhD in Strength and Conditioning. He's a research fellow for

03:08
AUT at the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand and as I mentioned he is also co-founder for Mass Monthly Strength and Conditioning Review and I have got links to where to find Eric and his podcast and Mass and other podcasts with me. I've got all of those links in the show notes so you can find loads of ways to connect with Eric there. Before we crack on into the show though I'd just like to remind you the best way to support

03:36
to support Micopedia is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform because that increases the visibility of the podcast in amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get the opportunity to learn from the guests that I have on the show like Dr Eric Helms. Alright team, please enjoy the conversation.

03:59
title. So it's like now the algorithm has made even just putting out information suspect. So it is, we have new problems in 2024 regarding good science information versus access like we had 10 to 15 years ago. So true, actually. And you know, you could be rolling in it right now, Dr. Helms, if you took advantage of that algorithm, given what I've just described, your presence on the internet.

04:29
Uh, yet you stay true. My ethics constantly hold back my pocketbook. It's terrible. So Eric, I'm so pleased to chat to you. Obviously you've been on the podcast a couple of times, but I don't know that we've necessarily delved into, um, your history and background in bodybuilding, but also just bodybuilding as a sport. Like I'm super interested to sort of begin there and then

04:57
talk about your own, I mean, journey is a really overused term, but that's the only thing I can sort of think of there. There you go. It's not, no, it's not overused. It's a trademark 3D muscle journey. I'll be sending you the royalty claim. Roger. And, and just sort of, and of course your most recent success with your pro card.

05:24
So these are the things that I want to chat about today. Normally, I would have sent you a little bullet point of discussion points, but I mean, that's your 101, basically. So it's all about you. I figure you're not going to need to prep on that. To be honest, I do have to prep sometimes, because if someone wants, if it's an audience that is really going to actually benefit from me talking about specific PubMed IDs and findings and stuff like that, I'm happy to prep. But most of the time, if someone

05:52
brings me on and I need to prep for it, they're asking me questions that are outside of my wheelhouse anyway. Yeah, that's a good call. I appreciate that. So first, I want to chat about bodybuilding. And there's, I know that there is obviously natural bodybuilding and that's the sport that you're involved intimately with. But then there is the, is it enhanced? Is that what I would call it? Bodybuilding? What is the name for that? I think most...

06:20
There are enhanced bodybuilders, but there are plenty of people who compete in non-tested organizations who are not enhanced. So I would say test it and untest it is the most proper definition because it doesn't make a claim about everyone who's competing in it, right? Yeah. And would people who are not taking any sort of substance which would prohibit them from being in the natural tested, would they also go up against competitors?

06:49
who knowingly take substances. Yeah, it's actually pretty common. Wow. And this is more of something that you'll see in the states because the NPC and IAPB Pro League are so large and they're the most organized as far as a competitive structure. They have a nationals, they have national qualifiers, they have a little more robust of a system.

07:16
you know, where you compete in the United States being so geographically large, but also so reasonably well populated has to do with what shows are in your local area. So, you know, if you go to a local NPC show, which is the largest untested organization, and you just go watch the novice division, probably more than half of those folks are drug-free. It depends on the division, obviously. Like in the open, immense bodybuilding, it'll probably be the largest percentage if you were to look at.

07:45
say the novice women's bikini is probably the smallest percentage. And then there's also a question of like, are you using a banned substance versus what is the dosage, how many are you using, how long have you been using it for, et cetera. But there's actually some surveys, anonymous surveys, so they're more likely to be accurate that indicate if you go to like a regional NPC show that can qualify you for nationals, probably...

08:14
like a large number but less than half of the competitors are using banned substances or at least anabolic steroids. There's a recent one that came out of those I think is led by Guillermo Escalante. That's really good work on bodybuilding as well. But there is a point in especially the bodybuilding division or the women's physique division, the more muscular divisions where to get to the highest level

08:41
It is not a question of whether you're taking something, it's how much and for how long. Like there are no Mr. Olympias, for example, maybe ever, or at least since like Larry Scott, and I probably think even then, so it was the mid-60s, who were drug-free, you know? And there probably haven't been any who've, you know, like top five in the Olympia or top 10.

09:07
when we're talking about someone who is like the WNBF overall world champion. So for example, this year's Brian DeCosta. He's huge. Don't get me wrong, but he's, you know, five, eight, five, nine, and on stage at 190 pounds. Um, you're five, eight, five, nine, and you win the Olympia. Um, now we're talking 250 pounds, 260 pounds. So like a 30 to 40 kilo discrepancy in stage weight at a similar level of body fat. So,

09:38
Yeah, it's different. Yes, totally. And Eric, are there still, you know, I'm completely ignorant. This is why I'm asking you all the ignorant questions. Like, I, as I understand, taking large amounts of anabolic steroids is not good for your health. Like, do you look at people in the non-tested sort of federations and think, May, in 20 years, you'll be really, you know, I'm not going to say you're going to regret doing that. Because actually, if we look at...

10:06
what elite athletes sort of what their overall goals are. A lot of them would say that, you know, that actually winning is their absolute primary concern. But like, is health an issue for these people later in life? Yeah. And this is something, this isn't me, you know, looking at it as an outsider. This is from me having talked to many people who I know personally, who are, you know, have committed to trying to get a pro card.

10:34
and ISBB or who have competed at that level. You know, I very much sit in the natural bodybuilding community, but it's not like there aren't, you know, like, cross talk. And the bodybuilding community is large, and there is definitely some division between enhanced and natural federations and bodybuilders. But, you know, you hang around long enough in the fitness industry, and especially as a bodybuilder, and you make friends with people. And I have no moral judgment against them.

11:01
you know, personally, to me, it's just a matter of how risk averse are you? What values do you have, motives and goals behind your bodybuilding journey? Um, and you know, some people make a different decision and they want to compete at the highest level in the enhanced ranks and they're willing to accept those risks, um, very much in the same way that someone who decides to be a professional golfer might be less concerned or like

11:30
more risk averse than someone who pursues free soloing and rock climbing. So I've definitely seen some personality differences. But I would say, on average, a typical enhanced bodybuilder is more similar to the typical natural bodybuilder than someone with a general population. So there's some camaraderie. I know a lot of people, and having talked to them, absolutely, at a certain point, they're making hopefully informed consent decisions about.

11:59
Yeah, the risk and accepting what they're experiencing. And I think what you said about large amounts of anabolic steroids is critical because, you know, like we don't have, there's not great data that is experimental on this because of illegal status. We have experimental data on typically just single drug like testosterone, exogenous testosterone.

12:29
up to reasonably high levels but, you know, like the classic Bayesian study, that's the lead author's name, that was 600 milligrams of testosterone compared to lifting or no lifting with or without it and how they made more gains. Disroulene body mass, I don't know if it's actually, you know, actual muscular gains, you know, lifting and not taking steroids versus, you know, not lifting and taking steroids. That was 600 milligrams. If you're talking to maybe the average...

12:58
person who is trying to turn throw into the national level, not even a pro, they're probably, if you count like total androgen load, like two grams of drugs are taking. So more than three times that amount. So we just don't have data on that. The only data that exists on that, if you were to look for it, is observational in nature. So you recruit a bunch of people who are using this and you can measure them over time at multiple time points or.

13:25
You can cross-sectionally compare them to people who are not using it, who are matched for height and weight and other covariates. You can look at some of these effects in vitro or theoretical models and things like that. But the unfortunate thing is the compounds that are being used are often only been tested in animals. They may or may not be pharmaceutical grade. They're largely experimental.

13:55
there was a huge amount of pharmaceutical exploration that was done in modifying the testosterone molecule to get various androgenic to anabolic ratios and all this stuff. And I'm by no means an expert. I'm just kind of, I have a very surface level understanding of this, to get various different effects and different conversions and aromatase to water retention to impacts even psychologically.

14:25
There's everything from Trenbolone to Decadurabolin to actual testosterone that is not, you know, the synthetic version of it. There's orals, there's injectables, and most people are doing polypharmacy of these drugs that don't have data on them. And they're not just sticking to the class of anabolic androgenic steroids. Your typical person at that same level I'm talking about in the open men's bodybuilding division trying to get a pro card is probably also taking insulin.

14:53
They're probably also taking growth hormone. And when they're prepping for contest, they may also be taking thyroid, clenbuterol, and potentially even other experimental drugs like DNP, which is creating uncoupling at the molecular level to enhance heat production, which, if overdosed, much like insulin, if there's not carbs around, can kill you acutely. And then in competition,

15:22
because there's all this potential water retention related to the polypharmacy, they're typically taking prescription diuretics while restricting the water. So a lot of, there are serious health complications when you're at that kind of level of dosage. It's not the same as say I'm on TRT, you know. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And are there doctors who work at the top of the...

15:47
top of the field with these athletes. You know, I'm thinking, you know, in Tour de France, for example, there were medical doctors administering the performance enhancement drugs to the athletes. And it was under, I'm not saying this is right or wrong, under very controlled, it appeared sort of situation like, or is that occurring? You're probably referring to like the Icarus documentary? Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. I mean, I just got the impression that it was, you know, there were people who sort of knew what they were doing.

16:16
But is it all just like the Wild West out there? It's far more like the Wild West. And obviously, there's going to be some regional differences here. Like there are known instances when we're talking about Olympic sports, or professional sports in some cases. And yes, we're talking about Ivy pros, but it's not really a professional sport, right? Where you actually do have a doctor who is overseeing a doping program. I would say now in the modern era, that is far rarer.

16:43
especially in countries that aren't as top-down organized politically. So in a New Zealand, a United Kingdom, an Australia, a US, there are of course instances of athletes using performance-hancing drugs, but most of the time what is occurring is they are sourcing it themselves or through a contact. They have some ability to get these.

17:10
there may be the closest thing to what you're describing is kind of a gray zone, sort of legal HRT clinic where you order it online and you provide very preliminary evidence that maybe you have low testosterone, which can range depending upon the quote unquote clinic, anything of I feel tired lately and not even getting a blood test or a single blood draw to determine testosterone levels, which you could just, you know.

17:39
diet for the day or, you know, take it in the afternoon. Take it at a weird time. Exactly. Right. All you need to show is that you're like low normal and then you can get a reason, like an unreasonably high dose to something that's actually legit HRT clinic where they want to see serial testing and actually follow up the endocrine-side guidelines. No one's doing that. It's always the former. But far more people are actually pulling the trigger and just let me get a source for what may or may not be in.

18:05
an illegal substance for personal use in the country I live in. That's different from the UK to New Zealand to Australia to the US and how well that's enforced and the penalties. And then the doctors involved on basically a personal GP level and they are simply doing like a minimal harm practice. It's the modern medical approach to dealing with anyone who is self-prescribing drugs. You provide them information.

18:33
And within the context of the decisions that they're going to make, you provide them the best care you can. So you encourage regular blood tests. You discuss with them the risks they're incurring. You are doing family screening for history of cardiac disease, et cetera. So when I talk to these folks who are doing it, they have a drug dealer, essentially.

19:02
And then they also talk to their doctor openly, ideally, about this and they get regular checkups and regular blood work and they will modify their dosage based upon their health to the degree that they're willing to incur risk. And they typically have a drug coach who is someone in the industry who is known to know about how to do bodybuilding pharmacology. And kind of the scary thing in my opinion is that almost never are these drug coaches

19:32
like endocrinologists or MDs. They are self-taught chemists or maybe they have a degree in pharmacy or something like that. But they just have a lot of experience and they've read some underground manuals on this stuff. Yeah, so it is definitely more the Wild West than some kind of like 1980s.

19:58
you know, East German doping protocol with sports doctors administering it. Although this occur in some places, like there was a weightlifting scandal in Thailand that came out, et cetera. But that's typically not happening in democratized countries, if you will. Yeah. Super interesting. The way you described it, I was thinking about Breaking Bad, like building Breaking Bad. It's like kind of similar, but obviously different. Well, sometimes, many times you are buying from the same people who would be selling

20:28
recreational drugs and you know, like, yeah, like from there are a spectrum from talking to these, these folks who engage in this, there's a smart way to do this of having a connection to an actual pharmaceutical grade supplier and going to see your doctor and all that to, yeah, I know this bro at the gym who sells me stuff and I just trust him that what I'm getting is actually what I've asked for. Yeah. And I never see my doctor. Eric.

20:56
Cause I know in your competition, like there are people, I'm sorry, his name escapes me now, but you were chatting about him on one of your podcasts and he's like 52 and he took out... Yeah, yeah, there you go. Right. And so 52 is, you know, it's like middle-aged or just over middle-aged. Like is the age, is there an age difference between those who are successful in natural bodybuilding? Is the longevity the same in the performance enhancing or do they seem to exit more quickly?

21:26
Yeah, I don't have great data on this, like demographics, but there's actually in a book by a historian and it is, I'm forgetting, I'm going to look it up really quick while I tell you basically the findings. It's basically going over the history of the Mr. America competition and it's a really good book. He's written John Fair. So

21:52
And John Fair has written a lot about the history of bodybuilding and the history of physical culture. And in his book, The Mr. America Competition, which goes all the way back to 1939 or 38, he talks about the age that the competitors died at in a certain excerpt from the 90s after Grogg's fully inundated professional bodybuilding and even high-level amateur bodybuilding.

22:19
And it goes from being basically in line with what the expectations of life expectancy are for Americans in like the 60s and earlier to then in the 90s being a lot of guys dying in their 50s. It's quite unfortunate. And there has been a lot of publicized deaths in the last handful of years of professional enhanced bodybuilders. And yeah, I think...

22:47
It's pretty rare to see people competing as IFBB pros at the highest level into their past their early 40s, which is still pretty impressive for a sport in general. But it is really common, not just, oh, there's some interesting rare examples for natural pro bodybuilders and pro in any division of natural physique sport to hit your peak.

23:13
in your 30s and 40s and then sustain that peak if you can stay musculoskeletally healthy, and you can still train into your 50s without really seeing noticeable declines until you're in your 50s or 60s. And this is interesting and it might be surprising to other people who are in the S&C world but not specifically in bodybuilding because they're thinking about bodybuilding as maybe a strength or power sport or the training being equivalent to it. But the

23:43
The actual force you produce or the power is not the dictating factor. It's more of like the impulse, if we want to talk about it from a mechanics perspective. So the force-time integral, right? So I think it's interesting when you look at weightlifting, powerlifting, and bodybuilding, they have an earlier age out that scales with that. So there's actually been some demographic data on when do weightlifters hit their peak and when do they stop.

24:12
seeming to be at the highest level. And on average, in the similar late 20s, you go a standard deviation up to get to your early 30s. In powerlifting, it's mid 30s, you go a standard deviation up, you get to your early 40s. So very common to see powerlifters at a high level in their 40s. And then I don't have demographic data on bodybuilders, but I can tell you from being involved in the sport as a coach and an athlete, very common to have people at the world level.

24:39
who are pros in their 30s and 40s, it's more common to see high level pros in their 30s than their 20s. Oh, interesting. And so much of that just has to do with the time it takes to keep building muscle and building muscle and building muscle. And the reason why there's a discrepancy between power lifters and weight lifters is because power lifters, it doesn't matter how quickly you squat, it just matters, can you produce the force, overcome the sticking region, and then actually have maximal force production? And more often than not, like,

25:09
Bodybuilders, in my experience, powerlifters are unable to keep training in the way they want. Because if you lift weights heavy, hard, and progressively for competitive outcomes for 20 years, you're going to get some injury. And eventually, that injury may prevent you from training the way you want. And there are more constraints on a powerlifter than there are on a bodybuilder. There's no way of getting around it. Powerlifter has to squat bench a deadlift.

25:38
you have an AC joint that doesn't allow you to bench press anymore, you can start doing uneven dumbbell presses as a bodybuilder. If your lower back starts playing up as a power lifter, really going to make squatting and deadlifting hard, but as a bodybuilder, you can shift to back extensions for higher reps, and you can do hack squats. If your knees start playing up with high loads, you can do blood flow restriction training.

26:05
so many ways around it as a bodybuilder. You can be creative, because hypertrophy responds to low loads, high loads, just so long as the procterina to failure is there, progression is there, not progression of load necessarily, just progressive overload of any type. So you can see that bodybuilders can sustain the stimulus necessary to keep growing, or at least maintain a peak for a much longer time. And there are numerous examples of people winning.

26:32
pro titles in there or even the early 50s. And so for example, Jeff Alberts, for those who are referencing, he is one of my colleagues at 3DMJ, he's one of our coaches and he and I both competed at Worlds. And he was the oldest in the class of the pro men's lightweights out of 16. He placed fifth. He's actually the highest placing American in the competition, you know. Crazy, yeah.

26:56
And I am no spring chicken myself. I play seventh out of ninth in the middle weights as a, and I was 40. Um, so, uh, and I don't think I was the oldest in the, in the middle weights. There were competitors older than me. Uh, Jeff was the oldest in the light weights, but there was also gentlemen in their forties in that same class as well. Yeah. It's super interesting, Eric. And as you say, you know, you're in your forties now, not wait.

27:21
I think I might age you up. You are, you're like 40. You're 40, right? April will be 41. So you can say I'm in my 40s. Yeah, yeah. Okay. And I believe you started like, what, late teens, early 20s in the sport? I started training. I started training, like when I started seriously lifting, I started training for bodybuilding, not necessarily for competitive bodybuilding, but to get big and strong basically. Yeah. And I started lifting at the age of 22.

27:51
Okay. And at that time, or not probably at that time, but when competing sort of came on your radar, was there a choice for you as in natural versus enhanced or were you not aware of the delineation at that point and just sort of gravitated towards what? I don't know. Did both. Yeah. So it was available, but you had to be aware of it. And this was, it's not pre-internet by any means 2004 when I started the thing.

28:20
I started lifting in, I want to say May of 2004. So I had literally just turned. Oh, no, I just turned 21. So I started lifting when I was 21. Too old to know when I started lifting. There you go. So geez, in May, I will have my 20-year lifting anniversary. That's exciting. Wow, yeah. So anyway, yeah. So natural bodybuilding, the first natural competition and organization of natural bodybuilders that I was aware of started in the late 70s.

28:49
the big first proponent of it was actually a guy named Chet Yorton. And Chet Yorton is one of the very few handfuls of, very few bodybuilders, only a handful who've actually beaten Arnold Schwarzenegger. Now, Chet Yorton beat Arnold, I think, when Arnold was like 20 or 19 and Chet was in his like 30s. So, Chet was a high-level bodybuilder in the late

29:19
relatively known and relatively inundated that anabolic steroids were being used by bodybuilders. This first started in like the mid-50s, right around the time Nilavar and Dianabol, the first synthetic version testosterone hit the market. And you could just go to your doctor and get them legally prescribed. It was very, very easy to get access to them. It was very normal. There were testosterone derivatives like synthetic, you know, injectable, but non-modified.

29:48
testosterone as early as the early 40s, but it didn't really become commercially viable until – I don't want to get into the history of it too intense, but there's something called a marker degradation. It was developed where you could make testosterone from yams rather than having to get like kilograms and kilograms of like bull testicles or things like that, like some of their original preparations were made. And the initial ones, the esters were very short-acting, so you had to inject almost every day or you had to put a pellet.

30:17
underneath your skin and it would slow release it. So yeah, it wasn't until the mid to late 40s until there was even a possibility of it kind of being something that people could use and there were longer acting esters of testosterone. I think in 1951 or right around the end of 51 or 52, long acting injectable testosterone esters where you could do like, I think once a week injections came out and were FDA approved.

30:45
you can actually track down the FDA approval. So it was like the early 50s it started, and that was right around also the same time people started to speculate, ask that, hey, maybe this could be useful for a sports competition. And then when you look back at records of USSR weightlifting performance, right around the mid-50s, it kind of jumped up unexpectedly. And so that's statistical analysis of records. And then when you actually look at the historical data, there's a fabled conversation between

31:14
John Ziegler, who is the sports scientist for the USSR and the US weightlifting coach. And this is when he says, hey, our weightlifting team is using steroids. And then Ziegler goes back. Sorry, I swapped who is the person there. Goes back and actually starts experimenting with some of the retired lifters at York Barbell with injectable testosterone.

31:42
With mixed results, they weren't huge fans of it, probably because the side effects at the time and not really knowing how to mitigate them or knowing dosages. And then it was not until the clinical trials had been done in Nilavar and Dianabol, which was the big one, came out in 56 and 58, that all of a sudden now it's really common. And I think the first report of a high school American football player taking steroids was in 1960. So the 60s, it really starts to expand.

32:10
But it was kind of like this new dirty secret, or maybe not even dirty at the time, because they don't have the same connotation, but this new kind of like secret weapon that a lot of the pros were using in the 60s. So anyway, to circle back, Chet Yorton finds out about this in the late 60s. And he, because bodybuilding at this time is so tied into health and performance, almost every bodybuilder is also a weightlifter. Bodybuilders are seen as, bodybuilding is about building your health. It comes from that as its roots. It's starting to split, but it hasn't fully branched off.

32:39
So you're getting this first time there's basically the competitive drive and the modern technological advances in pharmacology are starting to divide bodybuilders in terms of them having to make a values choice. And the values choice of we value health to a degree where we don't think performance enhancing drugs is something we want to include in what we consider bodybuilding started with Chet Yorton going, what the hell? And basically starting a natural bodybuilding organization.

33:08
which didn't really become successful or mainstream until the 80s. Okay. So the late 80s, early 90s, if you track some of the still existing, largest natural bodybuilding organizations, is when they were actually created and became popular. And there was also the awareness that the longer you took these, the more of an impact it had. So in the United States, in the East Coast, is where kind of natural bodybuilding was born.

33:37
the late 80s, early 90s, and they started implementing polygraph testing or the quote unquote lie detector test, even though it doesn't technically detect lies. And that's the way of screening for, okay, we need you to be ex-impreviewers drug-free. And then when you win a pro card or if you're a pro when you win money, you also have to pass your analysis test. And now we're seeing in modern era as cost is coming down, we're starting to even see some out of competition, your analysis testing. So

34:04
But that's kind of the story of the development of natural bodybuilding. There was a time period before the 50s where all bodybuilding was natural. And then there's a time period where the most mainstream organization got inundated with drug use because it made such a huge difference. Drug use in sports is common to the degree that it enhances performance for that given sport. So it's common in weightlifting, common in powerlifting. But because...

34:31
there's not a perfect transfer to how much muscle do I have and how strong I am. It's not as ubiquitous in powerlifting as it is in bodybuilding. Because in bodybuilding, it doesn't matter what you do. It's just how much muscle do you carry. And like I said, 30, 40 kilogram difference at the highest level in people using the whole chemical warfare suite of drugs they can get access to at the highest safe dosages that doesn't kill them immediately. And the enhanced side compared to...

34:57
you know, just someone who's genetically elite has trained for 15 years on the natural side. And you have this huge disparity in performance where, you know, the, the world champion in natural bodybuilding would probably be able to get a pro card, but not be able to compete at all if they, that they chose the right show, or maybe if they competed in like the classic division, which is a newer division in competitive physique sport. That's kind of a throwback to the seventies and eighties where they actually have weight limits at a given height.

35:26
So it kind of caps the amount of drug use you can use. There are some examples of natural athletes getting a pro card in the untested plastic division and doing decently well, like top 10 in a pro show type of thing. But we're talking about open bodybuilding. The disparity is so high that as soon as you turn pro, if you turn pro, period, it means you're incredibly talented. And then trying to compete is basically not going to happen. And we think we actually have.

35:55
evidence of this. So Ronnie Coleman, who probably most people have heard of, the story is that he actually turned pro as a natural athlete. And he actually did it at a drug tested event, the International World Championships in the IFBB, which are slightly different outside of the NPC circuit. And they are IOC recognized and they do drug testing. It's not extensive and I don't think they're really serious about it. But his roommate is a well-known natural bodybuilder who they both competed in it. And there was this circuit where

36:24
A lot of the naturals who wanted to be in the biggest organization, NPC, would compete in what's called the team universe, which is one of the few drug tested NPC shows. And that was where a lot of the naturals who wanted the largest exposure would go and wanted to be seen kind of with the NPC IPV circuit. And then if they did well enough in team universe, the team portion is the US team that would qualify them. They'd go to the world championships and there they'd be competing against all the other nations.

36:52
who were trying to get an IPP Pro card and many of them are trying to cheat the drug test so they wouldn't typically do very well. So anyway, Ronnie Coleman goes there and he actually wins, claims drug free and probably the best evidence is that he was about 220 pounds or 100 kilos at 5'10.5", which is huge. Don't get me wrong, looked incredible, shredded, amazing proportions. One of the best natural bodybuilders of all time if he was to stay natural. But by the time he's at the peak of his career...

37:21
he's competing at 130 kilos. So if he was on gear at back then, it was such a low dose that he was able to then change something to put on the kind of difference you see between naturals and enhanced over time. So the most obvious interpretation was that this guy was so genetically gifted that he could turn pro drug free, but then to become Mr. Olympia eight times rivalingly Haney, he had to hop on the gear, and then he was just as dominant.

37:50
He was the most dominant bodybuilder of all time. Yeah. Okay. And so before I delve into you, Eric, the difference, is there a money difference when you compete at... Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So is that like one of the, I don't know, one of the reasons why people will go in the non-tested versus tested? Yeah. I mean, so if you ever go to the Olympia, it is in Vegas.

38:19
It's in a big stadium. It's got a massive expo associated with it. And when you compare it to other professional sports like boxing or MMA, it's not as big. But compared to something like natural bodybuilding, it is a factor. It's factors larger, tenfold or different. So for example, the Mr. Olympia winner this last year in the open men's bodybuilding division won $400,000 for winning.

38:48
Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. If you win the overall at WNBF Worlds, I think the most that's ever been awarded because you get a prize money for winning your weight class and the overall it's like 10K. Okay. So we're talking a 40 fold difference. And even if you mopped up the entire scene, like you did multiple different federations, world championships, uh, like if you win the Jordan cup, if you win the Mr. America, which is now

39:15
been brought back as a protested event. If you win IFU Worlds weight division and overall, and if you win the natural Olympia, which is the PMBAs, you're probably looking at 30 grand. So if you literally just were God's gift to natural bodybuilding and you just flew around the world and did every single prize money show, you would make one-tenth of what the Mr. Olympia winner won. And the unfortunate thing is that even as a pro athlete,

39:42
you're paying an entry fee of $200 to $300 for each one of those shows. You're paying for your own drug test, so your entry fee is that covers part of it, but the polygraph you typically have to pay out of pocket. And also, you have to pay for those flights in those hotel rooms. So let's say you're in the States, you're driving. We can bring down the cost maybe to, and you get in like a Motel 6 type of deal, $500 per show. So you're probably spending.

40:11
to do all that competition, three grand. So at the least, you know, probably closer to like five or 10. Yeah. So it's in. Yeah. That's huge. That's such a difference. And then of course, I mean, if I'm thinking about you, Eric, so when you began in bodybuilding and you were aware of the different divisions, did any part of you think, oh, like you'd

40:40
go down the non-tested route or just, yeah. So when I started, I didn't know that natural bodybuilding competitively was a thing. So for 2004 and most of 2005, I was just wholly unaware of it. And then I joined the bodybuilding.com forums, which was the kind of proto social media at the time and Facebook was just kicking off.

41:05
And I became aware and there was a contest prep forum. So people were logging their contest prep, but I went there seeking with them because my plan was sometime in mid 2000, sometime in 2005, maybe late 2005, early 2006, I decided, you know, I want to compete in this thing. Yeah, that might've been 2006. And I got on those forums, started reading people's experience. I started talking to local bodybuilders and I started watching like the Olympia and reading Flex Magazine like online, right? Going to bodybuilding.com.

41:35
I think I watched the 05, 06, and 07 Mr. Olympias. And it wasn't until, I want to say 2006, that I became fully aware. Oh, there's pro natural bodybuilders out there. You can get a WNBF Pro Card. And I found out going to Borders, I finally noticed that. I was like, hold on. Right next to Flex Magazine is Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness Magazine, which

42:01
If the IFBB NPC was kind of at the peak in this era of enhanced bodybuilding or untested bodybuilding, the big dog for tested because of the magazine era was the WNBF. The World Natural Bodybuilding Federation started in the late 80s, was owned by a guy named Chalo at this time, who wasn't a front-facing member of the organization. He had his acting president and all that. But the reason why it's important to mention that he owned it is because he owned a magazine

42:31
So you had like, you know, men's fitness or fitness for men only, like three or four or five different fitness magazines and Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness Magazine was the magazine of the WNBF, INBF. And you could look and see all the different competition results. You could see pictures of people and you could get on the cover of it. And it was at Barnes and Nobles and Borders, which for those who are not Americans or Canadians, those are, there's like one or two in every city.

43:00
And that was where you went to get books and magazines. It was a very big deal. So being on the cover of that could get you things. So nobody really goes into bodybuilding for the money, period, enhanced or otherwise. Because even the enhanced guy winning $400,000, he might be spending $2,000 a month on anabolic steroids. Cool. Yeah, yeah. So really, you do it for the love. You do it for the art. You do it for the competition. And you do it because you're just drawn to it.

43:30
And so anyway, but one of the ways or the most common way that bodybuilders make ends meet is not through the prize money they win, but potential endorsements, you know, working with a fitness clothing company or more commonly a supplement company. So the world champion who was pretty dominant in the early and mid 2000s, the guy named Jim Cordova.

43:55
And he had this great muscle bellies, great shape, looked like he was 200 pounds. He only competed at 165, 170 pounds, but looked like these 50 pounds heavier because of his muscle shape and condition, very Arnoldesque physique, a little shorter. And he was on the cover multiple times of this magazine and it actually resulted in him getting a paid sponsorship from a very large supplement company, MuscleTech. Right. So that's the type of thing that you could see back then. And that all went away and changed with social media.

44:24
and natural bodybuilding because it's very mom and pop has been behind the times and it hasn't been able to provide anything near to the same kind of prestige and supplement sponsor opportunities you can get as an enhanced bodybuilder. So some people go that route for that reason, for exposure, but I think more so just because it's bigger and more organized. That's the choice that a lot of people make. But from an actual participation standpoint, there is actually a similar number of competitors

44:53
all of the natural bodybuilding organizations compared to the one very dominant untested organization. So there's a huge market for it. And in fact, the NPC IFBB is starting to do drug tested shows on a much higher scale and they're trying to expand into the market of natural bodybuilding because they see the demand for it. Oh, amazing. Yeah. So for you, or actually- I never even answered your question. I'm sorry.

45:18
That's all right. No, no, no problem. So to be very clear, I became aware that natural bodybuilding was a viable pathway sometime in late 2005, early 2006. I became a huge bodybuilding fan and I actually got to attend, I want to say in April 2006, a INBF WNBF show that was a pro qualifier in Augusta, Georgia when I was still stationed at the Air Force. Actually, I just got out of the Air Force and my wife Barbara was still in.

45:45
and we would move six months later. But I got to go to the show and I got to be on the judging panel as a test judge, trying to help out the local scene. And I got to see live these national athletes. And I saw a guy win a pro card and he had these ridiculous legs. He was shredded. And they achieved these looks that, while definitely smaller, I really resonated with. I didn't really like the huge physiques of the IFBB pros. Like, I was attracted to Frank Zane, for example.

46:12
as kind of a statuous physique. And I really liked Pumping Iron, the documentary of Arnold and Franco Colombo and all those guys. And that was about as big as I thought looked aesthetic to me, which is just a personal judgment. So when I saw the physiques that could be attained, that there was a heavily competitive environment, you could turn pro, that they were getting polygraphed, and that it seemed like a level playing field and it was a viable pathway, I immediately shifted gears. I went from trying to rationalize

46:41
the eventual decision of taking anabolic steroids in the United States at a time when they were vilified. This was right around the time they brought Mark Gwyer and Jose Canseco in front of Congress and, you know, questioned them about their drug use. You know, knowing that my family wouldn't respect that decision and, geez, do I want to deal with getting a drug deal and all that? And I was like, you know, if I hadn't been exposed to natural bodybuilding, I don't know how far I would have gone.

47:10
I was definitely working on going, well, I love bodybuilding. As from an artistic perspective, what it feels like to do something hard like that and push myself, what it's given to me from an emotional perspective and a cathartic experience, a positive thing in my life at that stage. Maybe it wouldn't stay positive if I had gone down the enhanced route. But I didn't want to give that up. And I also knew that I had a competitive drive. So maybe I need to think about being able to do that. But when...

47:39
The opportunity to compete and not have to use anabolic presented itself, I was frankly relieved because I knew my own mentality that if I was training as hard as I could, if I was doing my nutrition as well as I could, and if I was dotting every I and crossing every T, and I wasn't where I wanted to be with a reasonable time investment for my competitive outcome, well, what am I going to do? I'm going to up the dosage. And I knew that that was a slippery slope that I really didn't want to find myself on.

48:07
So that's why I chose to go the natural route, is to kind of draw a line in the sand that was self-protective. So I had a little bit of foresight for, surprisingly, at the young age of 22, 23, that I really don't, like I'm really pleased with me thinking about future Eric, to be honest. So. Yeah, nice one. Eric, is it fair to say that you've always been chasing a pro card? Is it, does anyone that go into bodybuilding

48:37
Okay, yeah. And I don't think everyone, I know there'll be people who will do a one and done, but in the initial phases, was that also something on your mind like, that's where I want to be? Yeah, I remember, and then I think there's a danger in when you start competing in something that you loved before you started competing in it, because it can definitely, that extrinsic motivation can supplant some of your intrinsic motivators. And that did happen to me. I remember saying to my wife during my 07 contest prep,

49:06
If I didn't think I could become Mr. Natural Olympia, I don't know if I would keep lifting. It was literally, soon as that sentence left my mouth, I looked at her and she looked at me and she was like, well, that's really weird because you've been lifting for three years now and it's your whole life, and you'd love it, and just because you couldn't achieve some outside thing, you'd stop? I was like, yeah, that's bad. That was my immediate thought.

49:32
so obsessed with the achievement and where I was going and the focus and the drive in my goals that I had lost my connection to the journey, which is why I... And I started purposely kind of retooling my thought process and thinking about, you know what, let me focus on being the best version of me and just letting the chips fall where they may and not forgetting that I do this for bigger reasons than a plastic trophy or a pro card. But at the same time, I...

49:59
I didn't want to lose the fact that I did like the competitive aspect. I wanted to see like what is a maxed out Eric Helms? How does he compare to everybody else? I wouldn't judge myself or feel like I'd failed if it was never getting my pro card or getting my pro card or being a good pro or being a bad pro or being a world champion or just being the novice tall 07 champ or winning nothing ever again. But what I eventually got to, it took years.

50:29
was I want to max out my potential and see how far I can take it. Aim for the stars if I hit the moon, fantastic. And then also see where does that land me competitively. And yeah, but as soon as I saw that gentleman win his Pro card at that show where I test judged, and as soon as I saw Jim Cordova, WMBF Pro World Champion on the cover of Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness Magazine, very early on, I was like, what a long time goal of mine is to get

50:59
pro status in the World Natural Bodybuilding Federation. There are a lot of different federations out there. I've competed in many. I live in the states. I competed in the INBA, the International Natural Bodybuilding Association. I actually won a pro card with the professional arm of that in 2011. I competed with the NGA, the National Gym Association, which has been a long time natural bodybuilding organization. But the goal from probably 2006.

51:27
was that I articulated was, you know, one of the things like bucket list items, I want to get my WNBF Pro card. And I started competing with the IMBF, the amateur arm in the States in 2009 was the first time I did a WNBF Pro qualifying show. Okay. And as I understand, if I'm going to fast forward us 13 years, 2019, were you like close to pro?

51:53
then in one of your last competitions in that year. Am I right about that? The number of times I've been close, I wish it was just 2019, but no. So in 2009, so the way you get a pro card is that in a pro qualifying show, which is dictated by, are there enough competitors in your division and has it been sanctioned as a pro qualifier? Those two things need to be met. The standard at the current time is that there needs to be at least seven in your division.

52:23
And it needs to be sanctioned as a pro qualifier. So you've proven to the heads of the organization that it's a good enough show, high enough quality and attracts enough competitors. And then you actually have to have the numbers. Then what needs to happen is you need to win your division and then win the overall. So you win your weight class and then you win the division overall. So a standard setup, let's say you've got 10 bodybuilders and a pro qualifier and they weigh in and you've got...

52:52
You get four in the light weights, four in the middle weights, and then three in the heavy weights. The top guy who wins in the middle is the lights and the heavies. Those three then go into a comparison, and you're comparing to see who's the best of those three winners. And then that's the overall winner, and that overall winner gets a pro card. There are also higher level amateur shows that are typically called super pro qualifiers. They have to be given a sanction as being able to allow multiple pro cards to be given out.

53:22
substantially more than seven to be able to give out multiple ones. And they will give them to people in the ranking order of the overall. And you can get them within your weight class if the weight class itself has seven or more. So you need to have eight. I think eight. I forget. So if there's eight lightweights and you win the lightweights, you're a pro. And then if you go to the overall, and there's enough for another pro card, the person who places second to you can get the pro card.

53:50
Or if you play second to them and they place first, they can get a pro card. So there can be sometimes as many as, like for example, at Worlds, Worlds for the amateurs is a very, very competitive show. Hundreds of people come out, you have to qualify to even get there. Every single weight class winner, if there's at least the right number in the class, can get a pro card. So they can award five pro cards at Worlds. The bantam, lightweight, middleweight, light heavy and heavyweight winner, when Worlds as well, the 10 and could all get a pro card.

54:19
So it depends on the show. So anyway, in 2009, I was in one, two, three shows that were pro qualifiers. And I got into two overalls and placed, I think, third in those, didn't get my pro card. And then in the last show I did, I placed second to the guy in my weight class in the heavy weights who went on to win the overall and get his pro card. And then I basically had a repeat of that in 2019.

54:47
I placed second in the first show I did in the year in April. In June, I actually won a show that was a pro qualifier, but they didn't have enough athletes in the show to get a pro card. And then in my last show in July, I also placed second in the middle weights and didn't get to go to the overall. So the number of times I've either gotten to the overall, won my class but not won the overall or placed second to someone and not gotten to go to the overall.

55:18
is like six or seven times. So, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And can you, when you're looking at your progress, Eric, do you look back and think on reflection, okay, I can see, you know, outside of the numbers thing, like you can see why, what was holding you back, like from a training or a physique perspective rather than there just weren't enough people there, you know, like they're looking at looking inside, I suppose. Yeah. No, absolutely. And even in 2023.

55:47
I had a few other of these kind of bridesmaids experiences, if you will. So when I did the New Zealand show, the WNBF New Zealand, I actually won that show. I won the overall, but I was not awarded the Pro Card for a combination of factors. There wasn't enough athletes. And then when you start the federation in a new country, because it's only the second year that we've had the WNBF New Zealand show, there's a panel that decides whether or not you're at a Pro.

56:17
standards. It's a little bit subjective. We're not doing it next year. So now we finally have the numbers and the judging panel themselves can decide whether the pro card is there and it'll just be based upon numbers. But at that show, they said, hey, you're not quite in peak condition. So it was a leanness issue, right? And in prior years, I probably could have done better if I was leaner in some of my earlier competitions. And other times it was just, I didn't have the size and the symmetry. So like in 09, the last show I did, I was in very good condition.

56:46
in terms of leanness, that's a condition is when bodybuilders say that, they mean basically how lean do you look on stage? And you see every detail. And then there's the other things that are judged in bodybuilding are your proportionality, which is left to right, top to bottom, front to back symmetry. And do you have a small looking waist, broad shoulders? Do you have what's called an X-frame, sweeping quads? And there's no muscle group missing, you know. If you have great, you know, V taper, but you have small legs.

57:14
that's going to be really challenging to overcome or vice versa. If you look great from the front, but you turn around and you have no back width and you have no glutes, no hamstrings and no separation there, you're going to lose a lot of points from the back. So I was just too small early in my career and I don't have a wide waist, but I don't have a small waist and I don't have narrow shoulders, but I don't have broad shoulders. So for a guy like me, especially at six foot.

57:44
I really need to create a lot of size in my lats and a lot of size in my delts. From the front, I don't look narrow. When you look at my, there's what's called mandatory poses in bodybuilding. You go through a symmetry round where you do front relax, side relax, back relax. They're not relaxed, but you're not flexing any specific muscle group. And then you have nine muscularity shots. You have a front double bicep, a front lat spread. You turn to the side, then you do a side chest.

58:13
a side tricep, you turn to the back and do a back double bicep, a back lat spread, turn back to the front, and then you're doing a ab and thigh and a different variations of a most muscular pose, right? Those two rounds are graded separately. The symmetry round, at least in the INBF, WNBF, is judged essentially, the best way to describe it is you imagine the person as a silhouette.

58:38
You don't think about their muscularity, their leanness, et cetera. You're just comparing the silhouettes and it's your symmetry score. And it is, how much of an X frame do they have? How proportioned does everything look? Not how cut is into the dual muscle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The muscularity round, you're judging them in those poses. So for a guy like me with my build, I will do very well on side triceps, side chest, because you can't see.

59:06
that I have a wider waist or narrower shoulders. And you just see the amount of muscle mass I'm carrying in my leanness. And if you were just to kind of like weigh my muscles on a scale and not think about how they fit on my frame, I'm not small. But in those front shots, I look narrow. So I've had to work very hard on building my deltoid size, my lats size and my quads. I haven't had to work that hard on my quads because I have naturally big legs, but my upper body specifically width, I've had to specialize in. And that's...

59:36
really didn't improve to the point where it made my physique look complete and symmetrical. Until this year, even in 2019, there was an incompleteness to my physique that made it challenging for me to win, even when I was in peak condition. And 2019 was the leanest I'd ever been at that point, like exceeding even a good standard of condition. And the feedback I got from the judges was, you need more size, which is that and the pandemic is why it took four years to compete again.

01:00:05
Yeah, yeah, super interesting. Anyway, I'd love to check to you about 2023 and the process whereby you ended up with your pro card. And this is the bit where, you know, I mean, this is super interesting regardless of whether you're interested in this in sport or in bodybuilding in general, because of course it brings in, you know, the nutrition side of things that, I mean, look, listen to the bias. Yeah, I'm super interested in the nutrition actually. Sure.

01:00:33
And I remember actually, you and I were, we were at a lunch for Hellistic Performance Institute. And you said, yeah, I've begun dieting or something. I'm like, oh, are you tracking? And you were like, no, not tracking at this point. And as I understand it, you sort of, I mean, it makes sense, right? Because you've just been doing this for close to two decades that you've just got this innate knowledge of what's in food. You can sort of look at something and.

01:01:00
pretty much estimate how many calories it has. But can you talk me through your process on the nutrition piece and how you sort of went from in April or whatever, right through to September and changes you made? Yeah, absolutely. So big picture what people are generally doing is in modern competitive bodybuilding in the bodybuilding division.

01:01:27
for natural athletes, you have to get really, really, really, really lean. We can't get as big as the enhanced guys. So the way that we look most impressive, and this is true even in the enhanced ranks, is to have zero visible subcutaneous fat. Yes. So you can see all the muscles and regardless of the size of them. Yeah. Yeah. And even someone who is not that big, who is truly peeled and just shredded, it is a...

01:01:55
It's a sight to behold because it's a level of detail. The muscles pop. You can see everything flex. They look much bigger than they do in clothes. Me on stage in peak condition, like any decent natural body builder, they're like, oh, wow, that's really impressive. And then me, as soon as I get off stage and I put on a shirt, especially one that I'd wear in the off season when I'm 15 kilos heavier, all of a sudden I look like I'm someone who is.

01:02:23
maybe just come out of chemo. You know? So, because your face is sunken, you've lost all the body fat on your face, you know, especially if you're like a little dehydrated or tired on the day, which is very common when you have low energy availability. First thing in the morning, it's like, wow, like I look like a skull shrink wrapped, you know, with skin on it. So that is very much an illusion. And the way you get to it is by getting very, very, very lean. And that takes a while.

01:02:52
So the standard kind of length of a prep for someone who gets to elite levels in conditioning and men's natural bodybuilding and what the standard is currently today is typically around six months. Anywhere from probably like four to eight is what you'll hear if you talk to competitors and shows. People who aren't in shape, typically it's shorter than that. And this is also somewhat the competitive structure. Worlds is typically the second or third week in November. And there are.

01:03:20
pro qualifiers and the world's qualifiers for amateurs, all the way from like March or April all the way up to two weeks prior to Worlds. So I started my diet in February and with the intention of going all the way to Worlds and competing in November. Right? So- What body weight were you at in February? I started at 96 and that was definitely like a bloated high body weight because by the end of the week I was like at 94.

01:03:50
So, you know, some of that is not reflective of body composition. So I was about 15 kilos after the initial bloat loss over stage weight. And sorry, Eric, when I think about your preparation in 2019, what was the highest weight that you were sort of at before you started dieting down? Yeah, there was a time in 2018 where I got to 98. But when I actually started my prep, I was like 89.90.

01:04:20
In 2018, I pushed my body weight up and really tried to just have kind of a concentrated gaining phase. And then I spent March and April of 2018 and then a brief period in October in 2018, bringing my body weight down to a better place to start my diet. And then I basically ate around maintenance or a very slight surplus for November, December, and then started my prep in 2019, just like 10 kilos over stage weight because I compete right around 80 kilos.

01:04:49
And is it more comfortable, is that sort of around 10 kilos above stage weight a comfortable place for you to be compared to say 15 kilos above? You know, they're both within like my, where I could settle, you know. I'm actually kind of exploring this off season to figure out like, hey, how lean can I be post show and feel relatively healthy? And you know, like not be food focused, be sleeping normally, etc.

01:05:19
And the more time you have, more runway you have for a gaining phase, the more optimized and efficient that process is. Because at a certain stage after the novice stage of building muscle, if you're in a calorie surplus because of the rate limiting step of how quickly can you gain muscle as a natural athlete who's already built 90% of the muscle you're ever going to be able to build based on your genetics, the rate is slow. You can only gain so much in a given time period. And it's also spurty.

01:05:48
you'll introduce a novel training program and you've assessed some things and you land on the right combination and you make great gains for like 10 weeks and then it's grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, grind, so it's not necessarily linear either, but it is, no matter how you dice it, relatively slower, the more advanced you are to gain muscle compared to earlier. So you're gonna gain body fat with it. And because...

01:06:12
I'm competing in a sport where I have to get down to having basically no visible subcutaneous body fat. You only want to get so heavy and then you want to kind of rein it in. So you either you take a slow, steady approach or you can take a faster approach and you have to do what's called mini cuts or off-season cuts in the off-season. And I do a combination of both. I go as slow as is reasonable with the level of precision that one can have and still eating a normalish diet for a bodybuilder.

01:06:40
And then once my body fat gets to a certain level, I cut back. So that was up to 98 in 2018. And I allowed myself basically a slow gain from 20. After my season ended in 2019, to getting as heavy as 96 kilos in early 2023.

01:07:10
like 94, 95. That's where I really feel like I'm probably at what Speakman and colleagues would describe as my upper intervention point, where my hunger is almost gone. I get satiated very easy. I feel like my energy expenditure is at the highest it is. And it feels like work. I've never been able to push myself up to 100 kilos except for my very first season after show when I was binge eating and at the time when my metabolism hadn't recovered.

01:07:40
So yeah, the heaviest I've ever been able to intentionally push my weight up was not unintentionally from binge eating. It was 100 kilos in 2010, and that was very hard work. And that was back when I was under the impression that you really had to bulk to get bigger. So my off seasons have actually gotten progressively lighter, but I was a little heavier in 2023 to start than I was in 2019. But my peak weight was actually lower in the off season by two kilos.

01:08:10
And where do you think like you'll end up in this sort of build phase? So if you're trying to, yeah, that's a good question. I'm right around 87. Yeah. So I'm like, you know, 15 pounds over stage weight, uh, seven, seven kilos. And this has been an interesting one because for the first time, now that I actually turned pro after, you know,

01:08:35
finally getting this goal that I set in 2006 and 2023, so 17 years later. Now I'm competing against pros, right? So if I had to scrape and crawl to the point where I turned pro and was able to play seventh out of ninth, now I've got the goal of trying to place fifth at Worlds when I do decide to get back on stage or higher, top five, which is a tall order. No pun intended because of my height and bodybuilding. I was the tallest middle eight. It's a tall order for someone who...

01:09:05
is it took long as I did to become a good enough amateur to turn pro. To do that, I have decided to be very focused in my approach. So while this has very much been about Eric the bodybuilder, my goals from the start were always strength and size. The first competitive endeavor I had in the kind of the Iron Game umbrella was actually powerlifting in 2006.

01:09:31
And I've done 20 powerlifting meets, five weightlifting meets, a Highland Games competition and two strongman competitions in my, you know, since 2006, right? So I've done more strength sport competitions than I have done bodybuilding. Bodybuilding I think I've done 17 or 18 shows over the years. I've heard you talk about that and that you like, I think your description was you'd come in a solid B minus.

01:10:00
I think if you had to rate yourself in that sort of strength-based sport, whereas in bodybuilding you've got more potential to reach a higher potential, obvious and as evidenced by your pro cards last year, I guess. Yeah, and there's multiple ways to kind of quantify that, but probably if I was to look at what's the best total I've ever done, and what if I did that at a lighter weight class and I optimized everything and...

01:10:26
And where do I think my peak capacity as a powerlifter would probably be like totaling mid 600s at 83 with a tough weight cut, you know, but just kind of sneaking in there. And that would be good enough to get me like a decent performance as a master's competitor. In the open division, I would not qualify for Worlds. And if I was in the even smaller, less powerlifting developed nation than New Zealand, and I could get to Worlds, I would place

01:10:55
I think in Malta, I would have placed like not dead last, but like 34th or something like that. And IPF Worlds, which is the balancing Federation that's road tested. So you know, like I'm a, I qualify for nationals for New Zealand, you know, not, not, and I probably, I think, I think last year at nationals, when I, when I looked at it, I would have placed seventh at New Zealand nationals and probably in the, in the twenties for the US nationals, kind of give you some comparison. But in bodybuilding.

01:11:25
I have won the equivalent of Nationals in New Zealand. I have won multiple smaller shows, and now I've actually placed seventh in the pro division at Worlds. So it's not as big of a sport, but I have done some reasonably large shows and competed against some pretty high-level competitors. Most of the people who have beat me are pros now. I can't think of anyone who's placed higher than me who didn't eventually get a pro card. So...

01:11:54
while my physique may not have the structure to handle 600 pound squats, I am pretty, I guess you could say. So yeah, to give you some perspective, like someone who placed seventh at Worlds in the 83 kilo class in the Open is totaling 100 kilos more than me. Crazy. Right? So it's something that is just, it's not in the realm of possibility for my body. Yeah. Yeah, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I hear that.

01:12:24
Eric, how, so obviously in 2023, you started at 96 and then you used that sort of intuitive approach for how long until you actually started to have to, I don't know, did you ever count, like I believe you were like ballparking calories, but how did that sort of, how did that progress?

01:12:46
Yeah, so I mean, it is important to stress that in my first three seasons, I did have like specific targets for macros and I weighed them and I hit them all the time. And it's just that I found that having a more auto regulated approach, if you have the skill set to do that, it has some advantages to it. And it is one less stressor to the competitor if unless they actually like it and benefit from it, then you can make an argument you keep it and even though they could eyeball it. And it's really it's not about tracking.

01:13:16
It's about reaching the outcome, right? So is the target rate of weight loss ideal? And are you hitting sufficient minimal thresholds for carbohydrates, fat, and protein? Are you having a good qualitative, healthily sport performance, supportive diet, right? And if you can achieve that without tracking, fantastic. And if you can auto-regulate it based upon hunger, satiety, energy levels, performance, sleep, and knowing when to kind of pull back the stress and then institute it, when to strike as far as chasing weight loss versus allowing recovery.

01:13:45
If you can have an intuitive sense of those things, that's an advantage. But not everyone does, right? That takes experience, which I fortunately have. So how did I do that? Initially weight loss is very easy. All those same reasons why I couldn't even push past 96 kilos is the same reason why the weight started falling off me quite easily. And as a nutritionist, you'll appreciate this. A lot of it was just swapping and maintaining the same lifestyle.

01:14:12
I had a good structure of eating and that's something I've had for a decade plus now where I eat kind of the same qualitative meals all the time and I have the same habits. So every morning I go on a walk with my wife and we go eat at the cafe. I'm now just making very different decisions, right? So when prep starts, now I'm having poached eggs on toast with a side of salmon, mushrooms and spinach, not a bowl of oatmeal, a side of salmon and eggs, right?

01:14:41
calories are getting cut easily there by 300, if not more. Lunch, I'm having like a nothing naughty protein bar, either like a vegetable protein, like with lentils and two pieces of fruit and a carrot. Now it's one piece of fruit and I'm making that protein a little leaner with less of the lentils and more, but just the protein itself. Boom, I've cut 200, 300 calories there.

01:15:09
You know, my post-workout shake, I'm having that alone without a carb source, like I would in the off season, it would also be a carb source. And then for dinner, essentially all we started doing is we started eliminating some of the really high calorie options. So you know, when we make food at home, instead of having like veggie burgers with a block of feta, there's the cheese and a slice of full fat cheese and barbecue sauce on it, now we're having wraps, right? So we go from having an 800 calorie dinner to a 500 calorie dinner.

01:15:38
And when we have the option of eating out, we're not going to get sals on Saturday. Maybe I'm going to get sushi, you know. So my dinners were dropping 300 to 400 calories as well. So I've already accumulated a like a 700 calorie drop from my norm just with those qualitative changes that feel quite similar to me. And then before I go to bed, instead of having a sweetened Greek yogurt, I'm just having a plain one that I add equal to and I've cut another 100 calories. So I've...

01:16:07
it very easily created a thousand calorie deficit with these qualitative changes that I'm not tracking. I'm just making those swaps and then I'm also making sure I get a certain step count. And on the days I can't hit that step count, I'm just doing a quick cardio session on my rower. And I dropped very quick. Nothing like, not too quick. Performance was increasing, but I dropped from 96 to I want to say the high 80s by March. Yeah. Amazing. Eric, what, what, around what?

01:16:36
What protein intake would you have? I mean, I imagine you have an idea of that. I'm just curious. Yeah. Yeah, it was probably between 190 and 220 grams. Yeah. So, you know, each meal is probably around 40. And then I've got the, on workout days, it's probably closer to that, the higher number I'm measuring, so I got to scoop away. And then I get a big bolus from the Greek yogurt that I ate 40 ago. But it's like 50 grams right there. Oh, wow. And how high protein you'll get? I actually like the skier.

01:17:06
Oh, yes. No, I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so at what point, like, so you got to sort of the high 80s. And when did you realize that you would actually need to be a little bit more precise with your calories? Well, the interesting thing is basically the lower your numbers get, and as far as what do you need to institute a deficit, the more precise you have to be. And this is just a function of numbers, right? So like, and it's also a function of the rate of weight loss that you should try to achieve.

01:17:35
So when you're trying to go from, I was probably 20% body fat, trying to go down to teens, you can lose faster without really having a physiological impact. You're moving within the upper and lower intervention point, again, as speak when my colleagues would define it. Less potential for a downside to losing on the faster side, right? But once you're trying to go from, say, 12% body fat to 8% body fat, you're losing faster.

01:18:01
or from 8% body fat even more so to 5% body fat if we're guesstimating where I eventually hit. Now, you should be losing slower because you can only lose fat so fast and if you push it higher than that, you notice that you get very flat, lethargic, you feel poor, your sleep gets worse and your performance goes down, presumably due to pretty substantial

01:18:29
the downstream effects there and probably some muscle loss if you can keep that up for too long. So you don't want to lose too quickly because you can't rush the process. That's something anecdotally that most coaches I've experienced and athletes will tell you like, okay, it looks like I'm five pounds of fat over stage weight. If I try to get there in five weeks, it's not going to go well, even though that seems like a reasonable rate of weight loss for normal fat loss conditions. And I could even go faster than that back when I was 96 kilos.

01:18:58
But when I'm 96 kilos, I've got 15 kilos of fat on me I'm gonna lose, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when I'm 83, I've only got 3 kilos of fat on me left to lose. So the relative proportion of 0.5 kilos is much higher. So if you have 3 kilos left to lose to get into true high-level elite level of conditioning, you're probably looking at 10 weeks of dieting, right?

01:19:24
to do that without pushing it too quickly. And there may even need to be like a diet breaker a week off there to get there. So therefore, your calorie intake is going to be lower and you need to be more precise because you're only trying to institute maybe a 200 calorie deficit, right? So if your error on any given day is a hundred calories, you could be eating up half your deficit, you know, even then that's precise if you're only off by a hundred calories and guesstimating.

01:19:50
So there was a certain point probably by, I want to say, June, July, where Berto and I were no longer just qualitatively let this happen and have your step count here. We were going, all right, let's have a calorie intake range and let's have a step count range and you can auto-regulate within those based upon what you're seeing, the rate of weight loss and how far we are from competition, energy levels, mood, et cetera. And you know, one of my life demands on a day-to-day basis outside of bodybuilding, you know, if I've got...

01:20:18
three meetings with students at AUT, I don't want to be like lethargic and unfocused. So that's not a data strike, right? So yeah, I went all the way from early Feb until through, I would say May, I remember I did a, we did an April seminar in Mexico, myself and Alberto, and I was still eyeballing it and just kind of letting it happen. May carried on. And I think in June was where we started to actually talk about numbers. And at that point,

01:20:48
I still wasn't necessarily weighing food or tracking it all the time, but I was having a running goal in my head, like, okay, I know where I'm at. And then any time that I would make something at home where I didn't feel confident eyeballing it, just chuck it on the scale. And any time where we're eating out, I would just make the... The trick to eating out is you make decisions where even if you are wrong, the impact is very negligible, right? Because you can think you're great at eyeballing and you might be.

01:21:18
But it is literally impossible to tell the difference between a pasta dish where there's one additional tablespoon of oil in it or not. Oh, 100%. Yeah. You just can't tell, right? And the chef does not care about your nutrition plan, right? So if you got to a restaurant, you're estimating a pasta dish, it is a true estimation. And there could be a 200-calorie swing quite easily, even if you're quite good at engaging other things. But if you go to a restaurant and you get a grilled chicken breast on salad, you're

01:21:47
Okay, so let's say you think it's two cups of salad and it's actually three. It's lettuce and your dressing is on the side. Okay, you're off by five calories. It just can't hurt you. Okay, it's a grilled chicken breast. You thought it was 100 grams. It was 150. Oh boy, 40 calories. It just doesn't really matter that much, right? So that's the type of thing where if you make the right decision, your potential error is going to be a lot lower.

01:22:16
And if your average estimation is quite precise, then it doesn't make a difference. And ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. If my scale weight's not going down, if I'm not getting leaner, then I'm clearly making systematic errors. That didn't happen. I got in great shape and won my pro card. So the approach definitely worked. But I was being more precise and more careful and much more discerning later on in prep than I was earlier on. Because when I'm

01:22:42
instituting a 900 to 1100 calorie deficit, an error still means I'm losing weight at a good clip. And I'm the type of person, if you were to talk to Berto, who is my collaborative coach who I work with and one of my other colleagues along with Jeff and Brad and Brian, I have more of a tendency to undershoot than over when prepping because my mindset is like, let's get me in a list, get leaner. And he serves to make sure that I don't chase too hard and actually eat up lean mass while burn myself out.

01:23:12
not that it would be extreme or terrible, but like it is really a game of let's preserve as much willpower, minimal amount of stress, least amount of suffering as possible. Because getting to elite level standards of conditioning and natural bodybuilding in 2023 and 2024 is not just a willpower game. It is that plus a needing to stay in the game and making sure that you preserve your physiology to allow you to get there. So if you can make it feel easier,

01:23:42
you can push yourself further to get a better result. So you have to be both efficient and smart and work hard. And I know we're talking bodybuilding here, but I just think that's such an important point to reiterate to anyone in that who wants to improve their body composition. Exactly what you've described with you undershoot because it's almost, you've got this, you're not impatient, but you just want to get as lean as possible. Yeah. And

01:24:10
And as you said, then you have to instigate willpower and discipline and all the things which aren't, they're not, they're not infinite. They're finite. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So if you can hold out and use willpower when you need to use willpower, then, you know, regardless of your goal, it just makes perfect sense. Absolutely. Erik, I understand that you had, the way that you structured it for yourself was having some low days and some high days. So you did a bit of calorie cycling.

01:24:39
Did you put those high calorie days in on days where you had heavier training loads or does that not? In my experience, it's individual as to whether that's helpful for someone or whether they're better on another day. How did you work it for you? That's the same experience I've had as well, is that it really depends on a lot of factors, volume of training.

01:25:05
assumptions we have about the type of substrate that person gravitates towards using more at rest and an exercise. Their subjective feelings, whether they go hypo or not, and just a lot of individual characteristics. And so for me, I think the way we structured it was that I had the weekend, Saturday, Sunday as my high calorie days that were in the low

01:25:35
2000s and then anywhere from say like at the very, very, very lowest during prep 1400 to up to like 1700, most of the time upshifted for most of prep by a couple hundred calories there like 1600 to 1900 calories on low days. And then we even got to a point where I had two even lower days where I would do that on Friday and Monday. So the rationale there is that Friday...

01:26:01
The light's already right there at the end of the tunnel. At least psychologically, you've got your two refeeds coming up. And then on Monday, you just came off of two high days. Both physiologically and psychologically, you'll probably be fine on a low day. Glockensens topped off. If you're training earlier in the day, it's really not much to do with, what did you have for breakfast and lunch anyway? It has to do with these 48 hours of refeeding. You can have good performance.

01:26:27
And then we would structure my training so that my most important body parts that were weakest for me were trained on Monday with the most effective, most innovative fatiguing exercises. And then we would get the work done on my body parts, which seemed more gifted, more likely to hold on the mass, just better structure and shape that even if they did lose some muscle, it wouldn't hurt me as much later in the week as my cumulative deficit was adding up. So absolutely a consideration for some general kind of guidance for people.

01:26:56
If you do want to try to benefit from a high calorie day for a training session, the next morning is a good time to train if you only have one high calorie day. Because it takes time to store glycogen. You can't really effectively store a ton of glycogen on the same day if we look at the research on this. So now that said, you don't want to be hungry going into a training session. Some of the research that we've done as a part of extra local PhD student, Andrew King.

01:27:24
is that peri-workout nutrition does help volume performance. When we aggregated enough, we did a meta-analysis on that, published in Sports Medicine. And it seems to some degree independent of the dose of carbohydrate. It's just, did you eat something or not, right? But it does seem to be impacted by the volume of training. So there is some gut brain connection or volume-dependent thing. It may not be directly related to glycogen storage or the amount of substrate you have available,

01:27:54
not going into it with low blood glucose levels or low glycogen levels or having hunger, all those things could potentially impede acute performance. So if you're looking to enhance training with acute feeding, if you want to cross all your potential tick boxes of what's going to lead to good performance, then you want to be going into the session with reasonably topped off glycogen and you want to go into it fed, even if it's just one meal so that you're not feeling acutely hungry.

01:28:23
So I think some people think, all right, well, I'm training at 3pm today. Today needs to be the refeed. It's like, well, you're going to have lunch and breakfast. We will be bigger than normal, but are you, you're certainly not topping off your glycogen if that came off six days of dieting. So for me, I had Sunday off and I trained Saturday. Um, and then I would train Monday. So I would have, you know, one day training reasonably hard, but not super hard, like I said, end of the week is kind of the lower priority sessions.

01:28:49
Sunday completely off with a high day, and then I feel great on Monday with my most high priority training session. So absolutely we did leverage some of that timing. Yeah. And was it carbohydrate that you increased your calories from? Mostly, but fat did go up as well. It wasn't like me trying to find really low fat, high carb sources, but the proportion of carbs would increase on those days more than anything else. Yeah. Any supplements, Eric, that you would just take? Yeah. How did that look for you? Very basic.

01:29:18
Creatine. I really actually reduced my caffeine intake a lot this last prep because I wanted to preserve my sleep quality. So no pre-workout. I was just doing coffee with breakfast. There were occasional times where I just felt like I was totally dragging ass and I would have like a hundred milligrams of caffeine. Nothing crazy. Again, I'm pretty heavy. That's a pretty small dose. That's the only actual like ergogenic something that I take.

01:29:48
you know, whey protein to reach my targets and like multivitamin and fish oil. So one thing I would say is that somewhere between 10 to 30% of all supplements are adulterated or contaminated with things that are not supposed to be in there. Yeah. Based upon the most recent, like, best guesses we have based on the evidence. Really good review paper on that by Yagaman colleagues. It was published at the end of 2023. And

01:30:16
Coming out on the first of March, I wrote an article all about this for mass, which is going to be available for anyone to read, not even a subscriber. It's our cover story. It's free. I think it's really important. So anyone would do well to only take third-party tested supplements, in my opinion, especially a drug-tested athlete because contamination can occur at the manufacturer level. It can occur at the supplement company level intentionally.

01:30:42
And if it's occurring at the manufacturer level just because they used a shipping container that had something else in it prior and it wasn't properly cleaned, it's going to get such a low dose that it won't even have a measurable impact on you. But the precision of drug tests these days are so high that that'll pick up and you can pop. And you're not even benefiting from the inadvertent doping you're doing. You're just failing a drug test and ruining your life. What's your brand of creatine? The Eric? I typically do Optum Nutrition. They have a...

01:31:10
They do third party testing and they're available here locally. So yeah. Yeah. Nice one. Yeah. Eric, at what point in your prep does Barbara start to go, far out Eric, you're just turning into an asshole. Like is that when you really know, okay, now I'm digging deep? You know, the funny thing is I do check with her all the time. Like how am I? Yeah. How am I doing? Yeah. And this season, and she's always very candid with me. She has been from the very beginning. Of course.

01:31:37
And this is probably the best I've done in terms of like irritation and being a dick or letting my mood state affect her. I think that the thing she got tired of was actually just my athletic focus. So not my interpersonal interactions, but just the fact that every day I'd get up, I'd assess my physique in the mirror, I'd track my weight and make some comment because I'm laser focused, especially when it got close to the shows. Like I competed on the 30th of September.

01:32:06
And then I competed the next two, I competed five times over an eight week period. So from being like two weeks out from the New Zealand show, so mid September all the way through to mid November. So basically September, October, November, three months straight, I was competing like at least I was either, I was always two weeks out or competing the next weekend. And I had, you know, I flew to Australia once and the States twice for these shows.

01:32:34
And so like my mindset during that period was like, got to dial it and got to dial it. And like, you know, I'm coming home in various states of having spray tan fading off me. I'm having to ask her, hey, can you put an air on my back? Because I don't, I can't reach it. She's got to drive me to the airport. So it was, it was mostly just of, okay, our life is, like my interactions with you are what's present on your mind is bodybuilding. And, you know, when she gave me feedback, she was like,

01:33:04
I think that would have been true if you were a cyclist, though. So it wasn't necessarily the diet. It was just like... Oh, I was going to say that too. Yeah. How you described it is like you're an athlete. Yeah. So that wasn't always the case. And I think for most people, this is, you know, you are fighting against disordered eating, body image concerns, and, you know, obsessive-compulsive things that all get exacerbated by the process of contest prep and learning how to manage that. And...

01:33:32
at the very least pretend to be normal and tell yourself, look, the food's going to be there tomorrow. This is, you know, like all of the things that come with being in an extreme deficit for a long time and getting very, very lean are what makes the sport so hard, potentially transformative in a positive way, but also in a negative way. And if you don't watch that and if you don't have people in your corner who will be honest with you and if you don't do things to mitigate that, it can be bad and it can be a negative.

01:34:01
a net negative people in their lives. And that's kind of the whole mission statement I have is to help people get more good than bad and make it worth it. And that they can do bodybuilding on their own terms for as long as they want in a sustainable way. So Eric, as you said, you did, what was it, five competitions over eight weeks. You got your ProCard, which is amazing, but it's not like the journey ends there. No. So is 2024 a year that includes

01:34:30
competing or is this just a phase of building? Like, what does this look like for you now? Yeah, I'm under no illusions that I will be able to easily become a competitive pro based on how long it took me to become a pro in the first instance. But what I mentioned about how I've always competed in strength sport and physique sport, that's changed. So my entire training focus is now on bodybuilding. And that is

01:34:58
There's a lot of overlap between strength, sport and bodybuilding. And if you took the average person and they said, Hey, I want to get big. Um, their program wouldn't look that much different to someone who said, Hey, I want to get really strong in all my different movements. Um, there'd be some differences, but at a certain level, like once you get to a high enough level, you know, we'll all take an endurance athlete as an example. Uh, in novice or intermediate endurance athlete, if they go do cycling when they're actually a runner.

01:35:24
It's a nice cross-training experience to give their knees and feet a break. If you take an elite level marathon runner and you take a whole block and do primarily cycling, they're going to get slower, not faster in their run. It's not specific enough. Their adaptations are at such a precarious high level that they'll regress to being a high level intermediate. So it's the kind of thing where, just like with weightlifting, you take someone who's never lifted before.

01:35:53
and they start doing one set, one hard set of bicep curls a week, their arms are going to get bigger. You take someone who's been doing bicep curls for 20 years and they do 10 sets a week, they start doing one set, they're going to probably lose some arm size, you know? So what that means is that for me to be my best in powerlifting and my best in bodybuilding, I actually can't. I can be the best I can be in both simultaneously, which has always been my goal until now. But now that I see the possibility of me actually placing...

01:36:22
and maybe meddling at Worlds, if I just really milk every last bit of potential out of me, I don't feel that that compromise is one that I, it's worth it. So I have entirely retooled for the first time in 20 years of training, my focus to be completely focused on building muscle exclusively on my bodybuilding endeavors, which wasn't something I ever wanted to do previously because I love strength sport. But now that I see, I don't want to have any regrets for bodybuilding.

01:36:52
And I don't have regrets for powerlifting, because me getting 1% better in powerlifting is like, sweet. Now you're sixth at nationals, right? In the master's division. And for me getting 1% better in bodybuilding could mean moving up from sixth place to fifth place and getting a medal and getting to hold my country's flag and stuff like that. Yeah, amazing. It's a big deal. So no competition, because.

01:37:20
dieting isn't conducive to building muscle. The earliest I plan to compete is 2025. And if I don't think I've made substantial improvements by 2025, I'll even push it back to 2026. Yeah, because I mean, where you're at, like it's that 1% gain, I mean, it's almost, it feels so like, it's a huge amount of work. It's a lot, yeah. And I understand Eric, that you're documenting it with the 3D MJ team.

01:37:48
on YouTube, you've got a vlog that's sort of going through, I don't know how often you're doing that, but people can follow along. About twice a month. Yeah. Amazing, yeah. We just released episode six last weekend. And it's with me with one of the other coaches, Brian Miner, who is, we're doing off-season coaching together. He's a big collaborative programming and things, and game planning, like at what rate should I gain weight? Where do I want to get my off-season weight up to? And I will say that his

01:38:16
as hard as I anticipated it to be to put on muscle at this stage in my career. The shift to emphasizing all of my efforts towards bodybuilding has been surprisingly effective already. Um, in my last update episode six, I did a side-by-side comparison of me walking around at 86 versus 84, like a two kilogram difference at very similar body fat, but substantially fuller. And for that to have occurred at the like,

01:38:45
12 week mark post show where a large part of that was also occurring during my recovery phase where I'm thinking I'm just getting back up to normal. We're very pleasantly surprised. So it goes to show just that there was a bit of a bottleneck with me trying to also be the best powerlifter I could be simultaneously because I did do actually a powerlifting meet in the middle of my prep in July. I competed in the North Islands.

01:39:15
even when you institute just a bit of powerlifting, it's hard to work up to a 200-kilo squat before you do the rest of your leg day or work up to a – especially when you're dieting and you're light. Pulling 230 kilos before then you go do an effort body workout and deadlifts, it takes a toll and those energies have been better spent and the joint stress and recovery demands are much lower, has allowed me to do substantially more work.

01:39:45
And unfortunately, I'm not one of those people who responds to like low volume, high intensity training. I respond to high volume, high frequency, high intensity training. It's been a very straightforward equation. I have to do more and I have to do it harder. So all of that real estate of recovery that needs to be used for me to kind of milk the most out of me. And I can tell you as a coach, that's not the case for many people.

01:40:11
There are lots of people who they can do more volume, but they don't benefit from it. And it's work that's being done that's not stimulative. And they do much better when they constrain their volume and put forth more effort and more strategic and exercise selection. But then there's other people who just need more. And I knew you're one of them.

01:40:33
I'm one of them. So it's like, you know, I need more time in the gym. I need to be time efficient and I need to spend it well. So it's a, it's a fun journey. I'm enjoying it. I'm loving my training and I'm, it's probably the best gains I've had in years since maybe like 2011, when I first realized that I needed to do more work for my upper body to get it to grow successfully. Yeah. Well, Eric, I'm just so pleased for you because of, you know, as I've said, you know, I followed along.

01:40:58
at least for the last couple of years when you've spoken about bodybuilding and just what your sort of goals are. And it's always just so lovely to see people be able to realize those goals. And then also for you to have like the potential to sort of get better and, you know, push forth as well. I think that's really awesome. So where can people find you? I know I've probably mentioned a few places, but just to finish us off.

01:41:26
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. So depends if you want to learn more about my own bodybuilding journey, the youtube.com slash team 3d MJ, you can catch up on my my series called believe 2024 forging the unlikely pro champion. And also the all the other coaches vlogs on the information we have up there. It's really good information source. For those who are more on the nerdy side and want to learn more about nutrition, and you're like, Oh, wait, you wrote an article for what now? You want to go to mass research review.com

01:41:55
where we do monthly reviews of the most important and relevant information that came out in the scientific literature for practitioners or athletes. So yeah, choose your poison and enjoy it. Drink the kool-aid. Yeah, that is awesome, Erythne. Of course, we'll put links in the show notes to that and to Iron Culture. And mass is amazing. I'm a subscriber. I love it. And it isn't just for...

01:42:20
people who are interested in bodybuilding. It really is for anyone interested in the health and fitness space. Absolutely. I'm the resident bodybuilder, but there's also Lauren, Collinza, Semple, Eric Trexler and Mike Cerda. So health, performance, psychology, you name it. It's all there. Awesome, Eric. Thanks so much for your time. Have the best day. You too, thank you, Miki.

01:42:47
Alrighty, hopefully you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed chatting to Eric and as I said you can find all of the information for Eric in the show notes. Next week on the podcast I am delighted to bring to you a conversation that I have with Dr Anna Lemke. She is the author of The Dopamine Nation.

01:43:09
Until then though, why don't you sign up to my webinar, The Hierarchy of Hormone Support, which is a masterclass in simple and effective strategies for you to optimize hormone health. And we will put a link to the show notes to that as well. Send me a DM or a message on threads, Twitter, or Instagram, @mikkiwilliden, Facebook, @mikkiwillidenNutrition, or head to my website, mikkiwilliden.com, and sign up for that webinar.

01:43:38
there and it is taking place on Sunday the 7th of April. Alright team you have the best week and we'll talk to you soon. See you later.